Here’s an invitation from our friend Beverly of LIRA –

When once-white canvases succeed to show images of ourselves, our lives and our society, we admire the likenesses and explore the distortions. But how much of ourselves could we actually see from a reversed take-off point? This time, we are invited to engage into a recollection of our realities through looking at, in and from the dark.

PUSIKIT, an exhibition of paintings created from black canvases by artist Vivian N. Limpin, will open on Tuesday, Nov. 20, 6:00 in the evening, at the Conspiracy Bar, Visayas Avenue, QC. A poetry reading with the word “Pusikit” as the theme featuring young poets from universities and literary organizations will follow. Poets from all walks of life are encouraged to join. Text 09193175708 for details.

Links: LIRA

Apologies to those of you who may have received multiple copies of our newsletter in your inbox.  You must be wondering what is going on with us.  Our mailing system needs some tweaking and we have been looking for the best way to get our news to you with minimal work on your part.  We found FeedBurner and we like its features.   However, you will have to re-approve your subscription to our newsletter once we start using it.

We will be sending you email or you can subscribe by entering your email address into the form on the right.

We have already begun amassing friends on Shelfari. If you have accepted our invitation to be a friend, thank you very much. We like it that Shelfari allows us to upload an unlimited number of books while a similar site, LibraryThing, limits us to 200. However, we do like the library-ness of LibraryThing. It just feels cozier. We like both sites, they are both great ways to be in touch with other book lovers so we are actually on both Shelfari and LibraryThing. If you will notice we have widgets from both sites on the right side of our blog.  So look us up and connect with us on either one.

Shelfari is a site where you can create a virtual shelf of books (which could be books you have in your library or even books you want to have), rate and review your books, meet people who like the same books you do, and even join discussion groups and online book clubs. It is similar to LibraryThing which we blogged about a few months ago.

Since we get requests to have our inventory online all the time, we thought we could make use of these excellent features and upload our titles to our own Shelfari shelf. (For now, we prefer to use Shelfari because it allows us to have an unlimited number of books on our shelves.) Our virtual shelf does not represent our entire inventory just yet. For now it contains our later additions and titles we want to highlight. Starting now, our website will have, on the right side, a short list of titles from our Shelfari shelf.

You can join Shelfari too, of course. It’s a great way to keep track of what books you have, which you lent out, the titles you plan to read next, etc. If you do join, add Booktopia as a friend. Or, if you get an invitation from us to be a friend on Shelfari, we hope you’ll say “Yes.”

Here is a link to our Shelfari page: Booktopia on Shelfari

Jiang Rong, author of Wolf Totem, was awarded the first Man Asian Literary Prize. The Man Asian Literary Prize is the Asian version of the Man Booker Prize and one of its objectives is to bring Asian authors to the world literary scene. Our own Butch Dalisay was one of those shortlisted for the award for his novel, Soledad’s Sister. Mr. Dalisay’s blog includes an excerpt from Soledad’s Sister which will be published soon.

Other links: The Man Asian Literary Prize