And … it’s out! I’m so happy to see my new book, Malled: Deciphering Shopping in Canada, in print from Wolsak & Wynn. It’s been some time in the making, and now I am keen to see it out in the world. More news on events in due course, but my first events were:
October 10, Salamanca, Spain: a group launch as part of the conference “Narratives of Resilience and Healing” at the University of Salamanca.
October 13, Edmonton: LitFest with Chris Urquhart at MacEwan University.
November 6, Calgary: Interview on CBC’s Homestretch.
November 23, Calgary: Guest on CBC’s Alberta@Noon
You can order the book here, or here, or directly from my publisher here.
In the meantime, here’s what my blurbers have to say:
“Malled is many wonderful things. A thoughtful meditation on the place of shopping in Canadian life, it is also deeply political, but free of the easy moralizing that marks so much writing about consumption and the shopping mall. As he moves from city to city, and mall to mall, Dobson reflects in honest and inventive ways about his complex relationship to shopping and the places in which it happens. The book is a refreshing, engaging, highly readable account of encounters with shopping malls, cities, people, books and movies.”
— WILL STRAW, author of Cyanide and Sin: Visualizing Crime in 50s America
“Malled does much more than decipher shopping: it asks tough questions about the beautiful and frustrating pastiche of our culture, the way our buying practices combine the absurd and the incomprehensible and how we have been taken hostage by disposable acquisition. Kit Dobson’s gentle and generous look at the mad folly of our being human together, in the mall, shopping for stuff we don’t need is queasy, fascinating and poetic, a wonderful amalgam of desire and degradation.”
— ARITHA VAN HERK, author of Mavericks: An Incorrigible History of Alberta
