In the Land of Long Fingernails & Magic: The Complete Course
The entire second floor of the Gladstone Hotel will be transformed into a haunted house. Acclaimed illusionist Joshua Jay shall astound you with sleight-of-hand moves from his new guide, Magic. What happens in Toronto’s graveyards when the sun goes down? Charlie Wilkins will recount, during a conversation with Ralph Benmergui, bizarre-yet-true events from his memoir of toiling as a gravedigger, In the Land of Long Fingernails. – A This Is Not A Reading Series event presented by Pages Books & Magazines, Thomas Allen Publishers, Penguin Group Canada, EYE WEEKLY and Take 5 on CIUT.
Toss the tuxedo. No more impaling women in boxes. Lose that top hat and set the rabbit free. Magic is getting a makeover. Forget those tired birthday party tricks or overproduced non-believable illusions. Joshua Jay's Magic is a complete course, jam-packed with over a hundred amazing but easy-to-learn effects. Much more than a collection of tricks, this book teaches both the mechanics and presentation necessary to perform each trick--since only a mastery of both (plus a lot of practice) makes a real magician. In Magic the performance scripts are topical (so you can transition seamlessly from a real conversation into a trick), the props are familiar (often right in front of you), and the magic is unbelievable (leaving your audience perfectly flabbergasted). Each trick is broken down into the Effect, the Secret, the Set-Up, and most important, the Performance, with lessons on what to say, how to direct the audience's attention, where to keep your hands, and so on. Magic by Joshua Jay is the Aha! book for a subject whose time has come.
Joshua Jay has made numerous television appearances and performed and lectured in more than 50 countries. He's a monthly columnist for Magic, the world's largest magazine for magicians, headlines at the prestigious Magic Castle in Hollywood, and has produced a series of top-selling instructional DVDs for magicians. In 1998, when Joshua was still a teenager, he was crowned champion at the World Magic Seminar (the Olympics of the magic world) in Las Vegas. He lives in New York City.
In the Land of Long Fingernails During the hazy summer of 1969, Charles Wilkins, then a student at the University of Toronto, took a job as a gravedigger. The bizarre-but-true events of that time, including a midsummer gravediggers' strike, the unearthing of a victim of an unsolved murder, and a little illegal boneshifting, play out amongst a Barnum-esque parade of mavericks and misfits. In the Land of Long Fingernails is a macabre and hilarious memoir of mortality, materialism, and the gradual coming-of-age of an impressionable young man.
Charlie Wilkins is the author of eleven books, including The Circus at the Edge of the Earth, which was shortlisted for the Rogers/Viacom Non-Fiction Prize, the bestselling Paddle to the Amazon and A Wilderness Called Home: Dispatches from the Wild Heart of Canada. He lives in Thunder Bay with his wife and three children.
Ralph Benmergui, host of Benmergui in the Morning on JAZZ.FM91, has a long and varied broadcasting background. Over the last two decades, Canadians have come to know him as a television host and journalist who has appeared on both CBC radio and television. He has won a prestigious Japan Prize for Best International Youth Programming.
