Toronto: Our New Hub for Author Interviews

James Adams of The Globe and Mail checks in with Man Booker winner Alan Hollinghurst, who's back in North America and ready to resume his creative writing classes at Princeton. He finds the media's emphasis on treating The Line of Beauty as a big gay novel "quite depressing," given how much more there is to be found in his work.

While Hollinghurst was up in Toronto, one of that city's novelists, M.G. Vassanji, came down to New York. He's from an Indian family that had been living in Kenya for two generations when he was born, and came to America in the 1970s for a college education, an experience that proved transforming in more ways than one. "I had never understood loneliness," he recalls in conversation with Daphne Uviller. "I'd only heard of it in pop songs. In such a tight community, like the one I grew up in, it was never an issue."