Bibliotravel is a great idea, but its selection of books obviously isn't representative. I love Toronto, but there's no way it's a more common literary setting than Paris (135 vs. 114) -- Paris has the advantage of both size and age. And the notion that Ottawa is the world's fifth-most written-about city (92 books, ten times as many as Dublin) is simply absurd.

There is a massive book called Toronto: A literary guide, though I believe it focuses more on the authors who've lived here and not the characters.

Imagining Toronto (www.imaginingtoronto.com), created by Spacing contributing editor Amy Lavender Harris, has compiled a comprehensive list of literary works set in Toronto.

It may be that Imagining Toronto's effort to compile that bibliography is partially responsible for the large number of listings on Bibliotravel.com

Oh, I forgot another all time favourite: The Song Beneath the Ice by Joe Fiorito.

Bottom Bracket by Vivian Meyer. I highly recommend it, a great read.

Toronto Noir - a mystery/fiction anthology filled with different stories with each story set in a different neighbourhood or area of Toronto. I've never read it but saw it at Chapters the other day and it looked interesting.

Thanks, Dylan, but I deserve no credit for Bibliotravel's Toronto literature list -- it's been growing organically for several years. The Imagining Toronto library (http://www.imaginingtoronto.com/library.html) does list several hundred literary works set in Toronto (as well as some dozens of scholarly works exploring Toronto writers and literature & place in general), but it's far from complete -- there are hundreds or thousands more works not (yet) listed there. I'm working on it, though.

As for plaques and other motifs recognizing local writers and literary sites, Project Bookmark Canada (http://www.projectbookmarkcanada.ca) is working on this very thing. It's my understanding that they'll be placing 'bookmarks' in the form of plaques identifying various Toronto literary sites sometime in the next year or so. Next year's Doors Open Toronto is literary-city themed, so undoubtedly you'll have a change to explore even more literary sites this way.

I'm currently completing a book exploring literary representations of Toronto. It's called Imagining Toronto, and is scheduled to be published by Mansfield Press this fall. The book traces Toronto's literary genealogy, but more importantly, tries to show how inextricably our experience of place in this city is tied to the stories we tell about Toronto's neighbourhoods, cultures, buildings and landscapes. As Michael Ondaatje writes in his iconic Toronto novel, In the Skin of a Lion (McClelland & Stewart, 1987), "before the real city could be seen it had to be imagined, the way rumours and tall tales were a kind of charting." Volume II, on which I have just started work, will extend this analysis to cinematic, television, art, architectural and musical representations of Toronto.

And my favourite book set in Toronto? This changes, but for a while now it's been Gwendolyn MacEwen's Noman's Land (Coach House, 1985), a collection of stories that creates a mythology of Toronto. My favourite line(s): "The past was the secret and mysterious city, the city within the city, the city of the alleyways and swimming pools and the city of the lakeshore. And the lake, which cared nothing for time, would often cast up strange relics of the future, as well as the past, upon its shores."

I'm also very fond of Darren O'Donnell's Your Secrets Sleep with Me (Coach House, 2004) and Phyllis Brett Young's The Torontonians (originally published in 1960, this book was reportedly the first to feature the new City Hall on its cover. The Torontonians was republished by McGill-Queen's Press last year). Dennis Lee's Civil Elegies (poems about Nathan Phillips Square) won the Governor General's Award for poetry in 1968, I think. And I second the vote for Catherine Bush -- who features Toronto settings in most of her beautifully written and powerful novels.

Other writers/works you might find interesting: Austin Clark's 'Toronto Trilogy, exploring the struggles of West Indian immigrants making room for themselves in a sometimes-bigoted 1960s'era Toronto (The Meeting Point, Storm of Fortune and ). Farzana Doctor's Stealing Nasreen (Inanna, 2007), one of a small number of Toronto novels focusing on the experiences of its largely Muslim characters. Mobashir Quereshi's amusing and probing R.A.C.E. (Mercury Press, 2006), in which a parking enforcement officer finds himself named to a top-secret police unit investigating the Radical Association of Criminal Ethnicities.

There is a Toronto novel (or poem or play) about nearly every Toronto neighbourhood, experience and culture. I agree that it's high time we paid more attention to our own rich literary heritage.

Easily "Jonathan Cleaned Up-Then He Heard A Sound" by famed children's author Robert Munsch. An amazing book about a young boy who discovers he has a TTC station behind his wall. The illustrations were superb, with Old City Hall and the red pleather TTC jackets drawn to a tee.

These are conventional academic writers. Try THING STREET ASYLUM at http://www.archive.org/details/ThingStreetAsylum or at litvision.org - for a change.