It was my plan this month to do a series of ambitious posts on short fiction, with author interviews, story serializations from forthcoming and recently published collections, links to reviews, and much else. But May is, as always, the cruelest month around the Bibliomanse, and even with Tara taking Congress off of my hands -- she is currently in Fredericton manning a booth for us at the Congress Bookfair -- this month has proved more than the three of us in office could manage. Yet a range of things short fiction related have been happening these past few days, so I thought I'd just round them up here.
1) The 2011 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award Longlist was announced today, and two Biblioasis collections made the cut: Alexander MacLeod's Light Lifting and Clark Blaise's The Meagre Tarmac. Congrats to both. More information on the longlist can be found here.
2) As mentioned in another post, Cathy Stonehouse is guest-hosting The Afterword this week, and her second post, Lucky, is now up. Read it here.
3) Cathy Stonehouse was interviewed by Dan McPeake on SFU/CJSF's Encounters on Monday, which can be listened to here.
4) Reviews keep coming in for Light Lifting, including a few online at Corduroy Books
Mostly Fiction
The Malahat Review
Foreword Reviews (not online, but the reviewer writes, in part: "Alexander MacLeod … writes with a devastating command of tone…. He isn’t afraid to leave his readers uncomfortable; he knows they’ll return for more lessons about loss and its hair’s-breadth distance away.... Quietly brilliant, brilliantly determined, these are stories that stay in the mind long after the book is closed."
5) It's worth mentioning that though Light Lifting did not win the Danuta Gleed Award -- that honour went to Billie Livingston (congrats!) -- it was one of the finalists. Congrats to Alex for that as well.
6) Another excellent review of The Meagre Tarmac was published recently in Quill & Quire. Not up yet, alas. But how many excellent reviews does a book have to get before you part with 19.95? It's had enough? Well, then: you're in luck, as Clark will be launching in Toronto -- alongside his wife Bharati Mukherjee -- at the Dora Keogh next Monday at 7 pm. It'll be one of the year's highlights, as far as I am concerned. And there will, of course, be books for sale.
7) Steven Beattie has continued his now yearly 31 Days of Short Stories, and he spent one of them analyzing Alexander MacLeod's story The Loop. You can read that essay here. The rest are worth checking out as well.
8) I hear that there is a very positive review of Terence Young's The End of the Ice Age in the current Fiddlehead, where it is suggested that this collection confirms the reviewer in his opinion that we are the press for the short story in Canada. We're thrilled, but really: who else would even want that title?
9) In non-short fiction news, Biblioasis poet Shane Neilson has been shortlisted for the Trillium Award for Poetry for his subsequent collection Complete Physical. Congrats to Shane!
10) A preview/excerpt of our forthcoming Wage Slave Glossary can be read in the July issue of Harpers.
No comments:
Post a Comment