Thirsty: A Biblioasis Miscellany

A Scrupulous Fidelity: Attack of the Copula Spiders

2012-02-02T08:24:00.000-08:00

The first book we will be launching this Spring is Douglas Glover's critical book Attack of the Copula Spiders. It's a fabulous collection of essays on reading and writing: the essays on writing are among the best and most useful I've read. If you want to learn how to write a short story, or the difference between writing a short story and a novel, or various tips and tricks to invigorate your prose, then Glover's Spiders is the book for you.

One of the main points Glover makes in this collection is that one must first learn to read well before one can write well, and to that end Spiders gathers some of Glover's best recent writing on writers and their work, including essays and reviews on Alice Munro, Leon Rooke, Mark Anthony Jarman and several others. One of these other essays, on Thomas Bernhard's The Loser -- a book which has been on my bedside table since I picked it up at Type Books last Fall -- was published yesterday as a web exclusive in The Brooklyn Rail, and can be read here.

Though Attack of the Copula Spiders officially pubs in April, we will be pre-launching it at AWP on Friday March 2nd in Chicago (7:00-8:15, The Hilton Hotel, Room 4). If you're attending AWP please make plans to stop by.

The Weekend in Review(s)

2012-01-30T07:06:00.000-08:00

Seems it's not just Suitable Precautions that got a little love this weekend. We also had a review of David Hickey in the Malahat; a review of Ray Robertson in the Winnipeg Free Press; and two more U.K. reviews for Alex MacLeod (one in the Independent, and another in the Irish Times). The latter, following in The Economist's punny wake--how could we forget "Of Moose and Men"?--is called "The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Writer." It's also quite good ... "a heavyweight in the making" is a pun we're happy to see again.

Anyhow, here are the pull quotes. Today's challenge: can you guess who's who?

"Subtle, smooth, and genuine."

"_____ is one of those writers whose work appears effortless only because they’re paddling like the devil under the surface."

"Stark as Springsteen’s Nebraska."
"Free to create ripples in the mind of the reader."

"For all his erudition, ____ is aware intellect sometimes pales, and fails ... learned, clear-sighted and occasionally funny."

"Whimsy, darkness, comedy, fear"

2012-01-27T15:02:00.001-08:00

Well it's been a quiet couple of days here at the Manse, with Dan at the Translation Fair in Montreal, but as of this afternoon we're able sign off with good news: Jim Bartley is doing a story-by-story run-down on Suitable Precautions in this Saturday's Globe. Take a look and find out exactly what about Laura Boudreau he thinks is "barbed and arresting," "familiar but irresistable," or (my personal favourite), "fl[ying] on snarky energy."

Light Lifting an ALA Notable Book for 2012

2012-01-25T08:37:00.000-08:00

The Notable Books Council, a group of readers' advisory experts within a division of the American Library Association, has selected Alexander MacLeod's Light Lifting as one of twelve notable fiction titles for 2012. They write that MacLeod's stories "explore the limits of physical and emotional endurance in muscular prose." Other selectees include Julian Barnes and William Trevor(!), and their press release can found online here. Congratulations to Alex! More info about the NBC below.

Since 1944, the goal of the Notable Books Council has been to make available to the nation’s readers a list of about 25 very good, very readable and, at times, very important fiction, nonfiction and poetry books for the adult reader. A book may be selected for inclusion on the Notable Books List if it possesses exceptional literary merit; expands the horizons of human knowledge; makes a specialized body of knowledge accessible to the non-specialist; has the potential to contribute significantly to the solution of a contemporary problem; and/or presents a unique concept.

"Of moose and men"

2012-01-19T10:24:00.000-08:00

As some of you may know, Alexander MacLeod's Light Lifting was recently published in the U.K. by our friends at Jonathan Cape. This afternoon we're happy to report that Alex's UK edition was reviewed--warmly? glowingly? ecstatically?--by The Economist. Here's a taste of what they had to say:

"A good novel woos its readers, tantalises them with glimpses of flesh and gradually lures them into a world from which they later emerge changed. Short stories, by contrast, rely on instant attraction and immediate gratification. If they are good they leave one hungry for the next encounter. More often, though, they leave the reader slightly jarred, looking for greater fulfilment.

Alexander MacLeod does not. His brilliant debut collection, “Light Lifting”, is engrossing, thrilling and ultimately satisfying; each story has the weight of a novel. The young Canadian writer is already winning plaudits in his own country. He can expect acclaim far beyond."

You can read the rest of the review online here.

The Women's Post on The Big Dream

2012-01-19T09:22:00.000-08:00

Afternoon's greetings from Emeryville, which today looks much like the Arctic (if the Artic had suburbs--?). Snowy bluster bluster freeze. Dan, brave soul, has ventured forth into the cold to fetch a wandering poet, while Chris and I get to remain warm at work, secure and safe ... and, er, while I get to tell you about the latest review of Rebecca's book, which was published yesterday by The Women's Post. Sarah Mahmood is an intern there and took the opportunity to write about the stories she likes best. Check it out, if such is your fancy--and also, kudos to the WP for encouraging its journalism interns to review fiction titles! We need more of that in the world. More reviews, less snow. A motto for February, perhaps? Hmm.

"The quietest kind of brilliant"

2012-01-16T06:33:00.001-08:00

Good morning, Biblioworld! What better way to wake up than with a happy bit of criticism? Alex Boyd, whose Least Important Man is readying itself for the press has we speak, has a few insights to share about his colleague David Hickey on Northern Poetry Review. Check it out! Open Air Bindery is David's second collection with Biblioasis, and à mon avis one of 2011's brightest jewels (poetry-wise, and to continue the gemology metaphors). It's lovely to see it under glass once more.

"A little gem"

2012-01-13T13:44:00.000-08:00

A happy note to kick off a snowy weekend: keep an eye out for Rebecca Rosenblum in this Saturday's Globe and Mail. Diana Brydon's review of the Big Dream is Top Notch! "The overlap of characters and accretion of detail between stories is like office gossip," she writes: "Rosenblum is an elegant stylist and spiky humorist; her language is precise, her ear for dialogue almost faultless. Her characters are alone or lonely, frail stoics who may hope for rescue but certainly don’t expect it. I found myself yearning for more connection, less deprivation on their behalf, and wasn’t sure if their plight was part of her uncompromising world view, or a consequence of working at Dream Inc. I suspect both. This is the way the world is now, she seems to be saying. Stop dreaming. Wake up."

Be sure to check out the rest of the review tomorrow in the paper.

Snowetry

2012-01-13T08:56:00.000-08:00

There's white on the ground for the first time in weeks here at the Bibliomanse, but it seems there's more than snow squalling on the horizon. Yes, that's right: the poets are on the move! Howling at Argo Books, we'll have Mr. Zach Wells (Montreal, Jan. 16); sighing before The Single Onion, we have Sir Joshua Trotter (Calgary, Jan. 19); and finally, brewing before the Grad Club in Kingston on Jan. 23, we have Mr. Wells once more. Take note: an iamb keeps the season's griefs away! So if you're nearby, go on out, then come on in, shake the snow from your feet (ha ha), and have a listen.

A little wonder (post-Epiphany)

2012-01-09T07:49:00.001-08:00

For those of you not up on your liturgical calendar, yesterday was the feast of the Epiphany. Three wise men, a baby Jesu, a donkey, a revelation of divine splendour ... and some lost camels, if you're T.S. Eliot. If you're Yeats? It's that uncontrollably mystery on the bestial floor. And if you're a parenting journal in Austin, Texas, well, it's David Hickey's A Very Small Something, which was strongly recommended by Parent Wise editor Kim Pletichka. "This whimsical tale," she writes, "told in lilting poetic form, harkens back to stories written a generation or more ago. The poetry itself is beautiful, trumped only by the fantastic tale it tells ... A lovely story for both preschoolers and early elementary children—and parents looking for stories filled with wonder."

Now Olive Bezzlebee might not be as wise or as grizzled as Melchior, or Balthazar, or that other one, but she did go out chasing a small bright something in the sky—and so "wonder" is exactly the right word for her journey. A very small something indeed! May good things and gumballs manifest to everyone in 2012.

The Wall Street Journal, and plain ol' Wall Street

2012-01-09T07:15:00.000-08:00

Douglas Glover, whose new book of essays on writing Biblioasis is proud to be publishing this spring, was roundly praised in the Wall Street Journal this morning. "A master of narrative structure"? You bet. For Darin Strauss's paean (and a nifty metaphor about boulders), take a look.

(And, um, speaking of Wall Street, Wage Slave co-author Mark Kingwell was interviewed last week by Aid Netherlands. Here's a taster: "I was especially upset about the police crackdown because of the cavalier way in which ‘health and safety concerns’ became a blanket justification for police action. The books in the OWS library ... were tossed in garbage containers. In a strange way, this blithe trashing of books was worse than setting fire to them. For this neo-liberal police state, books are not even dangerous or important enough to burn. A depressing thought.")

Biblioasis Hits the Canadian Bookshelf

2012-01-06T08:20:00.001-08:00

Congratulations to Anakana Schofield and Alex Boyd, whose forthcoming books were given special mention in Canadian Bookshelf's Most Anticipated preview for 2012. If you're up for a little Malarky (or, um, if you've ever felt like The Least Important Man), you should check it out.

Five Reasons Why Most Self-Help Books are Bullsh*t

2012-01-06T06:16:00.000-08:00

Anyone watching Strombo last night? You know, that beguiling fellow, Clooney-esque good looks, uncipherable last name? Well if you were, you might have seen this: Ray Robertson telling the CBC-TV waves why most self-help books ain't gonna help you do squat. Try Montaigne, he says. And, well, why not?

(Sorry. Couldn't resist. But seriously, watch the clip. It's great.)

Resource Links Praises A Very Small Something

2012-01-04T06:36:00.000-08:00

Calling it " an engaging story with crisp rhymes and brilliant illustrations ... a concord of colour" Resource Links recommends our late 2011 publication of David Hickey's and Alexander Griggs-Burr's marvellous children's book A Very Small Something. Who loves bubblegum? It seems just about everyone under eighty.

For more information about the book please check out the website.

Lucky Bruce on WSHU Public Radio

2012-01-03T08:56:00.000-08:00

Last but not least! Tune in for a lovely little feature on Bruce Jay Friedman that aired last week on WSHU out of Connecticut: "Friedman tempers hot remarks with humor (often hilarious), and affection for friends and foes alike ... refreshingly candid ... never mere dish."

(Two Thousand and) Eleven Days in Review

2012-01-03T08:02:00.000-08:00

Well this morning the Bibliomanse flings wide its gates once again--or, rather, we're now open for business after a whole week off. A week! How is it so much can happen in 11 days? Review-wise, Ray Robertson was featured on That Shakespearean Rag ("The Three Stooges or Voltaire," Dec. 22), and interview-wise, David Hickey talks to Elan Paulson on The Rusty Toque (Dec. 23); Biblioasis furthered its global blog invasion with appearances on The Story Prize Blog by Cathy Stonehouse (Dec. 29) and Alexander MacLeod (Dec. 31); and last but not least, our authors continued to be highlighted in best-of lists both at home and abroad. The Irish Times recommended Light Lifting for readers in 2012, and Clark Blaise's The Meagre Tarmac was tenderly mentioned by Philip Marchand (National Post), Ian McGillis (Montreal Gazette), and Quentin Mills-Fenn (Uptown) in their years-in-review. ("You know it's going to be a stellar year for fiction when Clark Blaise publishes something," QMF writes: damn straight it was!) Amanda Jernigan's Groundwork appeared (officially) on NPR's best 100 Poetry Books of 2011, with a paragraph praising her "daunting formal skill," "emotional intensity," and "light, perfecting touch"; and last (but certainly not least), our very own Laura Boudreau came in fourth (fourth!) in the National Post's Readers' Choices survey. That makes her the second Biblioasis author to have beat out Ondaatje's The Cat's Table in recent weeks. (Suitable Precautions may also be topping the import lists in Switzerland, but that's another story.)

So! That was the break. Keep tuned for more news, and an annum faustum to you all!

A Pinch of One More Thing

2011-12-22T11:21:00.000-08:00

Just when you thought Thirsty was waterblogged, we find ourselves trudging back to the well. Something about drinking salty ink? Congrats to Ms. Rosenblum for making the top 10 books of Canadian short fiction for 2011, & thanks to Chad Pelley for the shoutout. (It's worth visiting the site for the picture of Zsuzsi Gartner alone, who looks not unliked the winged Nike of the CBC. Yowsers.)

... and to conclude today's Blog Binge ...

2011-12-22T09:42:00.001-08:00

Just a quick note to say that the Who Killed CanLit? issue of CNQ is now not only on the newsstands, but up and running online. Check out notesandqueries.ca for select features, select online-only features, new fiction from Nathan Whitlock, and new poetry from Nyla Matuk, and more!

Quillcast Clark Blaise

2011-12-22T09:14:00.000-08:00

I'm sure many of you have seen this already, thanks to the its appearance on the Walrus Blog and of course thanks to Quill & Quire, but in case you haven't, take a listen. This interview with Catherine Bush was recorded in October of this year, when Clark was in Toronto for IFOA and the Writers' Trust Awards. It's called "Clark Blaise and the Writing Life," but really it's just about Life full stop, and It. Is. Great. Why--gasp--is writing a short story harder than writing a novel? How does the son of an Amoskeag Mills bobbin boy end up studying with Bernard Malamud? And what, most tantalizingly, is our very own master storyteller and border-crosser planning next? If you don't already know, find out now.

Well we always kinda assumed we had the best darn poets around ...

2011-12-22T08:56:00.000-08:00

But now we know it's really true, because NPR and the Boston Globe say so. Congratulations to Amanda Jernigan, whose Groundwork will appear shortly on NPR's top 100 poetry books for the year, and again to Marsha Pomerantz, whose Illustrated Edge made the Boston Globe's Best Poetry Books of 2011.

If you'd like to learn a little more about Amanda and Groundwork--and if you weren't lucky enough to catch part of her east coast odyssey this fall--well, this past week she recorded a truly epic podcast for Indi 101.5's Art Waves, and it's almost as good as hearing her in person.

Short Fiction Gets Tangential

2011-12-19T07:48:00.000-08:00

Sounds like a limbo move or a calculus maneuver, but no: it's Laura Boudreau, live from The Story Prize Blog. Our dynamic cosmopolite talks about Singer, Carver, travelers, and what (if anything) holds a collection of short fiction together. Take a look!

Two More for the Poets

2011-12-19T06:14:00.000-08:00

Good morning, folks. As Christmas rolls down toward the two-tongued sea here by the Bibliomanse (or rather, as piffling amounts of snow continue to melt into Lake St. Clair), it seems that our minds are turning to two very important seasonal things: poetry, and cake. On December 18th, Marsha Pomerantz was the Poetry Daily Poet with the title poem of The Illustrated Edge. Since December 18th is exactly one week before Christmas, and since one of her "edges" is a table with "drips and crumbs and bellies pressed up close," I figure I can segue rather neatly to the unexpected theme of 2011: CAKE. The year of cake closed with one final slice this Saturday at the London Children's Museum, where David Hickey read to a captivated crew of children and parents. What happens when you combine cake, gum, balloons, and poetry? See for yourselves. More pictures shortly. Also keep an eye out on the London Free Press, who did (bless 'em!) give us a shout-out before the launch, and an interview during.

Claire Tacon on CFRU 93.3

2011-12-15T08:20:00.000-08:00

Hey, all! This morning Dan Evans of The Bookshelf interviews Dan Wells and Claire Tacon on Books for Breakfast (yum, books). Take a listen! Claire Tacon in the 8 AM slot, and Dan Wells in the 9. Highlights include a nice summary of what small presses can do, and a handsome paean by Mr. Evans on the merits of good book design.

First Toronto, then New York (or: the Poets Bury Ondaatje)

2011-12-12T21:00:00.000-08:00

For those of you keeping track of R. Rosenblum's campaign for global blog domination, you'll have seen the pickup last week in the New Yorker's Book Bench and on rumpus.net. "Oh my God, my friend is a" -- what? Here's a clue: the answer is neither "vampire" nor "kitten."

And in unrelated-but-equally-exciting news: a little birdie told us last week that Amanda Jernigan's Groundwork now ranks as the sixth-highest bestselling title at Bryan Prince, Booksellers, according to Open Book Toronto. That's one, two, three, four (count them, FOUR) rankings above Michael Ondaatje's The Cat's Table. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the poets are gaining on the Giller Prize, one devoted fan base at a time ... congrats to Amanda, and to Rebecca too. Keep on crusading.

Call for Submissions

2011-12-12T14:48:00.001-08:00

Hey folks. Red Claw Press is putting out a new anthology, this time about sleep. (Sleep? Remember that? Anybody?) If your eyes are still open at 6 PM on a Monday, take a look. Deadline's February 1st.

Why Not? longlisted for Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction

2011-12-12T06:41:00.000-08:00

All of us at Biblioasis are proud to announce that Ray Robertson's Why Not? Fifteen Reasons to Live was longlisted for the $25 000 Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction. The prize recognizes excellence in Non-Fiction for books that combine "subtlety of thought and perception" with elegant style and mastery of the English Language. The Shortlist will be announced on January 10th 2012 and the finalist on March 5th 2012.

Congratulations to Ray and everyone who made the longlist!

Check out the longlist and read the full story here.

Day of the Dead, Redux

2011-12-08T06:21:00.000-08:00

Well, Biblioasis is happy to boast that our authors have thus far authors participated in, arranged, slogged through, flew to, trained towards, and gloried over EIGHTY-TWO events this fall. Now (as people are doing their pre-Christmas memory dumps, perhaps?) the photos are trickling in, and they are MARVELLOUS. Yes indeed.

These from our Day-of-the-Dead launch of Love Poems at Dora Keogh, featuring the inimitable Colin Carberry, along with our new & dulcet-toned friend over at the Consulate General of Mexico, Gerardo Ochoa. Cameo appearances by poet Goran Simic and his lovely wife Lida, our genius-behind-the-translation-curtain Stephen Henighan, and Stephen's wife Lorena. (And pssst. Toronto-ites: look for this last uber-duo at the Aluna Café Monday night, where they'll be presenting Llosa's La Chunga. 1 Wiltshire Ave, 7 PM.)

That other person there? Rather shiny of forehead? Not me. Nope. No sir.

Therefore. Bibliophiles! Have more pictures from the fall? Send 'em my way. Thirsty drinks everything up. Much like a sponge ... or the poets at an open bar. (Jokes. Kidding! Love you all.)

David Hickey Chews the Fat--er--Gum?--with The Londoner

2011-12-07T16:31:00.000-08:00

So Rebecca Rosenblum is tromping up and down the blogosphere, and now (it seems), David Hickey is midway through a London media coup. A charming little profile appeared in the Londoner today: if you want to hear David talk a bit about his reasons for writing A Very Small Something, you should absolutely take a look. Seems his nieces and nephews aren't the only ones who love the book--and if this keeps up, we'll have hit every paper in London! (Hear that, Free Press? Huh? ALL the cool kids are reviewing it.)

(As an aside, I tried to load the Really Very Adorable Photo of David Holding His Book and Looking Proud, but I was defeated by the Londoner's photo-embedding technology. Send me a note if you're reading this and know how to get around the problem ... and in the meantime, look at the page. Great shot. Great book. Heck, it's all great.)

The Other Voice

2011-12-07T16:28:00.000-08:00

Hello, world. Good evening. Happy Wednesday. Just a quick note to say three cheers to Biblioasis author K.D. Miller, who's new book The Other Voice is just now out from Stonebunny. Doing a little pre-holiday Amazon snoop? Check it out.

Rebecca Rosenblum's Quest for World Domination

2011-12-07T06:55:00.000-08:00

... okay, so that's a fib. She's not taking over the world. ("Everyone knows if I were given access to the red button, I'd put a kitten sticker on it," saith RR.) But she may just be taking over the blogosphere: yesterday she provided the 41st installment of the Story Prize blog, where she described (oh woe to all of us who have been there) the experience of a salvaging a Bad Story. And elsewhere in Toronto? Blogs are still coming out fast and furious on the Afterword. Yesterday she talked (gulp) about editors--"Scourge of the Earth or Cheap Psychotherapists?"--and today? It's anybody's guess. (Okay, granted I'm not guessing because I read it last night, but the rest of you will have to guess because I'll get in trouble if I tell you.)

Last but not least! For all you Laura Boudreau fans, knoweth that a Certain Story Prize blog abovementioned might, just might, be featuring a Certain Story Writer of the initials LB some time soon ... so keep yer ears to the ground.

Hey, there's a Shreddie on the floor! Rebecca Rosenblum Guest Edits the Afterword

2011-12-05T15:16:00.001-08:00

Great news, folks: all this week our very own Rebecca Rosenblum will be guest editing The National Post's Afterword. Curious as to why she's more interested in stray Shreddies than the movements of the stars? Here's a taste:

For me, exploration is writing and reading and also being alive. I use the details I know to explore people and situations I don’t understand. I access them in the micro details, the laundry emergencies and poorly chosen lunches and unhappy kittens in our laps. And it is out of these details that the larger issues construct themselves…or we construct them.

Rest of the blog post is on the Post site, and more will come. Read them! Eat them! They're grrrreat. (Okay, yes, that's Frosted Flakes, but whatever.)

Dad of Divas on A Very Small Something

2011-12-05T06:30:00.000-08:00

This weekend parenting blog host Dad of Divas took a look at A Very Small Something, and here's what he called it:

"A beautiful tale ... This author has put together a wonderful book that both children and parents will alike will enjoy and the illustrations within the book are also ones that will just jump off the page! I highly recommend this to all!"

So there we go. It's a book fit for divas, darlings, dads, dumbledorfs--everybody. And (along with a few gum balls, maybe?) what a beautiful Christmas present ...

The Telegraph-Journal Raves About Suitable Precautions

2011-12-03T06:56:00.001-08:00

from today's Telegraph-Journal:

This review was originally going to be a survey of some of this fall's debut Canadian short fiction
collections. But Laura Boudreau's Suitable Precautions was so superior it would have been a disservice
to her fine collection to have it share the spotlight.
I first read Boudreau, who was born and raised in
Toronto and lives in London, England, in the The
Journey Prize Stories 22. Her story, Dead Dad Game,
with its non sequitur twists left me wanting more. And
Suitable Precautions delivers.

Like her precocious, deviant tween girl Lauren in the
Poses, Boudreau is definitely someone who doesn't
know when to quit. She is best when at a ramble speed,
with words and thoughts spewing until the narrative
leads you someplace quite different from where you
began. And the wayBoudreau does it, these twists
don't feel like forced tricks - they come on like the slow
boil a frog feels sitting in the pot.

For the full review, please go here.

Learning to Celebrate Life: Ray Robertson makes Globe Top 100, reviewed in The Gazette

2011-11-28T06:28:00.001-08:00

Well, the Globe's Best 100 book list came out on Friday, and we're proud to announce that both Ray Robertson's Why Not? and Clark Blaise's The Meagre Tarmac ranked among them. What else? Ian McGillis of the Montreal Gazette gave Ray's book a thoughtful going-over, comparing it to Sarah Bakewell's NBCC Award-winning How to Live, and describing the part Ray's book plays in the "mini revival" of "the humanist essay with practical application."

Here's a taste:

"The book as a whole is ... heartfelt, funny, rigorous, practical without ever being preachy. Robertson has the born essayist's way with an aphorism ('There's no age more conformist than youth'), and his catholic range is contagious: when he pulls in Lord Byron and Jimmie Rodgers as back-to-back sources, he not only evinces no strain, he makes you think of a romantic poet and a yodelling country singer as natural soul brothers. Two of the longest quotes in the book appear close together: One is from Baudelaire, the other a mock-news piece on teenage masturbation from the The Onion, and by the time we reach them, Robertson has us thinking of them as equally worthy sources of wisdom."

For the rest of the review, check out the Gazette online.

And hey! If you're anywhere near Burlington tomorrow, you should check Ray out as he reads for the Book and Author Series.

LaSalle Park Pavilion,

50 North Shore Blvd.,

9:30 AM.

What's blue and white and read all over?

2011-11-25T13:15:00.001-08:00

The books section of this week's Western News, that's what. If you're in London-town and have a chance to pick up UWO's news mag, be sure to flip to their new "Read All Over" book supplement, as spearheaded by Jason Winders. The supp. features a lovely write-up of David Hickey, plus shout-outs to all those wonderful Western peers who helped make the video trailer for A Very Small Something.

If you haven't seen the trailer yet, it's now up on www.averysmallsomething.com. And if you're near the Children's Museum on Saturday Dec. 17th, be sure to keep your eyes peeled for David, who will be (among other things!) organizing a bubble gum scavenger hunt and a craft session for local kiddles.

Rosenblum: Short Story Specialist.

2011-11-24T07:26:00.000-08:00

In advance of tonight's event at McNally Robinson, The Winnipeg Free Press interviewed Rebecca Rosenblum, calling her a "Short Story Specialist". What does Rebecca want you to know about The Big Dream?

"That it exists? Um, that it’s a book about people who work, who have jobs and lives and fall in love and get sick and eat sandwiches and care about each other, but sometimes not enough or not in the right ways."

Check out the rest of the interview here!

If you are in Winnipeg be sure to join Rebecca and Ray Robertson at McNally Robinson tonight at 7:00pm!

After-Dinner Games for the After-Dinner Man

2011-11-12T09:18:00.000-08:00

Hey, Toronto! Looking for something to take the edge off your shovel? The starch out of your shirtcollar? Come on out to Type Books, this Thursday, for a little Wage Slave Recreation. Details below.

After-Dinner Games for the After-Dinner Man

What, pray tell, is the After-Dinner Man? Let us consult the Glossary. “In the early 17th century,” say our Authors, “a man who returned to his place of work after dinner was to be pitied; either the after-dinner man was overly devoted to labor, or else he had too much of it.” Sound familiar? Yes indeed: quoting once more from our text, “we are all after-dinner men and and women, now.” So to provide, as is their goal eternally, some small portion of pleasure to their loyal Readers as they depart from (or perhaps return to) their places of employ, Mssrs. Kingwell, Glenn, and Seth have decided to throw a PARTY. Yes, my friends, a small gathering, a respite from labour, and the chance to fête the Glossary with GAMES and MERRIMENT. We dearly hope you can join us.

WHAT: An After-Dinner Party for the After-Dinner Man: The Toronto Launch of The Wage Slave's Glossary
WHO: Hosted by Mark Kingwell and Seth
WHERE: Type Books, 883 Queen West
WHEN: Thursday Nov. 17, 6-8 PM
CONTACT: Tara Murphy, 519 968 2206, tmurphy@biblioasis.com

Admission is free; however, because of the nature of the event, we ask that you RSVP to Tara at tmurphy@biblioasis.com.

Laura Boudreau and Rebecca Rosenblum reviewed in the Toronto Star

2011-11-08T06:43:00.000-08:00

Sarah Murdoch, at the Toronto Star, gave a quick shout out to Laura Boudreau's Suitable Precautions saying: "Suitable Precautions (Biblioasis; 182 pages; $19.95) is a debut collection of 13 stories by Laura Boudreau, a Toronto writer who lives in London, England. The writing is accomplished, she has a good ear for dialogue and there is a dark thread of unease winding through these urban and angsty stories. The press material trumpets that "We're Not in CanLit Any More" and it's true: No gazing thoughtfully at wheat fields sullies Boudreau's prose."

Look out for a forthcoming review of Suitable Precautions in Geist.

The Toronto Star also wrote a short review of Rebecca Rosenblum's The Big Dream:

"What a fine idea to write a short-story collection situated in the petri dish where so many of us spend our days: the workplace. The Big Dream (Biblioasis; 196 pages; $19.95) is set at Dream Inc., a lifestyle-magazine publisher, and Rebecca Rosenblum's 13 stories deal with the backbiting, flirtation, rivalries, schemes and friendships that define every corporate culture. This is the Toronto writer's second collection, Her first, Once, in 2008, won the Metcalf-Rooke Award for Fiction, and was praised by reviewers."

Bruce Jay Friedman: Jaunty and Energetic

2011-11-07T11:05:00.000-08:00

Adding their voices to the numerous good reviews for Lucky Bruce, The Washington Independent Review of Books says that "Friedman's writing is jaunty and energetic, the journalist at play." See what else they have to say here.

Laura Wells over at The East Hampton Star also reviewed Lucky Bruce, calling it "a true testament to decades of hard work, of perseverance ... in true Don Quixote fashion, Friedman is fascinated by everything going on around him."Check out the rest of Wells' review.

Keep an eye on NY1 tomorrow for an interview with Bruce Jay Friedman on The New York Times Close Up that aired over the weekend.

Rebecca Rosenblum: Master of Minutia (and a Hard Right Hook?)

2011-11-07T09:17:00.000-08:00

We are proud to report that Biblioboxer Rebecca Rosenblum slugged it out with Dani Couture last night at The Literary Death Match, Toronto. Live from the blow-by-blow: "Round 2: Rebecca Rosenblum (Maclean’s “CanLit Rookie of the Year”), and ReLit award-winner Dani Couture. Couture, suffering from bronchitis, led-off and had the packed crowd on the edge of their collective seats with her excerpt from her novel Alaoma. Rosenblum struck back with a fantastic selection from her book The Big Dream."

What did the judges say? Find out on the Death Match Site, and thanks to Julie Wilson & Todd Zuniga for all their organizing, refereeing, blood-mopping, etc.

The Big Dream has also been receiving the love (not war!) from our friends in the media. Check out Mark Paterson's review at The Rover, where he says: "Rosenblum is an entertaining master of minutia, she has a prodigious ability to take ordinary details and restyle or adorn them in just the slightest way, transforming the mundane into the eccentric. The stories in The Big Dream come alive with orange-juice stained pillows, Zellers jeans, and jam sandwiches ... The Big Dream thoroughly succeeds ... Rebecca Rosenblum is a gifted chronicler of our time."

Salty Ink also praises "Rosenblum as an original, dialogue-strong stylist among Canadian short story writers," and the site features an extensive Q&A on Rebecca's own rose-coloured view of the world, writing, music, what have you. Get the full scoop here.

Last but certainly not least: the National Post's review calls The Big Dream a "clever, penetrating collection" that showcases her "shrewd, razor-sharp, yet deeply compassionate" style. If you haven't checked out The Big Dream yet, it's available online and in better bookstores everywhere.

Amanda Jernigan & David Hickey at Type, Tonight!

2011-11-07T07:13:00.000-08:00

Hello, Toronto. Missing IFOA? The hustle? The crush? The hospitality suite? Yep. Me too. Every day should be IFOA. And though we at the Bibliomanse don't have the budget for complimentary single malt, we can afford some pretty great poesy, and we're giving it to you as a post-IFOA present. Come hear Amanda Jernigan and David Hickey at Type (wonderful Type!) tonight at 6.

Want to know more about Open Air Bindery? Check out the review that just came out in the Western News, where they say that "Hickey’s poetry is not only light on its feet, but rich in substance." (Get it? Feet?)

Ray Robertson on Tapestry

2011-11-06T19:40:00.001-08:00

Ray Robertson appeared on CBC's Tapestry today on a program on Reasons to Live to discuss Why Not?. It's an exceptional interview, which you can listen to here.

An article in the University of Toronto newspaper also sheds some light on Why Not?:

At most, you’ll find a kindred spirit in this book; at least, you’ll add a few shiny new quotations to your collection. A University of Toronto grad (and a former editor-in-chief of the newspaper), Robertson read his share of Kant and Hume. He found a large part of the heavily analytic philosophy program to be “not enough about what life is really about”, and turned his talents to writing. It came to be that “novels were a sort of philosophy co-op program” for him.

Why Not is, in a sense, a practical application of philosophy, but that’s not to say he made any sacrifices stylistically. Straightforward and never shy, the reader feels welcome and respected as Robertson plays the role of earnest life professor. He remains true to his literary tone in real life. “All the writers I like have voices. Language and the way they sound was always important to me,” Robertson said. “I think of myself as a sort of highbrow lowbrow. My needs are simple, but with that comes an honesty.”

Perhaps surprisingly, one of the fifteen reasons is the antithesis of life. “I didn’t realize until about three quarters of the way through the book there was going to be a chapter called Death. That kind of snuck up on me, but it seemed appropriate, because no matter how wonderful things are you’re still going to die.” It’s that sort of off-the-cuff realism that makes Why Not an entertaining and insightful read.

You can read the rest here.

Photo by Marty Gervais, taken this past weekend at Bookfest Windsor.

Day of the Dead at Dora Keogh

2011-11-02T09:00:00.000-07:00

On this year's Dia de Muertos, Biblioasis and the Consulate General of Mexico are proud to launch the seventh volume of our International Translation Series: Love Poems, by Jaime Sabines. Regarded as one of the major poets of the twentieth century, with admirers known to overflow auditoriums and to whisper raptly along at his readings, Sabines attained a status in Mexico that few poets achieve in life. His Love Poems are now available for the first time as a collection in English. Join Irish-Canadian poet Colin Carberry as we celebrate his spectacular new translation.

Admission is FREE. The event will be in English and Spanish.

"Clark Blaise Maps the Indo-American Experience"

2011-11-01T08:35:00.000-07:00

The following interview ran in The National Post this morning. Thanks to Jason Rehel. Keep your fingers crossed for Clark tonight at the Writers' Trust Gala, where the winner of this year's fiction prize will be announced.

* * *

Clark Blaise is a border-crosser.

In life, Blaise moved between Fargo, N.D., where he was born to Canadian parents, Montreal, Iowa City, Toronto, Calcutta, Delhi and San Francisco, among other cities. In his literary output, Blaise flits across even more divides, between generations and races, regional boundaries within nation states — even the boundary between corporeal solidity and spiritual boundlessness. So it’s no surprise that Margaret Atwood’s blurb on his latest book, The Meagre Tarmac (Biblioasis, $19.95), calls Blaise a “master border-crosser.”

“Borders themselves are very close to the short-story form,” Blaise says in an interview in Toronto during the recent International Festival of Authors. “They compress, they keep things within a tight structure. And I think maybe I am more comfortable in the short story form than the novel. In the short story, the boundaries are pretty well defined and you have to stay within them. And I enjoy that compression, where everything counts, every act has a consequence. And the consequences of any action in a short story are manifest, especially if you’re a sensitive reader.”

The Meagre Tarmac is a collection of 11 stories, some grouped, as the first three are, into mini-narratives — all concerning the sutures and broken seams of Indo-American families who’ve immigrated to the United States in the 1970s in search of prosperity amid burgeoning technological innovation in northern California. There’s the patriarch who, because of personal shame related to a sexual dalliance before his wife and son arrived in the U.S., is tearing apart his family 16 years later by insisting on a move back to India. It’s a story told arrestingly from the father’s, mother’s and most jarringly by a 13-year-old daughter, Pramila’s perspectives.

“It used to be called among Indian immigrants ‘12 and out.’ When your daughter reaches 12, if you don’t take her back to India, you’ve lost her,” Blaise says. “But those people who didn’t go back, their children are doing what North American children do; they break away from their family, they don’t want to go back and live with their parents and they don’t want to have their parents come to live with them. But that’s the way it is in India. That’s the overriding arc of this book — that they prospered here, but they can’t stay.”

Later in the book, another male household head recounts spending his $250,000 dot-com bonus saving an uncle back in Calcutta, losing his immediate family back in the U.S. in the process. We revisit him six years later in the very next story, wandering and lonely, after recognizing his own folly during a sojourn in Tuscany.

Finally, the collection closes with a successful executive who’s played the North American game successfully, accumulated vast wealth and a network of friends and acquaintances, even embracing the ephemera of American cultural life, only to give it all up while yearning for “Old Calcutta.”

“These people are missing one thing in life, and that is that India could prepare them for success in America, but it could not prepare them for happiness in America, personal satisfactions, sexual gratification, marriage,” Blaise says. “Those were all to be given by parents. Arranged, and maybe love would follow, maybe it wouldn’t. All the men are, in some way, failed as fathers, husbands, lovers. They are all looking for something.”

Blaise, 71, resides now in San Francisco with his wife, writer Bharati Mukherjee, a tenured faculty member at Berkeley. They’ve been married since 1964, and have two sons. Until the recent California budget crisis, Blaise was himself teaching at Berkeley as an adjunct professor in creative writing, after a distinguished academic career that included an eight-year stint as director of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. Named an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2009 for his contributions to writing and scholarship, and for founding Concordia University’s creative writing program in the late 1960s, Blaise is now widely considered to be one of the foremost practitioners of the short-story form. With The Meagre Tarmac, which is shortlisted for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, due to be announced in Toronto Nov. 1, even he, while being quite modest about it, feels he’s reached a new level.

“In this book, I had in my life for the first time the experience of being a director. It was like having actors milling around the wings waiting for their cue to come on. Most of the times you have to methodically grind it out. ‘What would she say now? What would he do now?’ This time, they all came with a backstory.

“Of course, I also have 50 years experience with Indo-Americans and Indo-Canadians, struggling here, and not struggling, maybe even succeeding here,” he says. “And I’ve seen many happy families, but you know, as Tolstoy said, you don’t write about them.”

It’s in the interplay between events, deeds, thoughts and dialogue between family members being ripped apart by the stressors of immigration that Blaise tells a heartbreaking group of stories almost all concerned about loss, estrangement, heart ache and alienation. In the end, the master border-crosser doesn’t seek to make any political points about assimilation vs. ethno-diversity; his stories, affairs of the heart, especially as they cross thick, irreversible borders, prove to be far messier, and far more human in scope and interest.

“The dream of immigration, I suppose, is to find yourself at home in a new place. All of them [the characters in The Meagre Tarmac] find themselves successful in this new place, but it’s missing something,” he says. “They didn’t have the Archie and Veronica moments: making out in the back seat of a car, the songs, the movies, the sports. They didn’t have all the things that make North America North America.

“They didn’t have the trivia. And you can never catch up with the trivia. You can integrate the great ideas, but you can never integrate the trivia.”

Post-IFOA, Pre-BookFest

2011-10-31T08:57:00.000-07:00

Some authors are straggling home. Some are sticking around. And some are even headed to Windsor. Interested in BookFest? Dan talks about it to Ted Shaw of the Windsor Star here. I also wanted to post a few photos from the Jernigan/Hickey reading of last Thursday, a) because it was AWESOME, and b) because of the funny. Kudos to Waterloo for being a poetry hotspot. And in the middle of IFOA, no less!

If you're looking for your Jernigan fix and you're in Hamilton this Thursday, check out Bryan Prince at 7 PM. Also of note in Hammy-town: Ray Robertson reads with Marina Endicott and JonAmo Lawson at the Carnegie Gallery, 7 PM, TOMORROW.

Photos by John Cull.

Roald Dahl Day Roundup

2011-10-24T15:49:00.000-07:00

Biblioasis poet & children's author David Hickey, with his lovely partner-in-crime Erica Leighton, dazzled children and parents alike yesterday at the Gladstone. The audience was small (literally!) but the enthusiasm big, and everyone had a great time.

2011-10-24T08:51:00.000-07:00

For those Bibliofans out there who plan, like me, to be skulking around the docks of Toronto this weekend, you might want to check out the following events. Or if you're in Hamilton, Owen Sound, or Windsor, keep an eye out for Clark Blaise at one of IFOA's satellite events:

Hamilton Art Gallery, Oct. 27, 7 PM: Reading from the Writers' Trust Nominees

Best Western on the Bay, Owen Sound, Oct 30, 2 PM: Reading with Clark Blaise, Wayne Johnston, Madeleine Thien, and Meg Wolitzer.

Art Gallery of Windsor, Nov. 4, 8 PM: Reading with Clark Blaise, Brian Francis, Will Ferguson, and Sarita Mandanna.

And for the Torontonians ...

ROUND TABLE: Building Character

Friday, October 28, 8:00pm, 2011

| Studio Theatre

Purchase Ticket

Character: round or flat, protagonist and antagonist, sympathetic and the antihero; join a conversation with Anita Rau Badami, Clark Blaise, Madeleine Thien, and D.W. Wilson on the development of literary characters. Moderator: James Grainger.

READING: Coady, van der Pol, Wells, Wolitzer

Saturday, October 29, 4:00pm, 2011

| Studio Theatre

Purchase Ticket

Lynn Coady, Marieke van der Pol, Zachariah Wells, and Meg Wolitzer read from their latest works. Michael Lista hosts.

READING: Marx, McWatt, Wells, Wilson

Sunday, October 30, 12:00pm, 2011

| Studio Theatre

Purchase Ticket

Patricia Marx, Tessa McWatt, Zachariah Wells, and D.W. Wilson read from their latest works. Mark Medley hosts.

See you there! TKM.

David Hickey, Roald Dahl & A Very Small Something

2011-10-20T18:34:00.000-07:00

This Saturday Biblioasis joins Small Print Toronto to launch their latest children's title, David Hickey's and Alexander Griggs-Burr's wonderful tale of bubblegum and belonging, A Very Small Something. Part of the International Roald Dahl Day celebrations, David Hickey will be reading at the Gladstone Hotel at noon, as part of a day of festivities which includes a giant peach scavenger hunt, a bubble gum blowing contest, a film presentation of James and the Giant Peach and a writing contest. $10 for an All Dahl Pass.

In anticipation, David has put together this book trailer, which I must say is one of the best I've seen. It gives you a great sense of the story and Alexander's wonderful illustrations.

If you would like to listen to a full version of the story, please visit the book website www.averysmallsomething.com, and click on the link.

for now, the trailer:

A Very Small Something from David Hickey on Vimeo.

Hello, Vancouver

2011-10-19T13:52:00.000-07:00

It seems every scribbler since Sophocles is descending on Vancouver today. We at the Bibliomanse are, well, we're still at the Bibliomanse, which is still in Emeryville, which is still very far from Vancouver ... but! We're pleased to say that Clark Blaise will be carrying the torch for Team Biblioasis at this year's 2011 Games. We're also excited to note that Anakana Schofield, who is publishing her first novel Malarky with us in spring of 2012, will participate in a panel discussion on Sunday. Take a look at the events below, and if you need a break from stalking Kate Beaton (which, um, is what I would be doing), then drop in and say hi.--TKM.

42 LAND OF PLENTY

Peter Behrens

Quebec / United States

Clark Blaise

Canada / United States

Ling Zhang

Ontario

Host: John Burns
Friday, October 21, 2011 - 10:00am - 11:30am
Studio 1398
$17 / $8.50 for student groups (Buy Tickets Online)

Canada is populated largely by immigrants, all with stories that carry shadows of what they’ve left behind, and how they’ve been welcomed to their new land. In his new novel, Peter Behrens transports the O’Briens introduced in his award-winning first novel from Ireland to Canada. Clark Blaise’s collection of short fiction tackles the struggle between tradition and modernity faced by Indian immigrants to America. And Ling Zhang, whose last novel became the highest-grossing film in Chinese history, gives voice to Chinese immigrants to Canada’s West Coast in her multi-generational saga. Join three compelling storytellers whose fiction embraces the possibility of success in a new land, where roots are shallow and cultural identity and personal identity are often at odds.

54 CLARK BLAISE AND RUDY WIEBE IN CONVERSATION

Clark Blaise

Canada / United States

Rudy Wiebe

Alberta

Saturday, October 22, 2011 - 10:30am
Studio 1398
$17 (Buy Tickets Online)

When a writer releases a volume called Collected Stories, 1955–2010, you know that this is a writer with “legs,” who has certainly stood the test of time. When an author who has published 20 books of fiction and non-fiction releases his first collection of short stories in nearly 20 years (The Meagre Tarmac), you also know that you’re looking at great talent.Rudy Wiebe and Clark Blaise, now both in their 70s, sit down together this morning to talk about their lives as writers, the craft of the short story, the “Canadian experience” and anything else that leaps into their fertile, inquisitive and sharp minds.

68 VANCOUVER 125 LEGACY BOOKS

Sunday, October 23, 2011 - 4:00pm
Waterfront Theatre
$17 (Buy Tickets Online)

Vancouver’s 125th Birthday Party continues and this time we are celebrating our city’s literature and the republication of 10 lost Vancouver literary gems, ranging from the classic oral history of Daphne Marlatt and Carole Itter's Opening Doors to Vancouver's most notorious unsolved murder mystery in Edward Starkins' Who Killed Janet Smith? Come armed with your “Best of VanLit” lists as host Michael Turner talks with Vancouver literary devotees Anakana Scofield, Stephen Osbourne, Dan Francis and Jean Barman about what makes our city’s literature great and what titles you must have on your shelf.

A reception at The Dockside Lounge at the Granville Island Hotel to follow.

Claire Tacon Launch at the Dora Keogh Tomorrow (Thursday, October 13th) Eve

2011-10-12T11:21:00.000-07:00

Attention all Toronto-area Biblioasis-o-philes: we'll be in Toronto tomorrow evening to launch Claire Tacon's Metcalf-Rooke winning In the Field at the Dora Keogh (141 Danforth Ave). Start time: 7 pm. Attendance mandatory, without a note from the doctor. And no, attending Dani Couture's launch of Algoma at the Gladstone tonight is not a valid excuse: if we were in Toronto, we'd be going to both as well. (We'll catch her here in Windsor in the next few weeks.) It's book launch season, folks: suck it up.

Looking forward to seeing (most of) you there,

Dan & Tara

PS: Please pass along to all non-Biblioasis connected folk: they are welcome as well.

The New York Times (Daily) reviews Lucky Bruce. Again.

2011-10-11T06:52:00.000-07:00

In what is certainly a first for a press-published book, The New York Times has reviewed Bruce Jay Friedman's literary memoir Lucky Bruce for a second time in three days. If Sunday's New York Times Book Review review was very positive, Dwight Garner's New York Times Daily review, out today, is even more so. If, as James Baldwin said to him, "You're not a writer until you have a shelf," then Friedman is a hell of a writer indeed, and Lucky Bruce is a wonderful addition to that ever-expanding shelf.

Garner writes:

Funny novels, like funny movies, rarely gain traction with prize committees. “People assume that it’s the gloomy buggers that are the serious ones,” Martin Amis has said, “but in fact, anyone who has ever been anywhere in fiction is funny.” A great comic actor, if he or she sticks around long enough, might win not an actual Oscar but a consolation prize: a lifetime achievement award. The National Book Awards need something similar for America’s comic writers. Among the first I’d nominate is Bruce Jay Friedman, whose prose, over the past five decades, has mostly been a pure pleasure machine.

There’s a bit of Larry David in Mr. Friedman, whose best novels include “Stern” (1962) and “A Mother’s Kisses” (1964), and whose vinegar-and-oil short work can be found in “The Collected Short Fiction of Bruce Jay Friedman” (1995). There’s a bit of Joseph Heller and Nora Ephron and Peter De Vries and Calvin Trillin and early Philip Roth in him too.

Mr. Friedman, also a playwright and screenwriter, called one of his plays “a tense comedy,” and that phrase describes his best fiction. It’s a bundle of neuroses. The Friedman book I hold most dear is “The Lonely Guy’s Book of Life” (1978), which was made into a mediocre Steve Martin and Charles Grodin movie. At times when I’ve felt like one of its sad-sack antiheroes — luckless, friendless, dumped, alone — that book has been high comic nourishment. It makes low-level depression and ineptitude seem stylish and ironic, almost a supreme way of being in the world.

Mr. Friedman returns now with “Lucky Bruce: A Literary Memoir,” a buoyant book. He is 81, but his prose, in terms of its vigor, is still in its 30s. “Lucky Bruce” is about a kid from the Bronx who finds early literary fame; fritters away some of his prime years, dabbling in movies and theater; makes and loses a load of money; eats very well; has close and funny friends; sleeps with more than his allotment of beautiful women; and, agreeably for his readers, has a way with anecdotes.

The author is big and gregarious; he seems like the kind of guy who might, out of the blue, decide to give you noogies. That’s what he essentially did to Norman Mailer, at a party at Mailer’s town house in the late 1960s. In return he was head-butted by Mailer, whose wife, Beverly, yelled, “Kill the bastard, Norman.” The pair took it outside. Mr. Friedman got in a few belly punches and won the fight, but Mailer bit him in the neck. Mr. Friedman ended up at Lenox Hill Hospital, on the receiving end of a tetanus shot.

There are a lot of stories like that one in “Lucky Bruce.” Mr. Friedman warned his friend Mario Puzo not to call his book “The Godfather.” (“Sounds domestic.”) He accidentally shushed Edmund Wilson at the theater. Al Pacino said to him admiringly, “Some men can wear a hat.” James Baldwin said to him, “You’re not a writer until you have a shelf.” Kurt Vonnegut asked, “Can you teach me how to hang out?” Philip Roth once called out to him, “Remember, Saul Bellow am de daddy of us all.” (Mr. Friedman thought to himself, “I did not feel he was my daddy.”)

Mr. Friedman criticizes himself for name-dropping in “Lucky Bruce,” but he needn’t worry: the stories are good ones. And he never strays far from his own shapely life story.

He decided to be a writer because he thought it might help him with women, and his early role model was J. D. Salinger. Mr. Friedman sold one of the first stories he wrote to The New Yorker. A letter he received from the magazine read, “All of us here are delighted with your story and we would like to publish it in the magazine.” Mr. Friedman’s response was, he writes, “All of us here in the Bronx are delighted that all of you there at The New Yorker are pleased with my story.”

By the time he was in his late 20s, Mr. Friedman had three sons, an unhappy marriage, a house on Long Island and a job editing low-brow men’s adventure magazines. He wrote his first novel, “Stern,” on subways and commuter trains.

“I recall writing the book in a heat,” he says, “as if I was being chased down an alley.”

The book sold only 6,000 copies, but its editor, Robert Gottlieb, assured Mr. Friedman that they were “the right copies.” The author later wondered, “Would it have been so awful to sell a few hundred thousand of the ‘wrong’ copies?”

Literary fame came; so did the smell of money, coming from the film business. Mr. Friedman wrote the screenplays for “Splash” and “Stir Crazy.” One of his short stories, adapted by Neil Simon, became the Elaine May film “The Heartbreak Kid.” He had cameos in three Woody Allen films and palled around with Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood and Richard Pryor.

Pryor asked Mr. Friedman if he wanted to get high. The author responded by explaining why, as he put it, “there were no (or very few) Jewish junkies.” The three reasons: “Jews need eight hours of sleep”; “They must have fresh orange juice in the morning”; “They have to read the entire N.Y. Times.”

In his best work, Mr. Friedman has always bounced his comedy off dark human action and emotion, and those things are here too. He worries that he was not a good father to his sons.

“I’d always felt shabby,” he writes, “about not doing a good enough job in looking after my father before his death.” He berates himself for career missteps.

“I’m a great fan of comeback stories,” Mr. Friedman writes in “Lucky Bruce.” His book is a pretty good comeback story of its own.

The Lucky Life of Bruce Jay Friedman

2011-10-10T07:57:00.000-07:00

Kassie Rose, of NPR's WOSU, reviews Friedman's new literary memoir over at The Longest Chapter:

I didn’t ever see the movies Stir Crazy (1980) and Splash (1984). Both popular flicks were “penned,” as the industry likes to say, by Bruce Jay Friedman, whose delightful memoir is out this month. Considering I’m also unfamiliar with Friedman’s nine novels, let alone his six collections of short fiction, it’s a wonder I pushed aside my organized reading plan and put Lucky Bruce: A Literary Memoir first in line.

But then, I like what’s coming out of Biblioasis, the book’s publisher. They caught my attention a while back with Alexander MacLeod’s Light Lifting, a collection of short stories that drove me to act similarly — I began reading MacLeod’s collection within moments after receiving it in my mailbox. Also, likely influencing my decision of what to read next, I desperately wanted a book on the lighter side. Friedman’s take on his life clearly fit that need with his humorous, self-effacing, name-dropping, candid storytelling. I dove into his memoir eagerly and was rewarded sumptuously on every page.

Friedman is a long-time successful writer, screenwriter and playwright whose heyday occurred during the second half of the 20th century. His memoir flourishes on the insider wit about the famous friends met along the way, as well as his hilarious sometimes jaw-dropping experiences in the world of Hollywood screenwriting and New York City literati.

There are so many entertaining riches in this book it’s impossible to cast a far enough net to capture them, from encounters with actresses Natalie Wood and Marlene Dietrich to competitive storytelling with playwright Harold Pinter. And then there’s the time Friedman engaged in a public fist fight with Norman Mailer. One of my favorite anecdotes involves Richard Yates, author of Revolutionary Road. He just appeared one day at the Magazine Management Company, an organization that published men’s adventure magazines where Friedman worked for many years. Friedman writes:

“He sat down behind an empty desk as if he worked on the magazines and hung around for weeks. It was difficult to know what to do with him. He was a disheveled-looking man with a handsomely ruined face and the hangdog demeanor of a sheepdog who had wandered in off the street. I knew of his quality. I had read Revolutionary Road and the word-perfect Eleven Kinds of Loneliness. But there was no job available at the time; nor did he ask for one. He just wanted to sit there, as if we were operating a shelter of some kind. He rarely spoke.”

for the rest of the review, please go here.

And then went down to the Ship

2011-10-09T05:59:00.000-07:00

Here's a lovely poster, as designed by Mike Mouland, for tonight's Jernigan/Callanan event. If you're anywhere near The Ship--heck, even if you're not--paddle your way to St. John's for the night.

And more good news for Biblioasis poetry aficionados: Marsha Pomerantz's The Illustrated Edge was reviewed this weekend by Arts Fuse. It seems we can add "inventiveness" to the list of Marsha's many accomplishments.

"A Miracle of Meter"? Poetry Magazine? Way to go Josh!

2011-10-09T05:51:00.001-07:00

All This Could Be Yours, by Joshua Trotter.
Biblioasis. $15.95.

Joshua Trotter’s All This Could Be Yours, a miracle of meter and meteorology, teems with rollicking weather reports. In “The Soloist,” a siren’s song brews storms as well as other kinds of trouble. The speaker, who evidently runs a kingdom by the sea, notes of his companions:

It’s not with sweat their clothes are wet, nor rain.
Her song slides down the sides of their bowed brains.
I listen to the drips, the drops and trickles. My kingdom drowns.

Like a siren, this debut poet offers mesmerizing music that can set us at sea, inducing a pleasurable madness drawn largely from sound, not sense. Aswim in the drips and drops of assonance, alliteration, and other sonic effects, his poems at their most enchanting nearly register as songs without words.

In “Hearing,” as in “The Soloist,” words turn literally to water:

Mornings after we gave up words, we still loved
to lie and graze the day awake
watching our old chit-chat thatch the street like rain.

Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon
now the dead grow sound limbs to stand upon
nourished by discourse we once loved.

In their sodden crypts they sigh awake
solitary, listening to the rain
heartened by our lost and rousing homilies—the rain

engaging vacant brains it falls upon
until everyone we love or once loved
is dying tonight or lying still awake

listening, for our sake, as rain rains the dead awake.
There’s something diplomatic about rain
strewing phrase upon phrase upon...

But here I pray that none whom once I loved
hold words they love from rain. I’m held awake
by heavy sentences the rain might lay upon them.

Wooed by acoustics, we accept Trotter’s premise that conversation has condensed into precipitation—partly because the poem enacts that very effect. Like raindrops hitting a roof, words and sounds strike and resound: “lie,” “sigh,” “dying,” “lying,” “I.” Several terms refract into multiple meanings: “morning” hints at “mourning”; “watch” and “awake” suggest “wake”; “sound” and “here”—a homophone for “hear”—enforce the poem’s appreciation for verbal music.

“Hearing” echoes another poem, “Rain” by the WWI soldier Edward Thomas. For Thomas, rain signified not company but condemnation:

Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain
On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me
Remembering again that I shall die.

Trotter’s revision permits Thomas an exquisite consolation: If rain and words are the same, then Thomas, hearing rain, was really hearing poems—as he was, in a way, since the rain inspired him to write a poem—and thus the company of fellow poets eased his isolation. Similarly Trotter, hearing rain, detected Thomas’s poem, and let it leak into “Hearing.”

The poem’s pretty but perplexing coda might give us pause. Trotter has not hinted at the significance of keeping words from rain, nor has rain seemed punitive, so what are we to make of his prayer that “none whom once I loved/hold words they love from rain” and his fear of “heavy sentences the rain might lay upon them”?

Such mild confusions trickle through All This Could Be Yours, and they exert odd effects. On the one hand they break Trotter’s spells, indicting him of pursuing mood at the expense of meaning. Yet even as our frustration mounts, we notice the poem winking at us from its island perch. It hisses that meaning might not matter after all: if that line doesn’t make sense, neither do a lot of the great things in life, like string cheese, or love. Stop thinking and just listen! Let go! Fall in! (Whether you drop into the waves or cling to the mast depends on your attitude toward meaning, which I confess I’ve always liked.)

Like us, Trotter seems at once flummoxed and fascinated by the nonsensical. Recalling efforts by Keats, Hardy, and principally Frost, the fledgling poet continues poetry’s long (and, one fears, unreciprocated) love affair with birds, which produce an unparsable verse of their own:

Decode the cries of birds, is why I came
at dawn to press record on each machine.
Oscilloscopes and spectrographs and hoists
grew hot then moist then rust I stayed so long
unknown among my future-perfect hosts.
I stayed so long and never heard them sing
a theme I couldn’t transfer note for note
to satellites that thronged above unsung
repeating birdcall bleep for bleep—but not,
I told myself—restating what they sang.
I’d caught the pitch, the point remained unclear.
Dead air, I said, as I prepared to leave
for they, like me, had little to declare
so I declared and made myself believe.
—“Turing World”

This poem dovetails with Robert Frost’s “Never Again Would Bird’s Song Be the Same,” which describes Eve’s voice weaving into birdsong, infusing “an oversound, / Her tone of meaning but without the words.” Trotter’s speaker is interested not in tone, but in meaning: like an augur, he believes the birds carry messages for him. Yet his many machines serve only to record and repeat the pitches they detect, transforming cheeps into bleeps. When he catches the pitch but not the point, he fails to understand that, in birdsong—as, perhaps, in Trotter poems—the pitch is the point.

In the end, he declares this medley “dead air,” an expression borrowed from that mechanical means of music production, the radio. But his phrase also suggests the birds are singing dead airs, useless songs—and that the poet, who similarly has “little to declare,” is doing the same. That suspicion could trouble us, too, for some of Trotter’s choices, here as in “Hearing,” prove difficult to “decode”: Why, for instance, does Trotter toss in a baseball metaphor (“caught the pitch”)? What’s the sense of the tense pun (“future-perfect”)? How heavily are we to weigh his words?

The poem’s conclusion might tip the scales in his favor. “So I declared and made myself believe” suggests, among other possibilities, that Trotter “declared” something—anything (note the lack of object)—and thereby created belief: even when words offer little content, they can produce emotion, just like Trotter’s poetry at its most elegant and indecipherable.

Yet in response to Trotter’s flirtations with sense, meaning mavens like myself can’t help but wish for something more, well, meaningful. His many strengths, however, keep us listening and wanting to understand. He makes us, if not birders, then worders, hoping his lovely and peculiar songs will eventually yield secrets worth knowing.

Inside Bruce Jay Friedman's Pulp Arcadia: The New York Times Reviews Lucky Bruce

2011-10-07T15:32:00.000-07:00

“You’d think that someone born in the thick of the Great Depression would have a sad story to tell,” Bruce Jay Friedman writes, “but mine isn’t one of them.”

For the length of this jaunty, dishy memoir, Friedman makes good on this promise, spinning campfire tales from a career spent turning the written word into that uncelebrated but elusive commodity, a living. Some writers seek immortality and end up scarred and bitter. Friedman sought regular paychecks and occasional furtive embraces and ended up with a table at Elaine’s. Boohoo. Whose memoir would you rather take away for the weekend?

“Lucky Bruce” is a “literary memoir” mainly for the persistence with which it reminds readers that Friedman, whose biggest successes include an early screenplay for “Splash” and the play “Steambath,” also pursued bigger game, the biggest being the almighty novel. Working both ends of the literary food chain, he edited a stable of swashbuckling men’s magazines and also wrote novels like “Stern” (1962) and “The Lonely Guy’s Book of Life” (1978) that got good reviews and won him fans among literary writers. In such a career, the occasional dark night of the soul may seem tempting, but not compared with a high-paying screenplay or magazine assignment. As Friedman recalls the playwright Jack Richardson telling him at a literary conference: “I don’t know anyone like you. You’re a writer. And you actually write.”

Insecurity runs through the volume at hand. Friedman quotes from positive reviews of his work and — oh, the shamelessness of it — uses his own bons mots as chapter epigraphs. It is as hard to imagine, say, Alice Munro feeling the need to subtitle her reminiscences “A Literary Memoir” as it is to imagine her writing of a college grapple, “As we made love, or what passed for it, she said: ‘You don’t really care much for this, do you?’ ” The soundtrack to this book is a rimshot.

Rarely does Friedman get caught up in the more formal stringencies of his art. When he meets the jazz clarinetist Artie Shaw over tongue sandwiches at the Carnegie Delicatessen, Friedman burns to ask about Shaw’s wives and lovers, who included Ava Gardner and Lana Turner. But to his disappointment Shaw waves such piffle aside. What does he want to talk about? “Short-story construction.” The author’s insights on this topic may be quite edifying, but you will not find them in this book.

What you will find instead is a free-associative scrapbook of dropped names, gossipy anecdotes and comfy jokes — or, in keeping with Friedman’s oft-visible Swank magazine roots, atasty confection of gossip and the rest. “Did I say ‘dalliances’?” he writes, raising an eyebrow over his own breathy prose. “You can lead a boy out of the pulps, but you can’t, etc.”

It is the right voice for the anecdotes collected here. Friedman gets in a fistfight with Norman Mailer, urinates next to Muhammad Ali, receives a blunt proposition from William Saroyan’s daughter, has “a night of madness” with Jean Seberg, hangs out at Elaine’s or on the patio of the Beverly Hills Hotel, hires Mario Puzo for one of his men’s magazines, helps Warren Beatty manage a tryst, manages a few of his own, marries twice and, in later midlife, settles into a regular lunch routine on Long Island with Puzo, Joseph Heller and a few others. They reject James Salter from the clique because he is too good a writer. In Friedman’s pulp Arcadia, bosoms are “capacious,” their owners “amply endowed” or “painfully beautiful,” figures are “dashing,” foreign lands are “far off,” and sums are “princely.” A more abstemious writer might have denied himself such clichés, but the joys here derive in part from Friedman’s guilty appetites, which include a jones for the equivalent of junk food.

For the rest of the review please go here.

Happy Birthday to Us

2011-10-07T12:36:00.000-07:00

Seven years ago today Biblioasis published its first book, Salvatore Ala's Straight Razor & Other Poems. So this past week we've been taking our birthday tour on the road. Tonight, it ends in Montreal, with a reading from the WOSS crew (Rebecca Rosenblum, Laura Boudreau & Cathy Stonehouse). Below please find a video from the start of the tour, which aired on Windsor Today.

All right, Montreal ...

2011-10-07T08:32:00.001-07:00

Ladies and gents of la belle province: the Biblioladies are coming to you! Cafe Matina, 272 Bernard, 7:30 pm. And for more about the tour, check out the video compiled by Jeff Boulton of Today's Windsor.

Short But Sweet: News from the Bibliolady Tour

2011-10-05T09:35:00.000-07:00

Well, the Women of the Short Story tour is through the first half of its run. We wowed a small but zealous crowd in Windsor, where the littlest Wellses proved that bookseller savvy may well be genetic; we successfully kept one R. Rosenblum from chasing stray kittens; we donned sunglasses to cope with the glare of L. Boudreau's copper stockings; we all, all, all, stood agog with envy at the sight of C. Stonehouse's grape-coloured boots (and later, at R.R.'s kitten-heeled blue cuties).

Yes, we were a well-shod sight to see on the third floor of the London Public Library, even if by decree executive we're no longer talking of who stole the show on floor one (grumbleahemcough). We had a kingly reception from our good friends in Hamilton, Bryan Prince Booksellers. And tonight, at 6 PM sharp, this cat-chasing, candy-necklace-wearing crew is punching in at Type. So be there, Toronto! And hey you, Ottawa: Collected Works, the 6th, 7 PM. It's going to be GRAND. If you ask very sweetly, Rebecca might break out the Ring-Pops.
What's in store for Montreal, I wonder? Fondant tiaras? We'll have to taste and see. Cafe Matina, 7:30 PM, October 7th. That event is Biblioasis's champagne birthday--turning seven on the seventh--so come and eat cake.

"Ray Robertson looks towards the light": from the National Post

2011-10-05T09:10:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Mark Medley & the Post for this--you can check it out in today's Afterword.

Ray Robertson emerges from between the curtains and takes his place behind the microphone. From his vantage point onstage, he looks out on a room full of family, friends and fellow writers. He thanks everyone for coming, and begins to read. The only source of light is a lamp off to one side of the stage, and as he reads he’s partly hidden in the shadows. A self-described “burly” novelist, he resembles a musician more than a writer, with a handlebar mustache whose ends are singed by grey and a visible tattoo on his right forearm. The tattoo’s words are uttered by Lucifer inParadise Lost, and later echoed by Stephen Dedalus in both A Portrait of the Artist as the Young Man and Ulysses: Non Serviam. I will not serve.

There was a time, only three years ago, when a scene like this might have been unimaginable to Robertson. In the summer of 2008, after finishing the first draft of his novel David, Robertson, who has battled obsessive–compulsive disorder much of his life, fell into a depression that eventually became suicidal. “One night I found myself thinking that if I didn’t wake up in the morning I wouldn’t be happy to be dead, but the idea of not being alive was a relief,” he writes in his new book. “Why not? I couldn’t help asking myself. Why not die?”

Robertson recovered over time, and as his illness receded into the past, he began to think about what it illuminated, what the pain had allowed him to see clearly: not the reasons for dying, but for living. Why Not? Fifteen Reasons to Live is Robertson’s answer.

“I wouldn’t have written the book unless I was sick,” he says. “I would have written another novel. I wouldn’t have said, ‘What are the wonderful things in life?’ because when you’re experiencing life you tend not to think about them, right? When you have the flu, that’s when you think, ‘Man, solid food would be amazing.’ ”

Solid food is not amongst Robertson’s reasons to live, but work, love, intoxication, art, the material world, individuality, humour, meaning, friendship, solitude, the critical mind, praise, duty, home and death are. The essays are both playful and profound, laced with insight from thinkers across a range of disciplines, from music to history, politics to literature, high to low culture.

“I think there’s a fundamental lack of honesty in a lot of literature,” says the 45-year old, who describes himself as “a wannabe one-time philosopher,” though he in fact graduated from the University of Toronto with a degree in the field. “And one of the things that I wanted to do with this book was to be honest. That’s why some sections have a quotation from Alex Chilton, and some of them have Heraclitus — because they’re both important to me.”

The first time Robertson told his eventual publisher, Dan Wells at Biblioasis, about the book, he described it as “15 essays in the style of Montaigne-meets-Nick Tosches.” Wells is a fan of both the French essayist and the American journalist. “How often in Canadian publishing does anyone know who either of those people are? They want to know if it’s like Dave Eggers. It’s like, ‘No, it’s like Montaigne with swearing in it.’ “

He calls the book a coming out party for his mental illness, which he kept hidden from most of the world. His wife knew about his OCD, but was unaware of the extent of his depression until she read the book. “With OCD, you try to avoid those things — you don’t talk about them. She could tell that I wasn’t quite right. So no one really knew. My parents were shocked. Her parents were shocked. My two oldest friends were shocked. I just wasn’t brought up that way, either — and it’s probably not healthy.

“What can I say?” he adds. “I wasn’t walking around moping. Or I do all the time and no one noticed any difference.”

Robertson is much better these days, in part, to a change in diet — gone are former writing staples coffee and Diet Pepsi. And if he needed it, he was likely cheered up last month when Why Not? was shortlisted for the $60,000 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Non-Fiction, a surprise considering “I tend to come up with books that just confuse agents and publishers.”

The author of six novels and a previous collection of non-fiction, Robertson certainly has more books in his future — it’s “one of the things that kept me living.”

“I felt like I had more books I wanted to write,” he says. “Whether anyone reads them, or they get nominated for awards, or I’m publishing them at Kinko’s, they need to be done.”

Why Not? Fifteen Reasons to Live, by Ray Robertson, is published by Biblioasis ($19.95).

Ten Questions with Rebecca Rosenblum: OpenBook Toronto

2011-09-29T10:52:00.000-07:00

In advance of the Women of the Short Story book tour, which kicks off in Windsor this Sunday, OpenBook Toronto has released an interview with Rebecca Rosenblum. Check it out! And if you're living in Windsor, London, Hamilton, Toronto, Ottawa, or Montreal, be sure to visit Thirsty often for news about the WOSS Tour. Four people+Toyota Echo+six stops=WOW.

The Meagre Tarmac on the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize

2011-09-28T18:23:00.000-07:00

All of us here at Biblioasis are proud to announce that Clark Blaise was named among the five finalists for the Rogers Writers' Trust Prize For Fiction this morning for his wonderful collection The Meagre Tarmac. Finding ourselves in Toronto following Ray Robertson's glorious Why Not? Fifteen Reasons to Live launch, we headed to the Rogers' announcement at Ben McNally's and we nearly jumped for joy when the first words by the announcer turned out to be "exploring the places where tradition, innovation, culture and power meet with explosive force...." At that moment, no words could have sounded more beautiful.

Heartfelt thanks to the jurors for this: Rabindranath Maharaj, Emma Donoghue and Margaret Sweatman, and warm congratulations to the rest of the authors and their publishers:

Michael Christie. The Beggar's Garden (Harper Collins)
Patrick deWitt. The Sister's Brothers. (Anansi)
Esi Eduygan. Half-Blood Blues (Thomas Allen)
Dan Vyleta. The Quiet Twin. (Harper Collins)

for more information on the Award and the shortlist, please go here.

To see my shaky iPhone video of the first 16 seconds of the announcement, please click below. (I had to put my phone to clap, which ended that.)

Wage Slave's Glossary and the Wall Street Protests

2011-09-27T13:38:00.000-07:00

Wall Street protesters, joined today by Oscar-winning actress Susan Sarandon, vowed to continue weeks of demonstrations after police squirted pepper spray at some participants and arrests mounted.

About 100 people camped out with mattresses and sleeping bags in Zuccotti Park as demonstrations against financial firms continued for an 11th day. Sarandon, 64, who appeared last year in Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps,” toured an area that includes a makeshift kitchen and library with titles such as “The Wage Slave’s Glossary” and “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America.”

"What makes life worth living?" Answer: Attending a Ray Robertson Launch

2011-09-26T10:04:00.000-07:00

Just a quick reminder to join Ray Robertson tomorrow night at 7:00 pm at The Garrison (1197 Dundas St West Toronto) for the launch of Why Not? Fifteen Reasons to Live.

The Globe and Mail has called Ray Robertson "clever, word-drunk, and falling-down funny... Robertson is a moral writer and a bitingly intelligent one, a man who writes with penetrating insight of what needs to be written about: beauty, truth and goodness."

So if you're lucky enough to be in the area, or are wondering "What makes humans happy? And what makes a life worth living?" stop by The Garrison and find out tomorrow night.

Also, don't forget to check out Priscila Uppal's audio review of Why Not? Fifteen Reasons to Live on Radio Canada International's biblio-file program.

Waiting for Women: Joyland

2011-09-22T08:06:00.000-07:00

So you didn't make Rebecca Rosenblum's fab launch, but you are still kind of interested in what the big deal is about The Big Dream. Well ... you're in luck. Over at Joyland they have just published a story from Rebecca's new collection, Waiting For Women. Go check it out, and then go and buy the book. There's plenty more where that came from.

Everybody Loves Ray Robertson

2011-09-22T06:34:00.000-07:00

Or at least Priscila Uppal does: check out her audio review of Ray's Why Not? Fifteen Reasons to Live on Radio Canada International's biblio-file program.

Ray Robertson launches WHY NOT? next Tuesday, September 27th, at the Garrison in Toronto

2011-09-21T15:44:00.000-07:00

Just back from a wonderful, wonderful Rebecca Rosenblum launch last night, we continue next week with the launch of Ray Robertson's latest book, Why Not? Fifteen Reasons to Live, Tuesday, September 27th, at the Garrison in Toronto. Doors open at 7 PM. With special guest Lonesome Lefty providing the musical accompaniment, next Tuesday promises to be honky-tonk infused night highlighting many of the reasons Ray provides in Why Not? for not giving in to his own suicidal impulses: friendship, art, literature, work, humour, meaning, praise and, last but not least, intoxication. We've dubbed this "self-help for the socially hostile": so help yourself by coming down to help us celebrate another wonderful Ray Robertson book and his Weston Writers' Trust nomination, at what promises to be one of the more entertaining launch parties of the year.

Bruce Jay Friedman: New York Times Style

2011-09-20T09:05:00.000-07:00

Yesterday an interview with Bruce Jay Friedman was featured in the New York Times Style Magazine. Here's the full text.

If there is an advantage to being an underappreciated novelist, it might be that when you get around to writing a memoir, the anecdotes of your life have not already been trotted out ad infinitum by book reviewers the world over. Such is the case with Bruce Jay Friedman, whose memoir, “Lucky Bruce,” will be published next month. On the strength of his early novels — “Stern” (1962), “A Mother’s Kisses” (1964) and “About Harry Towns” (1974) — Friedman was a literary star, frequently mentioned alongside Bernard Malamud and Philip Roth. He hung out at Elaine’s; edited for legendary Magazine Management pulp journals, where he hired Mario Puzo onto the staff of True Action; and, later, moonlighted as a screenwriter (“Stir Crazy,” “Splash”), rubbing shoulders with Warren Beatty and Richard Pryor. Yet Friedman has always remained somewhat under the radar. In “Lucky Bruce,” readers get fresh, amusing stories from Friedman’s life in letters — the time he provoked Norman Mailer into a fistfight by mussing his hair at a party, say, or was hired to write a script and introduced to his new secretary, a between-marriages Natalie Wood. The Moment caught up with Friedman, now 81, at one of his favorite Chinese restaurants in Manhattan, Chin Chin, to talk about his latest book.

The title “Lucky Bruce” suggests your success was perhaps accidental. Is that how you see it?

It’s meant as an homage to “Lucky Jim.” But in a funny way it was like invoking the displeasure of the gods, because after decades of being a robust guy, I had a knee replacement and here I am limping around. I should be out on a tennis court. My original title was “A Reasonably Good Life.” I should have hung in with that but I didn’t have enough nerve. But that’s what it’s been.

The book focuses largely on your writing life. Where’s the heavy emotional excavation found in so many memoirs these days?

Something about the fiction I was writing required that you just lay your insides out hot and smoking on the table. I didn’t feel I was going to get into that part of my life in this memoir. I stuck with the development of the writing. In my case, magically I came up with a story and sold it at a very young age to The New Yorker. I wrote a novel and that worked out well. I wrote a couple of them. I got interested in theater. Then I got interested in film. And I had some achievement in each of these areas, and of course I met everybody. So I thought maybe this story is worth telling.

Even when you tackle darker material, it often comes across as funny. Do you consider yourself a humorist?

I’m supposed to be a funny guy, but I’ve never written a joke. It’s sort of an attitude. Also, I think the most powerful effect comes when the emotion is beating up against the surface rather than thrown in your face. There’s an Evelyn Waugh novel, “A Handful of Dust,” and the most emotional moment in the book is when the boy falls off a horse and gets trampled and dies. But it’s buried in the middle of a paragraph. If Dickens or Tolstoy wrote a dying scene, they would record every tear.

The book also relates your Hollywood adventures. Early on, at least, you embraced the West Coast.

I loved the characters and the action and the tennis and the pretty girls. I felt very free there, maybe for the first time. What could be bad about it? Except for the writing, which is absurd. It’s the only literary form, if you want to call it literature, where it’s being attacked as you write it. No matter what you wrote, it would be sent back by the studio.

It’s said that writers co-exist uneasily, but you’ve had friendships with several literary lions, among them Mario Puzo and Joseph Heller.

Mario was the most quotable guy I ever met, and one of the dangers of writing a book like this is when you introduce him, he’s like a certain spice in a food — he can easily take over. I had such admiration for Heller’s writing, but he took a lot of work. He would smoke out your weak spots, and he knew how to get me. I had written this piece about cocaine. I was hardly a cokehead. Like everybody else, I tried it, I enjoyed it and then I stopped. But any place I showed up with a roomful of people, he’d say, “Well, he’s probably got a bagful of coke with him.” Or if some pretty girl came over: “Well, he gives her coke. Why else would she be there?”

What advice do you give young writers?

I picked up this line somewhere: I say, “Every word you write should be put on trial as if for its life.” I really do believe that.

One More Reason to Live: Why Not? Shortlisted for Canada's Largest Nonfiction Prize

2011-09-20T08:40:00.000-07:00

It is with extreme pleasure and pride that we announce the shortlisting of Ray Robertson's Why Not? Fifteen Reasons to Live for the $60,000 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Nonfiction Prize.

Previously the Writers' Trust Prize, the Trust received a generous endowment from the Hon. Hilary Weston in May of 2011, creating what is now the largest nonfiction prize in Canada, and one of the most valuable nonfiction prizes in the world.

The prize is awarded for literary excellence in the category of nonfiction, which includes, among other forms, works of personal or journalistic essays; memoirs; commentary; and criticism, both social and political; history; and biography.

The shortlist was announced in a press conference held at the TELUS Centre for Performance and Learning. The other nominees are: Grant Lawrence (Adventures in Solitude), Richard Gwyn (Nation Maker), Charlotte Gill (Eating Dirt), and Charles Foran (Mordecai).

All nominees receive a cash prize of $5,000.00. The winner will be announced at the a special gala on October 25, 2011.

Reminder: Big Dream Launch in TO tomorrow night

2011-09-19T14:09:00.000-07:00

Just a quick reminder, if you are lucky enough to be in the Toronto area tomorrow night, check out Rebecca Rosenblum’s launch of The Big Dream, taking place tomorrow night (Sept. 20th) at 7:00 PM at the Dora Keogh (141 Danforth Ave.). There will be an onstage interview conducted by Kerry Clare, and a short reading by Rebecca Rosenblum.

Margaret Atwood recently tweeted about The Big Dream, and how she is "looking forward: stories re: foundering publisher,sounds like Yikes! Real Life..." These stories are funny, moving, frightening, surreal, fearless, generous and wise; a short story collection that should be on every short fiction fan’s reading list.

Books will be for sale by Ben McNally. For you Facebookers there's a Facebook launch page (http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=240321889344529).

Also, check out Rebecca's recent interviews at The Danforth Review and the Faded Paper Project.

In the Field ... literally?

2011-09-19T09:38:00.000-07:00

Yesterday Team Biblioasis showed up in force on the streets (and, yes, in the fields) of Eden Mills, Ontario. With record turnouts, surprise performances, and patented Leon Rooke perorations, this year's celebration was positively, well, splendiferous.

The poets flocked to Dionne Brand and Lorna Crozier--we broke ground with Amanda Jernigan, who was called up by Leon Rooke to read from her newly-minted collection--and of course we celebrated the publication of Claire Tacon's In the Field, winner of the Metcalf-Rooke award. The lunchtime reading culminated with an impromptu chorus, led by Mr. Rooke himself, of Claire, Amanda, and Alison Pick each reading simultaneously from their own books ... while the festival founder accompanied them with rowdy song.

Photo Credit Tony Saxon of the Guelph Mercury. (Also, there may be a video.)

Amanda Jernigan lauches Groundwork tonight!

2011-09-15T14:56:00.000-07:00

This is not so much an event notice -- unless you're reading this in Cobourg -- as an announcement: Amanda Jernigan's Groundwork is so hot off the presses that the skid they arrived on still sits in my driveway; it so fresh I haven't yet done a proper cover scan, so this photo of Amanda will have to fill in for now. But it has been around just long enough that we were able to get her copies of her book, which she'll have with her tonight at the P.O.W. reading series, run by the indefatigable James Pickersgill.

Northumberland Today published a short article about the reading, and Amanda's participation in it:

Joining Ward at tonight's reading will be Maritime poet Amanda Jernigan who is launching her own book, Groundwork, with the 3rdThursday Reading the start of a tour that will take her to Ottawa, Montreal and around the Maritimes, ending in St. John's Newfoundland. "The Cobourg reading will be my first for Groundwork. I'm excited to have this chance to share the poems with an audience after keeping them in my private world for so long." says Jernigan. "The book is made up of three poetic sequences, the first is set on and around an archaeological dig in modern day Tunisia; the second in and out of a kind of heterodox Garden of Eden. The third is in the world of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey -although they are deeply informed by myth, they are also deeply personal, in their ways." Having recently taught at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick, Jernigan is currently working toward a doctoral degree in Hamilton.

Expect to see a lot more of Amanda's work around these parts -- and a lot more of Amanda at events across the country -- over the next several months.

Caroline Adderson Recommends Rebecca Rosenblum's ONCE

2011-09-15T09:49:00.000-07:00

It's always nice when a backlist title comes up again on the radar. While checking out the Writer's Trust site, I noticed that Caroline Adderson has recommended Rebecca's first book with us, Once.

Speaking of generations, Rosenblum is a new voice, a writer just over thirty years old, destined to take up where our current mavens of short fiction leave off. How refreshing to read about young people who aren't entirely messed up, but funny and perceptive and deeply human.Once gives the middle-aged hope, as does Rosenblum's clean, singing prose. Don't believe what they say about illiterate youth, or about youth being wasted on the young. Rebecca Rosenblum has squeezed every bit of life out of her thirty-two years and put them in these delightful stories. - Caroline Adderson

Haven't read Once yet? Well, as it happens, we'll be launching her second collection, The Big Dream, this Tuesday at the Dora Keogh, 7 pm. I'll make sure we have copies of Once on hand: three years old this weekend, Once's pleasures remain well worth (re-)discovering.

For the rest of Caroline's choices, please go here.

In the Field: An Interview with Claire Tacon

2011-09-14T07:44:00.000-07:00

In anticipation of the official launch of Claire Tacon's Metcalf-Rooke Award winning In the Field this Sunday at the Eden Mills Writers' Festival, we thought we'd run this interview with Claire. If you're at Eden Mills please drop by the booth (we'll all be there) where you'll be able to pick up freshly printed copies (off of the truck today!) of Claire's novel (& six other fall '11 releases besides).

Here's the interview:

1. In the Field touches on a lot of what you might call ‘timely’ issues. Our population

is aging and one of your themes is geriatric care; interculturalism has been a

vital part of social policy over the past ten years, and your novel addresses mixed

marriage straight-on. You also explore the values differences that some say divide

urban from rural communities across North America. Did you have a sense for the

social relevance of your book as you were writing it? What drew you to these issues

in particular?

With the novel, I really wanted to ask what divides us and what connects us. I wasn’t so much consciously striving for social relevance as I was trying to explore which divisions are possible for us to bridge.

The urban/rural split is central to that question. Having grown up on a farm but gone to school in the city, it was a disconnect that I was aware of early on. My family didn’t work the land, but we regularly raised animals for our own consumption. Shoveling out the chicken coop or helping my brother skin rabbits were normal parts of my life, but they weren’t something I could bring up with my urban friends. Wolfville felt like a natural setting to highlight that divide because it’s a university town surrounded by a large agricultural industry. There’s a real gulf between town and gown.

Race or ethnicity isn’t set up in the novel as quite so clear a divide. Before writing the novel, I had a conversation with a friend about how interracial or interethnic families are rarely presented without that becoming the central issue of the book. There are a lot of great books in this genre, such as Gish Jen’s The Love Wife, but I think it’s problematic if we only see diverse families presented as an “issue.” While race complicates the Bascom family’s experience, it’s not the focus of the book or the main source of their discord.

That being said, I did want to explore how Ellie, a white woman married to a black man, has a different reaction to the same situation than her husband or sons. She assumes that because they are family, they will perceive and be perceived the same way, but the reality often differs.

Finally, in terms of aging and geriatric care, a number of my friends are starting to enter the so-called “sandwich generation.” By the end of the novel, Ellie is forced to ask herself whether it’s better to be a good mother or a good daughter. It’s a hard decision—we owe allegiances to both sides, but don’t always have the resources to fulfill both obligations.

2. In a recent interview you said that your first glimpse of a character is like ”hitting

it off with a friend of a friend at a cocktail party. On the one hand, it feels as if you’ve

known them all your life, but then you hit a point where you really need to sit them

down and ask them some questions.”

What were the questions you had to ask of your protagonist, Ellie Lucan?

One of my professors at UBC, Keith Maillard, spends a lot of time writing biographies for each character before starting any project. That was something I found really useful going into the second draft; I took about a month and wrote out Ellie and Richard’s lives from grade school to the present. Most of it got trashed, but it helped clarify their motivation and past experience going into the re-write. Since they’re fighting for most of the novel, asking each of them how they met and why they fell for each other was one of the central questions in that exercise.

3. Later in the same interview you said that by the time you’ve finished your first

draft, “the characters seem like family—I don’t always like them, but I always love

them.” It’s true that many characters in In the Field go on to make less-than-likeable

decisions. Which of your characters do you struggle to “like” the most?

Mordecai Richler is one of my favourite authors, partly because he manages to create deeply flawed characters that you still care about. I doubt many people would say they want Duddy Kravitz or Barney Panofsky as friends, but the books succeed because readers still understand them and care about them.

My protagonist Ellie and her husband Richard are certainly not at their best in the novel. At any other time in their life, they’d probably be as likable as anyone else, but we see them, particularly Ellie, at a time of crisis. I think that’s pretty human, to be self-centred or wrong-headed or even a bit of an asshole during a difficult time. The tension lies in how far you can go and still expect your loved ones to stand by you. While writing the book, I asked myself the same question—how far can I push these characters while keeping the audience on board?

4. First novels are always a rite of passage, and you’ve done significant rewrites of

In the Field since it was first conceived. Do you have plans for a second? What, if

anything, will you do differently?

Right now I’m working on a second novel. Like In the Field, it tackles family dynamics, but this time with parents of a special needs adult. The main difference is that I have a stronger idea of the narrative arc going into this writing process than I did the last one. In the Field started as an image—a woman driving down the road in the rain, her wipers not really working. As I wrote, I realized I knew that road and the plot spun off from there—where was she going? who was she meeting?, etc. It was a bit like being dropped off in an unknown location, mapping the terrain and then plotting the best route through. This time I’m at least packing a map and have a general idea of how to get from A to B.

5. What (other) work of fiction has meant the most to you as you were writing In the

Field?

I started writing the novel while I was doing my MFA at the University of British Columbia. During that time, I was turned on to so many different books and authors that it’s hard to pick just one. Books I prized most, but which I don’t presume to have emulated, are ones that maintain a sense of humour through the bleak moments. For that reason, Lorrie Moore’s short story People Like That Are the Only People Here… and Martin McDonagh’s play The Beauty Queen of Leenane have stuck with me for years.

6. Who is your ideal reader? Who would you like to reach the most with this story?

Honestly? Anyone who wants to start on page one and finish on page 278 and have an opinion about it.

One of the most moving book reviews I’ve ever heard was by a young woman in inner-city New York discussing Anne Frank’s diary. Her connection to the material went against a lot of current thinking about pairing books with readers who share a similar experience. I think that unpredictability of reader response is part of the beauty of literature.

Deep Time, Black Magic, Ugly Stuff

2011-09-13T07:20:00.000-07:00

For all you poetry & knitting aficionados out there (and yes I know you're out there!) take a look at Zach Wells's new interview on The Puritan. Interviewer Jesse Eckerlin stumbled across Track & Trace at Zach's mother's craft stall, and the rest you can unravel at your leisure. For the full interview, check out mag. There's more to this text block than textiles ... I promise.

The Wage Slave's Glossary on Marketplace

2011-09-12T19:06:00.000-07:00

If you read the July issue of Harper's, where Mark Kingwell's introduction to the soon to be launched Wage Slave's Glossary appeared in excerpt, than you may well know that the follow-up to the Idler's Glossary was soon to hit bookshelves. With incredible foresight, we released The Idler's Glossary in October 2008, at the precise moment the world slipped into the worst recession since the Great Depression. We are releasing The Wage Slave's Glossary, at least according to the catalogue bumpf, as we strive to climb out of it. Truth be told, however, not much has changed since '08: on the BBC this evening a leading British economist predicted we're actually closer to entering a Great Depression than ever. One way or another, this glossary serves as useful function, as it continues its authors exploration of the various linkages between words and work, and how language continues to bind us in chains.

Over on American Public Radio's Marketplace, glossary-compiler Joshua Glenn gave a short interview about the book and its genesis, and some of the more interesting concepts it explores. Here's a taste of it:

KAI RYSSDAL: This next three-and-a-half minutes of the broadcast are for all you "clockless workers," grinding away in the countless "cube farms" out there.

If you need a translation, I direct you to a new book called "The Wage Slave's Glossary." It's a new collection of terms about work and the workplace. Joshua Glenn's one of the co-authors. Welcome to the program.

JOSHUA GLENN: Thank you.

RYSSDAL: Why write this book? I mean, we've got dictionaries all over the place.

GLENN: Our previous book was "The Idler's Glossary," and that was a collection of terms that were celebrating a certain style of life: the idler's way of life, where you don't let work define who you are and what you do. And this one is looking at the other side of that coin, which is the fact that so many of us work at jobs where we don't have very much control over how we do it or when we do it or what we're doing, even.

RYSSDAL: Run me through some of the definitions, some of your favorite key phrases in this dictionary, would you?

GLENN: I'm very interested in all these words that come from the workplace that people use to describe themselves. For example, the word "downtime." It was a mid-century term that meant time when a machine is out of action or unavailable for use. And today, of course, this means that human beings who aren't working are compared to machines that being serviced, or robots that are being recharged. And the worst thing of all, is that many of us now use "downtime" to describe our own weekends and vacations.

We look at a lot of corporate jargon, of course, things like the "clockless worker," "loyalty time," "flexibilization" -- these kind of sinister euphemisms for bad things that corporations like to do. "Clockless worker" being somebody's who's willing to ignore what the clock says and just keep working; "loyalty time" being another word for unpaid overtime. Even the word "boss" actually comes from Dutch plantations; a work boss was somebody who was in charge of, the overseer of the slaves on the plantation. So the fact that we've now come to use that in a completely, almost admiring way -- it's no longer a pejorative -- says a lot about how much we've forgotten about how work has developed over the years.

For the full interview, please go here. You can also listen to it at the same link. For a short excerpt from the glossary, please go here.

Tne Quarterly Conversation Reviews The Accident

2011-09-12T09:29:00.000-07:00

Over at The Quarterly Conversation, David Auerbach offers an in-depth and thoughtful consideration of the latest title in the Biblioasis International Translation Series, Mihail Sebastian's The Accident:

The Accident arrives as something of an appendix to the massiveJournal of Mihail Sebastian (1907-1945), a record of his life as a Romanian Jewish writer from 1935 to 1944. Though Sebastian is known in Romania for his plays and, to a lesser extent, his novels, to my knowledge nothing of his appeared in English until his Journal was published in 2000, chronicling the horrors and fears of life in Romania during World War II. The Accident is his first translated work of fiction.

Next to the immediacy of the Journal, The Accident initially disappoints. The novel begins promisingly with an evocative scene in which the intense, quixotic Nora falls while exiting a tram and is helped up by the downtrodden intellectual Paul. They tentatively embark on a rushed affair driven by Nora’s fixation on Paul, which frightens and liberates them. But the novel then loses its way in a flashback chronicling Paul’s earlier involvement with Ann, a dreary artist. Ann clearly represents the faux-bohemian life that has ensnared Paul, but both she and Paul remain too diffuse for this section to take hold as a picture of the limits of Paul’s life. Paul’s criticism of Ann’s paintings telegraphs the problem with their entire milieu: “There’s something gesticulating in your paintings. They’re too hearty, too talkative, too familiar at the first glance.” Ann replies: “I am talkative, I am frivolous.”

The greater import of The Accident reveals itself only against the background of Sebastian’s Journal, which described in some detail his writing of the novel. But the greater context is crucial as well. The Journal was not published until 1996 (it was translated into in English in 2000), when its portrayal of Romanian complicity in the Holocaust caused controversy. Over 300,000 Romanian Jews died during World War II, a large percentage by death squads set up by Romania’s own aggressively anti-Semitic government. Sebastian was fortunate to live in Bucharest, which was spared the worst of Romania’s policies, but he witnessed the virulent anti-Semitism and deportations and heard firsthand accounts of the government’s massacres carried out on the orders of Prime Minister Ion Antonescu. Sebastian sensitively, painfully chronicled details of the Holocaust as it was happening that many would not know until after the war. Sebastian survived the war, only to be killed in an auto accident in 1945.

To read the full review, please go here.

The Big Dream: The Launch

2011-09-11T18:54:00.000-07:00

On Tuesday September 20th we'll be launching our first title of the Fall publishing season: Rebecca Rosenblum's new collection of stories, The Big Dream. We're very excited. Rebecca's first book, Once (2008), remains in the top handful of books we've published here, and The Big Dream is, in every way, a worthy successor. If Once was, as Steven Beattie said, " the most exciting first book of short stories by a Canadian writer since Munro's Dance of the Happy Shades," then this may well prove to be 2010's Lives of Girls and Women. The Big Dream offers a suite of linked stories about a group of disparate workers -- from the cafeteria and telemarketing staff to the researchers and CEOs -- employed by a foundering publishing company, and chronicles its character's lives mainly between the hours of nine-to-five. These stories are, as one would expect, beautifully told, with a sharp, pitch-perfect ear for dialogue: funny, moving, frightening, surreal, fearless, generous and wise. If this is indeed the Year of the Short Story (YOSS), than The Big Dream should help firm up Biblioasis's reputation as the Press for the Short Story, and it should be a collection on every short fiction fan's reading list.

The Toronto launch will take place next Tuesday, September 20th, at the Dora Keogh (141 Danforth Ave.) at 7 PM. There will be an onstage interview conducted by Kerry Clare, and a short reading by Rebecca Rosenblum. Books will be for sale by Ben McNally. For you Facebookers there's a Facebook launch page (http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=240321889344529).

If you can't catch Rebecca in Toronto this Tuesday, fear not: she'll be all over the country in 2011-12, including stops in Windsor, London, Hamilton, Toronto (again), Ottawa, Montreal, Peterborough, Winnipeg, Calgary, Vancouver, Halifax, Wolfville, Fredericton (and likely many more places before she's through. For further information you can always check the press website calendar here.

One Question Interview: Salvatore Ala

2011-09-09T09:03:00.000-07:00

Over at Alex Boyd's blog, he has conducted a one question interview with Biblioasis poet Salvatore Ala:

While your poems in Lost Luggage certainly have intellectual ideas in them, they’re grounded in some very organic imagery: fish, dragonflies, almonds, rain barrels, pine, fog and snow, crabapple wine. Considering your title, is it fair to say your book is at least partly about how we’ve left something important behind in modern, everyday life?

When I look back at poems I didn’t include in the final manuscript, this sense of having “left something important behind in modern, everyday life” is even more apparent. I was trying to strike a metaphorical balance, but as you know these ruminations are subtle. The past is very much part of the present in this collection, though I would add that some poems which do not appear on the surface to be part of the motif of having "left something important behind…” are in fact also about lost origins. Working from the etymology of words is for me a way of seeing what’s not there, and is very often the source of the imagery in a poem. “Ala,” “Church Demolition,” and “Roman Coins” are very much poems about lost or uncertain origins. I was also able to question value and judge hypocrisy with the strongest evidence being in the roots of the words themselves.

For the rest of Ala's response, please go here.

Michael Bryson Reviews The Meagre Tarmac

2011-09-08T07:13:00.000-07:00

Over at his blog Michael Bryson has offered up a rave review of Clark Blaise's The Meagre Tarmac, nominated Tuesday for a Giller Award. Here's how it starts:

Masterpiece. That's a big word. In 20 years of writing book reviews I don't think I've ever used it, but I'm throwing the dart at Clark Blaise's new short story collection, The Meagre Tarmac(Biblioasis, 2011).

Primarily a short story writer, Blaise has often explored the period of this upbringing and his multiple identities and senses of self. He has also been an administrator of writing programs and a notable essayist and non-fiction author. He is currently the President of the Society for the Study of the Short Story.

...

The eleven short stories in The Meagre Tarmac continue Blaise's interest in the social construction of identity. This time, however, his characters are not exploring the two solitudes of North America's English/French divide. The characters in this book are nearly all Indo-American. The two solitudes on display here are the East and West. Also, cultural tradition versus liberal capitalism.

Post-Obama, are we post-racial? Blaise's book argues emphatically, no. But it's a no that is dense with complication.

In an earlier age, this book would be a lightening rod for an "appropriation of voice" debate. How can this white dude write from within the perspective of the Indo-American population? And he does it over and over, in precise detail, and so well!

Clearly, the author has experience of Indo-American culture through his in-laws, but (more importantly) he has brought to it a lifetime of experience, a lifetime of thinking through precise cultural differences, a lifetime of mastering the short story.

And it is a mastery, here, that ought to be celebrated. And read. And studied.

We, of course, couldn't agree more. For the whole review, well worth reading, please go here. (And sorry about the mustard colour highlighting: can't seem to steal from Bryson's blog without it. )

The Serial Name-Dropper

2011-09-08T06:54:00.002-07:00

The Brooklyn Rail has just published an advanced review of our forthcoming Bruce Jay Friedman memoir Lucky Bruce. Here's a taste:

Not to get gushy, but if you’re a writer, or want to be a writer, or just like to hang out around writers and pretend you’re a writer, then you’ll gobble up Bruce Jay Friedman’s literary memoir, Lucky Bruce.

I met Friedman at this year’s Hunter College Writers’ Conference. At 80, he’s still tall and handsome, and he was full of chatter about stuff that hadn’t even made it into the book: the record 22 pieces he’s had published in Esquire over the years (“now they won’t even return my phone calls”). An encounter a few nights before with angry revelers (“I was on crutches with this knee replacement; they almost crushed us”) who’d been denied entry into Elaine’s, the legendary Upper East Side restaurant where he and best pals Joseph Heller and Mario Puzo tested out their best stories for more than 40 years. He was almost apologetic about writing a memoir, a genre he obviously considers low-hanging fruit. However, Lucky Bruceis no ordinary self-story; it’s a delightful addition to the catalogue of the last Mark Twain leviathans—writers like Mario Puzo, Joseph Heller, Norman Mailer, and Kurt Vonnegut.

For the full review please go here.

The Meagre Tarmac Makes Giller Longlist

2011-09-06T06:13:00.001-07:00

Today the longlist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize was announced, and we're delighted to report that Clark Blaise's The Meagre Tarmac is on it. He's in good company: also represented are Michael Ondaatje, Guy Vanderhaeghe, Lynn Coady, David Bezmozgis. According to the bumpf it was a "record-breaking year," with a total of 143 book submissions. Here's a bit of blurbing from the Giller Prize website (and a citation that, for my two cents, applies darn well to Clark Blaise):

This year’s jury is made up of: award-winning Canadian writer and 2009 Giller finalist Annabel Lyon; American author, memoirist and Guggenheim fellowHoward Norman; and acclaimed UK playwright and prize-winning novelist Andrew O’Hagan.

“Each title on our longlist dignifies world literature, not only Canadian literature. That said, the Canadian fiction we have unanimously chosen exhibits an astonishing range of dramatic incident, subject, narrative strategy and memorable characters. What connects these wonderful books is an excellence of craft. Many of these novels and collections have intensely cinematic qualities; others, decidedly influenced by l9th century classics. All have the deepest levels of engagement with the art of storytelling and bring life to the page with vivid immediacy. Our list is a celebration of eclectic and fearless writing. ”

The shortlisted finalists will be revealed at a news conference in Toronto on Tuesday, October 4th. CBC is the proud broadcast partner of The Scotiabank Giller Prize. Broadcast details will be disclosed at a later date. The Scotiabank Giller Prize awards $50,000 annually to the author of the best Canadian novel or short story collection published in English and $5,000 to each of the finalists. The Scotiabank Giller Prize is named in honour of the late literary journalist Doris Giller and was founded in 1994 by her husband Toronto business man Jack Rabinovitch.

Why Not, Toronto? UofT Mag on Ray Robertson

2011-08-29T10:54:00.000-07:00

Review available online here.

“Trying to be happy is like trying to be tall,” writes Ray Robertson, referring to the period of depression he experienced in 2008 after completing the first draft of his novel David. His latest book, Why Not? Fifteen Reasons to Live, is not a memoir of that depression, but instead a reflection upon the things he yearned for most from his darkness. Each of the 15 essays in the book – with titles including “Work,” “Individuality” and “Humour” – is an attempt to understand what makes life worth living, and what happiness means.

In spite of the general nature of these ideas, Robertson’s address is profoundly personal – “So listen to me as if I were speaking to myself” reads part of the epigraph. Robertson admits that his approach is limited by his own experience, and also by what he has read – though this is actually not much of a limitation at all, with references to writers from Flannery O’Connor to Baudelaire (and also to TV detective Columbo and hockey player Tiger Williams) in the first four pages alone.

For Robertson (BA 1993 VIC), reading is one of the most essential reasons to live – but not just any kind of reading. Throughout Why Not? he calls upon Canadian readers to be more critical of their national literature, and to demand artistic works that generate an authentic aesthetic response. With these critical skills, readers are thereby equipped to better understand the world, and also to articulate their experiences of it – both two great pleasures of being alive.

He gives other reasons to live as well, including love, and meaning, and friendship, and solitude, each essay offering surprising illumination about ideas that might seem familiar. In “Duty,” Robertson connects a story about his wife’s futile recycling efforts to his own commitment to creating the kind of literature that goes uncelebrated in a culture of “middlebrow mediocrity.” Never, ever boring, within the wild trajectory of each piece, Robertson backtracks, repeats himself, changes his mind and displays his characteristic ribald humour. Why Not? is intentionally provocative, stirring readers to vehemently agree or disagree. But this is Robertson’s point: to be stirred at all, regardless.

--Kerry Clare, UofT Mag

How does David Hickey sleep at night? Winnipeg wants to know.

2011-08-29T07:58:00.001-07:00

A short but pretty review of David Hickey's Open Air Bindery came in on the weekend from the Winnipeg Free Press. Here's the text in full:

"Hickey hails from the Maritimes originally, so here, too, we get prodigal poems, but Open Air Bindery is as informed by the poet's insomnia and his (perhaps concurrent) backyard astronomy as it is by any notion of homecoming.

Set on ferries and in hotel rooms and suburban neighbourhoods with their "collected sidewalk(s)" and "selected raccoon(s)," these poems are wry and tired and human.

Hickey might proclaim himself "lost in the staging / of the twentieth-first century. // And never sure / if it's my turn to sing" ("Short Lives"), but in this book he croons out into never-ending night, ignoring the demands of the day to come."

"Bruce Jay Friedman" Scrawled All Over Tablet

2011-08-29T07:47:00.000-07:00

Today the independent Jewish-American online magazine has released a full-length interview with novelist and screenwriter Bruce Jay Friedman. To listen to the interview (and--shhh!--to preview a section of Lucky Bruce), check out In the Picture.

That not enough BJF for you? Here's Tablet's two cents on why Philip Roth is more famous than Bruce Jay. Here's a heads-up: it has something to do with being a Funny Guy ...

Marius Kociejowski Interviewed on Wasafiri

2011-08-26T12:44:00.001-07:00

Following the interview he performed with Zimbabwean writer Brian Chikwava for issue 67 of Wasafiri, Wasifiri online has done an interview with Marius himself.

Wasafiri When did you begin to write literature as a serious pursuit? Are there any artists you particularly admire (literary or otherwise) that have influenced your writing?

Marius Kociejowski I think I’ve always written seriously, which is not to say I’ve always written well. It took me years to find my voice, with a hundred failures behind every success, only for those successes to be later seen by myself as failures. At times I’m so self-critical I wonder if I will ever arrive at that imaginary goal I carry within me. The list of writers I admire is long, although not nearly as long as the list of those I do not admire, but to suggest they have influenced me would be to put myself in their esteemed company, which makes me feel uncomfortable. Maybe it is best to say they have inspired me. Among poets of recent times I can cite Zbigniew Herbert, W S Graham, Ivan V Lalic, Geoffrey Hill, Christopher Middleton and many others; in the travel genre, Tim Mackintosh-Smith, Tim Robinson, Alberto Denti di Pirajno’s A Cure for Serpents (but not his subsequent work), and, in a slightly different vein, Gustaf Sobin.

Wasafiri Your book The Pigeon Wars of Damascus depicts your trip to the country five years after your last visit was documented in The Street Philosopher and the Holy Fool. Do you intend to revisit the Middle East during this time of political upheaval in the Arab world? Also, having visited the region firsthand, are you optimistic that a people’s revolution can successfully bring about political and social change?

MK I dare not return any time soon simply because I do not want to compromise my friends and acquaintances. It is too risky to even write to, or phone, them. I am not greatly optimistic about change but then, a few months ago, I could never have predicted the massive protests that are now taking place. The question as to whether any revolution brings about the desired changes is a complex one because almost always there are also dark forces at work. If, for example, the Islamicists were to seize power in Syria it could spell catastrophe for the many religious minorities and sects living there. The one thing that can be said for the Asad regime is that it enforced religious tolerance. Mind you, it did so in its own self-interest. The lifting of any lid, and here I am thinking of the collapse of the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe in 1989, is that it brings to the surface any number of simmering prejudices. The fate of the Roma is a case in point.

Wasafiri You have given talks on the subject of ‘European Travellers to Syria and the Question of Orientalism’. Could you elaborate on your thoughts regarding the topic of Orientalism, for those that are unfamiliar with your discussion of Edward Said’s thesis?

MK I wonder if there is any thinker of modern times who having brought into the intellectual forum a valuable discourse has had such a pernicious effect on the thinking or, rather, theunthinking of his many admirers. What he has given us is yet another ism, another lens through which students and critics, with their prescribed narrowness of vision, deprive themselves of the larger picture. As right as he may have been in general when it came to the particulars Said falsified almost everything he touched. Students read him rather than the works he so casually demolishes.

Wasafiri God’s Zoo, the book you are currently working on, depicts London’s exile and émigré artists. Furthermore, you write in your interview with Brian Chikwava of a sentence in his novel Harare North that ‘captures perfectly the disillusion that sets in when people who come to London’. As you were born and raised in Canada and now reside in London, to what extent has your own background influenced your representation of people who have moved here from elsewhere?

MK So many of the people about whom I write have come from deeply traumatic circumstances. I would never put myself amid their company, even though I do conclude the book with a chapter describing my own experiences of coming to London. This said, I grew up in a condition of exile, with a father who, after the war, was unable to return to his homeland. I grew up with, and breathed daily, that deep pain. I think, too, I gravitate naturally towards ‘outsiders’. I suppose most artists and writers do.

Wasafiri As somebody who has published four poetry collections thus far, has this form of writing complemented your other roles as an essayist and travel writer?

MK Somewhere Baudelaire writes that a poet should always be a poet, even when he is writing prose. This is not an argument for ‘poetic prose’, which I normally despise, but I do like to think of myself as being governed by a poetic perception of things, which is why I think my two ‘travel’ books do not fit easily into any genre.

Marius's interview with Brian Chikwava appears in the latest issue of Wasafiri.

Cathy Stonehouse on Largehearted Boy

2011-08-25T09:19:00.000-07:00

Biblioasis has the honour once more of playing digital deejay for Largehearted Boy's synesthetic blog-of-goodness. This time round our table-turner is Cathy Stonehouse, who will be touring (along with Rebecca Rosenblum and Laura Boudreau) in Ontario this fall. Take a look, take a listen. Britpop, Brit folk, B.C. bards, and (um) Queen.

National Post Praises Mihail Sebastian's The Accident

2011-08-12T11:23:00.001-07:00

Over at the National Post, Randy Boyagoda reviews the latest title in the Biblioasis International Translation Series: Mihail Sebastian's The Accident, translated from the Romanian by Stephen Henighan.

All serious writers have at least two dreams. The primal dream is of immediate discovery: at a preposterously early point in your career, Important People will discover your genuine greatness and encourage it along, putting you in place for decades of attention and accolades. Call this the Philip Roth model of literary success. The back-up dream is of posthumous discovery: many years after one has lived, written and died, Important People somehow come across your work, perceive its true worth, and make up for your life of being ignored by introducing you, posthumously, to enthusiastic new generations of readers. Call this the John Kennedy Toole model of literary success. Of course, most successful literary writers live out more modest versions of one or of both of these dreams.

In recent years, however, the posthumous discovery, at least by English-language readers, of books by otherwise little-known international writers such as Robert Bolaño and Irene Némirovsky has been newsworthy for the intense interest and runaway success of their works upon the release of English translations. In both of these instances, the inherent strengths of the works are matched by both their authors’ compelling and tragic stories and by breathless tales of the works’ miraculous uncovering.

If not as prodigious as Bolaño or as emotive and dramatic as Némirovsky, the Jewish-Romanian writer Mihail Sebastian is nevertheless very much deserving of fresh discovery today, which has been made possible by the first-ever publication of his fiction in English — in this case his final novel, The Accident. Long a respected name in European circles, Sebastian, a lawyer, playwright, intellectual and novelist who grimly suffered through a succession of anti-Semitic cruelties and indignities during the Second World War only to be fatally hit by a truck after the war ended, enjoyed a flurry of English-language attention about a decade ago with the translation of his war-era diary,Journal 1935-1944: The Fascist Years (which won rare praise from Philip Roth, incidentally, among many others). One hopes this new book, whose lyricism and depth of feeling have been made wonderfully apparent thanks to Stephen Henighan’s elegant translation, will only expand his English readership.

For the rest of the review, please go here.

Poets in Profile: David Hickey

2011-08-11T07:21:00.000-07:00

Open Book Ontario interviews our very own David Hickey about poetry, poets, and ... um ... socks.

Find out what inspires, confounds and delights today's Canadian poets by following the Poets in Profile series.

In Open Air Bindery (Biblioasis), David Hickey builds on the success of his first collection with poems that have been described as playful, humorous and profound.

He talks with Open Book about his new book and the poet's life.

Check it out!

Publisher's Weekly Reviews Rebecca Rosenblum's The Big Dream

2011-08-08T03:13:00.000-07:00

In what I expect will be the first of many, many positive reviews for Rebecca Rosenblum's new collection of short stories - due to hit bookstores in mid-September -- Publishers Weekly praises Rebecca Rosenblum for The Big Dream.

In her spry, satirical new collection, Rosenblum (Once) presents 13 dialogue-rich and highly readable vignettes featuring a colorful cast of characters who work for Dream Inc., a foundering Canada-based lifestyle-magazine publisher. There's the Vice President of Human Resources, forced to lay off customer-service reps while her mother lays dying in a local hospital; the college student on the verge of a nervous breakdown who works in the cafeteria; the corporate-branding specialist experimenting with lesbianism; and the retired exec who can't quite let go of the dream. None of her main characters are editors; they come from other areas of the publishing industry, and they struggle with such mundane decisions as where to eat lunch and what to do after work. Rosenblum makes these challenges read like monumental events in her characters' lives (which they no doubt are), and deserves admiration for her well-chosen details and nuanced protagonists.

RainTaxi Reviews Light Lifting

2011-08-08T03:10:00.000-07:00

Benjamin Woodard reviews Light Lifting in the latest edition of RainTaxi:

The Canada found in Alexander MacLeod’s impressive debut story collection, Light Lifting, is full of anxiety and obsession: a land where man masters the ins and outs of minivan combustion engines, parents fixate on the origin of lice, and the powerless struggle to overcome childhood fears. Across seven wide-ranging tales, lives are saved, others are lost, and redemption, both physical and spiritual, is occasionally found. Nevertheless, the world harnessed by MacLeod is also one that bursts with wonder and nostalgia, and the author lets his subjects shine with both raw power and supple beauty throughout. Each story in Light Lifting is a true marvel—there are no fillers here—and with every passing page MacLeod firmly establishes himself as a bright new talent in literary fiction.

For the full review please go here.

2011-08-01T10:23:00.000-07:00

John Eklund (American book sales rep and Canadian literature aficionado) has done a bit of spin busting lately on his blog, Paper Over Board. He talks about the invisibility of the working classes, both historically and in the present, and lauds a couple of recent books for their treatment of manual labour--notably Light Lifting. Thanks to John for the shoutout, and for (will she say it?) all the hard work.