Boyko, Miller in National Post "Shortcuts" Column

What lovelier way is there to canter into the sunset than with a newspaper & some short stories in your saddle roll? Check out this weekend's National Post for Steven Beattie's monthly short fiction column, where he talks about the linked collection as Canadian consommé, calls KD Miller's "Kim's Game" the "Citizen Kane of humiliation," and CP Boyko's "The Prize Jury" a " highly amusing riposte to the culture of literary awards, eviscerating the petty politicking, log-rolling and absurdity that can result from jockeying for recognition." Not bad for a rainy end-of-week, huh? Nice to know that KD and Craig are firing on all cylinders, even if we at the office have a bad collective case of math brain.  Happy Friday!

Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award

We're very pleased to announce that Cynthia Flood, C.P. Boyko, Kathy Page and K.D. Miller were just long-listed for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. Worth €25,000, the award is the biggest prize for short stories worldwide.

Journey Prize-winning author, Cynthia Flood's Red Girl Rat Boy is a precise collection of minimalist stories that explore the lives of innumerable wives, husbands, sisters, and in-laws vexed by short temper and insecurity and trying to navigate through upheaval with grace. 

C.P. Boyko's Novelists is a comedy of manners (and manuscripts), rivaling Vanity Fair for its satirical wit... though not, mercifully, for its length.

Orange Prize-nominee Kathy Page's Paradise and Elsewhere is a collection of dark fables at once familiar and entirely strange.

K.D. Miller has been nominated for a National Magazine Award for Fiction. Her short story collection, All Saints is a moving collection of tremendous skill, whose linked stories illuminate the tenacity and vulnerability of modern-day believers.

Hearty congratulations to all the long-listed authors!

Boyko in Wall Street Journal, Globe & Mail

Who's that guy? D@*ned if I know.

It was a good weekend for Novelists, yes indeed, with wonderful write-ups in both The Globe & Mail and The Wall Street Journal. "Few writers in this country have a better poker face than C.P. Boyko," begins Michael Hingston in the Globe, going on to call him "vivid and wickedly funny," noting that "Boyko is at his best when documenting the ways in which writers insulate themselves from reality by adopting the trappings and jargon of the publishing world into their everyday lives." (He also, ahem, implies that authorship is a kind of terminal madness, and that writing short fiction perhaps lessens one's exposure, and thus the acuity of the condition. Could the same be said for the publishing short fiction? I wonder.)

Today, the same day, the very same day, our good friends over at The Wall Street Journal had this to say (noting that a review of Edward St. Aubyn's Lost for Words preceded it, and didn't fare quite so well):

The stories in C.P. Boyko's uproarious "Novelists" display authors in their many exotic varieties of misery and neurosis .... The signal trait shared by Mr. Boyko's dreamy wretches is egotism; they rarely have the faintest idea what is actually going on around them. (In "The Word 'Genius,' " the author of Edwardian-era melodramas sees a physician about his ulcers and turns out to suffer from hunger pangs, having forgotten to eat.) "The Prize Jury" calamitously throws a baker's dozen of novelists together to choose the winner of the Godskriva Prize, a one-time award honoring "the best novel of all time." (Being invited to serve as a judge gives one writer pause: "Wouldn't his being on the jury disqualify his own novels from being chosen?") Mr. Boyko's ensemble of absurd, inexhaustible narcissists is no more flattering than Mr. St. Aubyn's ship of fools, but it comes uncomfortably nearer to reality.

I'd say you could read the full review online, but really, that'd be a fib, since the WSJ security-monkeys are pretty fierce. You'll have to trust that I've given you the best bits. Happy Saturday, all, and happy long weekend. (Novelists go well with beaches & beer. I swear.)

C.P. Boyko Reading

On Saturday, May 24 at 1pm, join authors C.P. Boyko, Trevor Clark, Andrea Routley and Brett Josef Grubisic for an afternoon of exploring the human condition.

The Globe and Mail has described C.P. Boyko as “Stunning. . . . Boyko [has an] unstoppable imagination. . . .” His latest work Novelists, will have you rolling in the aisles with what Russell Banks calls "proudly, gloriously, gleefully old-fashioned" literary satire.

Trevor Clark, author of Love on the Killing Floor and Hair-Trigger, has worked as an oil rig roughneck, editor, portrait photographer, bookstore manager, and home entertainment coordinator for a TV movie production company in London, where he lived for a number of years.

Andrea Routley is the editor of Plenitude Magazine, Canada’s queer literary magazine. Her debut short story collection, Jane and the Whales, is a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, an international English-language award for LGBT literature.

Brett Josef Grubisic's novel The Age of Cities was a finalist for the City of Vancouver Book Prize. This Location of Unknown Possibilities is his latest work of fiction.

The event will take place in the Alice Mackay Room, Lower Level of the Central Library, 350 West Georgia St., Vancouver. Admission is free though seating is limited.

For more information: call 604.992.9960 or email melissa@nonpublishing.com

Long Story Short, Kathy Page and C.P. Boyko

Join Biblioasis tomorrow evening at The Cultch in Vancouver for a round of short stories from two of  Canada's finest writers in the genre.

The Vancouver Sun describes them as "a pair of restless authors... drawn to experimentation with content, form, and tone, and who are (a reader could surmise) rebelling against a literary orthodoxy that holds up stalwart realism as the true writer’s best and only friend."

Kathy Page, nominee for the Governor General's Award and the Orange Prize, presents what Barbara Gowdy calls a "vibrant, startlingly imaginative collection" in Paradise and Elsewhere, while the Journey Prize-winning C.P. Boyko (Novelists, 2014) will have you rolling in the aisles with what Russell Banks calls "proudly, gloriously, gleefully old-fashioned" literary satire.

Hosted by Cynthia Flood, recently shortlisted for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, Long Story Short will begin at 7pm and is an evening not to be missed.


As always, admission is free.

Precision-Crafted Machines Spring Anticipation

Over at The Afterword, Meeting the Tormentors in Safeway by the inimitable Alexandra Oliver is one of Michael Lista's four Canadian Poetry Books of the year for 2013, cited for "precision-crafted" poems at once  "[t]heatrical, funny,  [and] formally ingenious."  Also listed alongside the stellar cast of Oliver, Sara Peters and Karen Solie is Amanda Jernigan, author of the much-lauded 2011 Biblioasis debut Groundwork, for her most recent book All the Daylight Hours from Cormorant. Congrats to all!

& for those of you hoping to beckon the thaw with anticipation/wishful thinking, here are The 49th Shelf's most anticipated books of Spring 2014, among which distinguished company you will find mention of not one but two of our forthcoming titles: Novelists, a new short-story collection by the enigmatic C.P. Boyko, and I Was There the Night he Died, the new novel by "the Jerry Lee Lewis of North American letters," Ray Robertson.