Marius Kociejowski: The One Question Interview

Over at Alex Boyd's blog, he has conducted one of his regular one question interviews with Marius Kociejowski about his just released The Pigeon Wars of Damascus. He asks:


Your book The Pigeon Wars of Damascus concerns a trip to Syria, and suggests travel writing shouldn’t be about going to a place, but should be writing that comes out of it. Is there something North Americans understand the least about the Middle East?

And Marius answers (in part):

One should not generalise, of course, because there are numerous Arabists in North America who have a keen understanding of the Middle East. I wish I had a fraction of their knowledge. If only the powers that be would consult them a bit more, then we might have been spared the consequences of their many mistakes. What I find alarming on my trips back to Canada is the tenor of many of the newspaper articles which in their interpretation of the Middle East and of Islam in particular are simplistic and crude in the extreme. Only recently the Ottawa Citizen ran a piece in which it was suggested that the pastor who wanted to burn the Qur’an and the imam who wants to build an Islamic centre, which actually is at some distance from the site of the Twin Towers, are of the same ilk. One wishes these columnists would read a bit more or even visit the countries which they discuss with such apparent ease before committing their erroneous and potentially damaging views to the page. What they have done, of course, is feed the fears of the populace. On September 11^th 2001 the terrorists not only hijacked planes but also the religious faith that has been such a source of strength for the Arabic people. The hell they inflicted upon others will be nothing as compared to the hell which, according to their own faith, they will have to endure.

For the rest please visit Alex's blog.

Alexander MacLeod's Light Lifting Makes Giller ShortList!!!

Alexander MacLeod's Light Lifting has made the Giller Shortlist. The Jury's citation reads:

“Rarely does fiction inhabit the body – the moving, athletic body – as fully as in Alexander MacLeod’s debut story collection. Whether describing what it is to run track, to swim against a current, to build cars or to haul bricks, MacLeod brings into vivid concrete language the physical experiences that mark us as profoundly as any thought. His stories are a careful marriage of the lyric and the narrative: each unfolds around a resonant, ineffable moment, replete with history and emotion, a Gordian knot comprised of all the strands that lead up to and away from it. Sensitive and subtle, MacLeod is a writer through whose deliberately partial and quotidian pieces shimmers life’s unspoken complexity.”

Also on the shortlist is Biblioasis alumni Kathleen Winter, for Annabel, do we feel doubly represented, and we're proud of both of these very fine people and writers. Looking forward to clinking glasses with them in November!

The National Post Profile: Small Towns, Big Honours

by Mark Medley

Alexander MacLeod needs some sleep. Bleary-eyed and bushy-haired, the author looks like he had a late night. He smiles sheepishly when pressed for details. All five of his siblings converged on the Gladstone Hotel in Toronto’s west end the previous evening to help launch his debut collection of short stories, Light Lifting, and the night featured literature, music and perhaps even a drink or two.

He has reason to celebrate. A little under 48 hours ago, sitting alone in a motel room in Guelph, Ont., MacLeod learned that Light Lifting had been longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, Canada’s most prestigious literary award. The shortlist will be revealed Tuesday morning.

“This certainly wasn’t the plan, he says, downing the first of what will be many coffees over the course of the following hour. “Nobody cared about this book. Noooooobody cared about it. And then on Monday this news came out, and since Monday …”

Since Monday, MacLeod has received a crash course in publishing; he’s been hounded by agents and the media, thrust into a position he didn’t expect to be in. Talking to MacLeod, you get the sense he finds it all a bit amusing. Although he’s the son of acclaimed Canadian writer Alistair MacLeod, whose novel No Great Mischief won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 2001, he’s always been far removed from the literary limelight. Says MacLeod of his father: “We never talked about stories — ever. We never talked about literature — ever. We talked about everything else.”

Light Lifting is a collaboration between two old friends: MacLeod and Dan Wells, the publisher of Windsor, Ont., press Biblioasis. There was no contract signed, no paperwork to be filed away, and even now he describes the book tour as “just driving around in a Volkswagen, selling books out of the trunk.”

“I was on Cape Breton Island, he was in Emoryville, Ont. So we were both very far from — this,” he says, meaning Toronto, the publishing centre of Canada. “Doing this last night, here … there’s definitely power in this city. It’s here. But it’s not where we live.”

For the past six years, MacLeod has lived in Dartmouth, N.S., with his wife and their three young children. He teaches English at St. Mary’s University, and coordinates the school’s Atlantic Canada Studies program, and his day job is one of the reasons this book has been so long in coming. MacLeod published his first short story when he was 21; he’s 38 now.

“I was supposed to be the big hotshot young guy.”

What happened?

“Good question,” he says. “Life.”

Read more: http://arts.nationalpost.com/2010/10/04/alexander-macleod-small-town-big-honours/#ixzz11Q3iPbk3

This and That

Largely a weekend off around the Bibliomanse, the first since Labour Day, so a quick list of odds and ends about our books, brought to you by the wide and wonderful internet.

Over at Pickle Me This, Kerry Clare calls Alexander MacLeod's Light Lifting one of the two best books she has read all year:

Alexander MacLeod’s short story collection Light Lifting never wavers, one solid story after another, and the effect is devastating, gripping, overwhelming. I could hardly believe that the book was this good, and so when I discovered that a friend was reading it at the same time that I was, I got in touch right right away for confirmation. Her take: “This guy is the real thing.”

Short stories whose absolutely evoked universes reminded me of Alice Munro in their expansiveness, whose subtly horrifying endings were a bit Flannery O’Connor. Stories so engaged with the stuff of this world, the living and the doing– laying brick driveways, changing an explosive diaper in a disgusting truck stop bathroom, learning to swim, cycling in the snow, crossing the finish line in a track competition, searching for lice, outrunning a train. So vivid that it’s hard to believe it’s fiction, which is why I had trouble remaining composed at the end of the story “Light Lifting”.

For the rest please go here.

Kevin from Canada, a blogger who is part of the Giller shadow jury blog project, includes his choices for the Giller shortlist, including Alexander MacLeod's Light Lifting. He also hands off a copy of Light Lifting to Alison Gzowski, who is "very impressed."

I finished Light Lifting last night. I was very impressed. This is a debut collection of short stories (some have been published earlier in literary journals) and it’s everything you don’t expect from debut collections: assured, traditional, consistently well-written and varied.

For the rest of her write-up, and a further plug from "Kevin from Canada," please go here.

Mary Jo Anderson, who reviewed Light Lifting last weekend in the Chronicle Herald, has published her full review of the book -- The Herald cut her review in its pages considerably -- over at Thresholds, the Home of the International Post-Graduate Short Story Forum. It can be found here.

A.J. Somerset continued with his Guest Blogging at the National Post's Afterword, which I linked to here a couple of times last week, with a couple of additional posts and a week-ending interview with Mark Medley. You can find two other posts, Tourist Trap and Only Fiction Can Save Us by clicking on their respective links.

Here's an excerpt from the interview:

Q: Can you tell us what the novel is about, in exactly six words?

Yesterday’s man, nobody’s daughter. Redemption unlikely.

Q: Okay, you can use more words now.

Well, that’s a relief. If I could do it in six, I wouldn’t have needed 80,000.

Lucas Zane, formerly a celebrated combat photographer, burnt out and washed up, has come to rest in Toronto where he pays the bills by shooting low-rent pornography. He hatches a plan to salvage his career by shooting a documentary project on a porn performer named Melissa, who hopes to make a fresh start. They each struggle towards a redemption that seems continually out of reach.

The youth audience will be pleased to learn that there are several references to vampires, although I hasten to add that none is sparkly.

You can find the full thing here.