Monday, November 18, 2013

Last Week Was Actually Pretty Great.

You wouldn't know it from the Thirsty blog (ahemcoughsorry), but last week was actually a pretty great one over here at the Bibliomanse. So a happy Monday to you all! See below for the movings, shakings, news, reviews, and gossipy tidbits that got our follicles tingling ca. Nov. 11 to Nov. 15th, 2013. On the 16th we at the Bibliomanse celebrated ONE FULL YEAR in our wonderful new bookshop and office, and admittedly got a little distracted preparing for that, but you know what? We had a heckuva good time. Paul Vasey, Bob Duff, and Rino Bortolin joined us for author signings, and—as an extra-special geek treat—we had bookbinder extraordinaire Dan Mezza come in from London to do on-the-spot book appraisals and make repairs suggestions on old volumes. Thanks to the book doctor for making the trip south, and thanks to all of our wonderful customers who came in to support us here at the shop. We couldn't do it without you.

On to the media!

1. We had a lovely endorsement of Ray Robertson's David from the Historical Novel Society, as well as a half-hour interview with Ray with Bill Kenower, editor in chief of Author Magazine, on Author2Author;

2. Mauricio Segura's Eucalyptus was reviewed in the Montreal Review of Books and was named an Editor's Pick/Amazon.ca Top 100 Books of the Year for 2013;

3. Lucie Wilk, whose Strength of Bone was also an Editor's Pick/Amazon Top 100 book, was reviewed in this month's Quill & Quire. Quoth Kamal Al-Solaylee: “If you suppose [The Strength of Bone] is a love story across racial and political lines, you’re underestimating the inventiveness and grace of Lucie Wilk’s meditative debut. Wilk instead works with what is unspoken, hinted at, and left to the imagination … anything but typical.”

4. A "Book News" piece by Annalisa Quinn is circulating on NPR.org and NPR affiliates for Mia Couto's Neustadt win:
Book News: Mozambican Writer Wins Neustadt Prize, 'America's Nobel’: on NPR.org’s “The Two-Way,” Nov. 5
Repeated on WWNO.org, Nov. 13

5. In the wake of the furor surrounding Garth Hallberg’s massive Knopf advance, I thought I’d mention that yep, that is in fact the same Garth who blurbed Traymore so handsomely for The Millions. Traymore was also singled out for its first line over the weekend by the San Francisco Chronicle

6. Friday was a lovely wonderful rare day for us here at Biblioasis, with our first full-length poetry review in Michael Lista’s “On Poetry” column. For the poetry enthusiasts out there—heck, for everybody—the whole thing’s worth reading in full. Congratulations to Alexandra Oliver.
“An incredible feat of vision and voice … technically, nothing is out of Oliver’s grasp. Her go-to iambic pentameter can swallow anything in its path. Meeting the Tormentors in Safeway should go a long way toward establishing Oliver as one of the country’s best stanza makers, with a fluidity and ambition aspiring to Dylan Thomas or Yeats … When she succeeds, she succeeds entirely.”
7. Last but not least, the following from KD Miller, whose new collection All Saints will be forthcoming with Biblioasis in Spring 2014:
Recently I was interviewed by CNIB volunteer Ann Saunders for Accessible Media Inc. about my experience of recording some of my own books for The Canadian National Institute for the Blind. Included in the interview are excerpts of me narrating Holy Writ (The Porcupine's Quill, 2001); actor Deborah Kipp narrating Brown Dwarf (Biblioasis, 2010); and Ann Saunders herself narrating The Other Voice (Stonebunny Press, 2011.)
If you'd like to listen in, just click on the word "online" at the end of this sentence: "The November 2013 episode of Choice Words, featuring an interview with K.D. Miller, is available for listening online."

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