I hope you had a wonderful Canada Day, we certainly did here at Biblioasis!
Kathy Page's Paradise and Elsewhere has been racking up the
praise this week. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune review
called it "A mind-bending collection of stories about transformation
and adaptation, full of startling ideas, capricious characters and uncanny
goings-on ... Paradise & Elsewhere is composed of elastic
language and distorted reflections, each story boldly illuminating as it
playfully confounds."
In their Canada Day blog That Shakespearean Rag made a list of their top 5 books so far this year and we are so proud that two of our authors were included. About Paradise and Elsewhere they said “Kathy Page’s new collection is cast in the fabulist mode of Angela Carter,
with stories about a society that has outlawed kissing due to an orally
transmitted virus, a sea creature who takes the place of a lighthouse-keeper’s
missing wife, and a journalism student who takes the notion of communing with
nature to a bizarre and unsettling extreme.”
Also
featured in That Shakespearean Rag's top 5 books was K.D. Miller’s All Saints. “All Saints is infused with humour, a
surprising degree of eroticism, and an uncompromising eye for human fallibility
and frailty."
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'sRed 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 Novelistsis 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 Elsewhereis 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 Saintsis 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!
Brown Dwarf by K.D. Miller is a mystery and a love story told by Rae Brand, a successful mystery series writer herself, who has returned to the “scene of the crime” in Hamilton, where the crime is hers. “I didn’t exactly kill my best friend,”she writes in her adult diary. “But I destroyed her nonetheless. You don’t have to lay a finger on somebody to destroy them.” The novel is the gradual revealing of what happened in 1962 between Brenda Bray, the girl Rae Brand used to be, with the pink-stitched “Pleasingly Plump” labels in her clothes, and her disturbingly precocious friend, Jori Clements as they haunted the escarpment that summer in their Jori-obsessed pursuit of escaped serial child killer, ClarenceFrayne. Jori offers danger and excitement to brow-beaten Brenda and a strange kind of love that is too compelling to resist. Scenes of Brenda’s life with the mother she calls “Hurricane Annie”, who is one minute exploding with rage, the next offering Brenda extra syrup for her pancakes, and Brenda’s entanglement with Jori and her upwardly mobile parents—Professor Clements quizzing Brendaon her views on euthanasia while Mrs. Clements hands around lemonade—alternate with the adult Rae Brand, walking the straight line streets of Hamilton, searching for clues to unearth the truth she has buried. The story moves back and forth in time as memory does, accumulating details, unravelling the secret like an outworn garment that no longer warms or protects, the multiple strands of what really happened becoming available to be knit into a new and truer self.
A “brown dwarf” is a character in crime fiction, the villain who is far from the prime suspect, too dull to be noticed. Also, it is “an astronomical wannabe”, once on its way to becoming a star, but it doesn’t shine, “something in its makeup was lacking”. Rae Brand tracks the villain, thinking she knows who the brown dwarf is, but, as in the best mystery stories, there is more to be found.
K.D. Miller is a poet and essayist as well as a fiction writer who writes with a clear-eyed humanity and devilish wit. Her novel illuminates the brown dwarf parts of us all as Rae Brand comes to see Brenda for who she was, neither entirely guilty nor completely innocent, but “culpable”, and in seeing that finds the love in her that wanted to shine.
This Fall the Literary Press Group is launching its Handmade Campaign, focusing on well-designed physical books in this age of e-reading hysteria. This, to my mind, is one of the more intelligent and creative back-to-the-book promos I've seen in a few years. There's some great titles there, by some of the best indie presses in the land: Coach House, Anvil, Pedlar, Invisible. And Biblioasis, of course.
Zach Wells's Track & Trace, K.D. Miller's Brown Dwarf and Mauricio Segura's Black Alley make up the Biblioasis contribution to this campaign. But if you're looking for some other great Biblioasis titles with that handmade appeal, why not also check out Mike Barnes's Thaw Foretold, Salvatore Ala's Straight Razor, Glenn & Kingwell's Idler's Glossary, Goran Simic's From Sarajevo With Sorrow.
Check in with you local indie bookseller to see if they'll be carrying these titles. For more information please go here.
Over at Open Book Toronto, Thom Vernon interviews K. D. Miller about Brown Dwarf, Alice Munro, writing, and much else.
I've been stalking K.D. Miller since pretty soon after I arrived in Toronto and came upon her "Semper Alicia" — a short story about an Alice Munro book club in southwestern Ontario — in New Quarterly. Although I've never actually met K.D. face-à-face, she is quite gracious and has, so far, always answered my emails. I'm thrilled that she was willing to let me in on murder, e-books and passing the sugar.
1. Mind telling us about yourself? Where do you come from and what part, if any, does this play in your writing?
I was born in Hamilton, Ontario in 1951. I would almost be tempted to say that those bits of information – where and when – brand me. What could possibly affect us more than time and place? Not that I am in any way limited to writing about or as a Recovering Hamiltonian Baby Boomer. I do have an imagination, and it is free to roam. But there is no doubt that I mine my own past for fictional material, and that I keep returning to it. And I confess that I am puzzled by writers who claim to put “nothing personal” into their writing, to make it all up out of whole cloth. Excuse me? Cloth is a weave. Where did the warp and weft come from?
2. You make juggling hilarity (Semper Alicia) & suspense (Brown Dwarf) look easy, what’s your secret?
Humour is all about suspense. Timing – or lack of it – can make or break a joke. And when you’re waiting for a punch line, you’re tense – even a little scared. I would compare it to the feeling of waiting to be caught in a game of hide-and-go-seek. Another thing the two have in common, from the standpoint of writing a funny or suspenseful scene, is difficulty and delicacy. They’re like a dance, or a balancing act. One false step... As for my secret, well, I was very lucky to grow up in a household where the atmosphere alternated between hilarious and scary. (I suspect now that one of my parents was bipolar.) Not the most tranquil of upbringings, but a goldmine for a writer.
3. 1962 was a big year: Cuban Missiles erupted, Marilyn Monroe died and Bernstein dissed Gould at the Philharmonic. What gives about that year and Brown Dwarf?
It’s that Baby-Boomer thing again, I’m afraid. Oh, I know – every generation thinks that its own coming-of-age year was the year. But in 1962, I really was more or less the age of the two girls in Brown Dwarf. And twelve is a very important age. While I was writing the book, I had a stick-note on the wall above my desk that said, THEY ARE TWELVE. Whenever things started to veer into what seemed improbable or even just unlikely (the two of them going hunting for a serial killer, for example) I would look up at my stick-note, and just carry on. When you’re twelve, anything is possible. As for the importance of 1962 globally, it was very much a cusp year. Soon, the Beatles would explode on the scene. Soon, Kennedy would be dead. For Boomers at least, two defining phenomena.
In today's National Post, Jeet Heer raves about K.D. Miller's latest:
Miller uses the conventions of the detective novel but is concerned with more than just the bare-bones question of whodunit. Although she remains under-appreciated, she is one of Canada’s finest writers, able to probe deeper into the human heart than the best surgeon. Here, as in her earlier stories, Miller’s concern is with why people do what they do rather than just what they do. Miller has a keen sense for how mixed all human motives are, how closely aligned love and hate can be and how deceiving others always involves a bit of self-deception.
Aside from its literary resonance, the story of Brand and her childhood friend Jori Clement also tells us more about Ann Perry’s real life story than any of Perry’s own books. In both the actual Perry murder case and in Miller’s novel, young girls in the hothouse of early adolescence form an intense quasi-sexual friendship that leads them to behave in unexpected ways.
One of the problems with traveling so much these past few months is that I have missed, with one exception -- and even that looked unlikely for a spell, due to a certain volcanic ash problem -- every launch this season, and a few other events besides. One of these was Kathleen Miller's Brown Dwarf launch April 14th, in Toronto. Thankfully she's sent a few photos, and the text to her introductory speech, which I've tried to upload to blogger, but it's simply not having it, and after a half-an-hour of fiddling I'm going to have to put it off for later. Fascinating talk though, and when combined with the photos gives at least a taste of being there.
While I was away (Which means that, yes, I have returned, dear readers. At least physically. Several parts of me -- including my heart -- remain elsewhere. More on that, possibly, later.) Kerry Clare wrote a review of K.D. Miller's wonderful Brown Dwarf.
K.D. Miller’s novel Brown Dwarfis a delicious secret. A slim volume, gorgeous to behold (and to hold! that cover. those thick pages. such an elegant typeface, perfect leading), it knows far more than it is telling. Rae Brand, a successful mystery novelist, turns to her own personal narrative in order to confront a pivotal event from her childhood. Though she’d been Brenda Bray then, lumpen outcast, daughter of a depressive, the character Rae Brand has been escaping ever since.
More to come, including Black Alley launch photos. As well as, perhaps, some photos on what I did when my British vacation was interrupted by an Icelandic volcano.
Trying to prepare for our trip to jolly old England this eve, wired as I am on Red Bull to try and catch up on an ever-growing pile of uncompleted tasks, I thought that I would take a moment to remind all Toronto-area readers of this here blog that K.D. Miller's launch is tomorrow eve, at St. Clement's Church, at 59 Briar's Hill Ave, at 7 pm. I wish I could be there, but as my host is leaving London on the 15th, I need to try and make it beforehand. Please, any of you Biblioasis-o-philes who can make it in my stead, do so. You know who you are.
I learned this eve that Corey Redekop has reviewed Brown Dwarf quite favourably in the current Quill & Quire, saying, in part:
Possibly basing her tale on the real-life exploits of novelist Anne Perry (fictionalized in Peter Jackson’s film Heavenly Creatures), Miller superbly captures the abject cruelty and loneliness of adolescence. Brenda’s alternating excitement and misery is rendered with haunting precision, sometimes recalling the youthful feverishness of Stephen King’s novella “The Body.
This is the second review of Brown Dwarf I've read in as many days which makes the connection between the book and Anne Perry's own youthful experiences, though I'd not made the connection on my own. Perhaps we should ask K.D. about that.
K.D. Miller will be launching her fourth book and first novel this Thursday, Wednesday, April 14th, at 7 pm, in the Reception room at St. Clement's Church in North Toronto (59 Briar Hill Ave., at the corner of Briar Hill and Duplex, one block west of Yonge, five blocks North of Eglinton). Refreshments will be served and books will be on sale. Please come out to support the launch of one of the highlights of our 2010 list.
Working on grants this week, CNQ's CC Grant, and Biblioais's OAC. Plus final reports, final copy-edits, covers, including the one above, for K. D. Miller's forthcoming Brown Dwarf, which should hit the printer early next week. Hosted Stephen Henighan last night for a Freedom to Read event, worked on promo for Page to Screen meetings next week, met with city officials about Rumrunners promotion. And, tonight, Adele Duck's opening at the Art Gallery of Windsor for a brief reprieve.
One of the highlights of our 2010 list -- Spring & Fall -- is K.D. Miller's first novel, Brown Dwarf. A moving, fraught psychological drama, a murder mystery, a painfully heart-rending settling of accounts, it is one of only a few manuscripts I've read in a sitting. I found it completely unputdownable. Jeet Heer has called her, in The Ottawa Citizen and elsewhere, Canada's best short story writer; Brown Dwarf will hopefully have him and others calling her simply one of Canada's best writers.
Here's a short description of the novel, and below that, Brown Dwarf 's first section.
When Brenda Bray, better known to the world as Rae Brand, the author of the popular "Elsinor Grey Mystery Series", returns home to Hamilton, she is set upon by vivid memories of the summer of 1962 when she struck up an intense relationship with a classmate, and together they sought to track and catch an escaped serial killer believed to be hiding out on the escarpment. Brenda and Jori search for this elusive murderer, their friendship twisting as the summer proceeds, becoming tautly fantastic and pre-adolescently sexual, eventually resulting in real tragedy. As the story of that summer unravels it becomes apparent that the headlines about Jori's disappearance only touch on the truth, and that Brenda must finally face up to that summer friendship and its results if she is going to discover any peace.
* * *
BRENDA
Brenda stares down at her saddle shoes. Navy and white, the navy parts like twin masks. When she wiggles her toes the white leather dimples like skin.
Jori is waiting for her. The way she always does. With her hands in her pockets and her head tilted back. Staring lazy-eyed out over the city. Just as if she doesn’t mind that Brenda’s holding them up. Again.
The white parts of Brenda’s saddle shoes were clean this morning. Now there are black scuff marks on them, and a smudge of dirt on one of her socks. She wishes she had thin, plain socks like Jori’s. Popcorn-stitch makes her ankles look thicker than they already are. But there’s more to popcorn-stitch, her mother says. They’re better value.
Jori is still waiting. She walked the ledge in seconds, just as if it was nice and flat and wide like the rest of the path. She didn’t inch along the way Brenda’s going to soon, holding her breath, grabbing at weeds that might pull out, clinging to corners of rock that might loosen and come away in her hand.
The first time Brenda made it across, Jori said, I’m proud of you, Brenda Bray. Brenda couldn’t look at her. Didn’t dare open her mouth in case she’d scream or cry. She had never hated anyone, not even Annie Bray, as much as she hated Jori Clement at that moment. And every time since then, she stands for long minutes thinking, I can’t I can’t I can’t. Then all at once it’s as if her feet think, Yes you can. And she hates Jori all over again.
Now the waist band of her skirt is starting to bind. She was going to wear slacks, but her mother made her change out of them because they’d gotten too tight for her to wear outside the house where all the world could see her. They looked indecent, Annie Bray said. (Sometimes Brenda lets herself think Annie Bray instead of my mother. She’s starting to do it more and more, especially when her mother says things like indecent.) All her other slacks were in the wash, so she had to put on a skirt. And that meant she had to put on her saddle shoes, because you can’t wear running shoes with a skirt. Just like you can’t go to church without a hat, or carry a white purse before the twenty-fourth of May.
She could tell Jori was surprised by the way she was dressed. Jori was in her usual Saturday outfit – blue jeans and a white T-shirt with a tan windbreaker over it and boys’ running shoes – the black and white kind with the red rubber circle at the ankle. (I get my clothes in the boys’ department. Daddy hates it, but Mummy tells him it’s just a phase.) Brenda kept expecting her to say something – What the hell are you doing in a skirt? Or, Jesus, Brenda Bray, we’re not going to a tea party. But she didn’t. She hasn’t said any of the other things Brenda keeps expecting her to say, either. How much do you weigh? What size do you take?
Brenda’s feet still won’t move. Maybe there’s a safety rule against walking a ledge in saddle shoes. What if she fell and broke her neck? Or worse, what if she fell and didn’t die, but got hurt so badly that her mother had to push her around in a wheelchair? If you’d done what I told you. If you’d stayed away from that Jori or whatever she calls herself. Day after day, for the rest of their lives.
It’s not really very steep here. If she did fall, she’d probably just scrape her knees and elbows. But she might rip her skirt, too, her perfectly good skirt that still has lots of wear in it and that cost good money. Annie Bray would demand to know how she did it, and would keep on at her until it all came out. Who she was with. What she was doing. Where. The where would be the worst part. No. Maybe the what. Except the who would be pretty bad too. There is absolutely nothing good about what they are doing right now. Not a single thing. And Jori is still waiting.
That waist band is almost cutting her in half. Brenda hopes it hasn’t rolled itself into a rope, because then the label might show at the back and Jori might see For the Pleasingly Plump Child stitched in pink thread.
“I’m sorry I’m taking so long,” she calls. It’s what she always says when they get stuck at the ledge.
Jori shrugs. “Take as long as you want.” That’s what she always answers. As if the two of them had just stopped for a minute to look at the view.
The city doesn’t look quite real to Brenda today. The bright October sun makes the shadows sharp. The streets could have been drawn with a ruler, they run in such straight lines down to the bay, and the tiny houses look perfect from this high up. No missing shingles or broken bricks or sagging porches. The trees look like somebody painted them green then shook drops of orange and yellow over them. Even the smoke from the steel plants is like something in a painting, shooting straight up into the pure blue sky. Brenda imagines the tiny people who live down there leading perfect little lives with no Pleasingly Plump labels and no Hurricane Annies and no ledges to cross and no Jori Clements waiting for them.
Jori is still waiting, with that cool smile of hers smoothing her mouth. Why doesn’t she just leave me here? Brenda thinks. What does she want with me, anyway? Wouldn’t she be better off without me?
She looks up into the sky. This would be the perfect time for her father to come rattling down out of the clouds in his bus. He would lift his Hamilton Street Railway cap to her and say, Hop aboard, Miss Bray! Then together they would drive up, up and away, for ever and ever amen.
She’s had that daydream for as long as she can remember. But ever since she’s known Jori, she’s been asking herself stupid questions, almost as if she wants to spoil it. How would your father recognize you, since he only ever saw you as a baby? Would he be disappointed at the way you turned out? Would you still be Pleasingly Plump in heaven? Twelve is too old for daydreams. She can just hear Annie Bray – A big girl like you.
Her feet still won’t take the first step onto the ledge. “I’m coming,” she calls. “Soon.”
