Two Reviews of Join the Revolution, Comrade

Finally. Two review this week of Join the Revolution, Comrade. The first appearing last Saturday in the Hong Kong Standard (almost certainly our first review in an Asian paper), and begins like this:

Canadian Charles Foran, a one-time resident of Hong Kong, has just had published a collection of essays under the title Join the Revolution, Comrade, covering life on three continents and spanning topics from China to Cervantes.

In a world where "page-turner" is often seen as the ultimate accolade for a book, collections of essays aren't for everyone. Essays don't, by and large, propel the reader from chapter to chapter but instead induce pauses for reflection.

But Join the Revolution, Comrade isn't merely a book for savoring, although it is that. The complaints that Western writers don't make an effort to understand Asia and its cultural subtleties are possibly partly based either in a lack of awareness of those writers like Foran who can move seamlessly from Tariq Ali to Lu Xun to Yeats - or also, perhaps, in a certain unwillingness to read books whose pages don't turn by themselves.

The whole review can be found here:

www.thestandard.com.hk/news_detail.asp?pp_cat=15&art_id=67920&sid=19595292&con_type=1

The second review appeared in the Globe & Mail Books section this past week. Part of a group review, Foran's section begins like this:

In Join the Revolution, Comrade: Journeys and Essays, novelist Charles Foran leaves Nowhere - Toronto's Willowdale - for Somewhere - China, Thailand, Vietnam - taking us with him on a rich and reflective voyage as he skillfully navigates the clash of languages, cultures and points of view that travelling can trigger if you are wide-eyed, curious and eager to learn.

The whole review, which also includes a review of Bruce Serafin's Stardust (which I might pick up), can be found here:

www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20080705.BKESSA05/TPStory/?query=charles+foran

The Little Literary Press That Could (& More Praise for Jailbreaks)

Managing editor Jared Bland has published a short post on the Walrus Blog about Biblioasis, enough to pick up our spirits a touch on a rather sweltering day above the garage. Here's a taste:

Surely Biblioasis, the small independent press run out of Emeryville, Ontario, is among the bravest entities in Canadian literature. This spring, after all, their list contained not one but two books of critical essays. One would be risk enough. Two is sort of admirably crazy.

Also, for Jailbreaks, the second nice bit of praise it has received this week. The Winnipeg Free Press reviewed it last Saturday, saying it belonged in every school library across the land, but thus far they are the only major paper to give it som much as a millimetre of ink.

Jared had this to say:

But what’s most endeared the press to me this year is Jailbreaks, a collection of ninety-nine Canadian sonnets, edited and annotated by Zachariah Wells. (Just how eclectic and broad is Biblioasis’s scope? This fall it will release Wells and Rachel Lebowitz’s children’s book in verse, Anything but Hank!, which has a really awesome cover.) Wells’s collection makes me happy for a number of reasons, but foremost among them is the eccentric range of names contained within ... What Wells offers is a thematic survey on formalist grounds, a sort of sleight of hand that makes the collection immediately familiar and intelligible but also, as his insightful notes on each poem show, rigorous in its aesthetic evaluations and thoughtful in its attention to details of prosody. As an editor and commentator, Wells is incredibly perceptive and mercifully concise. ... It’s perhaps a fine distinction, but this is a collection for those interested more in poetry by Canadians than Canadian poetry.

The whole post can be found here:

www.walrusmagazine.com/blogs/2008/06/26/the-little-literary-press-that-could/

Jailbreaks: Belongs in Every School in the Country

So says Maurice Mierau in a review in the Winnipeg Free Press. We, of course, completely agree with him.

Here's a short excerpt:

Vancouver

poet and critic Zachariah

Wells has edited a collection of

Canadian sonnets that should be in

every school library. Jailbreaks:

99 Canadian Sonnets (Biblioasis,

160 pages, $20) reminds us of our

national involvement in one of

English poetry's most significant

forms.

The entire review, which also has a good review of honourary Biblioasis poet Adam Getty's latest, can be found here:

www.winnipegfreepress.com/subscriber/books/story/4189885p-4780427c.html

Cutting Down our Tall Poppies

An article in the Republic of East Vancouver has just been published about Stephen Henighan and his latest collection, A Report on the Afterlife of Culture. You can read it here:

www.republic-news.org/archive/191-repub/191_sercombe.html

Here's a short excerpt:

A public intellectual on the cutting edge is lauded in most countries, but in Canada many literary types have not read Henighan or they bristle defensively at the name as though he doesn’t quite know how to behave around the Canlit table. Picture your favourite uncle who comes to Christmas dinner and pokes gentle fun at stuffy family habits.

The Idler's Glossary

One of our big books this fall looks like it will be Joshua Glenn and Mark Kingwell's Idler's Glossary. Think of it as a Devil's dictionary for the idling classes, a volume that is destined to open wounds with Calvinists, Timekeepers, clock-watchers, workaholics, uptightniks and punctiliocrats everywhere. It includes an essay by Mark Kingwell -- Idling Toward Heaven: The Last Defence you will Ever Need -- and Glenn's glossary proper, which gathers and closely examines (and in some cases coins) hundreds of idler-specific terms and phrases. Illustrated by Seth, if you can't tell from this first cover mock up. I love the Bertie Wooster-ish feel of it. Wodehouse would have approved, I think.

Josh has just put his glossary in Wordle, a web-based tool that gives you acloud of key words and phrases: that can be found here:

wordle.net/gallery/03059/idler_glossary

This will be the perfect volume for all you idlers, loafers, layabouts, shit-heels, losers, dawdlers, amblers, indolents, flaneurs, epicureans, dodgers, spongers and cadgers: the bulk, I expect, of Thirsty readers.

Steven Beattie interviews Charles Foran

That Steven Beattie guy just might like us. Two posts in one day. This one an absolutely fabulous interview with Charles Foran around this April's Join the Revolution, Comrade. For which I thank him, again, heartily.

You can find the whole interview at That Shakespeherian Rag, here:

stevenwbeattie.com/2008/06/17/tsr-author-interview-charles-foran/

A brief excerpt:

Novelists who do make an attempt to write in a more challenging or idiosyncratic way that might lack mass popular appeal are often castigated for being “elitist,” an epithet that William A. Henry III has suggested “has come to rival if not outstrip ‘racist’ as the foremost catchall pejorative of our times.” How do we counteract the prevailing cultural tendency towards comfortable, staid fictional products and authors?

At this stage, there is likely no escaping charges of elitism. Simply to aspire to write not a “literary’” book or a “real” novel or any such loaded term but to write simply to the tradition, to Cervantes and Sterne, Eliot and Conrad, Virginia Wolf and Keri Hume, is to open yourself up to epithets. As I said before, it seems we don’t really want these books, these writers, any longer. We only accept, begrudgingly, the “difficult” ones that the Nobel committee or, sometimes, the Booker jury, bully onto our media bookshelf. (What a tiny, badly constructed shelf that is, too: can’t hold more than a few titles at any one time, books rated by gaudy covers and sensationalized titles, then still filed upside-down or spines-to-the-wall; all excess releases allowed to topple off the edge and tumble to the ground, there to be not even trampled on; just ignored, until covered in dust, dirt, and returned to the earth.) We no longer have the time or attention span or, possibly, the faith in the form. We’ve moved on.

What to do? Join the Revolution, Comrade, I suppose — or else …

Rebecca Rosenblum and the Future of the Short Story

Steven Beattie, over at That Shakespeherian Rag, has a short post on Rebecca Rosenblum. Seems he's become enchanted this past weekend with the pretty fantastic world which is Rosenblum's ONCE, her first collection of short fiction, set for an early September launch. He attended her Luminato reading on Friday, and it seems he was also at BookExpo and got his hands on one of those cerloxed monstrosities posing as an Uncorrected Galleys I spent much of last week producing when it became apparent the printer would not get them done on time (one of the reasons I needed to rush back from the Jailbreaks launch Wednesday evening, which forced me to postpone finishing my CNQ grant, which meant I spent much of Father's Day working on my computer. I know, I know ... cry me a river.) and that he likes, very much, what he has thus far read.

Steven, in part, writes:

At a Luminato reading on Friday, I had the immense pleasure of meeting Rebecca Rosenblum, a Toronto-based short-story writer whose debut collection, Once, which is set for release in September, is already receiving astounding word of mouth. No less a stalwart figure than John Metcalf has commented that Rosenblum “is among the most talented of the writers I’ve worked with in forty years” — quite a compliment considering that this list includes Michael Winter, Caroline Adderson, Terry Griggs, Sharon English, and Russell Smith, among others.

I picked up an ARC of Once at Book Expo Canada over the weekend, which I’ve been dipping into. From my experience there, and having heard the author read her story “Route 99″ on Friday, I expect that this is a collection you’ll be hearing much more about round these parts in the run-up to September.

Smart guy, that Beattie.

He also pointed me over to Rebecca's own blog, where she has a wonderful post on the short story and its/her imminent demise. You can find that here:

rebecca-rosenblum.blogspot.com/2008/06/rumours-of-my-demise-have-been-greatly.html

You'll also be hearing a lot about Rebecca in the lead up to her September launch 'round these parts, so get used to it...

Smith's Diana,& the Herald's Bestseller LIST: An Update

Russell Smith's pornographic tale of one woman's sexual conquest of an unnamed metropolis a lot like Toronto seems to have struck a chord in Calgary, Alberta, where it is now number 4 on the Herald Bestseller lists, where it sits only behind Elizabeth George, Laurell K. Hamilton, and Salman Rushdie. You can check it out here:

www.canada.com/calgaryherald/news/booksandthearts/story.html?id=013fe568-e064-4813-a25b-4dd5a83c2666

Flirt: The Globe Review

A fabulous, smart, funny, moving, convincing, flirtatious review of Jackson's Flirt in the GLOBE this morn. Katia Grubisic: I owe you at least a shot of an (un)reasonable scotch the next time you're either in Emeryville, or I make it back to Montreal! (I know, I know: destined to be the latter.)

Katia-the interviewer-cum-reviewer: "I like the book more each time I read it." Which is what I was saying in yesterday's post. This is a book you read more than once. It keeps drawing me back to it (the last time being yesterday, hence the post), if only for the pleasure of dipping in for a few pages. It's as gratifying, as pleasurable, as a back-rub from Janet Jones Gretzky. Not that I've had one of those. Yet. But an impoverished publisher can dream, can't he?

So, please, go out and buy the damned book before Chapters/Indigo sends them all back.

FICTION

In which I flirt with Lorna

KATIA GRUBISIC

June 14, 2008

FLIRT

The Interviews

By Lorna Jackson

Biblioasis, 93 pages, $16.95

Print Edition - Section Front

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Lorna! Oh. Sorry.

- Mouthful of hair, sorry.

- I'm used to the two-cheek Montreal kiss. Leads to accidental making out when I try it with West-Coasters.

- The West Coast doesn't kiss. Flirting's transgression enough.

- Were you trying to be transgressive with this book, a literary incarnation of flirting?

- Not particularly. Just to show ... Just a coffee for me. This is a great old dive.

- Do you have The Macallan? 15? 21? Thanks.

- This was one of only three that got licences after Prohibition, the other two long gone. Vancouver's reinvented itself 14 times since we played here. "I lived in the city when it meant something, before it meant so little." I say that in the book.

- In Flirt, every short story is a mock-interview - with musicians, athletes, writers - cobbled together from real interviews, research, biographies, but each piece crescendos to reveal the interviewer. Like your first collection and your novel, the primacy of character is what drives the story. The tone is similarly edgy, too; you describe breastfeeding as being stabbed with a chainsaw.

- Alice Munro takes exception to the feasibility of that comparison.

- You've always done violence well, the latent violence of how hard it is to live a hard life well. You strike a risky balance between tenderness and honesty. Your writing revs. Mark Jarman summarized it as Hamlet meets Baywatch.

- Mark's a hoot.

- You wouldn't have wanted to flirt with him in this one? Or Hamlet, for that matter? David Hasselhoff?

- Nah. Flirting with Mark, we'd've ended up eloping to Vegas in robot suits or something. Hamlet's too wordy wordy wordy, and as for the Hass, I don't like men with bigger breasts than mine. Anyway, you're here with Lorna the character. Ask me about the interviews. Lorna the writer is home watching the game.

- Right, yes. The writer is not a tube of toothpaste, sayeth Atwood.

- But I toy with that autobiographical distance.

- Lorna-the-writer's last book was about hockey. In Flirt, we see you cruising around with Bobby Orr in his Cadillac, kayaking with your real-life pretend boyfriend Markus Naslund, getting a backrub from Janet Gretzky. What is it about hockey?

- You know, it's the facing opposition, often against the odds, and then someone at last does something. It's not unlike an interview, with a different set of players.

- Constructing the self by confronting the other. And the self is the story? I was concerned initially about the lack of linear plot in Flirt. I was worried too about keeping track of who's saying what. Like in some unattributed dialogue, when you find yourself counting backward to figure out the speaker. But the voices here are clear, just idiosyncratic enough. And the through line is Lorna-the-character's need to tell her stories, the way everybody has stories, plural.

- Yeah. To quote myself quoting Richard Ford, whose answers to the mock interview are lifted from a real interview I did with him.

- But your questions were different?

- The character I construct, her thoughts on writing, art, fatherhood, daughterhood, teenage love and rebellion, all that is elaborated against those real answers, yes.

- What was your favourite mock-terview? The Janet Gretzky is hilarious; she's so self-helpish, repressed. Has abolished the first-person singular pronoun. Says gosh.

- Totally wanted me.

- Totally. And Alice Munro - "Maybe it's flirting you smell, not manure." Your frustration with how she wrote Dance of the Happy Shades while her girls were napping ...

- ... while my daughter wailed, "Come get me, you slut," as soon as I sat down with a pad of paper.

- You have a little crush on Alice Munro. That's probably the most seductive interview, you coyly reminding her of the end of Floating Bridge ...

- Great story; she dances so much so fast, without her "tights getting saggy."

- You seemed sweet on Benjamin Britten, too. By that last piece, the protagonist-cum-interviewer has told her whole story, in subtle bits that emerge organically, if somewhat megalomaniacally, through each conversation: the older sister who died young, the father who ineptly faked his own death, the string of musician boyfriends, the end of alcoholism. What's Britten like?

- Meticulously attentive, even posthumously, waiting for the world to amaze him, wondering what instrument he'll use to mimic the happy hens cavorting roosterless nearby. He held my hands, you know.

- Yeah, I liked that part. It was sincere; the interview rings true, sketches the subject exactly while touching on your own ars poetica.

- So it works, the character of the interviewer?

- Perfect. I like the book more each time I read it. She's a great character, flawed in all the right places, the kind of hard knocks all women would dare to rub up against, and sympathetic because it is hard, but you live it anyway. No self-pity ...

- Gawd no. Suck it up, snarls my Don Cherry-esque alter ego.

- You get the secondary characters, too -- you explain an absent God and do a full portrait of the dead sister in three sentences. A cutlery-coddling husband. Chelios. Thurber the spaniel.

- The story emerges from those details. Storytelling, like interviewing, is about the ability to lead your audience to a different perspective.

- You ask Britten whether "superficial effects are the will of the material, rather than the ego of the artist." Alluding to writing as well as to his Three Divertimenti?

- A writer has to listen to the writing, to the characters, in order to know the story and how to tell it.

- A good listener, in short. Like a musician, like ... You used to be a bassist, right? Good listeners. And bassists are hot.

- Are you flirting with me?

Katia Grubisic bats her eyelashes and drinks reasonable scotch in Montreal. Her first collection of poems, What If Red Ran Out, was published this spring.

Lorna Jackson Flirts with Richard Ford.

I haven't posted enough about this book yet. Available for about two months now, we only got around to launching last weekend in Victoria. There's only been scant coverage thus far -- a rather poor review of it in Q&Q, an article in a Victoria paper -- the Times-Colonist? -- which got many of its facts mixed up. A piece last week or this I have not seen yet in Monday magazine, Victoria's ALt-weekly. There's a Globe review upcoming, and I expect a few others to follow. Not the wide net cast by Lorna's Cold-cocked, but nor did we expect there to be. It's not a hockey book (though several of the pieces deal in some form with the sport), and it's a book which is awfully hard to define. A book which may fall between the cracks.

Which is a damn shame, as it is certainly the most idiosyncratic book of fiction Biblioasis has published, and perhaps the oddest title that will be published in Canada this year. Is it fiction? Okay, then, short fiction? A strangely arranged novel? A collection of linked riffs? Is it, as we've said in the cover bumpf, a long, comic essay on grief?

It's all of these things, and also brilliant. Comic. Beautifully conceived and written. Every time I look at the book I'm drawn into it, abandon myself to its pages for the pure pleasure of them. It has nothing to do with the interview subjects, Ian Tyson, Bobby Orr, Alice Munro, Janet Jones-Gretzky, Michael Ondaatje, Benjamin Britten. Richard Ford. It is entirely the book's finely crafted sensibility, its humour and sadness, its language and the joy Jackson takes in it. The intelligence and compassion and the absolutely bizarre shape this book takes. So give the damn thing a chance, will you?

As it ahppens, we've put Lorna's Richard Ford interview online on the CNQ website, so you can read it here:

www.notesandqueries.ca/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=85&Itemid=48

Here's an excerpt, which starts with a question from the narrator:

—Do you have anxieties about writing in the first person from the narrative perspective of a guy who has sex with 18 women after his little boy dies, or a guy who thinks Canadians and their sport are boring? Are you afraid friends and family might confuse author and character?

—Absolutely not.

—Is that maturity, or did you never have those anxieties?

—I don’t give a shit.

—And did you never give a shit?

—If I did I made myself quit.

—One more question, Richard, then my time’s up. Who’s writing better short stories than you are?

Jailbreaks: 99 Canandian Sonnets

Pulled my own version of There and Back Again last night as I headed up the 401 for the Toronto launch of the Zach Wells edited Jailbreaks: 99 Canadian Sonnets. As boring as the 401 between Windsor and Toronto may be, one is quite thankful for it at 4 AM. Too tired to do so tonight, but I should be able to post a fair number of photographs tomorrow. It was an excellent event, with some very fine readings.

In the meantime, Nathan Whitlock has posted an interview with Zach about the anthology on Open Book Toronto that can be found here:

www.openbooktoronto.com/nwhitlock/blog/interview_with_zachariah_wells_jailbreaks_99_canadian_sonnets

And Alex Good has reviewed the anthology in his usual thoughtful fashion on his website, which can be found here:

www.goodreports.net/reviews/jailbreaks.htm

A brief excerpt:

"It's refreshing to see an editor so engaged with his material. And while there are omissions and inclusions individual readers may disagree with, the result is a collection that successfully showcases remarkable variety within its narrow room."

Speaking of Alex Good, he's getting a lot of attention and praise for his fine, sharp and straight-talking piece Looking Backward, in the current edition of CNQ, seemingly on newstands everywhere. Quillblog, Bookninja, and That Shakespherian Rag, among others, are all atwitter. Though I think Susan Glickman put it best: "Alex Good is great!"

If you are unwilling to part with $7.95, you can read Good's essay for FREE -- a CNQ public service -- here:

www.notesandqueries.ca/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=79&Itemid=48

Russell Smith's Diana, and the Bestseller list

Russell Smith's Diana: A Diary in the Second Person, a pornographic novel he published earlier this year with Biblioasis, has finally hit the bestseller lists in that sexiest of all Canadian cities, Calgary, Alberta. If you want proof, you can check here:

www.canada.com/calgaryherald/news/booksandthearts/story.html?id=bf4327cc-30b5-4b6f-9d94-4e9e5bc1235a

Number 9, but, hey, it counts! Notice it's the only book they don't give a one line synopsis of, letting the subtitle do all of the work. I WONDER WHY. Perhaps "A story about a woman's sexual conquest of an unnamed city" was a bit much for the arts section.

Elsewhere, if you haven't read Russell's column on Caroline Adderson and the short story, from yesterday's Globe, please do so. You can find it here:

www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080612.wrussell12/BNStory/Entertainment

Caroline is one of my favourite writers, one of the best in the country -- even her two kids books are fabulous. (We've just finished reading I, Bruno in this household for the second time, and look set to start Very Serious Children a 2nd time as well. Both boys are already showing signs of having exceptional taste.) Her latest collection of stories Pleased To Meet You is everything Russell says it is. It's probably not on the shelves too many places these days, as it's been 20 months or so since it was originally released, but you can special order it or get it at amazon.ca. If you love short fiction and have not read her, I envy you the treat of discovery.

We published a profile of Caroline Adderson a couple of issues ago in CNQ. I'll get it up on the web soon.

But back to my original point:

BIBLIOASIS: PUBLISHERS OF BESTSELLING PORNOGRAPHY SINCE LAST WEEK.

CNQ 73: The Translation Issue, hits Newstands and Web

Word has reached me from Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal that CNQ 73: the Translation Issue, has actually already hit mailboxes, perhaps the fastest turn-around for Canada Post in the history of magazine delivery. It's a packed issue, most of it dealing in some fashion with the issue of translation, and includes work by Mike Barnes, Stephen Henighan, Robyn Sarah, Alberto Manguel, Amanda Jernigan, Goran Simic, Sheila Fischman, Andrew Steeves, Roy MacSkimming, David A. Kent, Barbara Nickel and Alex Good, among others. As an added bonus, there are 14 verse translations of Charles Baudelaire by Richard Outram published here for the first time anywhere, complete with an exceptional introduction by Amanda Jernigan. There's also a photo-essay by Amanda to accompany a suite of photographs by Erin Brubacher. Really, it's the best buy on the newsstands at 7.95, so why don't you head on out, if you don't already subscribe, and pick up a copy. Better yet, subscribe yourself, and help us keep the Canada Council happy.

The website has also been updated for the first time in the last two issues, and I promise to keep it updated (fairly regularly.) I don't have everything up yet, and I'll be trying to make it a touch more visually appealing -- I've been at it since 5 am (7 hours or so now) -- and need a break. But you'll find a few articles from the magazine on there, as well as some web-only exclusives: Shane Neilson on Covering Up, Lorna Jackson Flirting with Richard Ford, and a review of Margaret Somerville by Michael Goodfellow. Additional reviews and articles will be added over the course of this week, and then with charming irregularity thereafter. The website can, of course, be found at www.notesandqueries.ca.

I'd like to draw your attention in particular to two of the pieces on the website, especially if you do not subscribe or intend to buy the print version. Alex Good's take on the 2007 Giller's is blistering, thought-provoking and at least mildly (to put it mildly) controversial. Also take a gander at Mike Barnes's fabulous A Real Spaceship From Across: Thoughts on Translation, which ranges through Philip K. Dick, Stanislaw Lem and does battle with two different translations of Celine. I think these two essays are evidence of why CNQ is one of the best critical journals in the country.

There will be a quick turn-around between this issue and the next, which will hit newstands at the end of July/beginning of August. For issue 74 we have partnered with The New Quarterly to present our joint Salon Des Refuses, a highlighting of the work of 20 of the most important short story writers not included in Jane Urquhart's less-than-magisterial Penguin Anthology of the Canadian Short Story. (These issues will include work by, among others, Douglas glover, Terry Griggs, Mike Barnes, Sharon English, Mark Anthony Jarman, Clark Blaise, Baharti Mukherjee, Steven Heighton, Ray Smith, Russell Smith, Diane Schoemperlen, Noramn Levine, John Metcalf and many others. And then there is our 40th Anniversary/75th Issue, guest-edited by Carmine Starnino .... So, really, what are you waiting for?

(PS: Yes, we know about the typo.)

Rosenblum at Luminato

Rebecca Rosenblum will be reading on June 13th as part of the Short Story Festival sessions of Toronto's Luminato Festival. Details are as follows:

David Whitton and Rebecca Rosenblum
(moderated by Lynn Coady)
Friday, June 13, 12:30p.m. Northern District Branch,
40 Orchard View Blvd

Rebecca will have on hand 50 chapbook samplers to give away in anticipation of the publication of her first book, ONCE, set for early September.

Should you wish to take a sneak peak at some of the stories in the collection, in the coming month's you'll be able to find Rebecca in the following magazines and anthologies:

Best Canadian Stories (September)
Coming Attractions (3 stories, September)
CNQ: Canadian Notes & Queries ( summer issue, an author profile)
echolocation 8 (a short story)
The Fiddlehead summer fiction issue (a short story)
The Journey Prize Anthology
Maisonneuve (September issue, short story)
New Quarterly (summer issue, 3 stories and an interview)

Rebecca won this past year's Metcalf-Rooke Award, yet more proof that the award can help make good things happen. We'll be posting details about this year's award, hopefully, by week's end, so stay tuned.

Winter Wins Silver

Kathleen Winter has won a silver medal at the National Magazine Awards for her story You Can Take One Thing, published in The New Quarterly as part of her Metcalf-Rooke Award profile last year. Steven Heighton topped her for his story the Dead Are More Visible, first published in the Walrus. Congratulations to both of them!

You Can Take One Thing is the opening story in her Metcalf-Rooke winning collection, boYs. It's a fabulous story, about a young girl's emigration from England to Newfoundland. It is Winter at her best: beautifully conceived, with an eye for details and dialogue, charming, quirky, humorous, honest and very moving. It presents me with yet another opportunity to urge you to go out and pick up this collection. It's still in all Chapters and Indigos, the best independents, amazon.ca, or at the press website, where it can be found here:

www.biblioasis.com/product_info.php?cPath=21&products_id=61

It has been a very good year for Kathleen. The Metcalf-Rooke Award, the Winterset Award, shortlisted for the Newfoundland-Labrador book award, and now a Silver Medal at the National Magazine Awards. And she deserves it all and more for this fine, fine collection.

Caught on Tape (or whatever the digital equivalent may be)

Still don't have any details about how the Vancouver reading went for Henighan at Pulp Fiction last night, but Zach Wells was present with his ever ready digital recorder and caught the reading and discussion on tape. My thanks to him for this. If you would like to listen in, it can be found on his blog, Career Limiting Moves, here:

zachariahwells.blogspot.com/2008/06/stephen-henighan-reading.html

For those in Victoria, a reminder: tonight Hernighan will be at the Black Stilt. Let's try for another fabulous event.

Jailbreaks Launch in Toronto

Attention all Toronto-area Biblioasis-o-philes. We'll be launching, finally, Zach Wells' fine anthology Jailbreaks: 99 Canadian Sonnets Wednesday, June 11th at 8 pm at the I.V. Lounge in Toronto (326 Dundas St. W). All of this due to the fine work of Alex Boyd and Colin Carberry. My thanks go out to both.

Confirmed readers are as follows, though I'm still hoping to guilt at least a few more into coming out (you know who you are: Mike Barnes, David Hickey (I'll drive you to and from, same night, Redbulling it late back at 75 k/hr in my less-than-trusty minivan along the 401), Ken Babstock (who, in case you didn't know, is a proud dad now (& he seems to think that is reason enough not to come to this shindig. Imagine.))

Walid Bitar, Colin Carberry, Evie Christie, Eric Cole, Pino Coluccio, E.A. Lacey (read by Fraser Sutherland), Gwendolyn MacEwen (read by Meaghan Strimas), David W. McFadden, Shane Neilson, Stuart Ross, Joshua Trotter, & Zachariah Wells.

Zach is flying in for this event from Vancouver, so come on out and congratulate him on a hell of a fine job with Jailbreaks.

Looking forward to seeing you all there.

Alex Good on Stephen Henighan's Report

Alex Good has come out of hiding and posted a review of Stephen Henighan's A Report on the Afterlife of Culture over at goodreports.net. The review can be found here:

www.goodreports.net/reviews/areportontheafterlifeofculture.htm

A short excerpt:

The "Report," which is the long essay that makes up the entire first part of this collection, is one of the most engaging and provocative pieces of critical writing I've read in years. And for those who enjoy seeing blood on the floor, well, you might want to go right to the final section and witness the flaying of Globe and Mail reviewer T. F. "Rave" Rigelhof. In the face of such a globe-trotting, erudite onslaught, caveats register like speed bumps. ... But disagreeing with a book like this -- and I disagreed a lot -- is the whole point. For jagged insight and provocative, anti-establishment rhetoric there's probably no other commentator on literary matters in Canada more worth reading. Or so much fun.

Henighan interviewed by a literary lad

In my sort-of unintentionally long hiatus from blog-upkeep these past few months, there's a lot of stuff I should have pointed out, and did not. This interview with Steven Beattie, whose blog, That Shakespeherian Rag, is one of the few I tune into regularly, is one of them. Steven is also set to interview Charles Foran in the coming weeks about his own collection of critical essays Join the Revolution, Comrade (April, biblioasis). So stay tuned for that.

His interview with Henighan, from early last month, can be found here:

stevenwbeattie.com/2008/04/28/tsr-author-interview-stephen-henighan

Biblioasis in British Columbia

For those west-coast Biblioasis-o-philes, Stephen Henighan will be reading in Vancouver and Victoria this week. Henighan will be reading from his latest critical book, A Report on the Afterlife of Culture on Thursday, June 5th at Pulp Fiction (2422 Main Street in Vancouver at 6:30pm). This event is co-sponsored by Geist magazine, with Stephen Osborne acting as host. Stephen will then be crossing over to Victoria for an event at the Black Stilt Coffee House on Friday evening, starting at 7 pm. (1633 Hillside Avenue #103 in Victoria) So, if you like thought provoking cultural and literary criticism, please come on out and get your dander up.

On Sunday, Biblioasis authors Lorna Jackson and Patricia Young will be launching their spring titles in Victoria at 7pm at the Fernwood Inn. (1302 Gladstone Avenue). Patricia will be launching Here Comes the Moonbathers, her first collection of poetry in nearly a decade. Lorna will be launching her collection of linked fictions Flirt: The Interviews. Also launching this evening, fellow Victorians Bill Gaston (The Order of Good Cheer (Anansi)), Dede Crane (The Cult of Quick Repair (Coteau)), and Steve Galloway (The Cellist of Sarajevo (Knopf)). Quite a literary line up, so please come out if you are in the area this Sunday.

Getting It Write

There was an article last week in the Newfoundland Independent about Kathleen Winter I've been meaning to post to for more than a week. It can be found here:

www.theindependent.ca/article.asp?id=1245

Kathleen was rather quietly shortlisted for another east coast prize, the Newfoundland-Labrador Book Award, won last week by Bernice Morgan. The judges had this to say of Kathleen's collection, boYs:

Kathleen Winters' BoYs is a debut collection of short fiction that thrives on its own unconventionality. Using whatever methods she can to defeat expectations (an elastic time-sense, odd details that constantly loom into the frame, interior monologues constructed out of the loose ends of dangling, half-spoken feelings) Winters rewards readers with deeply felt tales—funny, startling, often dark—about the relationships between men and women. Both spare and speeded-up, these stories have the energetic subtlety, kinetic quickness and emotional honesty of an original voice.

If you haven't yet picked up a copy of Kathleen's collection, let me urge you once more to do so. It's a splendid book, and her voice, as the judges' commented, is original. If you're a writer intending to submit to this year's Metcalf-Rooke Award -- which we'll be officially announcing the start of in the next few days -- it wouldn't be a bad idea to pick up one of the books by a previous winner: Kathleen's boYs, or Patricia Young's Airstream. It'll give you a sense of where the bar is at.

Book Launch 2.0

Russell Smith sent this to me this morning, and it was so funny, so painful, so damning, so ... well, I thought I should share it with you.


www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxschLOAr-s

Report on the Afterlife Review

Michael Bryson tackles -- with both arms and full body weight -- Stephen Henighan's new tome, A Report on the Afterlife of Culture. The review can be found here:

www.danforthreview.com/reviews/nonfiction/henighan.htm

London may not be calling, but Guelph, Toronto, Vancouver, and Victoria, for starters, certainly are. Henighan will be launching Afterlife in Guelph at the Bookshelf on Tuesday, May 20th at 7 pm, as part of a Bookshelf Birthday Bash, alongside Pasha Malla, Claudia Dey, and Maggie Helwig. He'll be then heading off to Toronto to read with Charles Foran (Join the Revolution, Comrade) at Nicholas Hoare at 6pm as part of the great Biblioasis muckraking revival. We're going to exchange the usual Hoare blue hairs for the baklava wearing revolutionaries who seem to come out of the Toronto woodwork whenever there's free wine to be had (to be served, in the proper spirit, in paper cups). Henighan will next be in Vancouver in early June (TBA), and Victoria June 6th at the Black Stilt Cafe.

Bryson's review has filled my head with 1980s alt-rock anthems. Hopefully the next cup of coffee will wash them away. But until then I'll counter the Clash's London Calling with R.E.M.'s It's the End of The World As We Know It (and I feel fine.)

{Yes: I know: another instance of the triumph of the global over the local. Sigh.}

Toronto Reading for Foran and Henighan

Nicholas Hoare and Biblioasis are pleased to present:

an evening with

Charles Foran and Stephen Henighan

Join us at the Nicholas Hoare bookstore for food, drink, and a remorseless assault on the literary status quo. Novelists, travel writers, critics, Governor General Award nominees, and disputatious freethinkers, Foran and Henighan will read from their highly anticipated essay collections, Join the Revolution, Comrade and A Report on the Afterlife of Culture.

Readings will be followed by a Q&A and a book signing.

Where: Nicholas Hoare, 45 Front Street East

When: May 21^st, from 6 pm until after 8 pm.

Kindly RSVP: 416.777.2665

Another glowing review of boYs ...

... is due out this week in The Current, St. John's cultural paper, though it can be found in toto early here:

chadpelley.wordpress.com/2008/04/10/why-she-had-my-vote-for-the-winterset-award-a-review-of-kathleen-winters-boys/

An excerpt:

This book defies a nutshell summary. There is no genre that could encase this collection of short stories. It is too fresh, too new, too unique, and in the best way possible. This book is alive! Every sentence pops like firecrackers ... It is a book you read for it’s ultra-modern, punchy, lucid diction. ... Kathleen can portray the normalcy of things with a rare and gifted simplicity. As I read the pages I saw images, not words. It is one of few books I’ve read that appeals to all of the senses.

Oh yes: I should also include this one last tidbit. After all, it's not every day the publishing house gets kudos in a review!

Lastly, hats off to her publisher, Biblioasis, for taking a shot on this atypical collection of short stories, and I am glad to see it is working out for them! Biblioasis might be proof that the book industry is not so rigid after all.

The book industry rigid? Bah!!! And I thought we were all shining examples of dynamism!

Adam Getty, Al Moritz, Shane Neilson

Over the last few weeks a few books have made their way across the transom here at chez Biblioasis. Each is by a writer with press associations: two by poets we published as part of our chapbook series, and the third by a poet we expect to publish a first full trade collection by in the next couple of seasons.

The first is a new collection by Shane Neilson titled Exterminate My Heart. Another beautiful, beautiful Frog Hollow Press Production, wonderfully illustrated with wood engravings by George Walker. It's a lovingly produced volume of love poems to Neilson's wife, daughter and mother. But like all else by Neilson, this collection of love poems is not typical, neither sweet or saccharine. They are tensely dark and open and howling and beautiful and loving and generous and read true. Very powerful. What I have is number 15 of 25 cased copies, so there are not many left, though there's a trade edition I've not yet seen to boot. If you would like to take a further gander, please go here:

www.froghollowpress.com/catalogue.html#exterminate

The next two books arrived late this past week, and I haven't had enough time to do more than flip through them. But Adam Getty's 2nd trade collection, Repose, and A. F. Moritz's The Sentinel, both contain poems we published in chapbook form a couple of years ago. Adam is one of my favourite poets and procrastinators, and I look very much forward to getting into this collection. (And in some future issue of CNQ, I'll be publishing his essay Poetry in the Slaughterhouse: I've only had the chance to read half of it, and the threat of Windsor thugs with aluminum bats has not yet frightened the rest of it out of him, but what I've seen is proof enough to know Getty can write well about anything, in any form, whenever he puts his mind to it.) I've read many of the poems already in the Moritz collection -- he is also a Frog Hollow alumnus -- but look forward to revisiting them soon here, alongside other work.

Alas, neither of these two books are for keeps: I'll need to send them off packing to a reviewer for CNQ. But I'll soon be buying both, and along with Neilson's above, would recommend that those poetry lovers out there add them to their lists as well.

Nuptials

Two Biblioasis authors -- Zachariah Wells and Rachel Lebowitz -- are tying the knot this weekend. Congratulations! For any of you out there who are attending, please take plenty of photographs. I hear Z cuts a mean figure on the dance floor. There are those, of course, that think he cuts a mean figure most of the time, though anyone who knows him can vouch that this is simply not so: he's as generous a soul as I've met in this rather small world of Canned Letters, a poet and critic who longs to say yes, and needs it to mean something. He'll be both saying and meaning it this weekend, and I'm thrilled for him, for both of them. I haven't had the chance to get to know Rachael yet half-as-well, but I look forward to the time when I will.

So: best wishes to both of you! You'll both be in my thoughts this weekend. i'll look forward to listening to the audio record over at CLM later next week.

Words at Large

CBC has released Shelagh Roger's interview with Russell Smith about his pornographic novel Diana: A Diary in the Second Person as a Words at Large Podcast. It can be found here:

www.cbc.ca/wordsatlarge/

The Fun Begins: A Report on the Afterlife of Culture

Over the last few weeks, some advance excerpts and reviews of Stephen Henighan's new collection of essays, A Report on the Afterlife of Culture, have begun to appear in various journals and blogs across the land. Due back from the printer in 2 -2 1/2 weeks, it's probably safe to say that it is one of the most anticipated new collections of literary and cultural criticism of the year. Here's a quick run-down of what has been going on, and what will be coming up.

In the April Quill and Quire, Henighan is interviewed on the subject of translation publishing in Canada in an excellent article by Shaun Smith. I don't believe this is available online, but it is certainly alone worth the cover price.

In the same issue, there is an excerpt from Report on the importance of literary translation. This has led to the following article on the UTNE Reader's website:

www.utne.com/2008-04-07/GreatWriting/If-Canadians-Think-So-It-Must-Be-True.aspx

In the forthcoming issue of Quill & Quire (May), there is an advance review of Report by Steven Beattie. It is now online, and can be found here:

www.quillandquire.com/reviews/review.cfm?review_id=6063

An excerpt: Fortunately, Canadian criticism can boast Stephen Henighan, a persistent thorn in the side of the Canadian literary establishment, but also a fearless and perceptive observer of our literary culture. Henighan’s criticism is not of the Dale Peck school of unthinking snark. He prefers a careful reading of texts and authors, and a deliberate analysis of how cultural forces in our society shape the kind of literature we produce. ... for his willingness to say the unsayable, and his enthusiastic piercing of the balloons of Canadian literary pretension, Henighan’s new volume is a welcome addition to the annals of CanLit criticism. ­"

(Beattie isn't completely positive about the collection, but I don't feel the need to excerpt that here. Follow the link for the full review.)

Beattie continues the discussion on his own blog, found here:

stevenwbeattie.com/2008/04/07/for-those-who-want-to-get-their-dander-up/

Looking forward, there is an excerpt in the upcoming translation issue of CNQ, which should hit shelves next month; there will be an interview with Stephen in Books in Canada in the April or May issue; an excerpt will also be appearing in Subterrain at the end of April. And I am certain that this is just the tip of the proverbial.

It's going to be interesting to see how this book gets read. There are those who will want it to be When Words Deny the World Part II, and though it certainly is related, and expands on many of the themes in that first collection, it was never intended as a mere follow up. I'm interested in how expectations will shape how this gets read, what gets focussed on, and what seems to get people's dander up most.

I've been using it these last few months to discover writers I may not have picked up otherwise: Roberto Bolano, Maria Vargas Llosa, Casares, Houllebecq. Henighan is a wonderful guide through world literature, and in the end, despite the attention that may get paid to his criticism of Canadian literary culture, this may be one of the most important things Report contributes: furthering our awareness of literature in other languages. Is there another Canadian critic out there who would even try to do so?

It's also interesting that those out there who would like to dismiss Henighan try to paint him as some small town and equally small-minded hick, when he is perhaps -- along with Manguel, and perhaps one or two others -- one of our most worldly, aware and cosmopolitan writers. How many other Canadian writers and critics out there can read and write in four or five languages, and are as well-versed in world literatures as Henighan? I can't think of many. We've seen otherwise intelligent writers sent into spasms of incoherent and reactionary rage over the past 12 months, with both rickets and racism invoked. I'm not quite sure how Henighan's criticism has led to an increased number of cases of rickets (!), but I can't think of anyone who is less deserving of being labeled racist. I have great respect for Michael Redhill, but he should have known better.

Anyway, the next few months should be fun. We'll be planning events in Guelph, Toronto, Ottawa, Windsor, and with Geist's help, Vancouver. We'll keep you posted.

Charles Foran & Rebecca Rosenblum

For those of you in Toronto tonight -- where I should be, if I was not so tired of travelling -- there's two Biblioasis-related events going on. First, Charles Foran will be reading with Pico Iyer at Harbourfront from Join the Revolution, Comrade, at 7:30 pm. Indigo's order came in a little slowly on this title, though it's through now, and copies of Charlie's collection of essays should be everywhere across the country no later than the middle of next week. It's already at any independent bookshop worthy of the name.

Also going on tonight, Rebecca Rosenblum will be at the Writer's Trust Gala in anticiaption of the Journey Prize announcement. Rebecca is one of the three finalists for the 10,000 dollar prize, for her story Chilly Girl. Rebecca also, you might recall, won last year's Metcalf-Rooke Award. Her new collection, Once, in its final, edited state, has finally crossed the transom at chez Biblioasis, and I'll be looking forward to getting right into it. It's one of the books were most excited about this fall. Congratulations to Rebecca, and let's all keep our unused appendages crossed for her this evening in the hope of a Rosenblum victory!