Fall Events: An Incomplete List

Despite the fact that by the time tomorrow ends this will likely be a 100 hour week (another sure sign fall is now here), I've not found time to update Thirsty much this week. There's been event promo and practicalities, editing and digging up photos for our history of the Windsor Spitfires (which led me to the basement of a NHL Hall of Fame defencemen with seven Stanley Cups (including 4 with Detroit and one with the Leafs the last time they won: but more on that later)), Eden Mills prep, grant-related prep, and a range of odds and sods to keep us busy.


But the next week is quite busy with events and launches, and though I've been posting these on the new website (sadly already out of date, and will be until next week), Facebook, Twitter and all the other online water cooler spaces, I've neglected to do so here. Until now.

Sunday, September 19th. Alexander MacLeod, Mauricio Segura and Leon Rooke read at Eden Mills

Sunday, September 19th: K.D. Miller reads at the Words ALive Festival

Monday, September 20th: A.J. Somerset & Alexander MacLeod read at the London Public Library 7 pm

Monday September 20th: Rebecca Rosenblum reads at Vagabond Trust in Toronto

Tuesday, September 21st: Alexander MacLeod reads at TINARS/Gladstone Hotel. Music by the MacLeod clan, in support of Lewis MacLeod's new album, For Sale As Is. $5 cover

Tuesday, Septemeber 21st: A.J. Somerset reads as part of Winnipeg's Thin Air Festival

Tuesday, September 21st: Marius Koceijowski reads at Drawn and Quartely in Montreal as part of the Maisonneuve 37th issue launch. Also reading Kathleen Winter.
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Wednesday, September 22nd: Alexander MacLEod reads at Trent University, Peterborough. Music by Lewis MacLeod and siblings

Thursday September 23rd: Marius Kociejowski will be reading at the Dora Keogh in Toronto 6:30-8:30

Friday, September 24th: Alexander MacLeod, Marius Kociejowksi, Norm Sibum and A.J. Somerset will be reading at Phog Lounge in Windsor. Music by the MacLeods.

Sunday, September 26th: Alexander MacLeod will be reading at the Inverness Centre for the Arts in Inverness Cape Breton, 2-4 pm.

Tuesday, September 28th: A.J. Somerset will be interviewed by Russell Smith as part of Tinars at the Garrison in Toronto.

If you can make it to any of these events, please come on down. And apologies if I've left something out: going by memory here, in a Guelph hotel room, as I wait to prep for Eden Mills. I'll post October events later in the week.

Prize Juries & Street Cred

In this morning's Toronto Star, this short note to the GG & Giller Juries:

The Giller and G-G juries could do worse to establish some street cred than nominating a decidedly edgy small press debut by a photographer, ex-soldier and outdoor mag writer named A. J. Somerset. His Combat Camera (Biblioasis, 255 pages, $19.95) is a mean city tale of a burnt-out war photographer who tries to rescue a damsel, and maybe himself too, from the cheap porno world he’s working in.

Here's hoping both juries are listening.

Bookmarked: Rogues' Wedding

On September 2nd, Terry Griggs's Rogues' Wedding was honoured in Owen Sound with a plaque as part of Project Bookmark, the second title in the series so-honoured, following only Michael Ondaatje's In The Skin of a Lion. The series "highlights and celebrates the stories that are embedded in our everyday geography."

For those of you who have not read Rogues' Wedding, this should serve as notice that you should do so. It tells the story of Griffth Smolders, who bolts on his wedding night after interpreting a rather odd natural occurence as an evil omen, not even waiting to consummate his marriage. When his wife Avice discovers this, she decides to pursue him to the ends of the earth, if she needs to, to have her revenge. Both embark on a flight of accidental discovery and cataclysmic misadventure -- including making what may be one of the first pornographic films.

Griggs weaves the folk stories and tales and landscapes of northern Ontario into a hilariously ribald tale, and it may be at least partly for this reason that Project Bookmark has honoured her creation. It's well deserved. We've made it clear here our admiration for Terry's writing over the years, and we're thrilled that she's getting a bit more wider recognition. Here's to hoping this leads more people to discover not only Wedding, but her other work for both adults and young adults alike. Like, perhaps, this and this and this.

www.biblioasis.com

It is what is called a soft launch. Meaning, that despite the fact that we are 10 months behind on this thing, it ain't yet close to being finished. But we still have a brand new website, and I must say, it looks smashing. Plenty of new features, including updated digital catalogue, forthcoming and featured books, links through Facebook and other social media, far better Event Calendar, excerpts (though not all of these are up yet), a new and improved shopping cart, e-books (though not all of these are up either), multiple book views, to recreate, as much as we are able, the tactile aspect of book shopping, and much else. Eventually you'll have an indie bookstore locator, audio, video and other media components, a fully incorporated redesigned blog, and much, much else. And when we learn to update it, hopefully next week, we'll keep it fresh, your one stop shop for all things Biblioasis-related.

So stop by, check it out. But go easy on us. We're not fully there yet, but we're getting there.

Thanks to Aleks, Sean and company at Soluble Design for the work, and finally, finally, getting this thing up and running.

What Boys Like on Relit Shortlist

I'm late on this I know, late on most things it seems these days, but last week it was announced that Amy Jones's What Boys Like made the Relit Shortlist for short fiction. I'm very happy to see it get this, both because it deserves it, and because it's the first time Biblioasis has made a Relit shortlist in a few years. Fingers crossed it will be the first title to win a Relit. She's facing good competition, including interesting collections from Stuart Ross and Ryan Turner. The rest of the Relit shortlist can be found here.

Living Colours

Over at the Rover, Neil MacRae reviews Mauricio Segura's Black Alley. Interestingly, this is the first review by a Montreal english language journal/newspaper of this novel, which is about racial tensions and the immigrant experience in Montreal. What is it with that? The book certainly gained plenty attention among francophones when it was published in 1998. Does the anglophone media just not give a shit? Anyone have an answer out there?

MacRae writes, in part:

Mauricio Segura is an established journalist specializing in issues of multiculturalism. Black Alley is his first novel, originally published in French in 1998, and it is primarily an examination of those same issues. But while its thematic concentration and narrative focus are sharp and specific, its scope is much broader. It is certainly a valuable glimpse into the life and nature of conglomerate immigrant neighbourhoods, racial animosities and street violence. It is also a universal coming-of-age story. Marcelo becomes Flaco, leader of the Latino Power gang, and Cléo grows into CB, head of the Haitian gang The Bad Boys, and the tragedy of violent racial conflict between two childhood friends is what the novel is about. But it is as much a story of the need to belong, and the choice that every maturing human is given and must make: will we define ourselves by what is inside us, or who stands beside us? By what we are not, or by what we are?

For the rest of the review, please go here.

Maisonneuve / Pigeon Wars of Damascus Joint Launch

On September 21st in Montreal Maisonneuve and Biblioasis will be joining forces at Drawn & Quarterly for a an evening of readings, music, food and wine. The event will serve as the Montreal launch of Marius Kociejowski's The Pigeon Wars of Damascus, the kick-off to what we at Biblioasis hope will be a regular series of travel literature. The follow up to his Street Philosopher and the Holy Fool (which Adam Thorpe, writing in the TLS, said was destined to be a classic), Pigeon Wars is, for my money, a far better book. It is equally beautiful, compelling, eccentric and true, but it is also immediately important, a darker book grappling in part with the changing nature of Damascene - and Middle Eastern -- society in a post-9-11 environment. It is a s urgent as anything I've read on the subject, and I hope readers of Thirsty will go and pick it up when it is released later this month.
The event serves as well as the launch of Maisonneuve's Fall issue, a magazine which has quickly become one of my favourites. Their last issue on The Music We Hate was brilliant, and contained an essay on villainy by Rebecca Rosenblum. This new issue also has Biblioasis author connections: there's an excerpt from A. J. Somerset's Combat Camera, an early review of Alexander Macleod's Light Lifting, and Kathleen Winter, the author of boYs (Biblioasis) and most recently Annabel (Anansi), will be reading that evening. It promises to be an excellent night, complete with music by James Irwin.

If you find yourself in Montreal that night, please head on down to Drawn & Quarterly. And pass the word: it promises to be a heck of an evening.

Salty Ink reviews Light Lifting

The first review of Alexander MacLeod's Light Lifting is in, from Chad Pelley's Salty Ink.

The apple may have fallen from the tree, but Alistair and Alexander are two very different apples, writing-wise. Green and red, or Granny Smith and Gala: each with their own distinctive qualities. Alistair seems known as a masterful storyteller, and the voice of dwindling cultures, whereas Alexander feels like part of the “new wave” of “the new writing” out of Atlantic Canada. His writing is clean, confident, and distinctive. His stories — urban and universal — are ambitiously constructed and all the more solid for it. In fact, Light Lifting, features a story, “Miracle Mile,” that was a Journey Prize finalist — the Journey Prize being the country’s most esteemed award for short fiction. And it’s not even the best story in the collection.

...

Calling B iblioasis "the metal detector for short fiction gold" -- Rosenblum, Jones, Winter (not to mention Young & Young, Rooke, Flood and others) anyone -- he finishes by saying that "Light Lifting is an assured and promising debut, and one of the region’s finest collections of shorts in 2010. It puts a new MacLeod on the scene, and the way I see it, from here on in, we’ll have to say, “Which one?” when someone refers to MacLeod’s writing."

For the whole review please go here. And we're expecting copies of Light Lifting to arrive any day, and should see bookshelves near you by the 20th of the month.

Introducing Jonathon Franzen

For the Real Reader (Not the E-Reader)

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.

The full Q&Q: Combat Camera

The full review of Combat Camera in September's Quill & Quire is up at the website and can be found here.

Even a toddler can do it....

Zach found this and posted last week, but if you have not seen it it is worth a look.

Lessons from Sarajevo

In Saturday's Globe, Goran Simic, who's new collection of poetry Sunrise in the Eyes of the Snowman we will be releasing in late October, muses on the plight of the Tamil refugees.

Back in my hometown to wash the family gravestone and meet friends, mostly writers, who never left Sarajevo, I heard a joke from the time of the siege, when the famous tunnel under the airport runway was the only way to escape the embattled city.

In the middle of the tunnel, two brothers heading in opposite directions bump into one another. They immediately begin shouting the same words: “Where the hell are you going? There is nothing there.”

I still feel the weight of that question mark.

As I watch the news about the Tamil refugee claimants touching shore in Vancouver, I think of the Siege of Sarajevo, which lasted longer than the Siege of Leningrad. Though every survivor has the right to tell his own stories, I published some on behalf of the 10,000 who were killed – by the daily barrages of sniper bullets, by grenades, by hunger. Even I was killed once – when the newspaper published my name on the list of victims of the 1992 bombing of the city.

For the rest of the article, please go here.

A Peripatetic Summer

It hasn't been a great summer of sailing this year: too much Biblioasis and CNQ work to catch up on, travel soccer, other things. Though we have managed to get out a few times. And, if the haze clears this morning, and you find yourself out on Lake St. Clair, you may find the Peripatetic out as well.
And after a couple of hours sailing, you might find us down at the boat wash for a quick swim.


See you out there.

The Artwork of Mary Harman

Mary Harman's artwork has graced both CNQ and Biblioasis covers, and will again, I expect, in the near future. I came across this video of a recent exhibition, and thought it would be of interest to Thirsty readers.

Quill & Quire reviews Combat Camera

Our first official Fall 10 review is out, with Claire Cameron reviewing A. J. Somerset's Combat Camera in the Quill & Quire. Cameron says, in part:

A book about a wounded alcoholic and a battered porn star might sound like a grim read, and in some ways that is just what Combat Camera is. Full of violence, both domestic and foreign, the story is gritty and raw. But somerset draws connections between disparate places to uncover universal truthsabout our reactions to violence ... Ultimately Zane is a rambling, tragic and surprisingly funny figure, and his tragic circumstances take on a strange kind of beauty. What this novel successfully shows is the way in which art can exist in the midst of mayhem.

Re-Lit Longlists

Three Biblioasis titles made the just-announce Re-Lit longlists. Congrats to Amy Jones, in the short fiction category, for What Boys Like, Terry Griggs, in the novel category for Thought You

Were Dead, and Zach Wells in the poetry category for Track & Trace. Wayne Clifford also made it for his Exile Papers, instead of Jane Again, so congrats to Wayne as well.

Fall 2010: A.J. Somerset's Combat Camera

**

Once a celebrated war photographer, Lucas Zane is burnt out after covering twenty years of war. Drunk, hallucinatory, all ambition fled, Zane earns the rent working for an impresario of shoestring pornographic movies. Here he encounters Melissa and hatches a plan that might save her, his career, and quite possibly himself.

The power of Combat Camera lies in its voice, a voice that is restless, ceaseless, meandering, tragic, sometimes very funny, a mind and a voice that maintain an almost hypnotic grip on the reader.

"Taut and terrific: Combat Camera is a lean, mean piece of story-telling machinery."
--Ray Robertson, author of David

**Yes: it will be Winner of the Metcalf-Rooke Award.

Forever Young

Another good review of Terence Young's latest collection of short fiction, The End of the Ice Age, this one from Montreal's The Rover.

Contrary to the codes of cliché, there’s more to men at midlife than Ferraris and pharmaceuticals. In his fifth book, the excellent short story collection The End of the Ice Age, Terence Young trains his sharp eye on the tricky state of being between young and old. His meaningful stories catalogue an array of possible experiences that reach beyond the platitudes so heavily relied upon by lazy advertisers, and reveal more nuance than can be expressed in 30 seconds.

Not every man has a so-called crisis, not every man acts out upon reaching a certain age. Some don’t even notice they are aging at all. In the book’s title story, an unnamed he is informed by his lover, an unnamed she, “Your problem is you still don’t think you’re old.” Indeed, he observes, he does feel like he’s younger than everyone else, even those who are officially younger, but he’s perplexed as to why he should consider it a problem. With this character who feels immune to getting older, as if he alone is capable of resisting the march of time, Young alludes to our tendency to feel self-important. He shows, however, that the clock is undeniably ticking, unstoppable, literally and figuratively. The lover is too absorbed in her compulsive reading to ever check the time. Instead, she repeatedly asks Mr. Ageless to check for her. Even if he doesn’t get the message, the reader does. And with a deft switch to the present tense for the last sentence of the story, Young reminds us time stops for no one, not even his own characters.

For the rest of the review please go here.

Amy Jones Interviewed

Over at Salty Ink, Danila Botha interviews Amy Jones.

I think that most fiction is really just piecing together little bits of reality in different ways.”

Amy Jones (http://listophelia.blogspot.com/) is a fantastic writer. Her first book, a collection of stories called What Boys Like is the most exciting book I’ve read in ages- a diverse group of utterly convincing, uniquely voiced characters whose pain, restlessness and triumphs are entirely relatable, and whose voices are fresh and vital. Both the dialogue and internal monologues are spot on.

I had the chance to chat with her recently about her writing process, inspirations and what she loves about writing short stories.

1) You write from so many perspectives so well- from the perspective of a young kid living with her teenage mom in How To Survive Summer in the City (I loved that story, it cracked my heart open) In A good girl, from the perspective of a waiter, Alex, who is in love with a much younger woman, in Miriam Beachwalker, a teen trying to figure out who she is and what she wants from life, and a girl who realizes how unrequited her love is in All We Will Ever Be. Do you find it difficult to get into different character’s minds? It reads so seamlessly. What is the process like for you? How do you get the characters to seem so relatable, so real and so human?

Well, for one thing, I spend a lot of time people watching. I’m kind of obsessed with what’s going on in other people’s lives, and I’m always wondering “What’s that single mother at the grocery store thinking?” Or “What’s that guy with the super young girlfriend thinking?” My stories are all attempts to answer those questions.

For the rest of Danila's interview please go here.

6th Annual Metcalf-Rooke Award

The End of the Ice Age

It has taken far too long for this collection to get its first review. Disappointing, because it is such a strong collection. Mark Anthony Jarman has said, of Young's first collection, that Young "assembles the silhouettes of a loopy suburb nation. He is our seeing-eye dog." He could just as easily have said the same of this one. Yet, for my money -- and I suppose it was that -- this is a far stronger collection than Rhymes with Useless. Taut, mature, merciless -- yes, Terence, merciless -- memorable. You should pick up a copy today.

So at least the first review of the book is bordering on a rave. From the Victoria Times Colonist:

The End of the Ice Age is a collection for adults, by which I mean that these characters have usually lived long enough to know -- though not to behave -- better. ... Call the stories summer reading for those who haven't forgotten the winter. ... In this world, speech is a dangerous substance, both vulnerable and volatile. Dialogue usually signals conflict... Flirting is sparring. ... The best stores in Ice Age maintain Young's mordant gaze, but their humour becomes something more profound than self-laceration. It is a way to point to, if not always to reach, the possibility of intimacy. ... In any case, the short stories in The End of the Ice Age are the perfect length. In 10 to 15 pages, there is space for everything a story needs to do, if you know how to do it as Terence Young does.

Open Book interviews K.D.Miller

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.

for the rest, please go here.

In the Trackless Wastes Beyond Emeryville...

We are getting set to launch the new issue of CNQ: Canadian Notes & Queries, newly arrived from the printer. You might notice something new about it, a certain new spring in its step. And for subscribers, a certain something between its pages, printed specially for you.


It also may well be one of the best issues we've put together. The Short Story issue, appearing concurrently with the biennial convention of the Society for the Study of the Short Story in English, currently going on in Toronto. This issue contains articles by Clark Blaise, Mark Anthony Jarman and Alex Good on the short story; Douglas Glover, Robert Thacker and Nathan whitlock on Alice Munro; Caroline Adderson on Mavis Gallant; Michael Darling on Audrey Thomas; a new story by Rebecca Rosenblum; poetry by Lisa Besner; Ryan Bigge on the 2009 Gillers; the first in our new CNQ Abroad feature, with Murray Wilson's visit to Robert Graves; a cartoon and fresh design by Seth; the usual gathering of excellent reviews ... and much more.

On newsstands and in mailboxes in the next week.

Combat-Ready

Over at Banjaxed A. J. Somerset sends a not too subtle note: don't fuck with my commas. And other stuff. And I haven't even started copyediting yet. That's later this week.

Dear [Redacted],

Why in the name of blue thundering Jesus Smurf do you keep moving my commas? Is there any reason? Can you not perceive that those sentences have a rhythm, a rhythm that you, with your tin ear and newspaperman’s sensibility, are fucking up in detail? I swear, if you move one more comma without just cause, I will cut it out, photocopy it to a million times its size, fly to British Columbia, and shove it up your ass, paper cuts be damned. Kindly stop moving my commas around. I put them there for a reason.

There's also some A-Team dialogue I'm not expecting to see in the movie:

Mr. T: I pity da foo who moves my comma!

Ed: “I pity the fool.”

Mr. T: Foo! Don’t you be messin’ with my aesthetic!

[Sound of breaking limbs.]

Ed: I need anaesthetic.

Mr. T: Foo! You got no aesthetic.

I've been warned.

For the rest, please go here.

Brown Dwarf in the National Post

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.

Read more: http://arts.nationalpost.com/2010/06/12/when-a-novel-about-a-perfect-murder-is-just-a-bit-too-perfect/#ixzz0qeYaQgAP

Annabel

In the mail today a treat: a review copy of Kathleen Winter's Annabel. I'm quite excited to dig into this one. A novel by the Metcalf-Rooke Award winning author of boYs, there's been a lot of fabulous pre-publication buzz about this one. Published by Anansi in Canada, it is also set for British publication by Jonathan Cape, and Grove in the States. Though I hate the thought of any of our writers leaving, I'm quite proud of Kathleen's success, and the two of us here at the Bibliomanse this afternoon wish her all the best.

Track & Trace

Over at PMT, Kerry Clare offers up some thoughts on Zach Wells's Track & Trace:

The one problem with having defined tastes and a bookish reputation is that nobody ever gives you books (and when they do, you usually don’t like them). So it was a wonderful surprise to receive Zachariah Wells’ collection Track & Trace as a gift from my mother, since it’s a book I’ve had my eye on for quite awhile. Just to receive such a thing was a kind of gift, but then the book itself was also an incredible package– small and beautiful, its cover embossed with footprints, with the “decorations” by Seth (which are plain and wonderful landscapes, horizons as broad as Wells’ poetry).

Reading this collection was a series of such unpackings. The poems themselves in general are about man’s relationship to the natural environment, the marks he leaves upon it, but each poem is also very distinct in how it relates to these ideas. Within each poem, the words fit together in surprising ways, with subtle rhyme, rhythm and alliteration. Within each word, the syllables, the vowels and consonants on and around my tongue. I read these poems aloud, lying on the carpet while my daughter threw blocks in the mornings, and the poems were a pleasure to put my mouth around, the starts and stops and open spaces.

For the rest, please go here.

CBC's Top 10 Music Books ...

includes our own Moody Food, by Ray Robertson, coming in at number 7 (& number 4 in terms of fiction).

For the entire list please go here.

Salty Ink's Book of the Month

June's Book of the Month over at Chad Pelley's Salty Ink is Amy Jones's Fall 2009 release What Boys Like, a collection Pelley puts in his top 10 short story collections.

Jones’s stories are as vibrant as the book’s cover. This is lively writing, punchy diction, and critically acclaimed dialogue, with closing lines that are occasionally a whole lot more for the deeper reader. They are character-forward stories featuring memorable characters — like the longing, list-writing Miriam Beachwalker — and if the title gives the illusion it is a sexually charged book: at times it is. The writing in stories “An Army of One” and “All We Will Ever be” censor nothing about the line between lust and longing, and properly captures the potency of unrequited love or, forgive me here, “the power of love.” The writing is tender in places and explicit in others, so that the vivacity of memories, passion, emotion, and desire punch through more than effectively.

Also commendable: she tells her stories in a way that is all Amy Jones. She tells them in a way that alternates between a wind-stealing punch in the guts and a playful punch on the shoulder. These stories, at times, fierce, powerful, and sexually charged, come from a tender, honest, and at-times vulnerable place, not an obnoxious, boisterous one. It is a deeply human collection, as vibrant as the front cover image.

Read the rest of this enthusiastic review here.

In other Amy Jones news, we're pleased to announce that we've sold a film option to the title story A Good Girl to Opolo Pictures. Here's hoping we see a feature film of A Good Girl (at least in cinematic terms) soon!