The Miscellaneous News/Reviews Edition:

It's hard to update the blog regularly when it is so beautiful out, so we've been a bit lax in that department around here. So here's at least a partial list of the new and noteworthy around these parts over the last week:

1) Over at Vesitge.org, August reviews two Biblioasis short fiction collections. Of Amy Jones's What Boys Like he writes:

Can I tell you what surprised me most about this book? Because months and months after I read it (I know, I'm sorry, I'm late with everything these days) the shock is still with me. What Boys Like isn't funny. Well, okay, it isn't primarily funny. There are bits in these stories that are meant to be funny, especially little bits of dialogue, which Jones has a wicked gift for, and those bits are funny, but these stories show a considerable range in terms of tone and emotional direction, just as you'd expect from a Metcalf-Rooke award winning collection. The reason this surprised me is because my primary experience of Amy's writing is her blog, which is basically the funniest thing ever. I—honest to God—got the sense that she was first and foremost a humourist (and the one reading I went to, where I totally chickened out and went slack-jawed when it came time to meet her, she was clever and charismatic in a way that was mostly humourous), rather than a writer in the Munrovian tradition, and so that was what I was expecting.

Which is not to say that I was disappointed by What Boys Like, because I was not at all. In point of fact, "A Good Girl," the story that opens the collection, hit home for me in quite a serious way. Leah, the titular "good girl," is exactly the sort of woman I tend to fall in love with, and seeing how horrible she was to Alex, and how Alex, who didn't really deserve to be treated so badly, also didn't really deserve to be treated a whole hell of a lot better, sent me into a fair bit of personal turmoil. (read the rest here.)

Of MacLeod's Light Lifting August writes:

The initial reviews of Light Lifting were excellent, but largely lacked the critical language that entices me to pick up a book. I don't know if it's a shortcoming on my part, or the way the literary conversation goes here in Canada, but I got the distinct impression that MacLeod's stories were just very well executed variations of standard Munrovian realism. Because the book is published by Biblioasis I felt sure I'd agree that it was an excellent book (I have yet to be disappointed by anything of theirs), so I dutifully bought it, thinking I'd get around to it in the fall when that sort of thing seems to appeal to me a little more than usual. When Bronwyn and others started raving about it on Twitter in way that felt different, exciting, I knew it couldn't wait and I wanted to be involved in the conversation, so I moved it to the top of the stack. That was months ago, but I've been a little blocked this year, so my review is coming very late.

Light Lifting is an astonishing achievement. I almost don't even know where to begin. There's certainly an element of Munrovian realism, but it's foundational, built so deep into the structure of the book that at first you're lulled into thinking that's all that's there; you get inside these stories and walk around in them for a while, and no matter what strange and wonderful things you see, there's no danger of them collapsing on you, and you know that there's no danger—of that kind, anyway—because that realism is there with you too. Most of these stories have a darker element to them, though. An edge that you don't always see coming, and conclusions that could have gone shaggy dog in lesser hands. (Read the full review here.)

Speaking of MacLeod, his story The Number Three is being published today on Storville's iPad App. Alex writes, by way of introduction:

“The Number Three” is my last story. It’s not the last one I’ll ever write, I hope, but it is the story I most recently completed and it functions as the concluding piece for the collection. As a finished work, it’s long and kind of contemplative - like its protagonist. The story has to cover a lot of territory between its beginning and its end - but whenever I think about it, I only remember the sprinting and scrambling we had to do to get it done on time for publication, and the way we wrapped up the final edits on the very last day, just hours before we sent the book to the printers.

“The Number Three” is about an everyday, mass-produced consumer item: the Dodge Caravan, a minivan that Chrysler Canada assembles in Windsor, Ontario. I was interested in the way even inanimate objects must run their cycle - they are born, they live and they die - and I wanted to think about how our existence is often intimately interwoven with the existence of such objects. My main character gives his life to work on these vans, but they also work on him, and I tried to imagine how this one object - a vehicle specifically constructed to move families and hold all their junk - could actually become a part of a family and actively participate in both the arrogant victories and the grinding defeats we share only with those we care for most.

Don't know much about Storyville? Check it out here. I subscribe, and it is a wonderful way to keep up up on the latest short fiction.

Another review of Clark Blaise's Meagre Tarmac appeared in the Waterloo Record on the weekend. Alex Good writes, in part:

Readers familiar with Blaise’s work will find much of this introspective accounting to be familiar ground. But the handling is as sure as ever, the mark of a master craftsman, and the detail is contemporary and well observed throughout. Nobody dramatizes life as a continual process of stock-taking as Blaise does. Nobody has imagined that process in so many different contexts. His stories are inward journeys, endless and unticketed.

See his whole review here.

And for those of you in NY, Clark will be reading with Bharati Mukherjee tomorrow evening at McNally-Jackson at 7 pm.

The Devil's Engine, No. 6

Some of you may have despaired that the Devil's Engine had gone the way of the spring. It's a new season, you might say. It's time for idling! (Or slacking, even? Josh? Mark? Anyone?)

Yet "the devil finds as much mischief for idle hands in Emeryville as anywhere else," as L.M. Montgomery said (or would have, if she'd ever been to Emeryville). And here we are--as mischievous as ever--where the discussion of fiction continues!

In "Punctuation as Score," John Metcalf remarks:
"Punctuation both for the fiction and non-fiction writer is primarily punctuation for the eye; the eye translates the symbols into stops and emphases. Yet at the same time, the fiction writer must also write for the ear; he must contend with the problem of dialogue. For many writers of fiction there is a conflict between ear and eye; the conventional symbols do not translate fully all the nuances of the voices that speak on the page."
What difficulties do you encounter when punctuating dialogue? Do you share Metcalf's sense of conflict, and if so, what measures do you take to resolve it?

Rebecca Rosenblum
I have a hard time punctuating the hiccups in dialogue--the points where the speaker restarts the sentence 4 words in, or trails off briefly because she's looking at something, or is waiting for a response but then gets nervous and keeps talking. Because those things don't happen anywhere except dialogue, and they are technically ungrammatical, there's no formal rules about how to indicate them. I am wildly over-reliant on the em-dash (—). I think it's more or less generally accepted that the em-dash makes a more abrupt stop, while the ellipses (...)--the dash implies that the sentence would've gone on had something not stopped it (that something could be internal), while the ellipses seems to indicate a running out of steam or words or will to continue. Sometimes it's hard to tell which is happening in the scene; you have to know the characters really well and hear it their words in your head, and still it can be unclear. I've also seen writers treat these punctuation marks in other ways in fractured dialogue, which bends my mind a little bit. Because these rules aren't really codified, you can kind of do what you want with them, always with the caveat that it has to work for the reader.

Cathy Stonehouse
I write mostly for the ear. It’s all about sound and rhythm. So I struggle with this a lot. I use italics to suggest an alternate voice, sometimes inside a character. Sometimes another voice is woven in, as in my story “Freak Waves,” which combines a third-person narrative with statements of scientific fact. I try to avoid speech tags (he said/ she said) to create rhythm but without pushing this so far the reader gets confused. Sometimes I do push this too far. But I love dialogue. I love dialogue that makes no sense. I love the weird collisions between different registers and voices that occur constantly in life, and which make up our consciousness. The simultaneous development of dual timelines or narratives, the mental interruptions of signage, overheard conversation and triggered memory: all of these are different voices, and thus, in a way, forms of dialogue. I prefer not to comment on any of it too directly. On the down side though I usually have to reformat my dialogue (and fiction) a lot so it’s at least somewhat navigable—and have

Blaise & Mukherjee in New York June 29th

A Georgia Straight Profile & Review of Clark Blaise's The Meagre Tarmac

Charles Demers gives us one of the best combined profiles/reviews yet:

In the ’70s and ’80s, when readers were first getting to know the essays, memoirs, and, perhaps most importantly, the short fiction of Clark Blaise, the author’s idiosyncratic biography dovetailed with many of the political preoccupations of the time. Half Québécois, half Anglo-Canadian, and raised mostly in the United States, Blaise wrote stories offering insights for a North America fixated on economic continentalization and the future of Quebec. But from almost the very beginning, along with the cultures of his birth and upbringing, there was also the vivid presence of the culture he married into: India and its diaspora. Since 1963, Blaise has been married to Indo-American author Bharati Mukherjee, with whom he has two grown children.

“India was, initially at least, the great ‘other’ in my life,” Blaise told theGeorgia Straight by telephone from New York. “India is decidedly not anything that was part of my upbringing, or part of my experience, or part of my preparation. I really fell into it the way one should fall into it, you know—through love.”

Over the years, in the course of visits to the country, time spent living there, and immersion in family life, the “other” became an integral part of Blaise’s already hybridized identity.

“Indian standards of artistry, and Indian standards of humanity, and Indian standards of love, and of family, devotion, commitment, stand for me as the standard for how one should behave,” he explained.

In his wonderful new collection of interconnected short stories, The Meagre Tarmac(Biblioasis), Blaise introduces a rich cast of characters divided spiritually, physically, and economically between India and North America.

“I really didn’t feel I had to mould them much at all. They seemed to be precast, as actors waiting for their cue. They were just sort of standing around the wings.…It was almost a matter of just naming them, and then seeing who came out,” Blaise said with a laugh.

For the rest, please go here.

The Wall Street Journal reviews Mihail Sebastian's The Accident

In what was quite a weekend for Biblioasis reviews -- see below for the Star and Globe reviews of Blaise's Meagre Tarmac -- the Wall Street Journal reviewed the latest title in the Biblioasis International Translation Series. In a review titled "Tender and Tense," Sam Sacks writes of Mihail Sebastian's The Accident (in a translation by Stephen Henighan):

The Romanian-Jewish writer Mihail Sebastian (1907-45) came to the attention of the English-speaking world in 2000 with the publication of his incandescently angry and exacting World War II diaries. Yet during the war—as he survived in Bucharest, shunned by his Nazi-supporting former friends—he wrote "The Accident" (Biblioasis, 257 pages, $17.95), a captivating novel about a love affair.

"The Accident," translated by Stephen Henighan, would be a marvel of beauty and control under any circumstance; that it was written by a Jew in Romania in 1940 seems miraculous. ...The mountains provide an escape for Paul from his paralyzing lovesickness—just as the writing of the novel, we suspect, transported Sebastian from what he called in his diaries the "anti-Semitic dementia" of his daily surroundings. As in Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain," the snowbound fastnesses seem to warp the standard measurements of time. When Paul takes to the slopes—the skiing scenes are the best I've read since Mann's—time's passage thrillingly compresses and expands in his consciousness ...

To read the entire review, please go here.

Goran Simic at the SPoT Literary Reading Series

Here's what everyone was talking about at this year's SPoT bookfair, which was held yesterday at Hart House (a beautiful venue). Thanks to co-organizers Sang Kim and Julian Zacharoff for doing such a fantastic job.

Toronto Star shines on The Meagre Tarmac

Here's an excerpt from Nathan Whitlock's review of The Meagre Tarmac, from yesterday's Sunday Star:

"The book's overarching theme is that of the ambiguous successes of immigrant Indians in America, a horse you'd have thought would be almost unrecognizable by now for all its postmortem literary beatings. (The collection's most overtly satiric story, “A Connie da Cunha” book, even acknowledges the trendiness of immigrant stories.)

Yet Blaise makes something surprisingly fresh out of this material, helped in no small part by his dense and dryly funny prose. The first time through, it is the cultural, geographical, and historical scope of the stories that most impresses. On subsequent readings, the precise observations and wickedly subtle jokes come to the fore.

Many authors, believing that people-sized stories are no longer adequate, struggle to cram the Modern World into their fictions. Blaise does so here with enviable skill, without ever letting us forget that these characters are just as human as they are cultural archetype. Though it does not even reach 200 pages in length, this book is anything but meagre."

Full-text available here.

"Blaise burns brightly"--& the Globe caught the spark

Today Steven Hayward published a review of The Meagre Tarmac in the Globe & Mail. Here's how it begins:

"'E.M. Forster, you ruined everything,' laments the narrator of a story from Clark Blaise's first collection of short fiction, published almost 40 years ago. 'Why must every visitor to India, every well-read tourist, expect a sudden transformation?'

It was that book, A North American Education, that launched Blaise’s remarkable literary career. It was also where he began to sketch the unique constellation of obsessions that would occupy him for the next few decades: the liquidity of personal and cultural identity, the vicissitudes of desire, and, at least somewhat as a result of his marriage to novelist Bharati Mukherjee, his knowledge of India and perspective on the Indian immigrant experience."

And the rest just gets better. Read the full article here.

"Clark Blaise and Bharati Mukherjee: a shared literary journey"

Hot off the presses, from John Barber of the Globe:

"Closely chaperoned Bharati Mukherjee, 23, had never been alone in the same room with a man when she met Clark Blaise at the University of Iowa near the unanticipated end of the Kennedy presidency. Two weeks later, the two young writers were married.

Almost 48 years after that, following dual careers in which the couple have published almost 30 books between them, two of them co-written and the latest two so intertwined they actually share some characters, the authors sit together in Toronto for their first-ever joint interview."

To read the rest of this (rather wonderful) feature, click here.

Richard Outram: Essays on His Works

A new collection of essays on Richard Outram was just released from Guernica. Featuring Eric Ormsby, Amanda Jernigan, and Zach Wells--and more besides.

Rosenblum's on Fire

For a preview story from Rebecca Rosenblum's The Big Dream, due out in September of this year, be sure to check out the Spring 2011 issue of Prairie Fire. Available in stores now!

Cathy Stonehouse on What Pink Sounds Like, CiTR

Cathy Stonehouse talks about the joys of short fiction on UBC feminist radio program "What Pink Sounds Like." Check out host Ashly Kissman's blog post here; for the podcast itself, click here (interview begins about 12 minutes in).

Clark Blaise & Bharati Mukherjee Launch in Toronto on Monday, June 6th

I'll be taking the Porter into Toronto tomorrow for one of the key Biblioasis launches of the year: Clark Blaise's launch of The Meagre Tarmac at the Dora Keogh at 141 Danforth Ave in Toronto at 7 pm. So any Toronto-area Biblioasis-o-philes: please, please, please come. You won't be disappointed.

The event will also serve as the launch for Bharati Mukherjee's latest novel Miss New India.

Books will be sold by Ben McNally.

See you there!

Funny Ha-Ha

Cathy Stonehouse in the Post:

It’s hard to be funny about death. It’s even harder to be funny about child rape, especially when it has happened to yourself. But Edward St. Aubyn does it, in Never Mind, the first volume of his fictional trilogy about his alter ego, Patrick Melrose. Well, the rape scene isn’t exactly funny, but the context surrounding it is. Patrick is raped almost off-handedly by his aristocrat father who clearly does not anticipate any consequences. In St. Aubyn’s crisp prose, the horror of the situation morphs into a terrifying absurdity. And unlike one might expect, the effect is uplifting, enraging yet liberating, not least because it allows for the fact that Melrose, aka St. Aubyn, survived.

Recently I took a clowning course here in Vancouver with the extremely talented David McMurray Smith. One of the exercises we had to do involved lying on our backs and engaging in short sharp exhalations. What was the point of that? I wondered as all of a sudden my diaphragm broke out into spasms. Suddenly I was giggling. Pretty soon I was downright hysterical. And after a week or two of this the laughter opened up its opposite: tears. These were harder to allow, but the swing, as David called it, was starting to happen. For the first time in my life I truly understood how inseparable sadness and joy are, humour and horror. The body movements (knees coming up to chest, head thrown back) are almost identical. And the end result—that pleasant chemical “brain wash”—is also the same.

Writing about Terrible Things is a bit of a downer, and difficult to market unless you play up the voyeurism factor, the lurid realism that somehow numbs as it entertains. Yet “light” fiction can be depressing too, like a bad summer movie.

Read the rest here.

Month-end (Mostly Short Fiction) Round-up

It was my plan this month to do a series of ambitious posts on short fiction, with author interviews, story serializations from forthcoming and recently published collections, links to reviews, and much else. But May is, as always, the cruelest month around the Bibliomanse, and even with Tara taking Congress off of my hands -- she is currently in Fredericton manning a booth for us at the Congress Bookfair -- this month has proved more than the three of us in office could manage. Yet a range of things short fiction related have been happening these past few days, so I thought I'd just round them up here.

1) The 2011 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award Longlist was announced today, and two Biblioasis collections made the cut: Alexander MacLeod's Light Lifting and Clark Blaise's The Meagre Tarmac. Congrats to both. More information on the longlist can be found here.

2) As mentioned in another post, Cathy Stonehouse is guest-hosting The Afterword this week, and her second post, Lucky, is now up. Read it here.

3) Cathy Stonehouse was interviewed by Dan McPeake on SFU/CJSF's Encounters on Monday, which can be listened to here.

4) Reviews keep coming in for Light Lifting, including a few online at Corduroy Books
Mostly Fiction
The Malahat Review
Foreword Reviews (not online, but the reviewer writes, in part: "Alexander MacLeod … writes with a devastating command of tone…. He isn’t afraid to leave his readers uncomfortable; he knows they’ll return for more lessons about loss and its hair’s-breadth distance away.... Quietly brilliant, brilliantly determined, these are stories that stay in the mind long after the book is closed."

5) It's worth mentioning that though Light Lifting did not win the Danuta Gleed Award -- that honour went to Billie Livingston (congrats!) -- it was one of the finalists. Congrats to Alex for that as well.

6) Another excellent review of The Meagre Tarmac was published recently in Quill & Quire. Not up yet, alas. But how many excellent reviews does a book have to get before you part with 19.95? It's had enough? Well, then: you're in luck, as Clark will be launching in Toronto -- alongside his wife Bharati Mukherjee -- at the Dora Keogh next Monday at 7 pm. It'll be one of the year's highlights, as far as I am concerned. And there will, of course, be books for sale.

7) Steven Beattie has continued his now yearly 31 Days of Short Stories, and he spent one of them analyzing Alexander MacLeod's story The Loop. You can read that essay here. The rest are worth checking out as well.

8) I hear that there is a very positive review of Terence Young's The End of the Ice Age in the current Fiddlehead, where it is suggested that this collection confirms the reviewer in his opinion that we are the press for the short story in Canada. We're thrilled, but really: who else would even want that title?

9) In non-short fiction news, Biblioasis poet Shane Neilson has been shortlisted for the Trillium Award for Poetry for his subsequent collection Complete Physical. Congrats to Shane!

10) A preview/excerpt of our forthcoming Wage Slave Glossary can be read in the July issue of Harpers.

Of Badgers and Bookstores

Cathy Stonehouse, author of the just-released short-story collection Something About the Animal, is hosting The National Post's Afterword this week. In Of Badgers and Bookstores she wonders what will happen in a world where we don't have independent bookstores as cultural centres, as places where we can get our literary bearings:


I don’t go to church or frequent many bars but I do go to bookstores. I love the fact that they are so anonymous: the perfect place to fondle the raw edges of new paperbacks or discreetly sniff stuck-together pages for that new ink smell. I go there for the sensory overload, the sense of company, to trawl the shelves for serendipitous findings or just to remind myself that books are still there. I prefer not to talk, although I like the companionship of other customers, each on their own erotic quest, seeking companionship, a quiet, yearning restlessness in the air.

The crazy crowded logic of Jimbocho, Tokyo’s bookselling quarter, that tiny store in the Japanese town of Kushiro with its half shelf of English language books, the subterranean alternative bookshops of 1970s Manchester, the antiquarian delights of Charing Cross Road. Whenever I travel I seek out bookstores as entry points. I also visit them for moments of peace.

A good bookstore is a matchmaking enterprise. Rifling through musty volumes in Vancouver’s Macleod’s Books one day several years ago I chanced upon an old green leather-bound volume entitled The Life Story of a Badger, by J. C. Tregarthen. Inside the front cover was a bookplate stating it belonged to a Mr. and Mrs. Brooke. Pasted into the back was a yellowing newspaper clipping on “Men and Badgers,” alongside penciled-in notes about the Brooke family motto. Slid into the pages were several newspaper articles and postcards depicting badgers.

I am a badger-phile. These tenacious, occasionally ferocious black and white creatures that shy away from humans fascinate me, not least because they are native to where I grew up. So I seized on the book with great delight. Its melodramatic tale of a badger named Brock, who escapes being hunted and trapped, is a piece of writing few would perhaps appreciate, yet clearly the Brookes were inspired by this fable of their namesake. I will treasure it also.

A good bookstore is not just a place where books are sold but one where connections are forged between past and future. It’s also a place where literary community is formed. When I arrived in Vancouver twenty years ago I knew nothing about West Coast Canadian literature. I also did not have many friends. But browsing the shelves of R2B2 Books in Kitsilano I overheard fascinating literary conversations. Dawdling in the aisles of Octopus Books on Commercial Drive I learned about local readings, got to know local writers. In People’s Co-op I browsed the rotating chapbook stand. In Duthie’s I surveyed the vast range of Canadian fiction titles, and in Ariel, the Women’s Bookstore and Women in Print I learnt about SKY Lee, Dionne Brand and Ethel Wilson.

Would I be able to do any of this online?

To read the rest of her post please go here. And please check back at The Afterword over the following days for more from Cathy.

Phil Marchand Reviews The Meagre Tarmac

Just in from BEA in New York, an exciting if absolutely exhausting stretch away from the office, of which more anon. But I wanted to draw your attention to today's Post Review of Clark Blaise's The Meagre Tarmac (of which more anon.) Phil Marchand starts:

The Meagre Tarmac, a collection of short fiction by Clark Blaise, is a naked instance of appropriation of voice — a literary felony justified in this case by the results. If you’re going to appropriate someone’s voice, you better know how you want that voice to sound, and Blaise has spent his life and his career tuning his ear to foreign rhythms. Born in North Dakota of a French Canadian father and English Canadian mother, he grew up in various locales, mostly in the United States, and then spent 12 years teaching in Montreal with his wife, the Calcutta-born novelist Bharati Mukherjee. After a brief stint in Toronto, he and Mukherjee moved back to the U.S., where they have remained since. In 1989, he became director of the International Writing School at the University of Iowa.

Enriched by experience, knowledge of variegated literatures and personal contacts, Blaise’s fiction spans the globe, exploring themes of diaspora, rootlessness and cultural identity. Two great historic cultural shifts in particular drive his work, the migration of French Canadians on this continent, and the struggle between tradition and modernity in contemporary India. The latter is the basis of The Meagre Tarmac, a sorrowful chorus of voices, men and women trying to bridge distances between India and the U.S.

To read the whole review, please go here.