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Awards, immigrant lit, and Vanity Fair: Marchand’s year in review

On the Toronto Star website, books columnist Philip Marchand begins a CanLit-year-in-review piece, somewhat surprisingly, with a lengthy discussion of British novelist Ian McEwan’s Saturday. Set in the present, McEwan’s issue-driven novel is used as a launching point for discussion on last year’s crop of past-obsessed Canadian novels, none of which, Marchand claims, were standout titles. Also to be found in Marchand’s article is criticism on the growing importance of awards on sales and the perceived success of writers; discussion on a dichotomy of Canadian immigrant literature, prompted by the 2005 release of very different novels by two Canadian writers born in the Caribbean, Dionne Brand and Rabindranath Maharaj; and a recap of the glowing profile of Toronto’s literary scene written by VanityFair.com’s associate editor Anderson Tepper, which called the city “a mini-New York; an anti-New York; a younger, more global, more tolerant New York.”

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Click here for the full story from the Toronto Star

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