Alice Munro = Oscars gold
Canadian talent fared well in this year’s Oscar nominations, announced this morning. And in case you needed an excuse to catch the February 24 ceremony – if it happens – there’s a publishing tie-in, too.
Besides the best actress nod for Halifax’s Ellen Page for Juno, which is dominating Canadian headlines, Toronto director/actor/activist Sarah Polley is up for best adapted screenplay for her directorial debut Away From Her, based on the Alice Munro story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain.” Julie Christie also got a best actress nomination for her role in the film.
The news dovetails with a mini-debate on GalleyCat about how Polley’s film has accomplished the seemingly unthinkable by sexing up Alice Munro for a mass audience. Yesterday, a mildly scandalized reader complained about the new Vintage paperback edition for The View From Castle Rock (pictured above), first published in 2004.
“I saw the cover for the paperback of Alice Munro’s latest collection, The View from Castle Rock, in an ad in the NY Times Book Review,” a GalleyCat reader emails, “and Vintage has given the book a Sessalee Hensley makeover.” … [I]t’s not too hard to see what he’s talking about, although my reference point upon first glance wasn’t so much Hensley, the fiction buyer for Barnes & Noble, as it was all those chick lit covers with women’s legs and no faces. (Not to mention the hot pink lettering; nice touch, that!) “While I understand the effort to sell more copies, it seems like a desperate approach for such a great writer,” our source continues, addressing the “chick lit” question directly: “Is that Vintage’s marketing strategy? I guess, if it gets Munro into more people’s hands it’s a good thing, but for me there’s a real disconnect in tone between the cover and the contents.”
Today, another reader rebuts by asking if Munro’s (or Munro’s publisher’s) concession to the marketplace is really such a big deal. After all, in CanLit, as in Canadian film, opportunities to sell out are few and far between.
It should be noted, first off, that these are the US editions that are being referred to (thus, no opportunity for CanLit or CanPub selling out here) - some will be relieved to know that the Cdn editions continue to be just as dire in trade as they were in hardcover (although, in fairness, those are bathing suits of a sort on the CDN trade).
This does underscore a certain dichotomy, however, in how Munro is perceived in the two different countries. Up here in the chilly north, she’s generally considered to be the province of the older, stuffier, more conservative set, whereas in the US her readership is much wider age-wise and demographically. The covers in both markets both reflect and perpetuate these different readerships for the same material.
(Yes, I know, sweeping generalizations, etc.)
Oh come ON. What’s wrong with making the book a little sexier? Why is a contemporary, stylish cover considered a “desperate approach”? God forbid we allow CanLit to appeal to a wider audience and sell a few more books! The horror!