Event photos: Tom Jokinen thinks outside the box at Toronto’s Gladstone Hotel

On Tuesday night, CBC Radio producer Tom Jokinen (left) launched his new memoir Curtains: Adventures of an Undertaker-in-Training (Random House Canada) at Toronto’s Gladstone Hotel as part of This Is Not a Reading Series. Above: Jokinen is interviewed by Torontoist’s books editor (and Q&Q contributing editor) James Grainger.

Jokinen, who signed books after the event, told the crowd he wanted to find out what actually goes on at a funeral parlour. “It’s a really mysterious process,” he said. “Somebody dies, they disappear for a couple of days, and then they magically pop up at a funeral in a casket or as a bag of ashes – and in between is this mysterious Alice’s rabbit hole where nobody knows what goes on.”

Event host Marc Glassman, co-artistic director of TINARS and former owner of Toronto’s Pages Books & Magazines, with Grainger. (All photos by Laura Godfrey)

Atwood takes home (half a) million-dollar prize

Margaret Atwood has won the Dan David Prize for “Literature: Rendition of the 20^th Century.” The Canadian author will share the $1 million (U.S.) prize with Indian author Amitav Ghosh, and each winner will share 10% of the winnings with graduate students working in literature.

The Dan David Prize is presented annually by Tel Aviv University in Israel, and includes winners in three categories: Past, Present, and Future (Atwood and Ghosh will share the prize for the Present category). A different discipline is chosen annually for each category, and this year’s literature prize honours the two novelists for providing “vivid, compelling, and groundbreaking depictions of 20th century life, rousing public discussion and inspiring fellow writers.” Here’s what was said specifically of Atwood’s work:

Her work enabled, for the first time, the emergence of a defined Canadian identity, while exploring both national and transnational issues, such as colonization, feminism, structures of political power and oppression, and the violation and exploitation of nature. She is the creator of a wide range of original fiction in which realism, myth, and parable are skillfully united.

Former laureates of the Dan David Prize include former British Prime Minister Tony Blair (in 2009, for leadership); former U.S. Vice-President Al Gore (in 2008, for social responsibility); and Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan (in 2008, for creative rendering of the past). Atwood and the rest of the 2010 winners will be honoured at a ceremony on May 9 at Tel Aviv University.

Amazon prepares for the launch of the iPad

Amazon has announced its Kindle app for the iPad, which includes features such as a full-colour display, optional page-turning animation, and the company’s Whispersync technology, which synchronizes the app with other devices (such as a computer, iPhone or BlackBerry). However, the New York Times reports that the new Kindle app won’t be available until shortly after the iPad’s U.S. launch on April 3, as Amazon wants the chance to actually test it out on the device before releasing it.

In typical Apple fashion, a shroud of secrecy surrounds the details of its new tablet computer, and only a handful of companies – including Major League Baseball, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times – have access to a pre-release version of the iPad. And those who do have access to the device must “agree to keep the iPad hidden from public view, chained to tables in windowless rooms,” according to the Times. Companies like Amazon and Barnes & Noble, which are both creating apps specifically for Apple’s newest device, must use special Mac software that mimics the iPad. From the Times:

At the offices of Barnes & Noble’s digital unit in New York, 14 developers have occupied a windowless room since January, completely redesigning the company’s iPhone app for the iPad, according to Douglas Gottlieb, its vice president of digital products. The developers hunch over Macs around a big table, and printouts and notecards are taped up on the walls.

Final Scott Pilgrim comic coming weeks before film’s release

Toronto-based comic book creator Bryan Lee O’Malley made an announcement today about the final volume of his popular Scott Pilgrim series, in which Pilgrim must defeat his new girlfriend’s seven evil ex-boyfriends (or sometimes girlfriends). The sixth book, Scott Pilgrim’s Finest Hour (Oni Press), will be available on July 20. That’s two days before the San Diego Comic Con, where O’Malley will make an appearance, and about three weeks before Scott Pilgrim vs. the World hits theatres on August 13. Joe Nozemack, publisher at Oni Press, says this in the release:

I’m convinced that Scott Pilgrim will go down as one of those series that changed comics forever. When I’m out and see someone wearing a Scott Pilgrim T-shirt or sitting in a cafe reading one of the books, I get so excited about comics entering the mainstream and to know that Oni Press’ books are helping lead the way, it’s an indescribable feeling.

Earlier this week, O’Malley released a teaser movie poster for the upcoming film adaptation, which stars Michael Cera. The tagline reads, “An epic of epic epicness.”

Lambda Literary Awards finalists include Canadian authors

This morning, the finalists for the LGBT-focused Lambda Literary Awards – or the Lammys – were announced. A total of 462 books were nominated (about 10% more than last year), and 112 finalists have been chosen in 23 different categories, ranging from LGBT anthologies to gay and lesbian erotica. And for the first time in the awards’ 22-year history, the category for bisexual books has been divided into two separate categories: bisexual fiction and bisexual non-fiction.

Among the finalists were four Canadian titles:

• LGBT SF/Fantasy/Horror: Fist of the Spider Woman, by Amber Dawn (Arsenal Pulp Press)
• Gay Erotica: I Like It Like That: True Tales of Gay Desire, edited by Richard Labonté  & Lawrence Schimel (Arsenal Pulp Press)
• Transgender: The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You, by S. Bear Bergman (Arsenal Pulp Press)
• Lesbian Fiction: This One’s Going to Last Forever, by Nairne Holtz (Insomniac Press)

Winners will be announced in New York City on May 27.

Ian Weir doles out writing advice at the Afterword Reading Society wrap-up

Last night, book lovers gathered at Ben McNally Books in Toronto for the National Post’s inaugural Afterword Reading Society wrap-up. Brad Frenette, Afterword co-editor, hosted a Q&A with Ian Weir, whose novel Daniel O’Thunder (Douglas & McIntyre) has been discussed on the Post book blog for the past two months or so (and was one of Q&Q’s “Overlooked Books” of 2009). The novel has also been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize and the Amazon.ca First Novel Award.

Weir, a successful playwright and screenwriter, spoke frequently of how his background influenced the writing process of his first novel, and offered up some writing advice.

“I find it really useful to think of myself as an actor playing the role of the character,” he said. “If I were an actor, what would I be doing with this moment? What would I be doing with this character? So often as a writer you stay outside the character and discover that you’ve written characters who make a certain intellectual sense to you, but don’t actually have life.”

Weir also said that he appreciated the creative freedom that comes with writing a novel – the usual budget constraints associated with writing for the screen or stage did not apply.

“That’s the wonderful thing about being a writer,” he said. “It costs just the same to set a story with a bazillion characters in the streets of London in Victorian England as it does to write a novel with one character in the streets of London in 2011.”

New book re-examines JFK’s death via letters to Jackie

When U.S. President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, the nation – and the world – expressed its grief by sending over one million letters to his wife, Jackie – some even came from Canada. Although there were far too many letters to sift through at the time, many were preserved in Boston’s John F. Kennedy Presidential Library. Now, historian Ellen Fitzpatrick has collected 240 of those letters in Letters to Jackie: Condolences From a Grieving Nation (HarperCollins). From The Globe and Mail:

The notes reveal how many Americans perceived the first television president – as a war veteran and family man, a leader who endured relatively little public criticism by today’s standards, Prof. Fitzpatrick says.

“People really took delight in following the activities of a lot of this young family,” she said. “This collective grief response represented a change in America.”

To avoid copyright issues, Fitzpatrick had to seek out each of the letter writers or their surviving family members for permission to print their letters. The writers vary widely, from widows who felt empathy for Jackie, to the doctor who assisted in John Jr.’s birth and later attended the president’s inauguration ceremony. The presidential library still holds about 200,000 pages of letters – the rest had to be destroyed because of storage limits.

Salty Ink’s Judge a Book By Its Cover Contest winner announced

After weeks of waiting and a thousand votes, Salty Ink’s Chad Pelley has announced the winner of the “Judge a Book By Its Cover” contest, out of a shortlist of three Atlantic Canadian books released in 2009. And the winner is (drumroll please): Anna Quon’s Migration Songs (Invisible Publishing), with design by Megan Fildes and artwork by Sydney Smith.

Pelley’s take on the link between the cover design and the novel:

Tying into the design of the book, there are some well-worded bird analogies or metaphors woven throughout the whole novel, which allude to their sense of community or rituals that [protagonist] Joan doesn’t have. How she chooses to see and depict birds, at any given moment in the novel – trapped within a tree or flying free – seems to be a reflection of how she feels in that moment. Joan spends a great deal of time in some sort of fond jealousy of birds.

Migration Songs beat out The Factory Voice by Jeanette Lynes and chick-lit mystery Hit & Mrs. by Leslie Crewe.

The end of the line for The Last Train to Hiroshima

As we mentioned in last week’s links round-up, Charles Pellegrino’s The Last Train to Hiroshima has recently come under scrutiny. It was discovered that the author’s main source, the now-deceased Joseph Fuoco, had been lying about being a flight engineer on one of the planes involved in dropping the Hiroshima bomb. Although Pellegrino, who said he had been fooled by Fuoco, promised to correct future editions of the book, it looks like his tangled web has only gotten more twisted.

The Associated Press reported yesterday that several people described in the book were actually fabricated:

The publisher was unable to determine the existence of a Father Mattias (the first name is not given) who supposedly lived in Hiroshima at the time of the bombing, and John MacQuitty, identified as a Jesuit scholar presiding over Mattias’ funeral.

“I read a number of books on this period of time and none of them mentioned Mattias or MacQuitty. I knew there was no way those people could have been omitted if they were real,” said history professor Barton Bernstein of Stanford University.

Even Pellegrino’s PhD, which he claims to have earned in 1982 at the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, appears to be fraudulent – university officials could find no proof of his degree.

Henry Holt, the book’s publisher, has announced that it will cease printing of Last Train, and will “issue full credit to wholesalers and retailers who wish to return the book.” The company said this in a statement:

The author of any work of nonfiction must stand behind its content. We must rely on our authors to answer questions that may arise as to the accuracy of their work and reliability of their sources. Unfortunately, Mr. Pellegrino was not able to answer the additional questions that have arisen about his book to our satisfaction.

However, Holt publicist Nicole Dewey told the A.P. that 18,000 copies of the book have been printed since its January release. And since yesterday, the book’s Amazon.com sales ranking shot up from 244 to 83, despite full disclosure that the facts in the book are untrue. The contrast between reviews before these facts were discovered (five stars – “nothing is more real than this book”) and afterwards (one star – “a falsification of history – reader beware”) is stark.

Yann Martel takes a break from Stephen Harper book project

With his next novel coming out in April, Yann Martel has informed Stephen Harper, his unresponsive book club partner, that he will be taking a break from his biweekly book-sharing project.

Since 2007, Martel has sent Harper 76 book that have “been known to expand stillness.” Today, however, Martel sent the prime minister a book accompanied by a letter explaining that he will take a four-month break from the project to promote his new novel, Beatrice & Virgil. From Martel’s letter:

I’ve decided to invite other Canadian writers to join our literary journey. I’m glad about the decision. This is certainly a case of making a virtue of necessity. After all, why should I be alone in making reading suggestions to you?

Martel also revealed that he recently received a handwritten thank you note from Barack Obama, who had just finished reading Martel’s Life of Pi with his daughter. The president wrote that it was “a lovely book – an elegant proof of God, and the power of storytelling.” Martel told Harper that he would frame the note “for sure,” and still takes it out sometimes to marvel at it:

What amazes me is the gratuity of it. As you would know, there is a large measure of calculation in what public figures do. But here, what does he gain? I’m not a US citizen. In no way can I be of help to President Obama. Clearly he did it for personal reasons, as a reader and as a father. And in two lines, what an insightful analysis of Life of Pi. Bless him, bless him.