Gabrielle Roy Prize shortlist revealed

The Association for Canadian and Quebec Literatures has announced the shortlists for the 2011 Gabrielle Roy Prize, honouring the best works of Canadian literary criticism published in English and French.

The finalists were selected by David Creelman, professor at University of New Brunswick Saint John; Carrie Dawson, professor at Dalhousie University; and Cynthia Sugars, professor at University of Ottawa.

This year’s English-language shortlist is:

• Brian Busby, A Gentleman of Pleasure: One Life of John Glassco, Poet, Memorist, Translator, and Pornographer (McGill-Queen’s University Press)
• Alan Filewod, Committing Theatre: Theatre Radicalism and Political Intervention in Canada (Between the Lines)
• Sophie McCall, First Person Plural: Aboriginal Storytelling and the Ethics of Collaborative Authorship (University of British Colombia Press)
• Herb Wyile, Anne of Tim Hortons: Globalization and the Reshaping of Atlantic-Canadian Literature (Wilfrid Laurier University Press)

The winners will be announced May 26 at the Association for Canadian and Quebec Literatures annual conference, held in Waterloo, Ontario.

Book links roundup: Encyclopaedia Britannica goes mobile, Pulitzer jury speaks out, and more

• Encyclopaedia Britannica digitally reinvents itself for iPhone and iPad
• Pulitzer jury speaks out on this year’s decision not to present a fiction award
• Los Angeles Review of Books launches new website
• Ted Hughes’s brother Gerald to publish memoir about their boyhood
• Take the sting out of the literary brush-off with this rejection-letter generator for writers

Book links roundup: TTC launches book club, activists concerned about London Book Fair’s China focus, and more

• Toronto Public Library launches TTC book club
• London Book Fair’s focus on China worrying to free speech activists
• PBS Newshour interviews attorney Steve Berman, lead counsel in the Apple ebook antitrust lawsuit
  
• Heather Reisman speaks to CBC Radio about the Canadian bookselling industry
• Brooklyn Based compiles 10 podcasts for writers

Book links roundup: Barbara Gowdy named Guggenheim fellow, Nigella Lawson’s online literary controversy, and more

• Barbara Gowdy awarded 2012 John Simon Guggenheim fellowship for fiction
• Nigella Lawson offloads her friend Sophia Waugh’s book on eBay
• The Guardian explores the cultural evolution of Chinese literature
• Emily Gould on how to blow a $200,000 book advance
• Mike Wallace’s 1958 interview with Aldous Huxley

Book links roundup: Tamara Faith Berger’s provocative prose, Marvel Comics launches new imprint, and more

• Tamara Faith Berger’s new novel explores pornography, virginity, and literature
• Marvel Comics goes digital with new imprint ReEvolution
• What makes Times New Roman so popular among writers?
• The Guardian on the pleasure of rereading your favourite books
• Listen to an Atticus Finch –inspired literary mixtape

Book links roundup: Encyclopaedia Britannica sales boom, Kindle’s lending library expands, and more

• Last call for Encyclopaedia Britannica’s print edition boosts sales
• Kindle Owners’ Lending Library boasts 100,000 titles
• German Nobel laureate Günter Grass pens poem about Israel’s threat to world peace
• Salty Ink interviews poet Kerri Cull about her new collection, Soak, and blog, The Book Fridge
• Watch Chip Kidd’s TED2012 talk “Designing Books is No Laughing Matter. OK, it is”

Esi Edugyan and Patrick deWitt nominated for Walter Scott Prize

Esi Edugyan and Patrick deWitt will go head-to-head once again, this time for the Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction, a U.K. literary award established in 2010.

Last year, the duo dominated the Canadian award circuit. Edugyan won the Scotiabank Giller Prize for her novel Half-Blood Blues (Thomas Allen Publishers) and deWitt’s The Sisters Brothers (House of Anansi Press) took the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Literary Award. Both were shortlisted for the prestigious Man Booker Prize, but lost to Julian Barnes.

The Canadian authors are up against Barry Unsworth’s The Quality of Mercy, Sebastian Barry’s On Canaan’s Side, Alan Hollinghurst’s The Stranger’s Child, and Andrew Miller’s Pure.

According to The Guardian, the Walter Scott Prize jury, composed of author and historian Alistair Moffat and television presenter Kristy Wark, is seeking “the ability of a book to shed light on the present as well as the past.”

The winner receives £25,000, and will be announced on June 16, at the Brewin Dolphin Borders Book Festival in Melrose, Scotland.

Book links roundup: Unicorn cookbook found at British Library, portraits of Canadian poets, and more

• Medieval unicorn cookbook discovered at the British Library
• Shelly Grimson exhibits portraits of 16 Canadian poets
• Why are books with titles like The  ______’s Daughter so trendy?
• Michael Crummey lists top 10 literary feuds
• Watch Glen Milner’s “Birth of a Book” video

Bestsellers list: poetry

From Tupac Shakur to Don McKay, this week’s bestsellers list honours National Poetry Month. For the two weeks ending March 25:

1. The Iliad, Homer; Stephen Mitchell, trans.
(Simon & Schuster Canada, $35 cl, 9781439163375)

2. Rain; road; an open boat, Roo Borson
(McClelland & Stewart, $18.99 pa, 9780771012983)

3. Paradoxides, Don McKay
(M&S, $18.99 pa, 9780771055096)

4. The Poetry of Pablo Neruda, Pablo Neruda; Ilan Stavans, ed.
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux/D&M Publishers, $21.95 pa, 9780374529604)

5. Assiniboia, Tim Lilburn
(M&S, $18.99 pa, 9780771050084)

6. Whiteout, George Murray
(ECW Press, $18.95 pa, 9781770410879)

7. The Iliad, Homer; Robert Fagles, trans.
(Penguin, $18.50 pa, 9780140275360)

8. A Wild Peculiar Joy: The Selected Poems, Irving Layton
(M&S, $24.99 pa, 97807710494840)

9. Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems, Billy Collins
(Random House, $21 pa, 9780375755194)

10. The Rose That Grew from Concrete, Tupac Shakur
(MTV Books/Simon & Schuster, $18.99 pa, 9780671028459)

11. The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri; John Ciardi, trans.,
(Penguin, $25 pa, 9780451208637)

12. Book of Longing, Leonard Cohen
(M&S, $21 pa, 9780771022296)

13. The Pleasures of the Damned, 1951–1993, Charles Bukowski
(HarperCollins, $19.99 pa, 9780061228445)

14. Joy is So Exhausting, Susan Holbrook
(Coach House Books, $16.95 pa, 9781552452226)

15. Beowulf, Seamus Heaney, trans.
(W.W. Norton/Penguin, $16.50 pa, 9780393320978)

16. The Odyssey, Homer; Robert Fagles, trans.
(Penguin, $19.50 pa, 9780140268867)

17. 101 Famous Poems, Roy Cook, ed.
(McGraw-Hill Ryerson, $15.95 cl, 9780071419307)

18. Puffin Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes, Raymond Briggs
(Penguin, $12 bb, 9780141337739)

19. The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri; Allen Mandelbaum, trans.
(Everyman’s Library/Random House, $32 cl, 9780679433132)

20. Metamorphoses, Ovid; Charles Martin, trans.
(W.W. Norton, $21 pa, 9780393326420)

Book links roundup: New generation of Canadian poets, gender and literary fiction, and more

• The 49th Shelf spotlights a new generation of Canadian poets
• The New York Times examines the rules of literary fiction for men versus women
• Publishers Weekly explores concerns about the future of Canadian independent bookselling
• 10 best practical jokes in literature
• Tamara Faith Berger, Sheila Heti, and Chris Kraus on sex and literature