Indigo boycotts books published by Amazon

What began as a “simmering feud” during the Christmas selling season, when Amazon launched a promotion offering users discounts for purchasing products scanned in bricks-and-mortar stores, has escalated into “full-scale war,” according to an article in The Globe and Mail. Late last week, news broke that Indigo was joining the U.S. chains Barnes & Noble and Books-a-Million in refusing to stock books put out by Amazon’s burgeoning publishing arm. Those books include new work by heavy hitters like James Franco and Deepak Chopra, as well as a memoir by actor and director Penny Marshall, which Amazon acquired for a rumoured $800,000 advance.

The boycott is in response to what many considered to be predatory practices on the part of Amazon. The Globe quotes an email from Indigo vice-president Janet Eger, who writes that “Amazon’s actions are not in the long-term interests of the reading public or the publishing and book retailing industry, globally.”

Today, The Bookseller published an article providing more detail about Barnes & Noble’s reasons for implementing their boycott:

In a statement, B&N chief merchandising officer Jaime Carey said: “Barnes & Noble has made a decision not to stock Amazon published titles in our store showrooms. Our decision is based on Amazon’s continued push for exclusivity with publishers, agents and the authors they represent. These exclusives have prohibited us from offering certain e-books to our customers. Their actions have undermined the industry as a whole and have prevented millions of customers from having access to content. It’s clear to us that Amazon has proven they would not be a good publishing partner to Barnes & Noble as they continue to pull content off the market for their own self interest.”

In her email to the Globe, Eger states, “Indigo Founder and CEO Heather Reisman has congratulated Barnes & Noble for taking a leadership stance on the matter, and offers kudos.”

The latest front in the bookselling wars comes amid rumours that Amazon may be planning to open a bricks-and-mortar store of its own in the not-too-distant future.

Wislawa Szymborska dead at 88

Poland’s Wislawa Szymborska, the woman the Nobel Prize committee called the “Mozart of poetry,” died in her hometown of Krakow on Wednesday.

From the Washington Post:

She has been called both deeply political and playful, a poet who used humor in unforeseen ways. Her verse, seemingly simple, was subtle, deep and often hauntingly beautiful. She used simple objects and detailed observation to reflect on larger truths, often using everyday images — an onion, a cat wandering in an empty apartment, an old fan in a museum — to reflect on grand topics such as love, death and passing time.

Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski said on Twitter that her death was an “irreparable loss to Poland’s culture.”

The Nobel Prize citation indicated that she was given the award “for poetry that with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality.” American poet Robert Haas said of her writing, “She’s a very pure poet and an unexpected choice because she writes poetry. There are no essays on man’s fate. There are no novels or theater. She’s lived in Krakow quietly most of her life and produced these marvelous, very simple poems.”

Szymborska, a lifelong smoker, succumbed to lung cancer at the age of 88.

Repurposing old books (or just reading them)

It’s not an easy time to be a book. Prey to the depredations of digital books that offer convenience and (theoretical) low cost, the traditional paper-and-ink book is beleaguered and battling cultural irrelevance. So what happens to unwanted physical books if and when they are replaced by digital copies?

A recent … ahem … book suggests ways of repurposing old volumes as decoration for living spaces. From an article in the Sidney Morning Herald:

A recent publication by the American artist Lisa Occhipinti, The Repurposed Library, shows how to transform unwanted books into a range of quirky objects. There are clocks, sewing boxes and chandeliers or, for the ultimate ironic literary statement, a hardback cover for your e-reader.

Occhipinti believes old books impart a sense of tranquillity to their surroundings.

”We live in this digital age and life is so fast-paced but there’s a silence and stillness about books,” she says.

Not only are books visually attractive, their stories convey a certain mystery, even if they can no longer be read in full, she says. The appeal comes down to a deep-seated nostalgia. ”There’s something very special about them and it may be that books may not exist some day,” Occhipinti says. ”There’s this forebodingness about them, so all of a sudden they become even more precious.”

The article also points out that crafty ideas for unwanted books have long been found in the online sphere:

The cyber world is awash with bookish objects made from orphaned volumes. Stripped, painted, bolted or glued, old books are being turned into jewellery, sculpture and furniture. From an old atlas refashioned into a chic lampshade to a Jane Austen hardcover stitched into a handbag, the projects display an astonishing ingenuity. Some designers, including Californian Jim Rosenau, treat books as lumber to create tables, chairs and even bookshelves.

Meanwhile, in an attempt to get people’s noses back into books (presumably before they are turned into lampshades), the Milwaukee Public Library has developed a campaign that plays on a number of familiar digital emblems.

Spring preview 2012: Canadian fiction, poetry, and graphica

In the January/February issue, Q&Q looks ahead at the spring season’s new books.

NOVELS

Vincent Lam won the 2006 Scotiabank Giller Prize for his debut, the short-story collection Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures. His follow-up is a novel set during the Vietnam War. The Headmaster’s Wager (Doubleday Canada, $32.95 cl., April) is about the gambling, womanizing head of an English school in Saigon, whose son runs afoul of the country’s authorities and is forced into exile. • Another Giller winner, CBC broadcaster Linden MacIntyre, has a new novel out this season. Why Men Lie (Random House Canada, $32 cl., March), the third volume in the author’s Cape Breton trilogy – which also includes The Long Stretch and 2009 Giller champ The Bishop’s Man – is the first to be told from the perspective of a woman.

Four-time winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award, winner of the Prix Médicis, the W.O. Mitchell Prize, and the Matt Cohen Award, and member of the Order of Canada, Marie-Claire Blais is one of this country’s most lauded authors. Her new novel is set in the Saloon, a phantasmagorical place where boys are transformed into dream creatures who engage in carnivalesque performances of song and dance. Mai at the Predator’s Ball (House of Anansi Press, $19.95 pa., May) is translated from the French by Nigel Spencer. • Following 2007’s The Letter Opener (and the successful children’s picture book Spork), Kyo Maclear’s sophomore novel draws on memories of her father, a foreign correspondent. Stray Love (HarperCollins Canada, $29.99 cl., March), which includes illustrations by Toronto artist Heather Frise, is about Marcel, a man approaching 50 who reflects on his childhood in London, his globetrotting father, and his mysterious, bohemian mother.

Nina Dolgoy lives in a bad neighbourhood. If only the boarded-up local pool reopened, she thinks, it might provide her daughters with something to do. The problem is Nina doesn’t have any money. What else to do but rob a bank? Nina, the Bandit Queen (Dundurn Press, $21.99 pa., March) is a darkly comic novel from former Toronto Star columnist Joey Slinger. • In her first novel since 2000’s A Message for Mr. Lazarus, B.C. writer Barbara Lambert tells the story of a woman who, after inheriting property in Tuscany from an estranged uncle, tries to find out why she is heir to this mysterious legacy. The Whirling Girl ($22 pa.) appears from Cormorant Books in February.

We’ve all been annoyed – or worse – by spam e-mail allegedly from exiled Nigerian royalty. In his latest novel, Will Ferguson imagines the shadowy criminals behind such scams and the potentially devastating effects they might have on the lives of their anonymous victims. 419 (Viking Canada, $32 cl.) is due out in April. • Culture journalist and Globe and Mail columnist Katrina Onstad returns with her sophomore novel, about a contented urban couple whose lives are turned upside down when they become legal guardians of a two-and-a-half-year-old boy. Everybody Has Everything (McClelland & Stewart, $22 pa., May) focuses on the collision between “urban affluenza” and parental responsibility.

Best-selling novelist Lilian Nattel returns with Web of Angels (Knopf Canada, $22 pa., Feb.), the story of Sharon Lewis, an apparently unflappable wife and mother whose battle with dissociative identity disorder is thrust into the open after a family friend commits suicide. • Set in postwar Montreal, Nancy Richler’s third novel, The Imposter Bride (HarperCollins Canada, $29.99 cl., March), is about the disappearance of an enigmatic woman and her daughter’s attempt to understand who her mother really was. • The dark inheritance of mental illness forms the spine of the debut novel from Grace O’Connell, one of this year’s “new faces of fiction.” Magnified World (Random House Canada, $22.95 pa., May) tells the story of Maggie, whose mother kills herself by walking into Toronto’s Don River. When Maggie begins to experience blackouts, she fears she may be suffering from the same condition that plagued her disturbed mother.

Eccentric and reclusive author D.O. Dodd follows up his/her controversial 2010 novel, Jew, with The Immigrant’s Handbook (Exile Editions, $19.95 pa., April), about a woman who relocates to a new country in order to leave behind her old life. • Judy Garland died of a drug overdose in 1969. Unless, like Elvis, her death was a ruse and she was secretly kept alive. In novelist and playwright Sky Gilbert’s Come Back (ECW Press, $18.95 pa., May), the year is 2060 and Garland, age 138, is working on her Ph.D. thesis at the University of Toronto.

Quebec’s Patrick Senécal is a literary sensation in his home province, despite being virtually unknown in English Canada. All of that may change with Against God (Quattro Books, $14.95 pa., April), about a man’s mental breakdown ­following the deaths of his wife and children. The novella is translated from the French by Susan Ouriou and Christelle Morelli. • Q&Q reviewer Alex Good has referred to the short fiction of David Nickle as “a perverted version of Alice Munro country.” In his new novel, Rasputin’s Bastards (ChiZine Publications, $19.95 pa., June), Nickle imagines a version of postwar Russia in which a group of “telekinetics” who were bred as secret agents begin to wield their powers for reasons contrary to the greater good.

“Sexy” is not a word commonly associated with CanLit, but it certainly applies to Maidenhead (Coach House Books, $18.95 pa., April) by Tamara Faith Berger, whose debut, a work of unabashed smut called Lie with Me, was made into a frankly explicit movie by Clément Virgo. The new novel focuses on a 16-year-old girl’s sexual awakening at the hands of a Tanzanian musician. The author has said it will be her last literary exploration of explicit sexuality, bringing to a close a “pornographic trilogy” that also includes The Way of the Whore. • Montreal-based novelist Daniel Allen Cox is back with his third book from Arsenal Pulp Press. Basement of Wolves ($15.95 pa., April) tells the story of paranoid actor Michael-David, who barricades himself inside an L.A. hotel after a film shoot involving a pack of wolves somehow goes awry.

Biblioasis is comparing Irish-Canadian writer Anakana Schofield’s debut novel, Malarky ($19.95 pa., April), to Brecht’s Mother Courage and Beckett’s Endgame. When Philomena discovers her son canoodling with another man and is informed of her husband’s (possibly invented) indiscretions, she embarks on a journey of discovery that involves grief, resilience, and something like madness. • Toronto-based poet and music journalist Tanis Rideout’s debut is part adventure story, part Mrs. Dalloway. Above All Things (M&S, $22 pa., March) alternates between the story of George Mallory’s ill-fated attempt to conquer Mount Everest and a day in the life of Mallory’s wife, Ruth, who anxiously awaits his return to England.

The new year marks the 100th anniversary of the Titanic disaster. In Titanic Ashes (Flanker Press, $17.95 pa., Feb.), St. John’s novelist Paul Butler uses the tragedy as a backdrop for the story of J. Bruce Ismay and Miranda Grimsden, two passengers on the ill-fated voyage, who are reunited 13 years later. • This Ramshackle Tabernacle, the debut from Newfoundland and Labrador writer Samuel Thomas Martin, was shortlisted for the 2010 Winterset Award and the ReLit Award for short fiction. Martin returns with A Blessed Snarl (Breakwater Books, $19.95 pa., Feb.), a novel about a man whose marriage ends when his wife takes up with someone she met on Facebook.

What would a Canadian publishing season be without a new book by Tim Bowling? This time the prolific author appears not with a collection of poetry, but a novel. The Tinsmith (Brindle & Glass, $21.95 pa., March) focuses on a surgeon during the American Civil War who moves to B.C., where he battles the unscrupulous practices of the province’s salmon canners. (It being Bowling, you had to know there would be fish in there somewhere.) • Set in Paris, Leper Tango (Guernica Editions, $20 pa., May) tells the story of a lawyer who becomes obsessed with a hooker named Sheba. David MacKinnon’s novel is the first in a projected trilogy.

Turnstone Press seems to be staking out territory in the area of male Boomer humour. Following last year’s novel Dadolescence by Bob Armstrong, the Manitoba publisher is bringing out Dave Williamson’s Dating ($19 pa., April), about a widower who finds himself thrust back onto the singles market in his senior years. • Canadian expat Emily Mandel has completed her third novel in as many years. The Lola Quartet (McArthur & Company, $24.95 pa., May) tells the story of Gavin, a disgraced journalist who moves home to Florida and embarks on a search for his high-school girlfriend, who has stolen a large sum of money from a drug dealer and is on the run with a girl who might be Gavin’s daughter.

The fourth novel from Quebec writer Martine Desjardins is a literary hybrid combining gothic elements with history and fantasy. In Maleficium (Talonbooks, $16.95 pa., March), translated by Fred A. Reed and David Homel, a 19th-century priest relates the confessions of seven men who have experienced bizarre or disturbing fates while in pursuit of material possessions.

SHORT FICTION

Acclaimed poet, novelist, and essayist Steven Heighton is set to publish his first collection of short stories in more than 15 years. The Dead Are More Visible (Knopf Canada, $22.95 pa.) appears in May. • Prolific St. John’s author and journalist Russell Wangersky returns with the collection Whirl Away (Thomas Allen Publishers, $22.95 pa., March), about what happens when people’s coping mechanisms begin to fail. • Self-confessed “literary voyeur” Julie Wilson has a debut collection with Freehand Books. Seen Reading ($21.95 pa., April), based on Wilson’s website of the same name, contains descriptions of people reading in public paired with short pieces of imaginative writing.

Victoria native Buffy Cram is the latest contributor to the 2010 anthology Darwin’s Bastards to appear with a collection of her own, following last year’s offerings from Matthew J. Trafford and David Whitton. In the surreal world of Radio Belly (Douglas & McIntyre, $22.95 pa., April), a mob of “intellectual vagrants” overruns a complacent neighbourhood, a father and daughter negotiate life on a post-apocalyptic island, and a woman who has recently undergone an appendectomy begins to receive Russian radio signals emanating from her belly. • Novelist and children’s author Cary Fagan’s first collection in a decade is due out from Cormorant in May. My Life Among the Apes ($22 pa.) includes a story about a bank manager who uses his obsession with Jane Goodall to solve his problems. • Poet and author Lynn Crosbie returns with her first full-length work since the poem-à-clef Liar. Life Is About Losing Everything (Anansi, $24.95 pa., May), chronicling the past seven years of the author’s life, is a literary hybrid combining fiction and memoir.

Gay dwarves don’t appear in Anne Fleming’s Gay Dwarves of America (Pedlar Press, $21 pa., April), but there is a story about a hockey mom who imagines she’s Swiss, a story told in the form of a musical, and a story structured as one family’s “puke diary.” • Heather Birrell returns with her first collection since winning the 2007 Journey Prize for the story “BriannaSusanna­Alana.” Mad Hope (Coach House, $18.95 pa., April) uses unconventional characters to explore universal subjects such as parenting, pregnancy, and marriage. • Stories that bring out the humour of the human condition appear in Saskatoon author Donald Ward’s The Weeping Chair (Thistledown Press, $18.95 pa., March).

Novelist, story writer, and biographer of Tommy Douglas, Dave Margoshes is back with a collection of linked stories loosely based on the life of his father. Set mostly in New York City’s Jewish community during the interwar years, A Book of Great Worth (Coteau Books, $18.95 pa., April) contains stories the author has been working on for 30 years.

CRIME FICTION

Wayne Arthurson follows up his well-received debut, Fall from Grace, with a second mystery featuring half-Cree, half-French protagonist Leo Desroches. In A Killing Winter (Forge/Raincoast, $27.50 cl., April), Desroches goes undercover as a homeless man and befriends a native street kid. When his young friend is found murdered, Desroches embarks on a highly personal investigation into local gang culture. • Mob enforcer Wilson is back for a fourth wallow in gritty urban noir in Hamilton author Mike Knowles’s Never Play Another Man’s Game (ECW, $24.95 cl., April). This time, Wilson is broke and takes a job with an old partner, despite reservations about involving his son.

Lake on the Mountain (Dundurn, $11.99 pa., Jan.), the latest mystery from Jeffrey Round, features missing-persons investigator Dan Sharp, who attends a wedding on a yacht and gets caught up in both a case of mistaken identity and a 20-year-old disappearance. • A veteran forest ranger and firefighter, Dave Hugelschaffer draws on his own life experience in a mystery series featuring Porter Cassel, an Alberta forest-fire forensics investigator. The latest book, Whiskey Creek (Cormorant, $19.95 pa., April), has Cassel looking into arson and murder in the isolated Alberta community of Fort Chip­ewyan. • The second adventure of Casey Holland, transit cop, is due out this season from TouchWood Editions. Debra Purdy Kong’s Deadly Accusations ($14.95 pa., March) finds Holland caught up in a gang war being waged on local buses.

POETRY

Dennis Lee (who is, not incidentally, co-founder of his current publisher, Anansi) returns with the culmination of his late-period trilogy that includes Un (2003) and Yesno (2007). Testament ($19.95 pa., March) reconstitutes poems from the previous books and incorporates new work to create a provocative statement about living in the modern age. • Also from Anansi is the new collection from Griffin Poetry Prize winner A.F. Moritz. The New Measures ($19.95 pa., March) is a suite of tonally varied poems that share a thematic strain of hope for improving the contemporary world.

M&S’s spring poetry features new collections from three of Canada’s so-called “eco-poets.” In Paradoxides ($18.99 pa., March), Griffin winner Don McKay combines his well-known affinity for the natural world with the mysteries of geology and the landscape of Newfoundland. • Rain; road; and open boat ($18.99 pa., March), Roo Borson’s first collection since 2004’s Short Journey Upriver Toward Oishida (which won both the Griffin and the Governor General’s Literary Award), ranges from New Zealand to Beijing to Toronto, exploring a variety of tones, themes, approaches, and subjects. • And finally, Tim Lilburn returns with Assiniboia ($18.99 pa., March), which interrogates notions of colonialism and modernity by addressing subjects such as Louis Riel, Western mysticism, and geography.

It’s not just the novelists who are marking the centenary of the Titanic’s sinking. Acclaimed Vancouver poet Billeh Nickerson’s Impact (Arsenal Pulp, $14.95 pa., April) uses historical research to recreate the ship’s construction and imagine what it must have been like to be onboard when the tragedy occurred. • The culmination of a decade of work, Whiteout (ECW, $18.95 pa., April), the sixth collection from erstwhile Bookninja George Murray, juxtaposes form and formlessness, anger and serenity. • The Smooth Yarrow (Véhicule Press, $18 pa., April), Susan Glickman’s sixth collection, explores life in all its manifestations, from an elegy to the poet’s late father to a sequence of poems on gardening. • Sumptuary Laws (Véhicule, $18 pa., March) is the first full-length collection from Nyla Matuk. The title is a reference to feudal regulations that enforced social divisions by stipulating what a person was allowed to eat and wear. • Chris Hutchinson returns with his third collection, A Brief History of the Short-Lived (Nightwood Editions, $18.95 pa., April).

In Geographies of a Lover (NeWest Press, $14.95 pa., April), B.C. poet Sarah de Leeuw finds inspiration from The Story of O and Marian Engle’s Bear. Her frankly sexual poems, written in the first person, explore the trajectory of a love affair, from infatuation through obsession, using the Canadian landscape as a metaphor for erotic passion. • Toronto-based poet and heavy metal journo Natalie Zina Walschots has a debut collection called DOOM: Love Poems for Supervillains (Insomniac Press, $16.95 pa., April), which employs dense, technical language to explore the pathology of comic book villains and other bad boys. • Gerald Lampert Award–winning poet and novelist Steven Price brings together Greek mythology and a North American childhood in Omens in the Year of the Ox (Brick Books, $19 pa., Feb.), which contains free-verse and more structured poems.

Mansfield Press is tapping both ends of the career spectrum with a pair of poetry collections by a newcomer and a veteran. Jaime Forsythe’s debut collection, Sympathy Loophole ($16.95 pa., April), includes poems that feature ventriloquism, contortion, and pickled sharks, among other (somewhat less colourful) subjects. • Now entering his sixth decade of publishing poetry, David W. McFadden’s new book, What’s the Score? ($16.95 pa., April), collects 65 poems by the revered author. • The Least Important Man (Biblioasis, $17.95 pa., April), Alex Boyd’s sophomore collection, contains poems that explore the dignity found in everyday life.

GRAPHICA

David Collier’s previous book, Chimo, told of the author’s experiences with the Canadian military. His new work, Collier’s Popular Press (Conundrum Press, $20 pa., Jan.), is a collection of the artist’s published work from the last three decades. • The Porcupine’s Quill has worked closely with iconic engraver George A. Walker to produce a series of beautifully designed books featuring the artist’s instantly recognizable woodcuts. Walker’s new “wordless novel,” The Mysterious Death of Tom Thomson ($22.95 pa., April), features 109 engravings that tell the story of the painter’s life.

The fine print: Q&Q’s spring preview covers books published between Jan. 1 and June 30, 2012. All information (titles, prices, publication dates, etc.) was supplied by publishers and may have been tentative at Q&Q’s press time. • Titles that have been listed in previous previews do not appear here.

Novel becomes a bestseller despite author’s anonymity

“During the first weeks of spring 1974, when Jingqiu was still at senior high school, she and three other students were selected to take part in a project to compile a new school textbook.”

So begins the English translation of Under the Hawthorn Tree,  a novel set to be published in Canada by House of Anansi Press. Already a huge success in China, in part due to a 2010 film adaptation by Academy Award–winning director Zhang Yimou, the book began life as a blog by the writer Ai Mi. Perhaps most remarkable about the novel’s international success (it has reportedly sold in 15 countries) is that no one seems to know the real identity of the pseudonymous author.

The novel, a love story, is part of a crop of Chinese works dealing with the Cultural Revolution of Mao Zedong. In a translator’s introduction to the English-language edition, Anna Holmwood writes:

While political sensitivities have continued to limit full historical and political analysis, novels were for a while – and perhaps even still are – the most fruitful way of coming to terms with this period. They became known as “scar literature” or “literature of the wounded” – a term coined after the publication of Lu Xinhua’s novel The Scar.

According to an article in The Guardian, Lennie Goodings, the editor at Virago who bought the book for the U.K. market, hadn’t even read it in English when she made an offer.

Goodings asked someone from Shanghai who works in Virago’s accounts department to read it: “Her face fell and she said, ‘I’m not interested in the Cultural Revolution. It’s my parents’ generation.’ The next day she was at my shoulder, eyes brimming, saying ‘it’s so wonderful and I cried.’ On the basis of that, I bought it blind.” Although the original blog was serialised on a website that was blocked by the Chinese authorities, an admirer had passed it to one of China’s state-affiliated publishers, which has been overwhelmed by its sales.

Anansi will publish the English version of Ai Mi’s novel in February. There is currently no North American release date for Yimou’s film.

New Jane Austen family papers made available for public viewing

The good news is that a slate of Jane Austen family books, previously available only to academics, has been digitized and is being offered for viewing by members of the public. The bad news, depending upon your geographic circumstances, is that the material is available by appointment only, and only at the Hampshire Record Office in Winchester, England. (Steventon, Hampshire, is Austen’s birthplace.)

From the BBC:

The “rare and precious” material includes digital copies of eight music books known to have been enjoyed by the author, a manuscript verse book given to her sister Cassandra in 1837, and a notebook containing her niece Caroline’s recollections.

The original copies have also been moved to the records office for “safe-keeping” after previously being held at the Jane Austen House Museum in Chawton, Hampshire.

The BBC offers no indication that the material includes corroborating evidence for Lindsay Ashford’s supposition that Austen died as a result of arsenic poisoning.

Christopher Hitchens, 1949-2011

Critic, gadfly, supporter of the Iraq war, misogynist, atheist. Christopher Hitchens was all these things. He was also one of the most erudite and plain-spoken writers of his day, possessed of intelligence, wit, and interests that were, in the secular sense of the word, catholic.

Hitchens died last night after a protracted battle with esophageal cancer. He was 62.

The man himself would, perhaps, cavil with the term “battle” to describe his ailment. In one of a series of pieces he wrote for Vanity Fair magazine describing, in typically direct, often painful detail, his daily struggles with the disease that was killing him, he referred to the oft-repeated term as “one of the most appealing clichés in our language”:

You’ve heard it all right. People don’t have cancer: they are reported to be battling cancer. No well-wisher omits the combative image: You can beat this. It’s even in obituaries for cancer losers, as if one might reasonably say of someone that they died after a long and brave struggle with mortality.

Once lionized by progressives, Hitchens’s views fell increasingly out of favour in the years following 9/11, especially concerning his support for the unpopular war the U.S. and its “coalition of the willing” launched against Iraq in 2003. From the Observer:

His advocacy for the Iraq war was only the latest of Hitchens’s positions that many on the left found uncomfortable, and led to a chill in his relations with Gore Vidal, who had once nominated him a “successor, an inheritor, a dauphin or delphino.” But Hitchens’s opposition to what he called “fascism with an Islamic face” began long before 9/11, with the fatwa on his friend Salman Rushdie, imposed by the Ayatollah Khomeini, whom Hitchens accused of “using religion to mount a contract killing,” after the publication of The Satanic Verses.

He was also excoriated in many circles for a 2007 article in Vanity Fair entitled “Why Women Aren’t Funny,” which prompted outraged, and not unfounded, cries of misogyny. That essay is included in his 2011 collection, Arguably, which is one of the books in the inaugural season of McClelland & Stewart’s non-fiction imprint, Signal. Writing on Random House’s Book Lounge blog, M&S president and publisher Doug Pepper says:

Christopher dealt with his illness as he did his life leading up to it: with wit, insight, incredible intellectual productivity, and extreme courage. We are all terribly saddened by his passing – his was an incredible life cut short and we send his family our heart-felt regrets and sympathy. We are honoured to be his publishers, and in that role to have brought and continue to bring his work to Canadian readers. He will be missed but his great and inspiring legacy will live on.

Among the many tributes pouring in is one from Graydon Carter, the longtime editor of Vanity Fair, where Hitchens served as contributing editor and where much of his recent writing appeared:

He was a man of insatiable appetites – for cigarettes, for scotch, for company, for great writing, and, above all, for conversation. That he had an output to equal what he took in was the miracle in the man. You’d be hard-pressed to find a writer who could match the volume of exquisitely crafted columns, essays, articles, and books he produced over the past four decades. He wrote often – constantly, in fact, and right up to the end – and he wrote fast; frequently without the benefit of a second draft or even corrections.

Indeed, Hitchens went out as he likely would have wanted to: writing. As recently as this month, he published an essay about his cancer treatments interrogating, with clarity and an utter lack of sentimentality, Nietzsche’s famous bromide that what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger:

I am typing this having just had an injection to try to reduce the pain in my arms, hands, and fingers. The chief side effect of this pain is numbness in the extremities, filling me with the not irrational fear that I shall lose the ability to write. Without that ability, I feel sure in advance, my “will to live” would be hugely attenuated. I often grandly say that writing is not just my living and my livelihood but my very life, and it’s true. Almost like the threatened loss of my voice, which is currently being alleviated by some temporary injections into my vocal folds, I feel my personality and identity dissolving as I contemplate dead hands and the loss of the transmission belts that connect me to writing and thinking.

These are progressive weaknesses that in a more “normal” life might have taken decades to catch up with me. But, as with the normal life, one finds that every passing day represents more and more relentlessly subtracted from less and less. In other words, the process both etiolates you and moves you nearer toward death. How could it be otherwise? Just as I was beginning to reflect along these lines, I came across an article on the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder. We now know, from dearly bought experience, much more about this malady than we used to. Apparently, one of the symptoms by which it is made known is that a tough veteran will say, seeking to make light of his experience, that “what didn’t kill me made me stronger.” This is one of the manifestations that “denial” takes.

Show Rob Ford and TPL some love this holiday season

Toronto Mayor Rob Ford has not been terribly successful on the literary front. From his under-the-breath insult to author Vikki VanSickle during this summer’s marathon executive committee hearing to his brother Doug’s very public spat with Margaret Atwood over cuts to library funding, Ford’s not been viewed as the most book-friendly mayor Toronto has ever known.

People feeling that the embattled mayor might need a bit of holiday cheer can now send him seasons greetings while also helping the Toronto Public Library retain its service levels in the face of calls for cutbacks from the city. A cheeky website called the Rob Ford Book Club has appeared, suggesting that users make a minimum $10 donation to TPL in the mayor’s name; they can then take advantage of an option to have a card sent to the person in whose name the donation has been made. “The effect is two-fold,” says the rubric on the Rob Ford Book Club. “[G]ive the library a hand, and have your voice heard.”

The site offers detailed instructions for making a donation to TPL on behalf of a third party, then instructs users on how to have a card or e-card forwarded to Mayor Ford. Users are also encouraged to include a personal message for the mayor, but are cautioned against any inappropriate commentary:

Use your real name or an alias such as “Toronto citizen,” but please keep the message respectful and do not make any slurs, attacks, or threats toward the Mayor. We want you to express your desire to see libraries remain an important part of the city in a constructive and peaceful way.

Quillblog applauds this clever approach to civic activism, and wonders whether one of the cards the mayor receives will be from Atwood.

Ontario students score high in reading proficiency, but don’t like to read for pleasure, report finds

There is good news and bad news in a report released today by the advocacy group People for Education. Entitled Reading for Joy, the study found that students in Ontario are competitive in their reading skills compared with students at similar grade levels around the world, but the number of students who read for pleasure is decreasing.

According to the report, in 1998-99, 76 per cent of Ontario students in Grade 3 reported that they “like to read.” As of 2010-11, that number dropped to 50 per cent. The percentage of Grade 6 students who reported enjoying reading also dropped, from 65 per cent to 50 per cent.

The key concern underlying the numbers is that reading for pleasure is an indicator not just of literacy, but of academic success across the board, and of a student’s willingness to pursue lifelong learning.

A press release about the report quotes Groundwood Books’ CEO Patsy Aldana, who expresses concern about the implications behind the findings:

“If reading scores are going up at the expense of children’s acquiring a love of reading we need to be very concerned. I hope policy makers take this as a wake up call. There is a danger that we have forgotten the important and fundamental role public education has to play in our society – that of creating critical, thinking, empathetic citizens who have all the tools required to tackle the huge challenges that lie ahead. Loving to read is the most important gift we can give our children.”

An article in The Globe and Mail points to an increase in the culture of distraction created by the Internet and social media as partly responsible for the decline, although the same article suggests that Internet use may have a positive effect on teenagers’ reading:

Doretta Wilson, executive director of the Society for Quality Education, who hadn’t read the report, found these factors were more likely to blame than the push for better literacy scores.

“I don’t think schools are turning students off reading, I just think there are a lot more distractions than there were a generation ago,” she said.

Teenagers are in fact likely reading more than they ever have before. They spend their free time online, posting to Facebook and Twitter, and texting friends. International surveys by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development have found that these behaviours are positively linked to reading proficiency.

Books of the year: Q&Q review editor Steven W. Beattie

Creating lists of the year’s best books is an annual ritual in which I am frequently asked to participate. These requests never fail to make me uncomfortable: such judgments ultimately come down to matters of individual taste, and in any case, it is impossible for one person to read the sum total of books published in a calendar year, and therefore to make an informed decision as to what constitutes the “best.”

It is possible, however, to look back on a year’s worth of reading and identify a handful of books that rose above the pack, books that proved more affecting, more memorable, or more enjoyable than the rest. Not necessarily the best, whatever that might mean, but a group of personal favourites. With that in mind, here are five books that made an impression on me in 2011.