Twitter fuels rumours of American Psycho sequel

It appears that anything Bret Easton Ellis does is bound to provoke fascination and chatter. That includes posting to his Twitter feed.

On Saturday, Book Riot posted a series of Tweets from the author’s late-night “rave session” on the popular social media site, during which he mused publicly about the possibility of penning a sequel to his controversial 1991 novel American Psycho.

The first tweet appeared at 1 a.m. PST on March 10, and read, “1:00 AM in L.A. and sitting at my desk finishing a script and suddenly I’m making notes on where Patrick Bateman’s now and maybe he could …” There followed a flurry of tweets musing about what American Psycho’s protagonist would be doing in 2012. These included thoughts on his favourite movie (The Help), his new favourite song (“Fix You” by Coldplay), and his relationship with new technology (“Patrick’s iPad would start speaking to him … Telling him Adele’s cover of The Cure drove him to killing, well, just about everybody …”)

The Sidney Morning Herald picked up on the Book Riot post, asking a question Quillblog is sure others have asked in the past: “Is everything OK with Bret Easton Ellis?”

From the SMH:

By the time Ellis signed off he said he had created 14 pages of notes, and was receiving ideas from his followers.

”Keeping what might be the new book under wraps for now after last night’s inspiration. But am still interested in suggestions and advice … Please keep sending me ideas. You won’t get credit. But they help.”

Scott Turow responds to U.S. Justice Department’s antitrust threat

At the end of last week, The Wall Street Journal reported that the U.S. Department of Justice was looking into the possibility of filing an antitrust lawsuit against five major publishers – Simon & Schuster, the Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Macmillan, and Penguin Group – for alleged price fixing in the area of ebook sales. Apple was also named as a potential party to the suit.

The news prompted best-selling author Scott Turow, president of the Author’s Guild, to issue an open letter criticizing the move. In the letter, Turow praises Apple’s adherence to the agency model for digital sales, which allows publishers to set prices and prevents online sellers from discounting them. Turow blames Amazon, which has built its Kindle business on deep discounts for ebooks, for “using e-book discounting to destroy bookselling, making it uneconomic for physical bookstores to keep their doors open.”

Turow goes on:

Two years after the agency model came to bookselling, Amazon is losing its chokehold on the e-book market: its share has fallen from about 90% to roughly 60%. Customers are benefiting from the surprisingly innovative e-readers Barnes & Noble’s investments have delivered, including a tablet device that beat Amazon to the market by fully twelve months. Brick-and-mortar bookstores are starting to compete through their partnership with Google, so loyal customers can buy e-books from them at the same price as they would from Amazon. Direct-selling authors have also benefited, as Amazon more than doubled its royalty rates in the face of competition.

Let’s hope the reports are wrong, or that the Justice Department reconsiders. The irony bites hard: our government may be on the verge of killing real competition in order to save the appearance of competition.

His letter sparked immediate and vigorous condemnation online from writers and consumer advocates accusing Turow of being beholden to “legacy publishers” who charge artificially high prices that unfairly gouge consumers. (The fact that Amazon takes a loss on some ebook sales in order to entice customers to buy electronics and other goods is something that largely goes missing in these responses.)

One such reaction appears on Joe Konrath’s blog. In a lengthy rejoinder, Konrath and fellow author Barry Eisler deconstruct Turow’s letter point by point. Eisler writes in part:

This argument is just bizarre. I mean, Amazon, which sells more books than anyone, is destroying bookselling? Amazon is destroying bookselling by selling tons of books?

Watch the linguistic dodge: Scott is implicitly arguing that the only model that counts as “bookselling” is the current model, built and maintained by legacy publishers and brick-and-mortar stores. That is, “bookselling = physical bookstores. Online bookselling doesn’t count as bookselling.” He’s arguing as though physical booksellers are the only legitimate organisms in the forest, while Amazon is some sort of exotic interloping alien species rampaging through a healthy native ecosystem. This is the only way to make sense of an argument that states, “Amazon is destroying bookselling by selling so many books.”

Whether or not the DoJ lawsuit ever materializes, this recent campaign in the publishing wars is simply another indication of the degree to which the two sides have become entrenched, with neither side willing to see any merit in the other’s arguments.

Fire damages New Star Books offices: arson suspected

The CBC is reporting that arson investigators are looking into a suspicious fire that damaged the East Vancouver offices of New Star Books.

Sprinklers in the building contained the flames but the business suffered extensive smoke and water damage.

Vancouver Fire and Rescue Services Captain Gabe Roder said investigators have determined the fire was deliberately set and the Vancouver police arson squad has been called in to continue the investigation.

Details are sketchy at this point, although the Vancouver Sun indicates that the fire at the New Star offices, located on the 3400 block of Commercial Street, was one of four blazes Vancouver fire fighters fought overnight. None of the fires appear to have been connected; the Vancouver Sun claims that the other three resulted from carelessly discarded cigarettes.

There were no injuries as a result of any of the four fires.

Andrew Westoll wins the Charles Taylor Prize

The $25,000 Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-fiction was awarded to Andrew Westoll for his book The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary: A Canadian Story of Resilience and Recovery at a ceremony in Toronto this afternoon. The book follows Westoll’s experience with 13 chimps that have been “retired” from biomedical research. The jury citation for Westoll’s book reads in part:

Westoll deftly draws the reader into the wild day-to-day ride of life with the Fauna chimps and soon their “otherness” falls away. Through his lens, the chimps are revealed as the individuals they are, with all their foibles, damage, and possibility – and the reader’s world view shifts on its axis. Heartrending and heart-warming, this is a stunning and important work of art and documentary and science.

A tweet from CBC Books indicates that Westoll thanked his wife and dedicated his award to the chimps.

The other shortlisted titles, culled from a longlist of 11 books, were:

• Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest by Wade Davis (Knopf Canada)
• Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber, and Life with the Tree-Planting Tribe by Charlotte Gill (Greystone Books)
• The Measure of a Man: The Story of a Father, a Son, and a Suit by J.J. Lee (McClelland & Stewart)
• Afflictions and Departures: Essays by Madeline Sonik (Anvil Press)

This year’s jury consisted of Harvard University dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Allan M. Brandt; investigative journalist (and former Charles Taylor nominee) Stevie Cameron; and editor Susan Renouf. The runners-up each receive $2,000.

You can listen to Q&Q podcasts featuring Westoll and Gill, and watch for more coverage later today on Q&Q Omni.

Amazon, the iPad, and the culture of reading in an age of distraction

“It’s like trying to cook when there are little children around.” That’s the assessment of one David Myers, a 53-year-old system administrator in Atlanta, regarding the experience of reading a book on the Kindle Fire. Myers is quoted in a New York Times article about the qualitative aspects of reading on multimedia, Internet-enabled devices. The article finds, unsurprisingly, that devices such as the iPad or the Kindle Fire, which are capable of surfing the Internet or streaming video, promote heightened distractibility among readers.

People who read ebooks on tablets like the iPad are realizing that while a book in print or on a black-and-white Kindle is straightforward and immersive, a tablet offers a menu of distractions that can fragment the reading experience, or stop it in its tracks.

Email lurks tantalizingly within reach. Looking up a tricky word or unknown fact in the book is easily accomplished through a quick Google search. And if a book starts to drag, giving up on it to stream a movie over Netflix or scroll through your Twitter feed is only a few taps away.

The argument is not a new one, having been well rehearsed in volumes such as Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows and William Powers’s Hamlet’s Blackberry. Nor is it likely to gain much traction with technophiles who envision a not-so-distant future in which even dedicated e-readers will feature enhanced books that link to external multimedia content.

And there is something to be said for the devices’ insistence that a book hold a reader’s attention. As Erin Faulk says in the NYT piece: “Recently, I gravitate to books that make me forget I have a world of entertainment at my fingertips. If the book’s not good enough to do that, I guess my time is better spent.”

Still, what Cory Doctorow referred to as an “ecosystem of interruption technologies” embedded in devices such as the iPad may be partly to blame for the reason Carr is able to quote Clay Shirky as writing, “No one reads War and Peace.… It’s too long and not so interesting.” Or maybe the lure of YouTube is just too great.

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.