Last night, House of Anansi Press united readers and writers in discussions about books, writing, the Alice Hoffman Twitter freak out, and how incredibly long it takes to drive from downtown Toronto to Don Mills in rush-hour traffic. Anansi held an online contest to select eight readers to accompany the Anansi Girls (Emily Schultz, Lisa Moore, Karen Solie, and Shani Mootoo) on a “magic bus” (actually a white mini-coach bus) on a trip from the Anansi offices at 110 Spadina to the authors’ public reading at McNally Robinson Booksellers in Don Mills.

According to Julie Wilson, online content manager at Anansi, the press wanted to create an event around these four female authors to showcase their work, as well as to show support for indie bookseller McNally Robinson. In Wilson’s words: “Don Mills is not exactly local [...] so we thought the easiest thing to do is to just put people on a bus!”

After a long drive through the side streets of Toronto (as well as along the Bridle Path, where the authors muttered comments such as, “If your book sells really, really well, you too can live here!”), the readers and writers arrived in rainy Don Mills for the readings.

The International Festival of Authors has just announced the preliminary lineup for this year’s edition, which will mark the festival’s 30th anniversary. (In the press release, the festival is dubbed “IFOA XXX,” which suggests the usual schedule of readings, panels, and onstage interviews will be enlivened by literary mud wrestling and peep shows. Alas…)

Though it seems a wee bit early  for the announcement – the festival runs Oct. 21-31 – the list of confirmed authors is impressive.

Already confirmed are Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, Barry Callaghan, Anne Michaels, Lisa Moore, Miriam Toews, Daniel Poliquin, Leon Rooke, Jane Urquhart, John Irving, Nicholson Baker, Debra Adelaide, Denise Mina, Tash Aw, Paul Theroux, Sarah Waters, Audrey Niffenegger, Kyle Buckley, Paul Durcan, Jacob McArthur Mooney, Linwood Barclay, John Brady, Hal Niedzviecki, Tim Cook, Sherman Alexie, John Bemrose, Diana Fitzgerald Bryden, Bonnie Burnard, Dani Couture, Michael Crummey, Anne DeGrace, Margaret Elphinstone, Robert Girardi, Jason Guriel, Jennica Harper, Jim Lynch, Linden MacIntyre, Jean McNeil, James W. Nichol, Kate Pullinger, Boualem Sansal, Ingo Schulze, Olive Senior, Adam Thorpe, Michael Turner, and Alexis Wright.

In other words, more writers than you can shake a stick at.

There will also be an appearance by Anne Murray – yes, that Anne Murray – and fans of the late Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series will get a look at a new, 6th installment, penned by U.K. kidlit favourite Eoin Colfer.

(We are also happy to note that Q&Q’s own Meaghan Strimas will be reading at the festival.)

A lot of bookish types were annoyed when rapper, producer, professional spoilt brat, and now author Kanye West claimed to be a “proud non-reader” in a recent interview. We’re guessing, however, that more than a few book tour-weary authors will offer up a quiet hallelujah at the sentiment West expresses at the end of a typically tense interview with Entertainment Weekly:

You know what I don’t like about the continuous questions about elaborating, is I’m not trying to give someone else a book to write. The book is itself. I just want to use this opportunity to explain to people why they need to buy this book. That’s what happens. Why elaborate?

Grumpy Bird author/illustrator Jeremy Tankard recently chatted with Sonja Bolle of the Los Angeles Times. Here are some highlights:

SB: Is Grumpy Bird based on anyone in your life?

JT: I’d probably be in trouble if I answered that honestly.

[...]

SB: What kind of a reader are you?

JT: The irony was that [as a kid] I was not a big reader at all. There were a million things I’d rather do than read a book. I still love being read to, but it wasn’t until I was 30 or 31 that I started to enjoy reading. [He's 36 now.]

[...]

SB: What are you working on now?

JT: Possibly an illustrated novel, maybe a chapter book taking advantage of my love of comic books. My editor at Scholastic did The Invention of Hugo Cabret with Brian Selznick, so she’s open to doing something unusual. I’ve got a story mostly written.

The great thing is that what I thought would be a hobby to supplement my work turns out to be a viable career.

Tankard also lays out the genesis of the Grumpy Bird character and series, something he talked about in Q&Q’s Jan/Feb cover story on children’s illustrators.

Prolific children’s author Robert Munsch will join Margaret Atwood and Pierre Berton to become the third author among the 124 members of Canada’s Walk of Fame in September. The announcement from Canada’s Walk of Fame and Canwest describes Munsch’s contribution to Canadian culture:

From the first time he stood in front of a group of children as a student teacher at a nursery school in 1972, Munsch’s animated presentation grabbed hold of the imaginations of his listeners and he’s been telling stories ever since.

To qualify for induction to Canada’s Walk of Fame, candidates must have been born in Canada or have spent their formative or creative years here. Munsch, a Pittsburgh native, falls under the latter category. Although Munsch, 64, suffered a stroke last August and has yet to return to writing, the author’s editor at Scholastic Canada, Diane Kerner, assured fans in a recent comment on a Toronto Star article that there are many more Munsch books to come:

As Robert Munsch’s editor, I want to let readers know that while he may not be writing new stories right now, he has dozens of stories ready for publication and Scholastic continues to publish two books a year. His most recent book, Down the Drain!, came out this spring, and Roar! will be published in September.

Among the many reactions to Alice Munro’s well-deserved winning of the Man Booker International Prize, one of the more interesting is that of The New Yorker, the magazine that has published the lion’s share of Munro’s stories over the decades.

On The Book Bench, the magazine’s book blog, Willing Davidson claims that “the arrival of a Munro story in the fiction department is always an event – her typescript pages, with their oddly bolded paragraphs, produce an almost atavistic salivary response.”

Really? They actually salivate when a new story arrives? Munro’s stories are great and all, but you know you’ve perhaps given over too much of your life to literature when you find yourself preparing to eat one.

Though, given how dry Munro’s prose style can be, perhaps a little spit is exactly what’s needed.

Though novelists who are also doctors (Chekhov, Maugham, Vincent Lam) get the most attention, there have been a few creative writers who have occupied lofty positions in the business world, too. Criminally underrated novelist Henry Green, for example, owned and ran a factory.

Aaannnd, that’s about all we can think of right now. (Feel free to suggest others in the comments.)

The Globe and Mail does bring to light a much more contemporary example of a writer-executive: Anne Giardini, author of Advice for Italian Boys, and, as of last fall, president of Weyerhaeuser Co..

From the Globe Q&A with Giardini:

Are you a weekend writer?

Weekends, evenings, trips. I don’t dislike business travel because if I’m uncommitted for an evening, I have time to write. I don’t know what people do when they are travelling for business and not writing a novel – that’s what I want to know.

Do you write in hotel rooms?

And airplanes. First, I catch up on whatever reading I have, and then my reward is to do a bit of writing.

Is there something about you that likes precision – in law and in prose?

I think that’s true, and the two careers reinforce each other. I’ve always believed that language in the wrong hands can be dangerous, and it’s a powerful tool both for law and for creative writing.

[...]

Will you eventually move into full-time writing?

I think I would hate that. What would worry me is the tyranny of the empty page. I can ignore that now because I’m busy at work. I really believe I do my best writing when I’m working on other things – so that when I come to write, I’ve worked a lot of it through. I have what I want to say fully formed. It more or less cooks on the back burner.

Your mother must have been proud to see a child become a writer.

I would think. Sadly, she died before my first book came out, but I think she felt confident there would be one.

NB: That last question is not a complete non sequitur – Giardini’s mother was the late Carol Shields.

Author and former New Yorker staff writer Dan Baum is attracting attention with an essay about his tenure at the prestigious magazine in that he’s posting on Twitter. Baum began his story this past Friday and has been gaining followers ever since, with 200 new readers joining in a two-hour period this morning. At the time of this writing, Baum is up to 1,411 followers.

Baum’s essay details his hiring (and firing) from The New Yorker and features many tidbits about his career in between, including links to stories he pitched but were never printed, information about his salary, and his commitment not to write for competing magazines such as Harper’s, The Atlantic, and The New York Times Magazine.

What the L.A. Times‘ Jacket Copy blog cleverly points out, however, is that the timing of Baum’s “big reveal” is rather suspect, considering he left The New Yorker back in 2007. Carolyn Kellogg writes:

It could be a Twitter experiment. It reads like a short essay that’s been chopped into 140-character bits (in a few places, sentences stretch across two tweets). Or maybe he’s promoting something. Could he have a book out?

In fact, he does. Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans was well-reviewed when it was released in February. It’s doing pretty well on Amazon (No. 1 in the subcategories of histories/Louisiana and biographies and memoirs/regional U.S./South). But it’s hard for a book to stay top of mind after the first flurry of attention.

While this Quillblogger is a fan of Twitter, this voyeuristic exposition sure doesn’t help counter the arguments that the site’s main use is for self-serving promotion.

Last week, Robert J. Sawyer – a.k.a. the Canadian author most likely to have his brain kept alive in a jar for centuries to come (Christian Bök being a close second) – launched his newest novel, Wake (Viking Canada), at Dominion on Toronto’s Queen Street East. The event was hosted by BakkaPhoenix Books. (Photos courtesy of Carolyn Clink)

Bakka’s Chris Szego and Aurora Simmons bag the books.

Space television’s Mark Askwith (fresh from having interviewed Sawyer onstage), Lesley Livingston, author of Wondrous Strange (HarperCollins Canada), and Sawyer.

Sawyer fan Troy Perault displays the tattoo he had made of Sawyer’s signature from a previous event. See, now here’s the difference between sci-fi writers and rock stars – sci-fi writers sign their fans’ legs.

An article published earlier this week in The New York Times looks at author Scott Turow’s decision to switch publishers for his impending Presumed Innocent sequel. It’s not exactly a publisher switch, though – as the article clarifies, Turow has simply decided to grant hardcover rights to his usual mass-market publisher, Grand Central Publishing. His usual hardcover publisher, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, has been left out in the cold. What’s noteworthy about this is how it reflects the growing sea-change in attitudes toward old publishing models.

Mr. Turow said in an interview that it no longer made sense to have one house publishing his books in hardcover and another releasing them in paperback. Such arrangements were common when he first sold the rights to Presumed Innocent in 1986 but are much rarer now, especially for a bestselling author. Terms of the new deal were not disclosed.

[...]

Gail Hochman, Mr. Turow’s agent, said splitting editions between two houses made it more difficult for an author to achieve the best possible financial arrangement. “We’re not unhappy with anything we’ve gotten, but it stretches the boundaries of the business,” she said. “Any publisher will acknowledge that if they are going to pay a significant advance for a significant author, they can make their money back and work harder on the book if they have two editions.”