Authors Paul Quarrington, David Adams Richards, and Emily Perkins all read and spoke at an event held at the Leander Boat Club in Hamilton, Ontario, Monday, May 5, 2008. The event was hosted by bookseller Bryan Prince and A Different Drummer Books. (Photos courtesy of A Different Drummer.)

Emily Perkins and Bryan Prince.

Paul Quarrington signs books with the help of a cold drink, a small pile of cash, and Ian Elliot of A Different Drummer.

David Adams Richards gets a grip on the lectern.

In J.K. Rowling backlash news this week, some Harvard students are apparently upset at plans to have Harry Potter’s creator deliver the school’s commencement address next month, according to a Scotsman article.

Adam Goldenberg, a Canadian student who writes for the Harvard Crimson, the daily newspaper at the university, said: “Our commencement speaker tricked parents into letting their kids read books filled with sex, murder, and homosexual role models.

“Harvard seniors have every right to demand a Harvard-calibre speaker. Harry Potter – and JK Rowling – is just a flash in the pan. Writing bedtime stories is lame – just ask Tolkien and CS Lewis. The class of 2008 has been royally screwed by Harvard. A petty pop culture personality of questionable permanence will send us on our merry way, while figures of real substance wait in the wings.”

A real charmer, eh? Doing Canada proud and all that.

Hang on a second, though – that quote is actually from a blog entry in which Goldenberg satirizes the anti-Rowling brigade. That should be clear enough from the Tolkien and Lewis references, but it seems lost on Scotsman writer Tristan Stewart-Robertson.

Goldenberg’s blog post also notes, “Last year’s speaker, Bill Gates, waxed so poetic about ‘appalling disparities of health, and wealth, and opportunity,’ that hundreds of graduates quit the lucrative jobs awaiting them on Wall Street and set off to change the world.” An obvious bit of sarcasm that, again, wasn’t quite obvious enough for the Scotsman’s Stewart-Robertson, who writes, “Last year’s words of wisdom to graduates, from Microsoft boss Bill Gates, reportedly inspired a large number of students to opt for charitable work rather than Wall Street firms.” Sheesh.

From CBC.ca:

Like Trekkies or Beatles fanatics, James Bond buffs are proud of the factoid retention that comes with their obsessive fandom. Thus, when the Fleming Collection – an art museum originally endowed by Robert Fleming, financier grandfather of Bond creator Ian Fleming – announced the launch of an exhibit celebrating the cover art of James Bond novels, the calls started pouring in.

“We’ve had to deal with the fans every step of the way,” says Selina Skipwith, curator of Bond Bound. “The responses to the literature on our website were like” — and here she affects a drippy tone to mimic a Bond fan — “‘You say Fleming was 43 when he wrote Casino Royale, but in fact he turned 44 before he handed the manuscript to the publisher, Jonathan Cape.’”

Luckily, as keeper of the Fleming Collection, Skipwith is armed with more Bond minutiae than most aficionados. In preparation for the exhibit, which opened April 22, she returned to the Fleming oeuvre, rereading dozens of novels and comparing cover artwork from dozens of countries. Skipwith is the ultimate Bond girl – at least until late June, when the exhibit closes and, in all probability, London will be Bonded out.

Only in the U.K. would the curator of a major exhibit openly mock that exhibit’s target audience.

Vanity Fair has an interview with A Million Little Pieces author James Frey – his first major one since his notorious appearance on Oprah’s show in 2006, and his last for a while, at least according to Vanity Fair. The magazine – as is its right – pumps up the “butterfly broken on the wheel” aspect of the story and comes on like a 1930s noir tell-all:

The story of what really happened with A Million Little Pieces has not been told in its full complexity. Owing to a non-disclosure agreement between Frey and Random House (which owns Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, the imprint that published it), neither he nor the publishing house can speak about what happened. But an investigation by Vanity Fair suggests that the story is significantly more complicated than Man Cons World. There were no fake Web sites, no wigs worn, no relatives pretending to be spokesmen for nonexistent corporations. It is the story, first, of a literary genre in which publishers thought they had found the surefire recipe for success, but one with such dangerously combustible ingredients that it could explode at any moment. On the one hand, memoirs have often been afforded a certain poetic license to stray from absolute truth in the interest of storytelling. On the other, they have the appeal of the real. Over the years, the marketplace hungered for more of both. Give us more drama! And tell us it’s all true! The publishing world responded, pumping up both. It was inevitable that one day the mixture would blow up in someone’s face. Frey had the right story to tell, the talent to get heard, the soaring ambition, and the right professional champions hungry for a hit.

Q&Q contributor Sarah Weinman outlines her troubles with the whole notion of getting books signed in a blog entry on the Guardian site:

The last vestiges of excitement about inscriptions disappeared when I became a freelance writer. Now there were scads of books arriving on my doorstep, more than I knew what to do with and most of which I did not want to read. And even though reading for a living is definitely the best job in the world, it’s still accompanied by the stress of paying the bills and chasing down errant pay-cheques. My snobbery about separating church from state, so to speak, worsened - to the point where I’ve skipped book parties and signings because I’d rather avoid the awkwardness of not having a book to present for a signature. When I heard National Book Award-winning novelist Richard Powers read from his work-in-progress and then explain that he didn’t sign books because it fostered a connection between author and reader that did not exist, I thought it was liberating.

Now I wonder if I’ve taken the proverbial wrong turn at Albuquerque, brought home with embarrassing clarity after a recent interview of an author I admired very much. I’d just shut off the tape after 40 minutes of nervous, disjointed conversation. A copy of his new novel sat to my left, propping up the two sheets of paper filled with questions I’d ended up not asking during the conversation. I’d begun packing up my things, certain the interview hadn’t gone well at all.

And then he asked, “Do you want me to sign your book?”

Instead of saying “yes, thank you” or politely demurring, I mumbled some incoherent twaddle about not wanting a signature because it had no meaning for me. He took my comments with reasonable humour despite the fact that he had ample justification for pointing out my rudeness. On the way out, conducting small talk on autopilot, I cursed myself for my idiocy and pondered why I had been so flippant, why I had missed the boat so badly. The dynamics were odd, yes, and I was more nervous than usual because I was in his home and didn’t want to come off like a blithering fool, but would a signature have really breached the invisible line between professional journalist and enthusiastic fan? Is this “bah, humbug” defence mechanism, adopted as a means of keeping distance, actually detrimental?

Ian McEwan, Khaled Hosseini, and J.K. Rowling were all honoured at the Galaxy British Book Awards last night, but much of the subsequent media coverage has focused on a brief moment after the awards, when Rowling came perilously close to a boob reveal.

From The Daily Mirror’s pun-tastic take on events:

She may be a wizard with words – but Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling keeps getting herself in a right old muggle with her frocks.

At the Galaxy British Book Awards on Wednesday night she almost revealed everything in her Chamber of Secrets as her figure-hugging purple satin gown suddenly started Slytherin down.

Luckily her press aide Mark Hutchinson gave new meaning to the phrase PR handout – by quickly grabbing the top of the dress to spare her blushes.

J.K., who picked up the Outstanding Achievement Award at London’s Grosvenor House, suffered more overexposure on a U.S. tour last year when her dress slipped to reveal her white bra.

Not to dedicate too much more time to this, but be sure to scroll down in the Mirror piece for the three-picture slide-show of the dramatic rescue as it unfolded.

According to The Baltimore Sun, hometown hero Tom Clancy is heading to Maryland’s highest court today to do battle with Wanda T. King – formerly Wanda Clancy – over rights to a series of books that bears his name.

At issue is a lucrative series of a dozen books called Tom Clancy’s Op-Center – a fictional U.S. anti-terrorist agency written in a Clancy-esque style and given muscular titles such as Op-Center: Acts of War and Op-Center: State of Siege. […] Clancy will fight to overturn a 2005 decision by a Calvert County Circuit Court judge giving [his ex-wife] control of [the] series.

While Clancy and former-friend-turned-business-adversary Steve Pieczenik are credited with creating the series, the bulk of the writing has fallen to a less exalted author named Jeff Rovin – whose name can generally be found on the covers in much smaller print than Clancy’s. […] The famous writer apparently became disenchanted with the series after King walked away with an equal share of the Jack Ryan Limited Partnership as part of the couple’s divorce settlement. In an e-mail introduced as evidence in the case, Clancy said of the Op-Center books: “I don’t even read them.”

The most gossipy parts of the story are toward the end, when Sun reporter Michael Dresser looks back at the messy-sounding divorce that preceded all of this.

Tom and Wanda Clancy’s marriage of more than 25 years apparently began falling apart in 1995, when she filed for divorce charging that her husband had committed adultery with a New York woman nicknamed “Ping-Ping” whom he met over the Internet.

[…]

In the Calvert County trial, Clancy claimed he wanted to take his name off the Op-Center novels for business reasons. Among other things, he claimed that the books were not making money and were hurting his “literary reputation.”

[…]

Pieczenik quoted Clancy as vowing to kill the Op-Center series before he would give “another dollar” to King and describing her in terms that devoted family man Jack Ryan would never have uttered about the mother of his children.

Margaret Atwood, writing in The Guardian, offers a lengthy take on Anne of Green Gables. Aside from giving a brief intro to the book to those who haven’t read it – and those who haven’t “are most likely male,” she says – Atwood delves into the darker side of the Anne story that has helped give it such lasting power. She also takes a look at Anne tourism:

We didn’t buy any Anne dolls or cookbooks, nor did we visit the “Green Gables” facsimile farmhouse, which – judging from online accounts of it – is as complete as Sherlock Holmes’s digs on Baker Street, containing everything from the slate Anne broke over Gilbert Blythe’s head to her wardrobe of puffed-sleeve dresses to the brooch she was accused, wrongly, of losing. There’s even a pretend Matthew who gives you drives around the property, though he’s not described as running to hide out in the barn at the approach of lady visitors, as the real Matthew would have done. Now I wish I’d taken in more of these sights while I had the chance, though somewhere along the way we did check out the early 20th-century one-room schoolhouse where the high double desks were just like the ones Anne would have known.

Atwood also attempts to get to the bottom of the Japanese fascination for all things Anne. The answers she gets from Japanese fans are interesting, but don’t really illuminate anything, so she attempts her own explanation:

Anne has no fear of hard work: she’s forgetful because dreamy, but she’s not a shirker. She displays a proper attitude when she puts others before herself, and even more praiseworthy is that these others are elders. She has an appreciation of poetry, and although she shows signs of materialism – her longing for puffed sleeves is legendary – in her deepest essence, she’s spiritual. And, high on the list, Anne breaks the Japanese taboo that forbade outbursts of temper on the part of young people. She acts out spectacularly, stamping her feet and hurling insults back at those who insult her, and even resorting to physical violence, most notably in the slate-over-the-head episode. This must have afforded much vicarious pleasure to young Japanese readers; indeed, to all Anne’s young readers of yesteryear, so much more repressed than the children of today. Had they thrown scenes like the ones Anne throws, they would have got what my mother referred to as What For, or, if things were particularly bad, Hail Columbia.

We here at Quillblog remember a day – back when we were young and having remarkable and poignant experiences we reserve the right to one day lay out in book form – when memoirs were expected to be at least within the neighbourhood of the truth. In these relativist times, however, when the boundaries between “truth” and “fiction” are just about non-existent, a memoir is most commonly defined as “a novel, told in the first person, that sells a hell of a lot of copies.”

Over at Slate, Meghan O’Rourke wonders how the hell this all came to be. Slate also give us a sneak peek at the memoir scandals we can expect to see over the next couple of months, including at-last revealed stretchers from St. Augustine (“’There’s just no reason to believe that the thornbushes of lust ever grew rank about his head,’ says historian Carlo Ricci….”) and Persepolis author Marjane Satrapi (“Satrapi does in fact have both lips and eyelids. She also confessed to ‘completely making up the whole two-dimension thing.’”).

C. Max Magee at The Millions points us to the latest in lit fun: literary action figures.

While most kids were playing with G.I. Joes or Barbies, we at The Millions were more likely to have our nose in a book. Finally, there are molded plastic figurines for us too, though its not clear whether they are fully posable or offer kung-fu grip action. We’ll take what we can get. Who among us wouldn’t enjoy staging our own literary roundtables with the likes of Jane Austen, Oscar Wilde, and Charles Dickens?

Magee doesn’t mention whether the figures come with a free inhaler refill and anti-wedgie kit.

For bonus wedgie points, The Millions also points us to a complete list of the Wikipedia entries updated and added to by author Nicholson Baker – a list that does not include, interestingly enough, the Wikipedia article on Baker himself.

A dapper-looking Douglas Coupland is interviewed on The New York Times’ book blog about his next book (“a new novel set in the near future when bees are extinct”), his thoughts on the web and reference librarians, and the authors shelved next to him on bookstore shelves.

(Read the comments to be reminded that hell hath no fury like a reference librarian scorned.)

From Reuters:

Billionaire Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling would feel “exploited” if a fan’s unofficial encyclopedic companion to the boy wizard series was published, she said in court papers made public on Thursday.

Steve Vander Ark has written The Harry Potter Lexicon – a 400-page reference book based on his popular fan Web site (www.hp-lexicon.org). Rowling and Warner Bros. are suing RDR Books, which planned to publish the book last November.

“I am very frustrated that a former fan has tried to co-opt my work for financial gain,” Rowling, 42, who wrote the seven hugely successful Harry Potter novels, said in a declaration filed in U.S. District Court this week.

We’re not copyright lawyers, but we’re pretty sure that lexicons, literary guides, book-length exegeses, annotated editions, and literary companion volumes existed long before little Harry took his first trip aboard the Hogwarts Express.

(And note how Rowling dubs Ark a “former fan” – zing!)

The other day Quillblog noticed that The New Yorker’s website lists “keywords” for its archived articles, including fiction. Quillblog also noticed that in many cases the keywords (a) tell a little story of their own, and/or (b) are often pretty entertaining.

So here’s a challenge for fans of CanLit giant (and New Yorker regular) Alice Munro: match the keyword collections with the story they refer to.

The stories are “Dimension” (June 2006); “Wenlock Edge” (December 2005); “The View from Castle Rock” (August 2005); and “Passion” (March 2004).

The keywords:

A. College Students; Second Cousins; Dinners; Roommates; Love Affairs; Kept Women; “A Shropshire Lad”

B. Boyfriends; Love; Dates; Houses; Ottowa [sic] Valley; Sabot Lake; Canada

C. Murder; Children; Marriage; Mental Illness; Buses; Ontario, Canada; Social Workers

D. Ocean Voyages; Immigrants, Immigration; Atlantic Ocean; Edinburgh, Scotland; Quebec, Canada; Pregnant, Pregnancy; Children

Answers after the jump!

(more…)

As The New York Times reports, American novelist Richard Ford has switched publishers, signing with Ecco for his next three books after failing to reach an agreement with longtime publisher Knopf. But for us Canadian readers, the more relevant info is the scoop on Ford’s next novel:

His first novel with Ecco, scheduled for a 2010 release, is tentatively titled “Canada,” and will be a “novel of revenge and violent retribution set on the Saskatchewan prairie, in the early 1960s,” according to Ecco’s statement.

The move shouldn’t be that much of a surprise – Ford has a well-known fondness for Canada, while much of his earlier work is set not that far from Saskatchewan, in Montana and Wyoming. It does seem ironic, though, that as many Canuck writers are self-consciously moving away from the traditional CanLit tale, international names like Ford and Stef Penney are heading for it.

After being much-chastised for trying to pass his first novel off as a memoir, James Frey, author of a A Million Little Pieces, is preparing to release a new novel in May. Apparently embracing his controversial side, Frey has asked artist Richard Prince to design the cover for Bright Shiny Morning, Page Six reports.

Prince has been shaking up the New York art scene with his highly sought-after photographs of billboards, such as Marlboro ads – works that were originally created by other photographers.

Some book-related links:

• “Free Radicals,” a new short story by Alice Munro (The New Yorker)
• Robert Fisk’s bio of Saddam Hussein is selling well – except he didn’t write it (The Independent)
• Why does it take so long to publish a book? (The New York Times)
• How the online archive of one student’s books became the behemoth that is LibraryThing.com (The Wall Street Journal)
• The trouble with translations (Times Online)
• Alberto Manguel on Dante’s Divine Comedy (The Globe and Mail)
• An interview with critic James Wood (Financial Times)

The New York Times reports that a new online book show is due to hit the Web in March.

The program will be hosted by Daniel Menaker, former editor-in-chief of Random House.

The show, to be called “Titlepage,” will feature a round-table discussion between Mr. Menaker, 66, a former fiction editor at The New Yorker, and a group of four authors. The first episode will be streamed online at titlepage.tv on March 3. The idea is to take advantage of the fact that it’s much easier to post video online than to get a show on television.

“Titlepage” will combine elements of “Apostrophes,” a popular French literary program; “The Charlie Rose Show” on public television; and “Dinner for Five,” in which a group of actors discussed their craft, on the Independent Film Channel.

Created by documentary filmmakers Odile Isralson and Lina Matta, the program is set to feature authors Richard Price (Clockers), Susan Choi (A Person of Interest), and debut novelist Charles Bock (Beautiful Children) in its premiere episode, followed two weeks later by the second episode, on first-time authors.

Canadian talent fared well in this year’s Oscar nominations, announced this morning. And in case you needed an excuse to catch the February 24 ceremony – if it happens – there’s a publishing tie-in, too.

Besides the best actress nod for Halifax’s Ellen Page for Juno, which is dominating Canadian headlines, Toronto director/actor/activist Sarah Polley is up for best adapted screenplay for her directorial debut Away From Her, based on the Alice Munro story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain.” Julie Christie also got a best actress nomination for her role in the film.

The news dovetails with a mini-debate on GalleyCat about how Polley’s film has accomplished the seemingly unthinkable by sexing up Alice Munro for a mass audience. Yesterday, a mildly scandalized reader complained about the new Vintage paperback edition for The View From Castle Rock (pictured above), first published in 2004.

“I saw the cover for the paperback of Alice Munro’s latest collection, The View from Castle Rock, in an ad in the NY Times Book Review,” a GalleyCat reader emails, “and Vintage has given the book a Sessalee Hensley makeover.” … [I]t’s not too hard to see what he’s talking about, although my reference point upon first glance wasn’t so much Hensley, the fiction buyer for Barnes & Noble, as it was all those chick lit covers with women’s legs and no faces. (Not to mention the hot pink lettering; nice touch, that!) “While I understand the effort to sell more copies, it seems like a desperate approach for such a great writer,” our source continues, addressing the “chick lit” question directly: “Is that Vintage’s marketing strategy? I guess, if it gets Munro into more people’s hands it’s a good thing, but for me there’s a real disconnect in tone between the cover and the contents.”

Today, another reader rebuts by asking if Munro’s (or Munro’s publisher’s) concession to the marketplace is really such a big deal. After all, in CanLit, as in Canadian film, opportunities to sell out are few and far between.

On Saturday, the Toronto Star published a number of eco-themed essays by such CanLit luminaries as David Adams Richards, Margaret Atwood, Jane Urquhart, Austin Clarke, Robert Bateman, Wayne Grady, John Wilson, and Stephen Marche.

(True to fashion, Marche complains about all the attention given to boring old-growth forests instead of hip, young trees that grow in Brooklyn. Just kidding.)

The essays were inspired by a short film by Star photographer Lucas Oleniuk entitled Airsick.

The film, as well as all of the essays, can be seen here.

A literary ethical dilemma involving the unpublished writings of Vladimir Nabokov is discussed at length by journalist Ron Rosenbaum over at Slate. It seems that Nabokov’s sole remaining unpublished work – a manuscript titled The Original of Laura – is mouldering away somewhere in a Swiss bank vault, unread. But Nabokov’s sole surviving heir – his 73-year-old son Dmitri – is torn about what he should do with it. Should he destroy it, as his father specifically requested, or ignore those wishes and unveil it to the world?

For the past two years I’ve involved myself in this question in print and in e-mail correspondence with Dmitri Nabokov, but a recent communication from Dmitri to me suggests that a decision may be near.

[…]

Dmitri’s predicament goes beyond Laura. It’s one that raises the difficult issue of who “owns” a work of art, particularly an unfinished work of art by a dead author who did not want anything but his finished work to become public. Who controls its fate? The dead hand from the grave? Or the eager, perhaps overeager, readers, scholars, and biographers who want to get their hands on it no matter what state it’s in?

To burn or not to burn? It’s not a question we can argue over forever. Time is running out, and the stakes are high: Dmitri’s past pronouncements suggest that Laura is not merely another scrap of paper. At one point he called it “the most concentrated distillation of [my father’s] creativity.”

So, to burn or not to burn? What say you, gentle readers?

Ian McEwan is the subject of a Q&A in The New Republic that ranges from the perils of movie adaptations, the worth of literary realism, and McEwan’s rarely concealed view on religion.

McEwan also offers his thoughts on book blogs:

I don’t read the blogs much. I don’t like the tone – the rather in-your-face road-rage quality of a lot of exchange on the Internet. I don’t like the threads that come out of any given piece of journalism. It seems that when people know they can’t be held accountable, when they don’t have eye contact, it seems to bring out a rather nasty, truculent, aggressive edge that I think slightly doesn’t belong in the world of book reviewing.

Thanks for that, you weedy, four-eyed, knee-jerk atheistic, Booker Prize recidivist.

It’s an interesting read, but we have to note – from way up on our high blog-horses – the fact that the occasion for the interview was not the recent publication of McEwan’s latest novel On Chesil Beach, but rather the fact that the film adaptation of Atonement was up for a bunch of Golden Globe awards.

Preliminary reviews of CBC TV’s jPod are in, and so far critical reception of the new hour-long comedy-drama series – based on the novel by Douglas Coupland – is decidedly mixed.

The only wholeheartedly favourable review is by Toronto Star critic Vinay Menon, who says the series’ premiere episode, which airs tonight at 9 pm, left him “craving” the second. At the other end of the spectrum is fusty National Post columnist Robert Cushman, who confesses his befuddlement regarding the series’ title (“You might guess that a jPod would be the next thing up from an iPod. Guess again.”) and offers a wholesale rejection of its premise, which unites a rag-tag group of eccentric video game producers on the basis of a random computer glitch. As Cushman puts it:

I mean, by my simple arithmetic the show’s co-workers, employees of a huge Vancouver company called Neotronic Arts, have been herded now for seven years, time enough for even the most intransigent organization to have acknowledged that its computer had bungled and to have done something to put it right.

In the past, the CBC’s attempts to appeal to the under-30 demographic have often been disastrous (Freestyle, here’s looking at you), so producers are clearly looking to the series for big things. If it catches on, it could benefit Canadian publishing as well, by directing TV viewers to Coupland’s novels and even promoting an image of CanLit as urban and contemporary – a view that’s not exactly widespread.

That trickle-down effect might be too much to hope for, however, if an interview with actor Alan Thicke is anything to go by. Thicke, who is most famous for playing Jason Seaver on Growing Pains and has a supporting role on jPod, says that he hasn’t read the book and isn’t planning to either. “Nothing against Douglas – I don’t read books,” he tells the Post.

The film adaptation of Raymond Briggs’ The Snowman is almost as inescapable at this time of year as Rudolph and Charlie Brown and the Grinch. This year marks the 25th anniversary of the wordless and – come on, admit it – touching film; the stage version turns 10, and the book itself will turn 30 next year. Briggs, not known for being a particularly touchy-feely kind of author, is a little baffled at the staying power of the book and the film, according to icBerkshire:

“I can’t understand it. It just goes on and on. We don’t see a quarter of the spin-off merchandising in this country. In Japan, everything you can think of has got a snowman on it – socks, pyjamas, duvets, toothbrushes, tooth mugs, electric lamps, everything under the sun.” The wry author sighs as he admits:

“I did a piece in 1997 saying I was never going to say a word to anybody about it ever again, yet here we are. You can’t ignore the 25th anniversary, or whatever it is.”

Briggs is also profiled in The Times, which provides a glimpse into his (mostly unhappy) creative process:

To use his own words, the business of putting together a strip cartoon book is “fiddle-arsing beyond belief”.

“It’s rather like making a film. You have to write the script, then become the director. People don’t realise how complicated it is. You have to decide who is coming in from the left, who from the right. Who speaks first – the maddening thing is that the person on the left always has to speak first, which is often very awkward.

“Then you have to become the set designer, and ask ‘Where are they in this scene?’ Is it a kitchen? Is it the sitting room? What is the view from the window? Then you become the lighting person. Is it evening? Have they got any artificial light on yet? What’s the light like outside? Then you are the costume designer. What are they wearing? What did a woman’s pinny look like in the 1930s?

“Then, when the ‘film’ is finished you have to put that to one side and become a book designer – do the typography, lay out the pagination, design the number of pages . . . in film or theatre you would have hundreds of people doing this for you. But you have to do the whole bloody thing yourself.”

And on that cheery note, Quillblog rests for the holidays. We’ll be back in the new year with more stories from the mad, manic, upside-down world of … well, more stories about books, anyway.

Happy holidays.

Q&Q’s Deals page is on a holiday break, but we would be remiss if we didn’t mention this deal, from The Globe and Mail’s “The Biz” column:

Rebecca Eckler has signed a deal for two novels with Key Porter Books. The first, Private School Confidential, is due in 2009. Eckler and Erica Ehm are also collaborating on a children’s book, Mischievous Moms, for Key Porter.

Is it just us, or do both Private School Confidential and Mischievous Moms sound like titles of books kept at the back of the store, just beyond the beaded curtain and the “Adults Only” sign?

A handwritten book of fairy tales by J.K. Rowling was auctioned off for more than $4-million (Cdn) yesterday, and U.K. newspapers were full of speculation this morning as to who the deep-pocketed buyer was.

As The Times Online reported:

An anonymous collector, bidding through a dealer who usually specialises in Old Masters, paid £1.95 million for The Tales of Beedle the Bard, a 160-page Potter spin-off of five “wizarding fairytales” that relate to his final adventure. The proceeds will go to the charity Children’s Voice. […] The Tales was estimated to go for between £30,000 and £50,000.

[…]

As the Sotheby’s auctioneer opened the bidding, a white-gloved porter held up the book at the front of the room. There were five or six players, all concealing their identity by bidding through someone in the room or through a member of Sotheby’s staff on the phone. At £1 million, there was applause from the room, and murmurings of astonishment as six-figure increases were tossed around the rooms.

A few children in the saleroom jumped with excitement as the hammer came down on the final bid, but the man at the back who bought it could not have looked more miserable as he scurried off into the street muttering “no comment”.

After most of the U.K. papers went to press, however, the buyer was revealed as none other than Amazon.com. As the CBC reports:

Amazon revealed later on Thursday that it had crossed over from the sales side to become buyer for the rare tome, with a spokesman saying the company is planning to take The Tales of Beedle the Bard on tour through libraries and schools.

The company has also posted on its website a host of large, close-up photos of and from the book — for which Rowling also created the illustrations — as well as staff reviews of the tales inside. Staffers will also answer questions fans have about the book via an online discussion board.

You can see the Amazon reviews here, but if you think they’re going to have anything remotely critical to say, you’ve got another thing coming. Just a sample:

So how do you review one of the most remarkable tomes you’ve ever had the pleasure of opening? You just turn each page and allow yourself to be swept away by each story. You soak up the simple tales that read like Aesop’s fables and echo the themes of the series; you follow every dip and curve of Rowling’s handwriting and revel in every detail that makes the book unique – a slight darkening of a letter here, a place where the writing nearly runs off the page there. You take all that and you try and bring it to life, knowing that you will never be able to do it justice.

From The Baltimore Sun:

Days after its publication, a largely positive review of the film version of The Golden Compass that appeared in Catholic newspapers across the country was retracted this week by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.

The bishops, who could not be reached for comment, offered no explanation for the decision. But Catholic groups, including the conservative Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, have urged moviegoers to boycott the film, saying the film and the book on which it is based are anti-Catholic.

“Certainly, there was all kinds of speculation from the day it went up [on the Web site] as to whether or not something like this would happen,” said Jim Lackey, general news editor for the Catholic News Service, a wire service run by the bishops’ conference. He was told Monday to remove the review from the service’s Web site.

However, it would appear that the USCCB – or “uscub” (we just made that up) – has as shaky an understanding of how the web works as they do of art. You see, nothing really disappears from the web, so if you’d like to read the Catholic News Service’s review, go here. You can also go to the main page here and watch the review appear and then disappear a few seconds later. Talk about a tease!

Ironically enough, it’s probably one of the few positive reviews the movie got anywhere.

Here is the money quote from the review:

To the extent, moreover, that Lyra and her allies are taking a stand on behalf of free will in opposition to the coercive force of the Magisterium, they are of course acting entirely in harmony with Catholic teaching. The heroism and self-sacrifice that they demonstrate provide appropriate moral lessons for viewers.

In case you missed it, The Globe and Mail, amid its post-sentencing Conrad Black coverage, took a look at the American reception for future inmate 0783124’s Richard Nixon bio – turns out there isn’t much of a reception. The Globe’s James Adams seems to take a certain glee in the story at hand: “A Life in Full has not been entirely neglected. The New Yorker accords it a review in its Dec. 10 issue, but only as a ‘Briefly Noted’ and a critical one at that.” And later: “Far more sympathetic (but almost as brief) is a pre-publication review found in the Sept. 24 Publishers Weekly.”

Quillblog’s favourite thing about the story is the headline: “Tome gets few U.S. reviews.” Stop the presses!

From The Globe and Mail:

Conrad Black will be sentenced to between 6.5 and 8.1 years in prison, the judge presiding over the case said Monday.

Judge Amy St. Eve said she is considering a sentence of between 78 and 97 months for media mogul Conrad Black, and is now hearing arguments on what penalty to ultimately impose in his fraud and obstruction case.

Black, for those who don’t recognize the name, is a respected political biographer whose most recent book is The Invincible Quest: The Life of Richard Milhouse Nixon (McClelland & Stewart), published earlier this fall.

[Update: 6 1/2 years and a US$125,000 fine.]

And on it goes: another school board has pulled Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass from its shelves following a parental complaint – this despite the fact that the book was published more than 10 years ago, and thus has been quietly corrupting youth ever since.

From The Globe and Mail:

The Roman Catholic school board in Calgary has followed the lead of a Catholic school board in Burlington, Ont., in pulling the children’s fantasy book The Golden Compass off school shelves.

Board officials said their decision followed concern voiced by parents and recent publicity surrounding the release of a movie version of the book, starring Oscar-winner Nicole Kidman.

“Our children are exposed to a wide range of information,” said board spokeswoman Judy Mackay. “One of our responsibilities is to help them understand how that fits with their belief system and to equip them with the skills so that they understand how they can fit that into their own belief system.”

It should be noted that, though these Catholic school boards seem to have the intestinal fortitude of a wounded llama, most Catholics are not quite so easily spooked. From the same article: “Calgary Bishop Fred Henry said there are more pressing issues facing Catholics than debating a children’s fantasy novel.”

In a similar vein, Toronto Star Books editor Dan Smith wrote a brief piece about the book in this past weekend’s edition (not online), stating that: “in our practising Catholic household, The Golden Compass remains a treasured read. It spurs kids to think and question. Good. That’s what great books are for.”

As had been predicted, convicted fraudster Conrad Black has made use of Margaret Atwood’s LongPen again, to promote his new Richard Nixon bio overseas. Lord Black, who is barred from leaving the United States as he awaits sentencing, made a surprise “appearance” at a London Waterstone’s yesterday, signing books electronically from the calm and quiet of his Palm Beach, Florida mansion. The Guardian described the event as follows:

Rehabilitation has to start somewhere, and for the former owner of the Telegraph it began between the “true crime” and “black interest” shelves, where he sold “about 20″ copies of his biography of Richard Nixon to 22 paying guests. At £30 per book, his evening’s work at least began rebuilding a fortune that once exceeded £175m.

[…]

Black admitted he would have to be “brain dead” not to be contemplating the four walls of a prison cell, although he refused to say whether he would attempt any more money-spinning LongPen signings from prison.

No word yet on how Peggy feels about all this, but we’re thinking she’s probably not one of Black’s bigger fans, even if she did virtually interact with him during a LongPen publicity event in Toronto recently. Maybe she can express her displeasure with him once he’s in prison by appearing on his LongPen monitor every day during dinner, eating bag lunches with husband Graeme Gibson and impugning the quality of the prison food.

Geography of Hope author Chris Turner has recounted, on the Random House Canada blog, a humbling moment from his recent book tour. It was the morning after his official book launch, when he hauled his hungover self to the University of Toronto campus radio station for a live interview.

[…] no one really properly greets us on arrival, and I’m so bleary-eyed that you could walk me out a second-story window and I’d be picking gravel out of my chin before it occurred to me to ask where the hell we were going.

Anyway, so somehow I get ushered into this airless vault of a studio in the attic and seated in a folding chair off in a corner, and then I’m left alone in there until, presumably, the host sitting there begins our interview. Except he doesn’t even look up at me. He’s leaning in tight to the mike, an earnest undergrad in a hipster t-shirt, delivering a steady stream of words to the airwaves in a clipped monotone. For awhile I just sit there in a hungover haze, and then maybe five minutes in it occurs to me that he’s just reading a pile of news stories. Wire-service pieces about incidents of animal cruelty. One after another after another. In their entirety. Verbatim.

As it turned out, Turner had been ushered into the wrong studio. Luckily, someone noticed the screw-up in time and sent him to the right one. This didn’t stop Turner from claiming in his blog, however, that he’d have “killed the kid with his bare hands” if he’d been given the chance.

Dude, it’s campus radio … be thankful for the folding chair.

Jane Rule, the B.C.-based author known for her pioneering treatment of lesbian themes, has died of cancer complications. Rule was born in New Jersey and moved to Vancouver in the 1950s. Her novels include Desert of the Heart, which was made into the film Desert Hearts, and The Young in One Another’s Arms, which was recently reissued by Arsenal Pulp Press under its Little Sister’s Classics imprint. There are major obituaries of Rule at Xtra and at The Globe and Mail.

Vanity Fair has unearthed a 1991 television special made by American Psycho director Mary Harron and starring VF culture columnist James Wolcott, in which Wolcott gives his take on both Norman Mailer and his then-current book, Harlot’s Ghost.

Here’s Wolcott on the long-buried video:

“Accompanied by guest star Malachy McCourt (as the bartender), I thrash out my Oedipal woes and critical misgivings over Harlot’s Ghost with some of the most poignant facial expressions ever to emerge from the John Candy school of acting. Satirical as the video is, it’s also a tribute to the sway Mailer had over our imaginations, and the electrical crackle of his personality up to the very end.”

Watch it here.

Philip Pullman keeps running afoul of Ontario school boards.

In what is looking like the most effective publicity campaign ignorance can buy, Pullman’s The Golden Compass has been pulled from the shelves of school libraries in two Catholic School Boards in Peterborough, Ontario.* According to the Peterborough Examiner, “all three books in the trilogy were taken from school libraries this month after two parents complained.”

This follows hard on the heels of similar action by the Halton Catholic School board. (More details here.) A boycott of the movie version of the book is being urged by the Catholic League in the U.S.

What’s the author’s take on all this? In an interview with CBC Radio’s Writers & Company this weekend, Pullman said that “the thing they should do if they don’t want people to read the book is to say nothing about it…. If you want people to read a book, then make a fuss about it, make it controversial. Tell your children they are not to read this book under any circumstances. What is more likely to make them go to the shelf and take it down and read it from there?”

So The New York Times has just unveiled its annual “100 Notable Books of the Year” list, and there ain’t a lot of Cancon on it. The only Canadian author we spotted was (surprise!) Alice Munro, for The View from Castle Rock, which, having been released here in 2006, just seems sooo yesterday. Meanwhile, another likely contender – Michael Ondaatje’s Divisadero – is nowhere to be seen.

Not too long ago, author Ken McGoogan argued in The Globe and Mail that non-fiction books get short shrift in our culture, fiction soaking up the glam and all. Now, Globe columnist and novelist Russell Smith has stepped into the fiction corner, and it’s a pleasure to see him all riled up. (Neither piece is currently available online to non-subscribers, alas; see Quillblog passim for more on McGoogan’s.)

The real question, it seems, is who is harder done by. Says Smith:

Every fiction writer in the country knows that he or she is working in the second-least-popular genre, more read only than poetry. We know it because our editors and agents are always subtly or not so subtly suggesting that we try a work of non-fiction next. We have all had the conversations at cocktail parties with the alpha males who loudly proclaim that they don’t have time for fiction because they need facts. We know it’s not considered to be very manly or important.

Smith also rightly jumps on McGoogan’s dubious claim that non-fiction is more likely than fiction to stand the test of time. He does twist the knife a bit, though: “It’s 100 years from now. Ken McGoogan or Alice Munro?”

According to a release from Sono Nis Press, author Nikki Tate was relieved to learn that Elizabeth School in Kindersley, Saskatchewan, which had previously banned her children’s book Trouble on Tarragon Island, has reversed its decision and “un-banned” it after a new school principal re-evaluated the content.

Sono Nis told Q&Q Omni this summer that the book had been deemed a problem because it contains a scene of bullying and because the bullying includes words that may be offensive to women.

Tate’s book, the third in her Tarragon Island series about protagonist Heather Blake, depicts a battle in Blake’s B.C. community over clear-cut logging. Blake’s grandmother joins an anti-logging activist group, and poses naked with them for a calendar, embarrassing her granddaughter. At the beginning of the book’s first chapter, several boys in Blake’s school taunt her about her grandmother’s breasts, calling them “bazoongas” and cupping melon-shaped areas around their chests.

The scene, Tate told Q&Q Omni, “sets up the central conflict of the book, which is asking the question, ‘when you step outside the rules of society … what is the impact on your community and on your family?’” Tate said the description shows the pain experienced by Heather as a result of the bullying. “It’s pretty obvious these kids aren’t being held up as an example of fine behaviour,” she said.

Elizabeth School administrators now seem to have come around to seeing it that way too.

Trouble on Tarragon Island has been nominated for a Diamond Willow Award in Saskatchewan, and Tate is participating in a TD Canadian Children’s Book Week tour in the province this month. As a part of the tour, she had planned to give away copies of her book to elementary students in Kindersley, and she says she will still go ahead with the give-away now that the ban has been reversed. She will sign copies of the book and chat with students at an informal event at the Kindersley Mall on Nov. 19.

Q&Q is doing some informal research on the best day jobs for authors. What jobs provide the most flexible schedules to accommodate creative writing? What jobs provide the best raw material or inspiration for fiction?

So, this is a call-out to authors: please comment and tell us about your best day job ever, then stay tuned for our report.