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…)

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)

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.

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.

A Canadian Press story says that Canada’s cultural deficit – the gap between the number of magazine, films, and books we ship out of the country versus the number that come in – jumped in 2006. According to Statistics Canada, which tracks this kind of thing, we’ve been importing slightly less of our entertainment from other countries (ok, from the U.S.), but have been exporting a lot less – illegal downloads of the new Arcade Fire album notwithstanding.

And with Alice Munro reportedly retiring and Margaret Atwood already publishing at maximum output, the outlook is even more dire for our cultural exports.

By way of an introduction to a fairly gushing Washington Post review [registration required] of David Adams Richards’ most recent novel, The Friends of Meager Fortune, reviewer Ron Charles asks a question that many Canadian authors, editors, and agents have likely been asking themselves for a long time now:

Why do Canadian writers get so little respect south of the border? Unless they’re caught writing “color” as “colour” or “center” as “centre,” you’d think they could waltz into the unsuspecting arms of American book buyers. But the tendency to dismiss them is so strong that not long ago an American publisher told me she was stripping all mention of a novelist’s Canadian identity from her publicity material in hopes of increasing the writer’s chances.

Yes, of course, there are exceptions: Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro can always get in. But most Americans probably think Michael Ondaatje is British (try selling “The Canadian Patient”); although Douglas Coupland lives in Vancouver, he says he’s often introduced at book events as German. Meanwhile, Canadian treasures such as Guy Vanderhaeghe, Frances Itani and Alistair MacLeod garner so little attention here that they’d be lucky to get arrested. And the most shameful American blind spot of all may be for David Adams Richards, who keeps piling up awards in Toronto but can’t find a stable publisher in New York.

Fair enough, though we’re sure there are many, many American writers who pile up the awards but can’t get a New York editor on the phone, either.

(And now we can’t get the image of Guy Vanderhaeghe, Frances Itani, and Alistair MacLeod together in a holding cell somewhere over the border….)

Read Q&Q’s review of The Friends of Meager Fortune here.

In a pretty funny essay in The New York Times Sunday Book Review, columnist Joe Queenan has publicly revealed the one criterion he uses when deciding what books to read: the adjective “astonishing.” As he explains it, he decided years ago to restrict his literary intake to books that have been described as “astonishing” by at least one professional critic, and so far, he reports, this screening system has worked marvelously.

Having recently picked up Alice Munro’s new story collection, The View From Castle Rock, which The Seattle Times described as “astonishing,” and the Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee’s Slow Man, deemed “an intense, astonishing work of art” by no less an arbiter of taste than O, The Oprah Magazine, I was rounding out the year in solid fashion with a troika of masterpieces that promised to be nothing short of astonishing.

Previously, I had limited my purchases to merchandise deemed “luminous” or “incandescent,” but this meant I ended up with an awful lot of novels about bees, Provence, or Vermeer.

Queenan goes on to point out a large sampling of recent astonishing works – including books by Orhan Pamuk, Alice McDermott, Thomas McGuane, and George Pelecanos – and, in the process, not-so-subtly skewers the critical establishment for a general paucity of fresh language and original praise.

Near the end of the essay, Queenan momentarily allows that there may be some flaws in his system:

Are there ever times when I worry that my obsession with the word “astonishing” prevents me from buying a great book? Sure. But, the truth is, if nobody describes a book as astonishing, it probably isn’t astonishing, and if it isn’t astonishing, who needs it?

The Alice Munro retirement dance continues. The Toronto Star’s Judy Stoffman keeps the story alive with a new piece reminding readers that Munro said back in October that she’s completed four more stories yet to be published, and after that, that’s it. “And at a recent event held at the World’s Biggest Book Store,” writes Stoffman, “where Munro read to the Toronto gathering long-distance and signed books using Atwood’s LongPen, readers pleaded with her to continue writing, but to no avail. She said she is done.” So Stoffman has written what feels like a legacy piece, quickly outlining Munro’s career and accomplishments. However, she still hedges a bet or two, noting about Munro’s retirement, “Her friend Margaret Atwood and editor Douglas Gibson don’t believe she means it.”

Related links:
Click here for the Star story

The allegedly press-shy Alice Munro was the subject of long features in the Toronto Star and The Globe and Mail this week, and in the former she turns over another card in the ongoing media parlour game that surrounds the subject of her retirement from writing.

“I feel it’s the right time to stop,” Munro tells the Star’s Judy Stoffman. Nonetheless, Stoffman wisely leads her piece with a hint of skepticism: “Alice Munro’s new book The View from Castle Rock will be her last — or so she says.”

Regular Quillblog readers will remember that this first came up last spring, when Munro contributed an essay to the anthology Writing Life that strongly hinted she was ready to hang up her quill. The Edmonton Journal went so far as to report that Munro was about to formally announce her retirement, which never happened. And at the time, Munro’s own editors — Doug Gibson at McClelland & Stewart and Deborah Treisman at The New Yorker — were quick to downplay any such talk when queried by Q&Q.

But it looks like Munro will keep, um, strongly hinting. (Though apparently not to the Globe’s Val Ross, who avoids the retirement angle completely in her own piece.)

At least she’s not organizing multiple farewell tours à la The Who or Cher.

Related links:
Click here for the Toronto Star story
Click here for the Globe and Mail story

The Toronto Star’s regular book critic and culture columnist, Philip Marchand, has a column up about this year’s Scotiabank Giller Prize shortlist, announced this past week. He confesses to having felt some unease at the announcement of the longlist back in September, mostly due to its seeming emphasis on the inclusion of writers who, as the accompanying statement from the Giller jury put it, “populate every region.” Marchand detected a familiar cultural problem rearing its head:

The list had a faint whiff of political correctness, in short. It made me recall the press conference announcing the founding of the prize in 1994 and the late Mordecai Richler, one of the three initial judges, along with Alice Munro and University of Ottawa English professor David Staines, proclaiming, “All three of us are politically incorrect. Looking for the first winner, we will not favour young writers over old writers, or vice versa. We won’t favour a book written by a woman over a man, or a black, gay or native writer, any more than somebody whose family has been here for 200 years.”The criterion was to be strictly literary quality. What a concept! Richler’s comments at the time reflected widespread unease over the Governor General’s Awards for literature, a suspicion that juries for these awards were increasingly all too aware of the need for diversity in handing out prizes — the children’s birthday party syndrome. Make sure everybody gets a prize. Although Richler did not mention regions, the biggest bugaboo in this regard was certainly regional.

Marchand, though he still thinks releasing a longlist has as much to do with politics as marketing, feels much better about the shortlist. He especially approves of the small press-bent of the list, and of the inclusion of two titles in translation.

(Which goes to show, we guess, that the definition of “political correctness” can be a slippery one.)

Related links:
Read Philip Marchand’s column on the Giller shortlist

A few decades ago, novelist and literary pugilist Norman Mailer, the man Woody Allen once said would be donating his ego to Harvard Medical School, took out a full-page ad for his own novel Deer Park. Instead of the usual puffery, Mailer filled the ad with all of the nastiest quotes he could find from reviews of the book.

Though not quite in the same vituperative league, Random House’s ad for Kevin Patterson’s novel Consumption in last Saturday’s issue of the Globe and Mail book section did contain a rare flash of piss and vinegar. Along with the raves (including one from the Globe itself), there was a quote from the Winnipeg Free Press that read thus: “The Giller Prize jury, which did not include Consumption on its recently released long list, should be shot for dereliction of duty.”

Though Random includes a far less contentious quote from the Free Press on its website, there is word that the Giller jurists — Alice Munro, Adrienne Clarkson, and Michael Winter — have been moved to an undisclosed location for their own safety, just in case.

Related links:
See the web page for Kevin Patterson’s Consumption

A story in The Toronto Star asks whether contemporary Canadian literature is or isn’t “anti-urban and anti-modern in spirit, and inimical to experimental writers” – like Douglas Coupland, who sparked the debate with an online rant he penned for an article on New York Times Select, an online service available only by subscription. Coupland charged that CanLit “is when the Canadian government pays you to write about life in small towns and/or the immigrant experience.”

The Star’s publishing reporter Judy Stoffman writes that Coupland “blamed entrenched, aging authors (none named) who suck up all the attention. The piece also takes aim at the system of government grants, supposedly limited to those who ‘follow CanLit’s guidelines.’ (Coupland has never received Canada Council money.)”

Publisher Patrick Crean of Thomas Allen & Son and Melanie Rutledge, head of the Canada Council writing and publishing section, argue in Stoffman’s piece that CanLit is edgy and that emerging writers are funded and published. But Toronto author Andrew Pyper, who has received grants from the council and also sat on a peer jury, agreed with Coupland up to a point. “We have done a very good job of creating a brand, a tone of fiction about distinctive Canadian topics,” he says. “But now, on the occasion of a new century, it might be useful to expand that brand, if not explode it altogether. Where I would part with Coupland is the blaming of the granting bodies.”

Quillblog reserves judgment until we can ask Alice Munro what she thinks about all this.

Related links:
Read The Toronto Star story here.

In a double review of Ross Lecker’s Dr. Delicious: Memoirs of a Life in CanLit and David Helwig’s The Names of Things, Good Reports’ Alex Good takes a hard look at the era that both memoirs look to as CanLit’s Golden Age. This is the period from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s when such institutions as Coach House Press, House of Anansi, The Porcupine’s Quill, and (perhaps most importantly) the Canada Council’s block grant program were created, and when books such as Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers, Dennis Lee’s Civil Elegies, Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women, and Mordecai Richler’s St. Urbain’s Horseman, among many others, were published.

After comparing and contrasting the two writers’ disparate approaches to their own personal histories and that of CanLit, Good offers up his take on that decade and its continued influence on Canadian literature and publishing: “Like it or not, there is a canon, and the new writing has to position itself in relation to it, if only to be recognized by lazy critics. I think that’s regrettable. I think the official canon of the Golden Generation was overrated. I also think it’s a shame that so much media oxygen is spent keeping the reputations of writers like Atwood and Ondaatje preserved long after they’ve done work of any interest. And what’s even worse is how we so often look to contemporary writers to be imitators rather than challengers.”

Good ends with a sentiment very dear to our hearts: “Literary debates are always being encouraged, not because of any particular delight in the struggle but because in the end it’s what makes literature stronger.”

Related links:
Read Alex Good on two CanLit memoirs

One of the most interesting book stories of the week started in the Edmonton Journal, when books editor Richard Helm wrote that Alice Munro was set to announce her retirement at Wednesday’s PEN Canada benefit and Writing Life launch in Toronto. It’s understandable that one would leap to this conclusion based on Munro’s contribution to Writing Life, an essay in which she writes about plans to give up, er, the writing life. We here at Q&Q were also alarmed, but a few weeks ago we contacted Munro’s editors at M&S, Douglas Gibson, and The New Yorker, Deborah Treisman, who both reassured us that this was not to be taken seriously.

Munro, of course, did not announce her retirement on Wednesday, although the Journal item had already been picked up by the National Post and blogged by Bookslut, Bookninja, and The Elegant Variation (at least most of the bloggers used question marks to denote some amount of skepticism). Whoops! On Thursday, Helm had a follow-up describing how Munro “may not be through with books after all.” (Many thanks to our Alberta correspondent Gordon Morash for following this for us.)

In other Munro news, the apparently press-shy author (for example, there are no pictures of Munro in Q&Q’s photo gallery of the PEN event because she asked that her photo not be taken) is the subject of a lengthy Q & A in the forthcoming issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review (hat-tip to Bookslut).

Related links:
Click here for the Edmonton Journal story
Click here for The Elegant Variation item
Click here for the VQR interview

Despite the success of relatively slim fiction titles such as Miriam Toews’ A Complicated Kindness or Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, or the most recent book by Philip Roth, or even any new collection by Alice Munro, many editors (and readers) are still enamoured of the big, fat novel. Indeed, it is rare to see a new, mainstream novel clocking in at under 400 pages. When in doubt, go for the girth, it seems.

In an opinion piece on Slate, Meghan O’Rourke takes to task the New York Times‘ list of the best American fiction of the last 25 years, accusing the current critical climate of harbouring a fat fetish that disparages the possibilities of the “small” novel — a novel such as, say, The Great Gatsby or Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.

“Big novels may indeed contain more of the flotsam and jetsam of social reality than shorter novels do,” O’Rourke writes. “But concision, lyrical intensity (not the same thing as ‘well-crafted prose’), and metaphorical depth are in principle as aesthetically valuable as expository generalization, sweep, and narrative complexity. Taut perfection may not be the only hallmark of a good novel (the novel has always been an expansive form), but it is surely one of them. It’s time that the books we call ’small’ get a closer look, which would reveal some of them to be as intellectually and artistically ambitious as their fatter counterparts.”

Related links:
Read Meghan O’Rourke’s opinion piece on Slate

The Danforth Review has a brief interview with Sara Jamieson, an academic who’s currently studying Alice Munro’s work and who teaches a University of Calgary course called “The Short Story in Canada.” Interviewer Michael Bryson takes the chance to ask her about a few common knocks against our short-fiction purveyors: that they’re overinfluenced by Munro, fond of nostalgia, and leery of experimentation. “[I]t seems to me that, as you say, there are plenty of writers out there experimenting with short fiction. They just never seem to get included in those anthologies of Canadian short fiction that are not expressly devoted to experimental writing,” says Jamieson. “I’m not sure why this has to be the case, and it is an issue for me in the class I’m teaching. The students really liked P.K. Page’s ‘Ex Libris,’ one of a few non-realist inclusions in the anthology I’m using. (Incidentally, it’s interesting, in view of your association of the experimental with ‘younger Canadian writers’ that Page is the oldest living writer on my course!)”

Related links:
Click here for the Jamieson interview

Those who feel that their TVs are a little starved of bookish Canadian content will take comfort in two upcoming broadcasts. Tomorrow night, TVO’s interview program, Person 2 Person, will feature an hour-long interview with the media-shy first lady of the Canadian short story, Alice Munro, while Yours, Al, a made-for-TV biopic on the life of Al Purdy, will air next Thursday, April 13, on the CBC. Written by playwright Dave Carley and starring Gordon Pinsent as Purdy, Yours, Al is a drama set in an abandoned house, which comes to life as Purdy returns to read, write, and remember his favourite poems.

Related links:
Click here for the Alice Munro Person 2 Person show synopsis, complete with links to video clips featuring Munro from the TVO archives
Click here for Purdy clips from the CBC archives

Earlier this year, The Guardian’s Culture Vulture blog made a New Year’s resolution of a kind: to embark on a world literature tour spotlighting work from countries overlooked on the literary map; that is to say, countries other than the U.S. or the U.K. In early January, the tour stopped in Finland; in early February it was Poland, and in the last 30 days, the country of discussion was the Czech Republic. Yesterday discussion opened on CanLit, and in the last 24 hours, the response has been strong, with over 100 different authors having been named in over 130 comments submitted by Culture Vulture visitors.

A survey of the comments offers a few surprises. Although, as one would expect, a lot of the usual names were dropped — numerous mentions of Alice Munro, Rohinton Mistry, Leonard Cohen, and Yann Martel were made, and a lively debate cropped up on whether or not Margaret Atwood’s work is really worth the hype — a collection of nice recommendations (probably from Canadians) has also been made. It includes poets and playwrights, Aboriginal authors, graphic novelists, young writers publishing with small presses, and Québécois authors, albeit in smaller concentrations than one would hope. One may or may not be surprised by the occasional post claiming that Canadian books are overrated, but two things that seem both sad and laughable are the moderators’ references to the “frozen north” and the “Arctic circle” and a photo on the website of maple leaves accompanied by the caption: “Sweet dreams … Maple leaves in Vermont.”

Related links:
Click here for Canadian books forum on The Guardian’s Culture Vulture blog

It’s a parade of Chekhov, Carver, Joyce, and, of course, Alice Munro over at The Danforth Review. The literary website has asked 27 Canadian writers to craft a “Short Story 101″ syllabus: “TDR asked 27 writers what curriculum they would bring to class, if they were asked to teach an introductory level course on ‘the short story.’” Among the respondents are Greg Hollingshead, Lynn Coady, Carrie Snyder, and Q&Q’s own review editor James Grainger and frequent contributor Nathan Whitlock.

Related links:
Click here for The Danforth Review’s

We all know that Gillers and Governor General’s Awards are boons for book sales in Canada. A book gets shortlisted, and its sales go up. A book wins, and its sales go up even further. But just how many sales are generated by awards is a somewhat murkier matter that depends on the book and award in question. Vit Wagner of the Toronto Star assembles the opinions of Canadian publishing execs and the sales data of notable cases to come up with a ranking system for awards according to sales power.

Wagner contends that the single-award media bash that is the Scotiabank Giller sells more books than the 14-piece, French- and English-language, non-televised Governor General’s Awards, and that the Man Booker, in most years, will trump them both. Questions still remain, however. Just how much of an effect do awards have on sales of books by internationally acclaimed authors like Alice Munro or already-hyped books like A Complicated Kindness? One thing is almost certain: in a year when both Scotiabank Giller and GG shortlists are void of Urquharts and Atwoods and full of names unknown to the general public, the winners of the prizes are almost sure to win big.

Related links:
Click here for the full story from the Toronto Star

On the CBC website, Rachel Giese tells us what everyone in the Canadian book biz should already know: how to spot award-winning Canadian works of fiction. Taking a tally of 31 past winners of the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Award for English fiction, she spells out two alternate recipes for success. First, be Alice Munro. Failing that, write a historical novel set in a small town revolving around themes of race and family and have it published by HarperCollins, McClelland & Stewart, or a Random House imprint.

It’s troubling to see just how often the decisions of Canadian tastemakers appear to align with Giese’s simple algebra; however, in a fall literary award season that has seen big international prizes go to unlikely contenders — see Harold Pinter and John Banville — and Scotiabank Giller and GG nominations bestowed mainly upon a cast of wild cards, the winners of Canada’s top fiction prizes will be anyone’s guess.

Related links:
Click here for the full story from CBC.ca

Reviewers, fellow writers, and award juries seem to be lining up these days to sing the praises of Alice Munro. The latest to join that line is novelist Jonathan Franzen with a rhapsodic review in The New York Times of Munro’s latest collection. Franzen actually uses the occasion of Munro’s book to argue that she is not only one of the most underrated writers of the last century, but one of the best. He also makes a cogent argument for the continuing relevance of the short story form, going so far as to say that “a high percentage of the most exciting fiction written in the last 25 years — the stuff I immediately mention if somebody asks me what’s terrific — has been short fiction.”

Related links:
Read Jonathan Franzen’s tribute to Alice Munro

CanLit giant Alice Munro is pretty reclusive these days, but on the occasion of her new book, Runaway, New York Times Magazine writer Daphne Merkin tracked the author down on her home turf in southwestern Ontario. In the resulting long feature, Munro discusses her early writing aspirations, her two marriages, and her conflicted views toward motherhood — all with a mix of candour and reserve.

Related links:
New York Times Magazine profile of Alice Munro

It’s a celebration of Alice Munro this week in The New Yorker. In this week’s issue, the magazine is publishing no less than three linked Munro stories; the first of them, “Chance,” is available free of charge on the magazine’s website. Also on the site is a web-only feature: an interview with Munro conducted by New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman. (Treisman has her own Canadian connection, having lived in Vancouver and worked for Hartley & Marks.)

Munro is publishing a new short-story collection, Runaway, this fall, and McClelland & Stewart reportedly has an ambitious marketing plan for the book. But with Munro on the reclusive side these days, this may be a rare opportunity to hear her speak. (”Hear” being the operative word — the interview is in streaming audio format.)

Related links:
Alice Munro’s short story
Deborah Treisman’s audio Q&A with Alice Munro