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.

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.

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.

In its coverage of last night’s Giller bash, the Toronto Star has a short sidebar about a goofy protest staged by Margaret Atwood and husband Graeme Gibson. According to the Star, the literary duo said “no thanks” to the Four Season’s fancy menu of tuna tartar and beef tenderloin, and instead ate homemade dinners they’d brought along in a gym bag.

The reason: They were protesting the Four Seasons’ role in a massive resort development in Grenada that threatens an endangered species: the Grenada dove.

“Until there is a fair resolution of the dispute over the kind of resort being built in Grenada, we cannot accept food or drink from the Four Seasons,” explained Gibson, who arrived at the event carrying what appeared to be a gym bag but in fact contained their meal.

And so Canada’s most famous literary couple munched on homemade spinach and cucumber, and drank their own sake, while others at their table, including former Governor General Adrienne Clarkson, ate beef and drank wine. […] Four Seasons CEO Isadore Sharp sat at a nearby table.

Not to be cynical, but if Atwood and Gibson really wanted to show solidarity with the Grenada dove, wouldn’t it have behooved them to boycott the ceremony altogether? They could have put out a press release explaining their absence and got the same amount of coverage. But by picnicking they managed to make a show of their anti-establishment credentials and still retain pride of place at the literary status-symbol night of the year. That takes some sort of genius….

House of Anansi Press celebrated 40 years of tenacious, improbable existence at a gala event Saturday as part of the International Festival of Authors. Actor and Soulpepper Theatre artistic director Albert Schultz acted as the evening’s very congenial host, cracking CanLit groaners – he mentioned that Margaret Atwood wrote 1967’s The Circle Game back when she was still using a “short pen” – singing a little, and at one point even throwing Anansi T-shirts into the crowd.

The evening’s readers were divided into three broad categories: Anansi past, Anansi present, and Anansi future. Margaret Atwood, Graeme Gibson, and Roch Carrier represented the press’s illustrious past – though Schultz noted that Atwood could just as easily have read during the future segment, given that she was slated to deliver the Massey Lecture in 2009. Carrier got perhaps the most enthusiastic reaction of the night with his dramatic and funny reading of “The Hockey Sweater.”

Anansi present was represented by poet Kevin Connolly and fiction writers Elyse Friedman and A.L. Kennedy. Kennedy’s comic reading set up a running joke on the theme of rodents. (Don’t ask.)

For the future, it was novelist Shani Mootoo (whose name Schultz repeated over and over – he just liked saying it) and rock critic Stuart Berman, who read from his upcoming book on the band Broken Social Scene. Berman expressed some confusion over his placement among such a group of renowned authors, and many heads were scratched during his potted history of the Toronto indie rock scene of the nineties. (“Who, or what, is hHead?” some audience members were clearly wondering.)

Songwriter (and BSS member) Jason Collett – wearing the unofficial uniform for artsy, youngish males at the event: thrift-shop suit jacket and jeans – sang a few folkily wistful tunes and charmed the crowd with his asides and anecdotes. (“In the U.S., they don’t call it a ‘Super Toke,’ they call it a ‘Shotgun’ – which should tell you all you need to know about the difference between the two cultures.”)

(This Quillblogger always knew it as a “Shotgun,” too, but still, it’s a good joke.)

After the reading, many moved up to the festival’s hospitality suite at the Westin Harbour Castle for a private party. The suite was packed, with some preferring the cooler corridor to the increasingly humid main room. In attendance were the evening’s readers, everyone from Anansi, including president Sarah MacLachlan and publisher Lynn Henry, authors Thomas King, Michael Ondaatje, and Janette Turner Hospital, and a host of other bookselling, media, and publishing types.

Cake, of course, was served at both events, though it was sugary and mass-produced. In other words, exactly the opposite of the kind of work Anansi is known for.

(See more photos from the event here.)

In other IFOA news, tongues were wagging at the Anansi event about author David Gilmour’s behaviour the day before as part of an onstage round table discussion that included Daniel “Lemony Snicket” Handler and Scottish writer Bernard MacLaverty. From the accounts we heard, Gilmour made clear his lack of interest in the discussion’s purported theme – “Innocence and Experience: How through writing and reading we recapture what we have lost,” which is, admittedly, a bit of an eye-roller – and accused Handler of once accosting him in a restaurant. All in all, the discussion was not a happy one, though probably more fun to watch than to participate in.

Quillblog: your best source for secondhand literary gossip. (Hey – didja hear about Dumbledore?)

At a book signing in Toronto last night, Conrad Black appeared “relaxed and smiling” from his home in Palm Beach, where Black is spending time ahead of sentencing next month in Chicago. Sitting at the other end of one of Margaret Atwood’s famous LongPen devices, Black joked with reporters, signed books, and responded to reports that former prime minister Jean Chrétien’s leaked memoir impugns his good name.

[Black] said that, despite affirmations to the contrary in Chrétien’s new autobiography, it was Chrétien who suggested Black try to become a senator while attempting to become a member of Britain’s House of Lords.

Though the “he said/he said”-type dispute must seem academic to a man facing hard time, Black’s eagerness to engage with the Canadian public seems to confirm one thing: even cyborgs love the limelight.

Canadian authors are well represented in a book of fictional love letters, titled Four Letter Word, which is being published by Knopf Canada in 2008. Prior to its release, Times Online is inviting readers to sign up for free excerpts, which will be sent to their inboxes beginning Oct. 29, by contributors such as Margaret Atwood and Leonard Cohen.

In the meantime, lonely hearts may find some consolation from a similar series of love letters published in The Walrus in 2005, which also featured contributions by Atwood and Cohen, as well as David Bezmozgis, Sheila Heti, M.G. Vassanji, and Jonathan Lethem.

That earlier series varied widely in terms of tone and delivery – from bald lasciviousness (Cohen: “When I caught her in the flesh / And floated on her hips…), to squalid romanticism (Bezmozgis: “My love has brought neither of us any happiness”), to outright weirdness (Lethem’s entry is addressed to and from inanimate objects) – but remained consistently G-rated. Times readers might be in for something a little racier: the promotion is prohibited to minors under the age of 18.

Former media baron and author Conrad Black has not been allowed to return to Canada following his conviction on fraud and obstruction of justice charges in the U.S., but he is finding other ways to reach out and touch the citizens of the country he once renounced.

Last night, Black appeared on CBC’s Rick Mercer Report doing a Martha Stewart-style celebrity tip on the proper techniques for waxing brightly coloured fall maple leaves. In the sketch filmed at his home in Palm Beach, Florida, he wryly suggested that it is necessary to press the leaves in books first, using weighty volumes such as his biography of Franklin Delano Roosevelt or his latest of Richard Nixon, The Invincible Quest, for instance.

Showing off the results of his efforts, he added:

Here we have a perfectly waxed maple leaf, a great solace to everyone and especially to those who, for complicated reasons, can’t at first-hand observe the changing of the seasons this autumn in Canada. (Canadian Press)

Black is scheduled to make another appearance in Canada via Margaret Atwood’s LongPen at Toronto’s World’s Biggest Bookstore on the evening of Oct. 15 to autograph copies of The Invincible Quest.

Depending on how many books Black might write if he is incarcerated, the LongPen may be a useful tool for any future book tours.

Canadian writing is spotlighted in the second issue of Atlas, a new literary journal being published in New Delhi, India. In a letter accompanying a copy sent to Q&Q, B.C. contributor Peggy Herring points out that “literary links between Canada and India are many. There are a number of accomplished writers of South Asian birth who live in Canada…. However, it is not often that Indian editors and journals turn their gaze toward Canada.” Canadian contributions to the issue include fiction and poetry from David Bergen, Katherine Govier, Nicole Brossard, Di Brandt, Paulette Jiles, and a sketched self-portrait by Margaret Atwood.

The same issue also features an interview with Salman Rushdie.

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.

The U.K. bookstore chain Waterstone’s has just released the results of a poll they put together for their 25th anniversary, in which they asked readers to vote for their favorite novels of the past 25 years. To practically nobody’s surprise, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was the top pick.

Also not surprising is the fact that Canadian Yann Martel made the cut with his enormously popular Life of Pi. What is a bit surprising, though, is that Margaret Atwood’s highly un-recent 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale made it onto the list, too – and that it ranked as high as #11. Who says readers have short term memories?

The full list, as it appears in London’s Daily Telegraph, can be seen here, along with a short article analyzing the list and discussing how it reflects British tastes.

Two years ago in Vancouver, five Canadian poets got together for a panel discussion on the state of the art, and tried to hash out whether Margaret Atwood’s seminal CanLit study Survival has energized or inhibited Canadian writing. Over the past several months, the website Northern Poetry Review has been posting the papers presented at the discussion by the individual panelists – Barbara Nickel, Chris Patton, Ross Leckie, Stephanie Bolster, and Eric Miller.

And now, poet, critic, and regular Q&Q contributor Zach Wells has capped the discussion with his own thoughts on Survival, contemporary poetry, and the panelists’ papers.

There are probably too many highlights to pull out of Wells’ piece – we really recommend reading the entire thing – but we’ll grab a couple of thought-provokers anyway.

Hermeneutic (as opposed to evaluative or aesthetic) criticism has certainly long been a stock-in-trade of the academic study of literature. It is not in and of itself a wrongheaded way to plumb a poem — unless we make the mistake of placing it ahead of artistic merit as grounds for close reading. In order for a book’s themes to gain a purchase on our imaginations — without benefit of scholarly intervention — it must first give us a thrill of emotional and aesthetic pain or pleasure.

[…]

Whatever the case, we cannot let Atwood off the hook for her role in disseminating and legitimizing the study of a nation’s literature through the lens of a single overarching theme, particularly now that her dated piece of nationalist propaganda, at best a historical curiosity, has been re-issued. It’s heartening to read these panel contributions and realize that poets with such different backgrounds and sensibilities can more or less agree that the victim morality of Survival has done more harm than good to the cause of Canadian poetry, both at home and abroad.

[…]

The most comforting – and consequently most harmful – idea in Survival is that literature can be the product of a nation, when in fact a country’s poetry should be one of the things that shapes it. America did not produce Whitman as much as Whitman has created America – as, for that matter, has Emily Dickinson in a completely different way.

BOOKED!, the readers’ festival created to accompany BookExpo Canada, has confirmed (as previously reported by Q&Q Omni) that bestselling thriller author James Patterson will be the star of a finale event to close the festival on June 10. “An Afternoon with James Patterson” will include a talk from the American author on his latest book, The 6th Target, and an interview with The Globe and Mail’s books editor, Martin Levin.

The latest announcement from the festival also mentions that Chuck Klosterman will interview Stephen King as a part of the gala tribute to the horrormaster. Margaret Atwood and Clive Barker will be on hand as well, toasting King. No word on whether King, who is widely reported to have labeled Patterson’s books “dopey thrillers,” will attend the closing event.

Click here for more event details.

New literary press Biblioasis has posted an excerpt on its blog from editor John Metcalf’s upcoming memoir, a kind of mauvaises-lettres work entitled Shut Up He Explained. (The title is a lift from Ring Lardner, and, in the case of this book, probably an excellent example of truth-in-advertising.)

In the excerpt, Metcalf gives his thoughts on the oeuvre of one Margaret Atwood – no points for guessing he’s unimpressed. He is especially incensed at Atwood’s apparent belief in a dichotomy of “craft” and “message” in literary fiction, with greater importance residing in the latter, which is like waving a red flag in front of someone like Metcalf, who tends to almost fetishize craft in his voluminous critical writings.

Plus, you know, Atwood’s a dame:

All too often [Atwood’s] messages seem to me to urge a raucous and almost hysterical feminism. Bill Hoffer used to grump that Atwood’s work was most appreciated “by girls of the most unpromising kind”. Doubtless less perceptive criticism than irritated misogyny. Yet the work does have designs on us. She does indeed want to send us messages. And like telemarketing, they’re messages I’m not interested in listening to. It comes down to a question of artistry. I would stand, rather, with William Faulkner who is supposed to have said to a lady who asked him what message he had wished his book to send that had he wanted to send messages he would have used Western Union.

Margaret Atwood says the Harper Tories are out to “squash the arts into the dust,” CBC reports. “They basically just hate us,” she says in an interview with CBC Radio. Criticizing the government’s cuts to arts funding, Atwood makes particular mention of the elimination of the $11.8-million public diplomacy fund, which the Foreign Affairs department previously used to help finance the export of Canadian cultural products and to help Canadian artists attend international events. She argues that an industry that contributes so much to the Canadian economy deserves more government support.

“When selling artistic things abroad, that money comes into Canada and is taxed in Canada, so it’s a net gain for Canada,” she said.

“Would they like to guess how much Yann Martel’s novel The Life of Pi generated abroad? Would they like to know … how much my foreign editions bring in? Would they like to know how much [Canadian producer] Robert LePage generates abroad?”

The timing of her comments might seem odd, a week after the Canada Council announced $33-million in new arts funding, but as a story in The Globe and Mail pointed out today, “the Conservative government scaled back a Liberal promise that the council’s regular funding would double from $150 million a year to $300 million. Instead, the Tories’ May, 2006, federal budget gave the council $50 million in new money as a one-time payment over two years.”

Atwood also drew attention to other funding needs. “Events such as the Four Seasons Performing Arts Centre in Toronto bring in millions of dollars from international guests, she said, yet the centre is one of six Toronto cultural projects still awaiting a funding announcement from Ottawa.”

Atwood was speaking in Montreal, where she is about to receive the $10,000 Grand Prix at the Blue Met Festival, an event, which she said, also lost $150,000 in funding this year.

Margaret Atwood finds items that are “quite offensive” when she browses online, at least on Amazon.com.

According to an article from The Times, Atwood spoke out against online book browsing at the London Book Fair last week: “You are not going to get the same experience on the net. Amazon is trying, by saying, ‘If you like this book you might like this other book’, but it’s often something quite offensive that they suggest.”

Fellow author Kazuo Ishiguro also enjoys wandering the shelves but says he finds the Internet more useful for research purposes. However, the practice occasionally backfires.

“Amazon’s recommendations were often amusingly useless, he added. ‘One of the last books I bought was a study guide to one of my old books, The Remains of the Day. Now they keep recommending my own books to me’.”

Wired scribe Jason Silverman has posted an article about the terror that strikes authors and filmmakers when their works are labeled as science fiction:

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is set during a nuclear winter. Two survivors walk south, breathing toxic air, seeking out the continent’s last canned food while ducking bands of flesh-eaters. Describe it as “post-apocalyptic,” as most critics did, or as a masterpiece of dystopian literature. Just don’t call McCarthy’s novel “science fiction.”

Chris Barsanti, a critic who dared to reference The Road in terms of sci-fi literature, said the phrase “science fiction” summons images of “space battles, aliens, mad scientists, time travel and the like … fantasy with testosterone.” So publishers, wary of putting their book into an “artistic ghetto,” twist themselves into knots to avoid using the label.

Silverman goes on to point fingers at Margaret Atwood, the Michel Gondry film The Science of Sleep, and even the TV series Battlestar Galactica. Unfortunately, the piece comes to an abrupt halt just when it seems to be getting going. But if you scroll down below the article you’ll find an interesting series of reader postings about their favorite “closeted” sci-fi works.

(Watch for the Science Fiction Spotlight in the brand-new issue of Q&Q, in stores now.)

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.

Stephen Henighan, known for his biting, if occasionally conspiracy-minded, commentary on the Canadian literary scene, takes aim at the Scotiabank Giller Prize in this column for Geist. Henighan calls the prize a symptom of the sickness ruining literature, saying, “Nothing signaled the collapse of the literary organism as vividly as the appearance of this glitzy chancre on the hide of our culture.” The column questions the prevalence of shortlisted books coming from publishers owned by the Bertelsmann Group, such as Knopf Canada, Random House Canada, and McClelland & Stewart (in which Bertelsmann has a 25% stake).

Henighan also makes much of Margaret Atwood’s connection to this year’s winner, Vincent Lam. Atwood helped Lam find a publisher and introduced the author at the gala. While his first observation, that “Margaret Atwood does not introduce losers,” holds some credence, he takes the point a little too far with his further comments. “By placing her authority behind Lam, she was giving the equivalent of el dedazo, the crook of the finger with which a Mexican president signals his successor.”

Quillblog’s favourite conspiratorial fact is Henighan’s observation that almost all Giller winners between 1994 and 2004 lived within a two-hour drive of Yonge and Bloor.

(Quillblog had been telepathically instructed by Margaret Atwood not to blog about this, but luckily we were able to briefly block her powerful brainwaves – emanating, of course, from the Yonge/Bloor epicentre – with our homemade tinfoil helmets.)

Exclusive: The 2006 Giller Conspiracy Runs Deep
Below is a photo of Margaret “El Dedazo” Atwood in a lineup with Giller jury member Michael “Mr. Tall” Winter. Was Vincent Lam’s Giller win arranged in the joint? Is Atwood Keyzer Soze?

(OK, it’s just an old Anansi ad, but suspicious nonetheless.)

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

After Ian McEwan was (sort of) accused of plagiarism, all kinds of big name authors came to his defence. But not everyone has been convinced by the razzmatazz lineup of defenders, which includes Thomas Pynchon, Margaret Atwood, Zadie Smith, and Martin Amis.

Jack Shafer at Slate, for one, remains completely unswayed. “As a long-time magazine and newspaper editor,” he writes, “I’d have no trouble firing McEwan for writing as he did if he worked for me.”

Shafer argues that McEwan’s defenders, who claim that every novelist worth his weight in newsprint undertakes research in the same manner as McEwan, are merely making an empty gesture. “If McEwan really did nothing out of the ordinary, the authors campaigning for him would do him a great service to note the passages in their own books that rooked from historical sources in a similar manner. Don’t hold your breath.”

After a brief interlude in which he admits that the charge of “Plagiarist!” never really seems to cause the accused the harm it should, Shafer engages in a passage comparison, examining two remarkably similar sentences, one from Ludmilla Andrews’ memoir, the other from McEwan’s Atonement.

His unimpressed conclusion: “I detect no mash-up here, no adding of value, and no ‘creative use,’ to quote Pynchon’s generous letter of support. McEwan helps himself to Andrews’ words as if they first appeared on the planet in one of his rough drafts. To protest, as he does, that her memoir served as ‘research’ is a lie. McEwan rewrote Andrews’ vivid copy and called it his own. The laugh of larceny is that the Booker Prize-winner didn’t even improve it.”

Related links:
Read the full story at Slate

An impressive constellation of literary stars has come to the defence of British author Ian McEwan, who was accused by a writer for The Daily Mail of plagiarizing the memoir of romance novelist Lucilla Andrews, who died in October, in his novel Atonement.

Letters from Margaret Atwood, Kazuo Ishiguro, John Updike, Zadie Smith, Martin Amis, and even the reclusive Thomas Pynchon were published in The Daily Telegraph. “Most of the writers said that they were intimately familiar with what Mr. McEwan had done, having done the same thing themselves,” an article in The New York Times reports. There is a difference between plagiarism and using other works for research and historical information, the writers argue.

If it is sufficient to point to a simultaneity of events to prove plagiarism, then we are all plagiarists, and Shakespeare is in big trouble from Petrarch, and Tolstoy stole the material for ‘War and Peace,’ ” wrote the Australian writer Thomas Keneally, the author of “Schindler’s List.”

McEwan has freely acknowledged using Ms. Andrews’s book for its period detail, but has pointed out that he “had gone out of his way to praise her publicly,” The New York Times article said.

He seems to have the support of the London literati. Erica Wagner, literary editor of The Times of London was quoted saying, “I thought, well, we have come to a pretty pass where an author like Ian McEwan has to write on the front page of The Guardian explaining what research is.”

Related links:
Click here forThe New York Times article

Wired has a feature in its November issue on short short short fiction. Inspired by Hemingway, who wrote a six-word story (”For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”) that he’s said to have called his best work, they asked sci-fi writers and personalities to try their hands at the same feat.

Notable Canadian entries come from Atwood (”Longed for him. Got him. Shit.”) and Shatner (”Failed SAT. Lost scholarship. Invented rocket.”).

The online version of the story also includes 59 six-word tales that didn’t make it to print, including one from another Canadian, Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing, who spotted this link in the first place: “Batman Sues Batsignal: Demands Trademark Royalties.”

Related links:
Click here for the Wired story

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

Margaret Atwood’s LongPen is set to wow crowds at BookExpo America in a couple of weeks, but at least one commentator is unconvinced of its appeal.

Author Stephen Henighan attended the failed test signing at the Bookshelf in Guelph in early March, and was struck by the low turnout for an event that was billed as historic. “The forty numbered tickets designated for the general public were not exhausted at the time the event was called off,” Henighan writes in his column in Geist magazine. “If Margaret Atwood came to Guelph in person, The Bookshelf could not contain the crowd. The reading would have to be held in the church across the street and the organizers could charge admission and still fill the building. (This happened when Ann-Marie MacDonald came to Guelph.)”

Provocatively, if dubiously, Henighan also draws some parallels between Atwood’s entrepreneurship, her writing, and her very culture. “By enshrining the author as a remote talking head, [the LongPen] harks back to an older vision of the writer as inaccessible authority figure,” he writes. “The device’s conception is counterintuitive to the logic of virtual culture. LongPen recapitulates the yearning for distance rather than engagement, ironic detachment rather than emotional involvement, that characterizes Atwood’s fiction; it evokes the diffidence of traditional southern Ontario WASP culture.”

Related links:
Click here for Stephen Henighan’s Geist column on the LongPen

After another round of spectacular financial results, Bloomsbury, publisher of the Harry Potter series, continues to be Britain’s homegrown answer to the multinational giants that dominate the industry. But there is much speculation about how things will go for the independent publisher when the seventh and final Potter book hits the stores, which could be as early as next year. The Guardian’s Matt Seaton reminds readers that Bloomsbury wasn’t exactly dead in the water before Potter — they are, after all, the U.K. publisher of such heavyweights as Margaret Atwood, Joanna Trollope, and John Irving — but shareholders have come to expect the kind of returns that only a mega-selling author like J.K. Rowling can bring. To keep up their profile, the company is using its excess cash to muscle in on the lucrative mass-market business, as well as backing up its literary list with new books by Richard Ford and Germaine Greer. And then there’s always Rowling’s post-Potter career.

Related links:
Read the Guardian article

Margaret Atwood’s extensive list of awards, citations, and fellowships just got even longer with the announcement that she has been chosen as the the inaugural writer for the The Muriel Spark International Fellowship. The fellowship, named after one of Scotland’s most revered novelists, will see Atwood fly to Scotland in September, where she will “spend time concentrating on work while also taking part in a number of light public duties, including presenting masterclasses, readings and lectures.” Those duties include a stay at an artists’ residency centre in Argyll and Bute and a public reading in Edinburgh. (Thanks to Bookninja.com for the link.)

Related links:
Read about the inaugural Muriel Spark International Fellowship

Our literature continues to come of age; the educational merit of Canadian books are being challenged at home and abroad. Bookslut’s blog has closely followed a story in which Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale was the subject of a challenge and a shortlived ban by the Judson Independent School District near San Antonio, Texas. The superintendent banned it after a complaint from a parent. But in a stunning turn of events, reported masterfully by San Antonio Express-News reporter Jenny Lacoste-Caputo, the board members voted 5 to 2 to reinstate it.

A senior named Craig Gagne spoke in defense of the book and his speech drew applause. (In Other Media can only hope that it began with one brave applauder and then spread quickly through the room.) What did Gagne say? “If we do ban The Handmaid’s Tale because of sexual content, then why not ban Huckleberry Finn for racism? Why not ban The Crucible for witchcraft? Why not ban The Things They Carried for violence and why not ban the Bible and argue separation of church and state? …All the books I just mentioned are part of the 11th-grade Judson High School English curriculum. I read and appreciated all of these books and would like future classes to have the same privilege.”

The reaction from the board’s vice-president Richard LaFoille is classic. The Lacoste-Caputo story makes it sound as though LaFoille just threw up his hands in the face of freedom-lovers like Gagne, who, based on his quote, has probably watched too many courtroom dramas. Says LaFoille: “I don’t see how we can ban this book…. You kids want this book, I’m going to give it to you.”

The piece de resistance, though, is the quote from Kwon Pyo, the husband of the woman who objected to The Handmaid’s Tale on the grounds that it was sexually explicit and offensive to Christians. “I’m appalled by this trash book…. When garbage goes in, garbage comes out. This is trash and it will corrupt the American youth.”

From sea to shining sea.

Related links:
Click here for the San Antonio Express-News

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

Author and publicity machine Margaret Atwood has been getting written up all over the world for her novelty device the LongPen, a machine that allows authors to sign their books and speak to their fans from thousands of miles away via a robotic arm and video display panel. This past weekend was supposed to be the “Marconi moment” that would see the device used for the first time, linking Atwood, in a booth at the London Book Fair, to a crowd of fans at the McNally Robinson bookstore in New York City. The only problem was that, at the last minute, the LongPen broke down, leaving Atwood to apologize to the fans with a few trademark quips — “The first helicopter didn’t work either” — before promising to sign the books the old fashioned-way — with a ballpoint, in person.

Related links:
Read the Guardian article on the LongPen

For the geeky list-lovers among us, the University of Illinois’s American Book Review has on its website what it calls the “100 Best First Lines from Novels.” The list is filled with the usual suspects — Dickens, Joyce, Kafka, Hemingway, etc. — but there is some variety. At #14, we see the po-mo stylings of Italo Calvino, who opened his novel, “You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveller.” That sentence follows an enigmatic, and, yes, Kafkaesque first sentence; this one from The Trial. Many sentences are instantly recognizable, like the J.D. Salinger line that begins, “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born…” Others by Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace are bewildering and wonderful. Sentences are short and declarative, like Melville’s list-topping “Call me Ishmael,” or rambling, like Laurence Stern’s opener for Tristram Shandy (too boring to be rendered here). Some defy all current rules of grammar as we know them (see all three James Joyce lines included on the list, as well as the four-lines long, comma-splice filled “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” that begins Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities“). Some, like Nabokov’s — “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.” — are, by definition, not even sentences.

But the books on the list are almost exclusively American and European in origin. The one non-American, non-European line (other than the one that starts Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye (#96!)) is from Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Could it be that the long histories of the world’s most populous continents have yet to yield a single author of note? Or did some not-too-learned professors in Illinois skip a few too many world literature classes as undergrads?

Related links:
Click here for the list

Margaret Atwood sat down with a CP reporter recently, ostensibly to promote her new collection, The Tent. But the main subject of discussion seemed to be next week’s federal election. Though she won’t reveal her own party affiliation, Atwood clearly fears a Conservative win, and wonders why no party is addressing the issues that have informed much of her own speculative fiction: disease, disaster, and out-of-control technology. She also speaks up for arts funding, and reveals that she has another short-story collection scheduled for publication this fall. Following The Tent and The Penelopiad, that will make three books in the space of a year; it’s a happy time for Atwood fans.

Related links:
Click here for the CP interview in the Brandon Sun

In the latest issue of The Walrus, Charles Foran reports on Noah Richler’s radio series, A Literary Atlas of Canada, which aired this past spring on CBC (and is coming out in book form next spring, courtesy of McClelland & Stewart). Richler travelled the country, chit-chatting with various authors about the role of landscape and place in their work in an effort to identify the unifying myth of Canadian literature.

Richler doesn’t get off to a good start with Wayne Johnston, who says, “It is extremely difficult and probably pointless to find a unifying idea or concept or even tradition.” Richler presses on. First, he tries out “nowhere,” as in the middle-of-nowhere, the bush, off the map. But Margaret Atwood, whom Richler describes as a purveyor of the “garrison mentality,” nixes that idea. “There isn’t really any nowhere,” she says. “There are only other people who think a place is nowhere.” Other adventures include 10 seconds of dead air while Rohinton Mistry thinks hard about the effect Canada has had on his novels.

Foran, for his part, supports the notion that the “most obvious quality shared among books by Canadians is a certain value system,” a “Canadian geography of values,” rather than Richler’s conception of a literary landscape. But Foran gives Atwood the final word. “Canada may be defined,” she says, “as the place where one is free to make up Canada.”

Related links:
Click on the link for Charles Foran’s piece in The Walrus

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

Time magazine has finally weighed in on the question of who wrote the greatest novels of the 20th century, with a list of 100 English-language novels. The list begins in 1923, the year the magazine was launched, so the chart is missing such obvious heavyweights as Ulysses and Heart of Darkness. The titles picked are certainly interesting. Reading at times like an advertisement for the magazine’s archive of online book reviews (each title is linked to the original Time review), the list is heavily American, with U.S. authors scoring 61 of the 100 spots, with one spot going to an African writer (Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart), two to Canadians (Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin and William Gibson’s Neuromancer), and one from the Indian subcontinent, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. The list is also skewed toward contemporary titles that have yet to be tested by the sobering influence of historical judgment.

Related links:
Read the Time Top 100

In the Toronto Star, Philip Marchand uses the launch of the Canadian Penguin Classics line as a chance to reflect on the new meaning of CanLit — who’s in the canon, and who’s about to fade into oblivion. Marchand writes: “every country wants to possess some world-class writers, proving that it has a soul. Canadians love Don Cherry but genuflect to Margaret Atwood, even if they never read her.” (Thanks to Bookninja.com for the link.)

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

Albanian writer Ismail Kadare has topped a list of famed authors with his win of the inaugural Man Booker International Prize. The £60,000 prize had a shortlist of 17 other contenders, including Margaret Atwood, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Ian McEwan, all of whom were judged for their entire body of work.

Related links:
Click here for the full story on The Independent
Click for the Man Booker International Prize website

It all began with an Ottawa Sun article in which reporter Kathleen Harris appeared to question the work ethic of George Bowering during his two-year term as Canada’s parliamentary poet laureate. “Bowering was paid $12,000 plus a $10,000 travel allowance each year to write poems and promote the art of verse. He finished his two-year mandate as poet laureate late last year with 87 lines under his belt,” wrote Harris. She then invited an MP and a tax activist to make the predictable political hay out of that revelation. “It suggests he had a very easy go as the first poet laureate,” said the obliging John Williamson, federal director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.

Now, Bookninja.com has compiled some letters from the literary community in support of Bowering. The poet’s supporters point out his steady publication of work that falls outside the official poet laureate description (including several titles during his two-year term alone), as well as his work promoting poetry and his busy schedule of appearances, readings, and conferences while in office. “George Bowering unproductive? Never!” reads one letter signed by more than 20 people, including Margaret Atwood, Christian Bök, and Brian Fawcett.

Related links:
Click here for the original Sun story
Click here for the Bookninja.com collection of Bowering-related letters