Sarah Polley to adapt Atwood novel

Sarah Polley is one step closer to bringing Margaret Atwood’s 1996 novel Alias Grace to the big screen. According to the Canadian Press, Polley’s adaptation of the Giller Prize–winning book is one of 29 scripts in development with Astral’s Harold Greenberg Fund.

Away from Her, Polley’s 2007 directorial debut (an adaptation of Alice Munro’s short story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain”), earned her an Oscar nomination for best adapted screenplay.

UPDATE: Also included in this round of funding are adaptations of Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas’s graphic novel Red: A Haida Manga (Douglas & McIntyre), scripted by Joseph Boyden; Alison Pick’s novel Far to Go (House of Anansi Press), co-written by playwrights Rosa Laborde and Hannah Moscovitch; Wayson Choy’s novel All That Matters (Anchor Canada), by director Paulo Barzman; Zoe Whittall’s novel Bottle Rocket Hearts (Cormorant Books), co-written by Whittall and Linsey Stewart; Gil Adamson’s novel The Outlander (Anansi), scripted by Esta Spalding; Sheree-Lee Olson’s book Sailor Girl (Porcupine’s Quill), written by film critic Johanna Schneller; and Steven Galloway’s novel The Cellist of Sarajevo (Vintage Canada), produced by Strident Films. A full list of recipients is available via the Greenberg Fund.

Q&Q review: David Bezmozgis’s The Free World

David Bezmozgis’s highly anticipated debut novel The Free World will be released on April 4th.

In the Jan./Feb. issue of Q&Q, feature reviewer Jeet Heer writes:

After Henry Roth, after Isaac Bashevis Singer, after Saul Bellow, after Philip Roth, after Grace Paley, after Mordecai Richler, after Cynthia Ozick, after countless other writers secular and religious, socialist and conservative, Zionist and assimilationist, subversively funny and sombrely nostalgic, is there really anything new to be said about the Jewish immigrant experience? Quite a lot, in fact, as David Bezmozgis proves with his impressive debut novel, the follow-up to his much-celebrated 2004 collection, Natasha and Other Stories.

Read the full Q&Q review.

Read Bezmozgis’s author profile.

Gordon Pinsent reads Bieber memoir

From This Hour Has 22 Minutes:

Kirkus gets new lease on life

As previously reported by Quill & Quire, Nielsen Business Media announced plans in early December to cease publishing Kirkus Reviews, the 76-year-old pre-publication review journal. Now, however, it looks as if the journal might live on.

According to an internal memo obtained by DailyFinance, Eric Liebetrau, the managing editor of Kirkus Reviews, claims that the magazine has an interested buyer and that the publication will immediately resume business as usual. The magazine will continue to operate under the Nielsen umbrella for now, and Liebetrau expects a sale to be finalized in the next two to three weeks.

Bookmarks: The Advent Book Blog helps you shop, The National Post picks a shadow Canada Reads list, and more

• Richard Lea at the Guardian blog: If you can’t get Roth, Palin, or Rowling on the Kindle, what can you get?
• David Suzuki’s garbage gets combed through for incriminating Kraft Dinner boxes, and now archeologists are looking at what the Bard may have tossed away
• The L.A. Times picks their 25 favourite books of the year and actually selects some – gasp – poetry! That provoked a hearty booyah from this cubicle
• Web 2.0 marketing guru and Bookmadam Julie Wilson has teamed up with Books on the Radio‘s Sean Cranbury to offer the Advent Book Blog: Great Books Recommended by Great People
• Those funny book blog dudes at the National Post noted this year’s Canada Reads pics and wondered, what should Canada also read? Get your answers in by 5:00 p.m. this afternoon and maybe you’ll be able to participate in the alterna-reads version of the popular CBC book debate show

Best of lists take a beating – but what about critical honesty?

On Salon.com, Laura Miller talks about the controversy over PW’s best ten books of 2009 being 100% male:

What’s at issue isn’t sales or even access to readers; this is an argument about prestige and critical recognition, an argument best articulated by the novelist and critic Francine Prose in a 1998 article for Harper’s magazine. Prose detected a greater reverence for books by men among the nation’s literary and critical establishment, which includes reviewers, prize committees and the institutions that bestow grants. She blamed this on a widespread if seldom-stated assumption that “women writers will not write about anything important – anything truly serious or necessary, revelatory or wise.”

Miller goes on to admit that anyone who’s had to compile a list – will feel an “awkward sympathy for the PW team”:

But every year we do face a ticklish question: Is it the right thing to gerrymander your list in order to counteract real, long-standing cultural biases, even if that means lying to your readers? What is a 10-best list, after all, if not a record of the books we enjoyed most over the past 12 months? If you insist on a list that’s ideally representative of gender, race, class, nationality (i.e., including at least one translation), publisher size (small as well as large), fame, length (short story collections as well as novels), region, genre and so on, you can easily wind up with, say, a list of nine books you kinda like and maybe one you truly love. That’s a tepid dish to serve up to readers, and not likely to inspire much enthusiasm, either.

Free advance copies to the willing – The Adderall Diaries Lending Library

MobyLives points out U.S. author Stephen Elliott’s subversion of the usual promotional plan.

His true crime memoir, The Adderall Diaries, was released earlier this month, and rather than send out the advance reading copies to the media, he started The Adderral Diaries Lending Library. Basically, he sent an ARC to anyone who wanted one, and who promised to lend it out after they read it in a timely manner. Readers had one week to complete their read, and they would be sent an Email address of the next person on the list scheduled to receive a copy. Then they’d have to priority post them the book.

This fall Elliott is touring D.I.Y. style, by connecting with readers in their towns and giving readings at their houses. Here is a Facebook group of people who read an advanced copy.

This kind of word-of-mouth promotion is PR gold. For every book review that gets printed, a few sales may result, but any publicist will tell you that nothing beats a personal recommendation.

Bookmarks: Duranie lit, fun with Pynchon, and more

• Simpson’s writer takes revenge on uppity Pynchon scholar
• Nick Cave has a new novel, with its own iPhone app, Dave Byrne has a new memoir, and now … wait for it … Duran Duran has a book club on its website?
• Listen up, weary book publicists – all you gotta do is get a celeb to tweet your book title and you’re gold!
• Infringe first and ask questions later? Well yes, if you’re Google. The copyright office weighs in
• Details magazine lists its favourite literary podcasts
• The 9/11 novels worth reading

Bookmarks: YouTube review revenge and library porn

• The best revenge on bad reviews

• Coach House Books publicist Evan Munday asks, “Which Canadian book should be made into a movie?”
  

• Novelist Mariko Tamaki on fiction versus academia in the new issue of No More Potlucks

• Montreal’s Arjun Basu, author of several Twitter-length short stories, is having one turned into a short film

• Book critic Julia Keller on how to read graphic novels

• Bologna Children’s Bookfair may be forced to reinstate a fourth day, according to Publisher’s Weekly

• The much anticipated Ted Kennedy book review in The New York Times

• Random silliness: There is a great need for a sarcasm font, library porn, and the “homeless” Elle intern

Clinton reads book blogs

One of our favorite book blogs, the L.A. Times‘ Jacket Copy, appears to have fans from all walks of life, including former U.S. presidents. This morning, blogger Carolyn Kellogg posted a handwritten note from the “Office of William J. Clinton,” in which Mr. Clinton took the time to gently correct her on a small error in an earlier post. From Kellogg:

I have no idea where he finds the time to read a book blog. I’m just a blogger and I can barely find time to do laundry.

But read it he did. How do I know for sure? Because he offered a correction: His dinner with Bill Styron was in 1994, not 1999. Thanks, Mr. President. It’s fixed now.

The main part of his note was to let me know what he’s been reading lately. And I think that he wouldn’t mind if I share that list with you. Here’s a list of books Bill Clinton has been reading lately, from his own pen:

1. Steven Johnson’s “The Invention of Air” and “The Ghost Map,” esp. #1
2. Tom Zoellner’s “Uranium”
3. Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers,” his best book.
4. John Bogle’s “Enough”
5. Selden Edwards’ “The Little Book”
6. Richard North Patterson’s “Eclipse”
7. Andrew Greeley’s “The Cardinal Sins” (now almost 30 years old)