Is CanLit sexy?

Photo courtesy of canlitissexy.tumblr.com

Move over Gosling, we’ve got Mistry, Martel, and Munro.

CanLit is Sexy, an anonymous blog that calls itself a “misguided response to the end of McClelland & Stewart as an independent Canadian publishing house,” is making Quillblog blush with its collection of pick-up lines “from the authors themselves.” We’ve never wanted to think about Robertson Davies’ slacks, and we’re not even going to touch the Susanna Moodie reference.

Fall preview 2011: Canadian fiction

In the July/August issue, Q&Q looks ahead at the fall season’s biggest books.

NOVELS

One of the most anticipated releases of the fall season is surely the new novel from internationally acclaimed author Michael Ondaatje, his first since 2007 Governor General’s Literary Award winner Divisadero. Set in the early 1950s, The Cat’s Table (McClelland & Stewart, $32 cl., Sept.) tells the story of an 11-year-old boy crossing the Indian Ocean on a liner bound for England, and the mysterious prisoner shackled on board. • Also from M&S is Guy Vanderhaeghe’s first novel in eight years. Set in the late 19th-century Canadian and American West, A Good Man ($32.99 cl., Sept.) is the third book in a loose trilogy that also includes The Last Crossing (2003) and The Englishman’s Boy, which won the 1996 Governor General’s Literary Award. • A third GG winner has a new novel out this season: David Gilmour, who won in 2005 for his previous novel, A Perfect Night to Go to China. Gilmour returns with The Perfect Order of Things (Thomas Allen Publishers, $26.95 cl., Sept.), the story of a man who revisits traumatic and life-changing incidents from his past.

Marina Endicott follows up her Scotiabank Giller Prize–shortlisted 2008 novel Good to a Fault with The Little Shadows (Doubleday Canada, $32.95 cl., Sept.), about three sisters who become vaudeville singers following the death of their father. • Acclaimed novelist Helen Humphreys returns with an historical novel set in France during the Napoleonic period. The Reinvention of Love (HarperCollins Canada, $29.99 cl., Sept.) is about a French journalist whose affair with Victor Hugo’s wife causes a scandal (as it might be expected to do).

Brian Francis’s debut novel, Fruit, was a runner-up in the 2009 edition of CBC’s battle of the books, Canada Reads. His second novel, Natural Order (Doubleday Canada, $29.95 cl., Aug.), tells the story of a mother who is forced to confront the secrets she has kept about her son when her carefully constructed life is overturned by a startling revelation. • Kevin Chong returns to fiction with his first novel in a decade. Beauty Plus Pity (Arsenal Pulp Press, $17.95 pa., Sept.) follows an Asian-Canadian slacker in Vancouver whose incipient modelling career is derailed by the death of his father and the sudden departure of his fiancée.

Requiem (HarperCollins Canada, $32.95 cl., Sept.), the third novel from Frances Itani, is about a Japanese-Canadian who embarks upon a cross-country journey of discovery following the death of his wife. • Anita Rau Badami follows her best-selling novels Tamarind Mem and The Hero’s Walk with Tell It to the Trees (Knopf Canada, $32 cl., Sept.), about the Dharma family – the authoritarian Vikram, the gourmand Suman, and the old storyteller Akka. When the Dharmas’ tenant, Anu, turns up dead on their doorstep, the family’s long-buried secrets begin to boil over. • Gayla Reid returns with her first novel since 2002’s Closer Apart. Set during the Spanish Civil War, Come from Afar (Cormorant Books, $32 cl., Aug.) tells the story of an Australian nurse who falls into a relationship with a Canadian soldier from the International Brigade.

Haitian expat Dany Laferrière is back with his third novel in translation in three years. The Return (Douglas & McIntyre, $22.95 pa., Aug.) tells the story of a 23-year-old Haitian named Dany who flees Baby Doc Duvalier’s repressive regime and relocates to Montreal. Thirty-three years later, Dany learns of his father’s death in New York City, and plots a return to his native country. David Homel translates. • Another Montreal resident, poet Sina Queyras, has a novel out this fall, the author’s first. Autobiography of Childhood (Coach House Books, $20.95 pa., Oct.) is about one day in the lives of five siblings haunted by the death of a brother years before. • Infrared (McArthur & Company, $29.95 cl., Sept.), the new novel by Nancy Huston, is about a photographer who travels to Tuscany with her father and stepmother. Employing internal dialogues with the photographer’s mental doppelgänger, Huston opens up her hero for exposure and provides an intimate picture of her interior life.

CanLit mainstay David Helwig returns with a novella, his first since 2007’s Smuggling Donkeys. Killing McGee (Oberon, $38.95 cl., $18.95 pa., Oct.) tells the story of a professor’s dual obsessions with the assassination of D’Arcy McGee and the disappearance of one of his students. • Toronto-based poet Dani Couture returns with her first novel, a surreal and iconoclastic take on that perennial CanLit staple: the family drama. Algoma (Invisible Publishing, $19.95 pa., Oct.) tells the story of a family attempting to cope with the aftermath of a young child falling through the ice and drowning. • Shari Lapeña also has a novel about a perennial CanLit concern: raising money to allow one time to write poetry. Happiness Economics (Brindle & Glass, $19.95 pa., Sept.) tells the story of a stalled poet who takes a job writing advertising copy to start a poetry foundation.

Jamaican-born novelist, poet, and non-fiction author Olive Senior returns to long-form fiction with Dancing Lessons (Cormorant, $22 pa., Aug.), about a woman looking back on her life after a hurricane destroys her home. • Memoirist Frances Greenslade (A Pilgrim in Ireland, By the Secret Ladder) has a debut novel out this August. Shelter (Random House Canada, $29.95 cl.) is a coming of age story about two sisters searching for their mother, who abandoned them after their father was killed in a logging accident.

Not one, but two novels this season extend the burgeoning CanLit focus on towns that have been/are about to be flooded (after Johanna Skibsrud’s The Sentimentalists, Anne Michaels’ The Winter Vault, and Michael V. Smith’s Progress). Tristan Hughes’s Eye Lake (Coach House, $19.95 pa., Oct.) is about the town of Crooked River, Ontario. Named for a river that was diverted to make way for a mine, the town harbours secrets that surface when the river reclaims its original course. • And in September, Goose Lane Editions will publish Riel Nason’s The Town that Drowned ($19.95 pa.), about the suspicions, secrets, and emotions that flare up when the township of Haverton is scheduled to be flooded to allow for the construction of a massive dam.

Edward Riche follows up his Thomas Head Raddall Award winner The Nine Planets with Easy to Like (House of Anansi Press, $29.95 cl., Sept.), a satire about a screenwriter and oenophile who dreams of travelling to Paris, but is trapped in Canada by an expired passport and a growing Hollywood scandal. Relocating to Toronto, he bluffs his way into the upper echelons of the CBC. • Former president and CEO of Penguin Canada, David Davidar was forced out of his position under a cloud of scandal after accusations of sexual harassment. Davidar’s new novel, Ithaca (M&S, $29.99 cl., Oct.), is, perhaps not coincidentally, about the rise and fall of a publishing star.

Canadian literary icon Michel Tremblay returns with a new novel, the first in a trilogy. Set in 1913, Crossing the Continent (Talonbooks, $18.95 pa., Oct.) takes the author’s characters out of Quebec for the first time, to tell the backstory of the people who populate his Chroniques du Plateau-Mont-Royal series. Long-time Tremblay collaborator Sheila Fischman translates.

A resident of St. John’s, Newfoundland, lately one of the most fertile spots for Canadian writing, Michelle Butler Hallett crafts genre-busting stories and novels that frequently experiment with gender and perspective. Her new novel, Deluded Your Sailors (Creative Book Publishing, $21.95 pa., Sept.), focuses on the culture industry from the perspective of Nichole Wright, who makes a discovery that puts a government-funded tourism project in jeopardy, and a shape-shifting minister named Elias Winslow. • Another Newfoundland native, Kate Story, has a novel out with Creative this season. The follow-up to 2008’s Blasted, Wrecked Upon This Shore ($21.95 pa., Sept.) tells the story of Pearl Lewis, an emotionally damaged, charismatic woman who is seen at different stages in her life.

In 1972, Christina Parr returns to her hometown of Parr’s Landing, a place she fled years earlier. The dirty secret of Parr’s Landing? A 300-year-old vampire resides in the caves of the remote mining town. Christina learns why she should have stayed away in Michael Rowe’s Enter, Night (ChiZine Publications, $17.95 pa., Oct.). • English literature professor Janey Erlickson struggles to make headway in her academic career while caring for a tyrannical toddler in Sue Sorensen’s comic novel A Large Harmonium (Coteau Books, $21 pa., Sept.). • Paul Brenner, a Vancouver lawyer, dines with his son, Daniel, one Friday evening. The next day, Brenner receives word that his son has been murdered. Hold Me Now (Freehand Books, $21.95 pa., Oct.), the first novel from Stephen Gauer, examines a father’s grief and a lawyer’s faith in the legal system.

SHORT FICTION

Anyone who has ever wondered what might transpire if the author of Bigfoot’s autobiography were to illustrate a story collection by Canada’s reigning postmodern ironist can stop wondering. October sees the publication of Highly Inappropriate Tales for Young People (Random House Canada, $24 cl.), the first collaboration between author Douglas Coupland and well-known illustrator Graham Roumieu.

D.W. Wilson currently lives in London, England, but is a native of B.C.’s Kootenay Valley. The winner of the inaugural Man Booker Prize Scholarship from the University of East Anglia, Wilson’s debut collection, Once You Break a Knuckle (Hamish Hamilton Canada, $32 cl., Sept.), is a suite of stories about good people doing bad things.

Novelist Anne DeGrace has her first collection of short stories on tap for September. Flying with Amelia (McArthur & Company, $29.95 cl.) spans the 20th century and crosses vast swathes of territory. Wireless telegraphy, German POWs in Manitoba, the Great Depression, and the FLQ crisis all crop up in her stories. • David Whitton’s story “Twilight of the Gods” was included in the 2010 sci-fi anthology Darwin’s Bastards. The story also appears in Whitton’s first solo collection, The Reverse Cowgirl (Freehand, $21.95 pa., Oct.), which sports the most sexually suggestive title for a collection of CanLit stories since Pasha Malla’s The Withdrawal Method.

Toronto writer Rebecca Rosenblum follows up her Metcalf-Rooke Award–winning debut collection Once (a Q&Q book of the year for 2009) with The Big Dream (Biblioasis, $19.95 pa., Sept.), a collection of linked stories about the lives of workers at Dream, Inc., a lifestyle-magazine publisher. • The Maladjusted (Thistledown Press, $18.95 pa., Sept.), Toronto writer Derek Hayes’ debut collection, focuses on people who run afoul of the dictates of polite society. • Also from Thistledown, Britt Holmström’s Leaving Berlin ($18.95 pa., Sept.) examines contemporary women in both Canadian and European settings.

The fine print: Q&Q’s fall preview covers books published between July 1 and Dec. 31, 2011. All information (titles, prices, publication dates, etc.) was supplied by publishers and may have been tentative at Q&Q’s press time. • Titles that have appeared in previous previews do not appear here.

In the April 2011 issue of Q&Q: Susan Musgrave talks to Lorna Crozier

It’s been more than a decade since the iconic – and iconoclastic – Susan Musgrave published a new collection of poetry. In the April 2011 issue of Q&Q, Musgrave discusses her new collection, Origami Dove (McClelland & Stewart), with fellow B.C. poet Lorna Crozier, whose collection Small Mechanics also appears this spring with M&S. Also in April, a profile of overlooked short story author Clark Blaise, a special report on B.C. publishing, and a feature on the financial struggles facing Canadian literary journals. Plus reviews of new books by Julie Booker, John Furlong, Joe Ollmann, Chester Brown, Nicola Winstanley, Elisa Amado, Mélanie Watt, and more.

FEATURES

On poetry and prose
Two of B.C.’s leading poets – Susan Musgrave and Lorna Crozier – discuss writing, self-doubt, and Al Purdy’s birthday cake

Special report on B.C. publishing
Industry newcomer Randal Macnair brings new life to Oolichan Books; B.C. BookWorld’s Alan Twigg on surviving lean times; New Society carves out a distinctive niche in D&M’s growing eco-book empire; B.C. booksellers find solidarity at this year’s provincial book fair

Rough cuts
A year after the Department of Canadian Heritage slashed funding for small-run periodicals, many venerable literary magazines are struggling to adapt

FRONTMATTER
Clark Blaise’s return to form
An insider’s take on the collapse of H.B. Fenn and Company
Snapshot: Books for Business CEO Sean Neville
Best short stories: Alexander MacLeod on Alice Munro
Cover to cover: Gil Adamson’s Ashland
Guest opinion: Carmine Starnino on rebooting the CanLit canon
Kirstie McLellan Day’s hockey-book hat trick

REVIEWS
Up Up Up by Julie Booker
Patriot Hearts: Inside the Olympics That Changed a Country by John Furlong with Gary Mason
Mid-Life by Joe Ollmann
Paying for It by Chester Brown
Touch by Alexi Zentner
Esther: The Remarkable True Story of Esther Wheelwright, Puritan Child, Native Daughter, Mother Superior by Julie Wheelwright
Underground by Anatanas Sileika
PLUS more fiction, non-fiction, and poetry

BOOKS FOR YOUNG PEOPLE
Cinnamon Boy by Nicola Winstanley; Janice Nadeau, illus.
What Are You Doing? by Elisa Amado; Manuel Monroy, illus.
You’re Finally Here! by Mélanie Watt
Banjo of Destiny by Cary Fagan
PLUS more fiction, non-fiction, and picture books

THE Q&Q/BOOKNET CANADA BESTSELLERS

THE LAST WORD
Cynthia Holz on a writer’s search for inspiration between novels

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Atwood-bashing begins over “Fox News North”

Margaret Atwood is once again lending her name to a worthy cause, and like her support for the environment, brown-bag lunches, and stay-at-home book tours, the celebrated novelist’s actions have generated some mild controversy in the Canadian media.

The latest episode erupted on Tuesday when Atwood announced (via Twitter) that she had added her name to a petition protesting Sun Media’s efforts to launch a Fox TV-style news channel in Canada (the channel is being dubbed “Fox News North” and “Tory TV”). That immediately prompted a response, also via Twitter, from Sun Media national bureau chief David Akin accusing Atwood of supporting “an anti-free speech movement” and effectively accusing “me and my colleagues of hate speech.”

Atwood in turn replied that the issue isn’t about free speech per se, but rather Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s meddlesome involvement with the CRTC, which recently denied the network a top-tier broadcast licence. As Atwood puts it in fewer than 140 characters, “we shouldn’t B Forced to Pay for it, & CRTC chair should be arms’ length, not Harper tool. Fox free 2 set itself up.” She elaborates her position in The Globe and Mail:

“Of course Fox & Co. can set up a channel or whatever they want to do, if it’s legal etc.,” she told The Globe and Mail in an email. “But it shouldn’t happen this way. It’s like the head-of-census affair – gov’t direct meddling in affairs that are supposed to be arm’s length – so do what they say or they fire you.

“It’s part of the ‘I make the rules around here,’ Harper-is-a-king thing,” she wrote.

In today’s National Post, columnist Kelly McParland hits back with an editorial deriding Atwood for “sign[ing] onto this silliness.” Atwood, McParland writes, “stands for good stuff like freedom of speech and freedom of the press, except when it comes to the case of people who don’t agree with her…. Right Peggy? Because you can’t be a good Canadian if you’re a Conservative. Everyone at the CanLit festivals agrees, so it must be true.”

The Post‘s paranoid speculation about a left-leaning CanLit cabal is nothing new. Assuming that at least some of Quillblog’s readers will want to follow Atwood in rejecting Fox News North, you can do so by adding your name to the petition here.

National Post reveals finalists for Canada Also Reads competition

The eight books and panelists for the National Post’s Canada Also Reads book competition – created to put a spotlight on lesser-known books ignored by CBC’s Canada Reads – were announced today. Two Q&Q staffers, Zoe Whittall and Steven W. Beattie, will be defending their choices on the panel, alongside six other authors, poets, and even one singer/songwriter.

The Post’s Mark Medley created anticipation for the event by live-tweeting in the moments leading up to the reveal, offering hints such as “one of the books is set near some famous falls” and “one of the finalists had two of her novels long-listed.” After announcing that the final post was being spell-checked, and admitting that they were milking this build-up for all it was worth, the results were finally posted on the Post’s Afterword book blog. Here’s the full list:

• Steven W. Beattie defends My White Planet by Mark Anthony Jarman (Thomas Allen Publishers)
• Author Tish Cohen (Inside Out Girl, Town House) defends The Day The Falls Stood Still by Cathy Marie Buchanan (HarperCollins Canada)
• Singer/songwriter Andy Maize (Skydiggers) defends Best Laid Plans by Terry Fallis (McClelland & Stewart)
• Poet Jacob McArthur Mooney (The New Layman’s Almanac) defends The Last Shot by Leon Rooke (Thomas Allen Publishers)
• Blogger John Mutford defends Yellowknife by Steve Zipp (Res Telluris)
• Author Lisa Pasold (Rats of Las Vegas) defends You and The Pirates by Jocelyne Allens (The Workhorsery)
• Author Neil Smith (Bang Crunch) defends Come, Thou Tortoise by Jessica Grant (Knopf Canada)
• Zoe Whittall (Holding Still for as Long as Possible) defends Fear of Fighting by Stacey May Fowles (Invisible Publishing)

According to the Afterword, while the blog is “a fan of what Canada Reads has done to promote CanLit, we figured this would be a great opportunity to help shine a light on some of the books sitting in the shadows.” Starting March 1, the Afterword will post two panelists’ defences of their chosen novels each day. On March 8, it will host a live chat with all the panelists and authors. The winner will be chosen via a public poll.

Douglas Coupland really does like the Canada Council

Douglas Coupland has called himself the world’s worst worrier, and apparently the thing he’s been fretting about lately is an inaccuracy that appeared in the National Post. In the article in question, crime novelist William Deverell draws on a recent op-ed penned by Coupland to bolster his argument that Canadian readers suffer from what he describes as a “national snobbery disorder.” From Deverell’s article:

The New York Times recently ran Douglas Coupland’s scathing critique of Canadian literary pretentiousness: “There is a grimness about CanLit,” he wrote, in which typically authors are supported by the government “to write about small towns and/or the immigrant experience.” Coupland refuses to accept Canada Council money.

Coupland wants to set the record straight: whatever his feelings about the state of CanLit, he happily supports the Canada Council. Earlier today, he sent out a mass e-mail correcting the misperception. The complete missive is below:

Hi everyone. Sorry for the mass email but it’s important to me. Here’s a letter I wrote to the National Post an hour ago.

Hi Post,

A puzzled friend forwarded to me your September 14 piece on publishing in Canada that I hadn’t read. Glitch! Fact is, I really do support the Canada Council – and have done well by them throughout the years. The Council helps creative people at all phases of their careers and is also critical in helping artists and writers and performers abroad as well as domestically. Could you publish this for me? I’d been wondering why certain people were being weird to me in some situations and now I know the reason. Otherwise all is well, and thank you for your support over the years. And please keep writing about publishing. It’s an interesting moment in its history.

Keep well,

Yours,

Douglas Coupland

That should do it. In case you’re wondering, here is what Coupland actually said about the Canada Council in The New York Times:

I’m a big fan of subsidization of the arts. Without subsidization, CanLit couldn’t exist for 10 minutes. Canada is an extravagantly huge and underpopulated country with no economy of scale. Maintaining an identity is expensive, period — thus the need for money in the arts. And I think the Canadian government ought to be hurling 10 times as much cash at literary arts in general, CanLit as much as anything else.

“High in antioxidants, low on caffeine”: Leah McLaren weighs in on CanLit

Globe and Mail columnist Leah McLaren is the latest public figure to opine on the state of Can Lit. Prompted by this year’s awards season, McLaren takes the discussion one step further (or, perhaps backward) by flat-out refusing to read any nominated titles.

Beyond wondering who does Annabel Lyon’s hair and if Margaret Atwood is “pissed” by her exclusion from several major shortlists, McLaren simply cannot deign to read jury-selected books, voracious reader though she claims to be. Which, of course, more than qualifies her to weigh in on the subject.

In Saturday’s column, she cautions against the dangers of reading what “the man” tells you to:

[...] despite all the good that literary prizes provide — and I say this as a member of the Authors’ Committee of the Writers’ Trust of Canada — there is also an inherent danger in their increasing cultural primacy.

As one Canadian writer who did not want his name used recently said to me in an e-mail, the problem with prize lists is that they take something intimate and eclectic and turn it into a socially sanctioned Cultural Event.

“Reading — unlike multiplex movie-going, say — is inherently idiosyncratic,” he wrote. “Its idiosyncrasy is in its strength, the breadth of library and bookstore choices offering a feast of discoveries for the curious and story-hungry. Prizes, on the other hand, ultimately work to shape a vast plurality of tastes into a single, institutionally endorsed selection. The Giller is a successful venture, no question about it. But successful at what? Bringing new readers to exciting, boundary-pushing, pleasure-filled books? Or calcifying CanLit into a predictable brand?”

She also likens prize lists to high-school English curricula and the content of prison libraries. Given this year’s sombre selections, it could be argued that McLaren has a point. Besides, who better to judge the state of CanLit than the author of the “giggly, airy” Continuity Girl?

Lisa Moore still “unreadably Canadian,” Barbara Kay says

National Post columnist Barbara Kay really has it in for novelist Lisa Moore. The one-sided feud began last July, when Kay responded to Post reporter Katherine Laidlaw’s “gushy” profile of the two-time Giller Prize nominee, calling Moore’s most recent novel, February, “unreadably Canadian,” a prime example of the “navel-gazing narrative stasis” that defines Canadian literature. “Welcome to the unrelenting self-regard of CanLit,” Kay wrote, “where it’s all about nobly suffering women or feminized men.”

The only catch was that Kay had yet to read the book in question. However, the opinionated journalist rectified the situation on her summer vacation, reading February and a handful of other literary titles sent to her by Moore’s publisher, House of Anansi Press. Not surprisingly, Kay’s summer reading only confirmed her assumptions about the novel’s unmanly approach to character and plot. “February is 99% writerly foreplay, 1% readerly orgasm,” she writes:

Moore is an enormously talented writer, but like so many others of her sensitive, creative workshopped-to-death ilk, a writer’s writer privileging an artistic, leisured rendering of memory and feeling over prole-friendly dialogue, action and, above all, plot.

According to Kay, the woeful state of CanLit can be blamed on the impact that feminism has had on the industry (Canadian publishing is “highly feminized by comparison to 40 years ago,” she observes) and indulgent public-sector grants, which encourage writers to “start writing for bureaucrats, academics, theorists and literary elites, not for flesh and blood readers,” Kay argues.

Of course, it’s impossible to take seriously a critic whose pre-judgments are so ingrained and politically charged. Unfortunately for Moore, any number of authors could have stood in as the target of Kay’s screed.

The undead of CanLit

In the footsteps of Quirk Books’ Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and its just-announced follow up, Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, Coach House Books publicist Evan Munday wants to know which Canadian book would be best suited for a zombie mash-up. He’s posted some suggestions over at Open Book: Toronto; they include Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town Under Siege by Zombies, Crabwise to the Hounds of Hell, and The Fat Woman Next Door Is Pregnant … and a Zombie. Readers can vote for their favourite, or suggest titles of their own. Some of the best suggestions include For Those Who Hunt the Zombies Down, Who Has Seen the Zombie, and (Quillblog’s favourite) In the Skin of a Zombie.

Getting into the mash-up spirit, Quillblog would like to suggest the following additions:

Headhunter
The Edible Woman
The In-Between Life of Vikram Lall
Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures

See? It’s easy if you put your mind to it.

Authors challenge the idea of a national literature

Canadian authors Margaret Atwood and Anne Michaels, along with Britain’s Monica Ali and Ireland’s Joseph O’Neill, have contributed their thoughts on the idea of a national literature to The Atlantic‘s Fiction 2009 special issue, created in partnership with the Luminato Festival of Arts and Creativity held in Toronto last month. The four essays, grouped under the title “Border Crossings,” discuss how globalization, immigration, and the internet have affected the concept of a national literature, and question whether the notion that books and authors belong only to one place can still exist.

In her essay “Reading Faust in Korean,” Michaels argues that the idea of a national literature is created by the reader who relates to the book in his or her own way, rather thanby the writer’s place of birth. Atwood, for her part, thinks that it’s impossible to place an author or a book into a single category. In her essay “The Beetle and the Teacup,” she writes:

“Do you identify as a woman, or as a writer?” I’ve been asked. “A North American? A Torontonian? An environmentalist? A poet, or a novelist?” As if we were so divisible.