Bookmarks: J.K. Rowling tweets, Dr. Seuss raps, and Charles Dickens fights pirates

Bookish links from around the Web:

• Douglas Coupland really wants you to name his new Toronto park, and Scott Feschuk wants you to name his dog
• J.K. Rowling is now on Twitter, The Huffington Post reports, but she follows no one and has only three tweets. The billionaire author has 49,570 followers despite the fact that she doesn’t seem to comprehend what a tweet is
• Dr. Seuss’ Fox in Sox gets the beat box treatment. As Scope Notes says, “If you knew that Dr. Seuss invented the word ‘crunk,’ then this will seem like a natural combination”
• Charles Dickens: writer, social reformer … pirate fighter? It’s not what you think
• In honour of Banned Books Week in the U.S., here’s an interactive map of books that have been challenged and banned in a country that prides itself on freedom of speech (apparently, people still have an issue with gay penguins). The American Library Association also has a video to help children understand what Banned Book Week means 
• The Telegraph finds 50 factual errors in Dan Brown’s best-selling novels

Douglas Coupland reminisces about writing Generation X

This month, acclaimed author and zeitgeist-hound Douglas Coupland publishes his 11th novel, Generation A. In advance of the occasion, he took the opportunity in yesterday’s Guardian to jump into the Wayback Machine and talk about the book that made him famous two decades ago (which, in the hyper-jacked-up Coupland sensibility is tantamount to a couple of centuries….):

[I]t’s odd that Gen X was the thing that would change my life, because everything about the book reeked of disaster and bad decision-making. I’d only begun writing less than three years earlier – non-fiction for magazines in Canada – and I was soon hitting that point in life where poor decisions come back to bite one. I was at the end of my 20s and it was becoming clear to me that my 30s were going to be a continuing mix of rootlessness and poverty.

Thanks to an agent who was “a real huckster” (Coupland’s words), the author landed a sizable advance, which led to his own road-to-Damascus moment at (naturally) Davisville subway station in Toronto:

[O]ne afternoon in April of 1989, I was emerging from the Davisville subway station – there had just been a rainstorm and the sunset was cold and tangerine – and a wave swept over me, one of those waves that occur not too often in one’s lifetime. It was one of the few times I’ve ever heard “a voice” (whatever a voice really is), and the voice very clearly said to me: “OK, Doug. It appears that you’re going to be a full-time writer now. Good. But that means you have to write fiction rather than non-fiction, because fiction is purer. You’ll have to clear all your decks and you’re going to have to change the way you see both you and your future.”

And then the voice left, and I was just another guy standing on a wet sidewalk outside the Golden Griddle. But life was now different.

And the rest, as they say, is hipster history.

September Q&Q: Dany Laferrière and more in the spotlight on Quebec publishing

The cover star of the September issue of Q&Q is the Haitian-born, Montreal-based author Dany Laferrière, who came to national attention in the 1980s with his first novel, How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired, and is set to make a comeback in English-Canada with his latest novel. Also in the issue, Q&Q looks at a Quebec City publishing house that is bringing English-Canadian writing to French readers, and at the Montreal micro-publisher Conundrum Press, which evolved from being a quirky literary house to a quirky publisher of graphic novels. All that plus Fall Announcements, listing every fall adult title, and reviews of Linwood Barclay’s Fear the Worst, Douglas Coupland’s Generation A, Shinan Govani’s Boldface Names, and Arthur Slade’s The Hunchback Assignments.

Returning North

Globe-trotting novelist Dany Laferrière is a big-time celebrity in Quebec. Now, after a decade-long hiatus, he’s being published again in English

Exposing family secrets

Six authors on navigating the personal minefield of memoir writing

The English invasion

An upstart Quebec City house is discovering a surprising demand in its home province for English-Canadian writing. And more in the spotlight on Quebec publishing: The evolution of Conundrum Press, and the dying art of literary translation

Fall Announcements

The season’s complete listings

FRONTMATTER

Bonnie Burnard is back in the spotlight

Don LePan among the Animals

Snapshot: BookNet Canada’s new CEO Noah Genner

Cover to Cover: Lavie Tidhar and Nir Yaniv’s The Tel Aviv Dossier

The e-catalogue cometh

Harry Bruce on the Hugh MacLennan novel that almost never was

Local Buzz: Back to the Beach

GUEST OPINION

Canada’s beleaguered litmags must experiment online to stay relevant, argues Jason McBride

REVIEWS

Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro

Galore by Michael Crummey

The Fallen by Stephen Finucan

Animal by Alexandra Leggat

Plus more fiction, non-fiction, and poetry

BOOKS FOR YOUNG PEOPLE

Violet by Tania Stehlik and Vanja Vuleta Jovanovic

The Winter Drey by Sean Dixon

The Hunchback Assignments by Arthur Slade

Plus more fiction, non-fiction, and picture books

THE LAST WORD

The ups and downs of Amazon’s sales rankings can drive authors to distraction, writes Linwood Barclay

Douglas Coupland video clips available on iTunes

Fans of quirky writer, visual artist, and Canadian cultural icon Douglas Coupland can watch three free video clips inspired by his new novel Generation A via the iTunes Store.

Set in the near future, Generation A revolves around five people from different parts of the world and their shared experiences of being stung by bees in a time when bees have supposedly become extinct.

 The clips were developed by Toronto-based production company Crush Inc. in collaboration with Coupland and his publisher, Random House Canada.

In the 10-minute clip “Generation A – 10 Questions for Douglas Coupland,” the author is seen trapped in a sterile white room with a psychologist’s couch and yellow coffee mug, answering questions posed by a faceless female questioner with a clinical British accent. Coupland provides answers to questions such as, “What is the most evil letter?” (answer: j) and “What is the loneliest letter?” (m). He also provides long-winded philosophical replies to unheard inquiries:

 The reason we have books, the reason we have stories … it allows someone else to come in and hijack your internal voice for awhile so that you don’t have to do any of the work. When you hear a story and when you read a story, it sort of somehow ennobles our life … 

In order so that we don’t go crazy, we imagine that our lives have to be stories … whether or not it’s true, it sort of works.

The clip is frequently interrupted by brief “commercials” advertising a fictional television news team and a drug called “Solon CR,” both of which are featured in Generation A.

The other two clips correspond to some aspect of the novel. “Colour Samples” is narrated by a character who eases his mind by concentrating on unique paint colours, while “The Tragic Death of the Channel Three News Team” tells the story of a religious cult bent on killing celebrities, beginning with the Channel Three News Team, in a graphic novel-inspired animated feature.

The film clips will be available on iTunes until Sept. 14. 

147 authors up for the Impac Dublin Prize

The longlist for the richest award for writing in English has been announced. And the longlist is, in fact, long, with 147 authors in contention for the 2009 Impac Dublin prize of £100,000.

From the Guardian:

The list, drawn from any fiction published in English — including translations — is made up of nominations from 157 libraries in 117 cities and 41 countries worldwide. Selected books include most of the literary novels rewarded elsewhere in the last year, as well as titles less familiar to British readers. Perhaps the most unexpected appearance on the list is from Ken Follett, best known for his bestselling techno-thrillers, whose World Without End is the sequel to his medieval epic The Pillars of the Earth.

The selected titles now go forward for judging to a panel of five novelists — Gabrielle Alioth, Rachel Billington, Vesna Goldsworthy, James Ryan and Timothy Taylor — chaired by the former U.S. appeals judge Eugene R. Sullivan.

Canadian contenders on the list include Michael Ondaatje’s Divisadero, which was nominated by 13 libraries (making it the second most-popular book, behind A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini, which received 18 nominations); Effigy by Alissa York; Late Nights on Air by Elizabeth Hay; October by Richard B. Wright; Remembering the Bones by Frances Itani;  Soucouyant by David Chariandy; Spanish Fly by Will Ferguson; The Architects Are Here by Michael Winter; The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill; The Gum Thief by Douglas Coupland; The Lost Highway by David Adams Richards; The Milk Chicken Bomb by Andrew Wedderburn; and The Outlander by Gil Adamson.

Rawi Hage took the prize last year for De Niro’s Game.

The scents of CanLit

Following up on our earlier post about the new Danielle Steel perfume, we thought we’d offer some fragrance suggestions for our own literary stars:

Wayne Johnston’s Terre Neuve – Cod oil, salt water, and seal blubber combined in one haunting, historically epic fragrance.

Michael Ondaatje’s Divisadero – A puzzling perfume that begins one way and ends another. You’ll never be sure what you are smelling.

Souvenirs of Douglas Coupland – The smell of today and tomorrow and the day after! Contains essences of bubble tea, Red Bull, and bad office coffee.

Alice Munro’s The Scent of a Good Woman – A fragrance that is dependable, trustworthy, and utterly devoid of flash. It’s not your mother’s perfume – though it may be her mother’s.

What is Stephen Harper Smelling? by Yann Martel – The patron scent of lost causes! Equal parts piquant and pedantic, this relentless fragrance reminds you, over and over and over again, of its own importance.

Paul Quarrington’s new venture: cinéaste

Here’s a slug this Quillblogger didn’t expect to see: “A short film by writer/director Paul Quarrington.”

But, according to Open Book Toronto, (and as reported by Quill & Quire Omni this past summer) the acclaimed author of the Governor General’s Award-winner Whale Music and this year’s Canada Reads champ King Leary has ventured behind the camera to shoot his first short feature, Pavane, based on his latest novel, The Ravine.

Open Book reports:

In Paul Quarrington’s short film, Pavane, Phil and Jay share more than a family bond — failed careers, failed relationships, bottomless drinks, and a debilitating memory of a shocking encounter in a ravine one childhood day.

The film will screen as part of the Book Shorts Moving Stories Film Festival, which will tour across the country beginning with a stop at the Winnipeg International Writers Festival on September 28, followed by stops in Ottawa and Vancouver in October, and Toronto in November. The festival also features work by W. Bruce Pirrie (adapting Douglas Coupland’s JPod), Bert Kish (adapting Andrew Davidson’s The Gargoyle), and Irene Duma (adapting Patrick Watson’s This Hour Has Seven Decades). The festival’s advisers include filmmakers Sarah Polley and Robert Lantos, writer Nino Ricci, and Random House Canada publisher Anne Collins.

Open Book has posted a trailer for the Quarrington film, and there are full profiles of the fimmakers and advisers at the Moving Stories site.

In the September Q&Q

Our brand-new September issue features a cover profile of Miriam Toews, whose new novel, The Flying Troutmans, is set for release next month (and is also reviewed in the issue). Also in September, we look at the succession strategies of four B.C. publishers; offer a close-up on author Rukhsana Khan; look at the issue of booksellers ordering from Ingram in the U.S.; and ask whether Canadian novels are just a little too long. Plus the Fall Announcements, and reviews of new books by Ronald Wright, Helen Humphreys, Joan Barfoot, Joseph Boyden, Rawi Hage, Tish Cohen, Cary Fagan, Polly Horvath, and many more. The full contents can be seen after the jump.

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A few favourite CanLit covers

Entertainment Weekly recently compiled a list of the 25 most memorable book covers from the past 25 years. Their list is slightly skewed toward ubiquitous mega-designer Chip Kidd, who scores six entries. The lone Canadian reference is Fred Marcellino’s 1986 cover for Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.

We thought we’d play along by starting a list of our own favourite CanLit covers.

Below, you’ll find five picks from the bookshelf of Q&Q art director Gary Campbell. These bold, daring, and memorable covers grabbed him straight away, regardless of the title or the author’s name.

	The Bookseller Matt Cohen (Knopf Canada) Designed by Gordon Robertson, 1993
	Miss Wyoming Douglas Coupland (Random House Canada) Designed by John Gall, 1999
	This All Happened Michael Winter (House of Anansi Press) Designed by Bill Douglas, 2001
	Not Wanted On The Voyage Timothy Findley (Penguin Books Canada) Designed by Soapbox Design Communications, 2006
	The Boys In The Trees Mary Swan (Henry Holt) Designed by Lisa Fyfe, 2008

Thinking visual with Douglas Coupland

The latest issue of Granta has an essay by Douglas Coupland about embracing his passion for visual arts in his literary work. And not surprisingly, one of the themes is Coupland’s estrangement from the literary establishment.

I came to realize this fundamental perceptual difference in humanity rather late in the day, perhaps a decade after I began writing novels. Before writing novels I worked as a visual artist and designer, and I naively and romantically assumed that writing precluded the making of visual art. Wrong. To illustrate the result of this assumption, let me provide a generic reconstruction of an interview with me in, say, 1999, just before I figured things out:

Interviewer: So, I read your book and, uh, you’re a visual thinker, aren’t you?

Me: Uh… yes.

Interviewer: (pained silence).

Me: (pained silence).

Interviewer: Yes, your work is so (insert loaded sigh here) visual.

Me (in my head): What is it with this person?

Me (out loud): Well, isn’t everybody a visual thinker? We all have eyes and we all see. How can people not be visual thinkers?

Interviewer: (another sigh).

And there’s the gist of it. I tried for a decade to be a part of the book universe, and the harder I tried, the more I encountered that same feeling that might have been experienced, say, by a black musician walking into a Baltimore country club circa 1955, sitting down at a table and expecting to be served. This is not a very good fit, is it?