Pick, Edugyan, deWitt make Booker longlist

Three Canadian authors have made the 2011 Man Booker Prize for Fiction longlist, announced today. Alison Pick’s Far to Go (House of Anansi Press, Q&Q’s September 2010 cover profile), Esi Edugyan’s Half-Blood Blues (forthcoming from Thomas Allen & Son in September and profiled in the July-August 2011 issue of Q&Q), and Patrick deWitt’s The Sisters Brothers (House of Anansi) are vying for the title of “the best novel of the year written by a citizen of the Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland.”

It’s also worth noting three of the longlisted titles come from House of Anansi, which is also the domestic publisher of Stephen Kelman’s longlisted book, Pigeon English.

The full list includes:

• Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending (Jonathan Cape/Random House)
• Sebastian Barry, On Canaan’s Side (Faber)
• Carol Birch, Jamrach’s Menagerie (Canongate Books/HarperCollins)
• Patrick deWitt, The Sisters Brothers (Granta/House of Anansi)
• Esi Edugyan, Half Blood Blues (Serpent’s Tail/Thomas Allen)
• Yvvette Edwards, A Cupboard Full of Coats (Oneworld)
• Alan Hollinghurst, The Stranger’s Child (Picador/Pan Macmillan)
• Stephen Kelman, Pigeon English (Bloomsbury/House of Anansi)
• Patrick McGuinness, The Last Hundred Days (Seren Books)
• A.D. Miller, Snowdrops (Atlantic)
• Alison Pick, Far to Go (Headline Review/House of Anansi)
• Jane Rogers, The Testament of Jessie Lamb (Sandstone Press)
• D.J. Taylor, Derby Day (Chatto & Windus/Random House)

The six-title shortlist will be revealed Sept. 6 and the winner announced Oct. 18. Each author included on the shortlist will receive £2,500 and a special edition of their book. The winner will be awarded an additional £50,000. The jury, chaired by Dame Stella Rimington, is made up of writer Matthew d’Ancona, author Susan Hill, author and politician Chris Mullin, and Gaby Wood, books editor at The Daily Telegraph.

Edmonton literary magazine launches in Toronto

Eighteen Bridges, the cultural magazine of “narrative journalism and first-person essays” that sprang onto Edmonton’s literary scene in October 2010, will make its Toronto debut tonight. A labour of love co-founded by Curtis Gillespie and Lynn Coady and featuring the likes of Lisa Moore, Marni Jackson, Timothy Taylor, and Marina Endicott, the general interest publication also includes literary criticism, fiction, and poetry that is “primarily, but not exclusively, about Canada or written by Canadians.”

On the magazine’s website, the co-founders suggest they’ve taken cues from some of the industry’s heavy hitters:

We value the timeless narrative flair of The New Yorker, the journalistic rigour of Harpers, the literary excellence of Granta, and we hope to weave these elements together with a distinctive Canadian sensibility. Eighteen Bridges will be a modern in-touch magazine concerned with people, politics, culture, and ideas, its articles substantial, in-depth, and grounded in the narrative tradition.

The public launch takes place at the Spoke Club, 600 King St. W., starting at 7 p.m. (RSVPs are welcome at nina@eighteenbridges.com.)


Mavis wasn’t crazy about Mordecai

Here’s an excerpt from the interview Jhumpa Lahiri did with Mavis Gallant in the new issue of Granta. (We just thought it was funny…)

MG: I remember one of the people around in that winter of 1950-51, and who I moved to the Right Bank to get away from, was Mordecai Richler. He was a bit of a brat. He was much younger. I’d met him in Montreal.

[...]

That winter everyone in the world was around Paris that I knew, practically. And I realized he didn’t like it at all. For one thing, he couldn’t speak any French. Though he came from Montreal, he couldn’t say, “Pass the salt.” He couldn’t say anything.

[...]

One day Mordecai came drifting over and he sat down and he grabbed the book out of my hand that I was reading. It was The House in Paris, Elizabeth Bowen’s great novel.

[...]

And he read some in a mocking voice. A mocking English voice that he didn’t do very well. And he said, “You know, if you go on reading this crap you’re never going to get anywhere.” So I just took the book back.

Bookmarks: Lahiri vs. Gallant, Calvin and Hobbes, Elizabeth Gilbert, and more

Some bookish links:

• The National Post reports on Jhumpa Lahiri’s 53-page interview with Mavis Gallant in the summer 2009 issue of Granta, a back-and-forth battle in which Lahiri constantly works to make her presence felt, making readers wonder who is actually interviewing whom.
• Author Nevin Martell offers comic book fans a free sample chapter from his upcoming book Looking for Calvin and Hobbes: The Unconventional Story of Bill Watterson and his Revolutionary Comic Strip.
• In a video at Salon, Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love, talks about her creative process and the changing roles of women writers.
• David Barnett from the Guardian‘s book blog hilariously rejects the idea of Borders’ new online dating service.
• “Thirty years ago, ‘Ivy League romance writer’ was like ‘jumbo shrimp’ — an oxymoron.” USA Today profiles smart women who write trashy books.

Granta editor calls attention to impending Canadian litmag crisis

John Freeman, the new acting editor of Granta magazine, weighs in on the state of litmags in an article in today’s Independent. Interestingly, the piece begins by looking at the recent blow dealt to litmags here in Canada:

Bad things happen up north in the winter, when no one is looking. Like last February, when Canada’s heritage minister James Moore gave a speech which poorly disguised the fact that his office was effectively preparing to clear-cut many Canadian journals. Under his directive a literary journal in Canada must now sell at least 5,000 copies each year to be eligible for government assistance. This may seem like an abstruse piece of bookish trivia, until one remembers that most journals are lucky to reach half that number of readers, and that this radical cutback in funding is happening in a country whose tiny journals supported the early work of Michael Ondaatje, Anne Michaels, and Alice Munro, let alone talented newcomers such as Pasha Malla.

But it’s not just Canada leading this retreat. Fearful capitulation has been the norm in so much English-language literary publishing over the last four years. Newspapers in the U.S. and England have slashed book review supplements, and watched dumbfounded as readers upchucked their subscriptions.

(Thanks to the National Post for calling our attention to Freeman’s piece.)

Meet John Freeman, Granta’s new acting editor

Granta has posted a lengthy online interview with its new acting editor, John Freeman, who stepped into the role last week after the abrupt departure of previous editor Alex Clark. The former president of the National Book Critics Circle, Freeman has been with the renowned literary magazine for less than one year. Described in a recent New York Observer profile as an energetic booster of literature and, in his book reviews, as “the ultimate generalist, writing solid if not always revelatory pieces on fiction, history, poetry and anything else he [feels] like,” Freeman promises to simultaneously “reconnect with the vibrancy of American writing” and bring to the magazine a more global outlook. From the Granta interview:

Culturally, financially, and metaphorically, we don’t live in an Anglo-American world anymore, but even the best magazines – Granta included – do not fully reflect this…. Our culture has become dangerously detached from the world at large. We need to do a better job of finding writers outside of the English language, from all parts of the world – but especially the Middle East, Africa, and Asia – and call on them to tell stories, rather than sending someone from the Anglo-American world to ferry back the news.

Laura Miller, Granta, and immigrant lit (and James Wood)

Granta‘s new “Best of Young American Novelists 2” issue is now out (the followup to a 1996 issue), and The Los Angeles Times looks at the under-35 authors who made the cut this time, noting that “many of the list’s 21 writers were raised abroad or are nonwhite. Are stories of transnational identity where the literary action is these days?” Taking the counterpoint is Salon critic Laura Miller, who tells the Times, “Writing about immigrants saves you from having to write about mass culture.”

“American novels have an extremely ambivalent relationship to mass culture and have a very difficult time coming to terms with it,” she said. “Because it’s supposed to be the opposite of all the things that people want from literature. People would just rather avoid it,” and writing about ethnicity or migration allows them to.

Those comments have already drawn some fire from Bookslut, and while Quillblog has never understood the obsessive antipathy some litbloggers seem to bear for Miller, she is guilty of a pretty big generalization here. Undoubtedly, many “transnational” writers come by their subjects honestly, should write about what they want to write about, etc.

On the other hand, Miller probably isn’t talking total nonsense either. Didn’t another much more celebrated critic, James Wood, sort of say the same thing in a review of Monica Ali’s Brick Lane a while back?

[Literature with immigration themes has a] momentous service to perform, which is to return fiction to its nineteenth-century gravity. This it does by re-importing into the Western novel traditional societies, with their ties of marriage, burdens of religion, obligations of civic duty, and pressures of propriety — and thereby restoring to the novel form some of the old oppressions that it was created to comprehend and to resist and in some measure to escape.

Wood’s position is admiring rather than fretful – he loved Brick Lane – but to Quillblog it sure sounds like a wish to retreat to the good old days when fiction was both simpler and more substantial.