The book world is just starting to shake itself awake after the holidays, so here are a couple of photos from events that happened before the break.

Avast! Canada’s Dada bard has a Santa hat: Coach House published a revised edition of Christian Bök’s “univocular” work Eunoia, and celebrated the re-launch at Toronto’s Supermarket on Dec. 15 with readings from Andrew Pyper, Ken Babstock, Darren Wershler, Priscilla Uppal, and Bök himself, pictured here wearing the finest in Maple Leafs headgear. (Photo by Rick/Simon, courtesy of Coach House Books)

We assume they’re laughing on the inside: JAZZ FM host and occasional comic Ralph Benmergui interviewed Yuk Yuk’s head honcho Mark Breslin at a This is Not a Reading Series event at the Gladstone Hotel in Toronto on Dec. 9 to launch The Yuk Yuk’s Guide To Canadian Stand-up (HarperCollins Canada). Above: Breslin (left) takes Benmergui step-by-step through the comedy “rule of three.” (Photo by Chris Reed, courtesy of HarperCollins Canada)

• Kate Sutherland, author of Kate’s Book Blog, writes about Encyclopedia Brown – specifically how the series taught her to think like a lawyer, and how the tough character of Brown’s sidekick, Sally Kimball, broke down stereotypes for girls in 1963
• Galleycat highlights a new book by Iraqi blogger: Iraqi Girl: Diary of a Teenage Girl in Iraq
• The Guardian on a new/old poetic form, the Englynion
• For our American friends, here’s a Thanksgiving journal by Jonathan Ames
• Stacey-May Fowles interviews Michael Turner about his latest book, 8 X 10, on The Walrus

Earlier this week, The Sunday Times ran a lengthy interview with novelist Sebastian Faulks in which he had this to say about the Koran:

“It’s a depressing book. It really is. It’s just the rantings of a schizophrenic. It’s very one-dimensional, and people talk about the beauty of the Arabic and so on, but the English translation I read was, from a literary point of view, very disappointing.

“There is also the barrenness of the message. I mean, there are some bits about diet, you know, the equivalent of the Old Testament, which is also crazy. If you look again at those books of the law, Leviticus or Deuteronomy, there’s a lot about who you are allowed to sleep with, and if a man had lost his testicles he wouldn’t enter into the presence of God, that is just terrible. But the great thing about the Old Testament is that it does have these incredible stories. Of the 100 greatest stories ever told, 99 are probably in the Old Testament and the other is in Homer.

“With the Koran there are no stories. And it has no ethical dimension like the New Testament, no new plan for life. It says ‘the Jews and the Christians were along the right tracks, but actually, they were wrong and I’m right, and if you don’t believe me, tough — you’ll burn for ever.’ That’s basically the message of the book.”

For some odd reason, people felt this might be a tad controversial, so Faulks has now written a slightly more conciliatory essay in The Telegraph:

While we Judaeo-Christians can take a lot of verbal rough-and-tumble about our human-written scriptures, I know that to Muslims the Koran is different; it is by definition beyond criticism. And if anything I said or was quoted as saying (not always the same thing) offended any Muslim sensibility, I do apologise – and without reservation.

It was never my intention to offend my Muslim friends or readers, and if you read my novel I think you will see how I have shown the positive effects of the Koran on a kind and typical Muslim family.

Awww…

Meanwhile, Riazat Butt, the Guardian’s religious affairs correspondent, writes that Faulks had it wrong to begin with:

The Qur’an is neither a bedside read nor a Booker entry – I won’t be packing it in my hand luggage before I go to Tunisia this weekend. It is, for Muslims, a blueprint for everyday life, with guidance on subjects such as divorce, the day of judgment and everything in between. So if it reads like a rulebook, that’s because it is.

The Qur’an was not written in English, nor is it normally read in English, so of course the scriptures lose something in translation. Should Faulks want to fully appreciate and experience the Qur’an, he should brush up on his classical Arabic. Most, but not all, of the Qur’an’s stories are based on tales from the Old Testament, so if he thinks the Qur’an is a bit rubbish at capturing the imagination, then it follows the Bible is a bit of a let-down too.

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.

A lot of bookish types were annoyed when rapper, producer, professional spoilt brat, and now author Kanye West claimed to be a “proud non-reader” in a recent interview. We’re guessing, however, that more than a few book tour-weary authors will offer up a quiet hallelujah at the sentiment West expresses at the end of a typically tense interview with Entertainment Weekly:

You know what I don’t like about the continuous questions about elaborating, is I’m not trying to give someone else a book to write. The book is itself. I just want to use this opportunity to explain to people why they need to buy this book. That’s what happens. Why elaborate?

Canada AM tech reporter Kris Abel was casually chatting with Indigo CEO Heather Reisman this morning – she had just got through doing an interview about her annual “summer reads” selections – when she revealed that Indigo is currently in final talks with a number of e-book reader manufacturers about adopting one of their devices and launching it here in Canada – under the Indigo name – by the end of this year.

The link to Abel’s post is currently broken, but the gist of it is as follows:

While chatting with myself back-stage she divulged the company’s plans, willing only to confirm that it won’t be the Sony Reader, already available and supported by Sony’s own online E-Book store, nor Amazon’s Kindle, which has yet to find a launch in Canada. Instead the retailer will launch their own service, one that will follow on the heels of their successful ShortCovers service, launched earlier this year.

No one from Indigo has verified Abel’s report, as of yet. Keep checking Q&Q Omni for further updates.

An article published earlier this week in The New York Times looks at author Scott Turow’s decision to switch publishers for his impending Presumed Innocent sequel. It’s not exactly a publisher switch, though – as the article clarifies, Turow has simply decided to grant hardcover rights to his usual mass-market publisher, Grand Central Publishing. His usual hardcover publisher, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, has been left out in the cold. What’s noteworthy about this is how it reflects the growing sea-change in attitudes toward old publishing models.

Mr. Turow said in an interview that it no longer made sense to have one house publishing his books in hardcover and another releasing them in paperback. Such arrangements were common when he first sold the rights to Presumed Innocent in 1986 but are much rarer now, especially for a bestselling author. Terms of the new deal were not disclosed.

[...]

Gail Hochman, Mr. Turow’s agent, said splitting editions between two houses made it more difficult for an author to achieve the best possible financial arrangement. “We’re not unhappy with anything we’ve gotten, but it stretches the boundaries of the business,” she said. “Any publisher will acknowledge that if they are going to pay a significant advance for a significant author, they can make their money back and work harder on the book if they have two editions.”

It’s been more than a year since Toronto author Carl Wilson released Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, his attention-grabbing meditation on Céline Dion, popular music, and aesthetic taste. And suddenly the book is getting publicity boosts that are unheard of for most Canadian authors (and most authors period).

First, actor James Franco – he played amiable stoners in Pineapple Express and TV’s Freaks and Geeks, but is probably best known for his supporting role in the Spider-Man films – praised Wilson’s book in an on-air red-carpet interview before the Oscars last Sunday.

And now Wilson is apparently scheduled to appear on The Colbert Report next Wednesday, March 4. It’ll be fun to see what Stephen Colbert’s faux right-wing-blowhard persona makes of music writing’s überintellectual.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos hit The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Monday night to promote the second-generation Kindle. Gawker has a clip collage that focuses on Bezos’s habit of laughing maniacally, but they seem to have missed a couple other things. One was Stewart’s instinctive pushback on the Kindle’s US$359 price. When Bezos tried to mollify him by saying that books are only $9.99, Stewart’s response was along the lines of, “You have to buy books too?”

Also notable: the loose and laughing Bezos tossed out a previously unmentioned fringe benefit of the device. To wit: you can, er, read it with one hand. Give Captain Amazon credit: it’s hard to imagine any other book-biz CEO being willing to mix it up with Stewart on the host’s own terms.

Open Book Toronto has posted this video interview with Ontario author Tony Burgess, whose 1998 novel, Pontypool Changes Everything, was recently turned into a movie.

Look for a story on Pontypool director Bruce McDonald – and his love of adapting CanLit – in the March issue of Q&Q.