Fashion designer Adrian Wu dresses up Atwood’s In Other Worlds for the Book Lover’s Ball

Adrian Wu at Toronto Fashion Week. Photo: George Pimentel

Tonight is the Book Lover’s Ball, an annual fundraiser that brings out the tuxedos and gowns in support of the Toronto Public Library Foundation.

A formidable list of authors, including Erin Morgenstern, Lawrence Hill, Kathleen Winter, Miriam Toews, and Peter C. Newman will be mingling with guests who paid anywhere from $600 to $8,000 (for a premium corporate table) to attend the dinner and auction.

The evening will conclude with a fashion show featuring the work of six Toronto designers. Each designer was paired with a book that shares a common thread to the designer’s aesthetic or philosophy.

Quillblog spoke to 21-year-old design wunderkind Adrian Wu, who was paired with Margaret Atwood’s science-fiction essay collection, In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination (Signal/McClelland & Stewart). It’s a bright idea, considering Wu’s voluminous spring/summer 2012 collection was partly inspired by quantum physics, specifically the double-slit experiment, which deals with the behaviour of light waves and particles.

What did you think when you were approached to participate in the show?
They asked if I was comfortable being paired up with Margaret Atwood. What do you say to that? Of course, I was ecstatic. This is one of the biggest collaborations that I have done and I’m honoured to work with such a legendary icon.

Did you relate to the book?
Margaret Atwood is unconventional, and I consider my collection to be an unconventional commentary on society. She’s witty but still serious; I relate to her contradictions.

I guess you could also say I’m fascinated with inhuman qualities and fantasy. I’ve always loved X-Men.

How do you translate the essence of a book into fashion?
What I’m showing is more of a styled version of my collection, but I did alter the collection to fit the meaning of the book. It’s more feminine and less ambiguous than as it was presented at Toronto Fashion Week.

CanLit grows hair, raises money for Movember

It’s halfway through Movember, and even some of Canada’s literary talent are sporting new upper-lip hair, raising money for prostate cancer research.

Q&Q discovered The Cat’s Mustache, a hirsute team of Canadian authors and poets, which includes Michael Redhill, Lawrence Hill, Adam Sol, Michael Winter, David Seymour, and Michael Healy, with support from honorary member Hadley Dyer, executive editor of children’s books at HarperCollins Canada.

The Cat’s Mustache has already raised almost $3,000, with Hill bringing in the most donations at over $1,800. But it’s team captain Redhill who appears to be winning in the hair-growth department. On his Movember profile Web page Redhill describes his current look as “pornshop owner.”

Clement Virgo’s film adaptation of Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes moves into production

Canadian film director Clément Virgo (Poor Boy’s Game, Lie With Me) is developing an adaptation of Lawrence Hill’s bestseller, The Book of Negroes, to begin shooting next year.

Hill’s publisher, HarperCollins Canada, sold the film rights to Virgo’s production company, Conquering Lion Pictures, in 2009.

In an interview with film website indieWire, Virgo says, “The main character, Aminata, is someone who I really connected to as a reader and a filmmaker. I thought that this would be a great character to build a film around, so we contacted Lawrence Hill. I told him I was really interested in his book and that I would love to work on the script with him. To my surprise, he agreed.”

Burning of Lawrence Hill’s Book of Negroes planned for today

Lawrence Hill learned last week that a Dutch activist – Roy Groenberg, leader of a group known as the Foundation Honor and Restore Victims of Slavery in Suriname – objected to the use of the word “negro” in the title of the Hamilton author’s most famous novel, The Book of Negroes (published in Dutch as Het Negerboek).

Groenberg informed Hill in a letter that he intends to burn several copies of the book today in an Amsterdam park that contains a monument commemorating Dutch slavery and the struggle for freedom. The chilling publicity stunt has provoked strong reactions, most notably from the author himself. In an even-handed yet forceful op-ed in Monday’s Toronto Star, Hill wrote:

Burning books is designed to intimidate people. It underestimates the intelligence of readers, stifles dialogue and insults those who cherish the freedom to read and write. The leaders of the Spanish Inquisition burned books. Nazis burned books.

Hill went on to discuss the fungibility of terms used to describe race, noting that “racial terminology will always fail, because it is absurd to try to define a person by race.” Describing the “kaleidoscopic evolution” of racial terminology over the past five decades, Hill concluded there are no easy answers:

I tell my own children that no single word is entirely out of bounds. One must simply know the heft of each word, and use it appropriately. If that means employing discretion around archaic or racist terms, so be it. I don’t use “Negro” in day-to-day language. To this day, I still cringe at the sound of “Nigger” or “Nigga” in hip hop lyrics. But there is sometimes room to use painful language to reclaim our own history.

New Yorker blogger Ian Crouch has picked up on the story, comparing the burning of The Book of Negroes to a similar stunt perpetrated by radical Florida pastor Terry Jones, who torched a copy of the Koran earlier this year. In both cases, Crouch argues, totalitarian tactics are being used to scandalize the public. From The New Yorker‘s Book Bench blog:

[I]n Amsterdam, another small, passionate political group is using book-burning as a way of getting attention. The political motivations and desired ends are much different, but the means are precisely the same: spectacle, provocation, brutish and simple acts in response to complex issues.

Despite these similarities, though, the protest in Amsterdam does stand out as a rare example of a group with progressive political demands – in this case, the recognition of the ways in which the Netherlands benefited from the slave trade and a call to end contemporary discrimination – resorting to such an odiously reactionary practice…. Hill’s story, looked at more evenly, reminds us that attempts to control language by those who are eager to move society forward can be just as insidious as similar attempts by those who want to hold it back.

Book of Negroes to become feature film

When you consider how astoundingly well Lawrence Hill’s 2007 novel The Book of Negroes has been selling, it was probably inevitable that somebody would want to turn the book into a film. According to a press release Q&Q received today from Hill’s publisher, HarperCollins Canada, film rights have just been sold to noted canadian director Clement Virgo’s Conquering Lion Pictures. Virgo (Rude, Lie With Me) intends to direct the film himself.

Canada Reads 2009 kicks off today

CBC Radio’s annual battle of the books, Canada Reads, kicks off today with five celebrity panelists each defending one Canadian novel they think that Canada should read. Each day this week, one novel gets knocked off (or, in Canada Reads parlance, “put back on the shelf”) until only one is left standing.

The defenders and their novels are:

Anne-Marie Whithenshaw, defending The Fat Woman Next Door Is Pregnant by Michel Tremblay (trans. by Sheila Fischman) (Talonbooks)

Avi Lewis, defending The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill (HarperCollins Canada)

Jen Sookfong Lee, defending Fruit by Brian Francis (ECW Press)

Nicholas Campbell, defending The Outlander by Gil Adamson (House of Anansi Press)

Sarah Slean, defending Mercy Among the Children by David Adams Richards (Doubleday Canada)

For the second year in a row, Jian Ghomeshi, host of Q, will act as moderator to ensure that no one gets physically injured in the fracas.

The Canada Reads website is a good location for info on the various titles, the panelists, plus an interesting blog, user forums, podcasts, and other Web 2.0 accoutrements. Other sites have been covering the run-up to the debates, including Roughing It in the Books, co-administered by Q&Q reviewer Alexis Kienlen.

The debates run at 11:30 a.m. and 7:30 p.m. all week on CBC Radio One.

The unstoppable Book of Negroes

At this point, you gotta wonder: has anyone in Canada not read Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes? Released by HarperCollins Canada more than two years ago, the book has grown from a solid word-of-mouth sleeper to an out-and-out sales juggernaut, and it doesn’t look to be slowing down anytime soon. Not only was it recently chosen as one of the 2009 CBC Canada Reads selections, but Ontario Library patrons have just picked it as the winner of the Evergreen Award for most popular book of 2008. Oh, and Trent University has selected it for its 2009 Trent Reads initiative, which encourages every student to read and discuss the book.

Giller speculation

It’s safe to say that last year’s Giller Prize-winner, Vincent Lam’s Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures, caught some pundits off-guard. (Ahem.) This year, the peanut gallery has kept curiously mum on who will take home the $40,000 prize (which, of course, is being awarded tonight in Toronto).

Except, that is, for a trio of Globe and Mail panelists made up of “Review”-section editor Andrew Gorham and writers Sandra Martin and James Adams, who say unanimously that the Giller should go to Ondaatje for Divisadero. Only Andrews thinks the prize won’t go to Ondaatje – he’s laying his bet on Elizabeth Hay’s Late Nights on Air. (Hay seems to have captured the popular vote, too.)

Literary merit aside, Gorham thinks the timing is right for a Hay win: “It feels like this is Hay’s moment because she has been building in our literary landscape with each book that she publishes,” he says.

Meanwhile, the Toronto Star teases readers with a recent headline — “Which book is likely to win the Giller?” — but finds the question too hot to handle (so does CBCNews.ca, for that matter). Instead of giving a straightforward answer, publishing reporter Vit Wagner coughs up some BookNet Canada sales data (for Quillblog’s take, see here) and simply says:

Winning a Scotiabank Giller Prize or a Governor General’s Award is guaranteed to boost the sales of any author, with relatively unsung writers having the most to gain.

The National Post hardly raises the bar, leading its Giller coverage with this eye-opener:

Novelists tend to command unnatural facility with language and possess keen powers of observation and a high tolerance for solitude. Talking to them can be intimidating.

This Quillblogger, however, is reserving speculation on who will take home the Giller in light of news out of France that the Renaudot prize — the country’s second most prestigious literary contest — was awarded to an author who wasn’t even on the shortlist.

But the biggest surprise of today’s announcements, not least to the novelist himself, was the award of the Renaudot prize to Daniel Pennac. Chagrins d’École was not even among the five titles selected for the final round of the award, which is second only to the Goncourt in importance to French readers.

“It’s a complete surprise,” he declared to journalists as he arrived late for the celebration at the Drouant restaurant in Paris. “I expected it even less since I wasn’t even on the programme,” he added. “There must have been something amusing happening [on the panel],” he suggested.

While a similar upset is unlikely at the well-scripted Gillers, the French shenanigans bode well for seemingly overlooked titles like, say, Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negros.

To brush up on all the Giller nominees, see Q&Q‘s reviews:

Effigy by Alissa York
A Secret Between Us by Daniel Poliquin (trans. Donald Winkler)
The Assassin’s Song by M.G. Vassanji
Late Nights on Air by Elizabeth Hay
Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje