Faber & Faber to open Toronto writing school this fall

According to a report by The Globe and Mail‘s London-based columnist Leah McLaren, the independent British publishing house Faber & Faber is planning to launch a writing school in Toronto this fall. Set to open in October, the Faber Academy Toronto will employ at least one high-profile Canadian author: Miriam Toews, who is published by Faber in the U.K. and whom Academy head Patrick Keogh says will be “involved in an essential way” in the school.

From the Globe:

The Faber Academy, a successful offshoot of Faber’s core publishing business, was launched 18 months ago in Paris, with a course taught at the legendary English language bookstore Shakespeare and Company, by novelist Jeanette Winterson.

Since then, the school has expanded to included short and long courses in London, Dublin and Geneva, with an expansion to Edinburgh and Glasgow planned for later this year. Instructors have included Tracy Chevalier, Anne Enright, Paul Auster, Kazuo Ishiguro and Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney.

McLaren speculates whether Toronto has a deep enough talent pool to match London’s, though from the sounds of things, the school’s administrators are aiming high:

After taking a series of meetings with writers including Margaret Atwood, Anne Michaels, Michael Redhill, Madeleine Thien, Michael Helm, Andrew Pyper and Ken Babstock, Keogh says he is so confident the Toronto school will be a success, Faber is already looking into plans to expand the model to Montreal and Vancouver.

“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?

Bookmarks: new Bond in Russia!, new Thunderbirds everywhere!, no new autobiographical characters in Salman Rushdie novels!

Some book-related links:

• New James Bond novel gets Russian publisher (MI6)
• New Thunderbirds novels after more than forty years (SWFA Pressbook)
• Salman Rushdie vows to stop creating autobiographical characters (The Canadian Press)
• Mold: the enemy of rare books (Chicago Tribune)
• Woman robs dirty bookshop (The San Diego Union-Tribune)
• John Updike on Flann O’Brien (The New Yorker)
• Deciphering authors’ handwriting (Slate)
• Leah McLaren: our own Paris Hilton? (Seven Oaks)

McLaren vs. Bigge: Round 2

Here at In Other Media, controversy makes us as giddy as the recipients of brand new puppies on Valentine’s Day morning. In the last month or so, we linked to as many stories on James Frey as there were alleged lies in his book A Million Little Pieces. Now, on this side of the border, we have a little bookish hilarity to call our own.

Yesterday, we linked to a review in the Sunday Toronto Star in which writer and reviewer Ryan Bigge scoured the English and German lexicons for words to describe just how bad he thought Leah McLaren’s debut novel, The Continuity Girl, was. Today we combed the archives to find the article that may have started it all: a column featured in The Globe and Mail in 2001, written by one Ms. McLaren about Bigge’s debut, A Very Lonely Planet: Love, Sex and the Single Guy. Like Bigge did in his review of The Continuity Girl, McLaren chose not to review the book so much as defame its writer. To this end, McLaren used more than half of her column to define a term that she coined and that no one ever used again. Lurpers, she writes, are the angry young men of the 21st century – cynics who have a hate-on for all that they don’t have but secretly want: “success, confidence, fame, money, sex, charm, recognition, art, conversational ease, style, respect, drugs, a sense of wonder…. He is Holden Caulfield 10 years later, a grown boy, who in the words of Philip Roth, approaches life ‘with all the arrogance of someone who has succeeded at nothing.’”

“Like so many Lurpers, Bigge is an established legend in his own mind. He even has his own Web site to prove it. His first book, A Very Lonely Planet: Love, Sex and the Single Guy, will be published by Vancouver small press Arsenal Pulp this month. The title could actually be Anatomy of a Hard-up Lurper.”

Ouch. From whence comes such a personal attack? Do these two know each other? Couldn’t McLaren, who has now written of a childless woman, have had sympathy instead of vitriol for the perpetually single Bigge? One thing seems clear: riffling through the discount tables at Pages the other day, In Other Media found copies of Bigge’s book. We can all be somewhat sure that, someday, in that very same spot, will be McLaren’s. So can’t we all just get along?

Related links:
Click here for McLaren’s review of A Very Lonely Planet, as featured on Bigge’s website
Click here to read comments posted in response to yesterday’s installment of the McLaren-Bigge feud

A little continuity

Ryan Bigge wasted no time in demonstrating his disdain for Leah McLaren’s debut novel, The Continuity Girl, in his review for the Toronto Star on Sunday. After praising the typesetting as the novel’s only virtue, Bigge struggles for adjectives to describe the prose: “Uber-lousy? Fifth-rate? Super-bad? None of the above. There exists no English word that adequately describes the not-so-goodness herein.” Bigge then goes on to trash the novel and dismiss McLaren as a “provocative pool toy that is kept inflated only by the warm air of the chattering classes.”

What Bigge leaves out of his review is that McLaren trashed his debut book, a memoirish examination of the lives of single men called A Very Lonely Planet, in her column. In Other Media can’t remember McLaren’s exact wording, but we suspect that Bigge has been waiting for some time to even the score.

Related links:
Read Ryan Bigge’s article in the Toronto Star