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.)


Daily book biz round-up: book hunting on Google eBooks; when Franzen met Oprah; and more

Today’s book news:

• MobyLives goes book hunting on Google eBooks
• Salon’s Laura Miller picks the best fiction and non-fiction of 2010
• WikiLeaks defector writes tell-all book (but it’s in German, so don’t get too excited)
• EW on the long-awaited meeting of Franzen and Oprah
• Lisa Moore and Emma Donoghue make New Yorker‘s best of 2010 list

Margaret Atwood among Edinburgh book fest headliners

Margaret Atwood is one of the big-name authors set to appear at this year’s revamped Edinburgh International Book Festival, which takes place Aug. 14–30. In a cross-festival program with the Edinburgh film festival, Atwood will engage architect Norman Foster in a conversation exploring the techniques used by filmmakers and writers for biographies, the Guardian reports. There’s a catch, however: in addition to the fact that Atwood and Foster are not, strictly speaking, biographers, the ever experimental Atwood will not appear in person, but via video hookup.

The popular fest, founded in 1983, is under the new direction of Nick Barley, who invited four guest “selectors” – Guardian cartoonist Steve Bell, poet Don Paterson, literary editor Stuart Kelly, and Ruth Padel, the poet and great-great-granddaughter of Charles Darwin – to program this year’s event. From the Guardian:

Barley unveiled his first programme today, which features 750 authors. It includes a rare public appearance by Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau in conversation with Guardian cartoonist Steve Bell, three Nobel prize winners, including Joseph Stiglitz, the poet Seamus Heaney, the hairdresser Vidal Sassoon and an opening debate on Jesus between the atheist author Philip Pullman and former bishop of Oxford Richard Harries.

Other Canadians in attendance will include Emma Donoghue, Marina Endicott, Linden MacIntyre, Lisa Moore, Miguel Syjuco, Annabel Lyon, Doug Saunders, Jan Wong, Gwynne Dyer, and Leanne Shapton.

Steven Galloway to Barbara Kay: I’m a Canadian novelist and proud of it

Last week, National Post columnist Barbara Kay stirred up some controversy when she trashed Lisa Moore’s novel February for being both unmanly and unreadable – a symptom of what Kay describes as an overly feminized, government-coddled publishing industry. In today’s paper, author Steven Galloway offers a rebuttal, arguing that Kay’s literary sensibility just isn’t very, well, literary:

Ms. Kay’s complaint isn’t with Canadian literature, it’s with the lack of Canadian blockbuster commercial fiction. My suspicion is that Ms. Kay can’t tell the difference – how is it that she thinks the literature of our country differs from the literature of any other country? Most contemporary literature is overwhelmingly reflective, personal and not ripped from the headlines. And that’s the way it should be. Novels are not twitter, they are not sitcoms and they are not action movies, and the moment they are, literature ceases to exist.

On the issue of arts grants, which according to Kay create a culture of mediocrity and smug navel-gazing, Galloway has this to say:

Yes, Canadian literature is subsidized. So are tourism, mining, forestry, automobile production, small business and oil. In 2006 the petroleum industry alone received $1.4-billion in government subsidies in the form of tax breaks. I’ll apologize for our subsidies when they apologize for theirs, because what writers do is every bit as important and vital as putting together cars, docking cruise ships or cutting down trees.

Galloway’s response is a well-needed antidote to Kay’s over-heated polemics. But the tinge of elitism that creeps into his argument – he says the type of book Kay would like to see more of in Canada “may well be entertaining but it would be neither a novel nor literature” – is a little off-putting. Surely, if commercial fiction can’t aspire to literature, it at least qualifies as culturally meaningful. And many novels that subsequently earned a place in the canon were first conceived of as entertainments.

Lisa Moore still “unreadably Canadian,” Barbara Kay says

National Post columnist Barbara Kay really has it in for novelist Lisa Moore. The one-sided feud began last July, when Kay responded to Post reporter Katherine Laidlaw’s “gushy” profile of the two-time Giller Prize nominee, calling Moore’s most recent novel, February, “unreadably Canadian,” a prime example of the “navel-gazing narrative stasis” that defines Canadian literature. “Welcome to the unrelenting self-regard of CanLit,” Kay wrote, “where it’s all about nobly suffering women or feminized men.”

The only catch was that Kay had yet to read the book in question. However, the opinionated journalist rectified the situation on her summer vacation, reading February and a handful of other literary titles sent to her by Moore’s publisher, House of Anansi Press. Not surprisingly, Kay’s summer reading only confirmed her assumptions about the novel’s unmanly approach to character and plot. “February is 99% writerly foreplay, 1% readerly orgasm,” she writes:

Moore is an enormously talented writer, but like so many others of her sensitive, creative workshopped-to-death ilk, a writer’s writer privileging an artistic, leisured rendering of memory and feeling over prole-friendly dialogue, action and, above all, plot.

According to Kay, the woeful state of CanLit can be blamed on the impact that feminism has had on the industry (Canadian publishing is “highly feminized by comparison to 40 years ago,” she observes) and indulgent public-sector grants, which encourage writers to “start writing for bureaucrats, academics, theorists and literary elites, not for flesh and blood readers,” Kay argues.

Of course, it’s impossible to take seriously a critic whose pre-judgments are so ingrained and politically charged. Unfortunately for Moore, any number of authors could have stood in as the target of Kay’s screed.

Bookmarks – Nobel Prize winner sued, Redhill on Henighan, and more

Some book-related links:

• Nobel Prize-winner sued by Canadian author (Forbes.com)
• Smoking bans: who will think of the writers? (The Telegraph)
• Michael Redhill responds to Stephen Henighan’s Giller rant (Geist… more here)
• Orhan Pamuk the greatest living writer? (Harper’s)
• Grass is greener dept.: Books booming in India (Hindustan Times)

Quote of the day:

“I hope that after Lisa Moore slaps him at the next Toronto cocktail party Henighan bitterly decides to go to, that Margaret Atwood walks up to him with a letter from her lawyer.” – Michael Redhill

Moore, Lansens have eyes on Orange prize

Two Canadian authors have made the longlist for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction (the award formerly known as the Orange Prize). Among the 20 contenders are Lori Lansens’ The Girls (published by Knopf Canada here and Little, Brown in the U.K.) and Lisa Moore’s Alligator (House of Anansi Press here and Virago there). Not to mention Stef Penney’s Canada-set The Tenderness of Wolves (Penguin Canada here, Quercus there), which already has a Costa Book of the Year (the award formerly known as the Whitbread Prize) win under its belt.

The Canadian and Canada-friendly titles are up against Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, which has already won the Man Booker Prize (the award formerly known as the Booker Prize); Nell Freudenberger’s The Dissident; and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, among others. The winner will be announced on June 6.

As this Guardian piece notes, the presence of Desai and Penney on the longlist seems to buck an unspoken but longstanding trend on the BritLit awards scene:

But the decision goes far beyond this. None of the richer awards since the first of them, the Booker, was founded in 1968 has gone to a book which has previously won a sizeable rival award. Few if any have even gone to titles shortlisted or longlisted for a rival.

“No prize committee wants to come second,” one of the most seasoned ex-judges said yesterday.

So an as-yet-unawarded Canadian author could be just the ticket.

That pan-industry Scotiabank Giller shortlist

There is, of course, plenty of Scotiabank Giller shortlist coverage in today’s papers. The National Post weighs in with betting odds on the five nominees, ranging from 2-1 for favourite Lisa Moore to 75-1 for dark horse Edeet Ravel. And Toronto Star columnist Martin Knelman has his own rundown of the list. But publishing folk across the land must have choked on this sentence of Knelman’s: “And no publishing company has more than one book in the running.” Er, imprint, shurely?

Update: The sentence in question has now been changed on the Star website to read, “Random House of Canada Ltd. has three books, under its imprints Knopf Canada, Doubleday Canada and Random House Canada, in the running.”

Related links:
Click here for Martin Knelman’s Toronto Star column on the Giller shortlist
Click here for the National Post‘s betting odds on the Giller nominees