September Q&Q: Dany Laferrière and more in the spotlight on Quebec publishing

The cover star of the September issue of Q&Q is the Haitian-born, Montreal-based author Dany Laferrière, who came to national attention in the 1980s with his first novel, How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired, and is set to make a comeback in English-Canada with his latest novel. Also in the issue, Q&Q looks at a Quebec City publishing house that is bringing English-Canadian writing to French readers, and at the Montreal micro-publisher Conundrum Press, which evolved from being a quirky literary house to a quirky publisher of graphic novels. All that plus Fall Announcements, listing every fall adult title, and reviews of Linwood Barclay’s Fear the Worst, Douglas Coupland’s Generation A, Shinan Govani’s Boldface Names, and Arthur Slade’s The Hunchback Assignments.

Returning North

Globe-trotting novelist Dany Laferrière is a big-time celebrity in Quebec. Now, after a decade-long hiatus, he’s being published again in English

Exposing family secrets

Six authors on navigating the personal minefield of memoir writing

The English invasion

An upstart Quebec City house is discovering a surprising demand in its home province for English-Canadian writing. And more in the spotlight on Quebec publishing: The evolution of Conundrum Press, and the dying art of literary translation

Fall Announcements

The season’s complete listings

FRONTMATTER

Bonnie Burnard is back in the spotlight

Don LePan among the Animals

Snapshot: BookNet Canada’s new CEO Noah Genner

Cover to Cover: Lavie Tidhar and Nir Yaniv’s The Tel Aviv Dossier

The e-catalogue cometh

Harry Bruce on the Hugh MacLennan novel that almost never was

Local Buzz: Back to the Beach

GUEST OPINION

Canada’s beleaguered litmags must experiment online to stay relevant, argues Jason McBride

REVIEWS

Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro

Galore by Michael Crummey

The Fallen by Stephen Finucan

Animal by Alexandra Leggat

Plus more fiction, non-fiction, and poetry

BOOKS FOR YOUNG PEOPLE

Violet by Tania Stehlik and Vanja Vuleta Jovanovic

The Winter Drey by Sean Dixon

The Hunchback Assignments by Arthur Slade

Plus more fiction, non-fiction, and picture books

THE LAST WORD

The ups and downs of Amazon’s sales rankings can drive authors to distraction, writes Linwood Barclay

It’s official: litmags to be cut out of CPF funding

There will be no exceptions for small literary and cultural magazines under the new Canada Periodical Fund, the department of Canadian Heritage has confirmed. In a letter to The New Quarterly managing editor Rosalynn Tyo, minister James Moore states that a 5,000 annual circulation minimum, first announced last February, will not be repealed, and nor will small, culturally significant magazines be given any special treatment. From his letter (via Canadian Magazines):

The CPF will support a broad range of periodicals, but it will no longer offer support to titles that sell fewer than 5,000 copies total per year, or specialized support for arts and literary magazines, including those that sell fewer than 5,000 copies a year. A recent evaluation of our existing programs found that specialized funding for arts and literary magazines currently offered by the Department was duplicating the funding offered by the Canada Council … I trust that this information is useful.

If you ever needed an excuse to subscribe to a couple (dozen) litmags, this would be it. As Tyo explains, the loss of Heritage monies will have a devastating impact on TNQ‘s finances.

The Canada Council does indeed support arts and literary publications; however, what the Council provides TNQ is operating support. All of the annual Council grant funding (for which we compete every year — it’s not a ‘given’) we receive goes directly to paying our contributors and printing our magazine. The funding we had been receiving from the programs the CPF is replacing was directed to subsidizing mailing costs (by the Publications Assistance Program) and to one-time business development projects like promotional direct mail campaigns (by the Canada Magazine Fund).

It’s worth pointing out that under the new funding regime, litmags are still eligible for the $1.5-million Business Innovation fund, which is aimed at  magazines with limited access to capital and has no circ requirement. Still, that fund is a small fraction of the CPF’s total budget ($75.5 million), and it’s unlikely to make up for the shortfall small magazines can expect to face in the new year.

For background on the CPF, and the grassroots movement that has sprung up to oppose it, see Q&Q‘s past coverage.

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.)

Bookmarks: Books as art, Watchmen, and more

• A GTA gallery is about to launch an exhibit in which books are transformed and incorporated into art.
• As the new Watchmen movie starts getting some not-so-great reviews, Canadian graphica expert Jeet Heer schools New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane. (Not that Heer’s a fan of the book or anything.)
• Following the announcement of Canadian Heritage funding policy changes that could be disastrous for litmags, the advocacy continues.
• Surprise, surprise: another Dan Brown movie adaptation is about to come out, and a Catholic group don’t like it. (Love the “Galileo asked for it” aside. Nice.)

We all begin in a little magazine

Traditionally, literary journals have been the place where young fiction writers hone their chops, and with the decline of the first-novel market, especially in Canada, the litmags’ importance may rise again. Sven Birkets writes about the litmag market in this Boston Globe piece, though there’s little hard information about where the form is going, other than that there sure are a lot of them, and many of them are quite interesting. Mostly Birkets offers a smiling and starry-eyed reminiscence of his own entry into the litmag world: “Books, no matter how current, how radical, were one thing; these journals were something else. They were the tip-sheets on the upcoming. They published stories, poems, and polemical rants just when the writers were breaking out — so it felt — while they still had their roots in the unauthorized or the forbidden, before most of them turned out the books that would get discussed with anthropological fascination in the review pages of Time and Newsweek.”

Related links:
Sven Birkets on literary journals