Book links roundup: 2011 Canadian bestsellers, Apple self-publishing rumours, and more

• Random House of Canada and Penguin Canada lead Canadian entries on the 2011 Globe & Mail bestsellers’ list
• Is Apple launching a digital self-publishing program?
• Kitty lit: reimagined classics from The Sound and the Furry to The Great Catsby
• James Franco sells debut novel to Amazon
  
• Jonathan Lethem has “no stake in defending lame stuff”
• Remembering U.K. illustrator and cartoonist Ronald Searle

Booksellers’ picks of the year: sports

Although it was released just last month, Cornered: Hijinks, Highlights, Late Nights and Insights (HarperCollins Canada) by Ron MacLean with Kirstie McLellan Day has quickly become one of Canada’s top sports titles of 2011.

Booksellers from coast to coast have seen the Hockey Night in Canada co-host’s memoir sell to a broad audience.

“That’s done really, really well,” says Ian Donker, manager of Book City in Toronto. “And I think it’s going to continue to do well.”

Another autobiography, Georges Laraque: The Story of the NHL’s Unlikeliest Tough Guy (Penguin Canada), written with Pierre Thibeault, is poised to join Cornered as another hit of the holiday season, says Michael Hamm, manager of Bookmark in Halifax.

“[Georges Laraque] is one of those sports books where the readership will expand into people who don’t normally follow hockey,” says Hamm. “It touches on wider subjects.” The book addresses topics including racism, animal rights, Haitian relief efforts, and drug use among athletes.

At Bookmark, local appeal has made Chris Cochrane’s Inside the Game: The Stories Behind Nova Scotia’s Sports Headlines (Nimbus Publishing) a top pick of 2011, Hamm adds.

Out West, Celebrating the 2010–2011 Season of the Vancouver Canucks (Fenn-M&S) by Andrew Podnieks has been a best bet this year, says Colin Holt, manager of Victoria’s Bolen Books – perhaps because 2011 was the Canucks’ first shot at the Stanley Cup since 1994, or because no list of Canadian sports lit would be complete without a heavy dose of hockey.

Jian Ghomeshi’s literary memoir to be published by Penguin Canada

Once he was the king of Spain, and soon Jian Ghomeshi can call himself a published author, too.

Rights for the CBC Radio host’s literary memoir, 1982, have been purchased by Penguin Canada publisher Diane Turbide. According to a press release, the book takes up the story of 14-year-old Ghomeshi, who donned eyeliner in an attempt to emulate David Bowie and win the heart of a cool, 16-year-old girl. Penned in the “style of two of his literary heroes, Nick Hornby and David Byrne,” 1982 is structured around 12 songs of the era, with a loose chronological narrative.

1982 will be published in fall 2012 under Penguin’s Viking imprint.

Plagiarism case heads to court as Canadian authors file lawsuit against Zhang, Penguin Canada

The controversy surrounding Ling Zhang’s novel Gold Mountain Blues continues to escalate, as a group of Canadian authors are now taking their allegations of plagiarism to court. On Thursday, Wayson Choy, Sky Lee, and Paul Yee filed a lawsuit against Zhang’s publisher, Penguin Group Canada, for copyright infringement, the Toronto Star reports. The trio of authors are seeking $6 million, plus $1 million each in punitive damages from Pearson Canada, Penguin Canada’s parent company. Also named in the suit are Zhang, for “purposely copying multiple elements” from the plaintiffs’ published works, as well as Nicky Harman, the book’s U.K.-based English-language translator who conducted a review of the plagiarism allegations for Penguin.

Gold Mountain Blues was originally published in 2009 in China, where it garnered literary awards, became a bestseller, and was optioned for film and TV. It was released on Oct. 8 in Canada and 11 other territories. According to the Star:

The suit says the Canadian authors now face “significant potential losses” when they are eventually published in China because “it will appear to Chinese readers in China that the plaintiffs have copied portions of Gold Mountain Blues” when the authors were long-published before the book came out. The suit says the authors have identified more than 50 key examples of original elements that have been substantially copied.

The Star has previously published a list of similarities between Gold Mountain Blues and works by Choy, Lee, and Yee, provided by the plaintiffs’ legal counsel, May Cheng. The list highlights comparable plot points, character backgrounds and dynamics, and historical settings.

On Oct. 3, Choy, Lee, and Yee sent a letter to Penguin Canada requesting a publication delay to allow for an independent review into the allegations. Author Denise Chong reiterated the request, raising concerns around the similarities between her novel The Concubine’s Children and Zhang’s. Days later, Penguin released the novel as they claimed to be satisfied by the results of Harmon’s internal review.

Shortly after the letter was made public, Zhang issued a statement in which she claims Gold Mountain Blues to be the product of years of first-person research and field trips, combined with the shared history of the Chinese diaspora in Canada. The author, who was born in Hangzhou, China, and moved to Calgary in 1986, defended her work again on Sunday in a Q&A with the Star’s Tony Wong. In the interview Zhang touches on her inspiration for the novel and the feedback she has received from readers, and re-asserts the claim that she has not read any of the titles she is accused of appropriating, which include Choy’s The Jade Peony, Lee’s Disappearing Moon Café, and Yee’s Bone Collectors and Tales from Gold Mountain. She admits to having read Yee’s Ghost Train and Chong’s Concubine’s Children and lists both titles in the bibliography at the back of the book:

If my memory serves me correctly (as I read the two books a while ago), Ghost Train is an illustrated children’s book and Concubine’s Children is a memoir of a family story, both wonderful and inspiring. Gold Mountain Blues is a multigenerational epic novel of 522 pages. The three books are vastly different other than sharing a portion of common history, with mine covering a longer span of more than 130 years. Ghost Train and Concubine’s Children are both great books which I enjoyed very much. Each of the three books is a unique work of art by its own right.

The allegations of plagiarism against Zhang originated in the Chinese-language blogosphere and caught the attention of  Canadian media back in February.

Joseph Boyden to publish YA novel

The fiction follow-up to Joseph Boyden’s 2008 Scotiabank Giller Prize–winning novel, Through Black Spruce, will be a novel for young adults. Turtle Island, written from the perspective of a young aboriginal teen grappling with gangs, drugs, and violence in his community, is set to appear under Penguin Canada’s Razorbill imprint.

The novel is developed from a short story of the same name published in The Globe & Mail this summer. It marks Boyden’s return to fiction following his dual biography of Louis Riel and Gabriel Dumont, published last fall by Penguin Canada.

The Razorbill imprint will launch in Canada next spring. Under Lynne Missen, Penguin’s newly appointed publishing director for young readers, the imprint has signed novels by Mariko Tamaki, Emily Pohl-Weary, Hiromi Goto, Carrie Mac, and Charles de Lint.

Ling Zhang responds to accusations of plagiarism

This week, the controversy dogging Chinese-Canadian author Ling Zhang’s second novel, Gold Mountain Blues, flared up again as prominent Chinese-Canadian authors Wayson Choy, Sky Lee, and Paul Yee signed a letter asking Penguin Canada to delay publication of its English-language translation of the book. Zhang has been accused of plagiarizing work by Choy, Lee, and Yee, as well as other well-known Chinese-Canadian writers. In their request, the trio criticize Penguin’s efforts to substantiate the accusations and they’ve asked for the delay so that an independent review might take place. (For more details on the controversy please follow the links to previous posts on Quillblog.)

In response, Zhang has issued a statement in which she claims not to have read the works from which she has allegedly borrowed, and expresses her disappointment at the recent turn of events:

Gold Mountain Blues is the result of years of research and several field trips to China and Western Canada. The research data obtained over the years is voluminous enough to allow me to write another complete novel if I chose to. A hundred and fifty years of Chinese-Canadian history is a “common wealth” for all of us to share and discover. I have not read The Jade Peony, Disappearing Moon Café, The Bone Collector’s Son, or Tales from Gold Mountain. I have a great respect for the authors who have already explored this rich territory before me: Wayson Choy, Denise Chong, Paul Yee, and Sky Lee.  I welcome and encourage authors interested in Chinese-Canadian history to do the same. When I started to write this book, I hoped it would serve to bring the Chinese-Canadian community a little more closely together, by sharing such a long and meaningful history.  I am deeply saddened to see that things do not seem to be going in that direction.

Marion Cotillard to star in film adaptation of Craig Davidson’s Rust and Bone

Marion Cotillard in La Vie en Rose

Academy Award–winning actor Marion Cotillard will star in a French-language adaptation of Craig Davidson’s short story collection, Rust and Bone (Penguin Canada).

According to The Playlist, Rust and Bone will be directed by Jacques Audiard, who co-wrote the screenplay with Thomas Bidegain, his collaborator on A Prophet, which won the Grand Prix prize at the 2009 Cannes International Film Festival. At a budget of $22 million, Variety calls it one of the biggest films to come out of France this year. Shooting begins at the end of September.

Q&Q‘s 2005 review of Rust and Bone describes each story as “based around either a macho sport or a wacky job. Boxing, basketball, dog fighting, stage magic, and, yes, porn all inspire treatment in the collection.”

Fall preview 2011: Canadian fiction

In the July/August issue, Q&Q looks ahead at the fall season’s biggest books.

NOVELS

One of the most anticipated releases of the fall season is surely the new novel from internationally acclaimed author Michael Ondaatje, his first since 2007 Governor General’s Literary Award winner Divisadero. Set in the early 1950s, The Cat’s Table (McClelland & Stewart, $32 cl., Sept.) tells the story of an 11-year-old boy crossing the Indian Ocean on a liner bound for England, and the mysterious prisoner shackled on board. • Also from M&S is Guy Vanderhaeghe’s first novel in eight years. Set in the late 19th-century Canadian and American West, A Good Man ($32.99 cl., Sept.) is the third book in a loose trilogy that also includes The Last Crossing (2003) and The Englishman’s Boy, which won the 1996 Governor General’s Literary Award. • A third GG winner has a new novel out this season: David Gilmour, who won in 2005 for his previous novel, A Perfect Night to Go to China. Gilmour returns with The Perfect Order of Things (Thomas Allen Publishers, $26.95 cl., Sept.), the story of a man who revisits traumatic and life-changing incidents from his past.

Marina Endicott follows up her Scotiabank Giller Prize–shortlisted 2008 novel Good to a Fault with The Little Shadows (Doubleday Canada, $32.95 cl., Sept.), about three sisters who become vaudeville singers following the death of their father. • Acclaimed novelist Helen Humphreys returns with an historical novel set in France during the Napoleonic period. The Reinvention of Love (HarperCollins Canada, $29.99 cl., Sept.) is about a French journalist whose affair with Victor Hugo’s wife causes a scandal (as it might be expected to do).

Brian Francis’s debut novel, Fruit, was a runner-up in the 2009 edition of CBC’s battle of the books, Canada Reads. His second novel, Natural Order (Doubleday Canada, $29.95 cl., Aug.), tells the story of a mother who is forced to confront the secrets she has kept about her son when her carefully constructed life is overturned by a startling revelation. • Kevin Chong returns to fiction with his first novel in a decade. Beauty Plus Pity (Arsenal Pulp Press, $17.95 pa., Sept.) follows an Asian-Canadian slacker in Vancouver whose incipient modelling career is derailed by the death of his father and the sudden departure of his fiancée.

Requiem (HarperCollins Canada, $32.95 cl., Sept.), the third novel from Frances Itani, is about a Japanese-Canadian who embarks upon a cross-country journey of discovery following the death of his wife. • Anita Rau Badami follows her best-selling novels Tamarind Mem and The Hero’s Walk with Tell It to the Trees (Knopf Canada, $32 cl., Sept.), about the Dharma family – the authoritarian Vikram, the gourmand Suman, and the old storyteller Akka. When the Dharmas’ tenant, Anu, turns up dead on their doorstep, the family’s long-buried secrets begin to boil over. • Gayla Reid returns with her first novel since 2002’s Closer Apart. Set during the Spanish Civil War, Come from Afar (Cormorant Books, $32 cl., Aug.) tells the story of an Australian nurse who falls into a relationship with a Canadian soldier from the International Brigade.

Haitian expat Dany Laferrière is back with his third novel in translation in three years. The Return (Douglas & McIntyre, $22.95 pa., Aug.) tells the story of a 23-year-old Haitian named Dany who flees Baby Doc Duvalier’s repressive regime and relocates to Montreal. Thirty-three years later, Dany learns of his father’s death in New York City, and plots a return to his native country. David Homel translates. • Another Montreal resident, poet Sina Queyras, has a novel out this fall, the author’s first. Autobiography of Childhood (Coach House Books, $20.95 pa., Oct.) is about one day in the lives of five siblings haunted by the death of a brother years before. • Infrared (McArthur & Company, $29.95 cl., Sept.), the new novel by Nancy Huston, is about a photographer who travels to Tuscany with her father and stepmother. Employing internal dialogues with the photographer’s mental doppelgänger, Huston opens up her hero for exposure and provides an intimate picture of her interior life.

CanLit mainstay David Helwig returns with a novella, his first since 2007’s Smuggling Donkeys. Killing McGee (Oberon, $38.95 cl., $18.95 pa., Oct.) tells the story of a professor’s dual obsessions with the assassination of D’Arcy McGee and the disappearance of one of his students. • Toronto-based poet Dani Couture returns with her first novel, a surreal and iconoclastic take on that perennial CanLit staple: the family drama. Algoma (Invisible Publishing, $19.95 pa., Oct.) tells the story of a family attempting to cope with the aftermath of a young child falling through the ice and drowning. • Shari Lapeña also has a novel about a perennial CanLit concern: raising money to allow one time to write poetry. Happiness Economics (Brindle & Glass, $19.95 pa., Sept.) tells the story of a stalled poet who takes a job writing advertising copy to start a poetry foundation.

Jamaican-born novelist, poet, and non-fiction author Olive Senior returns to long-form fiction with Dancing Lessons (Cormorant, $22 pa., Aug.), about a woman looking back on her life after a hurricane destroys her home. • Memoirist Frances Greenslade (A Pilgrim in Ireland, By the Secret Ladder) has a debut novel out this August. Shelter (Random House Canada, $29.95 cl.) is a coming of age story about two sisters searching for their mother, who abandoned them after their father was killed in a logging accident.

Not one, but two novels this season extend the burgeoning CanLit focus on towns that have been/are about to be flooded (after Johanna Skibsrud’s The Sentimentalists, Anne Michaels’ The Winter Vault, and Michael V. Smith’s Progress). Tristan Hughes’s Eye Lake (Coach House, $19.95 pa., Oct.) is about the town of Crooked River, Ontario. Named for a river that was diverted to make way for a mine, the town harbours secrets that surface when the river reclaims its original course. • And in September, Goose Lane Editions will publish Riel Nason’s The Town that Drowned ($19.95 pa.), about the suspicions, secrets, and emotions that flare up when the township of Haverton is scheduled to be flooded to allow for the construction of a massive dam.

Edward Riche follows up his Thomas Head Raddall Award winner The Nine Planets with Easy to Like (House of Anansi Press, $29.95 cl., Sept.), a satire about a screenwriter and oenophile who dreams of travelling to Paris, but is trapped in Canada by an expired passport and a growing Hollywood scandal. Relocating to Toronto, he bluffs his way into the upper echelons of the CBC. • Former president and CEO of Penguin Canada, David Davidar was forced out of his position under a cloud of scandal after accusations of sexual harassment. Davidar’s new novel, Ithaca (M&S, $29.99 cl., Oct.), is, perhaps not coincidentally, about the rise and fall of a publishing star.

Canadian literary icon Michel Tremblay returns with a new novel, the first in a trilogy. Set in 1913, Crossing the Continent (Talonbooks, $18.95 pa., Oct.) takes the author’s characters out of Quebec for the first time, to tell the backstory of the people who populate his Chroniques du Plateau-Mont-Royal series. Long-time Tremblay collaborator Sheila Fischman translates.

A resident of St. John’s, Newfoundland, lately one of the most fertile spots for Canadian writing, Michelle Butler Hallett crafts genre-busting stories and novels that frequently experiment with gender and perspective. Her new novel, Deluded Your Sailors (Creative Book Publishing, $21.95 pa., Sept.), focuses on the culture industry from the perspective of Nichole Wright, who makes a discovery that puts a government-funded tourism project in jeopardy, and a shape-shifting minister named Elias Winslow. • Another Newfoundland native, Kate Story, has a novel out with Creative this season. The follow-up to 2008’s Blasted, Wrecked Upon This Shore ($21.95 pa., Sept.) tells the story of Pearl Lewis, an emotionally damaged, charismatic woman who is seen at different stages in her life.

In 1972, Christina Parr returns to her hometown of Parr’s Landing, a place she fled years earlier. The dirty secret of Parr’s Landing? A 300-year-old vampire resides in the caves of the remote mining town. Christina learns why she should have stayed away in Michael Rowe’s Enter, Night (ChiZine Publications, $17.95 pa., Oct.). • English literature professor Janey Erlickson struggles to make headway in her academic career while caring for a tyrannical toddler in Sue Sorensen’s comic novel A Large Harmonium (Coteau Books, $21 pa., Sept.). • Paul Brenner, a Vancouver lawyer, dines with his son, Daniel, one Friday evening. The next day, Brenner receives word that his son has been murdered. Hold Me Now (Freehand Books, $21.95 pa., Oct.), the first novel from Stephen Gauer, examines a father’s grief and a lawyer’s faith in the legal system.

SHORT FICTION

Anyone who has ever wondered what might transpire if the author of Bigfoot’s autobiography were to illustrate a story collection by Canada’s reigning postmodern ironist can stop wondering. October sees the publication of Highly Inappropriate Tales for Young People (Random House Canada, $24 cl.), the first collaboration between author Douglas Coupland and well-known illustrator Graham Roumieu.

D.W. Wilson currently lives in London, England, but is a native of B.C.’s Kootenay Valley. The winner of the inaugural Man Booker Prize Scholarship from the University of East Anglia, Wilson’s debut collection, Once You Break a Knuckle (Hamish Hamilton Canada, $32 cl., Sept.), is a suite of stories about good people doing bad things.

Novelist Anne DeGrace has her first collection of short stories on tap for September. Flying with Amelia (McArthur & Company, $29.95 cl.) spans the 20th century and crosses vast swathes of territory. Wireless telegraphy, German POWs in Manitoba, the Great Depression, and the FLQ crisis all crop up in her stories. • David Whitton’s story “Twilight of the Gods” was included in the 2010 sci-fi anthology Darwin’s Bastards. The story also appears in Whitton’s first solo collection, The Reverse Cowgirl (Freehand, $21.95 pa., Oct.), which sports the most sexually suggestive title for a collection of CanLit stories since Pasha Malla’s The Withdrawal Method.

Toronto writer Rebecca Rosenblum follows up her Metcalf-Rooke Award–winning debut collection Once (a Q&Q book of the year for 2009) with The Big Dream (Biblioasis, $19.95 pa., Sept.), a collection of linked stories about the lives of workers at Dream, Inc., a lifestyle-magazine publisher. • The Maladjusted (Thistledown Press, $18.95 pa., Sept.), Toronto writer Derek Hayes’ debut collection, focuses on people who run afoul of the dictates of polite society. • Also from Thistledown, Britt Holmström’s Leaving Berlin ($18.95 pa., Sept.) examines contemporary women in both Canadian and European settings.

The fine print: Q&Q’s fall preview covers books published between July 1 and Dec. 31, 2011. All information (titles, prices, publication dates, etc.) was supplied by publishers and may have been tentative at Q&Q’s press time. • Titles that have appeared in previous previews do not appear here.

Event photos: London Book Fair Luau party

On July 5, approximately 80 people donned leis and Hawaiian shirts for the London Book Fair Luau to celebrate the retirement of Bryan Prince (owner, Bryan Prince Bookseller), Bridget Barber (partner, Hornblower Group), and Susan Parsons (trade buyer, University of Waterloo Book Store).

Susan Wallace (Oxford University Press) with guest of honour Bryan Prince

Party emcee Bruce Martin (D&M Publishers) with guest of honour Bridget Barber

Shelley Macbeth (Blue Heron Books) and Bonnie St. Aubin (Penguin Canada)

Martin Deck (University of Windsor Book Store) and Kathy Elliot (Thomas Allen & Son)

Chinese novel alleged to have stolen from Canada’s “literary elite”

The “Great Chinese Canadian Literary Feud” is now underway, according to a Toronto Star story by Bill Schiller. The author at the centre of the supposed controversy is Toronto’s Zhang Ling, whose previous novel, Aftershock, became a surprise bestseller in China when a film version was released there last summer.

For her latest novel, Gold Mountain Blues, Zhang is accused of stealing from a diverse group of Chinese-Canadian authors, including Denise Chong, Wayson Choy, Sky Lee, and Paul Yee. An English translation of the novel was due to appear with Penguin Canada by early 2012, but according to the Star, it has been put “in limbo until [Penguin] is satisfied that the author hasn’t been poaching from the works of Canada’s Chinese Canadian literary elite.”

It’s a damning accusation, but the case against Zhang is anything but cut and dried. The accusations of plagiarism appear to stem from an online smear campaign led by an anonymous blogger known as Changjiang. When the Star tracked down and questioned the man supposedly behind the posts, one Robert Luo, he “grew alarmed and then hung up.” Another of Zhang’s attackers, Cheng Xingbang, also refused an interview.

Meanwhile, Penguin has not said it is delaying publication of Gold Mountain Blues, only that it is waiting for the English translation to be complete before making an internal decision about how to handle the accusations. And two of the supposed victims of plagiarism contacted by the Star – Sky Lee and Denise Chong – were equally in the dark, as neither reads Chinese. As the Star reports, Chong, who is also published by Penguin, is hesitant to weigh in on the controversy:

Changjiang’s website accuses Zhang of borrowing the key character of Chong’s [1994 memoir, The Concubine’s Children] – her grandmother May-ying, the hard-drinking, smoking, gambling “concubine” of the title — then fashioning it into a character in Gold Mountain Blues.

Chong says that without a translation she can’t really comment.

But she did send an email to alert her agent once the controversy hit the Chinese blogosphere.

Reached in Montreal, reclusive Canadian writer Sky Lee, author of the groundbreaking novel Disappearing Moon Café (1990), an instant classic, admits she was “shocked and dismayed” when she first heard from a friend in British Columbia that someone might be poaching her work.

But then she realized that she couldn’t really evaluate the allegations first-hand. She doesn’t read Chinese either.

So she farmed it out to her trusted friend, Jennifer Jay, a historian at the University of Alberta who is fluent in Chinese, who spent a day reading an online version of Gold Mountain Blues.

Jay was careful in a telephone interview, saying she was not an expert, noting she had had limited reading time and, while intimately familiar with Disappearing Moon Café, she had not read it for a while. But she said Gold Mountain Blues did make her feel “alarm.”

“I’m not ready to say this author is a plagiarist,” she says. “At this point I’m saying it’s ‘problematic.’ ”

At the same time, says Jay, she has “a lot of sympathy” for Zhang.

“It must be a nightmare for the author to be going through this if she’s innocent,” she says.