In the July/August issue of Q&Q: 2011 fall preview

The busy season for publishers has no shortage of big new releases, with novels from Ondaatje, Vanderhaeghe, and Endicott, the Massey Lectures from Adam Gopnik, and kids’ books from Kenneth Oppel and Kit Pearson. In the July/August 2011 issue, Q&Q takes a look at the fall season’s top titles.

Also in this issue, QR-code marketing, novelist Esi Edugyan’s sophomore blues, and publishers’ reactions to Indigo’s new co-op program. Plus reviews of new books by Lynn Coady, Nicole Lundrigan, Cary Fagan, and more.

FEATURES
Fall preview
A sneak peek at the season’s top fiction, non-fiction, children’s, and international titles

The CBA’s balancing act
The Canadian Booksellers Association looks to new digital partnerships – and old-school member outreach – to regain its place as the united voice of booksellers

After the collapse
Canadian book distributors remain optimistic following the bankruptcy of H.B. Fenn and Company

FRONTMATTER
Esi Edugyan finds an unlikely inspiration for her sophomore novel, Half-Blood Blues
Winnipeg’s Aqua Books revinvents itself as a popular community hangout
Joshua Knelman’s art-theft investigation landed him a book deal
Best short stories: Michael Christie on David Bezmozgis’s “Tapka”
Indigo’s new co-op program faces mixed publisher reaction
Is QR-code marketing just a fad, or can it sell books?
Cover to cover: Caitlin Sweet’s The Pattern Scars
Snapshot: eBound Canada CEO Robert Hayashi

REVIEWS
The Water Man’s Daughter by Emma Ruby-Sachs
Alone in the Classroom by Elizabeth Hay
Glass Boys by Nicole Lundrigan
The Antagonist by Lynn Coady
How Shakespeare Changed Everything by Stephen Marche
PLUS more fiction, non-fiction, and poetry

BOOKS FOR YOUNG PEOPLE
Dear Baobab by Cheryl Foggo; Qin Leng, illus.
Nini by François Thisdale
The Summer of Permanent Wants by Jamieson Findlay
Testify by Valerie Sherrard
Born Ugly by Beth Goobie
Peter Nimble and His Fantastic Eyes by Jonathan Auxier
PLUS more fiction, non-fiction, and picture books

THE Q&Q/BOOKNET CANADA BESTSELLERS

THE LAST WORD
Authors who borrow from historical events face real ethical issues, writes novelist D.J. McIntosh

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In the April 2011 issue of Q&Q: Susan Musgrave talks to Lorna Crozier

It’s been more than a decade since the iconic – and iconoclastic – Susan Musgrave published a new collection of poetry. In the April 2011 issue of Q&Q, Musgrave discusses her new collection, Origami Dove (McClelland & Stewart), with fellow B.C. poet Lorna Crozier, whose collection Small Mechanics also appears this spring with M&S. Also in April, a profile of overlooked short story author Clark Blaise, a special report on B.C. publishing, and a feature on the financial struggles facing Canadian literary journals. Plus reviews of new books by Julie Booker, John Furlong, Joe Ollmann, Chester Brown, Nicola Winstanley, Elisa Amado, Mélanie Watt, and more.

FEATURES

On poetry and prose
Two of B.C.’s leading poets – Susan Musgrave and Lorna Crozier – discuss writing, self-doubt, and Al Purdy’s birthday cake

Special report on B.C. publishing
Industry newcomer Randal Macnair brings new life to Oolichan Books; B.C. BookWorld’s Alan Twigg on surviving lean times; New Society carves out a distinctive niche in D&M’s growing eco-book empire; B.C. booksellers find solidarity at this year’s provincial book fair

Rough cuts
A year after the Department of Canadian Heritage slashed funding for small-run periodicals, many venerable literary magazines are struggling to adapt

FRONTMATTER
Clark Blaise’s return to form
An insider’s take on the collapse of H.B. Fenn and Company
Snapshot: Books for Business CEO Sean Neville
Best short stories: Alexander MacLeod on Alice Munro
Cover to cover: Gil Adamson’s Ashland
Guest opinion: Carmine Starnino on rebooting the CanLit canon
Kirstie McLellan Day’s hockey-book hat trick

REVIEWS
Up Up Up by Julie Booker
Patriot Hearts: Inside the Olympics That Changed a Country by John Furlong with Gary Mason
Mid-Life by Joe Ollmann
Paying for It by Chester Brown
Touch by Alexi Zentner
Esther: The Remarkable True Story of Esther Wheelwright, Puritan Child, Native Daughter, Mother Superior by Julie Wheelwright
Underground by Anatanas Sileika
PLUS more fiction, non-fiction, and poetry

BOOKS FOR YOUNG PEOPLE
Cinnamon Boy by Nicola Winstanley; Janice Nadeau, illus.
What Are You Doing? by Elisa Amado; Manuel Monroy, illus.
You’re Finally Here! by Mélanie Watt
Banjo of Destiny by Cary Fagan
PLUS more fiction, non-fiction, and picture books

THE Q&Q/BOOKNET CANADA BESTSELLERS

THE LAST WORD
Cynthia Holz on a writer’s search for inspiration between novels

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The Washington Post expands book coverage

Starting Jan. 23, The Washington Post is expanding its Sunday book coverage to include two new specialized reviews.

The additional coverage is part of The Post’s decision to split the Arts and Sunday Style sections, the latter of which will now come as a pull-out tabloid. The Arts section will feature a review of an arts-based book, while the Sunday Style section will get its own pop culture-themed book review. Book news and criticism featured in the newspaper’s Outlook section won’t be affected by the changes.

In a press release, Post publisher Katharine Weymouth said the expansion reflects the publication’s “commitment to providing [the metro Washington] community with news and information that is compelling, informative and engaging in our Sunday package.”

New online writing community geared toward teens

Parents and educators spend a lot of time, and spill a lot of ink, debating how to get teenagers interested in reading. Anyone who stops to think about the phenomenal success of Stephenie Meyers’ Twilight series will realize this is a somewhat odd debate to be having: teenagers are already reading (although perhaps not the kind of books that parents and educators might prefer).

Jacob Lewis, a former managing editor at The New Yorker, and Dana Goodyear, a staff writer at the magazine, seem to understand this. Lewis and Goodyear have teamed up to create Figment.com, an online community where young readers and writers can connect and submit their own fiction, poetry, even cell-phone novels.

From The New York Times:

The idea for Figment emerged from a very 21st-century invention, the cellphone novel, which arrived in the United States around 2008. That December, Ms. Goodyear wrote a 6,000-word article for The New Yorker about young Japanese women who had been busy composing fiction on their mobile phones. In the article she declared it “the first literary genre to emerge from the cellular age.”

Figment is an attempt to import that idea to the United States and expand on it. Mr. Lewis, who was out of a job after Portfolio, the Condé Nast magazine, was shuttered last year, teamed up with Ms. Goodyear, and the two worked with schools, libraries, and literary organizations across the country to recruit several hundred teenagers who were willing to participate in a prototype, which went online in a test version in June.

The Beta version of the site is up now. It features new writing from Blake Nelson, author of the acclaimed YA novel Girl, as well as contests, reviews, and user-generated content.

Reviews sabotaged on Amazon U.K.

The U.K.’s Daily Mail (via MobyLives) reports authors and publishers who are accusing each other of skewing Amazon star ratings by creating fake reader reviews:

[PR firms] provide favourable reviews of new books, at a price. Nathan Barker, of Reputation 24/7, offers a service starting at £5,000. He said: “First we set up accounts. For a romance novel we’d pick seven female profiles and three males. We’d say we like this book but add a tiny bit of criticism and compare it to another book.” Mr Barker claims this is common practice among publishers.

The article goes on to describe hostile reviews received by authors Polly Samson and Rosie Alison.

Books of the Year 2010: Fiction and Poetry

There’s no formula for choosing the books of the year. Some break ground, some tackle familiar themes with new energy. Some represent the best work from established authors, some introduce us to important new voices. And some are simply in-house favourites we feel deserve a little more attention. Here are the Fiction and Poetry books that made the most impact in 2010.
(more…)

Happy birthday, John le Carré

John le Carré, known for spy thrillers such as The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, turned 79 this Tuesday. According to MobyLives:

He’s since gone on to write some of the finest thrillers in the literature. And now, in his eightieth year, he’s still going strong. His new book, Our Kind of Traitor, is receiving rave reviews. In a review in The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani called it, “a bullet-train of a thriller”, saying it’s “the author’s most thrilling thriller in years.”

Why “likeable” characters aren’t important

Lazy reviewers – often online reader-reviewers – tend to be deeply concerned about whether or not a character is “likeable” and use this as the foundation of their overall critique of a book. Laura Miller skewers this propensity in an article for Salon‘s reading club:

I confess, I’ve grown to hate such remarks. It makes me feel like we’re all back in grammar school, talking about which kids are “nice” and which kids are “mean.” It’s a willfully naive and blinkered way to approach a work of literature.

James Wood, in his book How Fiction Works, wrote that this complaint implies that “artists should not ask us to try to understand characters we cannot approve of — or not until after they have firmly and unequivocally condemned them.” That we might recognize a character’s unappealing qualities while simultaneously seeing life through her eyes, “and that this moving out of ourselves into realms beyond our daily experience might be a moral and sympathetic education of its own kind,” doesn’t seem to occur to far too many readers. Wood calls this sort of criticism, so common in Amazon reader reviews, a “contagion of moralizing niceness.”

The Salon reading club is currently discussing (what else?) Freedom. Miller describes her feelings about one of the main characters:

Patty is not nice. She does some bad things, and she can be grouchy and bitter. I wouldn’t necessarily want her as a friend, but then that’s not really an option because she’s not a real person. She’s a literary character — which means it’s not imperative that we take a moral stance on every single thing she does. Literature is an experiment of the imagination, and if we don’t try to leave behind our contemporary compulsion to pass judgment on everything and everyone when we enter into that experiment, then we are the ones who lose out.

Daily book biz round-up: new Kindle reviewed; World Fantasy Award nominees unveiled; and more

Today’s book news:

• The New York Times reviews the new Kindle
• Beaten down by Random House, Andrew Wylie now in talks with Penguin
• World Fantasy Award shortlist unveiled
• BookNet Canada looks for speakers for next Technology Forum
• Keith Richards, Jay-Z to give “talks” at NY library

Daily book biz round-up: Amazon’s bombshell, Kafka exposed, and more

• The news that e-books have topped hardcover sales at Amazon is rocking the publishing world…
• … But MobyLives questions some of the figures
• Andrew Nikiforuk becomes The Tyee‘s first writer-in-residence (via Canadian Magazines)
• Frank Kafka archive opened to prying eyes
• Disgraced historian Orlando Figes settles over fake Amazon reviews
• The BookLiberator allows every citizen to launch a Google-style mass digitization scheme