National Post reveals finalists for Canada Also Reads competition

The eight books and panelists for the National Post’s Canada Also Reads book competition – created to put a spotlight on lesser-known books ignored by CBC’s Canada Reads – were announced today. Two Q&Q staffers, Zoe Whittall and Steven W. Beattie, will be defending their choices on the panel, alongside six other authors, poets, and even one singer/songwriter.

The Post’s Mark Medley created anticipation for the event by live-tweeting in the moments leading up to the reveal, offering hints such as “one of the books is set near some famous falls” and “one of the finalists had two of her novels long-listed.” After announcing that the final post was being spell-checked, and admitting that they were milking this build-up for all it was worth, the results were finally posted on the Post’s Afterword book blog. Here’s the full list:

• Steven W. Beattie defends My White Planet by Mark Anthony Jarman (Thomas Allen Publishers)
• Author Tish Cohen (Inside Out Girl, Town House) defends The Day The Falls Stood Still by Cathy Marie Buchanan (HarperCollins Canada)
• Singer/songwriter Andy Maize (Skydiggers) defends Best Laid Plans by Terry Fallis (McClelland & Stewart)
• Poet Jacob McArthur Mooney (The New Layman’s Almanac) defends The Last Shot by Leon Rooke (Thomas Allen Publishers)
• Blogger John Mutford defends Yellowknife by Steve Zipp (Res Telluris)
• Author Lisa Pasold (Rats of Las Vegas) defends You and The Pirates by Jocelyne Allens (The Workhorsery)
• Author Neil Smith (Bang Crunch) defends Come, Thou Tortoise by Jessica Grant (Knopf Canada)
• Zoe Whittall (Holding Still for as Long as Possible) defends Fear of Fighting by Stacey May Fowles (Invisible Publishing)

According to the Afterword, while the blog is “a fan of what Canada Reads has done to promote CanLit, we figured this would be a great opportunity to help shine a light on some of the books sitting in the shadows.” Starting March 1, the Afterword will post two panelists’ defences of their chosen novels each day. On March 8, it will host a live chat with all the panelists and authors. The winner will be chosen via a public poll.

The publishing industry: this week in quotes

“Like Al Purdy or Joe Strummer, he was unfailingly generous in his encouragement and support, treating everyone who ever beat a guitar or twirled a pen as his spiritual equal. He was the kind of modern artist that we now take for granted: someone who laboured to explore the complicated and emotional grist of life while wringing humour and exultant joy from his sources.” – author Dave Bidini paying tribute to Paul Quarrington in The Afterword

“To my mind successful reviews identify works and discuss them within their own framework or tradition; the reviewer – and his or her opinion of the work – is nearly invisible; and the review acts as a signpost to readers to go this way, or not, and don’t presume to know what readers want, or don’t want, from a text.” – poet Elizabeth Bachinsky on Lemon Hound

“For all the Kindle’s success, it remains in many ways a niche product, aimed at consumers who fit a certain narrow profile, namely avid readers. In 2007, the Associated Press reported that a quarter of Americans hadn’t read a single book in the prior year. And among those who did read that year, the average number of books read was seven. Even considering that you can get some non-book content on the Kindle, these numbers alone suggest that the market for the Kindle is limited.” – The Millions

“So, Best Beloveds, the New Novel. I’m calling it that in the frail hope that it will hear me and turn into one – at the moment it is, of course, the New Notebook Full Of Stuff and A Smattering of Early Paragraphs. A long project is, as you will realise, a massive and potentially ludicrous commitment of time and enthusiasm which could come apart in your hands at any moment, could promise wonders, cough twice and then turn into ashes and sand at the end of three years’ preparation and one year’s labour.” – author AL Kennedy in the Guardian book blog

Daniel O’Thunder to kick off National Post’s online book club

Earlier today, the folks at the National Post‘s books blog unveiled the inaugural selection for their newly launched virtual book club, known as The Afterword Reading Society. The chosen work is first-time B.C. novelist Ian Weir’s Daniel O’Thunder (Douglas & McIntyre), an off-kilter historical novel set in Victorian London about an evangelical boxer who challenges the devil to a round of bare-knuckle boxing (see Q&Q‘s review of Daniel O’Thunder).

Beginning on Feb. 2, a panel comprising Post staffers, as well as novelist Craig Davidson (author of the boxing novel The Fighter) and books blogger Erin Balser, will host weekly online discussions and live chats with the author. These virtual discussions will culminate on March 9 with a Q&A session with Weir at Ben McNally books in Toronto.

Debut novel paints unflattering familial portrait: novelist’s family upset

Apologize, Apologize! is not just the title of Elizabeth Kelly’s debut novel, it’s also what her estranged brother is demanding she do on account of the way their family is represented in the book. According to the National Post‘s Afterword blog, Kelly’s brother, Arthur, responded to a review of the novel by sending an e-mail to the Post, which demanded that the newspaper

alert readers to the fact she is maligning her family, which she identifies as the book’s inspiration. Her interviews distort our family life, much to the dismay of her 85-year-old mother, myself and sister Susan … none of the book’s characters have any redeeming qualities, so you can understand our objections to the author’s claims they are based on her own family.

The novel, which is described by its publisher, Knopf Canada, as “a rollicking and generous story filled with characters that are a delight to get to know and impossible to forget,” features (among other things) a mother who reacts to the drowning of her son by asking the dead son’s brother, “Why did it have to be him…. Why couldn’t it have been you?” and a father who makes public displays of himself:

Pop, impeccably dressed and manifestly drunk, had apparently decided to crash the party and was threatening to take apart anyone who tried to interfere.

“What’s he saying?” one of the guests asked while I watched, aghast and disbelieving, as Pop, shouting and red-faced, spewing spit and rage, trumpeting and heaving like a rogue elephant, wrestled with security. He was bent over at the waist, his stomach straining against three sets of arms, hotel employees vainly trying to drag him back outside.

While these portraits may lack a certain sympathetic veneer, Kelly’s brother seems to have forgotten that the novel is, um, fiction. In her response to Arthur’s accusations (also posted on The Afterword blog), Kelly states:

Obviously, the book is fiction – no part of it corresponds to any of the events of my own life, which should be apparent to even the most disinterested reader.

If there is a soupçon of disingenuousness here – what novelist doesn’t cull from real life to some degree – it is nonetheless appropriate to bear in mind the novel’s generic classification. This whole tempest in a teacup should rightly remain a “private and personal matter” – at least until Kelly writes her family memoir.