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Fall preview 2013: highlights

The provocateur

It is unfair that, in 2013, André Alexis may be most readily known for his essay “The Long Decline,” which appeared in The Walrus in 2010. The essay was a howling indictment of “the shallow, self-aggrandizing rhetoric that now passes for [literary] criticism” in Canada. It was swiftly and roundly excoriated, instantly becoming that year’s tempest in the CanLit teapot.

The essay’s notoriety is unfortunate, because it obscured the fact that the book from which it sprang (Beauty and Sadness, released later that year), was a genre-busting collection of fiction, memoir, and non-fiction that Q&Q reviewer George Fetherling called an “irresistible, one-of-a-kind work.” The book was a departure for Alexis, who had previously published a story collection, Despair, and two novels: Childhood, which won the Books in Canada First Novel Award and the Trillium Book Award, and the ambitious Ottawa-based novel Asylum.

Alexis continues to explore hybrid territory with an intriguing new book entitled, simply, A ($15 pa., Sept.), published by Toronto avant-garde specialist BookThug. The novella (which may be the first of two in a series) tells the story of a book reviewer’s pursuit of his literary hero, a reclusive poet by the name of Avery Andrews. As the reader tracks the elusive writer, the book unfolds as a rumination on inspiration and the creative process.

 

The hidden gem

Whenever Canada is lauded for its short fiction, the usual names are trotted out as evidence: Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant, and Clark Blaise, alongside younger talents such as Sarah Selecky and Jessica Westhead. But one name that rarely gets the attention it deserves is Douglas Glover.

If Glover is mentioned at all in conversations about CanLit, it is usually in reference to his 2003 novel, Elle, which won a Governor General’s Literary Award. When the Jane Urquhart–edited anthology The Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories was released in 2007, Glover was conspicuously absent (though, to be fair, he was far from being the only author not included). This, despite the fact that he has published four collections of stories (such as Dog Attempts to Drown Man in Saskatoon) that rank among the finest short fiction being produced anywhere.

Glover’s stories are uncategorizable: scabrous, sexually charged, linguistically inventive, and defiantly unsentimental. In 2003, when U.S. press Dalkey Archive released a volume of selected stories under the title Bad News of the Heart, no less a literary light than William Kennedy praised Glover’s stories as “bizarre, wild, and Byzantine in their telling” and “excursions into the intricate worlds of exploded love, erotic insanity, brutal lunatic despair.”

In what can only be considered good news for anyone who prizes strong storytelling and bloody great writing, Goose Lane Editions is set to release a new collection from this perennially underappreciated talent. The new volume’s title, Savage Love ($29.95 cl., Sept.), should provide some indication of what to expect.

The Stalwart

If there is a gold standard for Canadian short fiction in the new millennium, it’s probably set by Biblioasis. The press has been at the forefront, season after season, of producing collections by some of the finest practitioners of the form, both veterans and newcomers. Nancy Jo Cullen, Alexander MacLeod, Rebecca Rosenblum, C.P. Boyko, Ray Smith, Alice Petersen, Kathleen Winter, Leon Rooke, Terry Griggs, Amy Jones: these authors, newly published or brought back into print, have found a champion and stalwart advocate in the small indie press out of Windsor, Ontario.

One writer Biblioasis has shown a strong affinity for is Cynthia Flood. The pieces in Flood’s previous collection, The English Stories, published by Biblioasis in 2009, “consistently delight for their careful craft and thematic intricacy, but especially for their attention to language,” wrote Lynda Grace Philippsen in The Globe and Mail. Q&Q feature reviewer James Grainger wrote that the collection “achieve[s] a brooding resonance that captures the literal and spiritual dampness of a provincial scene that all but died out with the last remnants of the British Empire.”

Flood’s subtlety and linguistic care earn her comparisons to Alice Munro, as does her frequent subject: the lives of girls and women. These lives are on display in Flood’s forthcoming collection, Red Girl Rat Boy ($19.95 pa., Sept.), which traverses a series of registers and approaches – Gothic, naturalistic, uncanny, subversive – to form the latest addition to an impressive, and growing, library of short fiction from this determined and discerning house.

Trial by fire

Any book by Michael Ignatieff is sure to get noticed, but his forthcoming memoir, Fire and Ashes: Success and Failure in Politics (Random House Canada, $29.95 cl., Sept.), promises something a little different than his more than a dozen previous non-fiction titles (not to mention his three novels, two screenplays, and numerous articles). As a journalist and professor, Ignatieff was rarely without an opinion on political matters. His latest volume, however, is a very personal account of his own time in office.

Ignatieff’s editor, Paul Taunton, says Fire and Ashes is singular in the realm of political memoirs. “Most political memoirs are legacy pieces, and this has more advocacy to it,” Taunton says. Ignatieff explains how his family’s long history of public service prompted him to enter politics in 2006. But he goes further: despite the seemingly unrelenting criticism he faced, Ignatieff makes a case for the virtue of a life in politics, “upending the notion of history being written by the victors,” as Taunton puts it.

“Failure has its privileges,” Ignatieff writes. “[I’ve] earned the right to praise a life that did not go so well for me.”

The survivor

When Amanda Lindhout returned to Canada after being held captive in Somalia for 460 days, she was so badly malnourished that she had lost several fingernails, a few teeth, and most of her hair. Things she had not lost: her dignity, capacity to forgive, and ability to tell a story.

As a small-town girl from Alberta who fled a violent home at age 18, Lindhout already knew a thing or two about escape when she travelled to Mogadishu as a freelance television reporter. Four days after arriving, she and her photographer, Nigel Brennan, were kidnapped and confined. Over the course of 15 months, Lindhout was shackled, starved, and repeatedly raped by her teenage captors.

In the four years since her ordeal, Lindhout has dedicated herself to running the Global Enrichment Foundation, a non-profit organization that advocates for women’s rights and promotes access to education in Somalia. She has also co-written a memoir with New York Times Magazine contributing writer Sara Corbett. A House in the Sky (Scribner/Simon & Schuster, $29.99 cl., Sept.) is an account of survival, recovery, and boundless compassion.

crude awakening

In May, the B.C. government officially expressed its opposition to Enbridge’s proposed Northern Gateway oil pipeline. While the federal government’s decision on the matter isn’t expected until next year, Canadians from across the country seem to have an opinion. But despite the flurry of conversation about the remote B.C. region that would be affected, hardly anyone has laid eyes on the place.

Journalist Arno Kopecky quite literally sails into the controversy in The Oil Man and the Sea (Douglas & McIntyre, $26.95 pa., Sept.). Without any prior sailing experience, Kopecky and a photographer friend spent three-and-a-half months aboard Foxy, a forty-one-foot cutter, spending time among First Nations communities along the coast as well as in Kitimat, the proposed terminus of the pipeline.

The pair discovered overwhelming opposition to the project throughout the region. But despite the gloomy sense of eco-dread, there are glimmers of optimism. As the logging and fishing industries have diminished in recent decades, Kopecky says B.C.’s central coast has undergone something of an ecological renaissance, with whale populations (not to mention those of wolf, bear, salmon, and herring) on the rise.

“To see this place where not just nature, but also First Nations cultures, are finally bouncing back after decades and centuries of onslaught was very inspiring,” Kopecky says. “It also made the prospect of so much progress coming undone with a single oil spill all the more infuriating.”

 

Salinger, An introduction  ➧

Is it still possible to publish a blockbuster literary bio­graphy? The Private War of J.D. Salinger (Simon & Schuster, $42.99 cl., Sept.), an 800-page opus about the famously reclusive author of The Catcher in the Rye, certainly fits the bill. Co-written by Shane Salerno (best known as the screenwriter of blockbuster films such as Armageddon) and polarizing author and literary critic David Shields (Reality Hunger), the biography purports to offer “a complete re-evaluation and reinterpretation of the work and the life” of Salinger, who withdrew from public view in 1953. What’s more, the book is being published to coincide with the release of a major documentary film written, produced, and directed by Salerno.

Details are being kept tightly under wraps about what bombshells, if any, the biography contains, but the authors claim to have interviewed hundreds of sources, some of whom have never before gone on the record. Touching on Salinger’s past as a soldier in the Second World War, his love affair with Oona O’Neill, and the traits that alienated him from family and friends, the book promises to illuminate aspects of the late author’s life that have remained in the dark for decades.

By

July 30th, 2013

3:24 pm

Category: Preview