Warren Moon on TSN’s Off the Record, CBC’s As It Happens
Never Give Up On Your Dream, by Warren Moon
9780306818240 | $31.95 hc | in stock
Da Capo Press / Publishers Group Canada (Raincoast)
Warren Moon will be in Toronto next month, and will be a featured guest on TSN’s Off the Record and will be interviewed on CBC Radio’s As It Happens.
Add comment October 19, 2009
The Case for Books on CBC’s Writers & Company
The Case For Books, by Robert Darnton
9781586488260 | $30.50 hc | available October
Public Affairs / Publishers Group Canada (Raincoast)
Robert Darnton’s interview with Eleanor Wachtel for Writers & Company aired on Sunday, Oct. 18, and will repeat on the afternoon of Wednesday, Oct. 21.
Add comment October 19, 2009
Eggers’ The Wild Things coverage in Toronto Star, Globe & Mail, more
The Wild Things, by Dave Eggers
978-1934781616 | $24.95 hc | temporarily out of stock
McSweeney’s / Publishers Group Canada (Raincoast)
Now that the movie is in theatres, we will start seeing reviews of the Dave Eggers novelization of the film. Reviews are expected in The Toronto Star, The Globe & Mail, National Post and Chatelaine.
EYE Weekly mentioned the book in their review of the film, and will likely cover it again before the holidays. Tribute.ca has also posted an article about the book.
Add comment October 19, 2009
Coteau Books receives nine Saskatchewan Book Award nominations
Coteau Books has received nine nominations in five categories for the 2009 Saskatchewan Book Awards:
| Nominated in the categories Book of the Year, Regina, and Award for Publishing:
Legacy of Stone, by Marg Hyrniuk, Frank Korvemaker and Larry Easton 978-1550503692 | $39.95 hc | in stock Coteau Books / Publishers Group Canada (Raincoast) |
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| Nominated in the categories Book of the Year and Fiction:
Euphoria, by Connie Gault |
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| Nominated in the category Award for Publishing:
The Knife Sharpener’s Bell, by Rhea Tregebov |
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| Nominated in the category Children’s Literature:
Fight For Justice, by Lori Saigeon |
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| Nominated in the category Children’s Literature:
Danger in Dead Man’s Mine, by Dave Glaze |
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Add comment October 19, 2009
Zoe Whittall getting great reviews in the Globe, National Post & Toronto Star
Holding Still For as Long as Possible, by Zoe Whittall
978-0887842344 | $29.95 hc | in stock
House of Anansi (HarperCollins)
Zoe Whittall’s new novel has been getting great press in the print media:
“. . . Whittall is a dexterous puppeteer, and the book is unputdownable . . . Whittall’s skill as a novelist is that her interest in her characters, and in their stories, is genuine and generous.”
– The Globe and Mail
“With Holding Still, Whittall has established herself as a writer of immense vitality and courage; she stands as the voice of a lost, but thanks to her not forgotten generation: the boys and girls who will inherit the Earth.”
– National Post
“In Holding Still For As Long As Possible, the awareness of mortality intersects with the romantic restlessness of youth. It makes for a story whose vital signs are fully present and robust.”
– Toronto Star
Add comment October 19, 2009
CBC’s The National, Toronto Star cover the Taqwacore movement
The Taqwacores, by Michael Muhammad Knight
978-1593762292 | $16.95 pb | in stock
Soft Skull Press / Publishers Group Canada (Raincoast)
The Taqwacores, by Kim Badawi
978-1576875001 | $45.50 hc | in stock
powerHouse Books / Publishers Group Canada (Raincoast)
Both The Toronto Star and the CBC’s The National ran stories about the Taqwacore movement, covering both Kim Badawi’s documentary film and Michael Muhammad Knight’s novel.
From the CBC’s online article:
They’ve got bands named Vote Hezbollah and Secret Trial Five. They’re Iranian-Texans, Vancouver-based lesbian Pakistanis and the converted son of a white supremacist wife-beater. They pump their fists into the air and chant “Allahu Akbar!”
And they’re punk Muslims.
Huh?
That was Omar Majeed’s reaction, too. He’s a Montreal-based filmmaker and his new film Taqwacore: The Birth of Punk Islam hits theatres in Montreal and Toronto this week after runs at film festivals in Vancouver and Montreal.
“It kind of blew my mind,” he said of his discovery of the sub-culture. “I kept thinking to myself, ‘Wow, if I’d only known about this when I was a teenager. What an effect it would have had on me.”‘
Majeed discovered the scene as he pondered what it meant to be a Muslim in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States.
He wanted to hear from different voices than the Muslim fundamentalists often seen in the media or the “mainstream Muslim organizations that were basically just saying, ‘Muslim is all good, peace and love’ and all that stuff.”
Most Muslims, Majeed believed, were somewhere in the middle and “felt that voice hadn’t been represented yet.” Enter the Islamic punk movement, known as Taqwacore.
The director said he’s never been particularly religious, but was turned on to the book The Taqwacores by American convert Michael Muhammad Knight.
Knight, who was raised by a racist father and an abused mother, created a radical bunch of Muslim misfits to populate his book only to find that a whole community of real Muslim youths had embraced it and turned fiction into fact.
Majeed hooked up with Knight and went on a voyage of discovery across the United States and Pakistan as the punks tried to spread their message and get gigs for their bands, culminating in efforts to stage a mass outdoor show in a sketchy area of Lahore, Pakistan.
Add comment October 15, 2009
Sherman Alexie on Writers & Company, reviews in Globe & Mail and Winnipeg Free Press
War Dances, by Sherman Alexie
9780802119193 | $28.95 hc | in stock
Grove Press / Publishers Group Canada (Raincoast)
Sherman Alexie’s interview on CBC Radio’s Writers & Company was broadcast on Oct. 11 and again on Oct. 14. Reviews of his new story collection War Dances are expected soon in both The Globe and Mail and the Winnipeg Free Press.
Add comment October 15, 2009
Governor General’s Shortlists Announced
The Canada Council has announced the shortlists for the 2009 Governor General’s Awards, and I’m thrilled to have nine titles on the shortlists:
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Fiction:
The Mistress of Nothing, by Kate Pullinger |
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Non-Fiction:
The Cello Suites, by Eric Siblin |
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Drama:
Where the Blood Mixes, by Kevin Loring |
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Another Home Invasion, by Joan MacLeod 978-0889226227 | $16.95 pb | in stock Talon Books / Publishers Group Canada (Raincoast) |
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Children’s Literature – Illustration:
Bella’s Tree, by Janet Russell, illustrated by Jirina Marton |
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My Great Big Mamma, by Olivier Ka, illustrated by Luc Melanson 978-0888999429 | $18.95 hc | in stock Groundwood Books (HarperCollins) |
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Alego, by Ningeokuluk Teevee 978-0888999436 | $17.95 hc | in stock Groundwood Books (HarperCollins) |
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Translation – French to English:
A Slight Case of Fatigue, by Stephane Bourguignon, translated by Phyllis Aronoff and Howard Scott |
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Empire of Desire, by Thierry Hentsch, translated by Fred A. Reed 978-0889225879 | $29.95 pb | in stock Talon Books / Publishers Group Canada (Raincoast) |
Add comment October 14, 2009
Daniel Goldhagen lecture to be taped for As It Happens
Worse Than War, by Daniel Goldhagen
9781586487690 | $37.95 hc | available October
Public Affairs / Publishers Group Canada (Raincoast)
Daniel Goldhagen’s lecuture in Toronto was taped for broadcast by the CBC, and part of it was aired on CBC Radio’s As It Happens on Oct. 16.
Add comment October 9, 2009
Love in Infant Monkeys gets 5 star review in EYE
Love in Infant Monkeys, by Lydia Millet
9781593762520 | $17.50 pb | in stock
Soft Skull Press / Publishers Group Canada (Raincoast)
Lydia Millet’s new collection of short stories has been given the full five stars in EYE Weekly:
Review by Brian Joseph Davis
October 07, 2009
In reviewing this collection of short stories, I’m tempted to type the 10 words, “Lydia Millet is the greatest American author of her generation” 50 times to fill up this space and just be done with it. In reality, however, I am paid to justify things beyond giddy fandom and, I’ll admit it, professional jealousy.
Just as you realize that she is writing about Madonna Ciccone in the opening story “Sexing the Pheasant,” Millet has, with her economical eloquence, already set up everything needed for a consonant arc (a superficial woman shoots a pheasant and confronts death, superficially, on her superficially British estate) as well as the common theme of the collection: encounters between celebrities and animals based loosely on factual accounts. It’s a perfect collision point to study human vanity imposing itself on nature.
This is why Millet is the greatest American author of her generation. She breaks rules by turning author polemic into poetry while at the same time allowing the kind of characters most writers wouldn’t touch to own the stories outright.
Witness her capturing Madonna’s charming crudity and blitheness in service of the story: “The best fags were all English fags,” Madonna broods. “Englishmen were the Ur-faggots, pretty much. All other fags in the world were pale imitations of real English fags. This was the land of homos; even the straight men were fags here. One reason she liked it so much. In the US guys were basically rapists.”
Stories like “Jimmy Carter’s Rabbit” and “Chomsky, Rodents” (Noam Chomsky pitching a hamster condo at a dump frequented by Cape Cod intellectuals) feature their famous subjects as protagonists, yet when Millet moves away from star power her writing really gets under the skin. “Sir Henry,” a tale of a dog walker in the employ of David Hasselhoff, is a subtly unnerving and wrenching day-in-the-life of a person charged with giving four-legged fulfillment to C-list celebrity ornaments.
At her best, Millet is a writer of ecologies, both traditional and, in Love In Infant Monkeys, cultural. Many creative-writing-grad types will tell you to avoid using fiction to explore big ideas but a more specific warning should be to avoid only certain overdone big ideas. Millet’s big ideas are always starting points that allow good writing to follow, naturally.
Add comment October 9, 2009
