Confirmed media for Everybody I Shot is Dead

Everybody I Shot is Dead, by Deborah Chesher
978-0979654206 | $69.95 hc | in stock
Chesher Cat Productions / White Knight Book Distribution (Georgetown Terminal)

This last-minute drop-in title from White Knight Books is a celebrity photo book — a collection of shots Deborah took as rock photographer for many magazines from 1974-1979. This is a self-published, high-quality coffee table book with 208 pages and over 400 never before seen photos.  Celebrity photos include: Waylon Jennings, Tammy Wynette, Jerry Garcia & Frank Zappa, among many others.

Confirmed media includes Associated Press and Canadian Press features (both sometime this week), a review in the November Quill & Quire, and forthcoming reviews in Rolling Stone, Newsweek, People Magazine, GiftBook, GuitarWorld, Photo Life, Playboy, Spin, Entertainment Weekly, Focusmagazine, and Fox News.

Calgary Herald writes about Odori

Odori, by Darcy Tamayose
9781897151099 | $22.95 pb | in stock
Cormorant Books (UTP Distribution)

The Calgary Herald ran a terrific piece that came out October 11. Aritha van Herk wrote about authors from mixed cultural backgrounds and how that has influenced their writing. It was a really good piece:

“Although shattered by war and the struggle between Japanese and Americans, the spirit of Okinawa shimmers beyond its military and political occupation. Tamayose tells the story of how ordinary people took refuge in the sand caves during the war, at the same time as she portrays how the Canadian prairies become a refuge for one family.”

Nature & the Human Soul to get starred PW review

Nature & the Human Soul, by Bill Plotkin
978-1-57731-551-3 | $19.95 pb | available January 2008
New World Library / Publishers Group Canada (Raincoast)

Publishers Weekly is scheduled to do a starred review of Nature & the Human Soul in January 2008. Reviews are also expected in The Spring Journal (the oldest Jungian Journal) and Voices: The Art and Science of Psychotherapy.

Finding Home and Glass Voices reviewed in Q&Q

Finding Home, by Eric Wright
9781897151112 | $22.95 pb | in stock
Cormorant Books (UTP Distribution)

Glass Voices, by Carol Bruneau
9781897151129 | $22.95 pb | in stock
Cormorant Books (UTP Distribution)

The November issue of Quill & Quire has reviewed both Eric Wright’s new Finding Home and Carol Bruneau’s Glass Voices very favourably.

Fantastic advance praise for One Soldier’s War

One Soldier’s War, by Arkady Babchenko
978-0-8021-1860-8 | $27.50 hc | available February 2008
Grove Press / Publishers Group Canada (Raincoast)

We have received a brilliant quote from Mark Bowden, author of BLACK HAWK DOWN, for Arkady Babchenko’s ONE SOLDIER’S WAR:

“Arkady Babchenko has written a hypnotic and terrifying account of his enforced participation in the Chechen wars, one that is entirely free of the self-absorbed razzle-dazzle that too often passes for ‘literary’ writing these days. The book’s power is in its clarity and detail. ‘It turns out that there is nothing out of the ordinary about war,’ he writes. ‘It’s just ordinary life, only taking place in very tough conditions with the constant knowledge that people are trying to kill you.’ Babchenko’s honesty has the force of a blunt object. He is surrounded by killing and by death, eager for a wound that will not kill him but take him out of hell. The killing he does shatters him to his core: ‘The main thing for me was to survive and to think about nothing. . . . A different soldier had been born in my place, a good one—empty, devoid of thought, with a coldness inside me and a hatred for the whole world.’ It is simply a great book.” —Mark Bowden

Kim McArthur named one of Canada’s Top Women Entrepreneurs

For the 9^th straight year, Kim McArthur of McArthur & Company publishers has been named to the annual Profit W100 ranking of Canada’s top women entrepreneurs. Developed in 1998 by PROFIT: Your Guide to Business Success, in order to bring attention to the rising trend of women-owned businesses, the PROFIT W100 is Canada’s largest annual celebration of entrepreneurial achievement by women.

“I’m absolutely thrilled to have been selected again to this prestigious group of Canadian women entrepreneurs, particularly because McArthur & Company is the only book publisher on this list.” says Kim McArthur, President and Publisher.

Ranking Canada’s Top Women Entrepreneurs by the annual revenue of their firms, PROFIT W100 profiles the country’s most successful female business owners and is published in the November issue of PROFIT and online at PROFITguide.com.

“The PROFIT W100 are role models for entrepreneurs who lead companies of any size,in any sector” says Ian Portsmouth,editor of PROFIT. “Through effective management,they’ve built profitable,sustainable businesses.”

Cathy’s Book mentioned in the National Post

Cathy’s Book, by Stewart & Weisman
076242656X | $21.50 hc | in stock
Running Press / Publishers Group Canada (Raincoast)

Cathy’s Book got a mention on the cover of the National Post’s Arts & Life section in a story on “bibliotherapy” (October 23, 2007). In the article, a 15-year-old girl cites Cathy’s Book as helping her to resist peer pressure and stop using drugs:

THE READ TO RECOVERY

Monique Polak, National Post

Kevin Kronstal fell into a depression after a classmate died in September. “I got really bummed out. I had trouble sleeping and concentrating,” said Kronstal, 16, a Grade 10 student at Westmount High School in Montreal.

It wasn’t a guidance counsellor or medication that helped Kronstal out of his funk. It was a book he found on his English teacher’s reading list: Walter Dean Myers’s Autobiography of My Dead Brother. “In the book, the guy’s good friend dies. It helped me realize mine wasn’t the only case. It showed me it’s possible to get through it and move on,” Kronstal said.

A book helped Eden Bradshaw, 15, another Grade 10 student at Westmount High, resist peer pressure. When Bradshaw realized drug use was interfering with her academic performance, she decided to stop. Her friends gave her a hard time. “They said, ‘Ha, what are you — scared?’” she recalled. Stewart Wise-man’s novel Cathy’s Book showed Bradshaw it was possible to stand up for herself. “I read it in four days. In the book, this girl tells her friend, ‘No, I can’t do this. I’m not getting into trouble for what you want to do,’ ” Bradshaw said.

Students sometimes lineup at lunchtime to get into the library at Westmount High. They come for the cozy couches and to talk books — and life — with librarian Susan Chau. “I really try to suss out what they want and need. Some kids are natural readers. You have to reach out to others,” Chau said.

Loads of Upcoming Media for Peter Jennings Book

Peter Jennings: A Reporter’s Life, by Lynn Sherr
978-1586485177 | $33.50 hc | available October
PublicAffairs / Publishers Group Canada (Raincoast)

Tons of fantastic media coming up for the release of the new book about Peter Jennings:

11/6 – ABC “Good Morning America”

11/6 – ABC Television Satellite tour

11/7 – ABC “The View”

11/8 – CTV “Canada AM”

11/9 – People Magazine

11/11 – CNN “Reliable Sources”

11/11 or 11/18 – ABC “This Week with George Stephanopoulos”

Date tk  – PBS “The Charlie Rose Show”

“[Reminds] readers of the commanding presence Jennings held over broadcast journalism.”  –Publishers Weekly

“A warm tribute to the Canadian high-school dropout who anchored ABC’s World News Tonight for 22 years.”  –Kirkus Reviews

Anne Enright interviews in the Globe, Canadian Press

The Gathering, by Anne Enright
978-0802170392 | $16.95 pb | temporarily out of stock
Black Cat / Publishers Group Canada (Raincoast)

Following Anne Enright’s appearance at Toronto’s International Festival of Authors, there have been a number of Canadian interviews with the Booker winner, including the following two from The Globe and Mail (October 23, 2007) and the Canadian Press:

‘Winning the thing is slightly daunting’

BERT ARCHER

Winning the Man Booker Prize can be a reductive experience for writers with relatively little previous international media exposure. Asked to write stories in hours about authors who spend a lifetime developing their craft and world view, journalists often gather around certain adjectives to sum things up for their readers. John Banville, who won the Booker in 2005, was “difficult.” Alan Hollinghurst, who won it the year before, was “gay.”

Anne Enright, the Dubliner who won it last Tuesday, should feel lucky – she gets two: “bleak” and “depressing.”

In Toronto this past weekend for previously scheduled appearances at the International Festival of Authors, Enright has already felt the effects of this prize-inspired abbreviation.

Speaking of her onstage interview with TV host Carolyn Weaver earlier that day, the 45-year-old writer says, “I spent most of the time trying to tell her what the book was actually about. She just thought it was depressing. She kept saying it – depressing, depressing, depressing.” Her publicist rolls her eyes. It seems they’ve been dealing with this a lot today, her only full day in Canada before she flies back home.

Enright herself, in an interview with the BBC minutes after winning the prize, did allow that her fourth novel, The Gathering, was “grief-soaked,” though anyone who thinks that’s the same as depressing or bleak hasn’t read enough Irish literature, or even those reasonable facsimiles of it by the McCourt brothers.

Sure, there might be an episode in Enright’s book in which a son – one of 12 children and seven miscarriages, of course – throws a knife at his mother hard enough that when it misses her, it takes a chunk out of the wall. But the Hegarty family, gathered in the kitchen, breaks out laughing as the mother, grinning herself, gets up from the ducking position, with another son jeering at his brother for his bad aim. And okay, the knife-wielding son ends up dead later by suicide. And there might be some sexual molestation of a child or two by an otherwise congenial friend of the family. And also, yes, at one point our heroine, Veronica, does say that “I find that being part of a family is the most excruciating way to be alive.”

But Enright finds none of this depressing. “She’s just sort of cross, you know?” she says, sitting on a long settee in a penthouse suite at the Westin Harbour Castle hotel in a cardigan and brown above-the-knee skirt that manages to say yes, I’m dressed up, but I really shouldn’t have to be.

Ripley’s Believe it or Not! on Montel Williams

The Remarkable… Revealed, by Ripley’s Believe It or Not!
978-1893951228 | $34.95 hc | in stock
Mint Publishing (Perseus Distribution Service)

The Montel Williams show will do an audience book give-away of The Remarkable Revealed during a show about unexplained events and strange stories. Air date either Oct. 31 or Nov. 1, 2007.