Starred Booklist review for Thousand-Mile Song

Thousand-Mile Song, by David Rothenberg
9780465071289 | $29.50 hc | in stock
Basic Books / Publishers Group Canada (Raincoast)

David Rothenberg’s latest book has received a starred Booklist review:

“A warmly inquisitive writer who makes technical information as entertaining as tales about nude whale watchers, Rothenberg tells remarkably dramatic and funny stories of his musical encounters with whales…a breathtaking CD accompanies the book…Rothenbergs unique study is particularly sharp in its analysis of the mysticism whales evoke and the findings and blind spots of scientific inquires. As he rekindles whale awe, Rothenberg calls for a revitalized commitment to protecting these great singers of the sea.”

NYT reviews Serve the People!

Serve the People!, by Yan Lianke
9780802170446 | $15.50 pb | in stock
Black Cat / Publishers Group Canada (Raincoast)

Yan Lianke’s novel received a great review in the New York Times:

Kissing the Cook

By Liesl Schillinger

Published: May 4, 2008

You can’t get better publicity for a book than “Banned in Boston.” But as product endorsements go, “Banned in China” sends a more mixed message, even if it still wins points for piquancy. Seeing this legend on the dust jacket of Yan Lianke’s faux-naif novel, “Serve the People!” — the first of his books to be translated into English — you have to wonder what Chinese officials are banning books for these days. Publishing overly frank air pollution charts? Leaking hints on Olympic gymnasts’ floor routines? Indulging in too much of the wrong kind of self-criticism? Too much lead in the ink or too much lead in the pencil — that is, excessive lewdness?

Yan Lianke has spent much of his adult life refining the highly rarefied, not especially transferable skill of being a provocateur who knows how far he can go without having his quill snapped. It’s a challenging job description: cautious troublemaker. Yan Lianke has won two of China’s top literary prizes for previous novels, but he has also been censured for writing books that annoyed the Party hierarchy. And although he admits to censoring himself to avoid censorship by others, this pre-emptive step hasn’t always been enough. His first book, “Xia Riluo,” described in a Washington Post author profile as a send-up of two People’s Army war heroes gone bad, was banned. A Chinese edition of his most recent novel, which takes place in his native province of Henan, was banned once the authorities understood the subversiveness of its subject. Called “The Dream of Ding Village,” it is reportedly a science-fictiony satire in which opportunists export the blood of peasants by pipeline, as if it were oil.

“Serve the People!,” smoothly translated by Julia Lovell, offers an initial sample of Yan Lianke’s writing to an English-speaking audience. A bluntly drawn, mildly erotic fable, it teases Mao Zedong by poking fun at a true believer who obeys the Chairman’s precepts too literally. To a Western sensibility, the broad strokes of Yan Lianke’s humor would seem to pose little risk of inciting rebellion, whether of the flesh or of the body politic. But then, part of the book’s attraction is that it doesn’t have a Western sensibility. It lets the reader see — or rather, intuit — what jokes Chinese officials don’t consider funny, and how very little it takes for a writer to be branded an incendiary in 21st-century China, more than three decades after the death of Mao, a decade after the death of Deng Xiaoping and seven years since China entered the World Trade Organization, a move that would seem to signal a willingness (however wary) to mingle with the rest of the world.

Silk Train Murder shortlisted for Arthur Ellis

The Silk Train Murder, by Sharon Rowse
9780786719464 | $27.50 hc | in stock
Carroll & Graf / Publishers Group Canada (Raincoast)

The Silk Train Murder has been shortlisted for the Best First Novel at the Arthur Ellis Awards. The winners will be announced June 5th in Toronto.

Skinny Bitch authors to appear on Ellen

Skinny Bitch, by Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin
9780762424931 | $17.00 pb | in stock
Running Press / Publishers Group Canada (Raincoast)

Skinny Bitch in the Kitch, by Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin
9780762431069 | $17.00 pb | in stock
Running Press / Publishers Group Canada (Raincoast)

Skinny Bitch authors Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin will be on ELLEN on May 27th.

Sad, Mad and Bad in the NYT

Sad, Mad and Bad, by Lisa Appignanesi
978-1552786765 | $34.95 hc | in stock
McArthur & Co. (HarperCollins)

The New York Times has reviewed Lisa Appignanesi’s book examining women and the psychiatric industry:

Diagnosis: Female

By KATHRYN HARRISON

Published: April 27, 2008

Back when Zelda Fitzgerald, her skirts wet from diving into public fountains, was accelerating from madcap toward outright madness, a Wharton School economist named George Taylor made the seemingly fey observation that hemlines rose and fell with the stock market, proposing a causal connection between two presumably separate spheres of human enterprise. Fashion, as the now familiar “hemline index” suggested, is socially determined. With prosperity come optimism and tolerance for risk; women are emboldened to show off a more daring length of leg. But what of more empirical, utilitarian domains? Surely doctors hypothesize independently of whatever forces drive style. Take, for example, the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness. Most of us trust psychiatry to remain immune to fads. And it does, doesn’t it?

One of the consistently fascinating and disturbing aspects of “Mad, Bad and Sad: Women and the Mind Doctors” is Lisa Appignanesi’s assiduous tracking of the modishness of what might be mistaken for a sui generis discipline. Of course, as anyone who has visited a psychiatric hospital — or ridden the subway — can attest, crazy is what we call people who refuse to conform to accepted norms of behavior. And the definition of nonconformity must change in step with styles of conforming.

“Mad, Bad and Sad” is, Appignanesi tells her readers, not only “the story of madness, badness and sadness and the ways in which we have understood them over the last 200 years,” but also a survey of the mad, bad and sad themselves, the particular women, including Zelda Fitzgerald, Lucia Joyce, Virginia Woolf and many less famous patients, who suffered “frenzies, possessions, mania, melancholy, nerves, delusions, aberrant acts, dramatic tics, passionate loves and hates, sex, visual and auditory hallucinations, fears, phobias, fantasies, disturbances of sleep, dissociations, communion with spirits and imaginary friends, addictions, self-harm, self-starvation, depression” and so on. Phew. A list like this makes a girl grateful that Freud even bothered to ask what such desperate, deluded creatures might want. No wonder the 19th century couldn’t build enough asylums to house them.

It seems that as soon as society relinquished witchcraft as the crime for which to punish an overtly liberated woman, it settled on madness as the reason to incarcerate her. As Appignanesi observes, “Patients could well find themselves the victims of a doctor’s prejudice about what kind of behavior constituted sanity: this could all too easily work against women who didn’t conform to the time’s norms of sexual behavior or living habits.”

That diagnoses conceived by male doctors would be subject to men’s changeable views of women — romantic, patronizing, idealistic, misogynistic: the choices are limited only by the imagination — comes as no surprise; it’s the meticulous and exhaustive account of these theories offered in “Mad, Bad and Sad” that is sobering. Victorian women who weren’t locked up for falling victim to lypemania (melancholy), monomania, homicidal monomania or “moral insanity” were at risk of neurasthenia, a “mirror image of rebellion” in which their “nervous depletion” was explained as the result of their “incursion into the masculine sphere of intellectual labor,” a strain that constitutions formed for tender sentiment couldn’t be expected to support. And then came hysteria, which “best expresses women’s distress at the clashing demands and no longer tenable restrictions placed on women in the fin de siècle.”

If male doctors conspired to define madness, responding to behaviors that flouted the social conventions of their culture, female patients, in the attempt to understand themselves and their context, and maybe even to create or bolster identity, colluded with those same doctors to satisfy the changing definitions of madness. “Often enough,” Appignanesi notes, “extreme expressions of the culture’s malaise, symptoms and disorders mirrored the time’s order.” Anorexia, she writes, “is usually an illness of plenty not of famine, as depression is one of times of peace and prosperity, not of war.” Having wept, raved, trembled and hallucinated our way into the 21st century, when “the sum of information available in any given minute is larger than it has ever been in history,” we’ve conceived “a condition in which attention is at a deficit.”

My Life as a Dame to be excerpted in Maclean’s

My Life as a Dame, by Christina McCall
978-0887842214 | $32.95 hc | in stock
House of Anansi (HarperCollins)

Maclean’s will excerpt Part 2 from Christina’s memoir (which covers her time at Maclean’s) in an upcoming issue.

Martha Brooks wins CLA Young Adult Book Award

Mistik Lake, by Martha Brooks
978-0888997524 | $14.95 pb | in stock
Groundwood Books (HarperCollins)

Martha Brooks is the 2008 winner of the Canadian Library Association’s Young Adult Canadian Book Award for her novel Mistik Lake. This is the third time Martha has won the award — her previous winning novels were Bone Dance and True Confessions of a Heartless Girl.

Taschen’s Michelangelo features in ABC documentary

Michelangelo, by Prof. Dr. Frank Zöllner, Prof. Dr. Christof Thoenes, Dr. Thomas Pöpper
978-3822830550 | $225.00 hc | in stock
Taschen (Ingram Publisher Services/IPS)

Petra Lamers-Schuetze, editor of Taschen’s Michelangelo, was interviewed for an ABC news special on Michelangelo that aired on Friday, May 2. The interview pictured the book as well.

McMafia on The Current, in Maclean’s

McMafia, by Misha Glenny
978-0887842047 | $29.95 hc | in stock
House of Anansi Press (HarperCollins)

Misha Glenny was interviewed on CBC’s The Current this past Thursday (May 1, 2008), and he has been interviewed by Maclean’s magazine for an article on crime in B.C. for a forthcoming issue.

True Norwegian Black Metal on Pitchfork

True Norwegian Black Metal, by Peter Beste
978-1576874356 | $64.00 hc | available July
powerHouse Books/Vice / Publishers Group Canada (Raincoast)

Influential music blog Pitchfork has posted an article on the release of True Norwegian Black Metal:

Norwegian Black Metal Stars Showcased in Photo Book

Posted by Paul Thompson

Peter Beste’s True Norwegian Black Metal is a 200+ page photo examination of the world of, well, true Norwegian black metal. Offering rare images of the members of such black metal acts as Darkthrone, Mayhem, Emperor, Satryicon, Enslaved, Immortal, Gorgoroth, Carpathian Forest, 1349, Dimmu Borgir, Ildjarn, and Aura Noir, the book seeks to uncover more about this secretive, often violent world where grown men wear a lot of makeup, make guttural noises, and say mean things about Jesus.

A good portion of the book is given over to selections from the archive of Jon “Metalion” Kristiansen, the publisher of pioneering black metal rag Slayer. True also includes interviews and quotes from Frost of 1349, Abbath of Immortal, Fenriz of Darkthrone, and Gaahl of Gorgoroth.

Vice Books will issue True Norwegian Black Metal May 15. Meanwhile, New York City’s Steven Kasher Gallery will host an exhibit of Beste’s work, opening May 9 and running through June 7. Additional gallery shows are expected to follow in London, Stockholm, Oslo, Berlin, and Los Angeles.