What Happened on the Colbert Report, Real Time with Bill Maher

What Happened, by Scott McClellan
9781586485566 | $29.95 hc | in stock
PublicAffairs / Publishers Group Canada (Raincoast)

Scott McClellan appeared on The Colbert Report on August 26, and will be on Real Time with Bill Maher September 5.

Kirkus gives The Sun and the Moon a starred review

The Sun and the Moon, by Matthew Goodman
9780465002573 | $27.95 hc | available November
Basic Books / Publishers Group Canada (Raincoast)

Matthew Goodman’s The Sun and the Moon has received a starred Kirkus review:

“A delightful recounting of ‘the most successful hoax in the history of American journalism.’… Goodman consistently entertains with his tale of press anipulation, hucksterism and the seemingly bottomless capacity for people to believe the
most outrageous things. Absolutely charming.”

Rawi Hage’s Cockroach on CBC Arts Online

Cockroach, by Rawi Hage
978-0887842092 | $29.95 hc | in stock
House of Anansi (HarperCollins)

Kevin Chong reviews Rawi Hage’s new novel for CBC Arts Online:

A bug’s life

Montreal author Rawi Hage explains his menacing new novel, Cockroach

Last Updated: Monday, August 25, 2008 | 2:40 PM ET

By Kevin Chong, CBC News

One of the central plot strands in Rawi Hage’s new novel, Cockroach, involves the weekly meetings between the book’s unnamed protagonist and Genevieve, his therapist. Genevieve was assigned to help him after his release from a psychiatric-care facility following a suicide attempt. While reluctant to share his feelings with a stranger, the narrator is mindful of the therapist’s power to return him to the hospital. To capture Genevieve’s attention, the narrator starts telling her, in piecemeal form, about a past plot to seek revenge on his vicious brother-in-law in Beirut. Only after several sessions does the narrator reveal whether he actually succeeded in killing the man.

"I don’t advocate violence, but it’s something we have to explore. It’s part of our society."— Rawi Hage

On one level, these therapy sessions echo One Thousand and One Nights. This famous collection of medieval stories from Arabia, India and Persia is framed by the story of Scheherazade, the new bride of a Persian king named Shahryar. After his first wife’s infidelity, Shahryar marries a succession of virgins whom he beheads after their wedding night. When Scheherazade becomes the Shahryar’s newest bride, she manages to stave off death by telling the king a series of overlapping stories over consecutive nights. The king ultimately spares Scheherazade and the story ends happily ever after.

“In a way, Genevieve is the king and the narrator is Scheherazade,” says Hage over the phone from Montreal in a low, soft mumble. His manner is friendly, if cautious. “[The narrator] is reluctant. He doesn’t want to be there. But he doesn’t want to go back to the hospital. He’s a good storyteller, and stories can save your life sometimes.”

Stories haven’t necessarily saved Hage’s life, but they’ve been exceptionally rewarding. Hage was trained as a photo artist and worked as a cab driver. In 2006, he emerged from complete obscurity with DeNiro’s Game, a debut novel that would appear on the shortlist for Canada’s two biggest book prizes, the Giller and the Governor General’s Literary Award; it also became a bestseller. DeNiro’s Game is the story of two young men growing up in war-stricken Lebanon and this past June, it earned the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, an international prize that comes with a 100,000-Euro cheque.

Before I spoke to Hage, his publisher warned me that he was reluctant to discuss either his biography or the IMPAC win. “I wonder sometimes if my story is more interesting than my writing,” jokes Hage, who emigrated from Beirut to New York City in the early 1980s to distance himself from the Lebanese civil war, before moving to Montreal almost a decade later. “I did surpass many obstacles; it makes a great story, of course. But at some point, I realized [many profiles] were more context than content. I think I can now claim to be known as a writer of literature first and foremost.”

Morally complicated and intellectually engaged, Cockroach can easily stand on the merits of its content alone. As with DeNiro’s Game, there’s some biographical overlap between Hage and the narrator of Cockroach, but the literary allusions and fabulist touches in the new book mark it unmistakeably as fiction. Cockroach is set in Montreal and follows its desperate, impoverished, Lebanese-born narrator as he wanders from his therapy sessions back to the city’s Middle Eastern immigrant community. A thief from an early age, he imagines transforming into a cockroach as he pays unannounced visits to the homes of his friends and acquaintances. Hage says he liked the image of the cockroach, a lowly yet resilient creature, “because it’s the closest thing to the earth. It’s the closest thing to the underground. Somehow, it enters people’s places with ease. It’s functional and metaphoric at the same time.” Reviewers have cited Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis as an influence, but Hage refutes it. “Kafka was no influence,” he says. He suggests that the fabulist stories of Russian novelist Nikolai Gogol had a hand in his writing. “If anything, the cockroach in Kafka is immobilized.”

As in DeNiro’s Game, violence plays a central role in Cockroach. While the narrator’s story of revenge comes out in therapy, an opportunity for payback emerges for another character, Shoreh, an Iranian woman who was tortured and raped at the hands of an Iranian official. But Hage passes no moral judgment on his vengeful cast.

“I don’t advocate violence, but it’s something we have to explore,” he explains. “It’s part of our society, but just exploring violence doesn’t mean I’m subscribing to it. Description is not prescription.” He adds: “There’s a lot of literature dealing with non-violence. But this non-violence is always advocated by people who are victims. You never ask non-violence from people in power. I find it ironic.”

Another primary theme in the book is the idea of madness. As in the classic novel Hunger (1890) by Norwegian Nobel laureate Knut Hamsun — another author Hage admires — the narrator’s delusions and anti-social behaviour aren’t part of an illness, but rather a symptom of a larger mental-health problem afflicting society. “We’re living in mad times,” says Hage. “There’s this collision of civilizations that live side by side. And I can’t believe religion is coming back.”

Raised a Christian but now an atheist, Hage regards all religions with scepticism. “If anything, this book is about secularism; it’s a clear attack on organized religion. Maybe because I lived through a religious war, but I saw how religion can be destructive and how irrational it can make people. Having said that, I’m not on a mission in my writing, but these are my own beliefs.”

Hage’s look at the underbelly of organized religion and immigrant life in Canada is unflinching and grim; what’s even more remarkable is that he has transformed that material into a page-turner. Cockroach’s finely wrought scenes build in tension toward a conclusion that’s fitting and yet unpredictable. It might be going too far to label Hage the Scheherazade of CanLit, but readers are bound to be seduced.

Cockroach will be published by House of Anansi Press on Aug. 30.

Kevin Chong is a writer based in Vancouver.

Gridlock Economy in the Globe & Mail

The Gridlock Economy, by Michael Heller
9780465029167 | $27.95 hc | in stock
Basic Books / Publishers Group Canada (Raincoast)

Michael Heller’s book is featured in John Allemang’s article in the Globe & Mail August 23:

What ails the economy? Too much ownership, author says

Law professor’s book on ‘gridlock’ offers a rare critique of market forces from a pro-market point of view. John Allemang explains

JOHN ALLEMANG

August 23, 2008

If wealth is what you seek in life – and who among us would really prefer nothing to something? – then it’s easy to believe that private ownership is a good thing.

But what if the liberating promise of the free market is a deception? Public ownership may have its problems, as the privatization gurus have been telling us for decades now, and yet the freedom of the open market may be held back by the very thing it believes in: the power of private property.

Life-saving drugs aren’t being made, new technologies are smothered at birth, cities suffer from neglect, cultural artifacts aren’t being created – and all because, says legal theorist Michael Heller, we are dubiously blessed with an overabundance of private ownership.

Prof. Heller is that rare thing, a critic of the free-market economy from a free-market perspective. A skeptic in a world of economic true believers, he has looked upon the business model we’ve been following so fervently and spotted its basic flaw.

"Usually private ownership creates wealth," he says from New York, where he teaches real-estate law at Columbia University. "But too much ownership has the opposite effect: It creates gridlock. And that is the paradox of free markets. If too many owners control a resource, co-operation breaks down, wealth disappears and everybody loses."

The disturbing scale of that loss is at the heart of his unexpectedly wide-ranging new book, The Gridlock Economy, which sets out to show the many ways in which the new economy is getting it wrong, whether it’s the commercialization of biotech research, the inability to reconcile copyright claims with new forms of music or the conflicts inherent in developing new digital technologies, where thousands of patents may have to be licensed in order to take a commercial product to market.

Consider the near-death of the BlackBerry in 2006: That very modern tragedy was staved off at the last minute only when the Canadian company Research in Motion, in what Prof. Heller calls a "bet the company" battle, paid out $600-million to silence a single litigious competitor with a dubious patent-infringement claim.

If that high cost of doing business sounds too remote from popular culture, consider the changes that gridlock forced on hip-hop music, where musicians such as Public Enemy and the Beastie Boys, who created collages of sound based on sampling thousands of fragments of previously recorded music, were confronted by record companies demanding license fees.

Instead of establishing a concept of fair use, or figuring out a token payment similar to that negotiated for radio-station air-play in a previous generation, the copyright bullies threatened lawsuits. And so a dynamic art form was forced into the confines of gridlock, where a legalistic assertion of rights ends up benefiting no one – save the lawyers.

"Anything to do with multimedia, with remixing, with mix tapes," says Prof. Heller, "is bound to be blocked by gridlock."

While capitalism’s critics are usually content to complain about its excesses, Prof. Heller’s insight is to see what isn’t there and what hasn’t happened – such as the drug development that has been stalled by the demands of innumerable patent-holders, all of them looking to exploit the maximum potential value of their intellectual property.

"We all know what happens if 50 people try to turn left at an intersection and everybody gets stuck," he says. "What I’ve discovered is the possibility of ownership jams, a kind of congestion that’s much harder to see."

At the centre of Prof. Heller’s thinking is the change that came about after a fundamental shift in the modern economy: "For a single resource to come into existence now, it requires a lot more pieces to be put together."

And the more pieces, the greater number of fractious owners. "It used to be the case," he says, "that the core of innovation in a free-market economy was that you discovered something, then you got a patent, then you created a product. Or you wrote a song and got a copyright and put out an album, or bought a piece of land and then you built on it.

(continued on the Globe & Mail website…)

Lightness of Being to feature in at least 5 major science magazines

The Lightness of Being, by Frank Wilczek
9780465003211 | $28.95 hc | available September
Basic Books / Publishers Group Canada (Raincoast)

Nobel Prize winning physicist Frank Wilczek’s book is set to receive terrific coverage in all the major science magazines: reviews scheduled for SEED (Sept/Oct issue), New Scientist (Sept), Scientific American (Nov), Natural History (Nov), Nature (tba).

Starred PW review for Walter Mosley

The Right Mistake, by Walter Mosley
9780465005253 | $25.00 hc | available October
Basic Books / Publishers Group Canada (Raincoast)

Mosley’s latest gets a starred Publishers Weekly review in the August 11th issue:

“In the face of gangs, drugs, poverty and racism, Mosley poses the deceptively simple question—‘What can I do?—and provides a powerful and moving answer.”

Salvation Boulevard in Booklist

Salvation Boulevard, by Larry Beinhart
9781568584119 | $26.95 hc | available September
Nation Books / Publishers Group Canada (Raincoast)

Larry Beinhart’s new novel has been reviewed in the August issue of Booklist:

“Beinhart does a fine job describing the treacly paradise of the Church of the Third Millennium and a finer job ratcheting up the pressure on his fragile hero.”

Three Groundwood reviews in School Library Journal

Brave Deeds, by Ann Alma
978-0888997913 | $17.95 hc | in stock
Groundwood Books (HarperCollins)

The Black Book of Colors, by Menena Cottin
978-0888998736 | $17.95 hc | in stock
Groundwood Books (HarperCollins)

The Sleeping Porch, by Ian Wallace
978-0888998262 | $18.95 hc | in stock
Groundwood Books (HarperCollins)

Groundwood has three books reviewed in the September issue of School Library Journal, including a starred review for The Black Book of Colors:

Brave Deeds: Gr 4-7–Straddling the divide between fiction and nonfiction, Brave Deeds tells the true story of two Dutch resistance fighters through the eyes of a fictitious 11-year-old. In the fall of 1944, the anonymous narrator’s parents must flee the Nazis, and she is taken in the middle of the night from their Rotterdam home to spend several months with the Braals. Frans Braal, a conscientious objector before Germany invaded Holland in 1940, is credited with leading the Dutch Resistance Movement on the island of Voorne. Together, he and his wife transformed their remote house, Het Buitenhuis, into a safe haven for all manner of refugees, risking their own lives and the lives of their young children in the process. At times, there are almost 30 adults and children living together. The day-to-day life at Het Buitenhuis is well described, but details about how Braal pulled off his various resistance exploits are absent. The author is a friend of the family about whom she writes, and her information comes directly from the survivors, with no other sources given. Alma’s tribute to an ordinary family who took extraordinary risks is commendable, and the numerous photographs from the family’s archives are very helpful. However, her decision to use the unnamed narrator to “stand for all children who go through war” weakens the offering and leaves readers feeling disconnected.–Kim Dare, Fairfax County Public Schools, VA

*The Black Book of Colors: K-Gr 8–With entirely black pages and a bold white text, this is not your typical color book. Meant to be experienced with the fingers instead of the eyes, this extraordinary book allows sighted readers to experience colors the way blind people do: through the other senses. The text, in both print and Braille, presents colors through touch (yellow is “as soft as a baby chick’s feathers”), taste (red “as sweet as watermelon”), smell (“green smells like grass that’s just been cut”), and sound (brown “crunches…like fall leaves”). Faría’s distinctive illustrations present black shapes embossed on a black background for readers to feel instead of see. One page even describes a rainbow. A guide to the Braille alphabet appears at the end of the book. Fascinating, beautifully designed, and possessing broad child appeal, this book belongs on the shelves of every school or public library committed to promoting disability awareness and accessibility. A feast for the fingers.–Kathleen Kelly MacMillan, Carroll County Public Library, MD

The Sleeping Porch: K-Gr 2–Evocative writing and outstanding watercolors meld in this dream fantasy. After setting the scene on a sweltering summer night on a sleeping porch, Wallace lifts both young Brando and readers into cool night flight. With guidance from a Maine coon cat visiting from its War of 1812-era grave, the boy and his feline friend fly from Saturn’s rings to sculptured icebergs. Readers tag along for a toe dip in the cold ocean, then a taste of ice. When melting icebergs cause tidal danger, Dad helps Brando awake enough to watch Graveyard Cat do a trademark “jaunty pirouette,” then disappear into the dust. Wallace’s writing shines with phrases like “shadows shimmied in the grass” and “the ocean swelled, sporting smart white caps.” The majority of the illustrations are powerful spreads featuring scenes such as leaping right whale pods, as well as more serene views with nimble details of the porch’s antler chandelier and a moonstruck wall of windows. These features keep The Sleeping Porch from being just another sleep fantasy.–Gay Lynn Van Vleck, Henrico County Library, Glen Allen, VA

Jillian Tamaki & Skim in O Magazine

Skim, by Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki
9780888997531 | $18.95 hc | in stock
Groundwood Books (HarperCollins)

Jillian Tamaki is one of the featured contributors to the September issue of O, the Oprah Magazine, and she has mentioned Skim in her contributor bio.

Cockroach review in Q&Q, upcoming in National Post, CBC Arts Online, more

Cockroach, by Rawi Hage
978-0887842092 | $29.95 hc | in stock
House of Anansi (HarperCollins)

Media is starting to hit for Rawi Hage’s new novel, Cockroach. The Quill & Quire has their review up online, and upcoming media will include a feature in this Sunday’s Toronto Star (24th) and the National Post (30th). The Gazette, the Ottawa Citizen, and CBC Arts Online have all recently interviewed Rawi for feature coverage and have been asked to hold their stories until pub date (30th).

From the Quill & Quire:

There is much to admire about Cockroach, Rawi Hage’s ambitious, but ultimately uneven, follow-up to his IMPAC award-winning debut, De Niro’s Game. Like its predecessor, the new novel is narrated by a male protagonist who has survived a childhood in a war zone. The war-torn country, like the narrator himself, is unnamed, but bears marked similarities to the Beirut of De Niro’s Game.

As the new book opens, the narrator, now living in Montreal, has been rescued from a failed suicide attempt and ordered to attend therapy sessions with a female analyst. The well-intentioned but misguided therapist, Genevieve, tries to be empathetic to her new charge, but the gulf that separates her privileged Western background from his violent upbringing proves an insurmountable obstacle to her understanding.

It is this gulf, and the immigrant experience that it fosters, that provides the novel with its heart; the seething anger and bitter ironies that Hage exposes account for the most electrifying sections of the book. When the narrator applies for a job waiting tables in an upscale restaurant, for example, he runs up hard against the casual racism that the maître d’ harbours: “He looked at me with fixed, glittering eyes, and said: Tu es un peu trop cuit pour ça (you are a little too well done for that).” It is left to Majeed, an immigrant taxi driver, to point out the essential irony of their situation: “You know, we come to these countries for refuge and to find better lives, but it is these countries that made us leave our homes in the first place.”

The narrator’s impotent rage leads him to imagine himself as a giant cockroach, the only living creature that will survive after humanity perishes in the apocalypse. He breaks into people’s houses and moves among their possessions, crawling along their walls and their drains. Paradoxically, it is this imaginary other self that affords the narrator respite from what he feels is the otherwise meaningless void of his life: “Yes, I am poor, I am vermin, a bug, I am at the bottom of the scale. But I still exist.”

Hage is an existential writer, and he wears his influences on his sleeve: Camus, Sartre, Céline, Houellebecq. In this story of an imagined metamorphosis, Hage’s largest debt is naturally to Kafka, but in grafting these influences onto a Montreal immigrant’s story, he has managed to recontextualize and transcend them.

The novel begins to lose steam in its second half, which focuses on an Iranian torturer and becomes a kind of revenge narrative. This is disappointing, since the intensity and the energy of the book’s earlier sections are so palpable. Nevertheless, if there is a lingering sense that Cockroach overreaches itself, it is difficult to fault Hage for the attempt. At its best, his second novel is a potent, honest dissection of material that is too often ignored by Canadian writers.

Reviewed by Steven W. Beattie (from the September 2008 issue)