Skim wins Ignatz Award for Outstanding Graphic Novel

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

Skim has won the Ignatz Award in the category of Outstanding Graphic Novel at the Small Press Expo in Bethesda, MD.

The Ignatz Awards recognize achievement in graphic novels and comics. The finalist are chosen by jury, and the winners were voted on by the participants at the Small Press Expo.

The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog on Oprah

The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog, by Bruce D. Perry, M.D., Ph. D and Maia Szalavitz
9780465056538 | $19.50 pb | in stock
Basic Books / Publishers Group Canada (Raincoast)

Child psychiatrist and author Bruce D. Perry has taped an episode of Oprah which should be airing soon. The book is featured prominently in the segment, which apparently lasts about three-quarters of the show.

M is for Moose on The National, CBC Radio’s Next Chapter, more

M is for Moose, by Charles Pachter
978-1-897151-33-4 | $20.00 hc | in stock
Cormorant Books (UTP Distribution)

M is for Moose is starting to get some great national coverage:

Canadian Press is running a story on the book, which will likely show up in newspapers everywhere.

The Scene, on CBC’s the National, is going to run a piece.

Shelagh Rogers is interviewing Charles on The Next Chapter, her new weekend show on CBC Radio.

The Walrus and the Canadian Jewish News will be running stories as well. Plus, the RCMP is promoting it in their newsletter.

Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth Inspiration Deck to be featured in Oprah’s gift guides

A New Earth Inspiration Deck, by Eckhart Tolle
9781577316510 | $21.95 bx | in stock
New World Library / Publishers Group Canada (Raincoast)

Eckhart Tolle’s A NEW EARTH DECK is being featured in the Oprah.com holiday gift guide and in the O magazine Winter 2009 issue.

2008 Nobel Prize in Literature winner available from McArthur & Co.

The Prospector, by Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio
9781567923803 | $16.95 pb | available November
David R. Godine / McArthur & Co. (HarperCollins)

McArthur & Company are pleased to announce that they are the new Canadian agents for David R. Godine of Boston. THE PROSPECTOR, from 2008 Nobel Prize in literature winner Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, is now available for ordering in paperback from Harper Collins. Another of Le Clézio’s works, THE DESERT, is being translated and will be available in 2009.

The Nobel Committee terms Le Clézio an "author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization."

Governor General’s Nominations for Anansi, Talonbooks, and Groundwood

I’m thrilled that there are eight books on the GG nomination lists this year from publishers I represent. Winners to be announced on Nov. 18, and the full list of nominees is available on the Canada Council’s website.

Fiction Cockroach, by Rawi Hage 978088784209 | $29.95 hc | in stock House of Anansi (HarperCollins)
Poetry Noise from the Laundry, by Weyman Chan 9780889225787 | $15.95 pb | in stock Talonbooks / Publishers Group Canada (Raincoast)
The Invisibility Exhibit, by Sachiko Murakami  9780889225794 | $15.95 pb | in stock Talonbooks / Publishers Group Canada (Raincoast)
The Sentinel, by A.L. Moritz 978-0887847905 | $18.95 pb | in stock House of Anansi (HarperCollins)
Drama Copper Thunderbird, by Marie Clements 9780889225688 | $15.95 pb | in stock Talonbooks / Publishers Group Canada (Raincoast)
Children’s Literature – Text Skim, by Mariko Tamaki 9780888997531 | $18.95 hc | in stock Groundwood Books (HarperCollins)
Children’s Literature – Illustration Yellow Moon, Apple Moon, illustrated by Matt James 978-0888998095 | $17.95 hc | in stock Groundwood Books (HarperCollins)
Shin-chi’s Canoe, illustrated by Kim LaFave 978-0888998576 | $18.95 hc | available November Groundwood Books (HarperCollins)

What Happened on Larry King today

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

Scott McClellan is the guest on CNN’s “Larry King Live” on Friday, Oct. 24.

Jim Harrison’s The English Major in the NYTBR

The English Major, by Jim Harrison
9780887842252 | $29.95 hc | in stock
House of Anansi Press (HarperCollins)

Jim Harrison’s new novel was reviewed in the New York Times Book Review:

Go West, Old Man

By JENNIFER EGAN

Published: October 17, 2008

Jim Harrison’s writing is oddly mysterious. His prose style is plain, even flat. His sentences unspool casually and are often comma-free to the point of sounding almost hapless. Yet they fuse on the page with a power and blunt beauty whose mechanics are difficult to trace even when you look closely. This straw-to-gold technique has served him in 14 previous books of fiction, including “Dalva” and “Legends of the Fall,” as well as numerous volumes of poetry and essays.

His new novel, “The English Major,” revisits some of Harrison’s longtime preoccupations: travel and literature, food and fishing; an engagement with the natural world against a backdrop of war (in this case Iraq); and our nation’s struggle of origin against the Native Americans, whose suffering forms a pounding subtext — if not text — in nearly all of Harrison’s fiction. “As the landscape unfolds it’s all we have to offer and it’s not even ours,” notes Cliff, the narrator of “The English Major.” “We were always an army of occupation. You know that if you read history.”

Cliff is an inversion of the classic Harrison hero: 60 years old, an English teacher turned cherry farmer, he has recently been dumped by his wife of 38 years for a rich guy she had a crush on in high school. After wallowing awhile in booze and sorrow, Cliff auctions off his cherry farm and begins a restorative journey west from Michigan with a plan to rename the birds and states of America; “The English Major” takes the form of his “trip journal.” As a man thrust unwittingly from the comforts of domesticity, Cliff is the antithesis of, say, the young narrator of Harrison’s fine 1973 novel, “A Good Day to Die,” who abandons his wife and young daughter to join a wounded Vietnam vet he meets in a bar on a doomed cross-country caper fueled by speed, booze and (above all) his howling lust for the vet’s devoted girlfriend.

Globe & Mail reviews new mysteries from Tana French, Elena Forbes

The Likeness, by Tana French
9780340924785 | $24.95 pb | in stock
Hodder & Stoughton / McArthur & Co. (HarperCollins)

Our Lady of Pain, by Elena Forbes
9780887848117 | $21.95 pb | in stock
House of Anansi Press (HarperCollins)

These two fabulous reviews ran on the weekend in The Globe & Mail, by Margaret Cannon. Both are excellent reviews, both books ship from Harper Collins and both are in stock:

THE LIKENESS
By Tana French
This premise of this knockout novel is so clever it’s difficult to pare it down for a review. Dublin police officer Cassie Maddox was once an undercover operative. Her false identity was Lexie Madison. Four years later, she’s called to a crime scene. The victim, who could be her twin, is … Lexie Madison, and her life is identical to the fake biography Maddox once created. Who is this woman, and why did she assume a cop’s undercover identity? French, author of the creepy Into the Woods, doesn’t stop there. The man who sent Maddox undercover wants her to go there again, to enter fake Lexie’s world and see a murder case "from the inside out." So Lexie Madison is revived to uncover her own murderer. Long (but not too long), dense and filled with wonderful characters and atmosphere, The Likeness is riveting.

OUR LADY OF PAIN
By Elena Forbes
Readers of Forbes’s debut, Die With Me, have been waiting for the return of Detective Mark Tartaglia, And what a return! In this intelligent, beautifully constructed novel, the victim is London art dealer Rachel Tenison. She is found in Holland Park on a snowy February day, naked and frozen, her body positioned symbolically. Tartaglia and partner Sam Donovan seek a killer, but Tenison wasn’t the first victim, and she won’t be the last. Furthermore, she had some unusual tastes. Forbes provides a terrific plot, great characters and plenty of atmosphere.

Margaret Atwood coverage everywhere

Payback, by Margaret Atwood
9780887848100 | $18.95 pb | in stock
House of Anansi (HarperCollins)

Coverage of Margaret Atwood’s Massey Lecture, Payback, has been hard to miss. The CBC Radio broadcast of the lectures will air Nov. 10-14. Here’s a list of some of the recent print highlights:

From The Economist, Oct. 16:

The best bits of “Payback” are about debts that do not involve money. What do people owe to the planet? To other people? To God? The author is particularly taken with Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol”, a story usually read only as a sentimental fable. Ms Atwood strips it down and rebuilds it with the brisk pen of an expert literary critic. The Archangel Gabriel bears the same relationship to God as Bob Cratchit does to Scrooge, she argues. It sounds odd, but makes perfect sense when you read it.

From The Globe & Mail, Oct. 11:

Rest easy: Payback, the published version of Margaret Atwood’s 2008 Massey lectures, is neither a treatise on economic principles nor an instant book about the unfolding market crisis. Instead, it is concerned with "debt as a human construct," and how "this construct mirrors and magnifies both voracious human desire and ferocious human fear." Debt, then, as an "imaginative construct" as well – a logical point of entry for a novelist and poet.

From The National Post, Oct. 10:

Still, the lectures also remind us of why Atwood has been so important to our literature. Referring to the "lurid, trashy 1940s crime comics" she read as a kid, Atwood writes, "In these moral though gruesome narratives, the criminals committed many noir deeds, usually in the glare of a single, unshaded light bulb or two cone-shaped car headlights, but they always got caught in the end. ‘The jig’s up,’ someone would say, leading to more puzzlement for me – what was a jig? – was it an Irish dance, and if so, what did its being up or down signify?"

Here we have, in two sentences, a demonstration of Atwood’s ability to evoke in memorable detail our vanished cultural past, and to examine both past and present in the form of language. Writing in this mode, she’s never off her game.

From The Winnipeg Free Press, Oct. 18:

Celebrated Canadian author Margaret Atwood couldn’t have picked a better time to deliver a cross-country series of lectures on debt and the ’shadow side of wealth.’ After all, the past few weeks have seen the world’s markets suffer their greatest meltdown in decades — and the shadow of debt is crippling North American consumers.