Book News Vol. 6 No. 29

BOOK NEWS

SPECIAL EVENTS

Michael Ondaatje - September 21, 2011
Join us for an evening with the Booker Prize-winning author of The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje, as he discusses his forthcoming novel, The Cat's Table. Details: http://www.writersfest.bc.ca/events/ondaatje.

An Evening with Anthony Bourdain - 8pm, October 29, 2011
The Centre in Vancouver for Performing Arts. Tickets: $47.50/$55.00/$62.50/VIP package: $152.50. Tickets now on sale at Ticketmaster. Support the Writers Festival: use the code "writers" when purchasing your ticket, a portion of the ticket proceeds will go to the VIWF and you will receive a $5 discount per ticket. Details: http://www.writersfest.bc.ca/events/bourdain.

An Evening with David Sedaris - 8pm, November 5, 2011
The Centre in Vancouver for Performing Arts. Tickets: $45.00/$50.00/$57.50. Tickets now on sale at Ticketmaster. Support the Writers Festival: use the code "writers" when purchasing your ticket, a portion of the ticket proceeds will go to the VIWF and you will receive a $5 discount per ticket. Details: http://www.writersfest.bc.ca/events/davidsedaris.

Wade Davis - November 10, 2011
An evening with scientist, anthropologist and bestselling author Wade Davis discussing his latest book Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest. Details: http://www.writersfest.bc.ca/events/wadedavis.

AWARDS & LISTS

Correction. The 2011 winner of the Caine prize for African writing is Zimbabwean author NoViolet Bulawayo, for her short story Hitting Budapest. Last week's notice that Sierra Leone's Olufemi Terry had won the Caine was listed in error: Olufemi Terry won the Caine prize for 2010. The Caine prize is known as the African Booker. Chair of the Caine prize's judges, the Libyan novelist Hisham Matar, said of Hitting Budapest: "the story's language ‘crackles'."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jul/12/noviolet-bulawayo-caine-prize

Geoffrey Hill, Oxford Professor of Poetry is one of the six names on the all-male shortlist for the prestigious £10,000 Forward prize for poetry. Six young poets have also been shortlisted for the £5,000 Felix Dennis prize for the best first collection of poetry. Four poets have been nominated for the best single poem.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jul/14/forward-prize-for-poetry-shortlist?CMP=EMCGT_140711&

Leslie Stark has won First Prize in the 7th Annual Geist Literal Literary Postcard Story Contest for her postcard story The Glamour.
http://www.geist.com/postcard-story/glamour

Although readers have submitted titles for consideration for the Guardian first book prize, the Guardian continues to ask: What's missing from the list?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2011/jul/18/first-book-award-missing-list

NEWS & FEATURES

Vancouver is seeking its third Poet Laureate. Nominations and submissions will be accepted until Aug. 24.
http://communities.canada.com/vancouversun/blogs/covertocover/archive/2011/06/23/vancouver-seeking-third-poet-laureate.aspx

Poetry for summer: Lie back, and let the verse wash over you, suggests Suzi Feay, who claims to read over 100 books a year.
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/poetry-for-summer-lie-back-and-let-the-verse-wash-over-you-2314863.html

Some of the keynote readers among the 70 poets participating in the Vancouver 125 Poetry Conference include Governor-General's Award and Griffin Prize winner Don McKay, and esteemed U.S. writers Fanny Howe and Martin Espada. Espada is a Pulitzer Prize finalist (for The Republic of Poetry), who has been compared to Pablo Neruda. The 125 Poetry Conference is working in collaboration with the Writers Festival, including poets performing evening cabarets as part of the Festival.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/books/vancouver-to-hold-major-canadian-poetry-conference/article2095906/

Why is it that the book for which an author is best known is rarely their best? asks John Self. He proceeds to list a few instances of a writer being famous for the wrong book, with suggestions for where their greatest achievement really lies.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jul/19/famous-wrong-book-vonnegut-waugh-ishiguro

Mary W. Walters, The Book Charmer, examines the question: How much do you really earn when you self-publish?
http://maryww.wordpress.com/2011/07/16/how-much-more-do-you-really-earn-when-you-self-publish/

Yuki Noguchi offers an analysis of why the Borders bookselling chain failed while Barnes & Noble survived.
http://www.npr.org/2011/07/19/138514209/why-borders-failed-while-barnes-and-noble-survived

The only remaining privately-owned fragment of a Jane Austen novel, in the author's own handwriting, has sold at auction in London for nearly £1m, three times its estimate. The fragments of the unfinished novel The Watsons reflect the author's wit, says Stephen Bates.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jul/14/jane-austen-manuscript-the-watsons

Over the past 20 years, male poets in the UK have outperformed female poets by a ratio of nearly 7:1 in the Forward Prize stakes. Who got rid of the women? asks Sarah Crown, as she ponders the all-male shortlist for this year's Forward Prize.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2011/jul/14/forward-poetry-prize-women

British author Helen Humphreys describes how reading Charlotte's Web as a child resulted in her becoming a writer.
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/book-of-a-lifetime-charlottes-web-by-eb-white-2308557.html

Dr. Theodore Roszak, historian, social critic and novelist, who coined the word ‘counterculture' and studied the social uprising of American youth beginning in the mid-1960s, has died, age 77.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/13/books/theodore-roszak-60s-scholar-dies-at-77.html?_r=1&ref=books

John Lucas wonders if relentless focus on plot is edging something of value out of our literary culture. He quotes a leading London literary agent who stated that, in his opinion, it is highly unlikely that Kafka would get published as a first-time writer today.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jul/14/plot-driven-out-other-kinds-story

There is a sad irony to the fact that a book about contemporary India, while available in full in most of the world, appears only in partial form for Indian readers. The book is Siddhartha Deb's The Beautiful and the Damned.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jul/15/beautiful-damned-siddhartha-deb-india

The publication of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique was one of those events that seem, in retrospect, to have divided the sixties from the fifties as the day from the night, writes Louis Menand, as he explores why the women's movement needed Betty Friedan.
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2011/01/24/110124crbo_books_menand?currentPage=all

Raymond Chandler was fifty when his first book was published. But, writes Carolyn Kellogg, it's hard to imagine Marlowe's particular blend of hardness, weariness, and empathy coming from a younger writer. In anticipation of the birthday they share—July 23—Kellogg describes Chandler's circuitous and tortured path to literary fame.
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/books/la-ca-raymond-chandler-20110717,0,4725526.story

While many of us might recall library vans visiting small towns with books for residents to borrow, it is much less common to discover a bookseller on a barge.
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/book-barge-how-to-stay-afloat-as-a-bookseller-2313594.html

A grandfather with fond memories of a childhood book about a magician wanted his grandson to experience that book as well. Unfortunately, the grandfather couldn't remember the book's title. A request to the Guardian for help elicited several possible titles and brought to readers' attention the existence of a website that might be helpful to many.
http://whatwasthatbook.livejournal.com/profile

The 50 best summer reads, as determined by The Independent, range from gripping thrillers to books such as Adam Foulds' The Quickening Maze: shortlisted for the 2009 Booker, a tale of the nature poet John Clare incarcerated in a radical asylum in the mid-19th century with Alfred Tennyson.
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/the-50-best-summer-reads-2003160.html?action=Gallery&ino=49

BOOKS & WRITERS

By any measure, writes Bill Sheehan, George R.R. Martin's A Dance With Dragons is one of the Big Books of the summer. It's safe to say that no work of fantasy has generated such anticipation since Harry Potter's final duel with Voldemort. And, says Sheehan, A Dance With Dragons was worth the wait.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/book-review-george-rr-martins-a-dance-with-dragons/2011/06/20/gIQAuJ1z9H_story.html

In a review of a prior Martin book, Lev Grossman of Time called him 'the American Tolkien'. A wide range of reviews can be found here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2011/jul/12/a-dance-with-dragons-george-r-r-martin

A Dance With Dragons has been excellent news for bookstores, with copies (even 1,000 pages long) flying off the shelves.
http://www.vancouversun.com/entertainment/books/Dance+with+Dragons+flies+bookshelves/5110067/story.html

Irma Voth is funny and skillfully drawn and shows the real appeal of tales set in unknown communities, says Rachel Shabi. Underneath the unfamiliar surfaces are the exact same people, driven by familiar dreams and desires.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jul/15/irma-voth-miriam-toews-review

James Morton's The First Detective explores the life of Eugène-François Vidocq a thief–turned-cop who paved the way for today's investigators. Yet it's harder to imagine a more antimodern figure, writes Matthew Battle.
http://www.salon.com/books/history/index.html?story=/books/2011/07/11/the_first_detective_james_morton

The research behind Judith Flander's The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime was excellent, and the subject matter fascinating, says Charlotte Grey. However, she found the cruelty of Victorian life overwhelming.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/books/the-invention-of-murder-by-judith-flanders/article2098662/

Eleven years after London: The Biography, Peter Ackroyd completes the picture with the subterranean city in London Under—the clay bed, sewers, stone, subway stations, and the phantoms some see. Some maps would have helped. Still, Philip Marchand calls the book fascinating.
http://www.vancouversun.com/entertainment/books/What+under+London+streets/5109446/story.html

John Farrow's River City opens with a description of the geological processes that formed Montreal. But there is no shortage of action in this historical whodunit, says François Lauzon. And the author holds the reader in his grip to the end.
http://www.montrealgazette.com/entertainment/books/whodunit+John+Farrow+Trevor+Ferguson+captures+grit+Montreal/5109055/story.html

Sandy Nairne, known in Canadian as well as British galleries, has written an account of his search for two stolen Turner paintings. Art Theft and the Case of the Stolen Turners is a tale of fraud and dodgy underworld characters, writes Laura Cumming.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jul/17/art-theft-case-stolen-turners-review

Many know Martha Gellhorn was married to Ernest Hemingway but who knows of the first of his four wives? In The Paris Wife, Paula McLean describes Hadley Richardson, who Hemingway ultimately acknowledges as his truest love and the best woman he had ever met.
http://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/books/his-first-and-truest-love-20110714-1hekj.html#ixzz1SPL5f8rm

In The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning, Maggie Nelson suggests that the fine arts, literature, theatre—even poetry, enlist violence and cruelty, inflicted physically or affectively on the psyches of the audience. Laura Kipnis describes it as an important and frequently surprising book.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/17/books/review/book-review-the-art-of-cruelty-by-maggie-nelson.html?_r=1&nl=books&emc=booksupdateema1

An excerpt is here:
http://books.google.com/books?id=Mbh-IL8YLb8C&printsec=frontcover

Responding in The Shock of the Cruel, Alan Wolfe asks: Do artistic portrayals of viciousness help us overcome it?
http://www.slate.com/id/2298718/pagenum/all/#p2

The works and speeches of Nobel prize-winner Imre Kertesz, including Fiasco, all converge on one theme: the Holocaust, the one inescapable event that weighs on those with memory or imagination, writes Anna Porter. Well worth the effort to read Fiasco, says Porter.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/books/fiasco-by-imre-kertesz/article2098988/

A California wildfire, five monks, hoses pumping water from a creek. Colleen Morton Busch's Fire Monks conveys what it is like to stand in the face of a fire's fury without flinching—the place where the vocations of monk and firefighter merge, writes Michael Haederle.
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/books/la-et-book-20110713,0,6750328.story

Defense lawyer Clarence Darrow is examined in enlightening detail in John Farrell's Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned. Farrell's rich narrative shows Darrow remaining true to the cause and his faith over the course of a tumultuous life, says Wendy Smith.
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/books/la-ca-john-farrell-20110626,0,4503692.story

The Globe and Mail has commissioned short stories to run over six weeks. This week: Miriam Grey Steps Away From Her Desk by Tish Cohen.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/books/stories-for-summer-miriam-grey-steps-away-from-her-desk-by-tish-cohen/article2098687/

COMMUNITY EVENTS

SCIENCE FICTION BOOK DISCUSSION GROUP
Read and review William Gibson's Burning Chrome, a collection of short stories that deal with cyberspace and the information age. Thursday, July 21 at 7:00pm, free. The Grind & Gallery, 4124 Main Street. More information at darthbuddy2000@yahoo.ca.

BUILDING STORIES - SCENE WRITING WITH MAGGIE DE VRIES
Come prepared to talk about several scenes in favourite novels and then to write a scene of your own. Monday, July 25 at 3:00pm, free. Alma VanDusen & Peter Kaye rooms, lower level, Central Library, 350 W. Georgia.

CHEVY STEVENS
Reading by the author of Never Knowing. Monday, July 25 at 7:00pm. Chapters Granville, 2505 Granville Street. More information at 604-731-7822.

VANCOUVER POETRY SLAM
Crackerjack Lipsmacker youth slam with Justin McGrail. Monday, July 25 at 8:00pm. Tickets: $6/$3. Cafe Deux Soleils, 2096 Commercial Drive. More information at vancouverpoetryhouse.com.

FARZANA DOCTOR
The Toronto-based author reads from her novel Six Metres of Pavement. Tuesday, July 26 at 7:00pm. Little Sister's Book & Art Emporium, 1238 Davie Street.

Upcoming

SUNSHINE COAST FESTIVAL OF THE WRITTEN ARTS
Canada's longest running summer gathering of Canadian writers and readers, featuring Charles Foran, Susan Juby, Alexander MacLeod and Margaret Trudeau and many more. August 4-7, 2011. Rockwood Centre (5511 Shorncliffe Ave.), Sechelt, BC. Complete details at www.writersfestival.ca.

KOOTENAY BOOK FESTIVAL
The 8th Annual Kootenay Book Festival will take place in Nelson B.C. September 23, 24 an 25. The featured authors are: Christos Tsiolkas' The Slap; Kathryn Stockett's The Help; Li Cunxin's Mao's Last Dancer, and special guest Ruth Ozeki and her books My Year of Meats and All Over Creation. Further information and registration forms can be found at www.kootenaybookweekend.ca.