As my friend John says, “it was a week from hell.”
Actually it wasn’t too hellish, it’s just that my dear friend is moving back to London, UK. I’m happy that she’ll be happy but I’m sad that I’ll be sad.
So for the sake of tossing down a blog post and moving quickly into the weekend, here’s a round up of the very interesting things going on in Canadian publishing.
Atwood’s LongPen
Margaret Atwood demos the LongPen at the London Book Fair. The LongPen is Atwood’s invention, which lets authors autograph books long distance. She’ll demonstrate at the fair by signing upstairs a book that is downstairs. Then her pen will cross the Atlantic and autograph a book at the Book Shelf in Guelph. Very cool. If anyone attends the event, please take photos.
That guy Craig Ferguson
Craig Ferguson, host of the Late Late Show has written a book. I’ve just finished reading an advance copy of his novel Between the Bridge and the River. Absolutely hilarious and quite beautiful. Craig Ferguson is obviously a smart guy. The clever and slapstick humour that works on The Late Late Show is present in the book, but at times I thought he was channeling Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
The story is about two friends and two brothers. The friends are both Scottish and they’ve since grown up. One has become a late night tv evangelist, who gets blow jobs before he goes on camera to preach the word of the Lord. The other is a fuddy-duddy who’s just learned that he’s chronically ill. He decides to commit suicide in style, ends up in Paris, falls deeply and madly in love–which is where many of the most beautiful passages of writing are in the book–and, well, I won’t tell you if he goes or not.
The brothers of the story are also evangelists, but they start out in Hollywood. The sexually perverted brother is the talented brother’s agent. Things go horribly wrong, as they often do, but they find redemption in tv evangelism, and happen to invite the Scottish religious guy to one of their conventions.
Ferguson pokes fun at the Scottish, Catholics, Protestants, terrorists, Hollywood, religious fanatics, and pretty much everyone in the first chapter. Definitely one of my top reads of the year. It’s suppose to arrive mid-April but you can pre-order on Amazon.
New consumer website for independent bookstores
BookManager, which is an inventory system for many Canadian independent booksellers, is now offering bookstores an online presence, bookmanager.com. It’s a group website. About 50 stores have created pages. Customers can look up books and their availability, find info on local stores and place orders. I haven’t tried it out yet, but I think anything independents can do to “get in the game” is great. Maybe they should all come to the SFU Summer Workshop in New Media.
Boyden brings home the gold
Joseph Boyden won the Writers’ Trust fiction honour on Wednesday, cbc.ca article. The prize is $15,000. James just finished reading his novel Three-Day Road. It was actually my copy, but I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, which is shameful considering that I’ve met Joseph several times in the last 2 years.
That, my friends, is this week’s snapshot of Canadian publishing.