Two of Britain's leading independent publishers are to join forces, following the acquisition by Profile Books of the imprint Serpent's Tail, writes Nick Tanner of the Guardian.

Profile was voted the small publisher of the year at the British Book Awards in 2006, and has notched up a string of recent successes including Lynne Truss' Eats Shoots and Leaves, and two collections of idiosyncratic queries sent in to new Scientist magazine, Does Anything Eat Wasps? and Why Don't Penguin's Feet Freeze? An impressive roster of international talent at Serpent's Tail includes Lionel Shriver, whose We Need To Talk About Kevin won the Orange prize in 2005, and the 2004 Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek...

Here follows a video trailer for the Catullus-obsesssed book Let's Pretend We Never Met (forthcoming from Pedlar, 2007) by Nathaniel G. Moore. Video by Geoffrey Pugen.

I don't know when this one is set to drop, but damn, I'm still working on a review of Moore's Bowlbrawl. Nathaniel G. Moore is the author of Bowlbrawl (Conundrum) and features editor of The Danforth Review. He regularly contributes to Broken Pencil and This Magazine. His next book (poetry) is titled Let's Pretend We Never Met, coming out in Spring 2007 with Pedlar Press. For more information visit www.notho.net.

On Friday January 12th at 7:30 p.m. the next event in the LUMINARIES Reading Series takes place in the Brenda Wallace Reading Room at Laurentian University's J. N. Desmarais Library. For contact details and directions, please check out our events section.

The fifth visitor in the 2006-2007 Series is Stephen Henighan, whose Governor General's Literary Award shortlisted essay collection When Words Deny the World (Porcupine's Quill, 2002) rolled through the Canadian literary world like a tsunami. Holding no prisoners, Henighan challenged the Canadian production of what he calls "free trade fiction." According to James Grainger in Quill and Quire, Henighan's "analyses of such classics of 'free trade fiction' as The English Patient, Fugitive Pieces, and The Stone Diaries are some of the most blistering and erudite pieces of Canadian literary criticism ever published."

The November/For more than a decade, the publishing teams at Insomniac Press and The Mercury Press brought you Word as a free tabloid. Word provides a much-needed service to the Canadian literary scene, including reviews, comment and opinion. Word's writers and reviewers are among the most insightful and entertaining in the country.

Word's six content-heavy, thought-provoking issues per year appear as PDF files, easy to read online, free to the public and simple to print. Subscribers will receive the Word Reader, packed with the best articles, reviews and writing about the world of books. The Word Reader is published three times per year, issues appearing as Winter/Spring, Summer, and Fall. Word's Toronto literary calendar of events appears online monthly as PDF files. December 2006 issue of Word: Canada's Magazine for Readers + Writers is available online. This issue features...

Available now from Horse Less Press: Wind is Wind and Rain is Rain by Brynne

Brynne is six. She enjoys playing with her petit fauve brother. She loves toads and trains them to do really cool stuff. She wants to be a gymnast and a veterinarian when she grows up. P.J. Harvey is her favorite singer.

For details, click here. Buy it here. 

Coming soon is Abraham Lincoln's Death Scene by Zachary Schomburg.

Zachary Schomburg's first full-length book of poems, The Man Suit, will be published in early 2007 by Black Ocean Press and he has poems from a new manuscript in, or forthcoming in, Pilot, Absent, Same Storm, the Hat, Forklift Ohio, and Denver Quarterly. He lives in Lincoln, NE, with A, M, S and G where he is a co-editor of Octopus Magazine and Octopus Books, a co-curator of the Clean Part Reading Series, and a PhD student. Abraham Lincoln's Death Scene will be included as a section within The Man Suit.