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...
The stage is bohemian basic—two standing house lights, a mic stand, some patterned cloth, and a lava lamp. Behind the stage area tacked up to one of the wooden cabinets, a sign reads "This is a WordPlay safe space." The scene is far from the Puritan New England landscape that Nathaniel Hawthorne evoked in his 1850 novel, The Scarlet Letter. Yet for the teens, standing up in front of a crowd of their peers—I imagine—breathing softly into the microphone, trying to gather their nerves and vocal chords into some kind of unified performance, Hester Prynne's pillory experience of public examination isn't actually that far off.
Judy Stoffman, staff writer for the Toronto Star reports that Alice Munro is retiring.
The only major living writer in English to have staked her career entirely on the short story, Alice Munro has this year done a remarkable thing: still in full command of her powers, she announced that she has finished writing because at 75, she has used up all her material and has nothing left to say.
Through 120 or so stories, she has shared with readers her sense of the "shameless, marvellous, shattering absurdity" of life, as she put it in "An Ounce of Cure." There are four more stories completed and yet unpublished, she told the Star in October.
So ends her tales, usually seen in the New Yorker, of unfaithful wives, disobedient girls, men who betray trusting lovers, parents and spinster aunts with dark secrets, guilt-tormented daughters unable to love an aged mother.
Her friend Margaret Atwood and editor Douglas Gibson don't believe she means it. And at a recent event held at the World's Biggest Book Store, where Munro read to the Toronto gathering long-distance and signed books using Atwood's LongPen, readers pleaded with her to continue writing, but to no avail. She said she is done.
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.
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.
Great new post from Editor Matt Staggs Skullring.org on John Everson, an artist with few creative boundaries. He's a Bram Stoker Award-winning author, music critic, musician and photographer living in Illinois. His newest novel is "Sacrifice", available from Delirium Books.
John, would you mind introducing yourself to our readers?
Sure! I'm an obsessively creative, frustratingly procrastinative writer-editor-musician type, living near Chicago with my wife and son, and two birds (a cockatoo and cockatiel) who tend to sit on opposite ends of my computer monitor whenever I write. I've always been fascinated with creepy stories, goth art and music, etc. I never dress up, but my favorite holiday is Halloween. I started my adult life as a newspaper journalist, moved on to become a music magazine editor and these days I serve as a publications director for a medial association...all the while still writing the weekly pop music review column I started at the newspaper almost 19 years ago (check here for column archives).
Authors Sarah Phelan (Stay At Home), Elisabeth Brink (Save Your Own), and Sara Faith Alterman (My Fifteen Minutes, Tears of a Class Clown) will be discussing their books at Borders, Downtown Crossing, Jan 18th, at
12pm
.
Stay At Home author Sarah Phelan will be part of the January 18th, 2007 Author Panel at the Borders Books & Music, Downtown Crossing, 10–24 School Street, in Boston, MA, beginning at 12 pm. The panel also welcomes Elisabeth Brink, author of Save Your Own and Sara Faith Alterman, author of My Fifteen Minutes and Tears Of A Class Clown.
Monica Drake’s debut novel, Clown Girl, is due out in February 2007 with an introduction by Chuck Palahniuk. In this darkly comic novel, Clown Girl lives in Baloneytown, a neighborhood so run down and penniless that drugs, balloon animals and even rubber chickens contribute to the local currency. Against a backdrop of petty crime, Clown Girl struggles to find her place in the world of high art; she has dreams of greatness and calls on the masters, Charlie Chaplin, Kafka and da Vinci for inspiration. But all is not art in her life: in an effort to support herself and her under-employed performance-artist boyfriend, she is drawn into the world of paying jobs, and finds herself unwittingly turned into a "corporate clown," trapped in a cycle of meaningless, high paid gigs which veer dangerously close, then closer to prostitution. Using the lens of clown life to illuminate a struggle between artistic integrity and an economic reality, Monica Drake has created a novel that embraces the high comedy of early film stars—most notably Chaplin and W.C. Fields. At the same time Drake manages to raise questions about issues of class, gender, economics and prejudice. This debut novel is an stunning blend of the bizarre, the humorous, and the gritty. The novel resists easy classification, but is completely accessible to a general audience.
News & Features
The only major living writer in English to have staked her career entirely on the short story, Alice Munro has this year done a remarkable thing: still in full command of her powers, she announced that she has finished writing because at 75, she has used up all her material and has nothing left to say. 
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 
The November/For more than a decade, the publishing teams at Insomniac Press and 
Available now from Horse Less Press: Wind is Wind and Rain is Rain by Brynne 
Monica Drake’s debut novel, Clown Girl, is due out in February 2007 with an introduction by Chuck Palahniuk. In this darkly comic novel, Clown Girl lives in Baloneytown, a neighborhood so run down and penniless that drugs, balloon animals and even rubber chickens contribute to the local currency. Against a backdrop of petty crime, Clown Girl struggles to find her place in the world of high art; she has dreams of greatness and calls on the masters, Charlie Chaplin, Kafka and da Vinci for inspiration. But all is not art in her life: in an effort to support herself and her under-employed performance-artist boyfriend, she is drawn into the world of paying jobs, and finds herself unwittingly turned into a "corporate clown," trapped in a cycle of meaningless, high paid gigs which veer dangerously close, then closer to prostitution. Using the lens of clown life to illuminate a struggle between artistic integrity and an economic reality, Monica Drake has created a novel that embraces the high comedy of early film stars—most notably Chaplin and W.C. Fields. At the same time Drake manages to raise questions about issues of class, gender, economics and prejudice. This debut novel is an stunning blend of the bizarre, the humorous, and the gritty. The novel resists easy classification, but is completely accessible to a general audience.
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