| This seems like a recipe for publishing disaster: you’re a small press in a western city, you publish only poetry, and you release all four of your new titles at the same time each year. That way if reviewers overlook one announcement, they miss them all. But Calgary’s Frontenac House has not only made the strategy work, they’ve made an impressive impact as one of Canada’s publishers to watch. They’ve done it with a smart selection of good writing and energetic promotion. Their increasingly effective book design hasn’t hurt, either.
Quartet 2005, this year’s fistful of poetry volumes, includes Sheri-D Wilson's Re-Zoom, Patria Rivera's Puti/White, David Bateman's Invisible Foreground and Diane Buchanan's Between the Silences. The launch takes place at stately Memorial Park Library on Wednesday, April 20 at 7 p.m., and is presented by Pages on Kensington and the Calgary Public Library. Oh, and Frontenac has just been shortlisted for four book awards, including publisher of the year (see below for more.)
By offering a writer residency program of any kind, you can support writing in two ways: First, by helping to support an author while she gets some work done, and second, by giving would-be writers someone to talk to about their own writing. Now, Pages on Kensington has its own writer-in-residence, Laura J. Cutler. You can meet her on Monday, April 18 at 7:30 p.m. for a discussion on writing and publishing. Cutler has been a world-traveller, RCMP officer and hotel manager. She’s published Out of Her Backpack with Coteau Books and Jumping Off with NeWest Press. She will look at writers’ manuscripts while in residence; please limit novels to an outline and one to two sample chapters, and bring in a maximum of two short stories.
About Camilla Gibb, author of The Petty Details of So and So’s Life, The Times of London says, "she can do funny, she can do sad, she can do sex. I suspect that there is little that this wonderful woman cannot do." Gibb reads from her new novel, Sweetness in the Belly, on Tuesday, April 19 at 7:30 p.m.
Book-award nominations – you want some, here they are: Shree Ghatage for Brahma’s Dream, Linda Goyette for Edmonton In Our Own Words, Greg Hollingshead for Bedlam and Tyler Trafford for The Story of Blue Eye. These are the finalists for the fifth annual Grant MacEwan Author’s Award. This year, the $25,000 prize is being handed out at the National Library of Canada in Ottawa on April 29 as part of Alberta Scene, the big showcase of Alberta arts and entertainment taking over the capital at the end of this month.
And there’s more. The Writers Guild of Alberta has just announced 51 nominees for 15 different book awards. Here are just a few: Hollingshead’s Bedlam, Paul Anderson’s Hunger’s Brides and Marie Jakober’s Even the Stones are in the running for the novel award. For short fiction, Thomas Wharton, Chava Rosenfarb and Ken Rivard are finalists. Tim Bowling, Walter Hildebrandt and Mingus Tourette are up for the poetry prize, while Stewart Lemoine, Ken Cameron and Karen Hines are shortlisted for drama. The final decisions will be announced on Saturday, May 14 at the Alberta Book Awards Gala. The event is in Edmonton this year at the Fairmont Hotel Macdonald. Tickets are $55, and to get them you can call the Writers Guild of Alberta at 1-800-665-5354. For more details and the full list of nominees, see www.writersguild.ab.ca.
Max Foran has published a dozen works of non-fiction, and now he’s put out his first novel. The Madonna List is a thriller of vast historical and geographical reach, about a secret list sealed away in a statue of the Virgin Mary way back in 1221. In Rome. Foran’s timing with this book seems somehow… blessed, coming along as it does just after the papal funeral and in the midst of the third or fifth or seventh wave of Da Vinci Code mania. Perhaps he has sources of a type not available to all mortals? Pages and the Calgary Public Library present the author and the new novel on Thursday, April 21 at 7:30 p.m. in the W.R. Castell Central Library’s John Dutton Theatre.
What’s Calgary poet Ian Samuels working on now, you’re wondering? A mythic history of the King Eddie, that’s what. And he’ll be reading from his poetry collection The Ubiquitous Big at McNally Robinson on Saturday, April 16 at 8 p.m.
Speaking of big, there’s a truly colossal poetry reading on Thursday, April 14 at the University of Calgary’s Boris Roubakine Recital Hall. The Coolest Writers in the Cruelest Month features more than 70 readers from the English department and creative writing programs. It begins at 7 p.m. and there’s a cash bar.
Sometimes, even after you’ve shot and shovelled, there are still things too scary and dangerous to shut up about. That’s the kind of thing Edmonton’s Brad Steel delves into in his novel Mute, which links mad cow disease, cattle mutilation and, of course, the war on terror. He reads at McNally Robinson on Friday, April 15 at 8 p.m.
Best-sellers
Best-selling books for April 1 to 7 at McNally Robinson
Fiction
1. Can You Keep a Secret?
by Sophie Kinsella
2. Saturday
by Ian McEwan
3. The Da Vinci Code Special Illustrated Edition
by Dan Brown
4. The Master
by Colm Toibin
5. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime
by Mark Haddon
6. Shadow of the Giant
by Orson Scott Card
7. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
by Jonathan Safran Foer
8. Runaway
by Alice Munro
9. Feed My Dear Dogs
by Emma Richler
10. The Time Traveller's Wife
by Audrey Niffenegger
Non-fiction
1. Collapse
by Jared Diamond
2. My Life So Far
by Jane Fonda
3. Calgary's Best Hikes and Walks
by Lori Beattie
4. Blink
by Malcolm Gladwell
5. The World is Flat
by Thomas Friedman
6. The Most Dangerous Branch
by Robert Ivan Martin
7. Reading Lolita in Tehran
by Azar Nafisi
8. Terry
by Douglas Coupland
9. French Women Don't Get Fat
by Mireille Guiliano
10. Eats, Shoots and Leaves
by Lynne Truss |
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