Year: 2020

It’s the age of the Amazon/Yelp/Google/etc. review. Should everyone get a voice when it comes to criticism? Is it still criticism? Is it even reviewing at this point? I’m just glad there’s another literary genre going through the sort of soul searching we poets have had forced upon us since the rise of Instagram “poetry”.

Book reviewing is a form of journalism. More than a report on publishing industry news, book reviews situate literature in the here and now, and make it accessible to the public. People often focus on the commercial nature of book publishing: do people use reviews to buy books?  How can reviews compete with algorithms that make recommendations based on your browsing history?  They don’t have to do that.

Then there’s the idea that reviews are esoteric, long-winded, irrelevant essays. They don’t have to be. Reviews have an opportunity to explain how books connect to the world around us.  

All this said, let me spin a tale of the joys of populism for you: I used to review for the Globe and Mail, back when it had a proper books section and was still a national newspaper (it doesn’t deliver to large parts of the country now, including much of the east coast), and I remember a turning point in my reviewing came when my father, who doesn’t really understand the whole ‘poetry’ thing (remember, this is a guy who mostly reads The Sun), would read my reviews because he counted newspaper publishing as “real writing” (an even more impressive publication was when I’d do a “Word Power” game in the back of Reader’s Digest….). One day he said to me, “I read your article in the Globe and Mail on the weekend…” and when I asked if he enjoyed it he said, “Yeah… I stopped reading when I came to the word ‘intertextuality’… I didn’t really know what it meant, so I just stopped reading.” It was a wake-up moment for me. Who was I writing reviews for? Other people like me? The Globe’s style guide said to write to a grade 11 level. So who was reading this stuff? I’d assumed mostly other writers. But if, just IF, there were others like my dad coming across, was I doing them a disservice by having my writing speak to others with specialized vocab and education? Was I doing the books I reviewed a disservice via the same? So, I separated the ideas of Review and Criticism in my head. Criticism furthers the literary conversation and advances our understanding of a work via close analysis. Review helps someone decide whether or not they want to spend $20 on a book of poems. So, now I write reviews like one might write a music capsule review: if you like Poet X, and Poet Q, you will like the work of Poet G. And the first trickles of fan mail I ever received for a review came after I started doing it that way. Bizarre. People don’t want to be talked down to.

• The Paris Review gets a new publisher in Mona Simpson
• Mystery of the Edgar Awards shortlist solved
• New Lee Child (seen here played by Bryan Cranston) adaptation coming to Amazon
• Why women love witches
• TiL today: the women of Jane Austen’s books weren’t wearing underwear… I’m pretty sure this calls for a reread
• Interviews and readings from the TS Eliot shortlistees, including Karen Solie

I imagine Canadian poetry sales are probably pretty static, year after year. What’s down is the number of people buying pseudo-philosophical platitudes accompanied by 10 second line drawings. Why? Because, as this article notes, they all bought their copies of Moo Juice and Bee Shit back in 2018.

251,354.

That’s how many poetry volumes were sold in Canada in 2019. Actually, they’re “poetry category units” according to BookNet Canada, the organization that measures sales in this country; it’s about to release these numbers in its 2019 Canadian Book Market survey. And those quarter of a million sales were worth $5,829,054.38 to the overall books industry. That represents 1.9 per cent of the entire nonfiction category of books.

That sounds great until we look at the 2018 numbers, provided by BookNet in its Canadian Book Market survey for that year. In 2018, there were 483,675 poetry units sold, with a value of $11,110,395.66. Of the entire nonfiction category it accounted for 3.2 per cent.

Trigger warning: book snuff. See Tweet below. Would you? Could you? Are you capable of this sort of carnage? Is there a spot for you on a super low ring of Hell wherein you’ll be forced to cut 50 Shades of Grey in half and read it, ONLY TO HAVE IT REFORM EVERY MORNING FOR ALL ETERNITY? (Thanks, Dennis)

There’s a new literary scandal brewing in the USA, which is a relief, because we all know it’s be very quiet and friendly around here lately. But seriously, this one doesn’t even seem to involve a man who abuses power to gaslight, assault, and defame women. Though it does once again seem to be centred around white people casually and/or cluelessly taking advantage of the oppression machine we’ve created over the last several thousand years. #babysteps? #progress? #makescandalsgreatagain?

As you may have noticed if you’re a person who follows Literary Twitter in any fashion, online controversy over Jeanine Cummins’ new novel American Dirt exploded over the weekend. If you aren’t, or if you were engaging in a digital detox this weekend, here’s what you need to know:

In 2018, Jeanine Cummins, who is white (but who recently revealed that she has a Puerto Rican grandparent), sold her novel American Dirt, described in Publishers Marketplace as “the story of a mother and her young son as they try to cross the border into the United States, fleeing their Mexican city, which has been taken over by a drug cartel,” for seven figures, after an auction between multiple publishing houses. Rights were promptly sold to a host of other countries, as is common in such cases.

As is also common for novels purchased for large sums of money, the publicity machine soon began churning, and by the time we made it to the beginning of this year, American Dirt had gotten a lot of early praise, and was on tons of Most Anticipated lists (including ours).

And it goes downhill from there.

The Aurora Awards seek to basically represent the pinnacle of the Canadian spec fiction (with the usual caveats that come with talking about any literary horse race) and I can tell you first hand that they do work, at least in terms of getting Canadian books publicity in a market choked with Americans. As a kid I was a huge reader of fantasy and scifi, a habit I have recently returned to. Many of you might not remember this, but there was a time before the internet when you couldn’t just type into Google “Canadian Science Fiction authors” to find out if your homeland produced its own Ursula Le Guins, Larry Nivens, David Brins, and William Gibsons. Wait. Anyway, I discovered Judith Merrill because of them, as well as many others. It was Cory Doctorow in his days at Bakka on Queen Street in Toronto who told me about them, I believe. He, or someone else there, also told me about the Tesseracts anthology (yes, I think there was only one then), which also felt like a real discovery. Anyway, point being: happy 40th anniversary, nerds.

Now in its 40th year, the Aurora Awards – the highest accolade in Canadian science-fiction and fantasy publishing – help foster community and fan culture through its public-voting system that celebrates small presses and indie authors.

The Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association (CSFFA) has been presenting the Aurora Awards to exceptional works of science fiction, fantasy, and horror since 1980, honouring such authors as William Gibson, Robert J. Sawyer, and Judith Merril. 

Hey! The Canada Reads Prose contest has announced its shortlist and our very own Meg Coles is on it! Hot damn. What a book. What a writer. And for the record, she’s 100% bringing snacks to our next dinner. FANCY SNACKS. Here’s hoping she’s not up against the usual patriarchal bullshit as EVERY OTHER YEAR.

Preschoolers’ brains on screens. I can’t even bear to link to text from the story.

I don’t write in books I give as gifts anymore, unless they are books I wrote (in which case, I am totally cheaping out on your gift because I likely got the book for free). But that said, I used to love combing through the stacks at The Strand and daydreaming about who owned books before me. I also LOVE other people’s marginalia. Most of it is so dumb that it makes me feel better about my own prowess as a reader. And best of all is when you find something tucked into the cover a book, like a letter or show tickets or even an old bill. It’s got a strangely archeological feel about it. Like you’re a nerdy Indiana Jones.

Among bibliophiles, the debate can be polarising and nuanced. For example: is it ever acceptable to write in a book? If yes: in pencil, pen or – heaven forbid – highlighter? Are all books fair game, or just some? And once they are so “defaced” – can you ever then give them away?

…

For some secondhand buyers, motivated more by sentiment than money, the traces of past readers are part of the appeal of what Virginia Woolf termed “wild books”. In his pursuit of a complete set of Picadors, author Nicholas Royle has amassed a collection of paraphernalia tucked inside their pages: business cards, boarding passes, photographs, cheques, currency, love letters. “I call these things ‘inclusions’, like flies or bits of bark caught in amber – because they’ve stopped time, in a way.”

I just don’t get what everyone is always freaking out about. Languages evolve, and revolve, depending on need. I mean, there are many, MANY more important ways to “defend the language” than pretending your losing (and perhaps under-acknowledged?) ideological stance is based in a desire to protect. Anyway, get over it. If you’re stewing for a language fight, go after business speak or something.

For the still unpersuaded, he points out that singular “they” is older than singular “you.” Only in the 1600s did singular “you” start pushing out “thou” and “thee.” Having the same pronoun for both singular and plural forms makes for potential ambiguity. So colloquial plural forms have sprung up, such as “y’all,” common in the American South, or the more recent “you guys” — an oddly gendered locution at a time when the generic “he” is becoming extinct. Still, we get by. No one considers ditching the singular “you.”

For Baron, the benefit of singular “they” is that it is often used by those in search of a nonbinary or gender-neutral pronoun, as well as those who give such issues little thought. While many language mavens are coming around reluctantly to singular “they” — in December Merriam-Webster anointed “they” its “word of the year” — this newspaper is among those publications still holding out against it. The paper’s defense is convention. I admit that the nonbinary use of “they” to refer to a specific person — “Alex likes their burger with mustard” — still sounds jangly to my ears. I will get used to it. Language, as Baron eloquently shows, works as a dynamic democracy, not as rule by experts. The sticklers may not like “they” (singular) but they (plural) will eventually have to bow to the inevitable.