Well, checking my newsfeeds full of lit types this morning confirms I missed the following: an awkward affair with too many cuts to Margaret Atwood. Regardless, Omar El Akkad wins for What Strange Paradise, a book you can somehow purchase at Winners even though it isn’t to my knowledge remaindered like everything else at Winners, is the… well… Winner. Congrats to all nominated. Hopefully the eye of the world lingers on you for an extra few hours today before you take that consolation cheque to the bank to pay your back taxes from 2018.
What Strange Paradise is a novel that tells the story of a global refugee crisis through the eyes of a child. Nine-year-old Amir is the only survivor from a ship full of refugees coming to a small island nation. He ends up with a teenage girl named Vanna, who lives on the island. Even though they don’t share a common language or culture, Vanna becomes determined to keep Amir safe. What Strange Paradise tells both their stories and how they each reached this moment, while asking the questions, “How did we get here?” and “What are we going to do about it?”
It’s Giller Day! The day about 100 people in publishing collectively lose their shit like literary Pentecostals speaking in tongues and flipping out in the aisles of a church in order to manifest this year’s Fiction Jesus.
Ok, hotshot: you’re a Black student in a creative writing class online and your earnest, White teacher often uses her books as examples, when suddenly, a kids picture book feature brown skinned characters and with an author name that is decidedly Southeast Asian sounding comes up on the screen. And it’s book. What do you do?
I was confused.
The instructor of my Zoom children’s book writing class often used her own books as examples for the students. However, the book she’d just shown us, featuring a brown-skinned main character, was written by someone with a distinctly South Asian name. I then heard the words “pen name” and my breath slowed.
Is this what I think it is?
It was. The POC author of the book was actually a blond white woman who didn’t seem to think there was anything wrong with her act of brownface.
The other seven students, all white women, continued smiling, taking notes and asking questions. I spent the rest of the hour staring ahead, trying to avoid looking at my Black face staring back on the computer screen.
And here I thought it was just my ADHD. Nope, I’m all kinds of contradictions and I contain multitudes, people. More like multidudes, man. Amirite?
Despite decades of research, scientists still know little about the source of creativity. Nonetheless, humans continue to create things. Or, at least, we continue to be fascinated by creativity; now more than ever, it seems. There may be as many best-selling books on creativity as there are on dieting or relationships. The current focus on creativity isn’t always a net positive. Anyone who does creative work may be labeled a “Creative” (used as a noun) at some point in their career. The term lumps all working artists together, as though their work were interchangeable deliverables measured in billable hours. The word suggests that those who don’t work as “Creatives” have no business in the area of creativity. As psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi put it:
Not so long ago, it was acceptable to be an amateur poet…. Nowadays if one does not make some money (however pitifully little) out of writing, it’s considered to be a waste of time. It is taken as downright shameful for a man past twenty to indulge in versification unless he receives a check to show for it.
So, we all know France likes a bookshop, but this is above and beyond anything the government would do here. Independent bookstores in the country of love and cigarettes are thriving thanks to a law that sets a minimum price for delivery fees. It doesn’t tackle their terrible terms for publishers that allow them to heavily discount books, but it’s a start. The free delivery is a major draw for Amazon, especially for people in places like where I live (we don’t have a single independent bookstore anymore, even in our capital city). I try to order mostly from Canadian independents like McNally Robinson, or direct from publishers, but it often makes the cost of buying a book rise by up to 50%. I still do it anyway, because I can and I believe in it, but this may make it easier for people who can’t resist the savings to switch back to buying independent. I mean, here’s hoping, anyways.
The fate of French independent bookstores during the pandemic has greatly influenced the new law. France had three nationwide lockdowns. During the first two, bookshops remained closed, despite protests from writers and publishers. But during the second lockdown, in November 2020, the government reimbursed delivery fees for small independent booksellers. It resulted in small shops maintaining 70% of their business. “It showed what a brake on business the postage costs are for local bookstores,” said the rightwing senator Laure Darcos who drafted the law.
In the final lockdown this spring, books were deemed essential items and bookshops stayed open, with historically high numbers of customers flocking to buy from them. Across France, independent bookshops saw a year-on-year fall in sales of only 3.3% in 2020 despite three months of closures.
Bookninja 