Hingston: Publishing tour boosts Edmonton writer’s optimism
Sure, big guns like Random House and HarperCollins have the kind of elegant downtown tower offices you’d expect—but did you know that Coach House Books, also in Toronto, operates out of a real coach house? (It took Sevigny a minute to realize the entrance was through the alleyway.) And houses like Frontenac House and our own University of Alberta Press run out of, well, houses. The U of A’s abode has untold numbers of hidden crawl spaces and a set of narrow servants’ stairs, while Frontenac’s, in Calgary, doubles as the actual residence of its husband-wife founders. Both look cosy.
This week’s column is about Erinne Sevigny, an Edmontonian who spent a month travelling across Canada, visiting 20+ publishers and seeing what she could glean about the publishing industry at large.
May 17, 2013
New Yorkerin’: April 2013
Only 16 days late this time! Great work. As usual, here are some of my favourite stories in the magazine of magazines from the month before this one. Some are behind a paywall. Sorry about that.
- Various, “The Talk of the Town” (April 1): Agh, my favourite section of the magazine by far is extra good this week. Read Jeffrey Toobin on same-sex marriage, Reeves Wiedeman on a sports-announcers convention, Adam Gopnik on a fancy French cooking sauce, Alec Wilkinson on the Hip Hop Word Count, and, uh, Rebecca Mead on high-heel podiatry, I guess (four out of five ain’t bad).
- Emily Nussbaum, “To Stir, With Love” (April 8): In Iron Chef, food is “a perpetual emergency.” Perfect.
- Nick Paumgarten, “The Last Book” (April 15): I just like this opening, where a family slowly realizes that their neighbour, “hale, collected, self-assured” James Salter, has written a novel about them. And it’s not flattering.
- Burkhard Bilger, “The Martian Chroniclers” (April 22): A pair of fascinating and eccentric scientists cannot distract from the sheer intergalactic lunacy/beauty that is space travel.
- John McPhee, “Draft No. 4” (April 29): Look, you don’t have to tell me the difference between further and farther, or which and that. (Or what a “Haligonian” is, for that matter.) But I’ll be your hype man any day.
Culture! Check back in a month for May’s report. Or maybe six weeks. I’m doing my best over here.
May 16, 2013
May 16, 2013When I contacted the designer, Elizabeth Alice Crum, to get a closer look at her creations, she explained that they were inspired by Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick: more specifically, the theme of chance, how the narrative is woven and broken, how tension is created, and where fate takes you.
Why do they even try? my 7-year-old self would wonder as I watched Alan Alda flounder helplessly through yet another failed rerun of M*A*S*H. Why is every single Korean-lady extra so much funnier than he is?Ellie Kemper: Can Men Be Funny?: Humor: GQ May 15, 2013
Dan Brown’s “Inferno" Translated in an Underground Italian Bunker
The “translators 11,” two months, NO CELL PHONES. Also, this:
And although the translators were “allowed to take their meals at the Mondadori staff canteen, they were each given an alibi and a cover story, just in case someone showed the slightest hint of curiosity about what they were doing all day (and a large part of the night) in a locked-down bunker. ”
Intense.
These co-workers sound awfully nonchalant about the fact that their office has a lockdown-able bunker in it.
May 13, 2013On doing what you love
May 10, 2013
“The key to eternal happiness is low overhead and no debt.”
—Lynda BarryAnybody who tells people to “do what you love no matter what” should also have to teach a money management course.
Low overhead + no debt + “do what you love” = a good life.
“I deserve nice things” + debt + “do what you love” = a time bomb.
(Image from Steal Like An Artist)
Hingston: NeWest excited about spring
In fact, of the 10 titles NeWest published last year, six have been nominated for prizes. Maybe 6.5, Matwychuk jokes, if you count some of the individual plays in Clem Martini’s collection Martini with a Twist, which were up for theatre awards the years they were first produced.
A celebration is most definitely in order.
This week’s column is about a party being thrown by our local literary press. If you’re in or around Edmonton, I hope I’ll see you at Roast next Wednesday.
May 10, 2013Hello, Governor: Swiss Sonata (1938)
What actually fills the bulk of Swiss Sonata’s pages is a cavalcade of back story about individual students and staff. You know those old Super Nintendo role-playing games, where you walk up to someone, press A, and then have to listen to forty screens of their life story? This novel contains the fictional equivalent, only it results in slightly less sore thumbs.
My latest dispatch from the history of the winners of the Governor General’s Award for English-language fiction. This time we’re in a Swiss finishing school on the verge of World War II. Finishing schools are very weird places.
May 9, 2013