Congratulations to Tamas Dobozy who won the Writers’ Trust prize for fiction for Siege 13, and to Alex Pugsley, who won the Journey Prize for “Crisis on Earth X,” published in The Dalhousie Review. Chad Pelley has more on the winners on Salty Ink, and Lynn Coady offer’s a juror’s perspective on Open Book Ontario.

John Barber’s spreading doom and gloom in The Globe and Mail again. ECW Press‘s David Caron responds, arguing that “patient capital creates cultural legacies.”

That said, as many as 25% of Canadian households don’t own a single book. How is that even possible? First Book Canada seeks to change that, having donated some 1 million books to children in low income families. Global has a spotlight here.

I had no idea that all these years I’d been writing with man pens. Thanks to Bic, which has just made special pens “for her,”⁽¹⁾ that come in lady colours like pink and purple, and cost twice as much as regular man pens, I can now write with ease. Or unease. What the fuck is this, Bic? Twigged by Ellen’s rant, which she linked to in a recent tweet, reminding me of this absurdity.⁽²⁾

Ready your lady pens, or your lady laptops,⁽³⁾ mes amis, write a short story, and enter it in Broken Pencil‘s Deathmatch 2013. If you dare.

More linkage below:  Continue reading »

Footnotes:

1. Worth clicking — the Amazon.com reviews are hilarious. [↩]
2. There are also a several dozen new sites and blogs mocking them. And rightly so. [↩]
3. Seriously, when will this shit stop? [↩]

A varied month.

50. Twenty-Seventh City, by Jonathan Franzen
(Picador , 1988, 2001)

To backtrack, I really liked The Corrections, and thought The Discomfort Zone was pretty good, but I felt like I kept waiting for Twenty-Seventh City to make sense.

At its most bare, it’s the story of a conspiracy by a group of people to destroy a family in order to take financial and political control of a city, ranked twenty-seventh in America. But while individual threads sometimes work, as a whole it fails to come together.

Through the entire novel I kept waiting for Franzen to bring it all around, but to skirt actually resolving plot points, he just kills off characters and then the book stops. Not ends, stops.

Kinda disappointing.

51. Kiki de Montparnasse, by José-Louis Bocquet and Catel Muller
(SelfMadeHero, 2007, 2012)

Kim kindly invited me to TCAF, the Toronto Comics Art Festival, and it was my first time attending. I’ll definitely be attending next year. It’s a free festival held at the Toronto Reference Library with an overwhelming number of small and indie comic presses from around the world, as well as artists, writers – with comics, art and other merchandise available for purchase.

It was there that I can across this gorgeous book. Catel Muller and José-Louis Bocquet were there, illustrating and signing copies purchased. It’s beautifully made, and captures a fascinating woman I’d not heard about previously, Kiki de Montparnasse, nee Alice Prin. It captures the rich life of Paris in the twenties among artists. Continue reading »

April seemed to be a month for poetry and reading books for Broken Pencil reviews.

36. Attack of the Copula Spiders, by Douglas Glover
(Biblioasis, 2012)

The subtitle proclaims this a collection of essays about writing, and while the first two may be construed as such, the remaining essays are primarily concerned with reading.

It’s a great book. Look for my review in the next issue of Broken Pencil.

37. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, by Haruki Murakami
(Vintage, 1994, 1998)

The first book I read by Murakami was  Norwegian Wood in January. I was told it was unlike his other books, as this is only the second I’ve read by him, and I’m still not sure how I feel about that. Continue reading »