The Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee Medal is a commemorative medal in honour of the 70th anniversary of Her late Majesty’s accession to the Throne as Queen of Canada. The medal is being awarded to 7,000 Albertans throughout 2022 in recognition of significant contributions to the province.
I truly expected more from the estimable Francine Prose, whose New Yorker pieces exemplify intellectual rigour and a lively feminism. (Witness her commentary on the bizarre cancellation of Elizabeth Gilbert’s upcoming novel due to the fear of upsetting certain people.)
Louise Penny is a wildly popular Canadian mystery author whose books sell very well at Shelf Life, so I figured I ought to check out her Inspector Ganache. Found a talking book of Glass Houses at the library and listened to it in the car on a road trip.
Friends, it has been a while since I yelled at the radio, but I was yelling at mine when a crucial plot device, the cobrador, which had already been explained by cop A to cop B, was then explained AGAIN by Cop B to Cop C back at the station. Give me a break, Louise, I yelled. I really was paying attention the first time. It’s insulting, dammit.
This is a book about women and ageism. There are twenty-nine contributing writers, ranging in age from their forties to their nineties.
Freehand Books, the Calgary trade publisher that spun off from the academic press Broadview Books in 2007, has been sold. Glenn Rollans, a publishing veteran in Alberta and owner of the Edmonton higher-ed publisher Brush Education, bought Freehand from co-founder and former owner JoAnn McCaig.
JoAnn McCaig, owner of Calgary’s Shelf Life Books, would love readers to describe her store as whimsical and serendipitous. And indeed, the store should be bursting with Christmas whimsy right now. Customers would normally be enjoying cider and cookies, browsing the shelves for the perfect gifts. But instead, people are waiting outside to be among the few customers allowed in the store at once.
The owner of Freehand Books is selling the acclaimed Calgary-based independent publisher after purchasing Saskatoon-based Thistledown Press.
JoAnn McCaig said she has found a buyer for Freehand, which she created as a literary imprint of Broadview Press in 2007 before purchasing it outright in 2016. She did not name the buyer but said the deal should go through before the end of 2020 and that Freehand Books will continue much as it has.
On July 25th, the Globe and Mail published an opinion piece by Kenneth Whyte called Overdue. Here’s my response.
I vaguely remembered Kate Pullinger’s name as the surprise winner of the GG for fiction a few years back, with a historical novel called ‘The Mistress of Nothing’. The blurb for her new novel ‘Forest Green’ didn’t really grab me at first, but now in late summer, with the book pile thinning, I thought I’d give this story set in the Depression-era Okanagan a try.
They say that summer is the time for light reading. If light means mindless or predictable, no thanks. But if light means comic, then I’m in. Here are two comic novels I thoroughly enjoyed this summer.
Each of the first four chapters of Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other tells the stories of three black British women whose lives are connected in different ways.
By Li Robbins | Write. When I was a kid, my parents, avid readers, talked about opening up a bookstore in a small prairie town. The town was best known for car shows, power tobogganing, and a failing newspaper — possibly not the ideal marketplace. But many book lovers will relate. To be surrounded by books, talk books, make a living from books? The dream.
Lately I’ve been getting a little irritated at Facebook boastings about all the great and lofty things that people are accomplishing in these COVID days. The ten best lists that highlight a person’s erudition or sophistication, for one thing. So announcing that I have been using this time of self isolation to finally tackle the greatest novel in English risks sounding like a boast. If so, I humbly apologize.
A lot of fine readers I know really liked Vanessa and Her Sister, a fictional recreation of the lives of Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf. But I resisted it, for some reason. I often dislike fictionalized biographies of my literary heroes – though David Lodge’s efforts in that genre are exceptional. However, when tidying shelves in the store during the Christmas rush, I stumbled upon a new title by an author I love, Sigrid Nunez.
I hardly know what to say about Five Wives. I didn’t love it, I didn’t enjoy it, but I certainly admired it. What a magic trick Thomas pulls off here!
About six years ago, I posted a piece called Westie Wonk on my website – about how in adopting Betsy from the Pound, I had accidentally joined a club. A club in which I can be approached by a total stranger and asked, “Is that a Westie? I’ve got a Westie too! Aren’t they great?”
Though there probably are exceptions, I think that the worst thing an author can do is to read his/her own work. In almost every case, this is a very bad idea.
I loved this book so much that I held it to my lips and kissed the back cover a moment after I read the last page.
I can’t believe that people aren’t outraged and insulted by Midnight in Paris. I cannot fathom how it got an Oscar for screenplay.
In this beautiful novel, translated from the German, Richard is a retired and widowed Classics professor whose narrow existence is forever changed by his encounter with North African refugees stranded in Berlin.