In Review: The Week of August 12th

On the Blog

~ We chat with Bindu Suresh, author of 26 Knots (Invisible Publishing)about why she writes, her favourite books, and how she combats writer’s block: “My first trick is to try to prevent writer’s block by quitting while I’m ahead the day before[…]”~ With Missy Marston’s Bad Ideas (ECW Press) in hand, we bookclubbed patio-side: “The chapters almost read like vignettes, like they could almost standalone from the whole novel.”~ Author Sally Cooper dreamed up a superstar cast for her third novel With My Back to the World (Wolsak and Wynn) and now we need someone to adapt it, pretty please.~ Combine the grittiness of Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel with the complex characters and themes in Catherine Hernandez’s Scarborough, and you’ll get The Nap-Away Motel (Palimpsest Press), our First Fiction Friday.

Around the Web

~ It turns out plenty of people abandon classic novels, proving that older stuff isn’t always better.~ But also, ’80s and ’90s teen classics might deserve a resurrection.~ Indie presses Biblioasis and Freehand Books made it on the Toronto Book Award shortlist with Mike Barnes’ Be With: Letters to a Caregiver and Cary Fagan’s The Student.

ICYMI

“Indigenous Poetics, An Island in the Neutral Sea, and Decolonization Moves” by D.A. Lockhart