The week started off with a roar when Michelle Winter's I Am A Truck was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and continued its hot streak with even more indie books as finalists for the Governor General's Literary Awards. We also took a field trip to poetry haven knife | fork | book, and a mental one to Saskatchewan, and much more.
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~ Rick Hillis' A Place You'll Never Be (Coteau Books) put us in touch with a Saskatchewan we hadn't known before in this edition of Where in Canada.
~ We took a field trip and chatted with owner of knife | fork | book Jeff Kirby about poetry in 2017, what's surprising about bookselling, and the store's new digs.
~ We went sci-fi with this edition of If You Liked X, Read Y comparing Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy to Randal Graham's Beforelife (ECW Press).
~ Ava Farmehri's debut novel Through the Sad Wood Our Corpses Will Hang (Guernica Editions) is The Kite Runner meets The Book of Memory.
~ Kazuo Ishiguro won this year's Novel Prize for Literature and said it was ""flabbergastingly flattering."
~ New research shows that words are resistant to change while grammar changes rapidly via Melville House.
~ The finalists of the Governor General's Literary Awards were announced and so many great indie books made the list, including The Water Beetles (Goose Lane Editions), Uncertain Weights and Measures (Goose Lane Editions), All the Names Between (Brick Books), Selah (Brick Books) On Not Losing My Father's Ashes in the Flood (Wolsak & Wynn Publishers), What the Soul Doesn't Want (Freehand Books), 1979, Indian Arm, The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, The Virgin Trial (Playwrights Canada Press), Within the Glass (J. Gordon Shillingford), The Handover (Biblioasis), Where It Hurts (NeWest Press), Brothers (Baraka Books), and Readopolis (BookThug), and In Search of New Babylon (Talonbooks).
Staffer Tan picked up a copy of Margaret Gracie's Plastic (Porcupine's Quill), a collection of twelve linked short stories central to Debbie Pearce, a former pageant queen, in pursuit of "perfect."
Here's what she had to say:
"Last fall, the office was abuzz, discussing the toxic masculinity displayed in Jowita Bydlowska's Guy (Wolsak & Wynn). We all agreed the writing was great, and drew you into a story about a character you realllly don't want to like. Margaret Gracie's Plastic (Porcupine's Quill) tackles the opposite – toxic femininity. I can't say the characters are any more charming for their faults, but the writing is equally good, and I can't wait for my colleagues to catch up on this one."
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