On the Blog

~ Publisher ECW Press gives us a behind-the-scenes scoop on the making of an ebook and its imprint "[...] what all of the Bespeak books have in common is that they are written, published, recorded, narrated, edited, and produced by a team of Canadians who want to see more Canadian books on the audio market." 

~ To launch our new column Off/Kilter, we asked a panel of authors — Evan Munday, Caitlin Galway, and Victoria Hetherington — to weigh in on the importance of lit that contains elements of the gothic, surreal, dystopian or macabre, particularly within a Canadian context: "We're allowed to confront anxiety, fear, and destabilizing questions of morality in a way that tiptoes to the edge of our psychological boundaries without dissolving them."

~ For Halloween, we shared four monster-approved book picks from classic villains, including Dracula, the Wicked Witch of the West, and other spooktacular monsters

~Author Philip Ernest (The Vetala, The Far Himalaya) chatted with publisher Linda Leith Publishing about leaving home, learning Sanskrit, and writing: "I was now writing for myself, for a small circle of intimate friends, for an ideal audience that I never expected to find, and as an unconscious result, my fiction’s relationship to my real life and history gradually became very much more open [...]"

Around the Web

~ The 2019 Governor General's Literary Awards winners were announced with some ALU faves on the list: Linda Gaboriau's translation of Birds of a Kind by Wajdi Mouawad (Playwrights Canada Press), Other Side of the Game by Amanda Parris (Playwrights Canada Press), and Holy Wild by Gwen Benaway (Book*hug Press).

~ Artist Pedro Reyes started up the first  Instagram-based library in Mexico City where lending libraries are uncommon. (We can't read Spanish, but we do like a good bookish Instagram account.)

~ Even horror authors frighten: writers share their most haunting reads.

via GIPHY

ICYMI (last week)

Under the Cover: Writing grief in Dance Me to the End

Alison Acheson shares about writing to cope with her late husband's terminal #ALS in her memoir, Dance Me to the End from Brindle & Glass Publishing:

"My laptop became my therapist, and my champion. It kept me to task. Moments of joy and humour and times of despair and frustration went into it. Pages and pages, over six hundred. The time spent on those pages was time spent expressing the emotions I was experiencing. And like any other time of growth and extreme change, the range of emotion, the daily, even hourly, shifts into 540 degree turns never experienced before."

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