Some recent travel reading. . .

Sorry it's been so quiet here for the last few weeks. I was working a ten day academic conference and straight after that I headed to Switzerland for ten days of vacation, where I climbed an Alp, went to a lot of art museums, sat through two Italian operas and an excellent production of Die Dreigroschenoper (Threepenny Opera) set in 1960s London, watched the dishy Roger Federer win the finals of the French Open on a channel with Spanish commentary, and climbed another hill in Zurich to visit James Joyce's grave. Oh, I do love Europe. And the chocolate and ice cream! The Swiss may be known for their watches, penknives and cuckoo clocks, but I for one salute their serious and professional dedication to butter.

Zurich is also the birthplace of Dada and so my reading material was two recent books published by Princeton University Press. The Posthuman Dada Guide: tzara and lenin play chess, by Andrei Codrescu was an inventive introduction to this literary movement and its key players. Codrescu argues that in our modern, impersonal internet age, the conditions are ripe for the nonsensical tenets of dada to flourish yet again. The book isn't as funny or creative as Tom Stoppard's play Travesties, which imagines meetings between James Joyce, Lenin and Tristan Tzara who were all in Zurich in 1916, but if you've seen the play or are interested in this artistic period, then Codrescu will certainly give you a good overview. Cabaret Voltaire (where Dada began) is now a nightclub called amusingly enough, the Duda Club.

One of the Dadaist members was Kurt Schwitters - I saw some of his collage paintings in the Swiss art galleries I visited - and he also wrote subversive fairy tales in the 1920s. These have been collected into a volume called Lucky Hans and Other Merz Fairy Tales, translated and with an introduction by fairytale expert Jack Zipes. I've been interested recently in this genre since reading A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book, and many of these tales are pure, twisted fun in the "be careful what you wish for" vein. One of my favourites was "The Scarecrow" which uses very interesting typography as part of the narrative. A concrete fairytale, if you will.

Zurich has great bookstores both antiquarian and new. One of the major chains Orell Füssli, has separate stores devoted to German, French and English language books. In the latter, I found an early Jonathan Coe novel (oh joy!) that isn't available in Canada. The Dwarves of Death isn't his best book, but it was very entertaining plane and train reading, with a Nick Hornby sort of feel to it. And then as a nice bookend to the holiday, I read Milan Kundera's excellent piece of literary criticism, The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts, over the weekend. Not only a look at the art of the novelist, it's also a call for the history of literature to encompass the work of multiple cultures and nationalities. Writers, he argues, are as much influenced by what they may read in translation as they are by their own countries' writers, and a literary history that acknowledged this would look far different, and bring far greater prestige to many writers whose work is now often forgotten or out of print. He certainly has me interested now in reading The Sleepwalkers by Hermann Broch, Ferdyduke by Witold Gombrowicz, and Jacques the Fatalist by Denis Diderot.

Happiness for Munro. . .

Congratulations to Alice Munro who has just won the 2009 Man Booker International Prize. This is only awarded every two years and celebrates not just one book, but an author's entire body of work. Munro once threatened that she was going to stop writing but fans needn't worry - her latest collection, Too Much Happiness, will be out in Canada at the end of August.

Previous winners of the International Prize include Ismail Kadare in 2005 and Chinua Achebe in 2007. Achebe will also have a new collection of essays out in October, entitled The Education of a British Protected Child and new Canadian editions of his novels will be published in January 2010.

An Interview with A. S. Byatt on her new novel The Children's Book. . .

A. S. Byatt's magnificent new novel - The Children's Book - tells the intricate and interweaving stories of several English families and their German friends, from 1895 through to the end of the First World War. The reader is irresistibly caught up in their lives, and swept along a narrative teeming with artistic temperaments, forbidden passions, dark secrets, bohemian parents, and the idylls and perils of childhood - all set against a turbulent backdrop of political and social change. It's one of the richest and most satisfying novels I've ever read and I think it's the best book Byatt has ever written.

During her recent tour to Toronto, I was thrilled to get the opportunity to interview the author about the writing of this novel and many of its underlying themes and preoccupations - the dark side of fairy tales, J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan, and World War I literature, just to name a few. Byatt peppers her conversation with book recommendations and if, like myself, you have an endless fascination with the Edwardian era and the First World War, this interview will provide plenty of suggestions for further, addictive reading. After you have devoured The Children's Book, of course.

MS: What was your inspiration for this novel? It’s such a rich period historically and culturally - which was the initial pull for you?

ASB: I think the beginning was with the fairy stories. It began with my sense that this was an immensely rich period for fairy stories, and increasingly in my own work, I wanted to weave that kind of writing into realistic fiction. So, I started looking into the fairy story writers and then I realized that the children of children’s book writers are not happy. You would think they would be very privileged but in fact, in some curious way they are excluded. So that was one thing. And the other thing - I was interested when I started reading about the life of E. Nesbit that she and her very strange husband were founding members of the Fabian Society and somehow I didn’t associate children’s story writing with political agitation. And there was a wonderful account of a strange little clicking noise that went on through all the Fabian meetings and it was discovered to be E. Nesbit clicking her fan, which is rather a nice sort of story.

MS: And she also, as with one of your characters, took care of two children who were not her own.

ASB: Yes, she sold a story to, I think it was The Lady, and the editor was a very intelligent woman called Alice Hoatson. Edith Nesbit made great friends with her and Alice came to visit, and after a bit Alice turned up pregnant and Edith took her in and said I will look after you and bring up the child as my own. It was only much later that she discovered that the child was her husband’s and then a second, similar child was born. And Edith did bring up both those children and they thought they were her children, when really they were not. And Alice Hoatson joined the household and that was very convenient for Edith because she had a housekeeper of extreme intelligence who loved the children and looked after them all and fixed things. And they all went on seaside holidays together.

MS: But do we know how Alice really felt about the situation?

ASB: I don’t think we do. I mean, I would quite like to know. I have a sort of feeling she felt she was the preferred wife. And the more I read about her, the more I realized she was formidably intelligent and she had absolutely no resources, so it suited her to be there and she put up with E. Nesbit’s perfectly excusable fits of rage and you know, H. G. Wells once said - you went to this household and it was all singing and dancing and everything was happy and you knew there was something quite dreadful through some dungeon door. I’m making it sound as though the book is more simply based on that family, but there are lots of other families I could tell you about.

MS: One of the main characters in your novel is the children’s book writer Olive Wellwood. Did you get that name from Well House, the name of E. Nesbit’s home?

ASB: No. I will tell you where I got Wellwood because it will amuse you no end. Near the beginning of writing this book, I got up one morning in appalling pain and my husband took one look at me and took me to the GP. And the GP took one look at me and diagnosed it correctly – it was a twist in the intestine – and found the right surgeon. And the surgeon said he thought he’d better operate right this minute. And afterwards – he was a big sort of man with very strong hands – he said laconically, I think you had four hours left to live. And his name was Mr. Wellwood and I thought, that’s the name I need for this novel.

MS: And yet it works so well. It’s so evocative, especially set against Olive’s maiden name – Grimwith.

ASB: That is a Yorkshire village, Grimwith - a perfectly ordinary place with a boating lake. My English publisher thought it was a bit over the top and I ought to take it out but it’s a perfectly real Yorkshire place. And grim is a kind of spirit, a type of fairy.

MS: And wells are often an entrance into the magical underground as are the woods.

ASB: And look at William Morris – The Well at the World’s End. It was perfect. Or The Wood Beyond the World - I mean he had both.

MS: In your introduction to The Brontës Went to Woolworths by Rachel Ferguson – another novel that deals with childhood imaginations – you wrote that a novelist needs two things: “the persistent curiosity about details of other lives and about the inventions of new worlds, new patterns.” What new worlds or patterns did you discover in the writing of The Children’s Book?

ASB: The curiosity had to be immense since it was a period of English history that I really didn’t know about. I discovered a technical pattern of my writing which was in fact a pattern of looking at the world. I don’t think I’ve ever had so many characters, or so many main characters, and the technical thing you have to learn as a novelist is to give them very strong characteristics – you can’t go into little fine, very tiny analyses of every little quivering, Virginia-Woolfish moment of their sensibility. You have to be able to choose moments of great importance to them where they say what they think or you are able to say what they feel at moments when they change. I didn’t know that Dorothy was going to say she was going to be a doctor and when she said it, I saw, like her, that she had changed her life. There are a lot of sudden moments in this novel where people’s lives get changed and the novel is present . This sort of coincidentally made it quite readable because it rushes onwards and that’s a technical novelist thing, rather than a thing about the world.
And the other thing I discovered which I should have always known, was that they didn’t know the war was coming . I discovered that I could write a society that rushed into a war it had no way of imagining. I’d read so much First World War literature and so much scholarly literature about the war – my favourite is the reminiscences of Edmund Blunden (Undertones of War) I kept reading and re-reading him. And I kept reading Robert Graves (Goodbye to All That). And what I didn’t do was re-read Paul Fussell’s wonderful book, The Great War and Modern Memory. I noticed that a lot of novelists had used the metaphors that he had picked out of all the war poetry – the skylarks and so forth. I very carefully didn’t put a skylark in the novel. I combed and combed for things that nobody had put in. For instance, I had never seen in a novel the fact that they had all these standing up, two –dimensional puppets at Passchendaele which they pulled on strings to get the Germans to fire on them, and betray their own whereabouts, and that gave me intense constructional pleasure. Fussell’s book is a wonderful book but when you’ve read the third or fourth novel which has used exactly the same image . . .

MS: Tell me about the British fairy tales of that period. Did they draw from European influences, such as the Grimm tales from Germany or Hans Christian Andersen, or was it something very unique to England?

ASB: I think an awful lot of it was about Englishness. Again, going back to E. Nesbit - because she was a socialist, you find things in her children’s stories like Russian anarchists. In The Railway Children the father is in trouble because he knows Russians and is thought to be communicating with the enemy, although he hasn’t. And as Nesbit got older, her horizon broadened. Andersen is quite separate; he had an appalling and wonderful effect on me. I thought he was out to get me, which he was. He didn’t like children – he’s an archetype. But I think the one I think of the most frequently, now I’ve finished the novel, is Kipling. And of Kipling’s books – when I was a little girl, I loved Puck of Pook’s Hill and that’s an archetype book about the nature of being English and Puck is an English sprite – he’s not a Scandinavian sprite, or a French sprite, he’s not German. And there’s a terrifying story called “Dymchurch Flit” in which all the fairies try to leave the shores of Dymchurch, which, by a wonderful accident is the place where E. Nesbit had all her holidays. It just always fits together, which is a bit terrifying. And I loved Puck of Pook’s Hill, but what I was also reading as a little girl was the Mowgli books and the Just So Stories and that man could write like nobody else.

MS: He wrote some wonderful war stories as well.

ASB: He did, he did. “Mary Postgate” for example. He couldn’t put a foot wrong once he got going really with his language. I didn’t read Kim as a child - I read it as an adult because Iris Murdoch had such a passion for it. She had a passion - which is interesting - also for Peter Pan, which appears in an enormous amount of her novels (MS - see for example, A Word Child). She thought the novel of Peter Pan was one of the great novels of all time. And she had a passion for Kim. But of course, because of Kipling, I also just knew about the Empire. And because I was the child of the parents that I had, I disapproved of the Empire. I thought there should be no such thing. I said, as a little girl, why does anyone go into someone else’s country and tell them what to do? In a way, Kipling gave you quite a lot of the world, very intelligently, when you were a child. And then there was Kenneth Grahame. Looking back and sorting out the child I was, which was a voracious reader, I wasn’t that keen on animals and certainly not on realistic stories and I didn’t like school stories. I liked Arthur Ransome, but that was because of the landscape.

MS: And that focus on nature is very much a part of the English fairytale, isn’t it?

ASB: Yes. I was blown over by this wonderful Swiss scholar called Max Luthi who says, rightly, that there’s only a very limited range of colours in fairy stories, which act like a kind of controlling pattern. Gold, silver, black, white and red. And he said, you’d think there would be green for the forest, but the forest is dark. And he also talks about the structure of the narrative – he’s terribly good on why you don’t give a damn when people are horribly punished because that is the nature of that sort of story.

MS: There is a very dark side to fairy stories which you explore in your novel. And children and adults read fairy tales on a very different level, don’t they?

ASB: It’s like the Twelve Dancing Princesses – they go dancing off underground and any lover who goes with them becomes decapitated. There are a lot of the German stories where all the lovers get decapitated. And indeed all the Germans got into the novel, not because of the war, but because of the fairy tales, because I’ve always liked the German ones rather than the French ones, which are rather courtly, with ladies with fans, teaching people how to behave in a lady-like manner. Whereas the German ones are about gut feelings and gut fears of the landscape, much more than the English ones.There are nasty things under the hill in England, but mostly you can come to some type of accommodation with them. Less so in Scotland – Scottish fairies are much more horrifying. There’s a book you can recommend on your blog – Katherine Briggs’ British Folk Tales and Legends. She’s a great writer and can describe any fairy story so that you immediately want to read it.

MS: One of the dark works that children and adults read very differently is J.M Barrie’s Peter Pan which is a recurring text in The Children’s Book. The characters actually attend the premiere of the play, and you have your own lost boy in the character of Tom Wellwood. Why is this play such a big part of your novel?

ASB: There has been an awful lot of writing about Barrie that is slightly psychoanalytical, which isn’t helpful. I think he is profoundly terrifying in a way he didn’t understand. And when he wrote about the fairies in Kensington Gardens and then the Lost Boys – they were the dead children who fell out of their prams that nobody paid any attention to – he was writing in a period when almost everybody knew quite a few dead children which nowadays they don’t. So there’s a sense that there’s a safe nursery and then there’s outside. And I have to say the last scene is the only scene on stage that has ever made me cry. And I cry for Mrs. Darling; I don’t cry for Peter Pan or any of the children. I cry for Mrs. Darling when she’s sitting alone, waiting for this dreadfully irresponsible creature to return her children. But as a little girl, I was quite unmoved by all the mermaids, and even Captain Hook.

MS: Tom Wellwood hates the play and also his mother’s later adaptation of her story for him -Tom Underground - that is influenced by Peter Pan. Why does he, as you write, refuse to suspend his disbelief and enjoy the plays as entertainment?

ASB: He doesn’t like the imagination being public. He has his own so intense, private, imaginative life; he’s not very good at being an ordinary boy. He gets to be more and more of a lost boy though he’s perfectly all right when he’s about ten. He fits in with everybody else and he’s rather beautiful and everybody thinks, what a nice boy he is. I have known two boys like that – one of whom did in fact kill himself at the age of twenty-one. And he was the most beautiful, the most charming boy. And he didn’t grow old. And it isn’t based on him, but I watched him and the moment when he ceased to be in the normal world. And then I looked back and saw that he never had been, whereas I think Tom was. Added to which of course, I connected Tom’s Peter Pan world to the horrible things done to boys at English public schools which Barrie didn’t know anything about.

MS: Were you also thinking about the Llewellyn-Davies boys?

ASB: Yes, I was. And I don’t know what to think about them. There’s been two television programs about them, one of them – Andrew Birkin’s - was very good. (MS – see also Birkin’s book J.M. Barrie and the Lost Boys) And I think he was very just about how Barrie was good for them as well as bad for them. I’ve just been reading an Argentinean novel (Kensington Gardens) by Rodrigo Fresan which has a brilliant structure. It’s told in the first person by somebody in the 1960s, whose parents were a pop group who sang against the Beatles and he is totally obsessed by Barrie and the Llewellyn-Davies boys and he tells and tells the story of them against this other completely childish period. And his parents went down in some ship. It’s a wonderful idea but he doesn’t know what I read subsequently on Birkin’s website – which is that when Peter Davies committed suicide, it wasn’t because he was working on the Barrie papers and what he called “the Morgue”, but because he had just discovered that his wife and children had Huntington’s disease. And when I saw that I thought, we’ve all been turning it into a story that we wanted to happen.

MS: And then there are the real lost boys of World War One. Tell me about the writing of the war and the research you did.

ASB: I have the great fortune of having a husband who is somewhat obsessed with World War One and military history in general, and so he has a huge library, and as fast as I read one book, he lent me another and I also re-read everybody’s reminiscences and memoirs. And I kept coming back to Blunden, but I read Edward Thomas and Siegfried Sassoon and Edith Wharton and memoirs of doctors and nurses.
I had the option when I started the book, of either finishing it in 1913 but then everyone would forever have wondered which of them died and I decided I couldn’t do that for that reason – it would drive readers crazy in a way they wouldn’t enjoy. So having planned this very long novel about children, I now had to write the first world war novel in a short space.

MS: What was it like writing the war poetry at the end?

ASB: It was awful, because I was really very ill when I wrote it. I decided to write it because I met this Polish post-graduate in Leiden, Holland who was writing on my Victorian poetry in Possession. And he asked me what the next book would be about and when I told him, he said, oh, well if you are writing a book that ends in the First World War, you will of course write First World War poetry. And I saw this as a dreadful challenge. And instead of saying, no, I’m writing fairy stories, I thought, can I do that? And then one day I just managed to do it. And one of them was published in the New Yorker.

In spite of everything. . .

Sometimes you just have an Etta James moment and only belting out "At Last. . . !" at the top of your inner voice will do.

Last fall, I just couldn't stop talking ad nauseum about how much I loved Christopher Plummer's memoir, In Spite of Myself (see my list of ten reasons to read it here). But alas, the sad downside of being a book rep is that frequently one is on the road selling, and never in the same city at the same time as an author you really, really want to meet. And thus it was with me and Plummer - I was out of town and missed all of his fall events.

But he was back in Toronto this week, being interviewed onstage by his friend and fellow Canadian acting treasure Gordon Pinsent, who called Plummer's memoir, "the Hamlet of theatre autobiographies". And there I was in the front row. Plummer talked about the importance of his youth growing up in Montreal and joked about how his American editor's one piece of writing advice was to "get out of Canada as quick as you can". To her credit, however, she left all of his Canadian content in the book. It really is a marvellous read; I will treasure my signed copy.

A Jury of Her Peers. . .

I've always been a fan of Elaine Showalter's work and her monumental study of American women writers, A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx is my current bedside tome, although I admit I'm savouring it slowly and am still residing in the 19th century. Have a notebook handy when reading this as you'll inevitably want to jot down a number of intriguing authors and their works to look up later. It's fascinating stuff and I'm looking forward to the chapters on two of my faves - Edith Wharton and Willa Cather. The Guardian has just published this very engaging and interesting piece by Showalter on why women writers are so often neglected or not given the equal review attention and admiration of their male counterparts. She also highlights who she thinks are the top eight American women writing today. You can read the full article here.

Canadian Culture from A-Z

Did you know that the first lending library in Canada opened in 1783?
The Quebec Library was opened in Quebec City in 1783 with roughly a thousand volumes. However, at £5 to join and an annual £2 subscription, it was only accessible to the wealthiest citizens. Montreal opened a similar library three years later.

Did you know that the first English Canadian novel was published in 1769?
The History of Emily Montague was written by Frances Brooke, who only spent a few years in Canada before returning to England with her husband, a chaplain in the army. The four-volume novel, which was set in Quebec City, became a kind of travel guide for Europeans who wished to learn more about Canada.

The first novels written by native-born writers:
St. Ursula’s Convent by Julia Beckwith (1824)
L’Influence d’un livre by Philippe Aubert de Gaspé (1837)

Did you know that Andrew Carnegie, a Scottish-American steel magnate, funded the building of more than 100 libraries in Canada?
Over the course of twenty years, Andrew Carnegie funded 125 libraries in Canada, the vast majority of them in Ontario. The first Carnegie library was opened in January 1903 in Chatham, Ontario. The $2.5 million that Carnegie handed out to Canadian libraries made an enormous difference in the cultural life of many communities.

For more fascinating facts about libraries, publishing, books and Canadian culture in general, pick up a copy of The History of Canadian Culture by Jonathan Vance.

"Jonathan Vance has made an essential contribution to the always consuming and often perplexing landscape of Canadian culture and identity - it is also a terrific read" Paul Gross

More cooking - James Beard Awards announced . . .

Something for everyone. Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient, with Recipes by Jennifer McLagan wins Cookbook of the Year! Or you can go for the winner of the Healthy Focus title - Ellie Krieger's The Food You Crave. Full list of all the winners is located here.

This movie looks delicious. . .

I don't think I've ever laughed so hard at a movie trailer before. Can't wait for this to come out. Julie and Julia is based on two memoirs - Julia Child's My Life in France and Julie Powell's Julie and Julia, her account of trying to cook every one of Child's recipes from Mastering the Art of French Cooking, in one year. See the trailer here. It stars Amy Adams and Meryl Streep who is hysterically funny.

The most amazing fall lists ever!. . .

I'm halfway through sales conference for the fall books and let me tell you, recession or not, there are so many fantastic books to look forward to, I just can't help but be optimistic that our industry is going to stay strong despite all the current economic challenges.

Unless you've been living under a rock the last two weeks, you'll know that there's a new Dan Brown novel called The Lost Symbol coming on September 15th. But in addition, just read and salivate over this line-up of amazing authors - many of them Canadian - who also have new books out this fall (and these are just the riches I'm lucky enough to represent - I can't wait to hear what the other Deweys will be selling):

Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Al Gore, Lori Lansens, Michael Crummey, John Bemrose, Audrey Niffenegger, John Irving, J.M. Coetzee, Sebastian Faulks, Denise Chong, Karen Connelly, Douglas Coupland, Kelley Armstrong, Peter Mansbridge, Arnaldur Indridason, Yann Martel, Sadie Jones, William Trevor, Orhan Pamuk, Chinua Achebe, Karen Armstrong, Lindsey Davis, Stephen Brunt, Lorrie Moore, Diana Gabaldon, Anne Tyler, Edward Rutherfurd, Terry Pratchett, Diana Evans, Paul Theroux, Peter Ackroyd, Robert Harris, Valerie Martin, Jonathan Lethem, Caryl Phillips, Peter Mayle, Ha Jin, Richard Russo, Jon Krakauer . . .

And that doesn't even include all the exciting new debuts, international writers in translation, children's literature (new Meg Rosoff and Kate DiCamillo and a new book by Carol Ann Duffy - just appointed today as Britain's new poet laureate, the first woman to hold the job), and re-issued classic treasures that I'll be talking up in the fall (can't wait to read this for example). My rep's cup (and catalogue pile) is truly brimming over, or as the title of Atwood's new novel proclaims, it really is The Year of the Flood. I have manuscripts scattered around my apartment. My Sony e-reader (filled with more manuscripts) and I have become inseparable. I may start weeping with joy at any minute.

Our first sandwich board. . .

Just a quick thank-you to all the terrific public and school library staff that came out to hear the Deweys Divas last week when we were touring around Alberta. We were particularly tickled to arrive at Calgary Public Library and see the above, outside on the sidewalk (thanks Sarah for sending along the photo). And thanks too to all those who stopped by our booths to chat at the Alberta Library Conference in Jasper. The weather completely co-operated this year and all of us had fun on the road. Of course being seasoned road trippers, we'll detour for anything out of the ordinary, and this year we went both highbrow and lowbrow. The highbrow was a quick pop into the Bruce Peel Special Collections Library at the University of Alberta to see their amazing exhibit of Hogarth Press books, which had me salivating in front of a first edition of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. The Deweys can also highly recommend the onion cakes at the nearby Friends & Neighbours Cafe on Whyte Ave. A friendly unpretentious restaurant with friendly staff and great retro-green vinyl seating.
As for the lowbrow - well, I'm too embarassed. Just google Torrington, Alberta and you'll see why. Not exactly Drumheller, but maybe next year.

And then there's Maude. . .

Coming home on the plane from a week's road trip in Alberta, I was saddened to hear that the amazing Bea Arthur had died. What a great, brassy, outspoken, raunchy, lovable diva she was. I grew up watching Maude and then The Golden Girls, and her cynical comic timing was next to none. Do yourself a favour and get your hands on the CD of Bea Arthur On Broadway: Just Between Friends, a one-woman show she did a few years ago. Oh, it's just marvellous - I've been listening to it repeatedly this afternoon and chuckling away.

Long before her TV fame, she was an enormous success on Broadway, winning a Tony Award for Mame. This live recording is equal parts stand-up comedy and witty cabaret. She tells many jokes and recounts hilarious and touching stories from her life and career, such as working with Angela Lansbury ("mouth like a longshoreman") to getting a coveted part alongside Lotte Lenya in Threepenny Opera. In between the amusing and frank banter, she sings a variety of songs from the very funny "What Can You Get a Nudist For Her Birthday?" or "If I Can't Sell It, I'll Keep Sittin' On It!", to terrific renditions of Kurt Weill's "Pirate Jenny" and Stephen Sondheim's "Some People". And of course she reminisces about some of her favourite moments from her television years.

"For me, TV was so creatively rewarding," she says at one point. "Doing material that was bright and LITERATE (her emphasis) and original and adult and daring!" Those were the days. R.I.P Bea - you were truly a legend.

Orange Prize 2009 Shortlist announced. . .

Love this prize - always new, exciting writers to discover. The shortlist was just announced and here it is:

Scottsboro by Ellen Feldman

The Wilderness by Samantha Harvey
The Invention of Everything Else by Samantha Hunt

Molly Fox's Birthday by Deirdre Madden

Home by Marilynne Robinson

Burnt Shadows by Kamila Shamsie

One Dewey pick among them - Lahring has been raving about Burnt Shadows for months now. The winner will be announced June 3rd.

Three Bunny Tails. . .

I do have a weakness for children's books featuring rabbits, having had two adorable bunnies - Juliet and Clover - as childhood pets. But Moon Rabbit, written and illustrated by Natalie Russell is a bunny book that speaks perfectly to my inner adult.

Little Rabbit - always accompanied by her oh-so-chic pink carrot purse - loves living in the big city that has all the cafes, bookstores and ice cream parlours she could ask for. There's always so much to do. But one day when she goes to the park to read a book, she falls asleep under a tree and doesn't wake up until it's dark and the moon is out. Hearing music in the distance, she discovers Brown Rabbit playing on his guitar. He leads her further into the park and introduces her to all the fun of communing with nature. But when Little Rabbit sees the city glowing at night in the distance, she misses her old life, and as much as she's enjoyed the company of Brown Rabbit, she decides to go home. Brown Rabbit doesn't understand how she could prefer the city to a beautiful moonlit park. It all ends happily though, because new friends can always come to visit.

I love the beautiful colour combinations used throughout the illustrations, and the simple but expressive rabbit faces. And if this isn't an allegory (though with a better ending) for every darn long-distance relationship I've ever had, I don't know what is.

For a different kind of leporine adventure, I got a lot of laughs out of Tuff Fluff: The Case of Duckie's Missing Brain by Scott Nash, in which a smart stuffed rabbit with a penchant for crossword puzzles, has to enlist the help of the other inhabitants of Los Attic to find the missing stuffing from Duckie's brain. He solves the case and gets his crossword clue as well. Lots of silly puns from this fun bun.

And you are in for a treat in August, when Big Bad Bun is published. It's written by Jeanne Willis and Tony Ross, the hilarious team behind one of my favourite children's books of all time - Tadpole's Promise . In their new book, a young rabbit leaves a note for his parents informing them that he's run away to join a gang and will thus be getting into all sorts of trouble as he aspires to be the baddest bun around. No need to twitch though - he's really at Grandma's, running away from a bad report card and wanting to let his parents know that really, things could be so much worse. . .

I'll be getting a copy for my mother.

Fallada's son on Charlie Rose. . .

I've been pressing Hans Fallada's Every Man Dies Alone - my favourite read this spring - into every reader's hands I know. Fallada died before the book was published in 1947, but his son Ulrich Ditzen recently travelled to the U.S. to talk about his father and the book. He recently appeared on Charlie Rose and MobyLives has posted the video here, where Ditzen, along with New York Times critic Liesl Schillinger, who in her review called this book the "signal literary event of 2009", and Dennis Johnson, the publisher of Melville House which is committed to bringing many of Fallada's previous novels back into print, discuss the novel, the real life couple that inspired Fallada, and the two other works of his now available - The Drinker and Little Man, What Now?

Definitely worth a look and if you haven't picked up this gripping and heartbreaking novel yet, what ARE you waiting for?

How dysfunctional is your reading?

Hmmm. What does it say about me or my reading habits that I scored 13 out of 13 on this Guardian quiz? (and I never get a perfect score on these things!). Check out your own traumatized reading habits here. Oh, and what was I reading this holiday weekend? Just the galley of an upcoming dystopian novel about a world that discards childless women, and finishing up Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum. Nothing disturbing there. . .

The Wonderful James Thurber. . .

It's Monday and it's April and it's snowing in Toronto. We all need a good laugh. But have no fear, The Wonderful O is here!

Written by humourist James Thurber in 1957, this re-issue has just been published as part of NYRB's great line of children's classics, and if you need a good giggle, no matter what your age, I highly recommend this tale. The story concerns two pirates looking for treasure on the island of Ooroo. But Black, the "man with a ship", has had a hatred of the letter "O" ever since his mother got stuck in a porthole and had to be fatally pushed out. When the islanders prove uncooperative in helping them find the jewels, Black with the help of the devious lawyer Hyde, decides not only to ban all items with the letter "O" in them, but also forces the people to remove the o's from their daily speech. The results are hilarious and disturbing. Verbal misunderstandings are so common that neighbours have difficulty understanding each other and the linguistic challenges become increasingly obvious because Black has neglected to consider collective nouns, synonyms and the names of things in foreign languages.

"Taking a single letter from the alphabet, " he said, "should make life simpler."
"I don't see why. "[said Hyde]. "Take the F from life and you have lie. It's adding a letter to simple that makes it simpler. Taking a letter from hoarder makes it harder."

Thurber writes terrific prose that is great for reading aloud as he packs his narrative with playful and alliterative language. Great for vocabulary building (yes, even adults will need a dictionary close by, but I for one, never get tired of learning new words). It also has very topical things to say about censorship and as I was reading it, I was thinking that this story is more relevant to today's kids than when it first appeared. With the advent of obsessive texting, they are conditioned to remove vowels from their messages; kids will be able to decode the shortened words in this story far faster than their elders.

For more in this vein, also check out Thurber's The 13 Clocks which plays with the traditional fairy-tale narrative, and for teens, you can also recommend Mark Dunn's delightful epistolary novel, Ella Minnow Pea, about a girl living on the fictional island of Nollop where the town council starts banning letters of the alphabet. In order to save the day, she must find a sentence other than “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” that uses every letter of the alphabet. It too is a wonderful read.

The Mystery of Grace Book Launch

Are you a fan of Canadian fantasy author Charles De Lint? If so, and you live in Toronto (or can get there) you are invited to the launch of his new book The Mystery of Grace next Wednesday night, April 8th, at the Cadillac Lounge (1300 Queen St. West, Toronto) from 7-9 pm.

With the theme of 'This Ain't Your Average Book Launch' this is definitely going to be a fun evening! There will be appetizers, an author reading, and special musical guest Sarah Blackwood from The Creepshow. Bring along a copy of the book to be signed (or purchase one there), but definitely come prepared to have a good time!

PC Cast Event Update

On March 26th P.C. and Kristin Cast were in town promoting the fifth book in the House of Night series Hunted. Along with interviews with the National Post , the Toronto Star and CTV.ca, the mother/daughter team appeared on Canada AM and did two bookstore signings. I went to the one held at a Chapters store in Burlington, ON.
What an event! Over 400 eager fans packed the store to meet the authors, who answered questions from fans and signed books for almost two hours. Two of the fans that I talked to had driven across the border from Buffalo to meet the authors.


Also on hand at this event were two Wiccans who set the mood by casting a circle giving thanks to the elements, a henna tattoo artist who provided free tattoos to fans waiting in line, and volunteers from a local cat rescue agency- Abandoned Cats Rescue. They brought along several cats available for adoption, and let me tell you, it was very hard not to take one home with me! Only the memory of the very bad reaction I got when I introduced my second cat Mo to Delaney (cat #1) stopped me...
Those unfamiliar with the series might be asking themselves- why cats? In the House of Night series, vampyres have a special affinity for cats and most fledgling have been 'picked' by a cat companion. The main character Zoey has a little orange cat named Nala (little lioness)- who I imagine looks rather like the cutie pictured below. Photos are courtesy of our fantastic Indigo rep (and all around nice guy) David Cuthbertson.

Hunted is even more action-packed than the first four books in the series. The school's High Priestess Nefret has 'gone to the dark side' so to speak, aligning herself with the recently freed fallen angel Kalona and his creepy army of Raven Mockers (rather grotesque bird/human hybrids) and turning her back on the Godess Nyx. Zoey and her friends have escaped from school and are hiding out in the Prohibition-era tunnels under Tuscon. However, when Zoey ventures above ground to confront her human ex Heath, she is attacked and gravely injured by a Raven Mocker. Forced to return to the House of Night to heal, she and her friends have to unravel a mysterious prophecy in order to find out how to defeat Kalona and Nefret. As with all of the books, Zoey is never short of boyfriends and once again has to juggle the hunky-yet-possessive vampyre Erik, the red fledgling Stark (who may or may not be evil), and her human ex- boyfriend Heath. Judging from the screams of the crowd at the signing, the fan favourite definitely seems to be Stark!

The authors were coy about who Zoey will end up with, only saying that the current storyline would continue for at least a few more books, but there was definitely a possibility of a spin-off series (possibly focused on Stevie Ray and the red fledglings ). I guess we will all have to wait to find out more when book six, Tempted, comes out this October!

So onto the contest portion of this posting! While I was at the event, I got one full set of the books in the House of Night series autographed, along with two copies of the new hardcover, Hunted.

If you are a teacher or librarian (Canada only, sorry) and would like to enter my draw to win these books, please send me an e-mail with the subject line 'PC Cast Contest' at rosalyn.steele@hbfenn.com. You must also provide the full mailing address of your school or library to be eligible. I'll collect entries until Sunday April 26th and will draw one 'grand' prize winner of the full set, and two additional winners of the individual books. Good luck!