There’s a new online bookselling venture in the U.S. called the Progressive Book Club, and though it doesn’t ship to Canada at the moment, it’s still worth a look. The month-old PBC is, as the name implies, a sort of book club for lefties, which offers a small, juried selection of titles chosen by an editorial board made up of authors like Bill McKibben, Michael Chabon, Dave Eggers, Barbara Kingsolver, Hendrik Hertzberg, Gail Sheehy, and many others. The PBC website claims it currently has “200+” titles available, including Canadian Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine.

According to the U.S. book blog Book Publishing News, which has just posted a piece about PBC:

More than two dozen of the country’s leading progressive organizations have signed on as [PBC] partners to help extend the Club’s reach and mobilize the broader community, including Campaign for America’s Future, Center for American Progress, Kos Media, Media Matters for America, Mother Jones, The Nation, and the Service Employees International Union. With nearly every book purchase by its members, Progressive Book Club will donate $2 to support a progressive organization of the member’s choosing dealing with such issues as environmental stewardship, public education, domestic violence and media reform.

A teacher in Indiana has been suspended without pay for 18 months for using The Freedom Writers Diary, a widely lauded collection of biographical stories written by inner-city teenagers, as part of her curriculum. For some reason, the two most detailed reports on this story are from U.K. newspapers, The Guardian and The Telegraph. According to The Guardian:

Connie Heermann, a teacher for 27 years, sought permission to introduce the book to her students last autumn after attending a training workshop held by the Freedom Writers Foundation. […] Her head agreed and Heermann got written permission from nearly 150 parents, but the Perry Meridian high school board urged her to wait for its decision. Teachers’ union officials say that a single board member objected to swearing in the book. The school board member allegedly persuaded the other six officials to ban Heermann from teaching the book.

Having got wind of the story, Hollywood screenwriter Richard Lagravenese – who wrote and directed an adaptation of the book starring Hilary Swank – has written a piece for The Huffington Post defending Heermann. It’s a good defense, and in it, he relates this particularly damning anecdote, which sheds light on the school board’s real concerns:

When CNN reporter Gary Tuchman remarked to School Board President Barbara Thompson how he couldn’t believe that the students would be worse off for reading the book – and questioned, is it possible the book could actually make them better for reading it, Thompson responded: “What worries me is that Connie Heermann […] sent a poor message to our children. If you’re told no, do it […] it if feels good, do it anyway.” She gave no response to the question of the book’s value to a student’s education.

Some book-related links:

• Indiana bookstore won’t have to register to sell dirty books (Courier-Journal)
• Speaking of which, shy and retiring Gene Simmons to launch new book on prostitution (Blabbermouth.net)
• New Halifax library should go big (Halifax Chronicle-Herald)
• Should books be more disposable? (Washington Post)
• Wrong winner announced at Wales Book of the Year award (The Guardian)
• Manga publisher opens U.S. branch (About.com)

There is nothing – aside from the sight of paint drying, perhaps – quite like the creation of fantasy CanLit canons.

On Canada Day, The Globe and Mail had a number of people – mostly professors – propose new additions to the list of the 10 best Canadian novels drawn up at a conference in 1978. The newly proposed books don’t exactly shock with their left-fieldness – though there are a few less-expected nominees such as Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach, Rawi Hage’s IMPAC-winning De Niro’s Game, and Elizabeth Hay’s A Student of Weather. But then, canon-building is really about being counter-counter-intuitive, anyway. Read the Globe piece here.

BTW: Back in November, 2001, Q&Q took a close look at the evolving nature of the CanLit canon. Read Stephen Smith’s feature article here.

As a further post-Canada Day distraction, LWOT (”Lies With Occasional Truth”) magazine is hosting a contest entitled The Most Mediocre Canadian, created “to honour Canada’s glorious historical celebration of all things lackluster and second-rate.” You can vote for your choice here.

The Economist’s blog takes a look at how the same market forces that led to the digitization – and ensuing fragmentation – of the music industry could eventually come to bear on the book biz. Writer Daniel Hall suggests that technology has shifted the balance for both books and music, with music consumption becoming increasingly individualistic (given the advent of the iPod), while book consumption is heading towards a more collective experience, given the rise of book blogs and other online promotions. He notes that the fragmentation caused by technology can often lead to more choice for consumers of art and media:

If this is so, it is interesting to consider the likely impacts on other cultural forms. For movies, while it is hard to imagine the summer blockbuster ever entirely disappearing, I think the net effect is likely to be increasing fragmentation. Museum art is harder to predict. Will global branding allow a few artists to attain rock star status? Or will niche artists flourish by using the internet to raise awareness and create alternative art experiences? I find myself hoping it’s the latter. In my experience the areas where technology is causing significant fragmentation—not only music but areas like news media—have become far richer and more interesting to me as a result.

Rattling Books, purveyor of Canuck audiobooks, is holding a contest on its website to caption a charming little cartoon of a flock of penguins razorbills – one of them sporting headphones, just like the bird in Rattling’s stylized logo – drawn by Newfoundland illustrator Jennifer Barrett. The contest runs for the month of July, and the winners will be announced in early August. Three winners will get to choose three Rattling titles each from their wide selection of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and kids’ books – not a bad prize for the dog days of summer, when lounging in a hammock while a good yarn is piped into one’s earbuds seems like a vastly better idea than picking up that unread tome still sitting by your bedside.

Toronto-based authors Emily Schultz and Brian Joseph Davis have come together and launched a new website for short fiction, called Joyland. In a mass e-mail sent to Q&Q, they explain the impetus for the site:

Current literary publishing wisdom has it that the short story is dead. We think otherwise. We think the form is at its stylistic peak. It’s just that the traditional venues for short stories – commercial print magazines – have changed dramatically and jettisoned the once prominent short story.

Joyland is dedicated to finding a new way to publish short fiction, and rather than just start a web magazine we’ve wedded a strict mandate (only short fiction) to some principles of social networking sites.

The message goes on to list the initial contributors, and it looks like a pretty respectable line-up: Canadian authors Lynn Coady and Nathan Sellyn, and U.S. authors Ed Park and Harold Abramowitz. (Another aim of the site, apparently, is to get readers from both sides of the border reading authors they may never have encountered before.) They’ve also got an international assortment of contributing editors, including Schultz herself, Vancouver author Kevin Chong, and U.S. authors Janine Armin (New York) and Matthew Timmons (Los Angeles).

You can check it out for yourself here.

Every author with even an ounce of self-promotional instinct seems to have a blog these days, but how many editors and publishers do? According to Booksquare blogger Kassia Kroszer, the whole publishing industry needs to step up in this department if they truly want to see their authors’ works succeed.

Just as authors need to better market themselves and their books, so do publishers. While the audience for a publisher website is diverse — authors, booksellers, journalists, agents, readers, and more — talking about books on your website the same way you talk about books in your catalog simply isn’t cutting it. In printed material, you have various constraints. On the web, you have the ability to do something special: tell the world what excites you, the publisher, about a particular book. […] If “blogging” can help you throw off the corporate chains and lead to a more natural, casual, exciting discussion about your books, then call it blogging.

Kroszer’s suggestion is certainly food for thought, but we can’t help thinking it’s maybe a little too Utopian. If we can assume, for a moment, that most publishers and editors routinely have to publish works they don’t personally care that much for, how can we expect them to muster blogger-style enthusiasm? That’s why dull catalogue copy was invented – it’s a passive, neutral voice that can be applied equally to works that editors truly love and to works that they are simply publishing to make money. And if an editor was to go on at bubbly length about a new Atwood title, say, but then stay curiously silent about the new Ondaatje, we would all suspect they hated the Ondaatje. Indeed, Kroszer practically acknowledges this herself:

Publishers, for reasons known only to them, are bizarrely hands-off when it comes to talking about their products. Sure, you get the occasional enthusiastic comment at a conference or during an interview, but the approach is more “we love all our children equally”… so we won’t talk about any of them.

Sadly, if you ask us, that’s the way it’s always been, and that’s probably the way it’ll always be.

(Thanks to Galleycat for the link.)

• Rushdie knighted (BBC.com), Iran fumes (BBC.com)
• Atwood wins big prize in Spain (CBC.ca)
• Let children make their own reading decisons! (The Guardian)
• Jon Krakauer pulls imminent book on Pat Tillman (OregonLive.com)
• Stephen Henighan profiled (The Republic of East Vancouver) *

* Sample: “He is late-forty-something but looks twenty years younger. Is this why the literati in Central Canada resent him? Are they envious?”

The latest issue of Granta has an essay by Douglas Coupland about embracing his passion for visual arts in his literary work. And not surprisingly, one of the themes is Coupland’s estrangement from the literary establishment.

I came to realize this fundamental perceptual difference in humanity rather late in the day, perhaps a decade after I began writing novels. Before writing novels I worked as a visual artist and designer, and I naively and romantically assumed that writing precluded the making of visual art. Wrong. To illustrate the result of this assumption, let me provide a generic reconstruction of an interview with me in, say, 1999, just before I figured things out:

Interviewer: So, I read your book and, uh, you’re a visual thinker, aren’t you?

Me: Uh… yes.

Interviewer: (pained silence).

Me: (pained silence).

Interviewer: Yes, your work is so (insert loaded sigh here) visual.

Me (in my head): What is it with this person?

Me (out loud): Well, isn’t everybody a visual thinker? We all have eyes and we all see. How can people not be visual thinkers?

Interviewer: (another sigh).

And there’s the gist of it. I tried for a decade to be a part of the book universe, and the harder I tried, the more I encountered that same feeling that might have been experienced, say, by a black musician walking into a Baltimore country club circa 1955, sitting down at a table and expecting to be served. This is not a very good fit, is it?