Chapters Indigo top reviewer Toni Osborne was recently tapped to do a review of Dan McNeil’s novel, The Judas Apocalypse. She gave it 5 out of 5 maple leaves and her early comments were very positive:

“Your novel is fantastic I loved it…Congratulations.”
“Excellent debut novel. It is suspenseful and a page turner.”

Read the whole review…

The new Ottawa Fiction Writers Collection was launched last Thursday and Dan, along with a number of other local authors were there to lend their support.

The launch went very well … [T]he station (“A“ …) came down and did a small piece on the launch, but I was the focus … [I]t was a success … By the way, the poster looked great!  Thanks!  And there are now about 24 requests for the book through the library…

…And now there are 29!

Dan sent us some pics of the event:

Good job Dan!!

The following press release was sent out to Ottawa area media outlets including the Ottawa Citizen, the Ottawa Sun, CTV, and CBC Ottawa.

Library and Authors’ Association Team Up to Let Community Meet Local Authors

OTTAWA October 17, 2008 – In conjunction with the official launch of the newly-established Ottawa Fiction Authors Collection at the Ottawa Public Library (OPL), local authors will be on hand to meet and greet the public at the OPL this Thursday in a Showcase presented jointly by the OPL and the Canadian Authors Association (CAA).

Dan McNeil, one of the featured authors at the Showcase event, says he looks forward to opportunities such as this one. “I enjoy having a chance to meet people who have read my book. Writing and reading are usually such solitary activities, it’s great to have events like this to bring authors and people of the local community together.” Mr. McNeil’s novel, The Judas Apocalypse, has recently garnered rave reviews from hosts of both the A Channel’s Breakfast Television and Rogers Daytime.

Eighteen authors in all are to participate in this exciting event whose aim is to promote local arts and culture:

Barry Alder Chris McNaught
William Bezanson Dan McNeil
Jill Bobula Philip Nagy
Jennifer Cook Emily-Jane Hills Orford
Jean Mohsen Fahmy Esther Paul
Suzanne Glandon Francesca Piredda
George Laidlaw Maurice Richard
Michèle Matteau Gwen Smid
Patricia McCarthy JC Sulzenko

Those who have previously purchased books by these authors are encouraged to bring them to the Showcase to have them autographed.

This Showcase of local authors was made possible thanks to tireless volunteers from the CAA in partnership with the OPL. The Showcase will be held on Thursday, October 23 from 11:00 AM-1:30 PM, and from 6:00 PM – 9:00 PM at the Reading Room area of the Main Branch of the OPL at 120 Metcalfe Street, Ottawa. The official Launch of the Ottawa Fiction Authors Collection will be held in the Auditorium of the OPL Main Branch at 7:00 PM that same evening. For more information visit http://www.canauthors-ottawa.org/booklaunch.shtml.

On Tuesday, September 16th, Dan McNeil will be appearing on Daytime on Rogers Television which airs weekdays at 11am, 3pm, 5pm and 11pm.

We’re pleased as punch that Dan McNeil, the author of The Judas Apocalypse will be on Ottawa television station A-Channel’s morning show on Monday, July 14th. This is what they say about the interview on their website:

Local author Dan McNeil drops by as he gets set to launch his debut novel, the Judas Apocalypse.  Already being hailed by some as the next Da Vinci Code, we’ll tell you why this is summer’s must read.

Break a leg, Dan!

I’m sure Vincent Lam was the most astonished person in the room when his book was announced as the Giller winner last night at a gala in Toronto. As I’m sure you’ve noticed, I have yet to review two of the finalists, Carol Windley’s Home Schooling, and the book with the biggest pre-award-announcement buzz, Rawi Hage’s novel about Lebanon during the years of civil war, De Niro’s Game. However, of the books I have read I would have picked The Immaculate Conception over Lam’s Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures, but I did enjoy that one too. What I think I liked most about Dr. Lam’s win was the backstory. We’ve all heard over the past few weeks how Hage’s book was plucked from the almost certain death it faced in Anansi Press’s slush pile, and we’ve heard how Lam’s book was the only one of the finalists to have been published by a major house. Until now though, I hadn’t heard that Lam’s path to having his book published was even more an instance of spectacular good fortune than Hage’s.

It started with a chance meeting between a doctor on a cruise ship and literary icon Margaret Atwood. He told her he was an aspiring writer. She asked him if he wanted her to be nice or be honest. He said “honest” and she agreed to read the half-written manuscript of his first book. She e-mailed him back a few months later saying “Congratulations. You can write.” She helped him get a book deal and last night Vincent Lam won Canada’s most prestigious book award.

This book has all the elements of a standard chick-lit novel: a young twenty-something Montreal woman on vacation in Tuscany, an older (maybe thirty-something?) attractive Italian man with a now-empty childhood home that’s just asking to be renovated and decorated, his mother who spends her time in the kitchen making culinary expressions of joy and familial ties, a village of quirky characters to be won over, and a couple of dogs ready to be fallen in love with.

Yet, The Perfect Circle is far from what you would expect given that list of ingredients. Instead, we’re thrown into a world of overwhelming, depressing, obsessive love that leaves Marianne isolated and lost rather than fulfilled and energized.

The power of this book is Pascale Quiviger’s lyrical writing style that comes across through Sheila Fischman’s masterful translation. In fact, there were times when it reminded me of another Fischman translation of a Quebec classic, Next Episode by Hubert Aquin. Her descriptions and commentary are insightful and demand contemplation: “Recollection is something like that scaffolding, memory is like the restored fresco: it’s the new skin applied to the past in order to bear its disappearance which is always, in the end, our own. [...] Eternity is the fact that once a fresco has been sunk into the wall and once the wall has eroded to the ground, it is still intact and close to me, despite my ignorance of them, despite my absence.”

“Marco’s country belongs to a handful of citizens, but it’s also the country of everyone,” Quiviger writes–and accurately too–I felt just that way when I stepped off the plane the first time I travelled to Rome. But Marianne finds she can’t abide there waiting in a kind of limbo for Marco to pay her sporadic attention.

This book was well-written, though rather heavy. I love Italy and I love love, so I think I might have preferred A Perfect Circle to have been written as that light, uplifting chick-lit book, with Marco and Marianne dividing their time between Quebec and Tuscany, with Marco’s village and family coming to adopt the Canadese traveller as one of their own…you know the story.

Vincent Lam’s Giller Prize-nominated work, Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures, is billed as a short story collection, but in many ways it is more like a novel. Its cast of characters make their way from story to story and the stories themselves are strung together by narrative threads created by a linear timeline and a tendency for the setting to be drawn toward a single nexus in Toronto.

In the opening chapter, “How to Get Into Medical School, Part I” we meet Fitzgerald and Ming, two pre-med students at the University of Ottawa. Ming’s approach to her studies and her emotional life is disciplined, structured, and compartmentalised. Fitz’s, on the other hand, is haphazard, intuitive, and (as we later discover), sometimes self-destructive. The two are in love, but decide to place restrictions on their relationship, due largely to Ming’s concerns about intimacy and fear of her family’s reaction to her being with someone who isn’t Chinese.

Fitz stays behind in Ottawa to improve his grades for a second attempt to get in while Ming goes on to the University of Toronto’s medical school in the second chapter, “Take All of Murphy,” which Andrew Piper of The Globe and Mail described as “perhaps the collection’s best story.” It is here that we meet the rest of the book’s recurring characters, Ming’s anatomy class lab partners: Chen and Sri. Ming and Sri are diametrically opposed when it comes to dealing with the body they are dissecting. Ming treats it as a cadaver, the object of scientific study, and the means to a good grade. Sri is just as interested in him as a man, a veteran, a person with a name (in the absence of his real one, Sri names him Murphy) and a life story. Chen is left to try and negotiate a truce between the two inclinations.

With each subsequent chapter, we see further and get to know these four characters in more depth. We also get glimpses into the lives of the people with whom they or their patients interact (the family of Dr. Chen in “A Long Migration,” a psychotic patient in “Winston,” a prostitute and a paramedic in “Afterwards,” a pregnant woman in “An Insistent Tide”) . We also have a detailed account of what life was like in the hospitals of Toronto during the 2003 SARS crisis in “Contact Tracing.”

Lam’s writing is straight-forward and uncompromising, as one might expect of a writer who spends his off-hours working in a Toronto ER. There are occasional hints of brilliance in a turn of phrase, apt metaphor or narrative layering. His characters, even minor ones, are generally complex and life-like, though he keeps his female characters at more of a distance (none of their stories are told in the first-person for example).

I look forward to reading more of Lam’s books (when he writes them of course), especially if we get to see more of the characters we’ve come to know in Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures.

While my attention was taken up with all of the literary award news earlier this month, Rachel Giese at the CBC was writing about a new book that’s making a bit of a splash on the CanLit scene this fall. The catch? This book isn’t the latest by Margaret Atwood (Moral Disorder) or Alice Munro (The View from Castle Rock), but a speculative fiction (let me say that again in case you missed it: speculative fiction) novel called Before I Wake by British Columbia author Robert J. Wiersema.

Giese touches upon two issues in her article: the first has to do with the way Wiersema had to construct a second career as a book reviewer in Quill & Quire and The Globe & Mail in order to get any of his novels looked at by publishers — as Tyee points out, not exactly “a credit to the Canadian book industry”; the second has to do with popular fiction in this country.

In short, there isn’t much of a place made for it. In the past few decades, we’ve managed to carve out a place for Canadian literary fiction, not only here but globally. But is there such a thing as CanLit generic fiction? Really, it’s still in it’s infancy. For the most part, most of those authors who are Canadian and writing sci-fi, fantasy, mystery or the like have to do their work in the States (just like big-budget movie directors).

“[Canada is] known around the world for our writers, rightly so. We have a literary culture that includes Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Michael Ondaatje, you could go on and on. But as far as CanLit goes, that’s it. We have the upper crust, but there’s no filling,” Wiersema says. “Our genre writers and commercial writers generally publish out of the U.S.: Charles De Lint, Robert Charles Wilson, Tanya Huff, William Gibson, Nalo Hopkinson. We do publish certain commercial writers — like Giles Blunt at Random House, or Penguin with Jack Whyte and Guy Gavriel Kay. But all of those people are published within a certain literary structure, because there’s no existing commercial structure in this country.”

Maybe this is a promise that things are changing. Maybe Canada’s finally ready for some pop lit. Maybe there’s room for lots of contemporary genre fiction set in Victoria and promising new Canadian authors won’t be tempted to pull out their hair or collapse in despair.

Governor General’s Literary Award nominees were announced today, and again the big literary celebrities were passed over (though it should be noted that icons Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood asked to be left out of consideration).

English Fiction

• The Law of Dreams by Peter Behrens
• The Fearsome Particles by Trevor Cole
• Gargoyles by Bill Gaston
• De Niro’s Game by Rawi Hage
• The Dodecahedron or A Frame for Frames by Paul Glennon

English Poetry

• Airstream Land Yacht by Ken Babstock
• Home of Sudden Service by Elizabeth Bachinsky
• Inventory by Dionne Brand
• Stumbling in the Bloom by John Pass
• The Good Bacteria by Sharon Thesen

English Drama

• The Optimists by Morwyn Brebner
• Cast Iron by Lisa Codrington
• I Still Love You by Daniel MacIvor
• Adapt or Die: Plays New and Used by Jason Sherman
• In a World Created by a Drunken God by Drew Hayden Taylor

English Non-Fiction

• The Hanging of Angélique: The Untold Story of Canadian Slavery and the Burning of Old Montréal by Afua Cooper
• The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade That Gave the World Impressionism by Ross King
• Starlight Tour: The Last, Lonely Night of Neil Stonechild by Susanne Reber and Robert Renaud
• The Empire of Mind: Digital Piracy and the Anti-Capitalist Movement by Michael Strangelove
• The Half-Lives of Pat Lowther by Christine Wiesenthal

English Children’s Literature – Text

• Ingrid and the Wolf by André Alexis
• Pirate’s Passage by William Gilkerson
• Skinnybones and the Wrinkle Queen by Glen Huser
• Me and the Blondes by Teresa Toten
• Friendships by Budge Wilson

English Children’s Literature – Illustration

• Earth Magic illustrated by Eugenie Fernandes
• The Birdman illustrated by Annouchka Gravel Galouchko and Stéphan Daigle
• Casey at the Bat illustrated by Joe Morse
• Let’s Go for a Ride illustrated by Maxwell Newhouse
• Ancient Thunder illustrated by Leo Yerxa

Translation (French to English)

• The Bicycle Eater translated by Sheila Fischman
• Bonbons Assortis / Assorted Candies translated by Linda Gaboriau
• Vetiver translated by Hugh Hazelton
• The Immaculate Conception translated by Lazer Lederhendler
• A Threat from Within: A Century of Jewish Opposition to Zionism translated by Fred A. Reed

French Fiction

• Le sort de Fille by Michael Delisle
• Sauvages by Louis Hamelin
• La rivière du loup by Andrée Laberge
• Jeanne sur les routes by Jocelyne Saucier
• La Cité des Vents by Pierre Yergeau

French Poetry

• Origine des méridiens by Paul Bélanger
• L’artisan by Jacques Brault
• Les îles by Louise Cotnoir
• Ravir: les lieux by Hélène Dorion
• L’Étang noir by Benoit Jutras

French Drama

• Venise-en-Québec by Olivier Choinière
• Août : un repas à la campagne by Jean Marc Dalpé
• Désordre public by Évelyne de la Chenelière
• Blue Bayou, la maison de l’étalon by Reynald Robinson

French Non-Fiction

• Le rêve et la forêt : histoires de chamanes nabesna by Marie-Françoise Guédon
• Le temps aboli : l’Occident et ses grands récits by Thierry Hentsch
• Paroxysmes : la parole hyperbolique by Michaël La Chance
• Condamner à mort : les meurtres et la loi à l’écran by Catherine Mavrikakis
• À force de voir : histoire de regards by Pierre Ouellet

French Children’s Literature – Text

• Les saisons d’Henri by Édith Bourget
• Je suis fou de Vava by Dany Laferrière
• Cauchemar aveugle by Fernande D. Lamy
• Poupeska by Françoise Lepage
• Nuits rouges by Daniel Mativat

French Children’s Literature – Illustration

• Le trésor de Jacob illustrated by Lucie Papineau
• Le petit chien de laine illustrated by Marie Lafrance
• Les cendres de maman illustrated by Lino (Alain Lebrun)
• Je suis fou de Vava illustrated by Frédéric Normandin
• Le gros monstre qui aimait trop lire illustrated by Rogé (Roger Girard)

Translation (English to French)

• Parlez-vous boro : voyage aux pays des langues menacées translated by Dominique Fortier
• L’Arbre : une vie translated by Dominique Fortier
• L’homme qui voulait boire la mer translated by Daniel Poliquin (in collaboration with Pan Bouyoucas)
• L’Odyssée de Pénélope translated by Lori Saint-Martin and Paul Gagné
• Un jardin de papier translated by Sophie Voillot