The Immaculate Conception refers to the doctrine that the Virgin Mary was conceived without Original Sin, her purity preserved through the power of divine grace. In Gaétan Soucy’s novel (a translation by Lazer Lederhendler of L’Immaculée conception (1994)), Purity is an elusive state and Grace a slippery object.

Many reviewers have likened the atmosphere of this book to a Grimm fairy tale, with its shadowy characters and shifting sense of reality. There is definitely a folk-tale-like aspect to Soucy’s Montreal parish of the Nativité: there are mysterious events, phantasmic beings, and evil monsters in human form. We are confronted over and over again with pairings and dualities: two nasty brothers, a set of twins (good and evil), two enigmatic little girls (one in the past and one in the present), two fathers for the protaganist (both of whom are partially paralyzed at some point), two relics saved from two different fires–all coalescing around the stories of two struggling, broken people, Remould Tremblay and Clémentine Clément.

Remould, once a brilliant, inquisitive, philosopher of a child, through horrific trauma now reduced to a shell of a man looking after his bitter, paranoid, Smallweed-like stepfather (the ironically named Séraphon), searches through the ashes of a devastating fire to retrieve an icon of redemption. He is also pressed into taking care of his employer’s young neice, a mute child that at times seems transcendentally innocent, at other times supremely malevolent. His encounters with a sinister fire captain and three troubled youths of the neighbourhood link his tale with that of schoolteacher Clémentine.
Clémentine–literally ‘mericiful mercy’–widowed a week before her wedding, delivered of a still-born boy not soon after, wants the best for her students but treats them with a strong dose of sterness verging on cruelty. She is smitten with the school principal, Brother Gandon, and dreams of moving to Paris and becoming a renowned poet. She harbours a great deal of suspicion, but it is consummately misplaced.

These two characters navigate their way through the fire-touched landscape of their village-like neighbourhood and through the still-smouldering embers and ashes of their memories, trying to capture for themselves some of that elusive, fairy-tale Purity. It’s left for the reader to decide whether they succeed or not.

The three judges of this year’s Giller Prize–Michael Winter, Alice Munro, and Adrienne Clarkson–have selected a shortlist of relatively unknown authors. This isn’t always the case with literary awards (after all, the bigger your authors’ names, the bigger the audience draw, thus the more prestige your award accumulates). So why no literary celebrities (like David Adams Richards or Douglas Coupland, both on the long list) this time?

“When we were choosing the books, we had no sense of choosing a writer who had a reputation … we just chose books that we loved,” Michael Winter explained. How great is that? If three icons can just choose books that they loved, there’s a chance for any Canadian writer to be the next Giller winner.

Another thing to note: four of the five finalists were published by small presses like I Publish Press. Only one was published by one of the big houses (Vincent Lam’s Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures was published by Doubleday Canada). So not only can any Canadian writer win, any small press can produce a bestselling Giller finalist.

As the CBC points out, “a Giller nomination is often a ticket to bestseller status for Canadian books, as the prize draws the attention of readers across the country.”
Businessman Jack Rabinovitch created the Giller Prize in 1994 to honour his wife, literary journalist Doris Giller, who died in 1993. It is considered one of the top literary awards in Canada. The winner will be announced at a black tie event in Toronto on November 7th.

The authors and their books:

• Rawi Hage for his novel De Niro’s Game
• Vincent Lam for his short story collection, Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures
• Pascale Quiviger for her novel The Perfect Circle, translation by Sheila Fischman
• Gaétan Soucy for his novel The Immaculate Conception, translation by Lazer Lederhendler
• Carol Windley for her short story collection, Home Schooling

Stay tuned for future reviews.

Read on.

The CanWest media company, owners of the former Southam newspaper chain as well as Global TV, has established the Raise-A-Reader campaign a day to raise money for local literacy programmes across Canada. The fundraiser started in Vancouver and first went national in 2002. More than $1 million was raised in 2005’s one day campaign.

“Teaching our children to read will ignite their intellect, imagination, and individuality. Giving back to our communities is an investment in our future. The gift of literacy empowers people and enhances our communities by creating opportunities to achieve success,” Leonard Asper, President and CEO, CanWest Global Communications Corp.

This year, well known Canadians such as Trevor Linden of the Vancouver Canucks and Laureen Harper (the PM’s wife) were among volunteers soliciting donations for Raise-A-Reader on the city streets.

I Publish Press encourages families to promote reading by making it part of their own traditions. Read out loud, entice kids to read rather than watch TV or play video games all the time, and make sure there is lots of interesting reading material around for every family member.

There are a plethora of stats that indicate how important reading and literacy are, and plenty of anecdotal evidence too (take a quick look at Jacques Demers’ interview with Global Television for just one example).

Read on.

I Publish Press is proud to be a Canadian publisher, and we’re especially looking forward to reading the Canadian entries for our 2006 Writing Competition.

It’s a great time for Canadian literature, with world wide recognition of our homegrown talent becoming more and more prevalent all the time. With Canadians winning of some of the world’s top literature awards in recent years (Yann Martel’s 2002 Booker for Life of Pi; Alistair MacLeod’s 2001 IMPAC Dublin Award for No Great Mischief to name just a couple) and big literary stars like Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro having had new books come out this year (in fact, Ms. Atwood has thrilled us all with three new books in 2006), the Canadian literary scene is vibrant and exciting.

But what about all those unknown literary masterpieces just waiting to be discovered? Could there be a Jane Urquhart, Miriam Toews, or Rohinton Mistry out there? We think so. We want to select at least two Canadian books to be among the twelve winning entries.

So if you’re a Canadian author, we encourage you to submit your manuscript.

Newcastle, ON, Canada September 26, 2006 — I Publish Press is inviting writers to enter its inaugural Fiction Writing Competition. Every entry will be individually considered for publication by I Publish Press. Winning manuscripts will launch the I Publish Press website and will be prominently featured and available for sale to the public. Original works of fiction written in English with a length of 60,000-120,000 words are eligible for submission through I Publish Press. The competition closes December 15, 2006.

“We want twelve great new books to showcase to all those eager readers out there,” says Michelle Noël, Editor and Co-Publisher of I Publish Press. “We think the way the conventional publication process works many talented authors are overlooked. We want to change that. After all, many of the greatest novelists had difficulties with traditional publishing. The Brontë sisters, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce all published through unconventional means at one time or another.”

I Publish Press is taking advantage of the latest in publishing technology and innovative marketing channels to create a fresh and progressive publication process. Conventional vanity presses, because they publish everything, can’t assure readers a minimum level of quality. At the same time, big traditional houses bank on publishing known authors, and smaller presses find it difficult to take risks.

“It can be frustrating for new authors trying to get their manuscript looked at by a publisher,” says Linda Noël, Director and Co-Publisher of I Publish Press. “After all the work that went into writing their book, they now have to find an agent or publisher who will look at a synopsis and solicit their manuscript. Then they have to wait with their fingers crossed, hoping a miracle will happen. Here’s a chance for them to get their manuscript over the transom.”

The competition will be judged by the Publishers of I Publish Press. Winning entries must conform to editorial standards for published works, and submissions will be judged on originality, quality of writing, readiness for publication, and literary merit. Winners will be informed by January 15, 2007 and will be featured on I Publish Press websites in the week following.

Full Competition guidelines can be found on the competition page. For more information, contact competition at ipublishpress.com.

Hidebound. Too conservative, too much tied to tradition and custom, often with the sense of blindness to the benefits of what is current or new. So, are readers hidebound–literally bound to the leather cover and velum pages (or, not so literally, bound to their more commonly found equivalent, quality paper)?

A couple of weeks back, I saw a CBC report, prepared in anticipation of Sony’s new e-reader. There were a few industry experts touting The Next Big Thing–a device that’s portable, easy to read off of, with a paper-like screen and the ability to store hundreds of books. One, Jesse Hirsch, was especially keen–even prophesying the end of the printed book.

Havard Gould, the CBC reporter, would have none of that though–after all, e-books and devices for reading them (i.e. personal computers until relatively recently)  have been around for almost as long as the predicted death of print. So, we heard from a bookseller and a book reader explaining how the first was unworried and the second turned off at the mere thought of reading for pleasure and relaxation from something requiring a battery.

I’m an avid reader myself, and I can see where Kshmana Patel is coming from. I hear it all the time from bibliophiles–a good part of that philia is directed toward the physical book itself. We all love to feel the pages, hear them rustle, look at beautiful cover art, fall in love with a new font, smell the ink and the paper. We love to be able to carry our book to the beach or into the bath with us, bring it on the bus, or take it out to lunch. Some people like to dog ear the pages, write in the margins, break the spine, while others do their utmost to preserve the book as it came from the store after a relentless quest for a pristine copy.

But I couldn’t help thinking, isn’t there room for that kind of “carnal love” (to quote Anne Fadiman), as well as for The Next Big Thing? There are so many situations where I’d love to have a hundred books available–packed into my luggage for example. Who needs to cart around a three tonne brick like War and Peace when you can carry the biblio version of the iPod?

In fact, I think that comparison is quite apt. Just as most music collectors aren’t about to give up their album or CD collections, so bibliophiles aren’t about to give up their tangible libraries. The sweet lure of the hardbound edition or the beautiful trade paperback is too difficult to resist. However, who can go on a train and take their CD collection with them? Someone with an MP3 player. So, don’t sound the death knell for printed books, but be prepared for electronic books to finally come into their own.

We at I Publish Press wish to extend our warmest greetings to all of you.

Watch this space for news about publishing and views about books (especially here in Canada), press releases about what we’re doing at I Publish Press, and information about our competitions and awards.

Read on.