Canadian Author Adrian Barnes Shortlisted for the Arthur C Clarke Award

"Reinforcing science fiction's image as a boys club the UK's most prestigious prize for the genre, the Arthur C Clarke award, has announced an all-male shortlist – for only the second time in its history.
     The six books in the running for the Arthur C Clarke – a mix of titles by major SF writers Kim Stanley Robinson and Ken MacLeod with lesser known debuts – follow an all-male shortlist for the reader-decided British Science Fiction Association prize, which was won earlier this week by Adam Roberts for Jack Glass.
     Roberts failed to make the cut for the Clarke award, however, pushed out by Robinson's story of an inhabited solar system 300 years in the future, 2312, Scottish award-winner MacLeod's dystopian vision of a London where genetic defects can be wiped from unborn children, Intrusion, and Nick Harkaway's acclaimed Angelmaker, a whirlwind race to save the world from a 1950s doomsday machine. Canadian author Adrian Barnes, published by tiny press Bluemoose, is in the running for Nod, in which humanity's sudden inability to sleep has devastating consequences, Chris Beckett for Dark Eden, where the incestuous descendants of two stranded astronauts try to make a life for themselves on a far flung planet, and Peter Heller for the post-apocalyptic The Dog Stars, set in a world destroyed by the flu pandemic."
— Alison Flood, The Guardian
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Buy all the books on the shortlist here...

Social Climbing

"[…] In his new novel, Mount Pleasant, Don Gillmor writes the perfect, hilarious send-up of the Toronto obsession with money, real estate and status. This is a book that makes you laugh with (and at) the characters but also, sheepishly, at yourself, because so much of what Gillmor describes is part of the urban collective conscience.

     Or rather, I should say, the collective subconscious. There’s a lot we don’t want to admit to ourselves when we’re swept up in the middle-class delusion of ever-rising expectations."
— Sarah Hampson, The Globe and Mail
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Rejuvenation

"Ig Publishing, which for more than a decade has maintained a list of fiction and nonfiction for adult readers and reissues for the academic market, is moving into a new direction this fall with the launch of Lizzie Skurnick Books. The imprint, explained Ig publisher Robert Lasner, will 'bring back the very best in young adult literature, from the classics of the 1930s and 1940s, to the thrillers and social novels of the 1970s and 1980s.'

     Skurnick, the author of Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading (William Morrow, 2009) and a freelance journalist who writes about publishing and culture, will handle all acquisitions and edit the books, roughly 12 to 14 titles per year. Ig, which is based in Brooklyn, N.Y., will continue to publish another 8 to 10 titles for adults per year."
— Claire Church, Publishers Weekly
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DIY or die...

Linotype "hot-press" metal cast printer (from: Brian Azevedo)

"The story of self-publishing is Jan Strnad, a 62-year-old educator hoping to retire in four years. To do so is going to require supplemental income, which he is currently earning from his self-published novels. In 2012, Jan made $11,406.31 from his work. That’s more than double what he made from the same book in the six months it was available from Kensington, a major publisher. He has since released a second work and now makes around $2,000 a month, even though you’ve never heard of him.

     Rachel Schurig has sold 100,000 e-books and made six figures last year. She is the story of self-publishing. Rick Gualtieri cleared over $25,000 in 2012 from his writing. He says it’s like getting a Christmas bonus every month. Amanda Brice is an intellectual property attorney for the federal government. In her spare time, she writes teen mysteries and adult romantic comedies. She averages $750 a month with her work.
     […] Of course, you’ll see articles lamenting the paucity of sales most self-published books enjoy, but there’s a problem with comparing average self-published sales with traditionally published books. In self-publishing, the slush pile is made available to readers. These comparisons between the two paths take the tip of one iceberg (the books that made it through the gauntlet and into bookstores) with an entire iceberg (all self-published books). It’s not a fair comparison."
— Hugh Howey, Salon
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"Self-publishing is the literary world’s version of masturbation, except the results are quite often less thrilling, and you usually end up with a mess. However, despite its reputation for producing amateur dreck or your crazy uncle’s genealogical findings, self-publishing has a long history that includes such luminaries as Marcel Proust and Lewis Carroll. As of late, the practice has been supercharged thanks to the Internet, which enables the production and promotion of a book by almost anyone. Since 2006, the number of self-published books, print and electronic, is up 287 percent – that’s more than 235,000 titles, according to Bowker, the company that handles ISBN numbers. In 2011 alone, nearly 150,000 print books were self-published."
— John Winters, Salon
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Spells success...

"It’s Game of Thrones week here at Flavorwire, and while much of our excitement is based upon the return of the TV series, we’re not forgetting George R. R. Martin’s books, either. The A Song of Ice and Fire series has done a great deal in legitimizing fantasy as a Serious Genre — a welcome development, given that a lot of people tend to disparage fantasy novels as a homogenous lump of sword-and-sorcery clichés with little literary merit.
     That’s not the case at all, so if you’re one of those starting to explore the genre — or if you’re a fan looking for some new books to read — check out our selection of the best fantasy novels you haven’t read. And, of course, let us know your favorites!"
— Tom Hawking, Flavorwire
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Two fine fantasy series come to mind right off the bat: The Dark is Rising Sequence, by Susan Cooper, and The Fionavar Tapestry by Guy Gavriel Kay, one of the Elora Writers' Festival's alumni of readers (no relation to Ailsa Kay, who will be reading at this year's Festival).

Sunrise, Sunset

"Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, the German-born screenwriter and novelist who, as the writing member of the Merchant Ivory filmmaking team, won two Academy Awards for adaptations of genteel, class-conscious E. M. Forster novels, died on Wednesday at her home in Manhattan. She was 85.

   Mrs. Jhabvala won an Oscar for “A Room With a View” (1986), with Maggie Smith [...] and Helena Bonham Carter. James Ivory, the director with whom she collaborated, said the cause was complications of a pulmonary condition.
   Mrs. Jhabvala (pronounced JOB-vahla) was already well established as an author when she began her screenwriting career with the producer Ismail Merchant and Mr. Ivory. Her 1975 novel, Heat and Dust, about an Englishwoman exploring a family scandal in India, received the Man Booker Prize, Britain’s highest literary honor.
     She wrote the screenplay for the Merchant Ivory version in 1983 as well."
— Anita Gates, The New York Times
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Pain to Pleasure

From: Roost

"Writers, like all artists, are Platonists. We have an inkling of something perfect and ideal, which haunts our imaginings and prompts every stroke of the pen or keyboard. We are aware that with a great effort of attentiveness, formulating and reformulating, listening closely to our own voice, modulating it into more tuneful harmonies, we might do something not just good, but perfect. And occasionally in phrase or sentence or paragraph we do just that. But I know of no writer who is not, finally, just that little bit disappointed with the final product. (Well, I know some who are not, but they are never the good ones)."

— Rick Gekoski, The Guardian
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 "This year’s 20th anniversary Publishers Weekly Bookstore of the Year Award goes to Square Books on the historic town square of Oxford, Miss., the center of the fictional Yoknapatawpha County in William Faulkner’s novels. Founded by Richard and Lisa Howorth in 1979, the store has grown into a trio of store fronts over the past three decades. It hosts 'Thacker Mountain Radio' show, a live radio show with author readings and musical performances that airs on Mississippi Public Radio, and the annual Oxford Conference on the Book. Later this month it will hold its second annual Camp Square Books for adults—four days of author talks, lectures, hikes, and meals.
     'I love the place,' says author John Grisham, a Square Books regular. 'When you walk in the front door you can smell books. Time stops, and you want to browse and read and gossip and drink coffee upstairs on the balcony for the rest of the day. If you want a book, it’s somewhere in the store.
 If you want to know something about a book or an author, Richard or one of his staff will have the answers. If you want to meet authors, they’ll stop by soon enough.'”
— Judith Rosen, Publishers Weekly
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