A Distillation

"When you pick up a novel by Anne Tyler, you can expect certain things. It will be set in Baltimore. It will follow families populated by out-of-step characters ranging from the slightly odd to the wildly eccentric, whose actions, or non-actions, are motivated by a need for love and tangible sense of self; this need is sometimes conscious, sometimes not. It will have a provocative, often seemingly contradictory title — The Accidental Tourist, Saint Maybe, The Amateur Marriage, Breathing Lessons. It will be a pleasure to read.
     The Beginner's Goodbye, Tyler's 19th novel, features all of these things and more — there is a ghost — and less; just over 200 pages, it is, both in literal weight and narrative complexity, lighter than most of the Tyler canon. Which should not be construed as 'less,' at least not in the pejorative sense of the word. In many ways, "Goodbye" feels like the center slice of an Anne Tyler novel, a distillation."
— Mary McNamara, Los Angeles Times
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"The story goes like this: Aaron Woolcott’s wife, Dorothy, is killed when the oak tree in their backyard falls on their house, knocking over an old Sony Trinitron television, which crushes her chest. Shocked and grief-stricken, Aaron buries himself in work; he is an editor at a small publishing house that specializes in books like The Beginner’s Wine Guide, The Beginner’s Monthly Budget and The Beginner’s Book of Dog Training. He moves in with his sister and settles into a glum routine. That is, until he starts receiving mysterious visitations from Dorothy’s ghost."
— Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
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Buy all of Anne Tyler's books here...

Come and be read to... Erin Bow

YABookShelf:

"Having written, published, and even won a CBC Canadian Literary Award for your poetry, you definitely have a poetic voice. Had you always intended to write a prose novel or did the inspiration for the tale suggest the current form to you?"
Erin Bow:
"Plain Kate bubbled away at the back of my mind for a long time before I started it, with a great bang and rush. The first thing I wrote down was the first sentence: 'A long time ago, in a market town by a looping river, there lived an orphan girl called Plain Kate.' So the fairy-tale tone and the prose form were set from the first minute."
— YA Book Shelf
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"[...] Don’t be fooled by Plain Kate’s youth: This is full of blood magic and unhappy people doing unpleasant things, but there's lots of heart and redemption, too. A haunting, chilling (but never gory or graphic) tale with a fantastic girl at its center."
— Kirkus Reviews

More about Plain Kate from readers:

"Erin Bow's prose is simple but it's more than that. I can't describe it as anything else but magic. The emotion that's weaved into her words is so powerful I almost broke out into a flood of tears when I came to a certain part of the story. Only I didn't because I was in a crowded bus and didn't want people to give me strange looks. My heart was shattered and if an author can affect me with only her words, you know she's done something very right and deserves high praise."
— Kkrystle Yanagihara, Good Reads

"[...]There is nothing that prepares you for what’s inside. So you wander in, try a sentence. Or maybe two. Then before you know it, you have read a hundred pages and you simply must finish it because you have to know what happens in the end."
— Nafiza, Good Reads
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Join us on Sunday May 27, 2012 to hear Erin Bow and five other outstanding Canadian authors read from their latest works. Sit back, relax... and be read to.

For more information about the Elora Writers' Festival go here...

And buy all of Erin Bow's books here...

This Post Has No Title

"Titles have a way of coming in waves. There was a time a few years back when it seemed like vast numbers of books were being published on the subject of secret lives, as in The Secret Life of Bees, The Secret Lives of Buildings, The Secret Lives of Words, etc. Our literature seems to hold a parallel obsession with vanishing, which involves of course any number of titles involving the words “Disappear” or “Vanishing” or “Lost.”
     But no trend that I’ve ever noticed has seemed quite so pervasive as the daughter phenomenon.   Seriously, once you start noticing them, they’re everywhere. A recent issue of Shelf Awareness had ads for both The Sausage Maker’s Daughters and The Witch’s Daughter. I’m Facebook friends with the authors of The Hummingbird’s Daughter, The Baker’s Daughter, The Calligrapher’s Daughter, and The Murderer’s Daughters, and those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head."
— Emily St. John Mandel, The Millions
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Next time you're tempted to call your novel or short story The Eggplant's Daughter or The Lion Tamer's Accountant, try using this handy app: the Random Book Title Generator.

Ask Questions Later

"A book by the host of a political talk show is often an ancillary product or marketing tool. But Drift, by Rachel Maddow, whose show is on MSNBC, is much more. It is an argument — a sustained, lucid case in which points are made logically and backed by evidence and reason. What’s more, it follows one main idea through nearly a half-century. The subtitle, 'The Unmooring of American Military Power,' explains exactly what “Drift” is about.
     Ms. Maddow’s point is that the way we go to war has changed: that there has been an expansion of [U.S.] presidential power, a corresponding collapse of Congressional backbone and a diminution of public attention."
— Janet Maslin, The New York Times
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Buy this book here...

Best Bunny Book Ever

From: Literary Tattoos

"Published in 1972, Watership Down was Richard Adams' first novel, and is by far his most successful to date. Although it was initially rejected by 13 publishers before eventually being accepted by Rex Collings Ltd, Watership Down has never been out of print, and was the recipient of several prestigious awards. Adapted into an acclaimed classic film and a television series, it is Penguin Books' best-selling novel of all time. In 1996, Adams published Tales from Watership Down, a follow-up collection of 19 short stories about El-ahrairah and the rabbits of the Watership Down warren."
— Wikipedia
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Alice Munro... "disjointed and demanding and peculiar."

Alice Munro in conversation with The Atlantic:

"In your introduction to one of your earlier collections, Selected Stories, you say your stories have, over the years, 'grown longer, and in a way more disjointed and demanding and peculiar.' Why do you think they've evolved this way?"

'You know, I'm not sure why this has happened, because when I'm writing a story, I don't really analyze it. But once I've got the story finished and I begin doing things with it, I think that in many ways what I've written breaks all the rules of the short story. This occurs to me, but not with any particular regret; I figure I can only write what interests me. So I don't try to do anything to make it a more regular story. In fact, if a story wants to go in a particular direction, I let that happen. I just put it out there and see what it does."

"You said your stories tend to break the rules. How so?"

"Well, I have an idea. Some of the stories I admire seem to zero in on one particular time and place. There isn't a rule about this. But there's a tidy sense about many stories I read. In my own work, I tend to cover a lot of time and to jump back and forward in time, and sometimes the way I do this is not very straightforward. I feel that this is something that people may find they have to adjust to, but it's a way of saying whatever it is that I want to say, and it sort of has to be done this way. Time is something that interests me a whole lot—past and present, and how the past appears as people change."
— The Atlantic
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Buy all of Alice Munro's books here...

Another Alice: "[...] being home when your guest is expected"

From: Smart Chick's Network

Alice Walker in conversation with Writer's Digest:

"So you don’t force yourself to maintain a writing routine?"

     "This has changed a bit, but for, I would say, three decades, I wrote every morning, or I made the space. Because part of writing is not so much that you’re going to actually write something every day, but what you should have, or need to have, is the possibility, which means the space and the time set aside—as if you were going to have someone come to tea. If you are expecting someone to come to tea but you’re not going to be there, they may not come, and if I were them, I wouldn’t come. So, it’s about receptivity and being home when your guest is expected, or even when you hope that they will come."

     "Publishing has changed dramatically since you released your first book, and you’ve worked with a number of houses, big and small. What are the most positive and negative changes you’ve seen?"

     "I was with Harcourt Brace Jovanovich for 25 years, I think, or more. And what I liked was having a close relationship with my editors—they seemed to really be there, fully embodied. They had a perspective about the world, and also a real connection to me and my work. And I think that that has changed. I don’t know many people who have that anymore."

     "Do you feel that writers suffer because of that?"

     "I do, especially early on. I think early on it’s really nice to have someone older, nurturing, thoughtful, well experienced in the ways of the world, and in the publishing world, too, just to guide one.
     [Also], the way the larger publishing houses are morphing into corporate structures, that’s a problem for people of conscience, because often you just don’t know what your publisher’s doing in the world, and it could be pretty bad.
     I think it’s important to support smaller publishers, which is why I’ve gone to smaller publishers lately, like The New Press, which has a really fine list and cares about the world, and not so much about the bottom line. Of course, they suffer, and writers suffer, because the bottom line is important. People have to survive and, if possible, thrive, and it’s hard to do if you’re not being sufficiently supported financially by your work."

[...]

     "What advice would you most like to offer writers today?"

     "The most healthy thing is to be true to your own self, quoting—who was it, Hamlet?—but also, that you have a right to express what you see and what you feel and what you think. To be bold. To be as bold with your vision as you can possibly be. Our salvation, to the extent that we have one, will come out of people realizing the crisis of our species and of the planet and offering their deepest dream of what’s possible."
— Writer's Digest
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Get all of Alice Walker's books here...