When the Giller Prize took an uncommon turn this year toward honouring new authors from outside Toronto whose work came from smaller publishers, many people celebrated. Stephen Henighan isn’t having any of it. “The Giller Prize is the most conspicuous example of corporate suffocation of the public institutions that built our literary culture,” he declares, right off the top, in “Kingmakers,” in the current edition of Geist magazine.

Not as bad an influence as the Chapters-Indigo chain, he says, “but if Chapters-Indigo is the disease, the Giller Prize is the symptom.” There’s nothing in Henighan’s commentary about herpetic sores, but it’s still pretty blistering.

Mostly, Henighan’s ire is directed at the Bertelsmann group —the international publishing giant squid that owns Knopf Canada, Doubleday Canada, Random House Canada, and a chunk of McClelland & Stewart. Henighan figures the associated insiders are hard at work: that underdog winner Vincent Lam was favoured because his book is published by Doubleday and because Margaret Atwood, who withdrew her own book from consideration, played a central role in the Toronto doctor’s literary rags-to-riches story. Lam has joined the Upper Canada “Family Compact,” Henighan argues, because he’s the right kind of ethnic who sought the right people’s approval.

Ah, yes, Toronto. It can be irritating to sit in the thousand-mile shade of its robust self-congratulation. Good thing we can all still make fun of the Maple Leafs.

Henighan concludes the piece with a remarkable piece of trivia: Chapters-Indigo provided all the attendees with a party favour, an individually wrapped remaindered Stephen King novel…

Alberto Manguel is also on a tear about publishers in Geist issue number 63, in “Idiot’s Fare.” The article is more restrained than Henighan’s, but it’s no less scathing. Manguel wants to know why English-speaking readers are so ill-served when it comes to great foreign-language novelists. “Less than .1 percent of everything published in English is a translation,” he laments, “and that include Japanese computer manuals.” Manguel doesn’t stop there. He wonders why Doris Lessing was told by her publisher that she writes too much. And why George Szanto can’t find a publisher at all.

The reason for all this, and it relates back to the glitz of the Giller, is that marketing has overtaken writing as the primary value in publishing, as the behemoths of the book industry run the business by supermarket rules.

Geist, of course, is full as usual of material that simply can’t compete on the checkout newsstand with pictures of Brangelina and the latest news in liposuction. Stephen Osborne writes about Grinkus and Pepper, and don’t ask me to explain. There’s a lovely piece about life in Deroche, and some capsule profiles of people living on the street. You can look it up online, but you should really buy the artifact at one of those better bookstores.