Distribution of Toronto writer Paul William Roberts’s acclaimed A War Against Truth: An Intimate Account of the Invasion of Iraq, has been halted because the book plagiarized an article from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Passages in five pages of Truth, which was shortlisted for the 2004 Charles Taylor Prize for literary non-fiction, closely paralleled those in an article on US defense policy by the Atlanta paper’s deputy editorial page editor.
The discovery was made by a blogger in late December, Vancouver’s Raincoast Books halted shipments of the book in early January, and on Jan. 19 Roberts apologized for his “egregious lapse of professional conduct” and “journalistic travesty” in a letter to the Journal-Constitution, according to ““, a James Adams article in the Feb. 3 Globe and Mail.
Roberts, a Harper’s contributor whose recent novel Homeland portrays a North American dystopia in the near future, puts his failure down to sloppy transcription of the article, which was e-mailed to him in Iraq at a time when paper and printers were very difficult to access.
Negotiations are underway to resolve the matter, and solutions may include distributing existing books with a correction, according to the Globe. The Journal-Constitution article’s author, Jay Bookman, told Adams: “Our main concern is that this occurred and people should be aware of it and then make their own judgment.”
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 “,” 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 “.” 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.
The Book News Collective at the Vancouver International Writers’ Festival has a particularly extensive list of events in their current mailout. You can sign up for the mailout at the festival home page , where you will also find a 2005 audio file of festival director Hal Wake interviewing Alice Munro, now that she seems to have retired.
Wake, by the way, will interview Vancouver-born 60 Minutes producer Barry Lando Friday, February 1, at UBC Robson Square at 7:30. Admission to these UBC-sponsored events is free, although pre-registration is encouraged at info.talkofthetown@ubc.ca . Lando’s Web of Deceit: The History of Western Complicity in Iraq from Churchill to Kennedy to George W. Bush, will certainly attract a crowd, although not necessarily of those who really ought to read the book.
Here’s a list of other upcoming events:
Guy Gavriel Kay
His work has been translated into 21 languages and he is the recipient of the International Goliardos Award for his contributions to the literature of the fantastic. Find out more about Kay’s new novel at . 7:30 pm, Thursday February 15, 2007, Room 1900, Simon Fraser University, 515 West Hastings Street, Vancouver. Tickets are $12 and are available on line at http://www.writersfest.bc.ca, by phone at 604.681.6330 or in person at White Dwarf Books, 3715 West 10th Ave., Vancouver.
Vancouver Writes
Features the biggest collection of Vancouver writers in one event ever, together with Vancouver’s all female jazz and blues quartet, Mother of Pearl, and the audience for a collaborative writing contest. Join host Billeh Nickerson and a dozen of the city’s finest writers (Caroline Adderson, Elizabeth Bachinsky, Kevin Chong, Steven Galloway, Zsuzsi Gartner, Genni Gunn, C.C. Humphreys, Nancy Lee, Billie Livingston, Miranda Pearson, Bill Richardson and Timothy Taylor) to create instant literature at Vancouver Writes, the Vancouver International Writers Festival’s collaborative writing contest. Top prizewinners will be published in The Tyee. Info: www.writersfest.bc.ca. February 23 @ 7:30 pm, Performance Works. Tickets: $20/18 students & seniors Call 604-681-6330 visit . Vancouver Writes is a part of Winterruption 2007, a showcase of food, arts, & culture, on Granville Island February 23-25, 2007.
Individual World Poetry Slam
Poetry slammers from all over the world (including U.S. spoken-word artists Jamie DeWolf and Ed Mabrey), compete for more than US$1,000 and a publishing deal. To Feb. 3, various venues. Info .
A Trio of Poetic Voices
32 Books Co. welcomes three west Canadian authors — Governor-General’s Award winner John Pass, Jacqueline Turner, and Christine Wiesenthal — to the bookstore (3185 Edgemont Blvd. North Van) on February 2nd for an evening of readings and discussion. We hope you will be able to join us for a glass of wine and some fine words. For more information, please email info@32books.com or call 604-980-9032. We do appreciate an RSVP if you know you will be attending, but last minute arrivals are just fine too.
Adrift on the Nile
The VECC presents a newworldtheatre production of Marcus Youssef’s adaptation of the novel by Naguib Mahfouz about a group of artists and civil servants who meet every night on a Nile River houseboat to smoke hashish and take refuge from the world. Feb. 2-10, 8 pm, Vancouver East Cultural Centre (1895 Venables). Tix $27/23 (plus service charges and fees) at Ticketmaster, 604-280-3311.
Vancouver International Storytelling Festival
Fest features 23 daytime performances, a gala evening show, a storytelling cabaret, workshops, and kids’ programming. Storytellers include Sherine El-Ansary, Comfort Adesuwa Ero, Nan Gregory, Bonnie Logan, Jean Pierre Makosso, Helen May, Michael D. McCarty, Bill McNamara, James Nicholas, Even Steven, Joujou Turenne, and Kira Van Deusen. Feb. 2-4, VanDusen Botanical Garden (5251 Oak). Tix at Tickets Tonight, 604-231-7535, www.ticketstonight.ca; info www.vancouverstorytelling.org/.
Lucia Gorea
Founder of the monthly event Poetry Around the World signs her new poetry collection, Journey Through My Soul. Feb. 3, 2 pm, Chapters on Robson (788 Robson). Free admission, info 604-603-6049.
Cry Me a River
Chantale Doyle launches her new collection of graphic short stories. Feb. 3, 8-11 pm, Blim (197 E. 17th). Info www.blim.ca/.
Beyond Feather Boas and Fainting Couches: Writing Romance in the 21st Century
Meet five dynamic published authors (Kate Austin, Eileen Cook, Mary Forbes, Susan Lyons and Lee McKenzie) who will share their experiences on writing and how the field has changed. This talk will appeal to writers or readers interested in romance - past, present and future. For more information please contact Vancouver Public Library at 604-331-3603. Sponsored by Romance Writers of America, Greater Vancouver Chapter. Wednesday, February 7 at 7:00 pm. Free. Alice MacKay Room, Lower Level Central Library, 350 West Georgia Street.
Original Writers and Oral Traditions
, author of Three Day Road, will be in Vancouver for the . He reads at UBC’s First Nations House of Learning at noon and joins several others at the Roundhouse Community Arts Centre at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, February 7. They include Maria Campbell, Richard Van Camp, Joanne Arnott and Richard Wagamese. Tickets for the latter event are $12 (children 12 and under are free) and are available at the door. Time: 7-9pm, Performance Hall at The Roundhouse Community Arts & Recreation Centre.
Michael Poole
The best-selling author reads from his new book, Rain Before Morning. Inspired by a real event it is a heart-rendering tale with an evocative northwest coast setting. For more information please contact Vancouver Public Library at 604-331-3603. Thursday, February 8 at 7:30 pm. Free. Peter Kaye Room, Lower Level Central Library 350 West Georgia Street.
After years of monarchist Upper Canada bluebloods doing their whole derivative British thing, it’s nice to see some Brits recycling Canadian ideas — in this case, recycling. The UK’s Independent recently ran a laudatory piece about Canada (and specifically B.C.’s Raincoast Books) — printing books on recycled paper.
“It is the country that gave the literary world Margaret Atwood and Carol Shields. Now it is at the vanguard of green publishing.” Pretty nice. Nicer still — if we stick to the conventional wisdom that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery — is the news that UK writers are following suit, including big names like “Helen Fielding, Philip Pullman and Ian Rankin” who “have signed up” to the effort.
The two novels posted on The Tyee were not flipped like hotcakes between computer screens across Canada. You’d think that (as in Bushes) and might have excited more imaginations. Hey, sex occured.
Now, however, Japan is embracing something even more unlikely — novels for cell phones. , they’re generally downloadable for about $10. One author, Chaco, has written five in the last 14 months, and one of them has sold one million copies.
In North America, at least audio books for iPods are taking off, as the last week. ’s George Murray, who as usual is ahead of The Tyee on all this news, notes that Canada’s is one good source of audio books content.
Two Tyee stories — Charles Demers’ “Will They Ever Stop ‘Hijacking’ Jesus?” and Deborah Campbell’s “What to Read While the Cradle of Civilization Burns” — were among the on the U.S.-based website Alternet. The Tyee shares stories with Alternet, which often picks up Tyee stories with an international slant.
Pro-Palestine activists in Toronto and Montreal have announced — and begun — a campaign to boycott Chapters/Indigo because of a foundation pioneered by majority owners Heather Reisman and Gerry Schwartz.
offers support such as scholarships to “lone soldiers” — foreign nationals without family in Israel who join the Israeli military. The Heseg website describes the ways in they work to ease former soliders into civilian life in Israel.
The leaflet handed out during the Christmas holidays at the campaign’s first picket, outside a Toronto Indigo location on Bloor street, states that Heseg foundation’s board of directors “is stacked with active and retired high level Israeli military personnel,” and goes on to state that by “rewarding and supporting Lone Soldiers who have served in the Israeli military, Reisman and Schwartz provide support for Israel’s military effort”. The leaflet is available from the website.
According to — who says he will now support Chapters/Indigo all the more, despite his anger of their refusal to sell the issue of Alberta’s ultra-conservative Western Standard that reprinted the infamous Danish cartoons — Chapters staff told him “a lie” when they claimed that “extra security” on site was meant to handle the busier holiday season, rather than the picket outside.
Anneli Rufus tours the hot genre of sex worker books and finds it compulsively sickening. Sarah Katherine Lewis’s memoir (Seal, 2006) “joins a string of new books about adult entertainers, along with Diablo Cody’s self-consciously comic (Gotham, 2006) and gender studies professor Bernadette Barton’s polemical (NYU, 2006).
The publishing industry is funny that way. Some honcho sniffs a trend in the air, word leaks out like blood at the beach, then boom: one year it’s all queer cowboys all the time. Or diets that let you eat lard. Right now it’s lap dancers.
“In this latter-day phase of stripper chic,” continues Rufus, “academics such as Barton churn out doctoral dissertations about peep shows and shimmering poles. Middle-class 20-something smarties write memoirs about ditching drone jobs in cafes and offices for ‘the penis gallery,’ to quote prep-school grad Cody, whose Pussy Ranch blog led to a six-figure advance for Candy Girl, and who is now a millionaire screenwriter working on a project with Steven Spielberg …”
“… Yeah, but the hate. These books are really less about sex than about loathing the customers. We see them depicted as groveling, foul-smelling, pathetic, perverted, laughable in their need and their loneliness. Cody mocks the ’standard model short, pink Minnesota dick,’ the glaze-eyed losers who ‘point dumbly’ and beg. Lewis, whose honesty makes hers the best in this trio, makes no bones about wanting to kill the men who ask her to help them ejaculate. “As I ran my hands over Steve’s spine, I imagined myself stabbing him in the back. For maximum damage I’d have to work the knife in between the bumps of his spinal column. … Fuck you is what I’m thinking. … Stabby stabby.”
Is this the new porn? asks Rufus. Or the death of feeling good about sex of any kind? Read her piece at Alternet .
So Judith Regan got hers. The publisher of Regan Books has been gassed by Rupert Murdoch’s HarperCollins following the withdrawal of her O.J. Simpson book If I Did It. But a U.S. National Book Critics Circle blog contributor .
“Often seen as a right-winger, Regan in fact was something other: someone who tweaked the culture wars to her own ends,” writes Art Winslow. “Lost amid the notoriety of the O.J. flap and publishing chaff such as Jenna Jameson’s How to Make Love Like a Porn Star is recognition of that: Regan’s imprint published Michael Moore and Ralph Nader as well as Dick Morris and Peggy Noonan; General Tommy Franks and Trent Lott but also Arianna Huffington and Xaviera Hollander. Are her hands bloodied? Sure. Is it unfair to tar her broad-brush? Yes. There’s a lot of joy in Mudville after this news, I’m sure, but is publishing really left any purer?”
National Post columnist Robert Fulford has weighed into the book reviewer conflict of interest fray with a resounding “Who gives a bookseller’s ass?” in
In response to the controversy at the Toronto Star, after a reviewer criticized a book by a publisher that had rejected his own book manuscript, Fulford recalled getting a conflict policy from the Los Angeles Times, and thinking: “How fair, how ethical, how pure — and how stupid!”
Fulford wonders what the “conflict police” would have thought of Edmund Wilson or H.L. Mencken, whose legendary criticism regularly crossed the ethical bounds being asserted today. Why no furore, Fulford wonders, about the issue of quality?
Of course, last week, some Canadian critics may be wearying of reviewing novels by people they’ve slept with.