Inside Jacket

The nominations for the 2011 BC Book Prizes have been announced. For the past eight years, AbeBooks has been a sponsor of the prizes, in the Hubert Evans Award for Non-fiction category.

This year’s non-fiction category looks particularly fascinating, including both Douglas Coupland (an author upon whom I have something of a literary crush) and John Vaillant (whose previous book, The Golden Spruce was fascinating – I can’t recommend it enough), as well as Morris Bates and Jim Brown, Sarah Leavitt and Derek Lundy.

Here’s the non-fiction:

• Morris Bates and Jim Brown, Morris as Elvis: Take a Chance on Life
• Douglas Coupland, Marshall McLuhan (Viking Canada)
• Sarah Leavitt, Tangles: A Story about Alzheimer’s, My Mother, and Me (Freehand Books)
• Derek Lundy, Borderlands: Riding the Edge of America (Knopf Canada)
• John Vaillant, The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival (Knopf Canada)

See all the Finalists

Coming soon: Penguin Classics in Arabic.

In the age of globalization, do national writers still exist?

“Smart people say very stupid things about Canadian poetry”: Michael Lista on the problem with literary critics and why growing poets is a lot like growing truffles.

A roundup of new books about higher education.

Beware the lush and lulling description: Ayelet Waldman on the dangers of “bore-geous” writing.

Five hundred years before the Internet, scholars worried about information overload. What can we learn from the Renaissance’s best indexers?

Christopher Hitchens’s search for the ultimate novel about Washington, D.C.

The Discovery Channel releases its first comic book, “Top 10 Deadliest Sharks.”

The Russian poet Bella Akhmadulina has died at the age of seventy-three.

Johanna Skibsrud’s debut novel The Sentimentalists won the Giller prize last night. In typical fashion the book has sold relatively few copies to this point and is expecting to see a giant spike after being named the Giller winner.

However there’s a little hiccup in the production process. The books publisher, Gaspereau Press, is a small press from Nova Scotia which specialize in hand crafted books, and even before the win they were having trouble keeping up with the shortlist demand.

According to The Guardian “Gaspereau printer and publisher Andrew Steeves described himself “printing jackets through the night” to have enough copies of the book available for readings at the International Festival of Authors in Toronto last weekend.” Now that Skibsrud has won Canada’s most prestigious prize the backlog is expected to grow.

In case you were wondering AbeBooks is out of copies at the time of my writing this post, however keep checking this link for copies, if one pops up you are going to have a beautiful book on your hands.

Lounging on a swanky rooftop patio the other day, dozens of beaming young people sipped complimentary cocktails and marveled about the nonstop hiring their company was doing—all of them excited and optimistic about the future. This was not your typical publishing-industry party.

I was playing fly on the wall at a company party thrown by Kobo, a.k.a. “The Kindle Killer.” Founded in Canada and now partially owned by Borders, Kobo is perhaps the scrappiest and most focussed player in the e-book war. Its online store has a vast and rapidly expanding catalogue of e-books that can be read on almost any mobile device (notable exception: the Kindle). And its own e-reader’s simplicity and affordability (it will reportedly be down to ninety-nine dollars in time for Christmas) has spawned a cult following. In Amazon’s rear-view mirror, Kobo is quickly gaining ground.

At the party, held at a trendy bar in downtown Toronto, a Koboite invited me to have a drink with him and some of his colleagues. They were all from the content side of the company, and I noted that everyone at their table was dressed like they might work in film or music.

“Doesn’t this company need techies to function?” I asked. “Where are all the nerds?”

“There,” the Koboite said. Across the patio, a group of people—almost all men, much less fashionably dressed, and possibly a little paler—were talking amongst themselves.

Later, I spoke to Michael Serbinis, Kobo’s forty-something C.E.O., who had been described to me by one of his devoted followers as a “visionary.” Indeed, Serbinis sounds like he might make a good prophet, or at the very least a good evangelical preacher. Most weeks he holds a raucous “Town Hall,” where he gets his staff fired up for the war they are waging, casting Kobo as David facing Amazon’s Goliath. Attendees report that his energy at the events is infectious.

“What we’re doing is the first major change in publishing in hundreds of years,” he told me. “Our device is a great marketing tool, but we’re first and foremost a content company, and you can take our content to any device you want. For us, it’s about escape, adventure, learning. It’s about the books.”

From a writer’s point of view, I noted, that was a rare bit of hopeful news.

“This is a monumental shift in how ideas and stories are spread,” he said. “This is an advance for humanity.”

Maybe. Or just a sunnier side of the publishing world.

When news emerged last month that Stieg Larsson’s fourth, unfinished book is set largely in Canada, the announcement forced some nagging worries—only incipient when I was reading the trilogy—to float prominently to the surface of my mind. The first three Larsson books feature sadists, dungeon torture chambers, serial murderers, gangster-murderers, murderers incapable of feeling pain, murderers killing under the guise of government jobs, and, well, you get it, a lot of killing. Yet all of this takes place—you know it by now, no doubt—in Sweden. Sweden, I thought? Larsson’s native land, of course, but I had to wonder whether there were more murders in each book than occurred in the notoriously neutral, progressively peace-loving country in an entire year. A little research revealed that this was not quite so—statistics vary, but there seem to be at least a hundred to two hundred per year, and the rate is rising slightly. Still, this is a country with fifteen times the population of DC and, at most, twice the murders. It would be hard not to notice the pattern left by a serial murderer, and pretty sensational if, among all the petty homicides, domestic disputes, and robberies gone wrong, there were many creepy sadists in the mix.

And then to move to Canada, which has an even lower murder rate? It’s as if Larsson were searching out the most laughably infertile ground for killings he could.

As is often the case in a Larsson book, however, looking into one mystery produced another, a sequel so to speak. Many believe that Larsson, who died of a heart attack at age fifty, was murdered for his far-left politics, as if the long arm of his fiction had reached out to enter his life. And maybe it has. My research began to turn up aspects of Larsson’s biography that sounded oddly fictional, first among them that Larsson has a Paul-Austerian doppelganger—a twin more appropriate to postmodern crime fiction than Larsson’s narratives. I know it’s the influence of too many dark books and horrific climaxes but, when I read the mirroring description of the two Larssons—and their parallel lives—on Wikipedia, a small chill went through me, and my mind was off and running with strange conspiracy theories of its own:

Larsson’s first name originally was Stig which is the standard spelling. In his early twenties, he changed it to avoid confusion with his friend Stig Larsson, who would go on to become a well-known author well before Stieg did. At the time, they were amateur photographers and it was in this capacity that they wished to prevent any misunderstanding; neither had yet published a book. Stieg Larsson, in later years, would tell the story that the two men had tossed a coin to decide who was to change his name, but this is disputed by Stig Larsson. The pronunciation is the same regardless of spelling.

(“Sweden Map 2,” by Juliee3 , via Flickr.)