Showing posts with label Boyagoda. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Boyagoda. Show all posts

08 January 2024

Canadian Notes & Queries at 114, Véhicule Press at 50, and a Few Favourite Forthcoming Things



A few days into the year and already a new issue of Canadian Notes & Queries. This one – number 114! – features writing by:
Noelle Allen
Tamara Faith Berger
Brian Bethune
Mark Bourrie
Randy Boyagoda
Kate Cayley
Steacy Easton
Alex Good
Brett Josef Grubisic
Canista Lubrin
Ian McGillis
Emily Mernin
John Metcalf
Vanessa Stauffer

As always, the cover is by Seth.

I contribute 'Véhicule Press at Fifty,' an interview with publishers Simon Dardick and Nancy Marrelli. Together we discuss the history and future of the press through ten key titles, beginning with the very first: Bob McGee's Three Sonnets & Fast Drawings

Subscribers also receive the latest issue – number 5! –of The Bibliophile. Just look at the goodness it offers:


So, why not subscribe!

Here's the link.

26 December 2021

The Very Best Reads of the Second Plague Year


This annus horribilis draws to a close – thank God – meaning the time has come to recap the last twelve months of reading old books. I tackled a bunch, twenty-one of which were reviewed here and in the pages of Canadian Notes & Queries. I'm counting Arthur Stringer's 1936 novel The Wife Traders and its British reworking, Tooloona, as two.

Fight me.

They're two different books... and having slogged my way through both, I've earned it.

Stringer proved to be this year's most read author, though I'm at a loss to explain why. I read four books by this son of Chatham, which is more than the previous seven years combined. The majority were pretty awful, but one made it onto my annual list of the three out-of-print reads most deserving a return to print:

Ted Allan
Toronto: McClelland &
   Stewart, 1977

Forget The Scalpel, the Sword,  this is the Ted Allan book you want to read. And yes, I'll again point out the wonderful Quentin Blake illustrations.

Get it while you can, then share it with the children in your life.

The Shadow
Arthur Stringer
New York: Century, 1913


Better known under the later (superior) title Never-Fail Blake, this story of one man's relentless drive to bring another to justice was one of Stringer's most reprinted thrillers. Today, it is all but forgotten. It doesn't deserve that fate.


Poldrate Street
Garnett Weston
New York: Messner, 1944


This was the second Weston novel read this past summer. Where the first, The Legacy of Fear, disappointed, Poldrate Street entertained as the year's most unpleasant, stomach-turning read. Voyeurism, adultery, greed, murder, and something approaching necrophilia figure. No disappointment here!


Three of the books I reviewed this year are currently in print:

Dear Departed stands out as a relatively new book. The first true collection of Brian Moore short stories, it features writing that originally appeared between 1956 and 1961. Dear Departed was published just last year by Belfast's Turnpike Books, but went almost unnoticed in the author's adopted land. The only review I've seen or heard is Randy Boyagoda's on The Next Chapter

Having been elevated in 2012, Grant Allen's An African Millionaire (1897) holds certain distinction as a Penguin Classic. Much as I like the novel, I wonder why. The Woman Who Did is a much better, more interesting, more enduring, and more culturally significant work.

Never mind.

Give An African Millionaire a read, but if you want Allen at his best I recommend The Woman Who DidThe Devil's DieFor Mamie's Sake, Michael's Crag, Under Sealed Orders, Hilda Wade, What's Bred in the Bone or The British Barbarians.

Brash Books is in the process of returning every Tom Ardies novel to print. The author's second, This Suitcase is Going to Explode (1972) has the defeated hero of the first, Charlie Sparrow, pick himself up to save us all. The third and final Sparrow novel is titled Pandemic (1973), in which he saves us from same.

 At least, I think he does.

Praise this year goes again to Stark House (first recognized in 2012) for its continued dedication to the work of Douglas Sanderson (aka Martin Brett, aka Malcolm Douglas). This year, the publisher put one foot outside its usual crime territory in publishing Dark Passions Subdue, which I reviewed here ten years ago. Sanderson's debut novel, it concerns a male McGill student's attraction to another man.

Dark Passions Subdue was first published in 1952 by Dodd, Mead. The next year, Avon brought it out as a mass market paperback. The McGill University Library does not have a copy of either edition. Now's its chance.

I was involved in the reissue of only one novel this year. Due to production matters, it's been pushed into next. Here's something to look forward to in the New Year:

Resolutions? I have a few:
  • I will focus more on francophone writers;
  • I will review more non-fiction;
  • I will keep kicking against the pricks.
Here's to a better New Year!

Bonne année!

Related posts:

The Very Best Reads of a Plague Year (2020)
The Very Best Reads of a Very Strange Year (2019)
Best Books of 2018 (none of which are from 2018)
The Year's Best Books in Review - A.D. 2017
The Year's Best Books in Review - A.D. 2016
The Year's Best Books in Review - A.D. 2015
The Christmas Offering of Books - 1914 and 2014
A Last Minute Gift Slogan, "Give Books" (2013)
Grumbles About Gumble & Praise for Stark House (2012)
The Highest Compliments of the Season (2011)
A 75-Year-Old Virgin and Others I Acquired (2010)
Books are Best (2009)

Arthur Stringer Unshackled (then bowdlerized)
Little Willie, Willie Won't Go Home
A Shadow Moves Through a Showy Underworld
The Dead of a Dead End Street
Fumbling Towards Legacy
Shorter Moore
Starting on on Grant Allen: A Top Ten
Getting to Know The Woman Who Did
A Nineteenth Century What's Bred in the Bone
Grant Allen Tells Us Like It Is
Criminal Notes & Queries
Have Bomb – Will Travel
The Jacket, the Dressing Gown and the Closet

14 December 2020

The Dusty Bookcase Christmas Gift List



A trying year all around, right? The Westons have been making out like bandits while we've been obsessing over our PC Optimum points balances. If any good has come out of this pandemic, it's found in communities coming together. Our family isn't alone in choosing to buy our meat, eggs, fruits, vegetables, jams, and honey directly from local farmers.

Take that, Galen Weston!

While we have no local book publishers in Merrickville, Ontario, our household has become even more focussed in spending its money on titles published by Canadian houses. And so, for the first time in Dusty Bookcase history, I present a list of Christmas gift recommendations, beginning with limited editions offered by Biblioasis. The pride of Windsor, the publisher has this year been offering attractive  numbered and signed hardcovers of some of its most recent titles.


I took out a subscription myself, and then found myself spoiled by all sorts of additional treats, like this collection of Indie Bookseller Trading Cards.

No fool I, my package of cards remains unopened. Imagine how much it'll be worth in 2040!

The most recent limited edition, Jason Gruriel's Forgotten Words, was accompanied by advance reader's copies of Randy Boyagoda's Original Prin and Rain and Other Stories by Mia Couto. Also included was this brilliant chapbook:

Take that, Jeff Bezos!

Give a loved one a subscription, if you can. If you've got more or less to spare, the rest of this inaugural Dusty Bookcase Christmas Gift List is as follows:


They Have Bodies
Barney Allen
Ottawa: University of
   Ottawa Press

The literary debut by a novelist I've suggested is Canada's strangest. First published by Macaulay in 1929, I'd been on the hunt for an affordable copy for years. At $29.95, this reissue is a steal. Gregory Betts' informative introduction and notes made me feel I'd really got away with something.

Swallowed [L’Avalée des
   avalés]
Réjean Ducharme [trans
   Madeleine Stratford]
Montreal: Véhicule

L’Avalée des avalés was taught in my Québecoise wife's high school, but not mine; this anglo-Montrealer was well into his thirties before he'd so much as heard of it. The greatest French Canadian novel of the 'sixties is here in the hands of one of our most talented translators.

Hearing More Voices:
   English-Canadian
   Women in Print and on
   the Air, 1914-1960
Peggy Lynn Kelly & Carole
   Gerson
Ottawa: Tecumseh

A study of unjustly neglected English Canadian women novelists, short story writers, humorists, historians, journalists, and broadcasters, including Dusty Bookcase favourites Edna Jaques and Isabel Ecclestone Mackay.
The Complete Adventures
   of Jimmie Dale, Volume
   Two
Frank L. Packard
[np: Michael Howard]


The second in Michael Howard's series of annotated Gray Seal adventures, this volume covers The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale and Jimmie Dale and the Phantom Clue. It all leads me to wonder why the Gray Seal hasn't made it to television. Walt Disney would agree.

17 January 2019

A Novel Every Bit as Good as Its Title



The Fiftieth Anniversary Issue of Canadian Notes & Queries arrived in my mailbox this week. I should've received it last month. I blame Deepak Chopra – not the Ageless Body Timeless Mind Deepak Chopra, this one.

Being the Fiftieth Anniversary Issue, much of the focus is on books from 1968:
Les Manuscrits de Pauline Archange - Marie-Claire Blais
Sarah Bastard's Notebook - Marian Engel
I Am Mary Dunne - Brian Moore
The Shattered Plinths - Irving Layton
John Metcalf writes on the short story "Images" from Dance of the Happy Shades, Alice Munro's debut. Not to be outdone, I chose to review A Lover More Condoling, the first novel by then-Take 30 co-host Adrienne Clarkson. Despite her fame, it enjoyed one lone printing, and never appeared in paperback. As I note in my review, the novel isn't so much as mentioned in Heart Matters, Clarkson's 2006 memoir.


Might A Lover More Condoling be a forgotten treasure? Not wanting to spoil things, I'll say only that it has the most memorable sex scene I've read since Donna Steinberg's I Lost it All in Montreal.

Other contributors include:
Randy Boyagoda
Andreae Callanan
Scott Chantler
Paige Cooper
Trevor Corkum
Kayla Czaga
Rachel Décoste
Daniel Donaldson
Antony Easton
Jesse Eckerlin
André Forget
Stephen Fowler
Alex Good
James Grainger
Benjamin Hertwig
Doyali Islam
Tasneem Jamal
Anita Lehey
Sibyl Lamb
Tracey Lindberg
Rabindranath Maharaj
Rohan Maitzen
David Mason
Patricia Robertson
Mary H. Aurbach Rykov
Seth
JC Sutcliffe
Vit Wagner
Bruce Whiteman
Martha Wilson
The fifty-first year sees CNQ striking out in a new direction. "We decided a radical expansion of our reviewer estate was necessary given ever-shrinking critical space the nation's newspapers, online journals, and periodicals," writes editor Emily Donaldson.


And so, we have the very first CNQ book review supplement, with contributions by:
Michael Barrett
Michel Basilières
Stephen Beattie
Jeremiah Bertram
Jeff Bursey
Kerry Clare
Allison Gillmor
Monique Giroux
Alex Good
Brett Joseph Grubisic
Stephen Henighan
Amanda Jernigan
Tess Liem
Domenica Martinello
Dilia Narduzzi
Ruprapriya Rathmore
Mark Sampson
Sarah Tolmie
Jonathan Valelly
Derek Webster
Jared Young
If you haven't already, now seems just the time to become a subscriber... easily done through this link.

The Canada Post carrier who delivered this magazine to our rural mailbox chose not to fold it.

She is not paid enough.

Related posts: