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Nino Ricci’s first novel, the best-selling Lives of the Saints, won international acclaim and a host of awards, including, in Canada, the Governor General’s Award for Fiction and the Books in Canada First Novel Award, and in England, the Betty Trask Award and the Winifred Holtby Prize.  It was followed by In A Glass House and Where She Has Gone, which completed the trilogy that Lives of the Saints began, Testament, co-winner of the Trillium Award, and, The Origin of Species which won Ricci his second Governor General’s Award.

Born in Leamington, Ontario, to parents from the Molise region of Italy, he completed studies at York University in Toronto, at Concordia University in Montreal, and at the University of Florence, and has taught both in Canada and abroad.  We met recently at the Blue Met Writers Festival in Montreal to talk about his most recent work: a brief biography of Pierre Trudeau for Penguin’s Extraordinary Canadians series.

Topics covered include the Italian Canadian attachment to Trudeau and the Liberals, immigration, gun slingers, alluring leadership qualities, fear of failure, media strategies, bilingualism’s mixed legacy, the Charter, budget deficits, the pride of being Canadian, and philosopher-kings.

Please listen here:

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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Speaking last week at Oxford’s Sheldonian Theatre J.M. Coetzee said that “those hoping to find the historical record tallying with the fictional record will be disappointed”, adding that he “played fast and loose with the historical record”. Summertime, the third in his fictious autobiographical series after Boyhood and Youth, takes the form of a series of interviews with people from Coetzee’s life carried out after Coetzee’s death. "The surprise for those in the audience was how much of a showman Coetzee emerged as, when reading his own work, inserting moments of broad comedy into his performance that had the audience rocking with laughter. It was an incongruous moment: fellow South African writer Rian Malan claimed a colleague of Coetzee’s once testified that in a decade of working together, he had seen him laugh just once."

(via Maud.) 

Speaking of lightening up, I’ve noticed that J.M. is these daysblurbing more books then ever before. 

Escher, Puddle, 1952 via wood s lot

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Good summary of James Wood’s criticism, and an email interview during which he addresses his critics by Nathan Ihara at the L.A. Weekly. Some points of interest:

On Realism

“Ibsen is no playwright,” Chekhov was heard to complain. “In life, it simply isn’t like that.” It’s still a radical statement, 100 years later, because it implies that form is always trying to catch up with the formlessness of life. And it doesn’t matter what form you have in mind (Chekhov clearly meant that the well-made Ibsen play, with its slightly didactic, big theme, made life too tidy). The writer’s job is to keep breaking the forms, and a realist writer may do this as profoundly as an antirealist writer (Naipaul might be an example of the former, Saramago the latter).

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• A few quick notes on what he said:
  
  
• ‘How much cheaper will the Kindle DX make university text books? ‘Substantially’ is all we get at this point. First though, you need to buy one for $489  – which includes a 3G wireless radio ($359 for the regular Kindle).
• Kindle ebooks are designed to work on iphones and other platforms, devices. With 9.99 price point for all books sold on Kindle. 
• Bezos prefers to keep book selling and device selling businesses separate. 300,000 titles now available on Kindle. Adoption rate has been high.
• ‘We humans do whatever is easiest.’ ‘We change our tools our tools change us.’ You can buy a book 60 seconds after hearing about it.

Property taxes are cited most often by the booksellers I’ve talked to as reason enough to close down their bricks and mortar operations. Scott points to another.

Over the weekend I noted the immeasurably sad news that Black Oak Books has become the latest Berkeley institution to be killed by Bush’s economy.

…as Black Oak owner Gary Cornell notes:

Cornell said the final blow came when California decided not to tax Amazon sales. New York recently passed a law that taxes book sales on Amazon.com, and a similar bill was introduced in the California Legislature, but it failed.

“That was the final kiss of death,” he said. “People would come in and browse. A lot of them were buying or not buying from us, but on Amazon books were heavily discounted, and it saved them another 10 percent in sales tax.”

It’s of course entirely ridiculous that Amazon would be taxed in a state like New York and not in California. It makes even less sense when you consider that California is in a sea of debt right now, yet it chooses not to tax online businesses like Amazon, which in large part are killing the bricks-and-mortar, tax-paying businesses still operating in California.

The rapid disappearance of unique places in which to browse, touch, talk about and buy books, is deeply troubling.  This is why I’m intent

on capturing

the ones we have left before they all close

down.

If you share my concern, change your buying habits.  Instead of just telling everyone how much you love these places, open your wallet and actually patronize local independent bookstores, new and used.Or be prepared to lose them.