I’ve just spent the past couple of hours engaging with the latest issue of CNQ magazine (83). It’s so good I may have to marry it. Editor Alex Good is to be commended. He has commissioned a superb selection of articles that collectively hit, bitch about, elucidate, lament, gripe, grapple with and analyse pretty well every topic worth discussing -  or at least knowing about – re today’s Canadian literary scene.

The future of bookstores, the impact of e-books, the state of book reviewing, Ken Babstock’s latest collection of extremely irritating poems, dumbed-down post secondary education, the birth and possible death of CanLit,  the Giller prize (of course), government funding cuts and priorities, and the miserable condition of Libraries and Archives Canada…

Despite its generally disconsolate tenor, the content of this 83rd edition of the magazine is meaty and heartily satisfying. Rare you might say, in this uncultured climate of ours. Eat it up. 

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George Woodcock, Canadian author, critic, anarchist.

2012 marks the centenary of these literary events:

 New books:

 Births

•       Nikiforos Vrettakos  Greek writer, poet
•       George Woodcock  Canadian poet, biographer, academic, anarchist
•       John Enoch Powell, Poet and MP  
•       Northrop Frye, Canadian critic
•        F. T. Prince  South African British poet and academic
•       John Jefferson Bray  Australian writer
•       Barbara Tuchman, American historian  
•       Roy Fuller English poet/novelist  
•       Lawrence Durrell, British poet and novelist   
•       May Sarton, American writer  
•       John Cheever, American writer 
  
•       John Toland,  British  historian and biographer  
•       Eugène Ionesco, Italian playwright  

    Deaths

•       Harry Elkin Widener Bibliophile, (b. 1885) drowned on the titanic
•       Bram Stoker, author (b. 1847)
•       August Strindberg, dramatist (b. 1849)
•      Andrew Lang, poet, novelist and critic (b. 1844)

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2005 Documentary film on George Whitman and Shakespeare and Company, the bookstore/commune he re-established in Paris in 1951

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Canada Council: Photo: Danny Palmerlee

Patrick deWitt was born on Vancouver Island in 1975. He has also lived in California, Washington, and Oregon, where he currently lives with his wife and son. He is the author of two novels, Ablutions and The Sisters Brothers, which recently won Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Award for fiction. Here’s how the jury described it: "Brothers Eli and Charlie Sisters are at the centre of this “great greedy heart” of a book. A rollicking tale of hired guns, faithful horses and alchemy. The ingenious prose of Patrick DeWitt conveys a dark and gentle touch."

I met recently with Patrick in Ottawa to discuss his award winning novel. Please listen here as we talk, among other things, about mannered language, the Coen Brothers,  Charles Portis, horses, psychopaths, masturbation, arts funding and being Canadian.

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Photo: Canada Council.

I met recently with Phil Hall, whose latest collection of poems, Killdeer, has just won the Canadian Governor General’s Literary Award for English Poetry. It’s a sensitive, engaging, revealing work that incorporates narrative essay, life philiosophy and literary criticism into its stanzas. In sharp contrast to  the arrogant, impenetrable and solipsistic, Hall’s poetry is humbly presented, accessible, beautiful, pastoral, reflective and at times profound. Listen here as we talk about brown speckled eggs and fiddle tunes, imbalance and literary prize juries, lying, distraction, pain, what’s important, plus theatre and spectacle,  truth and doubt.

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More videos at The Guardian.

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