Madeleine Thien(M) hit the news this month in relation to the Amazon.ca First Novel Award. Ms Thien resigned as a juror for the award in protest of how the award misrepresented the jurors’ role. For full details, see her erudite opinion piece On Transparency in the National Post. ~~~ Creating loads of canlit buzz is Toronto novelist Shelia Heti’s inclusion on the long list for the UK’s prestigious Women’s Prize for Fiction (formerly the Orange Prize). How Should a Person Be? (M) by Shelia Heti “In this innovative novel, Heti invites her readers to share one woman’s intensive pursuit of meaning and purpose in life. Through Sheila, who’s obsessed with self-reflection, we witness the raw and sometimes painful experience of searching for the truth of one’s soul. Sheila is recently divorced, and her friendships, particularly that with painter Margaux, are central to this quest for self-realization; she relies on the desires and expectations of others to determine her own worth. Interestingly, for a somewhat confused character working through the process of self-discovery, Sheila is capable of relaying sharp insights into human nature and complex emotion.”- Library Journal ~~~ Douglas Glover’s new book on writing, Attack of the Copula Spiders: and other essays on writing(M) has created quite a buzz of discussion among writers around the world. A blog post gone viral by jpon of The Los Angeles Review highlighted Glover’s ideas to the larger literary world in a blog post titled “The Case of the Copula Overdose, or, Why I’ll Never Write (or Read) the Same Way Again.“
