On My Bookshelf – the MAGs edition!

ON MY BOOKSHELF asks QWF authors what they're reading, perusing, consulting, reconsidering.

In this special Q&A edition, Arjun Basu, former editor-in-chief of the award-winning enRoute, talks magazines.
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ARJUN BASU

Q. Which mags do you read regularly (specify print or online)?

How long do you have? I must admit something right here: social media has really cut into my magazine consumption. And magazines had cut into my TV viewing. I’m like the poster child for the “problems with print,” albeit in a well-read package.

Regularly?

Print: The Economist. Esquire. National Geographic. Details. Geist. Saveur.

Online: The Daily Beast. Huffington Post. Lost at E Minor.

I used to read, almost always, something called Retail Traffic. I would often tell people it was my favorite magazine and for a few years it was. It’s a trade magazine for shopping mall developers. It was a fascinating look into the retail trends to come. And then they changed editors and it became a business magazine. And I lost interest. But looking back, I realize now that its change to a business magazine kind of presaged the economic collapse we saw last year. So it was still a trend magazine in the end, I just didn’t see it.

Q. Which, if any, magazines do you have paid subscriptions to?

One: National Geographic. My father used to get it and now I do. For whatever reason, it’s important to me. Over the years, I’ve let subscriptions lapse for most every magazine except NatGeo. We all love our subscriptions but the current collapse in magazine advertising has shown what happens when publications practically give their product away. They devalue it. Readers became just a way to sell to advertisers. So you have all these magazines beloved by readers, with growing circulations, but falling ads and they have to stop the business. Gourmet is, I think, the perfect example of that phenomenon.

Q. What about work -- do you have access to magazines there? Who decided which ones the office will receive?

My work space is full of magazines. I’m lucky that way.

Q. Which mags do you love to browse through at stores, in the check-out line, but would never buy?

In the stores I usually go through design and food magazines. I love looking through Australian food magazines. For a number of years, they really were the best magazines in the world. I love design magazines from France. There’s a city magazine for Nice that is just gorgeous. I like browsing through the British Esquire as well.

Q. Can you name some of the odder magazines you've browsed through, for lack of choice or out of curiosity, in a waiting room?

I love waiting room magazines. Doctor magazines are fascinating. It’s where I read old issues of celebrity magazines, like People and US and Hello! I suppose Retail Traffic is the oddest magazine I’ve ever loved. But, honestly, it was a fantastic and fascinating publication.

Q. What are your guilty pleasure mags?

Women’s fashion magazines, the glossier the better. I can’t put them down.

Q. Any mags favored for the toilet?

Um...literary pubs. Honestly. I read literary magazines in the toilet. National Geographic is always good. Same with Harper’s.

Q. I think you emailed from a BlackBerry -- do you read online mags on it? If so, how do you like it?

I don’t like reading magazines on my phone. I can read the New York Times but not a magazine. I’m a bit old fashioned in that I still see the magazine as a sensual experience. A magazine needs to be held to be appreciated. Perhaps that’s not the best business model moving forward, but I still believe in magazines. I think they will survive and even thrive but they will become a kind of niche product. Or more niche than what they are now. I mean, we’re bemoaning the loss of Gourmet but it had 800,000 readers in the US. That means over 300 million people weren’t reading it.


ARJUN BASU was born and raised in Montreal. He is the author of Squishy, a short story collection. His stories have also appeared in publications such as Matrix, The Moosehead Anthology and in AWOL: Tales for Travel Inspired Minds. He was editor-in-chief of enRoute Magazine from 2001 to 2007.


DC Books

Author photo: Jane Heller

RECENTLY LAUNCHED!

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Aislin's Shenanigans
... and other recent cartoons
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Aislin is "wickedly funny with a king-sized heart. How does this guy always manage to get it right?" Douglas Coupland

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Whether it be unresolved wars, the daily chicanery of Canadian politics or even Michelle Obama touching the Queen, the world is a place filled with enough daily shenanigans to keep cartoonist Aislin very busy. This is a collection of Aislin’s favourite political and social cartoons and travel sketches from the past three years.

AISLIN is Terry Mosher’s nom de plume as the editorial page cartoonist for The Montreal Gazette, where he has worked since 1972. He has produced 40 books, either collections of his own works or books he has illustrated. Mosher also wrote, with journalist Peter Desbarats, The Hecklers, a history of political cartooning in Canada, published in 1980. The recipient of many awards, Terry was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2003.

http://www.ailsin.com/

McArthur and Company Publishing

Joan & Goodridge:
My Life with Goodridge Roberts
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When the author met Goodridge Roberts (1904-1974), he was 48 years old and she was thirty. Roberts, part of a celebrated Canadian literary family, was earning recognition as an important Canadian artist. In this heartfelt memoir Joan Roberts describes in a forthright way how they came together and the realities of her life as wife and partner to a man committed to his art, while she practiced her own career as a social worker – at the time a fledgling profession. She describes their life in the intellectual circles of Montreal in the forties and fifties among friends who were artists, journalists, writers, social workers and academics. She discusses her husband’s long and difficult struggle with depression at a time when such things were not openly acknowledged. Roberts also provides fascinating insights and reflections on the long- term relationship between the artist and the Dominion Gallery, and its tumultuous rupture.

Includes 24 b&w archival photographs and 8 full-colour reproductions of seldom-seen Goodridge Roberts paintings from the author’s private collection. His paintings are in public and private collections across Canada. In 1952 Roberts’ work was chosen, together with that of David Milne, Emily Carr, and Alfred Pellan, for Canada’s first exhibition at the Venice Biennale.

Joan Roberts is a former social worker. She lives in Montreal, Quebec.

Vehicule Press

Science, Sense and Nonsense
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"There is a vivacity in pure science that somehow gets lost… Schwarcz is doing his part to bring the joie de vivre back." Kansas City Star
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Dr. Joe's new collection of commentaries will inspire an appreciation for the science of everyday life, and equip you to spot the muddled thinking, misunderstandings and deceptions in media stories and advertising claims. Does organic food really always equal better food? Are vaccines dangerous? Will the latest health fad make you ill? Do expensive wrinkle creams do the job? What are the best ways to avoid cancer? The answers to such questions often lie in an understanding of the chemistry involved. Ask Dr. Joe.

Science, Sense and Nonsense celebrates chemistry's great achievements, lambastes its charlatans, and explores its essential connections to our wellbeing. And does so in authoritative, highly readable, good humoured style.

DR. JOE SCHWARCZ is director of McGill University's Office for Science and Society, where he teaches courses on nutrition, health, and the applications of chemistry to everyday life. Among his many honours are the Royal Society of Canada's McNeil Award, and the American Chemical Society's renowned Grady-Stack Award, of which he is the only non-American recipient. Dr. Schwarcz is the host of a weekly radio show on CJAD in Montreal and CFRB in Toronto and writes a weekly column for The Montreal Gazette. He is the author of a number of bestselling books.

Random House

Russia:
Forward to the Past

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Russia: Forward to the Past captures Russia’s new face and vision under the leadership of Vladimir Putin as it enters the 21st century. It is a companion volume and logical sequel to Pruska-Carroll’s popular Russia Between Yesterday and Tomorrow that revealed the battered and confused Russia of the 1990s.

Pruska-Carroll provides an intimate look of the key elements of Russian society, post 2000, as well as its underside, with an intimacy not available to most observers. Her fluent Russian and knowledge of the country provide us with a unique report on the state of Russian society: the generation gap, the search for a new identity amidst the old icons, and the new paths that Russia is taking.

MARIKA PRUSKA-CARROLL teaches Russian and Eastern European politics at Concordia University. She is the author of Russia Between Yesterday and Tomorrow. She lives in Montreal, Quebec.

Vehicule Press

The Writing Room

In this special edition of The Writing Room, Denise Roig, the author of Butter Cream: A Year in a Montreal Pastry School, takes us into a different creative space...her kitchen in Abu Dhabi.

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Denise Roig

I don’t actually write here, other than notes like: whisk in 60 grams of corn starch; remember to add vanilla. But my kitchen in Abu Dhabi (UAE), where I’ve been living for the past year, is probably as much my “lab” as my office.

When I first saw the space where I would be baking, testing, washing and thinking (at least for the foreseeable future), I was stunned. It was the largest kitchen I’ve ever worked in, with granite counters on three sides and ample, dark-wood cabinets. It was sparkly new. No one had even fried an egg here. Then I noticed there wasn’t a window: only a small pane of glass that looked over a dark shaft of some sort. But no light. No more lilac-framed views of the St. Lawrence River as I beat egg whites or melt chocolate.

I live in the desert now (I almost wrote dessert, a baker’s slip), in the richest city in the world and one of the poorest in human rights. There’s no window in the kitchen because a kitchen is for a maid and what does a maid need a window for?

I write food stories for The National, the new English newspaper that brought us here. I cover my lovely granite counters with sheets of phyllo, sticky them with rose-water syrup, spatter them with bits of falafel batter or black lentils. The place smells like Beirut meets Mumbai. These aren’t the only stories stewing in my head as I cook and bake. Right now there’s an ex-pat woman about to rescue a Filipina maid from two Egyptian families. That’s fiction, and that waits for me down the hall in my other office. Once the dishes are done.

DENISE ROIG is the author of Butter Cream: A Year in a Montreal Pastry School and two collections of short stories, A Quiet Night and a Perfect End and Any Day Now, which was short-listed for the 2005 QWF fiction award. She co-edited the anthologies Future Tense and The Urban Wanderers Reader. She is currently working on a new collection of stories.

LAUNCHED!

Here’s a look at recent fiction & non-fiction by Quebec authors:
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The Mountain Clinic
Nominated for the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction

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The Mountain Clinic traces the life of Walter Schwende, a Scarborough boy who seeks out his past in travel. He lives with Czech refugees in a Vancouver rooming-house, then works in a northern mining town, later settling on a Nicaraguan coffee farm. He ends up as a college teacher in Montreal, where he tries to imagine what life in his family’s native home of Austria might have been like. This becomes an obsession that finally takes him back to Europe.

HAROLD HOEFLE’s work has been published in The Antigonish Review, Exile, Front&Centre, Grain, Kiss Machine, Matrix, The Windsor Review and Telling Stories (New English Stories from Québec), as well as in Cutting, a four-story chapbook. Hoefle’s non-fiction received an Honourable Mention at the 2006 National Magazine Awards. The Mountain Clinic is his first book.

Oberon Press

The Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy

Nominated for the Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-Fiction

“We bear responsibility for what governments do in the world, primarily our own, but secondarily those we can influence, our allies in particular. Yves Engler’s penetrating inquiry yields a rich trove of valuable evidence about Canada’s role in the world, and poses a challenge for citizens who are willing to take their fundamental responsibilities seriously.” Noam Chomsky

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This book could change how you see Canada. Most of us believe this country’s primary role has been as peacekeeper or honest broker in difficult-to-solve disputes. But, contrary to the mythology of Canada as a force for good in the world, The Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy sheds light on many dark corners: from troops that joined the British in Sudan in 1885 to gunboat diplomacy in the Caribbean and aspirations of Central American empire, to participation in the U.N. mission that killed Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, to important support for apartheid South Africa, Zionism and the U.S. war in Vietnam, to helping overthrow Salvador Allende and supporting the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, to Haiti, Iraq and Afghanistan today.

Former Vice President of the Concordia Student Union, YVES ENGLER is a Montréal activist and author. He has published three books, The Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy, Playing Left Wing: From Rink Rat to Student Radical and (with Anthony Fenton) Canada in Haiti: Waging War on The Poor Majority.

Fernwood Publishing

Objects of Worship

“These stories are terrifically creepy. And not unlike Edgar Allan Poe or Potted Meat Product, they gave me the willies.” Christopher Moore

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Twelve strange, eerie, sensual stories by a bold new voice in weird fiction. Capricious gods rule a world of women. Zombies breed human cattle. The son of a superhero must decide between his heritage and his religion. Young lovers worship a primordial spider god. The apocalyptic rebirth of the god of the elephants. Monstrous chimeras roam through a devastated future Earth. A retired fisherman caught in the middle of a conflict between gods and superheroes. Teenagers struggle to survive a surreal ice age . . .

CLAUDE LALUMIÈRE has edited eight anthologies, including the Aurora Award finalist Tesseracts Twelve: New Novellas of Canadian Fantastic Fiction. He is the Fantastic Fiction columnist for The Montreal Gazette. In the 1990s, Claude owned and managed two Montreal bookshops, danger! and Nebula. He is also the co-creator of Lost Myths with Rupert Bottenberg.

Lost Myths
ChiZine Publications

The Brutal Telling
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“Brilliant!” The Daily Mirror (UK)

---Chaos is coming, old son.

With those words the peace of Three Pines is shattered. As families prepare to head back to the city and children say goodbye to summer, a stranger is found murdered in the village bistro and antiques store. Once again, Chief Inspector Gamache and his team are called in to strip back layers of lies, exposing both treasures and rancid secrets buried in the wilderness.

No one admits to knowing the murdered man, but as secrets are revealed, chaos begins to close in on the beloved bistro owner, Olivier. How did he make such a spectacular success of his business? What past did he leave behind and why has he buried himself in this tiny village? And why does every lead in the investigation find its way back to him?

As Olivier grows more frantic, a trail of clues and treasures – from first editions of Charlotte’s Web and Jane Eyre to a spider web with the word “WOE” woven in it – lead the Chief Inspector deep into the woods and across the continent in search of the truth, and finally back to Three Pines as the little village braces for the truth and the final, brutal telling.

LOUISE PENNY is a former award-winning journalist with CBC radio. This is the third mystery in her award-winning Inspector Gamache series.

louisepenny.com

The Writing Room

Brian Campbell

Here is my favourite creation space, where I’ve drafted a great many poems: the kitchen table in my Mile End apartment. Warm and inviting, with lots of natural light, it’s arguably the best spot to write in the house. We have a shelf of plants under the window; on the table, a pot of flowers. Pretty well every week we buy a bouquet; this was not contrived for the photo.

Like most writers nowadays, I work on a laptop, which I find far more comfortable than handwriting. It’s opened to a blank page of Word, which I face many a morning.

The poetry in my latest collection, Passenger Flight, came after I decided to kick start myself by doing automatic handwriting (rather, laptop writing). My idea was to extract the strongest imagery – raw patches of psychic landscape – and create poems out of it. But to my surprise, whole prose poems came quite fully formed, although of course a lot of drafts and fine tunings followed.

After I’ve worked on them in the kitchen, I transfer my poems to a floppy disk (this laptop is old; it doesn’t take memory sticks), then to a PC in my cluttered home office. There I print out and refine further, do submissions, blog, assemble manuscripts, etc.

By the way, this kitchen also features prominently in a reading from Passenger Flight in this video.

My next collection, which I’m working on now, is tentatively titled, You Told Me to Write a Love Poem.

Montreal-based poet, singer-songwriter, editor and translator BRIAN CAMPBELL is the author of Passenger Flight (Signature Editions), Guatemala and Other Poems and Undressing the Night, a translation of the selected poems of Nicaraguan-Canadian poet Francisco Santos. Published widely, his poetry was shortlisted for the 2006 CBC Literary Awards.

www.briancampbell.org

LAUNCHED!

Here’s a look at recent poetry books by Quebec authors:

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Pause for Breath

“So assured and musical is the hand that shaped them that these poems tend to memorize themselves, as though they had always formed part of our experience.” Eric Ormsby

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Look beyond the everyday meaning of the title phrase, and hear a summing-up of life itself: one day we come into the world, one day we leave it again – and what is the time between, what is our whole span on earth, if not a pause for “breath”?

Diverse in subject, style and mood and rich in contrasts – from the public and collective to the personal and private, from the lyrical to the rhetorical – the poems in this collection are a meditation on time, aging, and mortality, sounding the human condition at a moment of world-change.

ROBYN SARAH’s poetry collections include The Touchstone: Poems New and Selected, Questions About The Stars and A Day’s Grace and she is one of 17 poets newly included in the Norton Anthology of Poetry (5th Edition). She is also the author of two short story collections, A Nice Gazebo and Promise of Shelter, and Little Eurekas, a collection of essays on poetry.

Biblioasis

Fish Bones
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Nominated for the McAuslan First Book Prize
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In her debut collection, Gillian Sze takes a random walk through the art museum and finds the drama of life framed in a series of powerful and precise artefact poems. Sze’s verse is unrelenting in its commitment to action. Each poem follows its own impetus, the origin of which is always a deeply felt encounter, whether aesthetic, familial, erotic, or exotic. Vacillating deftly between the suspended space-time of a museum exhibit and the charged urgency of the lives she imagines, Fish Bones is a collection at once stirring and arresting, tender and coolly true.

GILLIAN SZE was born and raised in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Her poetry has appeared in CV2, Prairie Fire, pax americana, Crannóg and Cha: An Asian Literary Journal. She is the author of two chapbooks, This is the Colour I Love You Best and A Tender Invention. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Concordia University and lives in Toronto.

DC Books