What’s at issue isn’t sales or even access to readers; this is an argument about prestige and critical recognition, an argument best articulated by the novelist and critic Francine Prose in a 1998 article for Harper’s magazine. Prose detected a greater reverence for books by men among the nation’s literary and critical establishment, which includes reviewers, prize committees and the institutions that bestow grants. She blamed this on a widespread if seldom-stated assumption that “women writers will not write about anything important – anything truly serious or necessary, revelatory or wise.”

Miller goes on to admit that anyone who’s had to compile a list – will feel an “awkward sympathy for the PW team”:

But every year we do face a ticklish question: Is it the right thing to gerrymander your list in order to counteract real, long-standing cultural biases, even if that means lying to your readers? What is a 10-best list, after all, if not a record of the books we enjoyed most over the past 12 months? If you insist on a list that’s ideally representative of gender, race, class, nationality (i.e., including at least one translation), publisher size (small as well as large), fame, length (short story collections as well as novels), region, genre and so on, you can easily wind up with, say, a list of nine books you kinda like and maybe one you truly love. That’s a tepid dish to serve up to readers, and not likely to inspire much enthusiasm, either.

On Nov 14th, the Toronto Women’s Bookstore will host the Written in Colour Writers’ Symposium, a full-day event geared toward emerging indigenous writers and writers of colour.

Workshops range from grant writing to getting your play produced to memoir and erotic writing. Facilitators include writers Tamai Kobayashi, Lee Maracle and Mariko Tamaki, as well as industry players like Cormorant Books publisher Marc Côté from Cormorant Books and John Degen from the Ontario Arts Council.

Tamaki, author of several books including the award-winning graphic novel Skim (with illustrator Jillian Tamaki), will be giving a workshop entitled You Are All Talk! about voice and writing.

“The idea is to get writers to think about writing and talk, what providing our characters with a voice means,” says Tamaki

Tamaki, who is Japanese-Canadian, thinks the symposium is relevant because culture and race are as important in the socio-political landscape as they are in the literary-arts landscape. “I think that representation is something everyone should be concerned about. People want to see themselves reflected back in the literary works that they love and so we should all have a vested interest in making sure that all different identities, readers and writers get supported.”

Tamaki notes that “colour” is a complex issue. “I write about Japanese people but I don’t like this idea that people feel beholden to put that element in their works. Like, if I don’t write about someone who’s Asian, have I messed up? Committed less of a service as an Asian feminist?”

The Written in Colour symposium will  be held at 918 Bathurst Street. Call 4-6.922-8744 to pre-register. Tickets are $15 to $30 sliding scale in advance and $30 to $50 sliding scale at the door.

Catholic school administrators are proposing all novels and books undergo a central review and approval process before being used in classrooms.

The process would also allow the Dufferin-Peel Catholic District School Board to create a book list teachers can use to select acceptable material for classroom lessons.

“We’re working on a report to take to the board in November that would propose a centralized process around how resources are selected for use in classrooms,” said Marianne Mazzorato, the board’s program superintendent.

The article makes no mention of what titles the board deems “acceptable,” but you can be sure that anything with a whiff of controversy would be relegated to the slag heap. The Catholic board, meanwhile, is spinning the move as being more about pedagogy than straight-up censorship:

Mazzorato said the process is less about “gate keeping” and more about allowing the board to develop resources around those individual literary choices that support a teacher’s lesson plan.

“What we’re attempting to do through this process is ensure that centrally we’re aware of all the novels that teachers are wanting to use in their classrooms,” she said. “If we’re aware of those novels being used then we can help support teachers and develop strong lesson plans.”

Besides ensuring the development of critical literacy skills and delivery of relevant messages for students, she continued, the process should also help mitigate against some of the sensitive subject matter that might occur in novels.

[Ndesandjo's] self-published novel – like the president’s memoir Dreams from My Father – focuses on Barack Obama senior.

“My father beat my mother and my father beat me, and you don’t do that,” Ndesandjo told Associated Press (AP), saying he wrote Nairobi to Shenzhen in part to raise awareness of domestic violence.

“It’s something which I think affected me for a long time, and it’s something that I’ve just recently come to terms with.”

In other Barack book news, the Scotsman (via The Bookseller) is reporting that sales of Obama’s two memoirs, Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope, have led their U.K. publisher, Canongate Books, to a record turnover of £7.35 million in just six months. The windfall has  propelled the success of Canongate’s publisher, Jamie Byng, whom the Edinburgh-based newspaper describes as the “enfant terrible of British publishing.”

The 40-year-old discovered the works of the then aspiring Democrat politician three years ago, before he rose to worldwide fame. Snapping up the U.K. and Commonwealth publishing rights may yet be the best decision he ever made.

Sales are eventually expected to pass two million – boosted by an innovative new e-book edition for iPods – and have put him on course to beat last year’s profits of £2.6 million.

Although coming from a wealthy family – who helped him buy his company, Canongate Books, when he was 25 – he is now on course to become a wealthy man in his own right.

A board meeting will be scheduled for a ratification vote shortly. The Union will be communicating with you about its ratification vote. An update will be sent once these votes have taken place.

According to AFP:

Laferrière won the Medicis for L’enigme du retour (The Enigma of Return), a fictionalised account of the 56-year-old author’s soul-wrenching return to his native Haiti to attend his father’s funeral. Born in Port-au-Prince but now living in Montreal and Miami, Laferrière has explored the themes of identity and exile in some 20 novels over the past 25 years.

Laferrière won the French-language prize, while Eggers won the prize for best foreign novel for his 2006 work What Is the What? Lafèrriere is only the second Canadian novelist to win the Medicis. The first was Marie-Claire Blais, who won in 1966 for Une saison dans la vie d’Emmanuel.

According to the site’s author guidelines:

Up until now the publishing industry kept a tight lock on their book reviewers, paying them large sums of money and giving them many freebies to urge them to review books for well known authors. The time has finally come where you, the self published author, can get quality, real life book reviews for the price of a couple of tickets to the movies.

But the owner of the site, PR professional Clark Covington, is apparently selling reviews only in bulk quantities: 100 reviews for $1,400 and 500 reviews for a mere $6,500. The book reviewers, incidentally, are everyday folk, people apparently so bored they’ll read (or at least skim) your self-published dreck in exchange for nothing more than a digital copy of the book and a Starbucks gift card.

Who knows what Amazon thinks of all this, but it sure doesn’t speak well of the integrity of its (already frequently dubious) reader reviews…

In search of the West

In his first novel, Don Gillmor puts an overlooked cartographer, explorer, and extraordinary Canadian back on the map

Kicked off the block

Have the rules of the funding game changed under the Ontario Art Council’s new literature officer?

The cut-and-paste method

Digital technology has led to customized products for the scholarly market – but are they a good deal for academic presses? Plus more in the College and Scholarly Publishing Special Report

Children’s Announcements

The season’s complete listings

FRONTMATTER

Reviewing the ReLits

Weighing the benefits of the Writers’ Coalition health plan

The future of the AECB

Local Buzz: Keith Halliday’s Game On Yukon!

Cover to Cover: Kennepohl and Shaw’s Accessible Elements

Snapshot: Bryan Jay Ibeas of Cormorant Books

COLLEGE AND SCHOLARLY REPORT

CSPI’s unlikely feminism

Free e-books for everyone

Revisiting the Canadian Research Knowledge Network

REVIEWS

The Last Woman by John Bemrose

Dracula the Un-Dead by Dacre Stoker and Ian Holt

Monstrous Affections by David Nickle

Plus more fiction, non-fiction, and poetry

BOOKS FOR YOUNG PEOPLE

The Pirate and the Penguin by Patricia Storms

Proud as a Peacock, Brave as a Lion by Jane Barclay and Renné Benoir

The Rocket by Mike Leonetti and Greg Banning

Plus more fiction, non-fiction, and picture books

THE LAST WORD

Authors who complain about bad reviews need to grow up, writes Claude Lalumière

• According to Amazon, Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin is the best book of 2009. Also on its list of the top 10 books of 2009: Strength in What Remains by Tracy Kidder; Hilary Mantel’s Booker Prize-winning Wolf Hall; Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín; Beautiful Creatures by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl; Crazy for the Storm by Norman Ollstead; The Girl Who Played with Fire by Steig Larsson; The City & The City by China Miéville; Stitches by David Small; and The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind by William Kamkwamba
• More trouble for Nook, Barnes & Noble’s new digital reader: GalleyCat reports that Spring Design is suing B&N over the Nook’s design, stating that the bookseller broke non-disclosure agreements and “misappropriated trade secrets” about Spring Design’s own Google-Android based e-book reader, Alex Reader
• British author/actor/comedian/Oscar Wilde fan/blogger/Tweeter Stephen Fry has something to say about the benefits of social media in this two-part online interview
• If you think the mania for classic literature and zombie mash-ups is going to die anytime soon, think again. The LA Times Jacket Copy reports that Quirk Books, the publishing company responsible for Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters has announced their latest project, titled Dawn of the Dreadfuls
• Can poetry be profitable? Publisher Dominique Raccah thinks so. The Wall Street Journal’s Speakeasy announces Raccah’s trial website, an online poetry community that allows Web browsers to upload, hear, and buy poetry
• The ever-controversial Globe and Mail columnist and author Margaret Wente responds to her many haters. Turns out she likes to make Canadians angry, especially Newfoundlanders