NYRB Classics: some of my favorites

For years, I've been wanting to do an event on NYRB Classics. The premise is simple: we ask three or four confirmed Festival authors to "champion" their favorite NYRB Classics book and defend it at a round-table event.

I've never been able to make it work for various reasons (though not giving up) but being a champion of NYRB and while reading Silvina Ocampo's Thus Were Their Faces in bed last night, I started wondering how many NYRB books I had in my library at home. A fair number it turns out. (I even have in my collection The Invention of Morel by her husband, Adolfo Bioy Casares.)

I think the first NYRB I bought was Mavis Gallant's collection Paris Stories. I may have even bought it in Paris now that I think about it. I've read and re-read this one many times and I love "The Moslem Wife" and several other stories in that collection which I could read and re-read every year and never grow tired of them.

I also love Natsume Soseki's The Gate which is one of those books whose images have stayed with me for years: a young couple who bitterly resign themselves to never being able to have kids and soon find themselves in a downward spiral.

Robert Walser's Berlin Stories is fascinating and when I was going through my Berlin literature phase a couple of years ago, I remember getting this one in the mail with the biggest smile on my face, knowing I would spend the entire next day on my sofa reading it. He's one of the most unique European writers...

And Eileen Chang's Love in a Fallen City is one of my most favorite books ever. Period. There are long passages of this collection that I practically know by heart.

The stroke of genius (or one of them) is that the editors ask really interesting writers to do the Simone Schwarz-Bart. Often these introductions or prologues or prefaces are just as interesting as the works themselves. So we have Helen Oyeyemi introducing Silvina Ocampo, Pico Iyer introducing Soseki, and Jamaica Kincaid introducing (the very under appreciated) Simon Schwarz-Bart. The main reason I bought George Simenon's Dirty Snow, in fact, is that I'm a huge fan of William T. Vollmann and I wanted to read what he thought about Simenon.

I don't love every NYRB (I find Stefan Zweig a bit thin though he's a fascinating character himself) but I love many of them and once something comes out in that familiar format, it rockets to the top of my list. (Really looking forward to Naked Earth by Chang and The Prank: the Best of Young Chekhov).

One could easily spend all one's time reading only NYRB collections and never have time to read anything else. Oh, in a perfect world...

QWF Awards 2013

The QWF awards banquet last night was wonderful as usual. But what struck me as I watched the show was how tight the English writing community is. Not coming from Quebec, it's a community that means a good deal to me personally. But to a writer who is writing to his or her peers and hopes for an audience, one could hardly hope for a more enthusiastic and talented group of people.

I appreciate how translators are given a prize each year. Translation is an under-appreciated art and one that is vital in our world today, literary or otherwise. Donald Winkler won the Cole Foundation Translation Prize for his translation of Pierre Nepveu's book of poems The Major Verbs. This is really an amazing collection and Nepveu is a poet whose work I've only recently discovered (though he's one of Quebec's best-known poets). Winkler praised the local community of translators, including his partner, Sheila Fischman.

Paul Blackwell, always dapper in his bowtie and beard, won the YA award for his book Undercurrent. He is charming and friendly though I missed his acceptance speech. I read one of his YA detective novels a few years' back and thought it was fantastic.

Adam Leith Gollner won the Mavis Gallant non-fiction prize for his book Immortality and told a charming story about having oysters with Mavis Gallant in Paris. His book's been at the top of my list since the late summer when I saw him being interviewed by Josh Dulgin at Pop Montreal.

The Concordia first book prize went to Andrew Szymanski, a writer I didn't know about (I
know well the other two books competing in that category). He was the comic highlight of the night, though I think unintentionally...

I was rooting for a friend who was nominated for the AM Klein Poetry Prize, but the winner, Ken Howe, was really funny and gracious.

And, of course, Saleema Nawaz won the Hugh Maclennan Prize for her book Bone & Bread, lovely novel that captivated many earlier this year when it came out. No surprise there.

The QWF banquet really is the highlight of the fall in the literary world of English Montreal. And it's always so great to see people coming out to support their peers, colleagues and friends. And I am proud to be around so many incredibly talented writers, translators, editors and literary professionals.

The Corona Theatre on Notre-Dame: an A+ venue!

Blue Met Grand Prize: our short list

So every year our Grand Prize announcement is one of our biggest "ooh and aaah" moments. I remember clearly the murmur that went through the packed room last year at our Press Conference when we announced Joyce Carol Oates as our 2012 winner. And what a winner she was: her event at the Grande Bibliotheque was amazing (and sold out!).

In anticipation of our announcement next week, we release our short-list. It wasn't easy but this year our jury came back with three short-listed winners (we had a longer list that the short list was pulled from). They are:

Orhan Pamuk: Nobel Prize-winner (the first time we've short-listed a former Nobel Prize-winner though we have awarded the prize to someone who later won the Nobel Prize!), author of The Black Book, Snow and many other works, Pamuk, who hails from Turkey but lives in Istanbul and New York, is one of the best-known writers working today.


Colm Tóibín: Irish writer whose best-known works include The Master, Brooklyn and The Testament of Mary, his books are moving, haunting and full of a fierce intelligence and understanding of human nature. Personally he's been one of my favorite writers my entire adult life.



Rohinton Mistry: one of Canada's best-loved sons, Mistry has been nominated and/or won just about every major prize there is. His works shine with his finely crafted prose that he seems to work so diligently at since he doesn't publish every year like many writers do. The publication of a new Mistry work is celebrated and anticipated throughout the world. A Fine Balance is one of those works I can return to every few years and revel again in the world he creates.

One of these writers, it will be announced next week, has one our 2013 Grand Prize. The prize, awarded every year since the year 2000, has featured some of the world's best-loved writers: from Mavis Gallant (2002) to Carlos Fuentes (2005) to Norman Mailer (2001) to Joyce Carol Oates (2012), Margaret Atwood (2007) and Paul Auster (2004), the prize quite literally is one of the highlights of the spring season in Montreal...

Tune in to find out who wins for 2013: we announce our winner next week at our official launch and press  conference: Tuesday, March 26 at 10:00 a.m. at l'Espace Fontaine in Park Lafontaine.