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The Montreal Fall Books Spectacular
compiled by Nathaniel G. Moore
with photography and files by Mary Williamson
(November 2007)
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 Montreal is a special city. It
is intoxicating; knows how lovely it is but never rubs it in your face.
It’s the home of the Montreal Canadiens, Corey Hart, Leonard
Cohen and Heather
O’Neill. It’s the place
where you can find Ladies Luncheon, Mitsou and Champ’s
Sports Bar -- all in the same night, if you're lucky.
TDR has compiled an impressive
cross-section of new works from Montreal and Montreal-related authors,
using a variety of means: e-mails, false-starts, tracking down a
fraction of Montreal’s literary scene at two different bars on Saint
Laurent. We have the dirt on Ian Ferrier's new CD, all you need
to know on Louis Rastelli and his debut novel, plus we offer you
insight into the Conundrum
fall 2007 catalogue.
 Richard Suicide and Elisabeth
Beliveau are ready for the visual treatment in technicolour, ink,
pulp and DVD thanks to their publisher’s multi-hundred if not thousand
dollar studio expansion at the D-wing of Conundrum Towers. While the
much anticipated Suicide graphic novel will pull you in with its
ethereal and maudlin whispers, that unsettling talent named Elisabeth
Beliveau presents her
compelling animations in a DVD/book combination called the great
hopeful someday.
Beliveau is a daring and ambitious
visual artist, whose dainty, delicate and emotional work is mesmerizing
and contagious. The DVD contains animations Beliveau has been working on
for the past few years while attending residencies at The Banff Centre,
the NFB (Montreal), The Klondike Institute for Arts and Culture, and
Struts Gallery in Sackville New Brunswick.
 Said Shameless Magazine of
Beliveau’s first book with Conundrum:
Something to pet the cat about is a
richly textured world. It is rendered via lush sketches and pencilled
notations — lists, diary entries, queries, assertions, meditations,
and laments — that complexly traverse the turbulent arc of coming
into oneself in a new city.
Richard Suicide is a writer and artist
of savage wit, whose comics are a testimony of life in Montreal’s East
End. Much of his early work has only appeared in French in various
international anthologies, including Comix 2000 (France), Stripburger
(Slovenia), The Comics Journal (USA), Kêkrapules (Switzerland),
Ferraille (France) as well as anthologies in Japan and Macedonia. My
Life as a Foot will launch at a variety of events including Expozine.
Suicide, along with Line Gamache and Andy Brown are invited guests at
this year’s Festival BD Cowansville: November 30, 2007, Municipal
Library in Cowansville, Quebec.
And speaking of Conundrum,
sophomore novelist Maya
Merrick is taking us on a daring ride through bohemian 1970s
Montreal in her new book The Whole Show, which will see the
barkeep/bard at readings in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver. Maya’s
brand new novel follows four characters who meet each other to form a
controversial theatre troupe. Hicklin, the collector, leaves Vancouver
under traumatic circumstances to find himself living a bohemian
lifestyle on the streets of a Montreal caught in the midst of political
upheaval.
 In the cover story, said the Montreal
Hour of Merrick’s latest literary outing:
fantastical 338-page journey through
an extravaganza of tantalizing topics, peopled with hermaphrodites,
pariahs, chimeras, albinos, ballerinas, satanic debutantes, and of
course holes - a whole range of holes. From construction pits to black
holes to peep holes that peer into memory theatres, the central,
titular theme runs throughout this story of four teens who, against
all odds, find themselves together in an apartment in 1970s Montreal.
Merrick reads with Toronto’s Jessica
Westhead at TYPE Bookstore, 883 Quest St. West in
Toronto on November 13, 2007, plus in Vancouver on Thursday November 15th
at Art Exchange Building, 568 Seymour. Both events are a 7pm start.
Recently, The Quebec Writers
Federation (QWF) presented a three day conference (Oct 18-20) on
Montreal poet A.M. Klein. A Portrait of A.M. Klein Today,
was an international conference organized by the Concordia Institute for
Canadian Jewish Studies, co-sponsored by QWF, among others. The
three day conference culminated in a poetry reading featuring Marie
Frankland, David
McGimpsey, Robyn Sarah, David
Solway, and Carmine
Starnino.
On November 21, 2007 the Annual QWF
Awards Gala will go down, where fifteen finalists will be honoured,
and the winners announced at the Lion d'Or, 1676 Ontario East. Novelists
Liam Durcan Garcia's Heart and (Governor General’s Award
short-listed author) Heather
O'Neill for Lullabies for Little Criminals and
short-story writer Neil Smith
Bang Crunch are the finalists for this year's Quebec Writers'
Federation award for fiction. Smith is also up for the
best-first-book prize, along with novelist Nairne
Holtz The Skin Beneath and poet Angela Carr for
Ropewalk.
For the QWF's non-fiction prize, the
nominees are Margaret Somerville, The Ethical Imagination;
Vikki Stark, My Sister, My Self; and co-authors Julie
Barlow and Jean-Benoît Nadeau, The Story of French. David
McGimpsey, Sitcom, Erin Moure, O Cadoiro and David
Solway, Reaching for Clear are the finalists in the poetry
category. Nominees for translation (French to English) are Moure
and Robert
Majzels; Phyllis Aronoff and Howard Scott; and Lazer
Lederhendler.
QWF
told TDR how local aspiring writers can become more active in their
literary pursuits.
Of course, I'd say they should join
QWF! A membership puts you in the loop right away. Our events,
programs and workshops give you the opportunity to meet other writers,
to develop your craft, and to know what's going on throughout the
community. For example, on November 10th we're offering a
half-day workshop called GETTING THE MONEY (AND THE TIME!): AN
INFORMATION SESSION FOR EMERGING WRITERS. We have writing
program officers coming from CALQ and CC to talk about getting grants
and residencies, and two writers talking about how to get fellowships,
writing assignments in newspapers, and more.
For a comprehensive database of
Montreal writers please click
here.
Toronto publisher The Mercury Press
have some Montreal writers with books out this fall. Including The
Humbugs Diet by Robert Majzels and The Prison Tangram
by Claire Huot, while Montrealer David McGimpsey's latest
collection of poetry (his fourth) is called Sitcom, was just
published by Toronto’s Coach House Books.
Said Eye
of Sitcom:
[It] draws on the metaphoric powers
of sitcom and television stars to construct something, and it is a
fascinating something, as tragic as it is funny ... Thanks to
McGimpsey's infomercial-strong pitch, he's proven that one may
experience sublimity by repeating the mantra 'Aloha, Garret, Five-O'
as much, if not better, than one can by studying W.H. Auden.
 And ECW Press has a guaranteed winner
in the controversial and always topical Conrad Black by George Tombs.
Tombs is an award-winning Montreal journalist. Robber Baron: Lord
Black of Crossharbour was published in Canada, the United
States and the United Kingdom on November 1st. This unauthorized,
hard-hitting book provides exclusive new details, insights, and
revelations about Conrad Black and his criminal trial for fraud,
obstruction of justice, and racketeering. Tombs is the only biographer
of Black to have interviewed him extensively and to have maintained
personal contact with him over the last six years.
And it just might become the wildcard
release from second year publishers Snare Books this season when Thumbscrews
by Natalie Zina Walschots makes its way around the country. Read
about Natalie’s tour here: http://snarenewest.blogspot.com
Selected TDR Montreal
Interviews & Reviews:
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