Nigel Beale's Biblio File Podcast

Peggy L. Fox is the former president and publisher of New Directions, was Tennessee Williams’s last editor, and is James Laughlin’s literary coexecutor. She lives in Athens, New York, where we met to talk about, among other things, her career at New Directions, Tennessee Williams, the Chinese poet Bei Dao, Norfolk confetti, contacts and connections, James Laughlin's literary influence, letter writ...

Richard Minsky  is an American scholar of bookbinding and a book artist. He is the founder of the  Center for Book Arts  in New York City. We met in his studio in Hudson, NY to talk, among other things, about the proselytizing of book art, books as metaphors, the art of book covers, publishers' bindings, modernism, art history and the evolution of technology, Will Bradley, the acquisition of books...

Michel Tremblay was born in Montreal in 1942. He studied graphic arts and became a linotypist like his father and brother. He wrote his first play Le Train in 1959 and with it won the 1964 Radio Canada Young Author's Competition. But it was his second play Les Belles-Sœurs that established him as an important writer - the first play to use Joual and feature working class women on the stage, the fi...

Patrick deWitt was born on Vancouver Island in 1975. He has also lived in California, Washington, and Oregon, where he currently lives with his wife and son. He is the author of two novels, Ablutions and The Sisters Brothers , which won Canada's Governor General's Literary Award for fiction. Here's how the jury described it: "Brothers Eli and Charlie Sisters are at the centre of this “great greedy...

This from Simon and Schuster : " Anna Porter was born in Budapest, Hungary, during the Second World War and escaped with her mother at the end of the 1956 revolution to New Zealand, where she graduated with an MA from Christchurch University. Like so many young Kiwis, after graduation she travelled to London, England, where she had her first taste of publishing. In 1968, she arrived in Canada, and...

Ian S. MacNiven 's authorized biography of Lawrence Durrell was a New York Times Notable Book for 1998. He has edited two collections of Durrell's correspondence (with Richard Aldington and Henry Miller), is the author of numerous articles on literary modernism, and has directed and spoken at conferences on three continents. He is also a past president of the D. H. Lawrence Society of North Americ...

Adrian King Edwards is the proprietor of The Word Bookstore near McGill University in Montreal; has been for more than 40 years. I met with him at his home to talk books, second-hand versus used, the John Schulman scandal in Pittsburgh, trust, stories, longevity, authors' obscure childrens' books, policemen checking the spices, David McKnight's collection of Canadian literary periodicals, Canadian...

Through his work as a writer, editor, and photographer, Terence Byrnes came to know and to photograph many Montreal-based writers throughout their careers. "For ten years, he photographed them in places where they felt at home, but not always at ease. 'Most contemporary literary portraits,' Byrnes says, 'are as highly burnished as  Playboy  nudes or as homespun as family snapshots. When I made the...

Bill Samuel is the grandson of the founder of Foyles bookstore and was long-time Vice-Chairman of the company. Samantha J Rayner captures the spirit of the enterprise when she writes "[Foyles] emphasised that trial and error was an integral part of learning what makes for success. Foyles is not just a bookshop – they have tried all sorts of enterprises to generate more revenue: sheet music, musica...

Priscila Uppal, poet, author, and English professor at York University, challenges traditional psychological and anthropological models of mourning in her new book We Are What We Mourn: The Contemporary English-Canadian Elegy , suggesting that Canadians mourn differently. Traditional models define successful mourning in terms of detachment from the loved one who has died; the ability to cut the st...

Robert Lecker is a Canadian scholar, author, and Greenshields Professor of English at McGill University in Montreal, where he specializes in Canadian literature. He has held a number of prominent positions in the Canadian publishing industry throughout his career. He co-founded  ECW Press  in 1977, he co-edited the Canadian literary journal  Essays on Canadian Writing  between 1975 and 2004, he ha...

Hugh McGuire has been building tools and communities to bring books onto the open web since about 2005. He's the founder of  LibriVox.org  (free public domain audiobooks, made by volunteers from around the world),  Pressbooks  (an open source book publishing platform built on WordPress).  He's also Executive Director of the  Rebus Foundation , a non-profit that is building the infrastructure to su...

Series: Biblio File in France Kickshaws is a private press founded in Paris in 1979 by John Crombie, and Sheila Bourne who often produces artwork for the books. Together they have hand-printed more than 150 small books. The design, typography and materials used to create Kickshaws publications are unusual. As a result it's difficult to define exactly what they are. Among other things, they display...

Series: Biblio File in France Maylis Besserie is a French radio broadcaster. She works for France Culture , the French national cultural radio station of the Radio France group, where she has produced documentaries and live programming about cultural issues since 2003. Over the years she has interviewed many artists and authors. She currently produces a summer program called  la grande table d’été...

Series: Biblio File in France Krista Halverson is director of the newly founded  Shakespeare & Company publishing house  and editor of the first-ever history of the bookstore,  Shakespeare & Company, Paris: A History of the Rag & Bone Shop of the Heart . Previously, she was the managing editor of  Zoetrope: All-Story , a magazine of fiction and art, published by Francis Coppola and headquartered i...

Born in 1931, Jerome Rothenberg is an American poet, translator and anthologist, noted for his work in the fields of  ethnopoetics  and performance poetry.  This from Wikipedia:  Technicians of the Sacred  (1968), which signalled the beginning of an approach to poetry that Rothenberg, in collaboration with  George Quasha , named “ethnopoetics,” went beyond the standard collection of folk songs to...

Series: Biblio File in France A recent fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Berlin) and visiting researcher at the Centre Interdisciplinaire de Recherches Centre-Européennes (Sorbonne-Paris IV), Daniel Medin joined the faculty of The American University of Paris in January 2010. He has taught German, English and comparative literature at Stanford University, Washington University in St...

Stephen Weiner is an award winning writer about comics & graphic novels. He has been writing about comics since 1992, and is the most recognized librarian responsible for promoting graphic novel collections in public libraries & bookstores. He is the director of the Maynard Public Library in Maynard, Massachusetts. His books include: 100 Graphic Novels for Public Libraries, The 101 Best Graphic No...

John Ralston Saul was elected President of International PEN in October 2009 (his term ended in 2015). His award-winning essays and novels have had an impact on political and economic thought in many countries. Declared a “prophet” by TIME magazine, he is included in the prestigious Utne Reader’s list of the world’s 100 leading thinkers and visionaries. His works have been translated into 22 langu...

Series: Biblio File in France Economist Jean-Guy Boin is the former Director General of the International Bureau of French Publishing ( www.bief.org ), the international promotion organization of French books. He has held various positions in the book sector: teacher and trainer, researcher specializing in publishing economics, general administrator of a publishing house of literature and human sc...

Series: Biblio File in France Héloïse d'Ormesson is a French publisher who founded a publishing house that bears her name. She studied comparative literature at Yale University in the United States, where she landed her first job in publishing, and then returned to France to work at  Flammarion  as director of foreign literature, and subsequently as an editor at  Denoël ,  Laffont , and within the...

Series: Biblio File in France Pierre Astier and Laure Pecher are co-founders of their own eponymous literary and film agency . Pierre represents mainly French-speaking authors and publishers. After working in the art world for ten years, he created the quarterly short stories magazine  Le Serpent à Plumes in 1988. In 1993, together with Claude Tarrène, he set up a publishing house of the same name...

" Ashley Obscura is a Canadian-Mexican writer, publisher and editor. She is the author of the poetry collections  Ambient Technology  and  I Am Here  (Metatron, 2014) and four digital poetry projects: LIGHGHT, How to Be A Rainbow, Aura Halo and Oh, Inverted Universe. The founder and managing editor of Metatron Press , Obscura currently lives in Montreal, Quebec where she holds a Bachelor of Arts i...

Robert Weaver (1928–2008) was an influential, well-loved Canadian editor and broadcaster. He was born in Niagara Falls and educated at the University of Toronto, and worked at the CBC where he created a series of radio shows that featured then unknown Canadian writers such as Alice Munro, Mordecai Richler, Timothy Findley, Margaret Atwood, and Leonard Cohen.   In 1956 Weaver founded The Tamarack R...

Glenn Horowitz is an agent in the sale and placement of culturally significant archives to research institutions nationwide. Among the many authors, artists, musicians, designers, and photographers he have represented are Norman Mailer, James Salter, Deborah Eisenberg, David Foster Wallace, Vladimir Nabokov, Philip Grushkin, the Magnum Group, Nadine Gordimer, and Danny Fields, to name but a few. I...