The Biblio File hosted by Nigel Beale

Waiting for the Barbarians is a novel  written by the South African-born Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee. Published in 1980 it won the James Tait Black Memorial and Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prizes for fiction. The book's title comes from a poem by Greek-Egyptian poet Constantine P. Cavafy. American composer Philip Glass wrote an opera based on the book which premiered in 2005. In August 2012, the Baxt...

I met with Canadian poet/critic Michael Lista several months ago to discuss the state of poetry reviewing in Canada, the need for honesty in criticism, and his take on poet/philosopher Jan Zwicky 's essay "The Ethics of the Negative Review," in which she defends her practice, while review editor in the 1990s of The Fiddlehead literary journal, of not publishing negative reviews. Buckle up and enjo...

Robert Fowler has had a distinguished career as a Canadian diplomat and public servant.  From 1989 - 1995 he was deputy minister of National Defence; from 1995 - 2000, Canada's ambassador to the United Nations, and, following that, ambassador to Italy  from 2000-2006. Over the years he has served as foreign policy advisor to three Prime Ministers, and as Personal Representative for Africa. On Dec....

 Corey Redekop has been many things: "actor, waiter, disc jockey, cameraman, editor, lawyer (almost), and now the fabled trifecta of publicist/librarian/author. His debut novel, Shelf Monkey , is either a work of insane genius or an intolerable left-wing screed, depending on which review you read. Stunningly handsome, supremely talented, superbly gifted at hyperbole, Corey abides in Fredericton, N...

Laurie Lewis began her publishing career in New York City with Doubleday in the early 60s, acting as liaison between the book design  and printing departments. In 1963 she moved to Toronto and joined the University of Toronto Press. When Allan Fleming came on board as Chief Designer in 1968 the new Design Unit was formed and Lewis became Fleming's assistant. The department produced many important...

According to his website , Ross King is "the bestselling author of six books on Italian, French and Canadian art and history. He has also published two historical novels, Domino (1995) and Ex-Libris (1998), and edited a collection of Leonardo da Vinci's fables, jokes and riddles. Translated into more than a dozen languages, his books have been nominated for a National Book Critics' Circle Award, t...

Julie Bruck is the author of three collections of poems from Brick Books , Monkey Ranch (2012) The End of Travel (1999), and The Woman Downstairs (1993).  Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Ms,  Ploughshares, The Walrus, The Malahat Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Maisonneuve, Literary Mama, and elsewhere. Montreal-born and raised, Julie has taught at several colleges and universities in C...

Born in Topeka, Kansas, Linda Spalding (née Dickinson) is a Canadian writer and editor who has, over the years, worked as a professor of English and writing at numerous universities. She currently lives in Toronto, is an editor with Brick magazine, and is married to novelist Michael Ondaatje.   Spalding's  novel The Purchase  won the 2012 Governor-General's Literary Award for English Fiction. We m...

Well known Canadian author/biographer Charlie Foran , playing the Literary Tourist, travelled to Wingham, Ontario and environs to spend a little time in Alice Munro country. I talked to him recently about his experience.  Photo credits: © James Lahey 2010

I met with Stephanie Hlywak, Media Director at the Poetry Foundation, one hundred years after  Poetry magazine was launched in Chicago to the month. We talk about the history, mandate, approach and architecture, not only of the magazine, but also of The Foundation and its impressive building , and, as if this weren't enough, the place and places of poetry itself in our world. 

Jason Webster is an Anglo-American crime novelist, travel writer and critic. Born in California he now lives in Valencia, Spain. Webster was educated in England, Egypt and Italy. In 1993 he graduated from Oxford University (St John's College) with a degree in Arabic and Islamic History. His books all involve Spain, and include Duende: A journey in search of Flamenco (2003), which recounts his move...

Shared Inquiry is a discussion method employed by the Great Books Foundation, which, according to its website provides " a teaching and learning environment, and a way for individuals to achieve a more thorough understanding of a text by discussing questions, responses, and insights with fellow readers. Shared Inquiry combines a sound theoretical base with proven strategies to engage all readers i...

While researching an article on Literary Tourism for an upcoming issue of Ontario magazine , I got to meet and greet some stellar Canadian authors at sites across the province that feature, variously, in their works. Here, it's Terry Fallis, and his novel The Best Laid Plans . I got together with Terry on Parliament Hill, right next to the newly refurbished parliamentary library to talk about how...

Attention Literary Tourists! I met with Kristi Beer from Inprint Houston , a non-profit organization dedicated to inspiring readers and writers in Houston, Texas. Founded in 1983, Inprint fulfills its mission through the nationally renowned Margarett Root Brown Reading Series, the Cool Brains! Reading Series for Young People, literary and educational activities in the community that demonstrate th...

Randall Speller was for 29 years a librarian in the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. Combining his career in art librarianship with an interest in Canadian literature and book collecting, he has done extensive research into the history of Canadian book illustration and design, especially in the years following World War II. Randall is a contributing editor to the DA: a Journal of the Printing Ar...

Houston's Museum of Printing History was founded in 1979 by Raoul Beasley, Vernon P. Hearn, Don Piercy, and J. V. Burnham, four printers with a passion  for preserving their various printing-related collections and sharing them with the community.  Chartered in 1981 the Museum had its official opening in 1982 with Dr. Hans Halaby, Director of the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz, Germany, cutting the rib...

In 1927, Ben Bass opened Strand Book Store on Fourth Avenue, home of New York's legendary Book Row. Named after the famous publishing street in London, the Strand was one of 48 bookstores on Book Row, which started in the 1890's and ran from Union Square to Astor Place. Today, the Strand is the sole survivor.  ("Ben's son, Fred, was learning the family business by the age of 13. He too a lover of...

Project Bookmark Canada is a national charitable organization that marks places where real and imagined landscapes meet. It does this by installing poster sized ceramic plaques - called Bookmarks - in the exact physical locations where literary scenes are set. Its mission is to develope a network of hundreds of Bookmarks in cities, towns and other areas across the country, allowing Canadians and v...

Adam Barrows is a Professor in the English Department at Carleton University in Ottawa. The focus of his research for the last eight years has been the relationship between time, literary modernism, and imperialism. His background is in the history of science and his theoretical approach to literature is largely historical materialist, drawing heavily on the Western Marxist tradition, from the Fra...

Terry Cook received a Ph. D. in Canadian History from Queen's University, 1977. From 1975 to 1998, he worked at the then Public, later National, Archives of Canada, leaving as the senior manager responsible for directing the appraisal and records disposition program for all media. In his long and distinguished career there, he was responsible for the development of policies and methodologies which...

As weird as it might seem today, people from New York used to come up to Montreal for a good time. Gambling houses, drugs, clubs, fast women... Montreal was one of the coolest places to be in post-war North America. Fun, racy, naughty...for a few fleeting years Montreal had a real Noir vibe.  A handful of cheap, disposable novels captured this era in ways that more main stream novels never could....

While there is no 'great Houston Novel,' a lot of good stories  have come out of the city, many of which are told in David Theis's Literary Houston, an anthology of writing on and about 'the Bayou city'. Stories, because Houston is a place where people come to DO things.  'To fly to the moon, create empires, build fortresses against cancer, and temples to surrealism' as Theis puts it. I met him re...

Michele Rackham is a post doctoral fellow at Trent University. She is currently working on a digital catalogue raisonne of P.K. Irwin's (a.k.a P.K. Page) artwork that will  accompany a print art book to be published by the Porcupine's Quill. Rackham recently completed a PhD at McGill University. The title of her thesis is "Between the Lines, Interartistic Modernism in Canada 1930-1960." We met at...

"Heinrich Heine's writings, poetry, and ideology delighted and enlightened me. He became a personal, meaningful experience, in the same way I feel, that private printing is a personal experience, printing meaningful things. These feelings make up the "idealistic" birth of the Heinrich Heine press" says Peter Dorn in Reader, Lover of Books, Lover of Heaven (North York Public Library, 1978. Designed...

I met recently with literary historian Brian Busby to talk about 'Literary Montreal', poet John Glassco, plaques and the Writers' Chapel of St James the Apostle Anglican Church.