The Biblio File hosted by Nigel Beale

Listen to my interview with Aleksandar Hemon on his National Book Award nominated novel The Lazarus Project  here, and at   The Quarterly Conversation.

David Carruthers , owner/proprietor of St. Armand Papers in Montreal takes us through the process of how he produces paper that is used in the letterpress printing of books. We talk about pure fibre rags, old jute coffee bags, cover stock, denim and blue paper, beaters, pulp, and vat-like structures for pulp, and machines that take 95% of the moisture out of the pulp and flatten it so that it can...

I first heard about Michael Lista in a workshop conducted by Meeka Walsh, Editor of Border Crossings magazine. She raved about him: "Michael is a remarkably gifted young poet who lives in Montreal. He has a special interest in the points of intersection between science and poetics." These points live dramatically in the person of Louis Slotin, a scientist from Winnipeg involved in the Manhattan pr...

This is part one of a series of interviews conducted with three acclaimed short storywriters: Rebecca Rosenblum , Nam Le , and Anne Enright. In each case we riff off those qualities which Flannery O'Connor thought best constituted a good short story. We start with Rebecca Rosenblum, author of Once , " a collection of sixteen stories portraying the constricted and confused lives of the rootless twe...

Patricia K. Macarthy is author of The Crimson Series, three books, to date, about vampires. We talk here about what makes Vampires so appealing to so many people, about their being symbolic of man's desire for supremacy, women's desire to be consumed, about the fringe elements of society, the attraction of eternal youth and immortality, confidence, the perfect villian whose weapon is seduction, al...

Margaret Visser  is a writer/broadcaster who lives in Toronto, Barcelona, and France. Her subject matter is the history, anthropology, and mythology of everyday life. Born in South Africa, she attended school in Zambia, Zimbabwe, France (the Sorbonne) and Canada. She taught Greek and Latin at York University for 18 years. Her books include Much Depends on Dinner , The Rituals of Dinner , The Way W...

This from Random House : "Miriam Toews…was born in 1964 in the small Mennonite town of Steinbach, Manitoba. She left at eighteen, living in Montreal and London and touring Europe before coming back to Manitoba, where she earned a B.A. in film studies at the University of Manitoba. Later she packed up with her children and partner and moved to Halifax to attend the University of King's College, whe...

Listen here to my conversation with Craig Poile, co-owner of Collected Works , an innovative independent bookstore based in Ottawa, Canada (now closed). We talk, among others things, about a rudimentary webcam-teleconferencing system dubbed 'Great Talking Head,' that Craig has set up to get big name authors, such as Julian Barnes and Peter Carey, and their fans, together in his bookstore; about bo...

Distribution is a critical spoke in the publishing cycle, and yet it's surprising the scant amount of thought many small publishers give to how their books will eventually be sold, and how much it will cost to get their titles into the stores. Most new titles issued by small/self publishers wont ever be stocked on the shelves of chain superstores, not even for a short tryout period. Only a tiny fr...

Harlan Coben's latest novel HOLD TIGHT debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list — and simultaneously debuted at #1 in the London Times. Winner of the Edgar Award , Shamus Award and Anthony Award – the first author to win all three – international bestselling author Harlan Coben's critically-acclaimed novels have been called "ingenious" (New York Times), "poignant and insightful" (Los An...

Jaap Blonk is a self-taught composer, vocal performer and sound poet. As a vocalist, Blonk has performed around the globe exciting audiences with his powerful stage presence and childlike improvisation. Live electronics have over the years extended the scope and range of his concerts. Besides working as a soloist, he has collaborated with many musicians and ensembles, including Maja Ratkje, Mats G...

Lindsey Davis was born and raised in Birmingham, read English at Oxford, then joined the civil service, which she left in 1985.She started writing about Romans in The Course of Honour, the remarkable true love story of the Emperor Vespasian and his mistress Antonia Caenis. Her research into First Century Rome inspired The Silver Pigs, the first outing for Falco and Helena, which was published in 1...

Rawi Hage was born in Beirut, Lebanon, and lived through nine years of that country's civil war. He immigrated to Canada in 1992. He is a writer, a visual artist, and a curator whose debut novel , De Niro's Game (2006), was shortlisted for the 2006 Scotiabank Giller Prize and the 2006 Governor General's Award for English fiction. It won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. House of Anansi Press publis...

Edward Pettit is a freelance book reviewer and writes the Bibliothecary blog . He also  pursues graduate studies in literature at bucolic Lehigh University in Pennsylvania and teaches writing at La Salle University in Philadelphia. After having spent the first twenty-seven years of his life in the same Philadelphia neighborhood (Olney), he now resides just outside the "Athens of America" in Jenkin...

Derick Dreher has been the Director of the Rosenbach since 1998. He has an M.A. in the History of Art from Yale University,and is a summa cum laude graduate of Princeton. A Fulbright scholar, he was awarded a Kress International Research Fellowship, for research in Germany. A specialist in graphic arts of the Renaissance, he has published on a variety of subjects, including prints and drawings ran...

Donald Antrim is the author of three novels and a memoir entitled, The Afterlife , which is about the strained relationship he had with his mother, Louanne, an artist, teacher and alcoholic. In addition to receiving some of America's most prestigious fellowships, he is a regular contributor to The New Yorker , a magazine that includes him amongst their "twenty writers for the new century." We met...

Frank Wilson has been reviewing books professionally since October, 1964. For most of the last decade that he was Books Editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer, he was given to retaining committed bloggers (e.g. Mark Sarvas , Scott Esposito , Ed Champion ) to review books. About ten years ago he started blogging at Books Inq . It is one of the most successful blogs in the literary blogosphere.  I inte...

" Margot Livesey grew up in a boys' private school in the Scottish Highlands where her father taught, and her mother, Eva, was the school nurse. After taking a B.A. in English and philosophy at the University of York in England she spent most of her twenties [in Toronto] working in shops and restaurants and learning to write. Her first book, a collection of stories called Learning By Heart, was pu...

Anke Feuchtenberger was born in 1963 in East Berlin and is one of Germany's leading comic illustrator/artists. Her award winning work has been published in numerous books, newspapers, magazines and anthologies, and includes paintings, drawings, comics, posters, prints, costumes and puppets. Her illustrations and comics are rendered in highly recognizable style, often featuring naked, childlike cre...

Glenn Patterson was born in Belfast in 1961 and studied Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia under Malcolm Bradbury. He is the author of seven novels. The first, Burning Your Own (1988), set in Northern Ireland in 1969, won a Betty Trask Award and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. We met at the Blue Met International Literary Festival in Montreal to talk about reassessing the pas...

Egyptian writer Alaa al Aswany was born in 1957 and studied dentistry in Egypt and Chicago. In addition to fiction, he writes on literature, politics, and social issues. His second novel, The Yacoubian Building , an ironic take on modern Egyptian society, was a significant best seller in and outside of the Arabic world. Chicago , a novel set in the city of that name was published in January 2007....

Born in 1929 in New York, educated at Columbia, John Hollander is a poet and literary critic. He has written more than a dozen books of poetry, and seven books of criticism, including Rhyme's Reason of which Harold Bloom said: "[it is] on all questions of schemes, patterns, forms, meters, rhymes of poetry in English, the indispensible authority..." and why I was so keen to interview him. According...

André Alexis was born in 1957 in Trinidad and Tobago. His parents left for Canada when he was a baby. The family reunited in Ottawa when Alexis was four years old. He still remembers the trauma of this separation; it has coloured much of his writing since. Themes of absence, displacement, belonging and home animate his work. His debut novel, Childhood (1997), won the B ooks in Canada First Novel A...

Andrew O'Hagan 's most recent novel, Be Near Me , has just won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize . It is the story of an English priest who takes over a small Scottish parish in a post-industrial town by the sea; a story of art and politics, love and faith, and the way we live now, which pretty well summarizes the conversation we had this past weekend at The Blue Met International Literary Festival...

Find out why L.M. Montgomery was so skeptical about biography despite spending endless hours shaping and re-shaping her journals for public display, using them to incubate ideas for her novels. Find out too how biography can, according to Ms. Gammel, provide valuable cultural and historical context within which to interpret, understand and appreciate works of art. And, if this isn't enough, listen...