The Biblio File hosted by Nigel Beale

William Deverell , has been widely hailed as Canada's greatest 'literary mystery' writer. This from his website: "Deverell worked as a journalist for seven years, with Canadian Press Montreal, the Vancouver Sun and the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix, where he was night city editor while at the University of Saskatchewan law school and editor of the student newspaper. As a member of the British Columbia, A...

In honour of Poetry Month, here is my interview with Canadian poet, critic and political writer, David Solway . We first discuss what constitutes a great poem in the context of 'political' and other agendas that some poets incorporate into their work. According to Solway, great poems consist of authentic, incontestable, memorable language, with vivid power, lapidary quality and prodigious rhetoric...

Sally Cooper's second novel, Tell Everything , delves into the darkest regions of the human soul, and lends credence to Kipling's line: "The female of the species is deadlier than the male." During our conversation about Tell Everything we discuss topics including: the media and murder, Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo, …body parts in ponds,  Rapunsil and crime plays, three way sex, the blurred, co...

The Brattle Book Shop , founded in the Cornhill section of Boston in 1825, has been in the hands of the Gloss Family since 1949. Over the years George and his son Kenneth built this shop into one of the largest antiquarian book shops in the United States. Ken is the current proprietor of The Brattle Book Shop. He is a past President of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America's New Engla...

Haslam's Books, now Florida's largest new & used book store, was established in St. Petersburg in 1933 by two avid readers, John and Mary Haslam. After World War II they were joined by the second generation, Charles and Elizabeth. The business began to expand. In response to customers' requests, new technical books were added, then Bibles and religious books and finally a complete line of trade bo...

Ian Brookes is Editor-in-Chief of The Chambers Dictionary which was first published in 1901 and most recently updated in 2006. We talk here about lexicographers, Samuel Johnson, Scotland, the speed of language change getting quicker, Chambers' unique focus on old, Scottish, literary, historical words with humorous, sardonic definitions, such as  mallemaroking and pock pudding, use of the dictionar...

Kathryn Court joined Penguin Books in 1977 and became Editorial Director two years later. In l984 she was named Editor in Chief of Viking Penguin and in 1992 Senior Vice-President, Publisher, and Editor in Chief of Penguin Books. She was named President of Penguin Books in August 2000. Authors she has worked with include: Reinaldo Arenas, Andrea Camilleri, J.M. Coetzee, Slavenka Drakulic, Mary Rel...

Patrick McGahern has been selling books in Ottawa, Canada since 1969. His store specializes in used and rare books: Canadiana, Americana, Arctic, Antarctic, Travel, Natural History & Voyages, Illustrated & Plate Books, Irish and Scottish History and Literature. More than 30,000 titles are stocked at the Glebe store . Thousands of rare, scarce and interesting books are offered through their Catalog...

Margie McMillan is co-owner of the award winning Granny Bates Children's Bookstore in St. John's Newfoundland. We talk here about longevity and research as a reason for success, the brilliance of Graham Oakley and The Church Mice , the difference between back lists and mid-lists, schools as bread and butter, booksellers as literary critics, driving through the Swiss alps, new products that are cal...

At the time of this interview, John Freeman was president of The National Book Critics Circle . Founded in 1974, the NBCC is a non-profit organization consisting of nearly 700 active book reviewers who honor quality writing and communicate with one another about common concerns. We met at BookExpo in New York and talked, among other things, about the NBCC's awards program , the blog called Critica...

Bernard Margolis was President of the Boston Public Library (BPL) from 1997-2008. Founded in 1848, the BPL was the first large free municipal library in the United States. Mr. Margolis has served on the Governing Council of the 63,000-member American Library Association (ALA), and has won many awards including "Colorado Librarian of the Year", two John Cotton Dana library public relations awards,...

John Wronoski is a rare book dealer who specializes in literature, and primary works in the history of ideas in English, German, French, Spanish, and Russian. His shop, Lame Duck Books , contains 'the most significant selection of 19th and 20th century Spanish language literature in the world,' and important originals of 17th and 18th century English poetry. In addition to performing the tradition...

Elias Khoury is author of eleven novels including Little Mountain and Gates of the City . He is currently professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic studies at New York University, and editor in chief of the literary supplement of Beirut's daily newspaper, An-Nahar . We talk here, at the Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival , about his latest novel in English Gate of the Sun , of...

Peter Behrens' short stories and essays have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly , Tin House , Saturday Night , and The National Post and have been anthologized in Best Canadian Stories and Best Canadian Essays . He was born in Montreal and lives on the coast of Maine with his wife and son. We talk here, at the Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival , among other things about voice...

Lydia Davis is a contemporary American author and translator of French. From 1974 to 1978 she was married to Paul Auster , with whom she has a son. She has published six collections of short stories, including The Thirteenth Woman and Other Stories (1976) and Break It Down (1986). Her most recent collection is not Samuel Johnson Is Indignant, but rather Varieties of Disturbance , published by Farr...

C.S. Richardson is an accomplished book designer who has worked in publishing for over twenty years. He is a multiple time recipient of the Alcuin Award (Canada's highest honour for excellence in book design) and a frequent lecturer on publishing, design and communications. A rare bird indeed, he recently published his first novel The End of the Alphabet , and is currently at work on his second. W...

Barbara Clubb is City Librarian and CEO of the Ottawa Public Library, past president of the Canadian Library Association, a member of the International Relations Committee of the ALA/Public Library Association; a director for the Canadian Writers Foundation and Monthly Book Reviewer for CBC Ottawa Radio One. In this fascinating, wide ranging conversation we talk about the role of a city librarian...

John Metcalf is a highly regarded author who happens to have edited many of Canada's foremost short story writers, including Lisa Moore , Alice Munro , and Michael Winter . Born in Carlisle, England, and educated at the University of Bristol, he emigrated to Canada in 1962. In addition to his own writings (novels, stories and essays), he currently holds the un-salaried post of Senior Editor at the...

Amanda Earl writes erotic fiction in Ottawa, Canada, as much for her own pleasure as anything else. Her stories have consistently been selected for publication in Carroll and Graf's annual Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica . Amanda publishes and writes poetry, is managing editor of the Bywords Quarterly Journal, and hosts Bywords.ca , a website invaluable to Ottawans interested in local literary ev...

Ronald Cohen is author of the Bibliography of the Writings of Sir Winston Churchill  published in 2006: a 'richly annotated work' containing thousands of entries, with detailed descriptions of each work by Churchill, including information on content, typography,paper, illustrations, maps, facsimiles, bindings, dust jackets, publication and printing history, translations, and library/collection loc...

David Franklin is former Chief Curator at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, and editor of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and the Renaissance in Florence , a catalogue published by Yale University Press to accompany a major exhibition of the same name held at the Gallery from May 29, 2005 to September 5, 2005. We talk here mostly about the exhibition catalogue as book: what differentiates it...

Christopher Pratt is one of Canada's most 'prominent' painters. He is now also a published poet. We talk here, in his home of St Mary's Bay, Newfoundland on the Salmonier River, about his book A Painter's Poems (Breakwater Books , 2005), about parallels between his writing and his art, emptiness, loneliness, cleanliness, juxtaposing real and imagined worlds, getting it right, abandonment, absence...

Barbara Reid's plasticine artwork makes her books instantly recognizable. They have won acclaim around the world, and many awards. We talk here about what makes her so good, about great children's book illustrators, the accurate conveyance of emotion, mice in subways, making room for the imagination, chiaroscuro, working in ice cream, wanting to show things to those you love, pony-tails, playing h...

Ramona Dearing lives in St. John's, Newfoundland, and is the latest member of the longstanding (and increasingly famous) fiction collective The Burning Rock to publish a collection of short fiction. Dearing works for CBC Radio where she is currently busy putting together a nationally broadcast program featuring young Canadian artists. So Beautiful was published in 2004 by The Porcupine's Quill Pre...

Here's Tim Parks on his novel Cleaver: "Cleaver comes out of my love of the South Tyrol and a growing awareness/ irritation/ anxiety about the invasive nature of the public voice, the spoken media, in our minds and lives. And of course Cleaver, this charismatic, chaotic, destructive, hatefully likeable man who seemed just right for bringing out all the tensions between the seductive fizz of public...