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Live Chat: How do you self-publish a novel? Ask the experts!
Everything you’ve always wanted to know about self-publishing, but had no idea who to ask.
A clockwork original: McMaster University bought manuscript of iconic dystopian novel for $250
In the bowels of Hamilton’s McMaster University research archives sits the original manuscript of A Clockwork Orange, typed by Anthony Burgess and featuring his hand-written corrections, notations and illustrations.
“The McMaster typescript is the only surviving text of the novel. Burgess wrote directly on the typewriter and made handwritten corrections on the typescript later,” said Andrew Biswell, director of the U.K.-based International Anthony Burgess Foundation. (Photos Glenn Lowson for National Post)
Author Philip Roth to retire: ‘To tell you the truth, I’m done’
Celebrated U.S. author Philip Roth quietly announced his retirement last month in a French magazine, Salon.com is reporting, saying that his 2010 book Nemesis will be his last.
“To tell you the truth, I’m done,” the 78-year-old Roth told French magazine Les inRocks last month, in comments that were printed in French and translated by Salon, then later confirmed by a representative for Houghton Mifflin, the author’s publisher. Read more: natpo.st/PJS2YK
Illustration by Antony Hare
R.I.P. Ray Bradbury
Artist Kagan McLeod’s beautiful portrait of the late author.
Jan Berenstain, co-creator of the Berenstain Bears, dies
Jan Berenstain, who along with her husband Stan created the popular children’s books about the family of lovable “Berenstain Bears,” has died in Philadelphia, her publisher said on Monday, after suffering a stroke late last week. She was 88.
“We are all deeply saddened to share with you the news that Jan Berenstain, surviving member of one of the greatest teams in all children’s literature — Stan and Jan Berenstain — passed away last Friday,” publisher Random House said in a statement.
Live Chat: Margaret Atwood discusses In Other Worlds
Join us at noon on Monday, November 28 for a one-hour live chat with Margaret Atwood. The celebrated Canadian author will discuss her latest collection of essays, In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination (Signal Books) and answer reader questions.Writing in the National Post, Zsuzsi Gartner called the book “a kind of encyclopedia: a quirky and admittedly personal primer on ‘imaginative writing.’” Read Gartner’s review of the book here.
Click here to read more about the book.
And click here for details on how to win the complete Signal Books library and a chance to see Atwood live in Toronto. (Illustration by Steve Murray)
Chuck Palahniuk writes a Hell of a story
For Madison Spencer, the 13-year-old narrator of Chuck Palahniuk’s new novel Damned, the most unpleasant thing about being doomed to Hell isn’t the “noxious Great Ocean of Wasted Sperm,” or even the giant, flesh-eating demons, but rather, endless screenings of The English Patient.
Not that Palahniuk, 49, wants to start a literary beef with Canadian author Michael Ondaatje, whose book the movie is based on. “I just wanted something that Madison would not really appreciate,” he says over the phone from his home in Portland, Ore. “And that’s a movie that was kind of a slog to get through, so Madison and I agree on that point.”
Besides, it seems nothing is safe from satire in the Fight Club author’s 12th novel, which can best be described as a cross between Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, John Hughes’ The Breakfast Club and Dante’s Inferno. Like the latter, Damned is the first book in a planned trilogy, and Palahniuk says he’s almost finished writing the second. (Photo by Neilson Barnard/Getty Images)
Margaret Atwood: How a love of comics started a love of reading
I learned to read early so I could read the comic strips because nobody else would take the time to read them out loud to me. The newspaper comics pages were called, then, the funny papers, although a lot of the strips were not funny but highly dramatic, like Terry and the Pirates, which featured a femme fatale called “The Dragon Lady” who used an amazingly long cigarette holder, or oddly surreal, like Little Orphan Annie — where were her eyes? The funny papers raised many questions in my young mind, some of which remain unanswered to this day. What exactly happened when Mandrake the Magician “gestured hypnotically”? Why did the Princess Snowflower character go around with a cauliflower on either ear?
Where did we kids discover the knowledge of flying capes, superpowers, other planets, and the like? In part, through the primitive comic-strip superheroes of the times, the most popular of which were Flash Gordon, for space travel and robots; Superman and Captain Marvel, for extra strength, superpowers, and cape-based flying; and Batman, who was a mortal, with a non-functional cape — one that must have encumbered him somewhat as he clawed his way up the sides of buildings — but who nonetheless shared with Captain Marvel and Superman a weak or fatuous second identity that acted as a disguise. (Captain Marvel was Billy Batson, the crippled newsboy; Superman was Clark Kent, the bespectacled reporter; Batman was Bruce Wayne, the very rich playboy who lounged around in a smoking jacket.)
Excerpt from In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination Copyright © 2011 by O.W. Toad Ltd. Published by Signal, imprint of McClelland & Stewart Ltd. (Photo: (Tyler Anderson/National Post)
Related:
Margaret Atwood: The stories we tell
Book Review: In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination, by Margaret Atwood
Even Cowboys Can Be Jews: A Q&A with Kinky Friedman
Kinky Friedman is one the last outlaws. He’s the author of more than 30 books, a musician who’s released over a dozen albums, and a plain-spoken populist who’s run from Governor of Texas on two occasions, espousing an anti-death penalty, pro-education platform. A jukebox musical based on his life, Becoming Kinky, recently opened in Houston, and producers hope to take it to Broadway.
