See also in this fall preview list books by Cynthia Flood and Jeet Heer, both of whom have contributed to NC.
Expect the unexpected: “Glover skewers every conventional notion we’ve ever held about that cultural-emotional institution of love we are instructed to hold dear.” This short story collection promises to make readers both laugh out loud and reel back in horror.
At a certain level this is a false argument. Had the Giller Prize marketing types thought ahead, they could have informed Gaspereau Press well ahead of time and the books could have been available and thus the clash between hand-bound cottage industry publishing and the frenzy of capitalism could have been muted. (I seem to recall that this was the way the Canada Council handled the Governor-General’s Award when I won; my publisher had plenty of books ready when the prize was announced.)
The other thing to remember is that winning a prize like this is next thing to an economic disaster for medium and small publishing houses. They have to print more books at a huge expense and send them off to distributors and bookstores that don’t have to pay the publisher for the books for at a minimum 90 days (usually more). If the books don’t sell, they come back to the publisher who still has to pay for them.
The Giller Prize has often been criticized for not considering small press books (the book pool for the Giller is much smaller than the book pool for the Governor-General’s Award). The paranoid side of my brain thinks: this could be a setup meant to discredit small presses in general and drive a wedge between them and their authors (as has happened in this case).
dg
But there’s method in their madness, the guys want people to know. It has to do with vaunting culture over profit, of matching the greatness of the word with the greatness of the page it’s printed on — a concept probably few Canadians have considered when buying a book.
Sitting in his print shop in this Annapolis Valley town 100 kilometres northwest of Halifax, Steeves is sensitive to the criticism.
But if there’s one character trait in which the Gaspereau co-founder isn’t lacking, it’s conviction. He may look a bit bookish, nerdy even in his dust-tinged glasses. But wiry frame and penchant for plaid flannel belie a village lumberjack.
He frequently cites American writer Henry David Thoreau, who famously documented his simple life at the cabin he built on Walden Pond in Massachusetts.
A little over a decade ago, Hugh Kenner returned to Canada to deliver the Massey Lectures, a long-standing Canadian Broadcasting Corporation radio lecture series. House of Anansi subsequently published Kenner’s lectures under the title The Elsewhere Community, and Jeet Heer wrote the following review essay for Canadian Notes & Queries #55 (the same magazine, not the same issue, that just published my essay on Alice Munro). Though all this happened some time ago, it’s a pleasure to bring Jeet’s essay back on Numéro Cinq; new eyes make the piece new. And some of Kenner’s background may come as a surprise to a new generation of American readers.
Jeet Heer, whom I have come to know since he scrambled up the bear-sex idea in my novel Elle a couple of weeks ago, is a graceful man, a widely published and prolific literary journalist and a comic book scholar (he is finishing his doctorate at York University, incidentally, my alma mater, in Toronto).
dg
Canadians, who are now merely indifferent to literature, once lived in fear of it. Customs agents, armed with a high school education and a list of proscribed authors, stood guard not only against smut but also naturalism, aestheticism and modernism – anything strange and foreign. As late as 1946 books by Balzac, Guy de Maupassant, Zola, D.H. Lawrence, and James Joyce were deemed by official policy to be dangerous to the Dominion.
During this distant era, Hugh Kenner, a student at the University of Toronto, developed an interest in twentieth-century literature. His mentors of Northrop Frye and Marshall McLuhan, both of 
whom benefited from studying abroad, had brought back word of modernism of the Canadian hinterland. Kenner discovered that Joyce’s Ulysses, otherwise verboten in Canada, could be found in the restricted access section of the University of Toronto library. However, in order to take a look at the illicit text, Kenner needed to secure two letters of reference: one from a religious authority and one from a medical doctor. Kenner knew a priest who could vouch for his morals, but unfortunately, was unable to find an obliging M.D. to attest to the fact that reading Joyce would not corrupt his physical stamina. Ultimately, Kenner had a family friend, a Jesuit priest, smuggle into Canada a copy of the greatest novel of the 20th century.
Reading Ulysses, along with meeting Ezra Pound in 1948, was a turning point in Kenner’s life. Modernism, he quickly decided, was the central literature of his time. While D.H. Lawrence was also forbidden in Canada, Kenner believed that it was Joyce’s masterly of language, much more than his sexual frankness, that made him a revolutionary writer. He once made a sharp comparison between Lawrence and Jocye:
The telling difference between Constance Chatterly’s surrender (“She was utterly incapable of resisting it. From her breast flowed the answering, immense, yearning over him; she must give him anything, anything”) and Marion Bloom’s (“yes and my heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes”) is a difference in the molecular structure of language: the former, a Victorian survival applied to counter-Victorian situations, the latter a radical linguistic innovation, rhythm and syntax interlocked, assured. Which is why the presence or absence on American shores of Lady Chatterly’s Lover ultimately makes no difference except to the publishing trade and the custodians of the immature, while the presence of Ulysses has for some decades been slowly altering the world.
Confident of the importance of modernism, Kenner would spend his career writing about not only Joyce and Pound, but also their many friend and disciples, including T.S. Eliot, Samuel Beckett, Wyndham Lewis, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and W.B. Yeats. Viewed as a whole, Kenner’s critical oeuvre constitutes our best guide to twentieth-century English literature. No one else has written about such a range of authors with as much care, as much thought, as much perception. Moreover, especially in major books like The Pound Era (1971), Kenner has written prose of rare grace and energy, making him one of the few academic literary critics who delight as well as illuminate.