Wait, they’re still at it?
The Giller longlist has been released and the award is reverting to its bad old habit of long- and short-listing people who have very little to do with Canada. Hello, Claire Messud! Also, singer Molly Johnson on the jury of three? The Canada Reads Law of CanLit: Anything in CanLit that has the slightest chance of going the way of Canada Reads — will.
Further in ‘they’re still at it’, a small group of activists shouting Stop the genocide interrupted the opening of the Toronto International Film Festival. Cui bono, no one has a clue. They are becoming the Canadian version of the soup-throwing anti-art figli di papà of Just Stop Oil.
Large publishing houses used to be chic
I emailed a publicity contact at HarperCollins the other day to kindly send me their catalogue for Canadian non-fiction, which turned out to be an impossible ask. I received a catalogue listing all HarperCollins Canada titles, a mix of fiction, self-help, cooking and very few non-fiction books. Ken Whyte over on Sutherland House’s Substack newsletter Shush has been covering this issue for quite a while now (and is one of the few noticing and giving a damn), to wit, that the Big Three multinationals dominating the Canadian publishing market publish very little Canadian non-fiction. Penguin Random House in fact had a global hit in Fire Weather last year, but I doubt this will have the effect of expanding the list for Canadian non-fiction in any significant way. It’s the university presses like the UBC Press and McGill-Queen's University Press where the bulk of non-fiction publishing happens for Canada. The U of T Press is where you’re most likely to find books written for academic audiences; the UBC and McG-Q, is my impression, already have a respectable backlist of academics publishing for the general public. A minority of academics are good writers, however; a lot of the books are this strange academic-somewhat-general-readership hybrid. But they’ll have to do for now. If you are interested in what’s going on in Canadian non-fiction, that’s where you’ll have turn — and Sutherland House.
Now, the Big Three are thinning out their Canadian output, and there’s a bundle of economic and policy forces behind that that span decades. But I had no idea how shitey their lists generally are these days until I had a close look at them. How do these behemoths survive publishing that much pablum? (OK, the small percentage of hits fund the entire machinery, but what a precarious, irrational model.)