September Notebook
Rosmersholm terrific, CBC hates book journalists, and fall theatre roundup
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.)