Mary Novik’s Conceit, which was named one of the Globe and Mail’s best books of the 2007 and nominated for the Giller prize, is now out in paperback. I caught up with the Vancouver-based author recently over email to talk about her novel, why John Donne is sexier than Sir Philip Sidney, and what it’s like to live inside your characters.

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In a time when so many first novels are autobiographical, you chose to retreat into the past. What drew you to the historical novel as a form?

When I started to write fiction, about ten years ago, I figured that young writers were much better at getting the contemporary idiom right, so I should try something different. I enjoy reading older literature and came up with the idea for Conceit when reading John Donne’s poems and wondering what his kids would have thought of Dad’s erotica. (more…)

Years ago, when I first met Nick Mount, he was teaching me about Major John Richardson in a U of T course called Early Canadian Literature. As I got to know him over beers and in the classroom, I learned more about his disparate interests: graphic novels, aesthetic theory, John Travolta records. He is the best teacher I’ve ever had. (more…)

Naomi Duguid and Jeffrey Alford’s new book, Beyond the Great Wall: Recipes and Travels in the Other China, is one of the best cookbooks I’ve ever read. Duguid and Alford have compiled twenty-five years of personal history, observation, photographs, travel narratives, and recipes into a collection that illustrates just how rich and varied non-Han Chinese culture is today, and just how endangered. In a year when China is in the news more than ever, the book serves as a reminder that the country is more than its capital city. I spoke with Jeffrey and Naomi a few weeks ago at the Random House Canada offices.

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Your own personal history is woven throughout this book and one gets the sense that these areas have been important to you for a long time. So why this book now? Why wasn’t it, say, your second book? What has changed politically, or in your own experiences, that made you want to write this book now?

Naomi: Well the ones out earlier, we put bits of those things in them—in our first book, Flatbreads and Flavors, we managed to squeeze Tibet in there, there was a lot of Xinjiang in there, and we started the book with flatbreads from Kashgar. But even now on our sixth book, we think this is lucky to be able to write about somewhere that is relatively so far out. So to have a contract even after a track record of six…that’s got to be our answer, partly. This has always been an interest of ours.

Jeffrey: in fact, a long time ago, Naomi wanted to do a book on Tibet. And I kept saying no way in the world…

N:…will anybody ever publish it. Stones and Silk, I thought. That would be a title.

J: Our editor was working on our second book with us, the one on rice, and she said, “you know, I’m okay to have my feet in the mud…”

N: “…in the rice paddies…”

J: “But please not over my knees.” (more…)

Much like Damien Hirst, Bigfoot considers his work “No dark, just misunderstood and ahead of time”

(Much like Damien Hirst, Bigfoot considers his work “No dark, just misunderstood and ahead of time.”)

This month marks the release of the third book in a series of collaborative memoirs by Bigfoot and Walrus contributing illustrator Graham Roumieu. Bigfoot: I Not Dead is a tender yet violent addition to Bigfoot’s ongoing self-exploration project, sure to please both fans of his previous work and those who aren’t yet familiar with him but enjoy furry creatures, mutilation, poetry, existential anxiety, and/or hard-learned life lessons.

Readers in Toronto should be sure to attend the book’s launch, which takes place Thursday night at the Gladstone Hotel as part of Pages Books’ “This Is Not a Reading Series.” Michael Winter, Nathan Whitlock, Douglas Bell, The Walrus’s own Jeremy Keehn, and others will speak about what Bigfoot means to them. Second floor, 7.30pm, free.

I reached Bigfoot last week at his home in the woods.

How has your life changed since your first book came out?

Bigfoot hang dirty laundry on line for all to see. Some things just needed be aired out on wind of disclosure. Others so heavy shit-encrusted that they fall off of line into mud and now scrutiny birds pick bits of corn out of it and neighbor steal and put on Ebay. Not totally regret writing books but wish sometime to go back to old technique of whisper secrets into hollow stump. (more…)

In our April issue we published a poem called “Two Cowboys” by Elise Partridge, a poet from Vancouver. I was the first person at the magazine to read the poem, and I immediately fell in love with its clarity, subtle complexity, and power. Last month, “Two Cowboys” reappeared as one of the poems in Partridge’s excellent new collection, Chameleon Hours, published by the House of Anansi.

On the occasion of her new book, I asked Elise a few questions about her work and new poems.

What attracts you to the lyric mode?

I think it’s the mode that best suits my gifts and inclinations; in any case, it was the one I was most drawn to attempt, and pursue. That said, in the future I’d like to incorporate more dramatic elements into some of my poems, for example perhaps try to write monologues for different voices. I also regularly get inspiration from short stories and would like to write more poems that include narration, however compressed. (more…)

Michael Pollan’s new book, In Defense of Food, has an air of summation about it, drawing on years of research to make an argument that is both profoundly radical and embarrassingly simple. In Pollan’s estimation, many of the epidemics facing our corner of Western society have little to do with, say, the ratio of saturated to unsaturated fat in our diet. Instead, the problem is the nature of our diet as a whole, and the fact that we eat way too much of it: too much red meat, too many refined carbohydrates and sugars (usually including an array of chemical enhancements) and too little of everything else.

Partly to blame for this is the rise of nutritionism, a particular branch of food science that has spent decades casting about in an attempt to blame some evil or other for the reality that many of us are overweight. Pollan’s book is as much a defense of food as it is an indictment of the mindset that has seen us reduce food from being nutritious to being comprised of particular nutrients. This tendency, Pollan argues, lies behind our societal fetishization of the latest black-balled ingredient, a focus that allows us to ignore actual nutrition, which would just tell us to eat more vegetables and fruit, and less food overall.

In Defense of Food is a small book in size, but its scope is massive: a comprehensive study of the ways in which, over the last fifty years or so, scientists and journalists have manipulated what and how we eat. Pollan also looks forward in its call to common sense. “Eat food,” Pollan advises. “Not too much. Mostly plants.” Simple advice, and geared less to a diet fad than a new lifestyle. The book’s overwhelming success indicates its message is being well received. And let’s hope so, for as Pollan suggested in our interview, as more and more of us “vote with our forks,” casting the ballot will become easier, and more delicious.

I spoke with Michael Pollan last week, by phone from his office in Berkeley, California. (more…)