Noteworthy

The latest edition of CANADIAN NOTES AND QUERIES is out. You can check out the online version of the magazine here. (I have an article in this one, though it's not online.)

With the help of Charles Yang, I am building a new version of the CBT blog. Check out its first, somewhat gangly and awkward first post-steps here.

Other than that, happy holidays.

Call for submissions

Dan Green, who has been running his litblog since its inception primarily as a one-person operation (though he did for a while have a side-blog entitled CRITICAL DISTANCE) invites others to contribute to THE READING EXPERIENCE. He is hoping to put a particular emphasis on poetry. I hope he might also consider contributions on graphic fiction as well as web-published fiction, though I realize that is entirely up to him.

From Green's call:

The Reading Experience would thus become a forum for reviews of this kind. I would contribute such reviews myself, but I would also be the "editor" in that I would be looking for other writers and critics to contribute as well. Since I can't pay anyone for the effort, unfortunately the reward would have to be in the value of the effort itself. I could imagine reviews of books that are appearing several months to several years after the publication date, as well as essays that attempt to retrieve books from the oblivion into which they threaten to fall because of a lack of attention.

If anything, poetry is even more endangered by current reviewing practices than fiction, since much important poetry is given no attention at all in book review sections and on book review sites. So I would be interested additionally in reviews of poets and poetry, especially those that attempt to identify the important work being done, either by examining single books by particular poets, or by grouping several poets together, or by discussing at length noteworthy anthologies.

Noteworthy

Dan Wagstaff's favourite book covers of 2011.

Noteworthy

Nigel Beale interviews book historian Jonathan Rose. The interview takes as its starting point the history of British publisher John Malaby Dent; however, it also provides an interesting overview of the publishing of the late 19th and early-to-mid 20th centuries.

Noteworthy

Korean film critics Bak Eun-young and Kang Yoo-jeong on Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's Biutiful.

Noteworthy

Doug Saunders on Canada at war, at war.