PAPER CHASE: Red River College instructor a textbook pioneer

Red River College business instructor Murray Moman is co-author of the first free online textbook for the Canadian market to be made available through the U.S.-based company Flat World Knowledge.

Moman co-authored the Canadian edition of the text Business Communication for Success with Scott McLean of Arizona Western College.

Flat World Knowledge makes textbooks available free online. They can also be downloaded to e-readers for a fee of approximately $35.

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Former Manitoban Corey Redekop has fun with our current pop-cultural zombie mania in his forthcoming novel Husk, to be published in October by ECW Press.

Husk tells the story of a struggling actor who dies in a bus restroom, wakes up during his autopsy and develops a taste for human flesh as he tries to keep both his body and his career from decomposing.

Redekop, who works as a publicist for Goose Lane Editions in Fredericton, previously published Shelf Monkey (ECW Press, 2007), a comic novel about a group of defenders of literature who gather to burn badly written but bestselling books.

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People who enjoy clever putdowns of deluded souls ought to go to hell. Slushpile hell, that is.

The blog Slushpilehell.tumblr.com collects examples of letters sent to "one grumpy literary agent" and publishes them, followed by frequently sarcastic responses. The slush pile, by the way, is where the hundreds or thousands of unsolicited manuscripts received every year by a publisher or literary agent end up.

In a typical Slushpilehell exchange, a would-be author writes, "My compelling story raises the bar in human literature," prompting the response "I don't know about raising the bar, but it certainly makes me want to go to a bar."

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The words of a great storyteller from Sagkeeng First Nation come to life in a new book that features English translations of stories recorded in the 1980s.

Sagkeeng Legends: John C. Courchene's Stories, by Craig Fontaine, includes stories originally recorded by Courchene's wife, Josephine. John C. Courchene, born in 1914, left the Fort Alexander Indian Residential School as a boy to work in the bush and learned the ways of the forest and his native language, Anishanabemowin.

The stories in the current book, presented by Fontaine, a researcher with the Manitoba First Nations Education Resource Centre, are also published in their original language.

The bilingual work will be launched Sept. 11 at 7 p.m. at McNally Robinson.

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Organizers of this year's Winnipeg Anarchist Book Fair are seeking input for a recommended radical reading list.

As part of this year's fair, which runs Sept. 21-23, fair organizers are hoping to assemble a list of "the top-50 radical books everybody should read" says Tim Brandt, a member of the organizing group.

The event, which takes place at the Albert Street Autonomous Zone Co-op at 91 Albert St., will also feature a panel on books that have motivated people to work for change, plus workshops, book tables and readings by authors Nik Barry-Shaw (author of Paved with Good Intentions: Canada's NGOs from Idealism to Imperialism) and Steve Langston (author of Canada by Bicycle).

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Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition August 25, 2012 J8