PAPER CHASE: Quill & Quire selects Joan Thomas’s Curiosity

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This article was published 04/12/2010 (5723 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

WINNIPEG author Joan Thomas’s novel Curiosity is one of Quill & Quire‘s selected books of the year for 2010.

In her April review in Canada’s book trade magazine, Amy Sands Brodoff declared, “Curiosity is without question the best novel this reader has come across in the past year.”

It is set in the English coastal town of Lyme Regis. Thomas fictionalizes the true story of a self-taught woman paleontologist, Mary Anning, who made some of the most important discoveries of her time.

Thomas’s 2008 debut novel, Reading by Lightning, won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for best first book and the Amazon.ca first novel award. Curiosity was longlisted for this year’s Scotiabank Giller Prize.

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Amazon.com and Penguin have announced the fourth annual Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award competition.

The 2011 competition is open to unpublished and self-published novels. It will award two grand prizes: one for general fiction and one for best youth novel. Penguin will publish each grand prize winner, chosen by voting by Amazon.com customers; those names will be announced June 13, 2011. The publishing contract includes a $15,000 advance.

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British author Rosie Alison, whose novel The Very Thought of You was shortlisted for the Orange Prize earlier this year, has traced a pattern of negative reviews on Amazon.co.uk, suggesting she has an online “stalker,” reports The Guardian.

Alison asked Amazon to intervene after a series of similar critical reviews appeared. One posting was made under her daughter’s name.

The author denied an earlier report in The Daily Mail that she had hired investigators to see if rival publishers were behind it.

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If you’re in Toronto this Tuesday night, you might consider sparing Canadian literary journal Brick a dime�ö or $75

Named by American novelist Russell Banks as “one of the best, if not the best, journals of ideas published in the English-speaking world,” Brick is presenting its inaugural fundraising ball, Kiki’s Paris: The City of Light in 1925.

Modelled after the parties and salons of 1920s Montparnasse the event will be hosted by Jian Ghomeshi of CBC Radio’s morning show Q. The evening will also launch Brick No. 86.

Publisher Michael Redhill told the National Post that 15 per cent of Brick’s income must be filled through fundraising; this amounts to $20,000 annually.

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The U.S.-based Lambda Literary Awards for gay writing will be the new home for the Outstanding Mid-Career Novelists’ Prize, the largest monetary prize awarded exclusively to an LGBT writer, beginning in 2011.

There will be separate prizes for one self-identified man and one self-identified woman, to recognize emergent LGBT authors who have published at least two to three novels and substantial additional literary work such as poetry, short stories and essays.

Several Canadians have won Lambdas.

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