Audiobooks, science fiction trending upwards

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This article was published 19/05/2018 (2714 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

More and more people are doing their reading with their ears, it seems.

Reporting on this year’s London Book Fair, Publishers Weekly describes the rise of audiobooks as the big trend in the industry. Figures from the American Publishing Association show that 24 per cent of Americans listed to audiobooks, and sales of the format added up to US$2 billion in 2016. Though final figures weren’t yet available for 2017, one survey indicated a 30 per cent increase that year.

One agent quoted by the magazine indicated that publishers at the book fair were interested in near-future science fiction, not interested in anything historical except the Second World War and “awaiting the bubble to burst on Gone Girl-y domestic suspense.”

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Award-winning Indigenous filmmaker Michelle Latimer has partnered with Sienna Films, the company that produces the CTV crime series Cardinal, to produce a series based on Eden Robinson’s novel Son of a Trickster and its forthcoming sequels.

Latimer, who won a Canadian Screen Award for a documentary on the Standing Rock pipeline protests, landed the screen rights for the book after writing Robinson a letter on the emotional impact the book had on her. The novel’s sequel, Trickster Drift, is scheduled for publication in the fall; a third volume, Return of the Trickster, is in the works.

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Toronto writer Leah Mol is this year’s winner of the $6,000 CBC short story prize. A graduate of the University of British Columbia’s creative writing MFA program, Mol won the prize for Lipstick Day, a first-person story of young girls and sexuality.

In addition to the cash prize, the winner receives a 10-day residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts.

CBC’s annual poetry prize is open for submissions until May 31.

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Scholastic Canada is looking for kids aged 10 to 14 for be part of next year’s Scholastic News Kids Press Corps.

In 2017-18, Scholastic’s 44 “kid reporters” covered news, sports and entertainment for Scholastic News. In past years, participants in the program interviewed Nobel Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai, UN Secretary-General António Guterres, Captain Underpants author Dav Pilkey, conservationist Jane Goodall and other newsmakers.

For application information, see scholastic.ca/kidspress. The application deadline is May 31.

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Nobody would have guessed before this season that Las Vegas would become a great hockey city. The desert playground is making a similarly unlikely transformation to a major literary city.

Last year, the University of Nevada-Las Vegas-based Black Mountain Institute bought the influential literary magazine The Believer and moved it from San Francisco to Las Vegas. This spring’s Believer Festival brought big-name authors including Dave Eggers, Rachel Kushner, Nick Hornby, Meg Wolitzer and Mohsin Hamid to locations including Fremont Street and the nearby Red Rock Canyon.

The city’s metamorphosis began when casino mogul Glenn Schaeffer, who studied at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, donated funds to the UNLV to establish the Black Mountain Institute.

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Brandon University history professor Rhonda Hinther examines a century of Ukrainian-Canadian political life in her new book Perogies and Politics: Canada’s Ukrainian Left 1891-1991 (University of Toronto Press).

Hinther, who previously co-edited the book Re-Imagining Ukrainian Canadians for U of T Press, will launch the book at McNally Robinson’s Grant Park location Wednesday at 7:30 p.m.

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Rapper Kanye West announced recently on Twitter that he is using the social media platform to write a book of philosophy, and no editor or publisher will tell him what to do.

Followup tweets gave a sneak peek: “The now is the greatest moment of our lives and it just keeps getting better. The bad parts the boring parts the parts with high anxiety… Pain happiness. It’s 3 dementional. There’s taste touch sound.” Needless to say (sic).

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