Professor launching 'grouchy' collection

Former Winnipegger Tanis MacDonald, who teaches English and creative writing at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ont., returns to her former hometown Thursday to launch what’s called "her grouchiest book yet."

Mobile: Poems (Book*hug) is described as an "urban lament about female citizenship and settler culpability." An essayist, poet and literary scholar, her previous books include Out of Line: Daring to be an Artist Outside the Big City and a book on the poetry of Manitoba’s Di Brandt.

MacDonald launches her book at McNally Robinson Booksellers’ Grant Park location at 7 p.m.

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After winning the Governor General’s Award for books for young readers and the U.S. Kirkus Prize for young readers with her last book, the bestseller The Marrow Thieves, Cherie Dimaline has another hit on her hand with The Empire of Wild.

Her new novel, based on a Métis legend of a werewolf-like creature known as the Rogarou, was named the top book of the year by Canadian book chain Indigo.

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A novel about the women who made Queen Elizabeth’s wedding gown, a memoir of travel and the search for identity and the little-known story of four young men who became the nucleus of Israel’s intelligence service were among the winners of this year’s Canadian Jewish Literary Awards.

Winning books in the fiction, memoir and history categories were, respectively: Jennifer Robson’s The Gown: A Novel of the Royal Wedding; Ayelet Tsabari’s The Art of Leaving: A Memoir; and Matti Friedman’s Spies of No Country: Behind Enemy Lines at the Birth of the Israeli Secret Service.

Award recipients in the other categories were Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century, by Alexandra Popoff (biography); A Cage Without Bars, by Anne Dublin (children and youth Jewish history); Confessions of a Yiddish Writer and Other Essays, by Chava Rosenfarb (Yiddish); Culture in Nazi Germany, by Michael Kater (scholarship); and Choices Under Duress of the Holocaust: Benjamin Murmelstein and the Fate of Viennese Jewry, Volume I: Vienna, by Leonard and Edith Ehrlich (Holocaust).

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The late Philip Roth made a Newark, N.J., library employee the protagonist of his first novel, Goodbye, Columbus, and in his late-career masterpiece, American Pastoral, he wrote about the city’s long decline.

He’s giving back to his old hometown with a bequest of at least US$2 million to expand the collection of the Newark Library — plus extra money to renovate a space to hold his personal book collection, which he has also given to the institution. The Wall Street Journal reports that Roth announced his plan to donate to the library in 2016.

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When Chicago became the largest U.S. city to eliminate overdue fines at its libraries this year, the result was a jump in returns of long-overdue books, the Sun-Times reports.

The head of the city’s libraries reported recently to city council that overdue fines often result in patrons never returning the book. "We lose the asset and we lose the patron," library commissioner Andrea Telli said.

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Conventional wisdom in the book world is that there’s no money in short stories and novellas.

But conventional wisdom never met Don Winslow, author of the bestsellers The Cartel, The Force and The Border. According to the website Lit Hub, Winslow has recently sold a collection of five novellas and a short story to publisher William Morrow for a seven-figure price tag.

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The author of a conspiracy-theory book called Nobody Died at Sandy Hook has been ordered to pay US$450,000 for defamation.

Leonard Pozner, whose son Noah was among 26 victims of the 2012 massacre in Sandy Hook, Conn., won the suit after he became the target of abuse by stalkers encouraged by the conspiracy theory that mass-shooting events such as Sandy Hook were staged hoaxes.

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