Quebecers to look out for in 2017
O’Neill’s streak continues
As they do every year, books continue to flout every trendy prediction of the death of the book. For proof, if needed, here is a partial look at what’s on the way from Montreal writers and publishers, confined to the first half of the new year. Publication dates are provided where available, but bear in mind they are subject to change.
Heather O’Neill is showing herself to be the most prolific Canadian writer this side of Margaret Atwood — and that’s a good thing, since her writing has the kind of seriously addictive properties that make readers antsy for more. At a time when plenty of people will still have her 2015 story collection Daydreams of Angels on the bedside table, and with the 2014 novel The Girl Who Was Saturday Night fresh in the memory, O’Neill is now back with The Lonely Hearts
Hotel (Harper Collins, February). There’s no sign that the author has exhausted her native city as a source, but for the first time her lyrical eye is being trained on the historical: the new novel follows the progress of foundlings Pierrot and Rose from the orphanage to the musical theatre and circus stages of early-20th-century Montreal. A dip into the first few pages indicates that O’Neill’s formidable powers are firing on all cylinders. A third consecutive Giller shortlisting could very well be in the cards.
Another non-slouch in the productivity department is Josip
Novakovich. Since arriving here from Croatia via the United States, the writer and Concordia professor has been amassing a multi-genre list of credits, from novels to stories to essays and memoir. His abiding theme — naturally, given his own backstory — has been emigration. Don’t be concerned about any creeping monotony, though: Novakovich finds all kinds of ways into the subject, with treatments that always seem to be teetering between laughter and horror. You get the sense he’s due for a breakthrough to a higher popular and critical profile, and the story collection Tumbleweed (Véhicule Press, January) might just be the one to do it.
There’s been a buzz around the work of Lesley Trites for some time now; the transplanted Maritimer’s short fiction has been showing up in the better literary journals, and her journalism has appeared in the Montreal Gazette and Maisonneuve, among other places. Trites is now set for her book debut with A Three-Tiered
Pastel Dream (Véhicule Press/ Esplanade Books, April), a story collection with a linking theme of modern women trying to cope. Also from the fecund Véhicule, and due in May, is John Buell’s
The Pyx, a reissue of the Montreal writer’s long-lost 1959 crime noir that continues the work of the inspired Ricochet imprint, dedicated to reviving and curating a rich seam of genre writing that would otherwise be lost to pulp-fiction oblivion. Joe Ollmann’s The Abominable Mr. Seabrook (Drawn & Quarterly, January) finds one of Canada’s great cartoonists stretching himself to hitherto unseen creative heights. The abominable man in question is William Seabrook, among the last of the old-school breed of hardliving, swashbuckling, globetrotting polymath journalists. Ollmann, an artist not unfamiliar
with some hard living himself, finds his perfect match in this epic-length graphic biography. Former Montrealer Jesse
Brown has drawn a devoted and growing following with his Canadaland podcast, an alternative news and media-watchdog source that has regularly outpaced better-funded competition, providing nuanced takes on thorny stories like the Steven Galloway firing controversy. Though humour is just one of Brown’s weapons, it looks like levity will be to the fore in The Canadaland Guide to Canada (Published in America)
(Touchstone, May), by Brown with Vicky Mochama and Nick Zarzycki. If it lives up to the high standard set by its cover painting — a pairing of two Canadian icons in which Drake canoodles with a moose — it will make a lot of people happy. Ariela Freedman’s Arabic for
Beginners (Linda Leith Publishing, February), a novel of motherhood and expat life in contemporary Jerusalem, is a debut that comes highly recommended by a certain Heather O’Neill, who compares it to the work of Rachel Cusk and Deborah Levy. Think back to the former’s Outline and to the latter’s Swimming Home, and you should be fairly whetted.
Remember the Earl Jones Ponzi scheme — that sordid, long-running episode that saw a local “investment adviser” bilk innocent citizens out of tens of millions of dollars, then serve a piddling four years of jail time? You may even be among the unfortunate Montrealers who have been trying hard to forget it. Either way, with the safe remove of time we can now all look forward to Michael Blair’s Jonesinspired novel The Evil That
Men Do (Linda Leith Publishing, March). Blair has been establishing himself as one of Canada’s most reliably readable crime novelists, so this new one looks like a perfect match of writer and subject.
As pointed out by Dimitri Nasrallah in this column last week, it’s a renaissance time for literary translation in Quebec, and a leading force in that development has been the politically inclined Baraka Books with their QC Fiction imprint. Due from them in June is Pierre-Luc Landry’s Listening for Jupiter, translated by Arielle Aaronson and Madeleine Stratford. It comes with a solid pedigree, having won in the French fiction category of the Ottawa Book Awards for 2016.
From elsewhere on the same front comes the rather exciting news that Catherine Leroux, now known nationwide for her Giller-shortlisted The Party Wall, is working on a French translation of Madeleine Thien’s world-beating Do Not Say We Have Nothing. Not much needs saying about this, other than to underline the obvious: when one of our best writers interprets another one of our best writers, it’s win-win. Oh, and word is that Leroux’s latest book in French, 2015’s Madame Victoria — a novel that digs into Montreal’s past via the true story of a body discovered buried beneath Royal Victoria Hospital — might make it into English this year.
As we grapple with the darker implications of what transpired on the international political stage in 2016, a couple of books from McGill-Queen’s University Press are on the horizon to help us. Donald J. Johnston’s Missing the Tide: Global Governments in Retreat promises a sobering look into “how the global optimism that characterized the 1990s evolved into pessimism and chaos,” while William Kaplan’s Why Dissent Matters: Because Some People See Things the Rest of Us Miss studies some prominent resistors whose example should be heeded in the months and years ahead. Both books are due in June.
CBC’s Canada Reads is upon us once again. Among the 15 longlisted books, many of us will be following the progress of Sheila Watt-Cloutier’s The Right to Be Cold: One Woman’s Story of Protecting Her Culture, the Arctic and the Whole Planet. One of the best things a competition like this can do is reset the spotlight on a book that might have been under-recognized the first time around, and that’s very much the case with this book, which packs a Naomi Klein-style punch in its capacity to make us rethink how the world works. (Some reading sure to complement Watt-Cloutier is Zebedee Nungak’s Wrestling With Colonialism: Quebec Inuit Fight for Their Homeland, an account of the historic 1970s resistance to the James Bay hydro project, due in April from Véhicule.) Another local writer in the Canada Reads running is
Sylvain Neuvel for Sleeping Giants, a soon-to-be-a-motionpicture novel that has been effecting a rare crossover from sci-fi circles to a general readership.
There is, of course, a whole lot more going on than can be accommodated here, two examples being the heroic efforts of a couple of fledgling local literary houses: Metatron, the brainchild of intrepid millennials Ashley Opheim and Guillaume (New Tab) Morissette, and the queer-focused Metonymy Press. Fuller looks at what both have been up to will be in this column in the coming months. I’m trying. Really, I am.