The Savvy Reader

“Profound or Whatever” - Jerry Levitan On the Fly

Forty years ago, Jerry Levitan snuck into a Toronto hotel to meet his idol, John Lennon. But instead of being kicked out by security, he was invited to spend an entire day with the man himself. During that time, Jerry and John got to talk about life, love, music and everything in between. Now, all the details of that extraordinary day, plus an exclusive 45-minute interview with John, have been captured in the bestselling I Met the Walrus. Jerry has already told us how meeting Lennon changed his life; now, he shares with us John’s incredible writing process.

Lynn Johnston - On the Fly video and a Contest!

Last week, our publicist Melissa blogged about Lynn Johnston’s whirlwind weekend in Toronto, promoting the adorable (and bestselling) Farley Follows His Nose. Now, we can unveil another surprise for you: an On the Fly video with Johnston, the lady responsible for years of early AM laughs with For Better or For Worse.

And if any of you die-hard Johnston fans haven’t already bought your own copy of Farley Farley Follows His Nose, then you’re in luck because we’re giving a couple away! All you have to do is tell me about your absolute favorite Farley moment in the comments section below, and you might just be crowned our winner. Deadline is June 24, 2009. May the biggest Farley fan win!

--Narvan

What Goes on at a Publishing House

I don't even like the Leafs.

Why the Leafs Suck by Al Strachan coming in the Fall.

Embarrassing video coming next week.

-- Cory

HCC Early Reads: Suddenly

I'm not going to lie, one of the most enjoyable parts of working in publishing is reading books before they go on sale. One of the most anticipated books of the fall season, Bonnie Burnard's new novel Suddenly, is ready for in-house reading, and I wanted to share the note that the author's editor, Phyllis Bruce, sent around from Lynne Missen, our children's editor:

Hi Phyllis,

Thank you for sharing Bonnie Burnard’s Suddenly, which I was thrilled to read. Having sat in the chair beside the hospital bed, I was struck by the view from the bed itself. Bonnie is particularly adept at portraying women’s friendships and family relationships; seeing these examined in light of a life about to end is both moving and eye-opening. That she also managed to show death as an everyday occurrence as well as a momentous occasion is somehow comforting. I was compelled to read this –- on the subway, on the couch, at my desk.

Thanks,
Lynne

Put up your hand if you want to read this book now...can you see me waving from across the internets like a madwoman?

The Inside View: First Look

Our Online Marketing Associate Cory Beatty gives an inside view about the success of Hurry Down Sunshine in First Look.

Sometimes in publishing it happens that those of us who have known about a book since early days (sales conference, proofreading, acquisition) really know that the title has the goods, know that we're really on to something special from the get-go, and we hope desperately that as many people as possible will enjoy it too. Unfortunately, sometimes (and certainly more often than we'd like) that doesn't happen.

So, it's a great feeling when readers really get on board with a book we all feel so good about, which is why we're smiling so widely after the fabulous reaction First Look subscribers gave Michael Greenberg's Hurry Down Sunshine.  If you don't know about First Look, it's a pretty amazing program where select readers can read and review books months ahead of publication.

Last month Greenberg's memoir set a record for the most ever requests with over 350 people asking to review it. The memoir (hopeful and inspiring) follows Greenberg's journey to help his 15-year-old daughter Sally who, during one long summer was suddenly struck mad. It's an incredible piece of writing and a story that really has touched a lot of us. By the sounds of it, the book is going to be something special to all of you too.

Thanks Cory! For those of you who are still interested in Hurry Down Sunshine, I have 2 copies to give away. Leave a note in the comments (and a way to contact you) and tell me why you think First Look rocks. I'll get Cory to pick the winners.

A Star Studded Sales Conference Rocks

It's one thing to work on a Sunday. It's quite another to work on the first absolutely gorgeous Sunday of the year. So there was a little bit of moaning and groaning around the office about coming in yesterday for the first day of our Fall 2008 Sales Conference. That's until the guests started arriving.

I'm not even going to front: it's an incredible fall list, with novels by Marilynne Robinson, Rebecca Miller and Helen Humphreys, two huge business books, one of which is authored by Peter C. Newman, and the other by Ted Rogers, plus a new mystery series called Bruno, Chief of Police that's akin The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency set in the world of A Year in Provence, and it's almost impossible to put into words how thrilled we are over every single book we've got coming out next fall.

But special guests too? On top of great books? Come on!

First off, for our morning break, we were treated to Peter C. Newman talking to the group about his Izzy Asper biography, aptly titled Izzy: The Passionate Life and Turbulent Times of Izzy Asper, Canada's Media Mogul. He's charming, funny and absolutely knows how to work a crowd. He also had some amazing advice for writers: focus on the body language because it's essential to all descriptions. Body language, in Newman's words, doesn't lie.

By lunchtime we were all starving, which made us the perfect audience for the utterly charming and truly unique David Rocco. He regaled us with stories of his travels, of the philosophy behind his lifestyle, and smiled that incredible smile! Oh, did I mention lunch? We enjoyed dishes from his new book, David Rocco's Dolce Vita, which included naked ravioli, incredible pasta, and some amazing zucchini (and more!

Afternoon rolled around, our bellies were full, and we were ready for our next guest, who was none other then Les Stroud, Suvivorman himself. Collins Canada is publishing his Survive! Essential Skills and Tactics to Get You Out of Anywhere -- Alive in October. The purpose of the book, or rather, why Les's is writing the book, is to debunk the more traditional survival guide techniques that his own experiences have proven ineffective. The central premise of Les Stroud's book is to keep it simple and survive. His whole essence is efficient, smart and utterly energetic.

That's a pretty jam-packed day, right? What more could we possibly expect? Three authors who could easily be moved into the celebrity category...and then Paul Gross showed up. And I gasped. I think I actually said, "He's so dreamy." OUT LOUD. Over twelve years in the making, his passion project, the feature-film Passchendaele, based on his grandfather's experience during the First World War, comes out in October. HarperCollins Canada is publishing the film tie-in books, and Alliance Films is distributing the movie. It's a huge, even epic, Canadian film that was shot in Calgary, and I'm already counting down the days until it's in theatres. It's impossible to put into words how magnetic he is in person, handsome, of course, but smart, well spoken and hilarious.

What a day! All that and books too.

Some Scary Stats From Stuffed and Starved

Raj Patel's Stuffed and Starved will hit the shelves next month, and in a letter to booksellers, he had this to say:

The world now has one billion people who are overweight and 800 million who are starving. Canadians exist at both ends of this spectrum, with nearly six million Canadian adults categorized as obese and one in five Canadian children living in poverty.

In my book Stuffed and Starved, I explain how these two conditions can occur at the same time. The story links a number of seemingly disparate phenomena, including the epidemic of farmer suicides to the problem of food distribution throughout the world.

Telling stories from India, South Korea, South Africa, Brazil, Mexico, France, Italy and the United States, I show how there is much more blood in our food that we can see, but also more hope than we can taste.

I do hope that you'll choose to support Stuffed and Starved, and that you will enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. And, if you'd like to find out more, do visit the book's website, where you'll find updates, outtakes and the latest news on food, hunger and the world's fight for justice.

And here are some very scary Can-con stats to further understand the issues explored in the book:

• Canada's obesity rate has risen dramatically -- in 1979, it was just over one in ten; today it is nearly double that
• At least one in three Canadians is overweight
• At the same time as obesity has risen in Canada, hunger has also been on the increase: since the 1980s the rate of food-source insecurity has been steadily rising in Canada
• The most recent data shows that over one in ten households in Canada has a point in its year when it is uncertain about where the next meal is coming from
• First Nations people are four times more likely to report hunger than other Canadians
• One in five Canadian children lives in poverty
• In real terms, social assistance for the poorest Canadians has decreased over the past 20 years
• In 1981, there was only one food bank in Canada. By 1995, there were nearly 500
• The second largest group of people who use food banks, at 13%, includes people who already have jobs but aren't earning enough to feed themselves
• The average Canadian drinks 77 litres of beer and eats 3.9 kilos of chocolate per year (the 14th-highest amounts in the world)

What makes these stats even more shocking is that fact that these opposing yet intimately mirrored problems of obesity and starvation come at a time in history when humans are producing more food than ever before. This tidbit comes out in the first sentence in the book. Certainly makes you think, doesn't it?

More info on Stuffed and Starved here.
Watch the trailer.
Join the Facebook Group.

Praise Be To Sales Conference

For those of you not in the book world, you haven't experienced a sales conference. Incredibly important, it's the week three times during the year where the publishers present the upcoming lists to the sales force so they can, in turn, head out and sell the books into the stores. It's quite a harrowing week for those of us in the office, preparing, thinking, preparing some more, but it's so rewarding once the list is up in the presentations, plans are all done, and each and every book looks not only intriguing but utterly and compulsively readable.

But in all the sales conferences I've attended over the last three years of working in publishing, I'd have to say that today was very special. Today was "Canada Day," which is always fabulous because it's the day our in-house editors and publishers present the books they've acquired and edited to the team. And it's quite a summer list, let me tell you. But what made it extra-special, was the fact that we had two authors come in and speak to the entire group.

The first, Anita Stewart, has a cookbook / food celebration tome coming out in April called Anita Stewart's Canada. After her presentation, a very short speech about the book itself and how it has set out to explore the frozen river (with tumultuous undercurrents) of Canadian cuisine, Anita kindly explained what we were going to eat for lunch, each dish coming from the recipes in the book. Well, let me just say that it was just about the most delicious meal I've ever had at any sales conference I'd ever attended. And Anita herself was ridiculously fascinating, bright and well-spoken.

Then, Gretta Vosper, author of the forthcoming With or Without God came in to address the entire group. Thoughtful, well-spoken and, frankly, inspirational in ways that words might fail here, she gave a little bit of background about the book. Rooted in her own study, and germinating from a book published in the 1960s called Honest to God, Vosper believes that the current idea of what a church is and has been for hundreds of years, may very well have outlived its purpose. What's important to Vosper, as she said in the brief moments that she spoke to us, is that as a whole, humanity needs to hold on to the parts of the religious experience that gives you strength, and to the life-enhancing values that are taught, and not necessarily to the old-fashioned fire and brimstone lectures of more traditional belief systems. Now, keep in mind I am paraphrasing as I was furiously taking notes during her fascinating talk, but it became obvious that she engaged the room so deeply that I don't think a single person left the room not wanting to read the book, whether they're a practicing Christian or not.

Lastly, while we're talking about inspirational things, whether they're high up in the spirits, or sitting on the table in front of us about to be eaten, here's a book crashing in on Hyperion's list called The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch with Jeff Zaslow. The title comes from the fact that the author himself had recently given his own Last Lecture at Carnegie Mellon, where he teaches computer science. He called it, "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams," it's at once a moving, pragmatic and ridiculously endearing speech Pausch gave to 400 students after learning he was dying of pancreatic cancer. There's a video of Pausch giving a condensed version on Oprah.com (where he appeared recently) and I urge you to take a look.

Like I said, inspiring. It was just one of those days.

Senior Editor Jim Gifford Talks Causeway

Jim Gifford, HarperCollins Canada's Senior Editor, Non-Fiction, talks a little bit about how Linden MacIntyre's Causeway changed from the time it was commissioned until its publication. It's a glimpse into the evolution of a book from the editor's mind to the writer's words on the actual page.

In October it was announced that Linden MacIntyre’s memoir Causeway: A Passage from Innocence had won the 2007 Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction. I was very pleased for Linden, of course, but certainly not surprised that one of the country’s most prestigious prizes would be awarded to one of this country’s most celebrated and important writers and broadcasters. Causeway is one of the finest books I’ve had the great pleasure to be associated with during my years in publishing.

When I commissioned Linden to write the book, I envisioned a traditional Cape Breton memoir full of quaint fishing villages, fiddle music, and perhaps not a little whiskey—the kind of Cape Breton that lives in the imaginations of many Canadians, the stuff of postcards and popular novels. Linden’s first draft was nothing like I had imagined, though it still featured some fiddling and not a little whiskey. Linden MacIntyre’s Cape Breton is a land influenced by mining and not by cod, a 1950s throwback lost in time, an island that was truly an island in an era before the proliferation of television and the invention of the Internet.

At the heart of the book runs the construction of the Canso Causeway, the ribbon of asphalt that meant to bring the world to Cape Breton, but which, in Linden’s estimation, brought Cape Breton to the world. Parallel to the causeway runs Linden’s relationship with his father, Dan Rory. The causeway was supposed to bring Dan Rory to Linden as well, to provide a steady income for a man often forced to work abroad in mines in Newfoundland and Quebec to support his family. The original title of the book was Home for Good, Again, a hope that Dan Rory would live in his house year-round with his family and finally realize his dreams of starting up his own timber mill and spending time with his boy. But politics, so divisive a half century ago, determined that Dan Rory wouldn’t be working on the causeway, and as he had built his timber mill in the path of the causeway’s construction, it, too, never had a chance to change the lives of the MacIntyres. Many of the homes and businesses that Linden knew as a boy were knocked or burned down to make room for the new land bridge, and life on the island was never quite the same.

Causeway is a highly evocative memoir, at once a vibrant coming-of-age story, a portrait of a vanishing way of life, and a luminous reflection on fathers and sons. MacIntyre fills his pages with vivid characters: his Gaelic-speaking grandmother, Peigag, who was rumoured to have “special powers” that could both cure and curse; Old John, the Hungarian immigrant, and Ted, a young Korean man, both hoping to find their way in Cape Breton; locals with colourful nicknames—John Dan Guts, Louie the Cat, and Ten-to-Six; and Dan Rory, the father MacIntyre struggles to know and love. These are the people who inhabit a time and a place that is on the brink of transformation.

Causeway, now available in a beautiful trade paperback edition, is a timeless book that reads like a novel, which isn’t surprising as Linden achieved great success with his novel, The Long Stretch, as well. The images and truths that lurk in the pages of Causeway will stay with you long after you’ve turned that last page.

Behind the Book with Lauren Groff

The Monsters of Templeton author Lauren Groff gives a bit of a background behind her new novel coming out this February. In her own words.

I was born and raised in Cooperstown, New York, a tiny village rich with legend, myth and magic. You may know of Cooperstown because it is host to the National Baseball Hall of Fame and the world-class Glimmerglass Opera, but my town also has spectacular natural beauty with a nine-mile glacial lake and rolling green hills. Unique to such a small place, the town has a vibrant history, one filled with ghost-stories and monsters, and one that has fired my imagination since I was a toddler.

About four years ago, I found myself homesick for my village, and decided to write it a love-letter, to craft a novel in which Cooperstown figured as a main character. When my historical research began to slide into the world of fiction, I followed the lead of James Fenimore Cooper, who was also from my hometown: when he wrote about Cooperstown he called the town Templeton, which allowed him a certain narrative distance.

The Monsters of Templeton is the result, a contemporary novel about twenty-eight-year-old Willie Upton, scion of Templeton’s founding family, who comes back to her hometown to recuperate when her life falls apart. There, her mother, Vivienne, a former hippie-turned-Born-again-Baptist, tells her a secret that sends Willie digging through Templeton’s past. The novel is also one that engages with the changing history of my hometown, and what it means to belong to a place and to a family. To match the form of the book to its function, I was able to write in the voices of characters from different epochs of the town’s history, through letters, editorials, journal entries, ghost-voices, a Greek Chorus—even the voices of some of James Fenimore Cooper’s own fictional characters. It is an unusual book, and one I had a great deal of joy in writing.