Atwood urged to decline Israeli award

Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood is slated to receive the Dan David Prize from Tel Aviv University in Israel on May 9. The prize committee awards three million dollars in the categories of "past, present, and future" to inspirational individuals of various fields who have made an outstanding impact on the world. Atwood would share one million dollars with Amitav Ghosh, an Indian-Bengali author who writes in English; past literary winners have included Amos Oz and Tom Stoppard, in addition to non-writers like environmental activist Al Gore, cellist Yo Yo Ma, and archeologist Graeme Barker.

Various people, including a contingency of students from the Gaza Strip known as the Palestinian Students' Campaign for the Academic Boycott of Israel, have expressed their concern over Atwood's possible acceptance of an award from Israel due to the nation's apartheid-like treatment of Palestinian people. In letters that can be read here, they plead that she either boycott the ceremony, use the podium as an opportunity to condemn Israel's actions, or publicly use the winnings to contribute to causes such as writers' groups in the Gaza Strip.

Atwood's website, however, still lists that she plans to accept the award.

She will also be participating in an Earth Day panel called Arts of the Earth on April 25 in Washington, DC.

Scream Literary Festival honors fallen books

Chelsea Miya of NOW Toronto reports on the Scream Literary Festival, a conference of Canadian writers, publishers, graphic novelists, poets, and artists that satirically eulogizes the death of the book. The festival, which began on July 2, will last until Sunday the 11th.

The Scream Literary Festival brings together some of the best Canadian authors, poets and artists. Hymns, readings, performances, and workshops explore the imminent demise of books and book culture.

Because it’s not just the books themselves that suffer.

Beneath Toronto’s storefronts is a graveyard. From the recently demised David Mirvish Books to Yorkville mainstays the Book Cellar and Britnell’s, Bloor Street is a virtual cemetery of loved and lost bookstores.

“When people hear dead bookstores, they think we’re poking fun,” said Carey Toane, who organised the July 4 Bankruptcy Walking Tour — a memorial trek for the lost.

“But it was a serious walk. We left flowers. People talked about their memories. When you ask writers and fans of literature they all have a favourite independent bookstore. It’s the only place you can find small press books, so when they disappear so does a huge chunk of Canadian culture.”

Chris Eaton launches microfiction program on Twitter

In part inspired by Roch Carrier's short excerpt from the short-short story "The Hockey Sweater" on the Canadian five dollar bill, novelist Chris Eaton will begin a microfiction exercise on Twitter on July 4. He will publish twenty-one stories of 140 characters or less, and subscribers are asked to submit story responses to each one, which need not follow the same theme or plot but must contain at least one third of the same words as the original.

The twenty-one stories and the best of the responses will be published in a literary journal anthology entitled GULCH: An Assemblage of Poetry and Prose.

Chris Eaton, author of The Grammar Architect and The Inactivist, is also the frontman of the alt-folk band Rock Plaza Central.

Literary journals are the bellwether of literature

John Freedman, editor of Granta, comments on the literary journal's vibrant and innovative role in the community and blasts a directive made by the Canadian heritage minister last February stating that journals must sell a lofty five thousand copies in order to receive government assistance.

Calling the literary journal a daring and diverse object in the world of literature, Freedman accuses the publishing industry of underestimating the tastes of readers and overvaluing profits.

From The Independent:

Literary journals are the antidote to this wrong-headed attempt to try and engineer sales. Their primary function, after all, is to undermine this economy of prestige, to promote gross miscegenation, messiness, conflict and disorder; to subvert the market; and to place writers in unexpected places, where they can create their own unlikely community of readers.

Nadine Gordimer had her first publication in the Johannesburg magazine, Forum, but her career as an international writer began with an acceptance from the good ol' boys at the Virginia Quarterly Review. The illustrious – and sadly defunct – Story magazine was founded in Austria in 1931, before moving back to New York, where it introduced everyone from JD Salinger to Charles Bukowski. Arundhati Roy would not have been an unfamiliar name to anyone looking closely at television credits in India; but her fictional voice was launched first in Granta magazine, which circulates primarily in Britain and America, and where her name was indeed new.

It is presumptuous of any literary journal to claim that it has discovered any writers – novelists and poets are hardly nickel deposits, after all – yet a good journal can make it far easier to readers to discover a new writer's work. It can take a piece of writing regardless of where it comes from and what unusual shape its story takes, and ask readers to smash into it. For these reasons the ideal reader of a literary journal is one who yearns for the lash of the new, the way a boxer needs to be hit.