Alice Munro

Here’s a good and positive story for these days of doomsaying and handwringing over the fortunes of bookstores. Munro’s Books in Victoria, British Columbia, founded in 1963 by Jim Munro and his then wife, Nobel laureate Alice Munro, is passing into the hands of its staff on the retirement of its founder. The thriving institution, […]

The post Alice Munro’s ex-husband gives away the store, hands Munro’s Books to staff appeared first on TeleRead: News and views on e-books, libraries, publishing and related topics.

In the latest fracas over literary sexism, Claire Messud objected to a comment an interviewer made about whether she would want to be friends with the main character of her new novel, The Woman Upstairs.

The interviewer asks: "I wouldn’t want to be friends with Nora, would you? Her outlook is almost unbearably grim.”

And Messud answers:

“For heaven’s sake, what kind of question is that? Would you want to be friends with Humbert Humbert? Would you want to be friends with Mickey Sabbath? Saleem Sinai? Hamlet? Krapp? Oedipus? Oscar Wao? …

With almost 10-million copies already sold and still a bestseller 12 years after it was first released, Yann Martel’s Life of Pi is the definitive opposite of a rare book. But there is a new edition of 350 signed copies currently housed in the office of a Vancouver environmental group that collectors will surely notice. That’s because the entire edition is printed on paper made in part from agricultural waste.

Martel enthusiastically joined fellow author Alice Munro, who signed 50 waste-based copies of Dear Life in the same cause: saving forests…

After tentative first steps, e-commerce giant Amazon is going on the offensive in Canada’s burgeoning e-reader market, finally debuting its Kindle north of the border in a direct challenge to the country’s top-selling Kobo.

But e-bookworms shouldn’t expect the same prices or selection granted to Kindle users in the U.S.

“It’s the big entry,” said Amazon’s vice-president of Kindle Peter Larsen, who flew to Toronto from Seattle to make the announcement.

Online book discovery doesn’t work very well. Random House is attempting to address that problem with a new Facebook app, BookScout, that gives users book recommendations from multiple publishers, not just Random House. Based on my extremely preliminary testing, the app’s recommendations leave something to be desired.