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Questions about the future of bookstores and libraries soon resulted in bold statements to the effect that “Bookstores will die. It’s a pity, but that’s the reality.” Booksellers fared better in this imagined future, but not by much. To the suggestion that booksellers can continue to play a role in providing advice on books, one participant cracked, “you might have difficulty living on that.” Publishers came in for some dismissive comments, as well, and radio and television got it in the neck.

Introducing fiction and poetry in translation into English -- and, in the weeks to come, a new blogue in French.

Not to mention, it's easier than ever to sign up and comment.

Not to mention the books that will follow in the new year.

Photo: Phyllis Papoulias

Berkeley Poetry Walk: For Jack Spicer
Photo: Guy Tiphane

Nelly Arcan, the talented and beautiful novelist who committed suicide in September 2009 (see my Globe Books post here) has published a posthumous story called Shame (La Honte) that is creating a stir.

Nelly Arcan on the cover of her second novel Folle

I hate to break this to you, Ladies and Gentlemen – especially if you’re still in denial about the digital revolution – but the literary future includes not only electronic books, but words and images dancing on a screen, with voice and music and other sound effects.

Bertrand Gervais

Letters appear, quickly metamorphose into other letters, creating new words, new meanings, and new stories. A story that might have been set in Brooklyn is transformed on screen into a story about Odessa, and then into another about Berlin.

I catch a line about being “hand in hand on uncertain ground.” It all reminds me of that line of Leonard Cohen’s about a woman “who’s gone and changed her name again.”

                                            as blue as an orange

While the Miron biography is a considerable assessment of the one of the great figures of nationalist Quebec, the publication this month of a new novel by Catherine Mavrikakis is an event, too, and one of the surest signs of vitality among a younger generation of Quebec writers.

And then there's Perrine Leblanc, aged 31.

Catherine Mavrikakis

This is, in short, the busiest time of the year for literary publishers here, perhaps even more so than elsewhere in Canada – and elsewhere in the world – since the Quebec industry takes its lead from France in its single-minded focus on the fall.

Kim Thuy

The heart of the novel is the brilliant and painful, detailed and multi-layered depiction of Annabel herself from his earliest years as the boy Wayne to the excruciatingly awkward and sometimes devastating experiences of the young woman Annabel in St. John’s. In scene after scene Winter wonderfully conveys a child’s literal-mindedness and imagination, a child’s consciousness of physiological transformations and emotional changes, an adolescent’s conflicts and yearnings, tensions within the family, all complicated by the salient fact of his/her gender.

                                                    Cover, Annabel (Anansi)                                               

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Photo: Linda Leith