13 July 2017
It’s 1974, a coup has just installed a repressive military regime in Ethiopia. A family of five undertakes to escape from Addis Ababa to Djibouti, cross the brutal Danakil Desert on foot. Beth Gebreyohannes, a young girl at the time, describes that grim, perilous journey. This excerpt from Fire Walkers appears by kind permission of Mawenzi House.
9 April 2017
The Nobel prize-winning St. Lucian poet Derek Walcott died on March 17, 2017, at the age of 87. Ingrid Bejerman remembers her first meeting with him in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 2000, and her last at the Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival in 2006.
28 March 2017
LLP is publishing a new edition of Mavis Gallant's play What Is To Be Done? in September 2017. What follows is an excerpt from Linda Leith's introduction.
15 February 2017
Author Bharati Mukherjee wrote of immigrant lives.
Special to The Globe and Mail, Friday, Feb. 10, 2017.
Photo of Bharati Mukherjee by Evelyn Hofer,
as it appears in Saturday Night, March 1981.
9 September 2016
19 August 2016
The Canadian book trade magazine Quill & Quire's Reviews editor Steven W. Beattie is the first journalist to have noticed that LLP "is enormously supportive of literature in translation." That was in the 2016 Fall Preview published in the July issue.
Literary translator Darryl Sterk and his daughter Julie
19 August 2016
The Shenzhen Economic Daily was preparing a 3-page feature on the publication of Shenzheners, the first of the Chinese-Canadian writer Xue Yiwei's books to appear in English, and I was asked to write about why LLP chose to publish the collection. What follows is the text I wrote, which Yiwei then translated into Chinese.
14 May 2016
Asked to present the keynote talk yesterday at the QUESCREN conference Connect and Disconnect: Anglophones, the English Language, and Montreal's Creative Economy, I took the opportunity to consider what has changed and what has remained the same in Montreal's anglophone literary milieu in the six years since the publication of my essay Writing in the Time of Nationalism (Signature Editions, 2010). What follows is a short excerpt from that talk.
12 April 2016
On 11 April, 2016, Linda Leith participated in TD Blue Met Talks: Femmes & leadership | Women & Leadership during the Opening Cocktail of the 18th Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival.
Blue Met had invited several women of influence to speak about the power of words, women in leadership and how books have inspired and changed them and their careers. The other participants were Louise-Ann Maziak, Marie-Josée Bédard, Suzanne Fortier, and Marie Giguère.
11 April 2016
Philosophy, politics—and a lot of sex. Michael Mirolla's new book, Torp (just published by LLP), is an erotic novel about a young married couple and their friend Torp set in Vancouver in 1970.
20 January 2016
Italian Ways: On and Off the Rails from Milan to Palermo, by Tim Parks (Norton 2014)
Part I is here.
20 January 2016
Italian Ways: On and Off the Rails from Milan to Palermo, by Tim Parks (Norton 2014)
18 November 2015
Linda Leith, President of the Montreal publishing house Linda Leith Éditions, is delighted to announce that Maurice Forget is joining LLÉ as Conseiller éditorial.
7 November 2015
This is Part III of a three-part text, The Decision to Publish in French.
7 November 2015
This is Part II of a three-part text, The Decision to Publish in French. Part I is here; Part III is here.
7 November 2015
In September 2014, LLP embarked on a process that has led, one year later, to the decision to publish books in French as well as English.
This is Part I of a three-part text. Part II is here.
20 October 2015
This is a fairy-tale victory for Justin Trudeau. An extraordinary triumph: a majority in Parliament, Liberals elected in every province—even Alberta—and all three territories; a clean sweep of the Maritimes; an entirely unanticipated forty-seven seats in Quebec. And, best of all, no more Harper.
5 October 2015
I don’t know how many times I have to explain this to you people.
12 August 2015
“There's a lot more to come,” says Lady G, “a lot more good things to come. Just like anything else, you can have good and bad. The bad is going to get lost somewhere. The good is going to prevail. Because good is always over evil. It's just one of those things. Every day you have a new artist from the reggae or the dance hall fraternity. It can never stop. Music will surely live on.”
12 August 2015
"It makes sense that the dance hall acts are always on Saturday. Sunday is more, like Jamaicans say, big people music, meaning people over 45." -- Richard Lafrance
Cocoa Tea
9 August 2015
Serious churchgoers and orthodox Rastafari see wining (the horrible term twerking in North America) as a sign of dissolution. Crouched with their legs apart, girls and women raise their behinds, swivel their hips, and vibrate.
