How do you pronounce “boatswain”?
The Globe and Mail wins the prize for obscurity.
Linda Leith, President of the Montreal publishing house Linda Leith Éditions, is delighted to announce that Maurice Forget is joining LLÉ as Conseiller éditorial.
Maurice Forget is a Montreal business lawyer known for his community involvement, particularly in the visual arts and literature. Counsel and former Chair of the Fasken Martineau law firm, he has also led the Montreal Arts Council (1999-2006) and the Foundation of the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal. A member of the board of directors of the Académie des lettres du Quebec, he is a former member of the board of Blue Metropolis Foundation and has been a member of the Advisory Council of Linda Leith Éditions from the outset. In 1998 he was admitted to the Order of Canada.
“When I chose the law as my profession,” he writes, “nobody told me one could earn a living making and selling books – otherwise I would surely have opened a bookstore. So now I am grateful to Linda Leith for inviting me to be part of her team, joining the world of publishers and booksellers of whom I have long been envious. And be reassured that the delay in making this foreseeable career move has not put my life on hold, since I still have a good time being a lawyer.”
Incorporated by writer and Blue Metropolis founder Linda Leith in June 2011, Linda Leith Éditions, known in English as Linda Leith Publishing, is a trade publishing house specializing in Canadian literary fiction, non-fiction, and political cartoons. Having published thirty books since its inaugural season in Spring 2012, it has established itself as one of Canada’s leading small presses.
In Spring 2016, in what may be an unprecedented move for an English-Canadian literary publisher, the company will start to publish in French while continuing to carry out its primary mission of publishing in English.
“LLÉ is a Montreal firm,” Leith says, “and it makes sense to us to publish books in French as well as in English. Maurice brings a wealth of experience in literature, the arts, business, and the law, and I’m delighted to welcome him as Conseiller éditorial.”
The Globe and Mail wins the prize for obscurity.
The carousel towards the latter end of the Brighton Pier, just before the roller coaster, is grotesquely beautiful, and enthrals the children and older bystanders for that reason. So vividly painted, the horses eerily distorted as they circle and bob, transfixed on a silvery pole to which half-terrified and half-delighted kids hang on and ride. Like all such carousels, this one unapologetically violates principles of aesthetic restraint, nightmarishly stunning as it spins to blaring music above the water.
JJ Lee is the author of GG-award nominated non-fiction book The Measure of a Man: A Father, A Son, and a Suit.
The best stories I have ever read about Montreal are the Linnet Muir stories that appeared in The New Yorker in 1978 and 1979. Set mostly in wartime Montreal, the stories dip back into the more distant past of Linnet Muir’s—and Mavis Gallant’s own—childhood memories of Montreal in the 1920s.