Turning a page to 2013

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Dany Laferri?re?s account of living through the 2010 earthquake in Haiti will be published in English next week.

Photograph by: John Kenney , The Gazette

MONTREAL ? Never having been much of an Apocalypse enthusiast, I?m glad the Mayans were wrong, for all kinds of reasons. Not least among them is that, having had a peek at some of the books to appear in 2013, it would have felt downright unfair to have been denied the reading experiences. But now that we know we?ll be around, here is an assortment of what?s in store the next three months or so. ?Pub dates,? as they call them in the business, are subject to change, so you might want to check ahead before sprinting out to the neighbourhood bookstore with your cash.

Right out of the gate, next week in fact, comes Dany Laferri?re?s The World Is Moving Around Me, the Haitian-Canadian?s account of his experience in and around Port-au-Prince at the time of the cataclysmic January 2010 earthquake. Written in a quick burst and published in French a mere 10 weeks after the quake, it now finally sees English-language publication, in a translation by David Homel, as the third anniversary of the quake approaches. Watch this column for more on it, soon.

Michael Crummey, after his extravagantly praised and popular Newfoundland historical novel Galore, does his bit to keep the Canadian tradition of the poet/novelist alive with his new poetry collection, Under the Keel. Late bloomer Peter Behrens, a Montrealer now living in Maine, is evidently still on a prolific roll; readers still absorbing his latest Irish diaspora novel, The O?Briens, now have the new story collection, Travelling Light, to look forward to. Saleema Nawaz returns in March with the much-anticipated Montreal-set novel Bone and?Bread.

Aleksandar Hemon has established himself as one of the most vital figures on the international literary scene since emigrating to the United States from Bosnia in 1992. His work has always drawn strongly on personal experience, but The Book of My Lives marks his first foray into proper non-fiction. Hemon writes of ?learning a new city, remembering the old,? the two cities being the only two in which he has ever lived ? Sarajevo and Chicago.

Pakistani novelist Mohsin Hamid showed a flair for capturing global geopolitical currents in fiction form with his 2008 book, The Reluctant Fundamentalist; the title of his imminent novel, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, would seem to indicate he?s up to something similar.

Karen Russell?s 2011 family saga, Swamplandia!, a master class in the comic-macabre, was one of the bigger cult novels of recent years and a Pulitzer Prize finalist to boot, so there will be a ready-made readership for her new story collection, Vampires in the Lemon Grove.

Every season brings one or two buzz-fuelled hits from relative unknowns, and right now signs are pointing to Eleanor Morse, whose White Dog Fell From the Sky has been drawing advance comparisons with Abraham Verghese?s Cutting Stone and the detective novels of Alexander McCall Smith. If either of those appeal to you ? they strike me as being quite different, which is intriguing in itself ? proceed accordingly. Also tipped for big things is Meg Wolitzer?s The Interestings, which follows a group of gifted teens into adulthood, and arrives bearing hosannas from Jeffrey Eugenides, who likens the novel to Virginia Woolf?s The Waves.

Literati will rejoice at news that a brace of writers? writers ? i.e. brilliant talents who have never sold quite as much as they deserve ? are back with new work. Short story master George Saunders has always pulled off the rare combination of innovation, accessibility, humour and gravitas; his new collection, Tenth of December, has been extensively previewed in The New Yorker and should be nothing less than great. James Salter, whose 1967 novel A Sport and a Pastime frequently shows up on the all-time-best lists of those lucky enough to have read it, is set to publish his first novel in more than 30 years, All That Is.

A titan of 20th-century letters, William H. Gass (trivia fans take note: His On Being Blue inspired the name of Blue Metropolis), is still very much with us, returning with the novel Middle C, his first work of fiction since 1998.

Also back after a lengthy hiatus is Antigua-born American Jamaica Kincaid with her novel See Now Then.

It may be getting tempting to take Malcolm Gladwell for granted, but cast your mind back 15 years or so, to a time before The Tipping Point, and consider just how unlikely it would have seemed then that an essayist/journalist working at the frontiers of social science should become a multimillion-selling author, as bankable as any airport blockbuster purveyor. Readers of all stripes, not to mention booksellers, will be glad to know that Gladwell will be back in book form sometime in 2013 with David and Goliath, a study of power and its uses, inspired partly by the Occupy movement.

Thanks to the readers who sent in their own Hallelujah stories after my interview with Alan Light, author of The Holy or the Broken, a study of the unique journey of Leonard Cohen?s song. Light has also written a fine Beastie Boys biography, and in part of the interview that didn?t quite fit into the feature, I asked him about the response to Adam ?MCA? Yauch?s death this year, and whether he saw any affinities between Cohen and the Beasties, beyond their being Jews who embraced Buddhism. ?We?re all kind of used to the deaths of rock stars,? Light said. ?But we still assume that means something dramatic or glamorous or somehow ?special? ? a plane crash or an overdose or a violent end, things that happen to people who ?aren?t like us.? But with Adam?s passing, this was someone we had grown up with, felt common interests and common cause with, who just got sick and died, like most people do. That really struck me as a different emotional experience than what Michael Jackson fans or Whitney Houston fans or whoever else went through.?

The Beasties and Cohen share ?the willingness to evolve, both personally and creatively,? he said.

?Cohen has always been a seeker ? most obviously through his various religious experiences, but also through finding different ways to write and make music; his embrace of songwriting in the first place, or synthesizers, or even his triumphant late-in-life tours, which surprised himself most of all. Both Leonard and the Beasties have refused to repeat themselves, when that?s what their fans most wanted and expected from them. But then, I guess that?s what being an artist is, right??

? Copyright (c) The Montreal Gazette

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Source: http://www.montrealgazette.com/entertainment/books/Turning+page+2013/7753582/story.html

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