If you’ve visited the Giller Prize website lately (The Scotiabank Giller Prize? Like Scotiabank Nuit Blanche? When did corporate sponsorship become so obvious?) you may have noticed that they are hosting a contest called “Guess the Giller.” An interesting choice of words. By guess, they of course mean choose. They want you to pick your favourite of the 5 shortlisted books (Elizabeth Hay’s Late Nights on Air, Michael Ondaatje’s Divisadero, Daniel Poliquin’s A Secret Between Us, M.G. Vassanji’s The Assassin’s Song, and Alissa York’s Effigy) and if your choice wins, you win. Maybe...

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Books were pretty, once. The insides were nice, sure, and the pages may have had an agreeable solidity, but it was the cover in particular that mattered somehow- if it wasn’t attractive, then the likelihood you’d read the book fell to zero. How old were you? Five? Ten? We were all at this stage, a stage where a book’s outer aesthetics trumped content. No matter how good the book actually was, if it wasn’t delivered in a comely package, it sat unread. The cover did more than bear the title; it bore the responsibility of having the reader actually read the book...

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Memo

 

TO: The Southernmost Review

FROM: Jenny Sampirisi, Executive of Book Pondering

DATE: Nov. 1, 07

RE: Pulpy & Midge, A Novel by Jessica Westhead

 

Imagine a cubical existence. Sketch in a Patrick Bateman-esque boss with an oversexed wife prowling your every move. Now add a sticky note with a cynical and lonely receptionist angling for a date. Ho ho! says Dan the boss man. The timid, clumsy Pulpy lives in this world with his ice-dancing, candle-selling wife, Midge. In the span of a few weeks their solid (and rather PG) marriage is challenged by the absurd, domineering demands of the new boss, Dan, and his wife Beatrice, who’s corrosive relationship and life-style destabilize Pulpy and Midge’s seemingly perfect one. Ho ho! says Dan, with a knee slap...

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