Need book suggestions for holiday gift buying?
Check out Amazon.ca Gift Guide.
The four Raincoast titles recommended are:
Walking After Midnight by Katy Hutchison
Great for men and women interested in powerful, nonfiction stories. Katy’s husband was killed when he tried to break up a teen house party.
The Quirky Girls’ Guide to Rest Stops and Road Trips by Karen Rivers
Super fun writing for teens. Karen Rivers’ characters capture the spirit of going on your first road trip sans parents.
The Complete Peanuts 1959-1962 Set by Charles M. Schulz
Any fan of Peanuts, young or old, will love this collection of Peanuts cartoons from 1959-62.
Bird Songs: 250 North American Birds in Song by Les Beletsky
Great for adults and kids. The sound chip in this book is very, very cool. The birds sound like they are outside your window.
Raincoast Books got a great plug today on GalleyCat for the “What’s Your Worst-Case Scenario?” Video Contest.
Survival Tips from the Great White North
“Canadian publisher Raincoast Books is sponsoring a contest to promote the bestselling Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook franchise, inviting people to submit their own amateur instructional videos illustrating various “survival” tips, from (to use their examples) how to get gum out of your hair to how to win a hockey fight ...” --Galley Cat (read the full post here)
Thank you GalleyCat!
Turn that worst-case scenario travel woe into a chance to win a $500 shopping spree in a participating bookstore.
Have a tragic travel tale? Create a video of a worst-case scenario travel tip and enter the “What’s Your Worst-Case Scenario?” video contest.
Need inspiration? Grab a copy of The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook: Travel. Or check out the Worst-Case Scenarios website for tips on how to land a plane.
Micronations: The Lonely Planet Guide to Home-Made Nations is a tongue-in-cheek travel guide to real places that people have declared as “nations”, and the real people who have named themselves presidents and emperors. Kind of like DIY country-making.
Intrigued? Want to learn how to make your own nation?
To get started, check out this two-part feature on Micronations on the Sleepy Brain blog: here and here.
BLDGBLOG also posted an interview with Simon Sellars, one of the co-authors of Micronations, in which he reveals his own territorial tendencies:
BLDGBLOG: Have you ever declared your own micronation?
Sellars: Yes. I grew up in the suburb of Bentleigh, in Melbourne, Australia. It was an exceedingly boring place, like a retirement village - it seemed like I was the only teenager around at times. So I founded the Independent Republic of Bentleigh, declared myself President, and claimed the whole of Bentleigh as territory. Our national anthem was “We Can’t Be Beaten,” a song by the toughest band in the land, Rose Tattoo.
BLDGBLOG: What happened to it?
Sellars: We were beaten - the IRB was invaded by Poland. The Polish kid next door already hated me, but when he saw me poncing up and down the back yard draped in my IRB flag, he was enraged even more than usual. He jumped over the fence, punched me in the mouth and stole my lunch money - and that was all the IRB’s assets gone, just like that. He also stepped on my toy tanks and melted my plastic soldiers with a cigarette lighter, which meant the IRB had no defence force, and that was the end of it, really. My mother banned me from starting up a micronation ever again, unless I could back it up with sufficient armoury and investment capital, which of course I never could, being a very lazy kid.
BLDGBLOG is running an Invent-a-Micronation contest: in 100 words or less, describe what kind of micronation you would found - and where. Get all the details here.
After the all furore surrounding Sacha Baron Cohen’s new movie Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, I’m sure many people were wondering what the little known (but geographically large) country of Kazakhstan would be like to visit. Well, thanks to Lonely Planet we can find out. John Noble has written a feature article on the real Kazakhstan for the Lonely Planet website:
Just in case anyone doubted it, Borat’s Kazakhstan is indeed a work of fiction. Horses do not yet have the vote here, women do ride on the inside of buses (and collect the fares too) and the country’s chief Rabbi not long ago praised the government for its support of the small Jewish community. Doubtless Sacha Baron Cohen alighted on this central Asian country as the home of his racist, sexist, ignorant journalist character because it was so little known in the West that few could point out the misrepresentation…
In the end, the guy maybe doing the country a favour. After all, millions who had never heard of Kazakhstan now have a notion of it that can only get better.
Lonely Planet also offer a brief online guide to Kazakhstan, which includes interesting facts and figures about the country.
Kazakhstan is included in the Lonely Planet guide to Central Asia (3rd Edition 2004), available in paperback for $41.95 (ISBN 1-86450-296-7)
The boil-water advisory for the Vancouver area is now on day seven. While your water is still brown, why not make a mini-film on what you’re doing to survive turbid water.
Experts say it could be weeks before the murky waters run clear, but don’t delay. Start your video project today and enter your short video in the “What’s Your Worst-Case Scenario?” Video Contest.
One lucky entrant will win a $500 shopping spree in a participating store. There are book and gift prizes available too.
Want to see what Vancouverites are saying about boiling water? Check out the Change Everything website.
Jaime Hernandez, author of the upcoming title in the Love and Rockets series Maggie the Mechanic, was the guest speaker on Inkstuds last week.
See all Jaime Hernandez titles.
Jaime Hernandez is one of the incredibley talented brothers behind Love and Rockets (the comic series). Jaime was recently in Toronto at the International Festival of Authors. But for those of you who missed him in Toronto, the Instuds interview is available in a podcast via iTunes, just search for INKSTUDS.
French photographer Mathieu Bourgois was a familiar sight to those haunting The International Festival of Authors in Toronto last month, gamely convincing authors to have their photograph taken instead of having another cup of coffee in the hospitality lounge. The results of Mathieu’s persistence can be seen on his website.
An incredibly extensive portfolio of international author portraits is available, including photographs of The Man Booker Prize 2006 winner Kiran Desai and our own Tom McCarthy (pictured), author of the simply brilliant Remainder.
More Tom McCarthy on the Raincoast Blog:
The opening scenes of a James Bond movie are often so spectacular that your only thought is, “wow.” This is certainly the case in the latest 007 flick, Casino Royale, which opened this weekend.
Our fearless hero Bond engages in a cat-and-mouse chase to catch a bomber, whose gymnastic feats of strength leave you breathless.
But don’t let the Bond adventure end with the closing credits.
Raincoast Books is running a video contest, “What’s Your Worst-Case Scenario?"
Grab a copy of The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook: Extreme Edition and create your own adventure, then capture it on film for a chance to win a $500 shopping spree in a participating bookstore.
Embracing your inner-Bond doesn’t have to mean surviving a fall down a stairwell or dodging bullets. It can also be about escaping a bad date, determining if your date is married (a Bond preference), surviving a fashion emergency and sobering up fast.
I put a life together with my family and friends and dogs. I learned to make use of the solitude I now had aplenty. I started writing, wanting to make something useful come from our catastrophe, and working hard, I began to be happy...
In her beautiful and melancholic new memoir A Three Dog Life, Abigail Thomas writes about the accident that left her husband brain-damaged and her domestic life shattered.
A wise and plainspoken account of personal tragedy and the rebuilding of a life, A Three Dog Life is a remarkable and inspirational book, and thanks to National Public Radio (NPR) online, you can listen to Abigail Thomas discuss the book on All Things Considered.
Have a listen to Episode 14 of the Chronicle Books podcast.
In this episode, we talk to Nick Bantock, best-selling author of the Griffin and Sabine series, about his new novel, Windflower. We also hear from Les Beletsky, the author of Bird Songs, a new book that includes illustrations and audio recordings of North American birds, drawn from the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Worst-Case Scenario author David Borgenicht has the week off—and while he’s away, we give listeners the chance to muse about what you would do if you were trapped in...well, tune in to find out.
LISTEN NOW (file size=11.1MB)
And remember, if you have a worst-case scenario survival tip, tell us what it is. Create a short video and submit it to the “What’s Your Worst-Case Scenario?” Video Contest.
The New York Times Book Review has posted a gorgeous online slideshow gallery of artwork from their list of the 10 best illustrated books of 2006, as chosen by their panel of judges.
Among the top 10 books is Gone Wild: An Endangered Animal Alphabet, written and illustrated by David McLimans and published by Walker. The book transforms each letter of the alphabet into a graphic depiction of an endangered animal, with striking black-and-white illustrations that incorporate an animal’s features into a recognizable letter shape. It also includes information about the animals in the book and about how and why their survival is threatened.
David McLimans has received awards for his editorial illustration work, but Gone Wild is his first picture book. Congratulations!
Susan Hill, prolific author of the Simon Serrailler books, has posted a strident defence of book blogs on her website:
The idea that those of us who blog about books and reading might somehow be degrading literary taste is a patronizing and ridiculous one. We are writing about books we love. Why on earth should we not do that in a blog, as anywhere else, and improve literary taste, whatever ‘literary taste’ means ?...The fact is that the tide has turned and the people have power now. Not that we do it in order to have ‘power’, we do it because we love books and want to recommend a wealth of them to others, so that they may enjoy them and for no other reason. We do it for nothing and for fun and for the book/literature. And to demonstrate that the many - with honourable exceptions - arrogant, lazy, stuck-in-the-mud, cliquey little set of literary editors, and/or ‘mandarins’ are now almost totally irrelevant.
Susan is also experimenting with a Book Bloggers Book Prize. If you run a book blog you can send Susan your nominations for the best book of 2006. The current nominations can be found here.
What books would you nominate?
(Thanks to Book World for the link.)
November 13 marked the launch of Raincoast’s 1st video contest.
“What’s Your Worst-Case Scenario?” video contest is about creating short videos based on survival tips from the Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbooks.
You don’t need to look far for examples. There are sample videos on Raincoast.com and links to independent videos on YouTube.com.
Blog TO also points out that “if you don’t get the big prize [a $500 shopping spree in a participating store], you could also receive weekly book and gift prizes.” It’s true! Enter early for more chances to win.
Contest runs: November 13 to January 31.
At the end of October, Raincoast offered one lucky winner 2 tickets to the Lyonesse Theatre’s production of Gonzo and a copy of Adam Lewis Schroeder’s novel Empress of Asia. (See original posting.)
Gonzo is written by and directed by Gordon Pascoe and is based on his WWII experience as a child in a Japanese prison camp in Shanghai. (Find out more ...)
The winner was Suanne from Richmond and she and her friend Betty Lou attended the play on Remembrance Day. Suanne said, “we thought it would be meaningful to see it today.”
Suanne noted that the child actors were quite engaging and stole the performance, and that Pascoe was in attendance that day and she and Betty Lou had a chance to meet him.
Similar to Empress of Asia in its Southeast Asia setting, Gonzo offers a perspective of the Second World War that is not often portrayed in novels or the media. Of Gonzo, Suanne says, “it was a personal remembrance rather than pure fiction. It was refreshing to see a different perspective on WWII, which didn’t focus so much on Germany and the force labor camps.”
Gonzo finished its run in Vancouver on November 12. Empress of Asia is available in stores now.
Raincoast podcasts are available from iTunes by searching for "Raincoast" or the RSS feed is available from Feedburner at 
Check out our NEWEST Podcast for Clancy with the Puck, a hilarious tale of hockey hubris.