LAVINIA is Le Guin’s interpretation of the Virgil’s THE AENEID. It focuses on Lavinia, who appears in the poem, but never speaks.

Here’s what the reviewers are saying:

“Le Guin is famous for creating alternative worlds (as in Left Hand of Darkness), and she approaches Lavinia’s world, from which Western civilization took its course, as unique and strange as any fantasy. It’s a novel that deserves to be ranked with Robert Graves’s I, Claudius.”—Publishers’ Weekly (starred review)

“Le Guin has researched this ancient world assiduously, and her measured, understated prose captures with equal skill the permutations of established ritual and ceremony and the sensations of the battlefield ... Arguably her best novel, and an altogether worthy companion volume to one of the Western world’s greatest stories.“—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“[A]pproaching a new book by Le Guin is like discovering a new Rembrandt. In some ways, the quality of the work is irrelevant, as it’s sure to be declared a new masterpiece—which it will be by most standards. The only thing to do is to judge the work against its creator’s own rigorous standards. Even in comparison to the rest of Le Guin’s body of work, Lavinia stands very high.“—The Winnipeg Free Press

“In one of the more impressive displays of feminist reconstruction since Margaret Atwood wrested Penelope out of the hands of Homer, National Book Award-winner Le Guin has rewritten the last six books of Vergil’s epic poem to create a rich life of the mind for the Latin princess. Unlike Atwood’s “Penelopiad,” the novel, as Le Guin writes in an afterword, is a “love offering,” and she writes with great affection for both the poet and his hero.“—The Christian Science Monitor

“This is a powerful and rewarding novel, a intricately layered narrative that weaves many themes into its rich tapestry, and touches on subjects that remain urgent in our own time.“—The Globe and Mail

“Le Guin does a fantastic job of bringing a tertiary character to life… Trojan horses, Vergil’s The Aeneid, ancient Italy, prophecies and quick witted maidens: Lavinia by Ursula K. Le Guin offers a lot to like. I give it a 4 out of 5. High entertainment value.“—So Misguided

“Well-researched with epic battles and many interwoven threads, Le Guin has captured the spirit of Virgil’s work and presented it faithfully in her own measured, lyric prose. Le Guin’s Lavinia is a strong, fascinating woman, with a tale to rival any hero of old.”—Eclectic Closet

Click here for The Word website.

We have just kicked off a campaign with Eco-Libris that is pretty exciting. Read about the details below.

Raincoast Books and Eco-Libris announced today the results of their first joint environmental campaign: Buy a Book, Plant a Tree.

Raincoast Books has signed up 80 Canadian retailers who will be selling a wide range of environmentally themed books through April 2008 which are emblazoned with Eco-Libris stickers stating that for each book purchased a tree will be planted in Central America and Africa. Participating independent bookstores, located from cost-to-coast, have purchased over 4,500 specially stickered books and hence over 4,500 trees will be planted on behalf of Canadian readers.

Raz Godelnik, Eco-Libris Co-founder and CEO explained that these trees not only benefit the environment but also the local communities where they are planted: “More than 12 acres of trees will be planted on behalf of the Canadian readers, offering many benefits to the local communities, from trees planted on the mountain slopes in Guatemala, preventing mudslides, conserving soil for more productive crops and protecting water to fruit trees that provide additional food and income in Malawi.

“Reading books should not have an adverse impact on the environment,” adds Godelnik, “and planting trees to balance out the paper usage in books is a practical first step towards sustainable reading, by replenishing our dwindling forest resources on this planet. We plant these trees with the help of highly respected U.S. and U.K. registered non-profit organizations who are screened for, and work to, very high ecological and sustainability standards. This way we make sure that Raincoast’s efforts to go green will have a maximum impact on society and the environment

“Raincoast and our Canadian customers are very pleased to be working with Eco-Libris on the ‘Buy a Book, Plant a Tree’ campaign,” said Jamie Broadhurst, VP Marketing for Raincoast Books. “No one campaign is going to solve the challenge of creating sustainable publishing practices, but each new campaign raises more awareness and makes that goal more attainable. We have a lot more work to do.”

For more information and great book recommendations go to: www.raincoast.com/green/

For more information on Eco-Libris go to: www.ecolibris.net

Does ALL SOULS draw on your real life experiences as a teacher?

The choral sections, where unattributed speech serves as a scene, draw on real life exchanges I have overheard as a teacher. 

“We didn’t know you were coming.”

“I tried to save you a place.”

“She couldn’t invite you; she could only have six friends.”

The literature taught in the novel is literature I have taught to seventeen-year-olds; and more than once I have heard the complaint that nothing happens in To the Lighthouse.  From middle school on the big books are all about death, but death in books.  In All Souls, a school community, uncommonly small, privileged, insular—another ruined garden, if you will—confronts death outside of books.  In math class Marlene Kovack, one of the sick girl’s classmates, muses, “Astra Dell’s dying: What did it mean to them all in this overheated room?” The book is bent on answering this question. 

Do you worry about what your students might think of your work, and what they might extrapolate (erroneously or otherwise) from it?

My earlier books, the two story collections and the novel, Florida, I would like kept on a high shelf until my students come of age, but All Souls, I hope, will amuse them for being familiar; moreover, it is a more accurate portrait of the school than may be seen on TV.  The author of the Gossip Girl series is a former student of mine, a good writer, who, by her own admission, spent her weekends riding horses; nevertheless, her depiction of school life tends to be sensational. All Souls is in part a response to the stereotypically repugnant, empty, pretty-girl models most often paraded in novels about private schools.

Your prose is beautifully succinct.  Do you edit yourself ruthlessly?

I do edit myself ruthlessly and rarely move forward until the passage is right. 

There’s also a kinetic energy though.  Is it difficult to balance the editing and control with intensity and daring? 

I don’t usually think of myself as balancing control with intensity; the struggle is to move characters, create scenes; the struggle is to stay interested in the scene.

Do you feel a strong affinity to poetry?

As has been true for many writers, poetry came first for me; I wanted to be a poet but despaired of achieving an evolved soul, fully believing then and now that poets live in a purer atmosphere that will not sustain lesser mortals.  I don’t think novelists ever reach the slopes of Parnassus although some have come close. 

What motivates you?  Do you have any rituals when you’re writing?

Reading is a provocation.  Reading other fiction or poetry is as much an inspiration as experience.  As to rituals, none beyond securing some privacy and time, but I do not write on trains or planes.

What are you working on now? 

I am working on a very difficult long something that I sometimes call a novella even though I don’t understand what a novella is exactly.  This long-something is to be part of a third short story collection.  Most of the stories have been published in NOON, a literary annual. 

Thank you Christine!

Click here for part one of Christine Schutt’s Q & A

In her new novel ALL SOULS, published by Harcourt (April 2008), popular high school student Astra Dell fights a rare cancer in the hospital, whilst her classmates at an exclusive Manhattan private school concern themselves with boys, teachers, exams, dance recitals, college applications, graduation, and, of course, the ailing Astra. 

Christine Schutt lives and teaches in New York City. We caught up over email.

What was the inspiration for ALL SOULS?

First came the name Astra Dell on an afternoon when I had been thinking of Pip’s Estella, and her name’s associations, the stars, the sky, the sky as it is experienced when Pip and Estella walk in Miss Havisham’s ruined garden.  Romantic, gauzy associations were in the air when I came up with the name Astra Dell, which combined sky and dell and seemed silly but worthy of any and all exaggerated beauty and gracefulness I might wish to attach to it.  The name, the dancer, the hair in that order; I committed to her saintliness when I took up her sickness and a community’s reaction to it as the way to organize and write a school novel with a large cast.  The saintliness and the sickness I took from life, a former student’s; she is thanked in the acknowledgments. 

The novel is set in New York in 1997.  Was it a conscious decision to set it before 9/11 or were there other reasons for the date?

Yes, I wanted the New York City I knew before September 11, 2001; the earlier date allows for a jolly solipsism, self-involvement mitigated by age and inexperience of emptiness.  In the novel, when Astra Dell is rumored sickest, she is a topic avoided for the simple reason that the sick girl’s “futureless future” horrifies her friends.  (Healthy girls, marginally unhealthy girls, American girls of all classes, do not, in my experience, look into a summer and see blank; rather, there is camp or a trip or an internship.) Since September 11, 2001, the possibility of the futureless future for us all in an instant occurs to anyone even passing through the city; everyone has been made a bit older and harder by the event—even the girls I know and teach seem born cynical.  As to why 97, my choice was made by my sons, teenagers at the time, full-blown, wonderful and awful; they and their friends and their girlfriends and the girls I taught made a deep impression on me in 1997.

All Souls raises some very uncomfortable issues (notably sexual relationships between adults and teens in their care).  Do you think it is important for fiction to be challenging?

Writers look for dramatic interest, and my experience of outdoor dramas—one drowning, two suicides, some accidents involving animals or heavy machinery—is yet small in comparison to the indoor dramas I might elaborate on.  The greatest of these dramas involve plausible sexual transgressions that keep me awake when I am writing. The writer, as much as the reader then, is challenged to look. 

I found it interesting that you’re quite un-judgmental of your characters’ behavior.  Is moral ambiguity important to your fiction?

I don’t set out to be morally ambiguous.  I want to be fair in the treatment of my characters, to admit any action is possible. 

Read part two of my Q & A with Christine Schutt tomorrow!

The winners of this year’s Libris Awards will be named on June 15 in Toronto. Many thanks to our customers for their vote of confidence in our abilities. 

Can you share an interesting experience you had researching INVISIBLE NATION?

As I describe in Chapter 6, I think I’m the only journalist who used his entire gas mask and chemical suit during the war, investigating what luckily turned out to be a bum-steer from the Kurds about a chemical shell they said had made a bunch of them sick.

Has US involvement in Iraq has aided the Kurdish cause?

The Kurds have been struggling for centuries, and in recent history they owe their worst defeats and their greatest victories to American foreign policy.  At the moment they’re riding high as Washington’s most trusted ally among Iraq’s factions, but they’re watchful for a hint that America might cut them loose again.

Will their situation change dramatically if the US military withdraws from Iraq?

If America leaves the region the Kurds will be able to hold their territory in the north against any of the internal factions.  It’s outside powers like Iran and Turkey - both with restive Kurdish populations of their own - that the Kurds of Iraq see as a major threat.

What inspired you to become a writer?

I got addicted to travelling when I was 19 years old, taking a back-pack to Central America and Middle East and I always kept a journal.  It wasn’t until 1996 that some journalist friends clued me in to the fact that I could make a living from it.

If you could give one piece of advice to aspiring foreign correspondents, what would it be?

I’d skip school and head out into the field.  Once you get a taste of the “ground truth”, you’ll never go back to watching from a distance.

Is there a particular ritual involved in your writing process? Or is it all about the deadline?

For writing news, the deadline is the only incentive you need, I’ve filed stories from the top of an armoured car stuck in human traffic (that was in 2005, the last time the Gaza border with Egypt burst open).  For writing the book I enjoyed a long cross country ski in the morning before a long day of writing, then another one in the evening if I’d earned it.

How do you relax?

I’ve been building a house out of stone in Maine for about a dozen years, it’s an eternal work in progress and once of my favourite things to do when I come back from the field.

What books are you reading at the moment?

I’m reading What is the What, by Dave Eggers and The Accidental Empire by Gershom Gorenberg - about the Israeli settlers movement. I also just picked up The New Cold War, by Globe and Mail correspondent Mark MacKinnon.

Click here to listen to the NPR interview.

Click here for the Raincoast Q & A with Brett. 

The largest ethnic group in the world without a homeland, 25 million Kurds live in the area around the borders of Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. In INVISIBLE NATION, BBC correspondent Quil Lawrence delivers an intimate and unflinching portrait of the Kurds’ quixotic quest for statehood and how it is reshaping Iraq. 

Quil is the Middle East correspondent for BBC news magazine The World. He has spent much of the last seven years in Iraq and Kurdistan, reporting for National Public Radio, the Los Angeles Times, and the Christian Science Monitor. He has won various awards for his journalism, including the Harry Chapin Media Judges Award and the Judges Award from the National Conference of Community Broadcasters.

He lives in Jerusalem, and we talked about INVISIBLE NATION by email.

What first interested you in the Kurds and their quest for statehood?

While I was a free-lance journalist based in Bogota, Colombia, I read in the Guardian Weekly about the capture in Kenya of Abdullah Ocalan, the leader of the Kurdish rebel group in Turkey, the PKK.  Hundreds of Kurds around the Middle East and Europe were so passionate about Ocalan that they immolated themselves in protest.  I had no idea what a Kurd was at the time, but the protests made a deep impression and peeked my curiosity.

I made my first visit to Iraqi Kurdistan in early 2000, when I was a Pew International Journalism Fellow at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS).  I spent several months in Washington talking with policymakers about the subject - Paul Wolfowitz was conveniently dean of SAIS at the time, he would later become the principle architect of the Iraq invasion.  I made two trips to Iraq as part of the fellowship, in the days when foreign reporters were a rare sight.  The Kurds were desperate for media attention and afraid that without it Saddam might easily crush them again.  It was a good time to get to know people like Jalal Talabani - then a rebel leader and now President of Iraq.  I met and formed lasting relationships with key figures of what is now the Kurdish Regional Government.

I had no idea at the time what good preparation I was making.  After my fellowship in 2000 I began working for the BBC World Service radio on their news magazine The World, produced with PRI and WGBH in Boston.  In January of 2003 I found myself back in Northern Iraq, crossing-in through the mountains from Iran in a blizzard.  With no idea when the US invasion was coming, I waited out the war for three months.  In those days most of the world was convinced that Saddam had anthrax or at least mustard gas - Kurdistan had living proof of that.  As the war approached many Kurds fled population centers fearing a last ditch revenge attack by the regime.  I slept with a gas mask next to my pillow.

I did most of my research just listening back through the audio recordings I’d made over 7 years covering Iraq - hundreds of hours of interviews.  In 2006-7 I took a sabbatical from the BBC.  I made one two-month trip to Iraq for research and then moved home to Maine to write in the wintry seclusion there.  I was also commuting to visit my girlfriend in Ottawa, and I would listen to entire day’s worth of audio recordings while I drove across Quebec to see her.

Read Part Two of our Q & A with Quil Lawrence tomorrow.

Reading as a child introduced me to a vivid world of the imagination. Travelling with my parents as an adolescent revealed the richness of a wider world of real experience. Writing combined both those pleasurable realms. Then after a while I discovered I could get paid for it.

Did you have a mentor, or was there a journalist who you particularly admired?

We never met, although I interviewed him once by phone, but Pierre Berton was my model: a wonderful story-teller who found material on every street corner and in the neglected back-closets of history. He also encouraged me to believe (against the odds early on) that a fellow could be a financially successful writer without either being an academic or an employee of some large corporation.

If you could give one piece of advice to aspiring writers, what would it be?

Do it: write. Write at every opportunity. Write for an audience, write for a teacher, a client, a friend or yourself; but write. No one ever got good at anything without spending a lot of time being bad at it first. But never, ever, write carelessly. Write about something; observe it closely. Choose every word with precision. Make every phrase you write, whether it’s in an email or a novel, the very best you can make it at that particular moment. Then go back later and see how you could have said it better.

Is there a particular ritual involved in your writing process?

I plan. I imagine the story then think about what I will need to know in order to write it. Then I go and learn that. Then I draft an outline and organize notes around it pointing to the relevant parts of the research material I’ve collected. All this can take between weeks and months.

Then one day I start at the beginning of the outline and start putting the real words down. When I’m writing for a project, I usually begin writing sometime between eight and nine o’clock each morning and continue until around five. I take several short breaks during the day to fix coffee or a soup or salad, but seldom a longer one. I eat at the keyboard. I usually work six or seven days a week until a manuscript is complete.

What are you working on now?

I’m working on a major magazine feature that will extend the ideas in DRY SPRING into a new area, and on a novel that imagines how far someone might go who truly believed some of the darkest predictions being made for our climate future.

How do you relax?

A lot of what I do for my work is huge fun. Reporting, for example. I don’t really need to ‘relax’ from it. But at the end of a writing day I do like to veg in front of a good TV crime drama (Numbers, the various Law and Orders and Without a Trace are all faves). My hobbies are creative woodworking and (not so creative) home repairs. Now and again, not as often as I’d like, I cook in a style I call bistro improv!

What books are you reading at the moment?

Paul Hawken’s Blessed Unrest, about the worldwide flowering of groups seeking ecological and social justice; James Lee Burke’s Louisiana-set Dave Robichaud mystery Pegasus Descending (I’m a long-time fan); Partha Dasgupta’s disarming A Very Short Introduction to Economics (from a series of such useful ‘very short introductions’ published by Oxford Press); an assortment of other books about the economics of the environment; El Reino del Dragon de Oro, an adventure for adolescent readers by Isabelle Allende (with my Spanish dictionary in hand).

Could you introduce an author you think people should read, and suggest a good book to start with?

For people who are concerned about our future and the planet we are creating, I recommend the philosophical groundwork laid by Thomas Berry, who reconciles today’s most urgent tasks with the ongoing story of mankind and our sense of the divine in his The Great Work.

For people interested in how Canada deals with the environment, I recommend Elizabeth Brubaker’s short book Property Rights in the Defence of Nature (Earthscan, 1995). It made me think differently about our legal approach to protecting the environment, and it’s well written.

Thanks Chris!

Click here for part one

Click here for part two