The New Brunswick Literary Times

Douglas Glover takes his time. The University of New Brunswick writer-in-residence tends to be a perfectionist, and even he admits that he can be a “difficult sell” as a writer. “I work to an internal rhythm that is mysterious even to me.

Mark Anthony Jarman is the author of 19 Knives, My White Planet, New Orleans Is Sinking, Dancing Nightly in the Tavern, and the travel book Ireland’s Eye.  His novel, Salvage King Ya!, is on Amazon.ca’s list of 50 Essential Canadian Books and is the number one book on Amazon’s list of best hockey fiction.

Jarman has won a Gold National Magazine Award in nonfiction, has twice won the Maclean-Hunter Endowment Award,

From Shore to Shoormal (Broken Jaw Press) book launch audio file here: From Shore to Shoormal launch (recorded by Joe Blades at Mareel, Lerwick, 1 September 2013).

First, I’d like congratulate you for winning The Malahat Review’s Far Horizons Award for Short Fiction! When Judge Alissa York  outlined why she chose “Palace of the Brine,” she praises the character of  Vlada, an ex-Soviet cleaning lady, who provides the narrator “with the closest  thing she’s known to a blueprint of how to live.”  To me, rather than any  significant ambition or philosophy, this blueprint seems to boil down to a sort  of dogged self-sufficiency and desire “to be strong enough to survive as long  as [Vlada] has”; would you be willing to elaborate on this notion of strength and  how it informed your writing of “The Palace of the Brine”?

Authors Valerie Sherrard and Peter D. Clark visited Blackville School over the past two weeks. Valerie Sherrard visited with students on Tuesday, November 19 and Peter D. Clark visited on Thursday, November 28. 

Check out the "School's In" podcast feature below where hosts Candace Purcell and Kyla Coughlan sit down to speak with Mrs. Sherrard about her books and the writing experience.

RIEL NASON I spotted Riel's Twitter feed via Goose Lane Editions (her publisher) a while ago and look forward to her tweets about writing and nature. As a novelist, involved parent and volunteer li...

The Globe and Mail guide to the year’s best books, compiled by Books editors Jared Bland and Lisan Jutras

A brilliant, heartbreaking novel from a Canadian icon that tackles the theme of debt, and what we owe each other, through three unforgettable characters. This is Richards' best and most complex work since his Giller-winning Mercy Among the Children, and a fitting companion to that novel.      Howard, Evan and Ian are inseparable as boys--so much so that one night, abandoned in the forest by the careless adults around them, and raging against society and the uncaring gods others worship, they seal their undying brotherhood with a blood bond. But soon after, a horrific accident scars each of them in a different way, testing their bonds and leaving each with a debt to be paid.