It’s officially fall around these parts, which means one thing: time to start ringing the bell about the new Short Story Advent Calendar!
2023 marks the ninth iteration of this deluxe holiday box set, which is edited by me, designed by Natalie Olsen, and published by the two of us together via the corporate entity known as Hingston & Olsen.
This project accounts for a significant chunk of my working life, and comes with the added financial risks and thrills that come with producing it ourselves. Nat and I are both so proud to make this thing, and we would both very much like for it to continue selling out, as it has in years past. Which is why it’s going to be front and centre during the next couple of newsletters.
Did you know Ron Charles of the Washington Post called H&O “a little Canadian publisher whose creations remind us what e-books can’t do”?
It’s true.
More information about this year’s set, including the names of five contributors and details about our ever-popular limited edition, can be found below.
Books I Bought
I talked a big game last month about showing restraint. This month, that’s all out the window.
Two statements in my defense. One is that early in the month I went to Edmonton’s quarterly library book sale, where I picked up two bags’ worth of great stuff, only a sliver of which—he said defensively—is migrating its way into the personal collection.
Two is that, while on book tour in Ontario, I spent an afternoon at freaking John K. King Books in Detroit.
If you’ve never been, this is a shop that takes up the entirety of a five-story converted warehouse, and has more than a million books on its shelves at any given time; we started in the fiction section, and it took me a full two hours to get from C to L. The store is so big that the staff communicate via walkie talkie. They also have a “rare book room”—in fact an entire separate building across the parking lot—that isn’t accessible to the general public. Luckily, I was with a regular who managed to get us access. What can you say? It’s the greatest bookstore I’ve ever been in. I wasn’t ready to commit just yet to a $50,000 (USD) first edition of Jacob’s Room, or a meteorite with alleged fertility powers, and so settled for all of the August Derleth I could carry.
Speaking of wild finds, earlier on that same trip I came across a first edition of E. B. White’s Here Is New York inside, of all places, a bookmobile at the Eden Mills Writers’ Festival. The bookmobile turned out to be operated by the lovely writer/bookseller couple Brown & Dickson, and the White, it turned out, was priced appropriately. So I had to let it lie.
All things considered, a good month for touching old books.
Books I Read
Michele K. Troy, Strange Bird (2017)
Steven Moore, Dalkey Days (2023)
Harry Crews, The Mulching of America (1995)
Brian Michael Murphy, We the Dead (2022)
Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Reputations (2013, trans. Anne McLean)
J. L. Carr, The Battle of Pollocks Crossing (1985)
Elaine Dewar, The Takeover (2017)
Stephen Marche, Love and the Mess We’re In (2012)
This month my reading was more scattered than usual, perhaps in part because I booked two out-of-province trips (the second of which I am still on as this newsletter hits your inbox).
Strange Bird, Dalkey Days, and The Takeover are all books about publishing, but very different reading experiences. One is a scholarly title set in Germany during the rise of the Nazis; one a short memoir/inventory set in the American midwest of the 1980s and ’90s; one an angry investigation into Canadian literary politics, post-Y2K. I could happily read three such books per month until my eyes give out.
Harry Crews is, clearly, a nut. Which I mean as a compliment. Each chapter in The Mulching of America takes a hard right turn from what came before it, and I loved the velocity (if not the exact direction) of each one. It’s the story of a door-to-door soap salesman who—you know what, I’m not even going to try describing it. This was my first book of his, and from what I’ve been able to gather online, many devoted Crews readers consider it among his weakest. I’ll take that as a good sign for future outings.
Jean Gabriel Vásquez’s Reputations is about an august political cartoonist in Bogota whose comfortable life is turned upside down by the surprise re-emergence of a woman whom he met at a house party, decades earlier, when she was just a child. It’s the kind of short, sleek, skilful psychological novel that Latin America seems to have cornered the market on. I read it on a plane, and hope to cross paths with Vásquez again very soon (which I have a feeling I will, given recent developments in the Kingdom of Redonda).
Stuff I’m Working On
The 2023 Short Story Advent Calendar is here!
If you aren’t familiar, this is a deluxe box set of twenty-five individual booklets to be opened daily beginning December 1, containing stories from some of the best writers across North America and beyond. It’s published by my company Hingston & Olsen, and it’s an absolute treat to put together each year. (H&O has its own mailing list that you can sign up for here.)
The 2023 edition—our ninth!—features stories from Melissa Broder, Thomas King, Naben Ruthnum, Colin Winnette, Hilma Wolitzer, and twenty others. It’s so good, honestly. Click through for more information, and please consider picking one up for the literature-loving folks in your life this holiday season.
Christmas might feel far off right now, but speaking from experience: December 1 gets here a lot quicker than you think.
TOP SHELVES
My web series interviewing readers and writers about their home libraries is… not quite ready yet! Sorry about that. But we’ve been hard at work tweaking the final cuts, and I’m hopeful I will have at least one link to share with you next time around.
CBC
Finally, I was fortunate enough to be a reader for the 2023 CBC Nonfiction Prize. I’ve done similar work (basically sifting the overall entries for the three jurors) in the past, and it’s always neat to see the range of work being done out there—this year was no exception. Here’s an announcement about the winning story, Louie Leyson’s “Glossary for an Aswang,” here’s another one about the five finalists, and here’s where you can learn more about the other readers.
A Few Final Letters of Recommendation
Lorde’s album Solar Power (2021)
The Martin Chronicles, a podcast about Martin Amis
The Vegan Ball Z sandwich from Farrow
