S4E61: Publishing Crushing with Alana Wilcox

Published: Oct. 20, 2014, 8:02 p.m.

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Near the University of Toronto, Colin Marshall talks to Alana Wilcox, Editorial Director of\\xa0Coach House Books\\xa0and author of the novel\\xa0A Grammar of Endings. They discuss the past twenty years\' boom in Toronto writing; what factors, including an embarrassing mayor in the nineties, made "mythologizing our own city" possible; why Coach House prints right there on premises, "giving cultural producers access to the means of production"; the technological palimpsest of Coach House\'s offices; the origin of their\\xa0uTOpia\\xa0series, which envision the Toronto of the future and which began when "you simply didn\'t publish about Toronto"; the broadness of the ideas about the city that surprised her, as well as the number of its "civic nerds"; how Coach House pushes for "adventurous" writing, such a recent book on surveillance, a novel about\\xa0Andy Warhol\'s\\xa0Sleep, and\\xa0Christian\\xa0B\\xf6k\'s\\xa0Eunoia; their shifting relationship over the years with the printed book; how she got interested in Toronto herself; what she\\xa0shows\\xa0students who turn up on field trips; her lack of worries about the future of the printed book, and how she finds readers process information differently depending on the physical medium of the text; their paper equivalent of 180-gram vinyl; how dominant bookselling chains have persisted in Canada, and the effects of that; Coach House\'s own books involving the city, like Maggie Helwig\'s blind-photographer novel\\xa0Girls Fall Down\\xa0and an upcoming study of the Ward, Toronto\'s first slum; her first novel, the second novel she put away, and what writing taught her about publishing; Coach House\'s "Exploded Views" series, which includes\\xa0Shawn Micallef\'s book on all-consuming precarity\\xa0The Trouble with Brunch\\xa0and David Balzer\'s\\xa0Curationism; shopping by publisher, and how she started doing it herself almost right away, acting as a consumer on her "publishing crushes"; how much of an enemy to consider Amazon; the literary figure from whom Coach House\'s bpNichol Lane takes its name; her lack of fascination with "CanLit"; the multiculturalism she doesn\'t see in Toronto; and how the city has lately tired her out.

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