There are many reasons why I think my job is amazing - being able to watch the World Cup kick-off game on a Friday morning with authors, coworkers and the media is one of them.
South African crime writer Deon Meyer has been in Canada for the last few weeks, speaking at the Bloody Words Conference at the end of May and again this past weekend at Luminato, Toronto’s Festival of Arts and Culture (read his guest blog post). We were thrilled to have him join us at our downtown office to watch the first game of the World Cup - one that featured his home team! We were even more thrilled to have John Doyle, author of The World is a Ball join us as well. Doyle has traveled the globe during the build-up to the World Cup. In between the drunken fans, crazed taxi drivers, leprechauns and lederhosen, John Doyle has been musing on the evolution of soccer as a global phenomenon - a perfect game-time companion, I’d say. MORE…
For the first time in its 104-year book-publishing history, McClelland & Stewart will debut a book in serialized podcast format.
Free audio episodes from The High Road by Terry Fallis will be posted weekly starting June 1, 2010, with the finale airing October 12, 2010. A print and e-book edition will be available for sale beginning September 7, 2010. MORE…
I have to tell you about my mother.
I know, I know, it’s not the kind of blog subject you’ll expect from a South African crime author, but bear with me, it should all make sense in the end.
My mother. Eighty years old, sharp as a tack, still fiercely independent in her own apartment, a stone’s throw from the Milnerton beach near Cape Town. Every time I publish a new book, I duly deliver one to her, and then the ritual starts. Nowadays, it takes about two weeks before the call comes.
“Hello, my child,” she says.
I’m fifty-one years old, but I’m still ‘my child’.
“Hi, mom.” Bright and breezy, with feigned surprise, even though I know what’s coming.
Long silence.
I wait.
Finally, with that exasperated tone of the failed parent: “I did not raise you like that.”
“I know, mom.”
“Where did you learn those words? Not from me, that’s for sure.”
“Of course not, mom.”
“What are my friends going to think? Did you consider that?”
“I’m sorry, mom …”
And when I finally and gently put down the receiver twenty apologetic minutes later, I wonder if I’m the only one. Did Connelly and Child, Barclay and Blunt, Rankin and Mankell get similar calls? Did they feel as guilty? MORE…
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