branta

Twelve years ago, Chris Brayshaw opened his first Pulpfiction Books location on Main; at the end of January this year, he opened his third, this one on Commercial Drive. “Sales are up many hundreds of percent over previous years, particularly on new books,” says Brayshaw, whose stores sell both new and used. Pulpfiction isn’t the only store that has weathered the changes. “It feels like a lot of independent booksellers are re-energized,” says Bryan Pike. As executive director of Rebus Creative, which oversees the B.C. Book Prizes, Pike travels the province, touring with authors and meeting and talking to booksellers.
Shawn Conner/The Straight

Unlike The Sweet Fuels, her first collection of poetry, Chaser is more like one long poem inspired by a handful of texts. Her interest in other people’s mail propelled her to read the letters of John Keats and Katherine Mansfield, taking note that most writers from a certain time period suffered from tuberculosis simply because it was just something everyone seemed to have. But it was in Keats’s letters that she started to tap into the value of his words.

The Encyclopedia Britannica has announced that after 244 years, dozens of editions and more than 7m sets sold, no new editions will be put to paper. The 32 volumes of the 2010 installment, it turns out, were the last. Future editions will live exclusively online. For some readers the news will provoke malaise at the wayward course of this misguided age. Others will wonder, in the era of Wikipedia, what took the dinosaur so long to die. Neither view quite captures the company or the crossroads.
Tom McCarthy/Guardian UK

As part of our perpetual search for new readers and writers, Geist offers complimentary copies of the digital magazine to instructors and students who choose to participate in the Geist in the Classroom (GiC) program. The Emerging Writer of the Month project showcases the good writing that is being produced in Canadian classrooms.

“Stevens’s poems force us, as great poems always do, to live in the occasion of their language — not simply to extract a ‘meaning’ from the language,” James Longenbach, a poet and the author of a book about Stevens, explained to me in an e-mail.
Jeff Gordinier / New York Times

image via rob mclennan’s blog
call via Canadian Literature

Not known as a hotbed of experimentation, the world of publishing has been slow to embrace the transition from print to e-books. This past week in New York, however, the Tools of Change digital publishing conference attracted entrepreneurs and innovators who are more excited by, rather than afraid of, the future.
Lynn Neary/NPR