If you are a fan of the 1960's classic "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintainence " I would strongly suggest you go out and buy a copy of Toronto Star Wheel's Section editor Mark Richardson's first book, "Zen and Now". More than a sequel to the classic, it is its own multi-layered journey across the middle of America on the back of a motorcycle.

I don't know Zen from Zip.
I don't know a Harley from a pothole in the road.

But I do know good writing and there is plenty of it in this book.

Having a hugely successful fantasy/historical series like Outlander could easily go to a lesser writer's head. Not so Diana Gabaldon. I have interviewed her three times over the years and she's still just as charming as ever. She likes to come to Toronto so she can take a side trip to the Fergus Scottish Festival and Highland Games.Originally she went to Fergus, which I swear has fewer people in it than any one of her books, because one of her characters was named Fergus. They liked her, she liked them and now the town invites her back for their festival every couple of years as a guest of honour.

Diana Gabaldon's Outlander universe now has two narrative strands. The story of the time-travelling Claire and her love for Jamie Fraser an 18th century highlander has spun off one of the major-minor characters into his own series with the latest Lord John and the Brotherhood of the Blade.

Interviewing Gail Anderson-Dargatz is a great pleasure. There is absolutely nothing stuck up about this literary writer. She is who she is and writes what she writes and frankly doesn't seem to give a damn what any critic might say.


Gail Anderson-Dargatz, best known for her 'British Columbian Gothic' novel The Cure for Death By Lightning, has a new book out. Turtle Valley is threatened by a forest fire coming down the mountain, but the real menace is much closer to home.

I hate missing a chance to interview an author. I was about to step onto an elevator at Random House when I learned that Pierre Berton had gone into hospital. He died the next day. Although Bookbits did interview him, it was under the watch of my predecessor, and ex-wife Tracy Shepherd.
I’ll also never get a chance to interview poet Anne Szumigalski. She died in 1999. Fortunately her work lives on. A new collection of poems has been edited by her literary executor Mark Abley When Earth Leaps Up.

Anne Szumigalski, the Saskatoon poet and 1995 winner of the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, died in 1999. Her editor and literary executor Mark Abley has produced a posthumous collection of new poems When Earth Leaps Up.
Published by Brick Books.

Sometimes I really just hit it off with an author. David Creighton is one of them. Some people might call him an old hippie. They’d be wrong. David Creighton is an old ‘beat’. The Beats, not to be confused with their bastard love-child “The Beatniks”, changed the way the world wrote and read. All four of the leaders of the movement are now dead leaving only a few like Canada’s Beat Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Creighton still believing.

Separately they were: Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Neal Cassady and Allen Ginsberg. Together they were the core members of the literary movement known as “The Beats”. Author David Creighton takes readers ‘on the road’ to understanding “The Ecstasy of the Beats”.
Published by Dundurn Press.

Getting a chance to interview really cool authors, editors, translators and illustrators has to be one of the best jobs on the planet. But Craig Glenday does me one better. As Editor-in-Chief of Guinness World Records 2008 he spends half the year travelling the planet verifying records.Who's the fastest? What's the tallest? Which is the oldest, smallest, fattest? If you have a question chances are editor-in-chief Craig Glenday has the answer in Guinness World Records 2008.
Published by Guinness World Records.

It's not that I'm opposed to dying. It's that I'm opposed to ME dying.
The thought of being dead offends me greatly. (And yes, I know this is an immature and childish position.) Strangely being dead in the future bothers me much more than not being alive in the past ie. before I was born. When you think of it, both amount to much the same thing. So I've decided not to die. Dying has been, literally, done to death. (Ditto the immature and childish add pathetic punning) So talking to the author of the award-winning best-seller "How We Die", Dr. Sherwin B. Nuland was an interesting prospect. In his new book, The Art of Aging: A Doctor's Prescription for Well-Being he talks with scientists who are trying to extend our lives well beyond the old 'four score and twenty' to two hundred, five hundred and thousand or even five thousand years. Dr. Nuland isn't in favour of that.


The Art of Aging is published by Random House.

Okay, so Austin Grossman looks like a young Lex Luthor. And yes, he's fiendishly brilliant and a computer whiz and getting his doctorate in Literature. But that doesn't mean he HAS to become a super-villain. He could turn out to be a brilliant young writer instead. Judging from his first novel, he's on his way.
Look up on the shelf!
It's a literary novel!
It's a super-hero comic!
It's Austin Grossman's debut novel Soon I Will Be Invincible!!!

I am pleased to announce that Bookbits will be interviewing two famous Canadians about their new books. Former Prime Minister of Canada Jean Chretien and Wrestling great Bret "Hitman" Hart.



Coming in October of 2007!

When I met Colin Angus I realized I was jealous of three things:
1. His ability to grow vast quantities of facial hair
2. His amazing physical strength and endurance necessary to circumnavigate the planet.
3. His girlfriend Julie looks hot in a bikini made entirely of fish skins!

Colin Angus is the first man to circumnavigate the planet using only human power. He began his adventure with one partner, but when they had a falling out his fiancee Julie joined him. 4,000 chocolate bars, 72 inner tubes, 250 kgs of freeze-dried foods, 31 dorado fish (caught from the sea), 2 offshore rowboats, 4 bicycles, 80 kgs of clothing, two tropical storms and two mid-Atlantic hurricanes later, he tells the story of how they made it home in his book Beyond the Horizon.
Published by Doubleday Canada.