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.

For a couple, writing a book together is hard enough. Writing a book while you are deprived of food you love would seem to me to be a recipe for disaster if not divorce. But these two were all smiles when I interviewed them about their new best-seller "The 100 Mile Diet".

For one year food journalists Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon decided to eat only food which had been grown or raised close to home. Now everyone is trying The 100 Mile Diet.

Canada Celebrates its 140th birthday on July 1st. Along with a day off from work and picnics on Parliament Hill Canadians get a chance to do what we do best: navel gaze!


The Dominion Institute has revised its 2000 book Great Questions of Canada. Contributors include: Neil Bissoondath, Charlotte Gray, Michael Ignatieff, Naomi Klein, Peter C. Newman, Allan Gotlieb, Ovide Mercredi, Bob Rae, Jack Granatstein, and George Jonas. Editor Rudyard Griffiths says they tackle questions ranging from: Does History Matter?, to Is Multi-culturalism viable in a post 9/11 world?
Published by Key-Porter Books

Novelist Alissa York's new book Effigy explores life inside a Mormon marriage in the 1800's. Erastus Hammer brings home his fourth bride, much to the displeasure of her three 'sister' wives. The story also weaves in the terrible Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857 when a group of Mormons disguised as natives killed a wagon train of settlers.
Published by Random House of Canada.

Everyone knows that after the failure of Neville Chamberlain's 'Peace for our time' appeasement of Adolf Hitler that Winston Churchill replaced him as British Prime Minister. What is not well known, and explained in Lynne Olson's new book, is that it was orchestrated by rebels on the Prime Minister's own back benches, the so-called Troublesome Young Men.
Published by Bond Street Books, distributed in Canada by Random House.

Considering the recent mess here at LJ concerning child porn material, this is probably taking my life, if not account into my hands, but here goes. This book is about the international internet business of exploiting children and the efforts by authorities around the world to halt it. Julian Sher is an investigative journalist who isn't afraid of tackling tough subjects like organized crime and biker gangs, but even he found this subject difficult to handle at times.


Recently a huge internet-based child pornography ring was broken up because of a co-ordinated effort by police around the world. Author and investigative journalist Julian Sher has the inside story of this battle in One Child at a Time: The Global Fight to Rescue Children from Online Predators.

I always love it when a publisher sends me the latest book by an author who isn't just a good writer, but also a hell of a storyteller. When I finished Heartstopper at 7AM on the day I was to interview Joy Fielding I remember saying out loud, much to the distress of my cats, "Now THAT was a great read!".

Author Joy Fielding is back with another thriller. The protagonist of Heartstopper is the deputy sheriff in a small Florida town dealing with the disappearances of attractive teenage girls.
Published by Doubleday Canada.

Liam Durcan is one of those people who, if he weren't so damn nice, you'd just have to hate. He's a neuroscientist and university teacher by day, writer by night. He combines it all in his new first novel.

Neuroeconomics is a very new science which examines, on a biological level, how people make buying decisions. It serves as part of the backdrop to Lian Durcan's first novel Garcia's Heart.

Odori is the Japanese word for dance. It is also the title of a first novel by Darcy Tamayose. It moves back in forth in time and space from the peace of the Canadian praires to the blood soaked WW II battleground of Okinawa.
Published by Cormorant Books.

This interview made me really, really nervous. Not quite as nervous as my interview with former Canadian Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, but awfully damn close. To begin with there wasn’t just one publicist looking after Lord Black, there were three. One of the publicists was the vice-president of publicity. The room was swept. Not for explosive devices, at least not the conventional variety. No, they swept the room for literary bombs: books critical of Conrad Black. There were several of those. Lord Black arrived sipping a coffee from the deli in the lobby of the M&S building. The doors closed and we began. If you’d like to listen to the entire interview (39:07) CLICK HERE.

Conrad Black, currently appearing in a Chicago court on fraud charges, is also a highly respected biographer. The Invincible Quest: The Life of Richard Milhouse Nixon is the most thorough biography ever written about America's most controversial President.

Oh, Conrad and me, we go way back! It was 1981, I was a young kid straight out of broadcasting college. He was the owner of Standard Broadcasting's radio station CFRB in Toronto. It didn't take long before...I realized he'd never know I existed. And until today, he didn't. And until today, I didn't much like the man.

He was not what I expected. There was no self-importance. There was no condescension. There was no ghost-writer. He was courteous, humourous, self-deprecating and very generous with his time. He has a very sharp mind with an amazing memory for detail. He is also a very compelling writer. I called him on using "fissiparous" twice. He thought he'd only used it once. But heck, in a 1075 page book, I guess that isn't gratuitous.

It's the little things about a person I find most telling.

The publicity staff at McClelland & Stewart were all quite nervous about making everything just so for him. They put out a couple of bottles of water, one for me and the other on the table in front of his chair. Someone else decided the big boardroom table looked a bit bare, so they added a few crystal wine-glasses and a water carafe. At the end of the interview, he asked me whether that was my water bottle. I told him it was his. He said, "I'll drink from that rather than dirtying one of the glasses. Not that I want anyone to get the idea I'm germophobic or something. I just don't want to make more work for someone else."

It wasn't forced. It wasn't for my benefit unless he is a BRILLIANT actor and totally fooled me but I doubt that. It was a just a guy being considerate. I'll be posting the edited interview here when we are closer to the publication date for his biography of Richard Milhous Nixon and probably post the entire interview as a podcast too.

After the interview was over, he signed my galley of his book. I shook his hand and wished him well with his trial in Chicago. And I meant it.

Me, a life-long lefty, liking Conrad Black...who'd have thought... ?