Ken Whyte buys Porcupine's Quill to add to his new non-fiction book publishing imprint

Ken Whyte, the former publisher of Maclean's and the National Post is launching his own book publishing firm The Sutherland House and has purchased the publishing assets of the Erin,Ontario-based The Porcupine's Quill. 

According to a story in the Toronto Star, the deal for The Porcupine's Quill is to close at the end of May and it will remain as an imprint of The Sutherland House, which  Whyte intends to focus on non-fiction (biography, memoir and history). 

The founders of The Porcupine's Quill, Tim and Elke Inkster, retain its main street premises and its printing equipment as well as the journal The Devil's Artisan.

Whyte said he didn’t get into digital media because “I want to make things and to me it’s a lot more appealing to make a tangible product, a physical product like a book or a magazine than it is to make a virtual one. I also have more confidence in the future of books than I do in the future of traditional magazine and newspaper models.”

Whyte's interest in non-fiction and biography is demonstrated by The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst, which was published in Canada in 2008 and the following year in the U.S. It was a finalist for the 2009 National Business Book Award, the British Columbia National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction, the Charles Taylor Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Award for biography. It was also a Washington Post book of the year. His second book, a biography of Herbert Hoover, was published last year by Random House/Knopf.

LRC says these are the top 25 books of the past 25 years

The Literary Review of Canada (known commonly as LRC) has published its list of what it considers the list of the best 25 books published in the past 25 years, since LRC was launched. As with all such lists, there will be agreements and disagreements about the choices, which are drawn from the almost half a million books published in that  period. Each book in the list is accompanied by a presenter's perspective.

A Short History of Progress
by Ronald Wright
Presented by Charlie Foran

Kiss of the Fur Queen
by Thomson Highway
Presented by Margaret Atwood

Generation X
by Douglas Coupland
Presented by Adam Sternbergh

Citizen of the World and Just Watch Me:
The Life of Pierre Elliott Trudeau
by John English
Presented by Michael Valpy

Boom, Bust and Echo
by David Foot with Daniel Stoffman
Presented by Michael Adams

Shake Hands with the Devil
by Roméo Dallaire
Presented by Thomas Axworthy

Clearing the Plains:
Disease, Politics of Starvation and the Loss of Aboriginal Lifeby James Daschuk
Presented by Niigaan Sinclair

Shooting the Hippo: Death by Deficit and other Canadian Myths
by Linda McQuaig
Presented by Bruce Campbell

Sisters in the Wilderness
by Charlotte Gray
Presented by Alissa York
Read more »

Fitter after 50; writer Margaret Webb pursues a stronger "second act"

Freelance writer, author and teacher Margaret Webb has written Older, Faster, Stronger: What Women Runners Can Teach Us All About Living Younger, Longer (Rodale Books, 2014), which is to be launched in Toronto in October. 

To whet readers' appetites Webb, who teaches Writing for Magazines and the Web at Ryerson's Chang School, has just released a 5-minute trailer featuring some of the extraordinary women she's met in the course of writing about setting out to get fitter after 50 than she was at university: the world's fastest 75+ sprinter, two 80+ marathoners and a 94 year old sprinter

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFOMLtUuIt8&feature=em-upload_owner