Michael J. Martineck‘s Cinco de Mayo is one of the five finalists for the second annual Alberta Readers’ Choice Award (ARC). The ARC is “an annual award for adult fiction and narrative non-fiction titles… published by an Alberta based publishing house.”
Martineck is from upstate New York, but his book is eligible for the $10,000 award because it was published by Alberta-based Edge Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing. Voting on the award is open to all, but “In order to maintain fairness while still providing the best opportunity for the public to vote for their favourite book, voting for the Alberta Readers’ Choice Award is limited to one (1) vote per IP address per day (24 hours). Although offices, households, etc. may have multiple computers, if they are sharing the same IP address, only one vote will be allowed in a 24 hour period regardless which computer is used.”
In addition to the public voting, the ARC provides each finalist with “a champion—a recognized member of the Alberta literary community who will be the voice for the book through numerous debates. Cinco de Mayo‘s champion is Janet Lane, the executive director of Literacy Alberta.”
The basic premise of the book is that, “on the 5th of May, every man, woman and child receives a complete second set of memories alongside their own—and that person, wherever they are in the world, receives theirs.”
The other, non-sf, nominees, are:
Letters from the Lost: A Memoir of Discovery by Helen Waldstein Wilkes
Too Bad: Sketches Towards a Self-Portrait by Robert Kroetsch
Bitter Medicine: A Graphic Memoir of Mental Illness by Clem and Olivier Martini
The Grizzly Manifesto by Jeff Gailus