1979
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eBook $9.99

Shakedown 1979

 Cool kids may never have the time, but we here at the Bibliomanse certainly do. Not that we’re not incredibly cool. Really we’re the coolest, because we’ve got the first copies of Ray Robertson’s latest novel. Set in Chatham, Ontario, 1979 is the story of thirteen-year-old Tom Buzby, whose dad is the local tattoo artist and whose mom, a born-again stripper, has run off with the church minister. But don’t worry! You can be as cool as us in just one week, because 1979 hits the shelves March 6.

Is That A Star(red review) In Your Eyes Or Are You Crying Because It’s Still February

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eBook $9.99

Saving us all from the winter doldrums is this brand-new starred review of Zolitude, Paige Cooper’s debut story collection. Library Journal calls it “[A] spikily surreal debut collection…vivid, complex…brilliant.” Congratulations, Paige! My hands feel warmer already!

Trade Paper $22.95

Little Book Made of Love Wins Big

Vanessa Brown and Jason Dickson were in Toronto last week to receive an Ontario Heritage Award for London: 150 Cultural Moments, a unique cultural map that anyone interested in Canadian history will enjoy. Asked by the London Free Press how she hoped readers would respond to their quirky and surprising catalogue of local lore, Brown responded, “I hope they laugh.” Where were you when I was sleeping through history class in high school.

What Did You Expect, We’re Canadian

In “The Best Canadian Stories Must Be Some Good,” Atlantic Books Today’s Chris Benjamin says of Best Canadian Stories 2017, edited by John Metcalf, “one comes to such a book with high expectations. The results are solid . . . it’s not hard to understand why any given story was selected.” That’s what we call a happy ending.

Can you tell us more about yourself and your writing?

I used to be middle-class, I used to work in the music industry, I used to be a librarian for a railroad. I learned how to lie five years ago, I learned how to be addicted to smoking a year ago, I learned that sports are interesting last month. My favourite virtue is tenderness. Writing fiction is the only way I know to gum up time’s nasty linear flow without snubbing the void. It takes forever. It’s weird that there’s no tangible, visible evidence of great emotion.

We deny or lie about our emotions. Stories exist as some kind of evidence, at least.

Who do you imagine reading your stories?

There are a lot of people who I hope won’t read my stories. If I thought about who might read what I’m writing while I write it, I wouldn’t write. This is what Zuckerberg has done to us: forced us to redact everything interesting. Self-censorship is complicity with the authority, but we love to spy on each other so it’s difficult to resist. I’ve already censored these responses so much.

I think the people who read stories are looking for a familiar feeling, and I hope they find it, but mostly I write what I wish someone else would’ve written already. Imagination was how I coped with childhood: self-insertion fantasies that were either romances or escape plans or both. The less pure thing is that my partners have often been writers and I’d write towards them or about them, with or without permission. I probably shouldn’t say that.

Some stories in Zolitude explicitly have some other-worldly or speculative components (“Thanatos”) and some don’t (“Ryan and Irene, Irene and Ryan”). They definitely all feel fantastical though. Is there a process by which you decide which stories demand realism and which don’t?

The fantastical at first was something I turned to before I knew how to write emotion directly. The older stories in the collection are repressed. There were five years where I didn’t write at all because a middle-aged man in a workshop (he was a fellow student and I admired his writing very much) told me my writing was self-indulgent and unreadable. He seemed very angry, and I’m a coward. So some bad years happened where I had a mortgage and listened to podcasts about the economy. When I started writing again I was still ashamed of my emotions. Now when I write, the fantastic appeals less as metaphor and more as an amplifier of emotion. We all fantasize. Emotions are monstrous. We try to contain them but they’re out of control. We know we’re secretly unlovable, no matter how human we try to appear.

 Your characters are often displaced in countries not their own—yet the exact locations they end up are either not named or, if they are, it’s incidental to the main plot. This feels different than most writing of someone travelling in a different land. Can you tell us more about that?

I grew up in a tourist town. People go there to look at the mountains and just the fact of their wanting to look has made my home unrecognizable—not to mention unaffordable—to me. The wolves are dead, the bears are inbred. It’s a source of bitterness. Now when I go there I’m a tourist. Actually I’m a tourist in everything I do: jobs, relationships, the cities I live in, the cities I visit. This mode is implicitly unequal and characterized by greediness. Most artists are users. Since we are human, understanding anything fully is impossible. I impose my own misperceived narratives and propagandize my own mythologies. What horrifies me most is how invested I am in camouflaging myself as I exploit places and people. The ubiquitous anodyne unplace doesn’t interest me because it has no secrets I can export. I often don’t name the places I’m writing about because I’m ashamed of how ignorant and unfair my interpretation is. My fiction isn’t experimental or long enough to contain the contradictions and multitudes of a real place and, like I said, there’s no understanding anything. I land on one or two facets that compel me and I use those. Sometimes they aren’t flattering. Once a man I loved didn’t believe me that I could recognize the faces of the mountains I grew up under. I imagine they all looked the same to him.

Your writing is so gorgeous. Please tell us about the writers that have inspired you in the past.

There’s always that period of time where you’re waiting for permission and so all you can do is read and figure out how commas work. My sentences got better when I started to read good poetry. It helped that I catalogued books as a librarian and the metadata records had the most obscenely uptight standards of punctuation. Every space and semi-colon counted. The worst thing about fiction is all the looking around and closing and opening of doors. I’m embarrassed to read fiction out loud to people. They could be listening to poetry, which is plainly more efficient. Lisa Robertson, Claudia Rankine, Ariana Reines, Mary Ruefle and Lydia Davis all prove it. My stories got more pointed when I learned to pay attention to what caught my imagination. Peter Carey and Steven Millhauser gave me permission to not be boring. Heti, Gaitskill, Cusk, Zink, and Moshfegh gave me permission to be brutal.

 What are you reading right now?

Fleur Jaeggy, Anne Boyer, Renee Gladman, Tamara Faith Berger (again). Nonfiction about American football, which is my current angle into the guts of racism and patriarchy, and which soothes me because I understand it so poorly. Bifo on the senility and impotence of late capitalism. Anything about Silicon Valley, Russia, or Vietnam.

Anything else you want to tell us about?

My sex life? Just kidding.

Paige Cooper was born and raised in the Rocky Mountains. Her stories have appeared in The Fiddlehead, West Branch, Michigan Quarterly Review, Gulf Coast Online, Canadian Notes & Queries, The New Quarterly, Minola Review, Cosmonauts Avenue, and have been anthologized in The Journey Prize Stories and Best Canadian Stories. She lives in Montreal. Zolitude publishes March 2018.

It’s a busy time in the Bibliomanse.

Bookbinding begins.

The immediate task (on top of production, marketing, arranging tours, getting all the holiday orders out, getting the spring season into a shape that doesn’t make us all want to open-mouth sob, etc.) is the production of handcrafted chapbooks.

Each book is hand-stitched.

Against Amazon is a short manifesto written by Biblioasis author Jorge Carrión. As with his hugely successful travelogue and love-letter to book stores everywhere, Bookshops, Carrión’s chapbook concerns itself with the state of the book. Against Amazon is exactly what it sounds like — an author explaining how damaging Amazon is to the world of the book. Dan loved the manuscript and immediately decided to turn it into a chapbook – an objet d’art to celebrate the independent bookseller from an independent-bookseller-turned-indie-publisher.

Production Manager Chris Andrechek, who has been with Biblioasis since the working-from-Dan’s-garage days, was tasked with designing and producing 500 individually-numbered chapbooks. Chris has been typesetting, printing, trimming, hand-binding and sewing

Production Manager Chris Andrecheck and Local History Editor Sharon Hanna sewing chapbooks. Sharon is one of the few people Chris allows to touch the books. Then he berates her.

chapbooks at Biblioasis for six years on top of his other responsibilities (like making sure our books actually get made). He’s never seen a response to a book like Against

Chris’ blood pressure is one billion over one billion.

Amazon. Within hours of offering the chapbook to independent booksellers, Chris received orders for over five hundred chapbooks. On top of that, the publicity department (Chris’ sworn enemies) gave away most of his existing stock to reviewers. With orders continuing to come in, Chris has developed a feverish look in his eye and is never without some sort of book-binding weapon in his hand. We’re not sure we’ll all make it.

He removed the safety to better control the trim on his books. No one is permitted to TOUCH the cutter except Chris.

Against Amazon is only available through independent bookshops (call your local shop!) and each copy was hand-folded, hand-stitched, and hand-trimmed by one of us here at the Bibliomanse (usually after work hours; sometimes while \drinking and practicing for Futuramatrivia night). Most of the books were made by Chris himself (and then he quality controls the ones the rest of us were permitted to make because he does not trust us). Bookshops is available everywhere and is getting terrific reviews all over the place!

The final product.

Read that book that started Carrion’s crusade against Amazon and Cultural Department Stores and that has been named a Globe and Mail top 100 book of 2017, a National Post 99 best books  of 2017, and one of Maclean’s 10 best books of 2017.

Extra! Extra! Read all about it!

DO IT! READ IT NOW!

Today’s media roundup is a heart-warming reminder that, in this world of e-readers and social media, some people in the old fashioned book worlds of newspapers, magazines, and libraries are still fighting the good bibliofight. Yes, they’re fighting it mostly online these days (and you are reading this on a computer or a cell phone) but it’s book people finding ways to talk about books and that is rad!

Halifax’s The Chronicle Herald wrote about David Huebert’s Peninsula Sinking, praising Huebert for capturing anxieties about the east that many Nova Scotians can relate to, saying “If you were born and raised in Nova Scotia, moved away and came back — or moved away and stayed away — there’s likely a story within Peninsula Sinking that will speak to you.”
The Chronicle Herald: Book Peninsula Sinking speaks to Nova Scotia connections 

The Toronto Star celebrated the poetry of 2017 with a nod to Pino Coluccio’s hilarious Class Clown, writing that “Colluccio proves that light verse isn’t necessarily lightweight.”
The Toronto Star: Poetry lovers — the latest volumes to entertain and make you think

More good press from the Star, as The Redemption of Galen Pike made their list for the 10 Best Books of 2017!

“This book of stories from Welsh writer Davis garnered critical acclaim — and the attention of our reviewers. “What a wonderful find this book was. The stories are compelling and quirky and more often than not take a turn toward the unexpected that can leave you breathless. I’d never read Davies before . . . I will always read her now.” “Dazzling writing that is so evocative, that takes you down a narrative road you think is familiar, and then takes a turn you weren’t expecting, with a gut-punch of emotion. Truly wonderful.”
The Star’s top 10 books of 2017

Early Edition! Sneak peak at 2018 Biblioasis titles!

Biblioasis’ 2017 titles continue to attract good buzz and we are so happy and thankful for all the wonderful readers and reviewers. Looking ahead, review copies of 2018 books have already started to garner some attention!  Here’s a sneak peak:

André Forget mentioned Paige Cooper’s upcoming short story collection, Zolitude, in The Walrus, saying “When I read a Cooper story, “Vazova on Love” for example, I feel I have been transported into a strange country, a puzzling one, sensuous and potentially hostile, and I know she will reveal something to me if I stay very focused.”
The Walrus: Does Writing About Boredom Have to Be Boring?

And some of our favourite bibliofriends of all, librarians, are chatting to one another through LoanStar and their blogs about 1979, Ray Robertson’s forthcoming novel about coming-of-age in smalltown Chatham, Ontario. Here’s what Alexandra Yarrow wrote:

“One to watch for, if you enjoy small-town Canadian stories, is 1979 by Ray Robertson. Tom Buzby, a thirteen year-old living in Chatham, Ontario, narrates this sweetly nostalgic coming-of-age story about Tom’s developing interest in girls, his understanding of his parent’s divorce, and his discovery of various rock bands (you could make an amazing playlist from records mentioned in this novel). I also loved reading about the dynamic between Tom and his sister, Julie. What makes this story a true gem however, is how Tom’s narrative is interspersed with a glimpse into the very private lives of his neighbours, including the people whose papers he delivers, and those whose paths cross his for other reasons.”
1979: Another year curled up with a novel — My favourites of 2017

You’ll be hearing more from us and our 2018 authors very soon. Keep reading!