Description
For your uncle who has a lot of opinions at the dinner table
Does your uncle, parent, or other family member like to keep up to date on current events? Are they engaged and passionate about serious issues, both at the national and international level? Will you miss having a discussion with them at the dinner table this holiday? We have the holiday bundle for you!
Our Opinionated Uncle Bundle includes two Biblioasis essay collections and one memoir: Jorge Carrión’s Against Amazon and Other Essays, Best Canadian Essays 2020 (edited by Sarmishta Subramanian), and Steven Heighton’s Reaching Mithymna. Get all three for $60, shipping included!
ABOUT AGAINST AMAZON AND OTHER ESSAYS:
A NEW YORK TIMES NEW & NOTEWORTHY BOOK
A history of bookshops, an autobiography of a reader, a travelogue, a love letter—and, most urgently, a manifesto.
“Good bookshops are questions without answers. They are places that provoke you intellectually, encode riddles, surprise and offer challenges … A pleasing labyrinth where you can’t get lost: that comes later, at home, when you immerse yourself in the books you have bought; lose yourself in new questions, knowing you will find answers.”
Picking up where the widely praised Bookshops: A Reader’s History left off, Against Amazon and Other Essays explores the increasing pressures of Amazon and other new technologies on bookshops and libraries. In essays on these vital social, cultural, and intellectual spaces, Jorge Carrión travels from London to Geneva, from Miami’s Little Havana to Argentina, from his own well-loved childhood library to the rosewood shelves of Jules Verne’s Nautilus and the innovative spaces that characterize South Korea’s bookshop renaissance. Including interviews with writers and librarians—including Alberto Manguel, Iain Sinclair, Luigi Amara, and Han Kang, among others—Against Amazon is equal parts a celebration of books and bookshops, an autobiography of a reader, a travelogue, a love letter—and, most urgently, a manifesto against the corrosive influence of late capitalism.
ABOUT BEST CANADIAN ESSAYS 2020:
“This book—like most that have found their way into the world this fall—began life in the Before Times,” writes editor Sarmishta Subramanian. Written and first published by leading magazines and journals in 2019, the essays selected here speak with striking prescience to our contemporary moment. From health concerns both global and individual; to decisions about how much of ourselves we should share, online and in person; to surveillance capitalism and cancel culture, public and private concerns intertwine throughout Best Canadian Essays 2020. Just as our current challenges in public health, policing, and justice require researchers, lawmakers, and citizen groups, writes Subramanian, they also require writers. Here she presents sixteen, “essaying in the French sense of the word to think it through.”
Featuring work by:
James Brooke-Smith • Larissa Diakiw • Jenny Ferguson • Wayne Grady • Alexandra Kimball • Amorina Kingdon • Andy Lamey • Michael LaPointe • Benjamin Leszcz • Alanna Mitchell • Alexandra Molotkow • Jeremy Narby • Andrew Nikiforuk • Michelle Orange • Christina Sharpe • Carl Wilson
ABOUT REACHING MITHYMNA:
FINALIST FOR THE 2020 HILARY WESTON WRITERS’ TRUST PRIZE FOR NONFICTION
In the fall of 2015, Steven Heighton made an overnight decision to travel to the frontlines of the Syrian refugee crisis in Greece and enlist as a volunteer. He arrived on the isle of Lesvos with a duffel bag and a dubious grasp of Greek, his mother’s native tongue, and worked on the landing beaches and in OXY—a jerrybuilt, ad hoc transit camp providing simple meals, dry clothes, and a brief rest to refugees after their crossing from Turkey. In a town deserted by the tourists that had been its lifeblood, Heighton—alongside the exhausted locals and under-equipped international aid workers—found himself thrown into emergency roles for which he was woefully unqualified.
From the brief reprieves of volunteer-refugee soccer matches to the riots of Camp Moria, Reaching Mithymna is a firsthand account of the crisis and an engaged exploration of the borders that divide us and the ties that bind.
