Archive for month: March, 2021

Biblioasis is thrilled to announce that on March 25 our forthcoming title A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa was shortlisted for the 2021 Republic of Consciousness Prize! An award of £2,000 will be given to each publisher on the shortlist, and the winner will be announced in mid May. 

Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat will be published in Canada and in the US on June 1, 2021. 

The Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses supports, promotes and celebrates small presses in the UK and Ireland, and rewards the best fiction published by small presses with fewer than 5 full-time employees. The prize is funded through the UAE Publishing Project at the University of East Anglia, the Granta Trust, as well as by donations to the Prize. They are maintained with the support of Arts Council England. 

The judging panel for this year’s prize includes novelist Guy Gunaratne, writer, publisher, and podcaster John Mitchinson, and previous Republic of Consciousness winner Eley Williams. The shortlist also includes Men and Apparitions by Lynne Tillman (Soft Skull Press), The Mermaid of Black Conch by Monique Roffey (Peepal Tree Press), A Musical Offering by Luis Sagasti (Charco Press), and Lote by Shola von Reinhold (Jacaranda Books). 

Judge John Mitchinson said about A Ghost in the Throat: “A Ghost in the Throat moves between past and present with hallucinogenic intensity as the narrator uncovers the details of the dead woman’s life, each revelation deepening her own sense of herself as a writer and a woman and creating in the process a brave and beautiful work of art.”

Previous winners of the Prize include Fitzcarraldo Edition for Animalia by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo in 2020, and Lucia by Alex Pheby (Galley Beggar Press) & Murmur by Will Eaves (CB Editions) in 2019.

A Ghost in the Throat is Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s hybrid memoir, historical unveiling, and feminist translation of the female body. In 1773, an Irish noblewoman discovers her husband has been murdered. Grief-stricken, she kneels beside his body and drinks handfuls of his blood—and later composes the extraordinary poem Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire, a keen to lament the dead that Peter Levi will famously call “the greatest poem written in either Ireland or Britain during the eighteenth century.” In the present day, a young mother narrowly avoids tragedy in her own life, and, upon rediscovering the poem she first read as a child, becomes obsessed with learning the full story of its composition.

In a kaleidoscopic blend of memoir, autofiction, and literary studies, Doireann Ní Ghríofa tells the mesmerizing story of her own self-discovery through her efforts to give voice to Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill. A moving study of the power of language to transcend eras and draw together the intimate experiences of women’s lives, A Ghost in the Throat is an astonishing story about one woman freeing her voice by reaching into the past and finding another’s.

Doireann Ní Ghríofa is the author of six critically-acclaimed books of poetry, whose awards include the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and a Seamus Heaney Fellowship (Queen’s University). Her debut book of prose is the bestselling A Ghost in the Throat, which finds the 18th-century poet Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill haunting the life of a contemporary young mother, prompting her to turn detective, and of which the Sunday Times writes: “Sumptuous, almost symphonic, in its intensity … As readers, we should be grateful for her boldness. Without it, we would not have had one of the best books of this dreadful year.”

PRAISE FOR A GHOST IN THE THROAT

 Winner of the 2020 Nonfiction Book of the Year from the An Post Irish Book Awards

Winner of the 2020 Foyles Nonfiction Book of the Year

Shortlisted for the 2021 Rathbones Folio Prize

Shortlisted for the 2021 Republic of Consciousness Prize

“A Ghost in the Throat is something strange and very special: a ravishingly immersive telling of the way in which a poet and mother’s obsession with a poet and mother who died centuries ago makes their different lives chime like bells.”—Emma Donoghue, author of The Pull of the Stars and Room

“Past versus present, blood versus milk, birth versus death, the Irish language versus the English: dichotomies abound, but the questions of women’s lived experiences and who history remembers link them all.”—The Paris Review

“Lush, lyrical prose that dazzles readers from the get-go … sumptuous, almost symphonic, in its intensity … As readers, we should be grateful for [Ní Ghríofa’s] boldness. Without it, we would not have had one of the best books of this dreadful year.”—Sunday Times

“Sensational, genre-straddling work of scholarship and memoir.”—The Guardian

“Ní Ghríofa’s one-of-a-kind literary quest, the unflinching intimacy of her life writing, and the stunningly lush, sumptuous sentences through which she tells her story made us fall in love with this book. If you’re anything like us you’ll read it, and recommend it, fervently, and when someone turns around and says I read A Ghost in the Throat you’ll recognize that look in their eye, and you’ll know you’re part of the same community of book lovers who have experienced something truly special.”—Foyles Books

You can order A Ghost in the Throat directly from Biblioasis, or from your local bookstore!

It’s been an exciting month for 100 Miles of Baseball, and it all leads up to next week, when we’ll be hosting our virtual launch on March 31 at 7 PM EST. Everything from radio interviews, to its own beer can design (available as part of the Book & Brews Baseball Bundle in partnership with Chapter Two Brewing) has kept authors Dale Jacobs and Heidi LM Jacobs busy! Recently, they’ve been featured in the Toronto Star in a lovely review which can be read on their website here.

Deborah Dundas wrote:

 “I was about to get a taste of real baseball love. Here, too, the atmosphere was part of the game. The stands were crowded, the fans not afraid to yell what they thought, the scents of popcorn and hot dogs filling the hot summer night in a dusty field. This, I thought, is baseball… It’s the same feeling evoked by the Jacobs’ book.”

ON THE RADIO!

Interview with Ken Eastwood and Loreena Dickson on Newstalk CJBK Radio’s Morning Show available to listen to here.

Interview with CBC Fresh Air! available to listen to here.

Interview with Christian Aumell on CJOB Sports Show available here.

Interview with Tony Doucette on CBC Windsor Morning available here.

Their transcribed March 15 interview with the Windsor Star can also be read on their website here, and their March 17 interview with Holly M. Wendt of The Baseball Prospectus can be read here.

You can order 100 Miles of Baseball: Fifty Games, One Summer directly from Biblioasis, or from your local bookstore.

Make sure to join us next Wednesday for a virtual night of entertainment! RSVP to the event on Facebook.

ABOUT 100 MILES OF BASEBALL

By the end of the 2016 season, Dale Jacobs and Heidi LM Jacobs both finally admitted to themselves and to each other that they were losing interest in the Tigers and, consequently, in baseball itself—a thread that had not only connected the two of them, but brought them together with their families and with their own histories as well. They weren’t sure what they were missing, but they had an idea where it might be found: in their own backyard. Drawing a radius of one hundred miles around their home in Windsor, Ontario, Heidi and Dale set a goal of seeing fifty games within that circle in one summer, a schedule that took them across southwestern Ontario and into Michigan and Ohio, from bleachers behind high schools, to manicured university turf, to the steep concrete stands of major league parks. 100 MILES OF BASEBALL is the story of their rediscovery of their love of the game—and with it their relationships, and the region they call home.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Dale Jacobs is the author of Graphic Encounters: Comics and the Sponsorship of Multimodal Literacy (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013). He is the editor of Sunday with the Tigers: Eleven Ways to Watch a Game (Black Moss Press, 2015) and The Myles Horton Reader (University of Tennessee Press, 2003), and co-editor (with Laura Micciche) of A Way to Move: Rhetorics of Emotion and Composition Studies (Boynton Cook/Heinemann, 2003). His academic/creative nonfiction book, The 1976 Project: On Comics and Grief, is forthcoming from Wilfred Laurier University Press. He is the editor of The Windsor Review and teaches in the English Department at the University of Windsor.

Heidi LM Jacobs’ novel Molly of the Mall: Literary Lass and Purveyor of Fine Footwear (NeWest Press, 2019) won the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour in 2020. She is a librarian at the University of Windsor and one of the researchers behind the award-winning Breaking the Colour Barrier: Wilfred “Boomer” Harding & the Chatham Coloured All-Stars project. She is currently co-writing a book about the 1934 Chatham Coloured All-Stars, the first Black team to win the Ontario Baseball Amateur Association Championship (forthcoming from Wilfred Laurier University Press). Originally from Edmonton, she now lives in Windsor, Ontario.

Biblioasis titles are turning heads in news outlets near and far! Check out some recent coverage below:

IN THE NEWS!

Murder on the Inside by Catherine Fogarty has been reviewed by Publisher’s Weekly! Their reviewer had this to say:

“Fogarty’s well-researched and moving debut examines a 1971 Canadian prison riot and the conditions that caused it … For readers who have ever wondered about life behind bars, this is a must-read.”

You can read the full review here!

If this sounds like the book for you, you can purchase it here or through your local independent bookstore.

Against Amazon by Jorge Carrion has been reviewed by the Winnipeg Free Press. Their reviewer, Ron Robinson, had this to say:

“Against Amazon is an optimistic overall take on books, reading and retailing, and an attempt to avoid ending up knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing.”

You can read the full review here!

If this sounds like the book for you, you can purchase it here or through your local independent bookstore.

Sea Loves Me by Mia Couto has been reviewed by Asymptote Journal. Their reviewer, Thuy Dinh, Editor-at-Large for the Vietnamese Diaspora, had this to say:

“Couto’s compact tales, which require several re-readings, represent a deft restructuring of iconic legends in the global canon … Like Mia Couto’s aesthetic effort to render whole the many facets of his contradictory identity, the translators’ linguistic dance simultaneously pays homage to his original fiction, and gives birth to its autonomous and indelible existence in English.”

 You can read the full review here!

If this sounds like the book for you, you can purchase it here or through your local independent bookstore.

On Property by Rinaldo Walcott has been reviewed in Publishers Weekly!: They had this to say:

“Walcott’s analysis of the ways in which white supremacy is baked into the legal systems of Canada and the U.S. is stimulating. Progressives will embrace this well-conceived call for change.”

You can read the full review here!

If this sounds like the book for you, you can purchase it here or through your local independent bookstore.

ON TV!

Ottawa CTV News’ designated “Book Guy”, Sean Wilson recommended On Property as a must-read for Black History Month.

You can watch the full clip and catch Sean’s other recommendations here!

If this sounds like the book for you, you can purchase it here or through your local independent bookstore.

IN FEATURES!

On Property author, Rinaldo Walcott wrote a piece for TVO, extrapolating on why race-based COVID-19 data needs to lead to political action and policy change. Walcott had this to say:

“Collecting race-based data is a policy decision, but it does not guarantee that good policy decisions will follow from the data that is collected. For example, Toronto mayor John Tory often repeats the phrase ‘evidence-based decision making,’ yet the city has not taken the lead in pushing the Ontario government to implement paid sick days, which would make a significant difference to the non-white communities experiencing the brunt of the pandemic.”

You can read the full article here!

If you would like to read On Property, you can purchase it here or through your local independent bookstore.

Parul Sehgal, NYT staff critic and former editor at the NYT Book Review, mentioned Ducks, Newburyport, in a New York Times piece examining the history of the NYT Book Review as the the publication celebrates its 125th anniversary. She had this to say of Ducks:

“I think of Lucy Ellmann, who also contributed to the Book Review around that time. In 2019, she published Ducks, Newburyport, a thousand-page doorstop — all in one sentence, no less — about “life and love and childbirth and war, and jokes and recipes” (and a mountain lion). The novel won awards, raves; no one that I recall accused it of indulgence.”

You can read the full article here!

If you would like to read Ducks, Newburyport, you can find it here or through your local independent bookstore!

ON AWARDS LISTS!

On Time and Water  by Andri Snær Magnason is nominated for The Nordic Council Literature Prize!

You can read the full announcement here!

If you would like to read this book, you can find it here or through your local independent bookstore.

Elaine Feeney won the Kate O’Brien Award from the Limerick Lit Fest for As You Were! 

You can watch the full announcement here!

As You Were will be available from Biblioasis in Fall 2021.

ON SOCIALS!

Bookriot contributor, Jessica E Squire, gushed about Forgone by Russell Banks on Twitter! She had this to say:

“[I got] sucked into this book so deeply I read it in a weekend.”

You can read the full thread here!

If this sounds like the book for you, you can find it here or through your local independent bookstore.