The Bibliophile: Along for the ride

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Next week, Vanessa will be attending the London Book Fair for the first time in my absence. I’m torn between relief and remorse, and excitement for Vanessa. I wish I could have been there for her first trip. Though the event itself happens in an inhuman environment, some kind of cross between an airport hanger and a processing plant, it’s nevertheless one of the most human-oriented of occasions. It’s both exhausting and invigorating. I will miss being there, jostling for floor space with my fellow indie publishers, raising a glass at the end of a long day with more of the same. Many of the people I’ve met through these fairs have become close friends and confidantes. I care about them deeply, and having missed Frankfurt in October I mourn that it’ll have been more than a year before I see any in person.

But I will also miss the raison d’etre for the fair: the books. The hunt for them, wandering the aisles and looking at what’s on display, flipping through the catalogues, listening intently to the enthusiastic pitches of those who care about what they publish as much as we care about what we do. The quickening that happens when you happen upon something unexpected, that might be a natural fit for our list. It’s a kind of magic. Many of the most important international books we’ve discovered have resulted from these fairs and from the relationships that they’ve helped cement: Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport, Roy Jacobsen’s Barrøy series, Elaine Feeney’s novels, the works of Jón Kalman Stefánsson. I learned about Roland Allen’s The Notebook spending a couple of hours strolling around Hampstead Heath as Mark Ellingham’s wolfhound loped pleasurably ahead of us through the grasses. It’s one of my favourite London memories.

Photo: The Passenger Seat by Vijay Khurana. Designed by Zoe Norvell.

The discovery of Vijay Khurana’s The Passenger Seat didn’t occur in such an idyll: I first read it in a narrow bed in my discount Frankfurt hotel room in mid-October, 2023, shivering under the too-thin sheets. Or at least that’s when I read the first sixty or so pages: I hadn’t realized that the manuscript Vijay’s agent, Philip Gwyn Jones, had sent was incomplete, and was not at all pleased to have to turn out the light without knowing what happened next. I accosted Philip first thing the next morning when I got to the fairgrounds, begging him for the rest, so intent was I on what happened to (though their names were different in that iteration) Teddy and Adam.

Teddy and Adam have been with me ever since. “There are books,” George Orwell wrote, “that one reads over and over again, books that become part of the furniture of one’s mind,” and The Passenger Seat is one of these for me. It goes to deeply uncomfortable places in its examination of male friendship and identity and our relationship with violence. From its opening apocryphal Mailer epigraph (“When two men say hello on the street, one of them loses.”) to its final despondent sentence, it never looks away from the ugly vulnerability that propels us too often to do our worst. Using the frame of real-world events—the 2019 Bryer-Schmegelsky spree killings—it risks imagining what can never be known, and in doing so gets at truths that might not otherwise be possible. And it asks the reader what can be learned from two broken boys/men: up to now, too often, the answer has been not enough.

The Passenger Seat has been adopted enthusiastically by American booksellers, who have made it both an Indies Introduce and an Indie Next pick. Douglas Riggs of Bank Square Books called it “a plunge into a pitch-black abyss . . . (that) feels so real it may as well be a cursed memoir.” It launched this week with a New York Times review which called it “unsettling and powerful.” It is both of these things, and like the best books, will leave no one who risks its pages indifferent.

Please read on for an excellent interview with the author, conducted by Ahmed Abdalla.

Dan Wells,
Publisher

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A Biblioasis Interview with Vijay Khurana

Could you tell me a little about yourself and how this novel came about?

I’m a fiction writer and translator from Germany. I was born in Australia but I’ve lived in quite a few different places. I’ve lived in the US, the UK, and Cambodia for about a year. But I’ve lived on and off for the last decade in Berlin.

This book’s genesis really came about when I was doing an MFA at the University of East Anglia. I noticed I was writing a lot of short stories about male friendships, and about the ways in which sexuality influences and shapes friendships among heterosexual young men and some of those stories included an aspect of violence, of young men dehumanizing those around them in various ways. I went from those short stories to looking at a larger piece of writing.

Photo: Vijay Khurana in the wilderness. Credit: Madeleine Watts.

I know it was partly influenced by true events. Could you speak about the relationship between fact and fiction and what made you want to write about this?

There was an incident I read about in North America where two young men did a similar thing to what I was thinking about. I was influenced by that, but also by those short stories that I had been writing. The book takes a few cues and images from real events. There’s a road trip aspect that is similar to some of the things I was reading about. There’s an image in the novel of Teddy and Adam using a digital camera and being obsessed with this idea of filming and experiencing the world through that medium of recorded video. That’s another thing that came from real events. Then the second part of the book is wholly fictional.

Why did you decide to call it The Passenger Seat?

It felt very much from early on that The Passenger Seat was the perfect title for this book. If you’re in the passenger seat, you’re not in control, and you’re also potentially not responsible for what happens in that vehicle. There’s this whole idea of passivity and abdication of responsibility that runs through the novel. There’s this question between Teddy and Adam of which one of them is actually in control and which one of them is responsible for the things they end up doing. One of the things I’m really interested in is to get at the idea that the male friendship itself is part of some of the problems with violence and dehumanizing among young men. But I think by the end of the novel, I’d like the reader to ask this question about why it’s called The Passenger Seat and what questions are there then about who was active and who was along for the ride. Who was culpable? And in what ways was everyone basically culpable?

There is a sharp shift in the narrative from the Teddy and Adam story to the Ron and Freeman one, where the former story ends unexpectedly. Both sections seem to be about men who don’t stop their friend from committing violence because of that idea of passivity and control. But one section is definitely much more violent than the other. How do you see these two sections as related and what are you trying to say by having them together in the novel?

In some ways I’m interested in asking what is the difference between the men that society tends to look at as being “essentially good” despite their faults and other men that society might deem to be so beyond understanding and so monstrous that they really have nothing to teach us. That we, the rest of society, are so unlike them that there is no redeeming them and there’s no sense that they might be able to teach us something about ourselves. The second part of the novel is exactly that, and it does have an element of Ron reflecting on a specific moment where his friend was committing domestic violence. He is pretty sure it’s happening, but he has sort of enough plausible deniability about the situation that he decided to not do anything about it. He asks himself about that and yet doesn’t really come to any conclusions about his own responsibility. I’m definitely comparing those two friendships and the ways in which the performance of masculinity itself can lead men, through the guise of friendship, to do things that are not productive, helpful or good.

Photo: Interior image from The Passenger Seat.

What do you think it means to perform masculinity and what does it reveal about the men in the novel? I’m thinking about all the references to audience and being watched. They seem to think a lot about how they will be perceived and what kind of man they want to be thought of.

In terms of trying to figure out what kind of man you are expected to be and what kind of man you might want to be when you are very young, it makes friendships you have with other young men really important. I think especially young men can only see themselves mediated through someone else. They can see themselves mediated through a friend, an enemy, through someone who’s envious of them, disgusted at them, through someone who, in a public space, perceives them as being disrespectful or threatening or going against some sort of social etiquette. This is something that happens a lot in various ways that may not be as stark as the ways in which I depict these characters, but performing in order to get a reflected sense of oneself is really common.

It’s also not just about performing masculinity as a way of understanding what kind of man you are, but it’s also about performing masculinity in terms of playing a role that you could see as absolving you from the consequences of your actions. If you’re just playing a role or playing a game or seeing yourself as a story, then it becomes easier to go through life without a sense that your actions have real consequences for other people. Hence there’s a lot of focus not just on that video camera, but also there’s a specific video game that these two young men play, which I’m not using to say that video games make young men violent, but it’s more that idea of mediation, of playing a role, of going through life as an avatar rather than as yourself.

And then also, the windshield itself, which I think has an interesting parallel with cinema. If you’re on a road trip, you’re looking through that windshield and everything you experience is mediated by the glass. You’re in the world, but you’re not really in the world, and that’s something else I was getting at.

That also makes me think of Adam’s refrain of “fun and games” whenever they’re together. It’s like all their actions are supposed to be taken as playful. So it further blurs reality and gameplay. They’re both in the world and not seriously in it.

And I think it’s also for him almost a defense mechanism at times. The way he feels he can get through life is to treat things as if they don’t really matter, especially at the beginning. It seems like something that he says to himself in order to help him cope with things not necessarily being in his control or to pretend that he’s okay with something that he finds challenging. But yes, game playing is absolutely a huge part of it. There’s even a line when they first start using the rifle, a comparison to how really young children will share their toys with pride and reluctance. That idea of playing games, using toys, is a big part of going through life when you are scrambling to work out what life is and who you are in it.

While Teddy and Adam are friends, a lot of their thoughts about each other seem to be comparing what the other has or lacks. Could you talk about the competitive aspect in male friendships and how this plays out in the novel?

There’s always this very fine line between play and competition. When something is played, it does not actually have an aim or a goal or an ambition. But once it becomes a game, then it might have rules, a goal, a winner, a loser. I think that competition is obviously a big part of how many young men have a sense of themselves, as a winner or a loser or someone who is good at something or not. It’s probably to some extent just human nature to contend with others, to want to best somebody at something, even something completely pointless. In the novel there’s a moment where they are perched on these fence posts beside a car park and they mess around for a while but then suddenly they are actually playing a game with a winner and a loser. They’re trying to hop from one to the other as many times as they can without falling. Or later they end up playing a game where they’re kicking an orange peel and trying to kick it as far as they can and further than the other one. Games for them are something they take refuge in as a language almost, as a way of communicating with each other, because they maybe lack more sophisticated ways of doing that. And of course they also take refuge in the idea of games once they have done something that is life-changingly tragic.

Learn more about Vijay Khurana and The Passenger Seat in another new interview with Open Book!

Violence seems to be a threshold that Teddy and Adam are building up to pass. We see them in different situations getting a bit more violent either with their words or their actions, trying to one up each other. But once Teddy does shoot those two people, a scene that is very drawn out in the novel, their relationship changes and also the rest of the violence happens off the page. How does that level of violence change them and their friendship?

One thing I was really conscious of with this novel is that I didn’t want to just “get inside the head” of someone who would do something like that because that would be to some extent a fool’s errand. But I think that I was trying to work out not just what these two characters would do after doing something extremely violent like that, but also what their relationship and the change in their relationship might say about other men or all men in general and how they would attempt to keep moving through space having done something like that.

They react in different ways. Teddy becomes increasingly passive and submissive almost as a way of dealing with what he’s done. Adam, for different reasons, tries to become much more dominant, while also at various times trying to treat what they did as a game, as something that didn’t really matter, and he has his own background and ideas that help him towards that position. After it happens, their relationship changes in a few ways. But for me, they’re both just hurtling towards the end of that section, which, if the reader doesn’t know it at the time, is essentially their deaths.

And why did you decide not to show the rest of their violent acts?

There are a couple of reasons. I was a journalist for a while and I worked in radio and have always been quite interested in the way that the media turns tragedy like this into its own kind of consumable narrative. So one reason is that I wanted to write some part of the novel from the point of view of a voracious media cycle, which is in the book as we get towards the end of the first section.

Another thing is that it was very difficult to write all these things and to write these characters who are in many ways just really terrible people doing really terrible things. I didn’t want to make the violence seem like page-turning excitement. In order to avoid that, and in order to concentrate on the ideas behind what was happening rather than the violence itself, having had a scene which I think had to be there, I didn’t want to then give more space on the page to violence that might just feel like it was for the sake of a narrative or anything like that.

What were you looking to say about how the media talks about male violence?

One of my main thoughts when I first started writing this is just how often this kind of thing happens. It just happens over and over and over again, and what I mean by “it” is young men, not always together, but often together with other young men, doing violent things. There is this idea that the media is fundamentally interested in certain things. The main one being trying to appeal to a lot of consumers of that medium, so it’s definitely going to create a narrative that suits its own aims and that combined with the fact that young men so often commit violent acts, I think that leads to quite an unnuanced depiction of some of these events. It’s often kind of lazy and emotionally manipulative in a way that is maybe unproductive for asking the really important questions, which is why does this keep happening? Why do we not seem to be learning anything from these repeated things happening?

I really enjoyed the rhythm of the book and how each sentence kind of flows nicely into the next as well as how the characters speak to each other and the language within their friendship. Could you speak about your style and how you decided to shape the novel?

Some of it is the sort of slightly taciturn rhythms of communications between male teenagers. Some of it is the rhythm of the road trip. There are rhythms to being in a car and driving down a highway or a road. So some of that I wanted to get into the prose. I like books where each sentence has its own kind of drama or tension. Or it might have a pleasing aspect if there’s some kind of alliteration in there or it might have a disharmonious or dissonant kind of quality as well. And the pace of a sentence also matters. The sounds of that sentence can reflect somebody’s state of mind or an action or the passing of time and how people’s experience of the passing of time is happening. There’s a whole lot of stuff that I really enjoy doing with a sentence.

Road trips in stories are usually associated with a desire to find something or change yourself, often a coming-of-age story. And this novel is kind of a coming-of-age story, just in a much darker sense. Do you have any thoughts about that?

I’m really interested in the paradoxes of the road trip. It tends to be about coming of age and becoming an adult to some extent. But at the same time, the road trip is so much about not actually engaging seriously and responsibly with the world around you, which we could understand to be a big part of adulthood. The very fact of just passing through different towns without properly stopping or engaging with them is like an abdication of adulthood.

I knew early on that I didn’t want their road trip to have a serious or specific goal. It sort of has these different goals but neither Teddy nor Adam properly commits to any of them. Adam has this idea that he might just leave home and never go back. He has this idea of maybe going and getting a job in a mine and completely leaving his old life behind. But you can tell that it’s still a childhood fantasy rather than actual ambition. There’s also that idea of running to something versus running from something and a lot of road trip narratives are a combination of both.

A road trip is about being completely free and wide open spaces, but it’s also about the utter claustrophobia of being stuck in a really small space often with someone else. It’s also about forcing a relationship to change under conditions of tiredness, or boredom, or whatever else. I also thought back to the road trips I took when I was around Teddy and Adam’s age. I thought a lot about the ways in which my friendships and relationships were impacted by those trips and some of the feelings of just what it was like to be in a vehicle. And I knew that the road trip was definitely what I wanted to use to explore those ideas about masculinity and violence.

We usually learn to be adults by watching our parents, but, for different reasons, both Teddy and Adam reject their fathers as figures to aspire to. Where do you think they get their ideas of masculinity and how does this affect them?

One of things I really wanted to avoid doing was telling a kind of trauma narrative where somebody does something terrible to somebody else and then you learn that they had had something terrible done to them. I didn’t want to tell a story where two young men don’t have father figures and therefore their manhood becomes twisted in such a way that it becomes polluted. But at the same time, they do both essentially turn away from their fathers. I wanted to get beyond the father figure, which is maybe the most obvious masculine example. I was more interested in getting at the many other examples that men see and emulate, including the male friend. I didn’t want to weigh things too heavily towards the idea of the father-son dynamic because that would have weighted the book in a very specific way. In fact, the idea of fatherhood is most present in the second section, when we find out that Ron has this fantasy that he could have been a stepfather if things had turned out differently, whereas in fact Ron never actually had the courage to commit to that role when he had the chance. It was kind of a game for him, too.

What are you hoping people take away from reading this novel?

I think I want them to read it again. I want them to feel like there might be undercurrents and links and things that a reader might not necessarily pick up on first read. Little ties between different characters, recurring images and things like that. And also that the experience of reading the prose will be a pleasurable one. I’m of two minds about saying “pleasurable” because the book is really not necessarily a pleasurable book. It’s about some quite disturbing stuff. But having said that, the idea of reading sentences and finding them to be in some way aesthetically interesting, is always part of reading, at least for me.

Also, I hope I am asking some interesting and difficult questions that the reader will be left saddled with after they’ve finished this book. I didn’t want to write a book where the problems that the book raises get resolved by the end. I wanted to write a book where people have to walk away holding all of that stuff in their head, holding those questions, juxtapositions and paradoxes. I hope readers might walk away asking some questions about the connections between friendship and violence and how men perform their masculinity in ways that often see them avoiding responsibility.

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In good publicity news:

Media Hits: THE PASSENGER SEAT, DARK LIKE UNDER, ON BOOK BANNING, and more!

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IN THE NEWS!

THE PASSENGER SEAT

The Passenger Seat by Vijay Khurana was reviewed in the New York Times! The review was published online on March 2, and can be read here.

Reviewer Teddy Wayne calls it,

“Unsettling and powerful . . . If the inciting episode reads as an overdetermined proof of male one-upmanship, Khurana’s execution of it is nevertheless gripping.”

Vijay Khurana was also interviewed on the ABA’s Indies Introduce podcast interview series, which spotlights debut authors. The episode was posted on Mar 4, and can be listened to here.

Grab The Passenger Seat here!

ON BOOK BANNING

On Book Banning by Ira Wells was excerpted in The Walrus on March 2, which can be read here.

On Book Banning was also reviewed in the Winnipeg Free Press. The review was posted on March 1, and can be read here.

Matt Henderson writes,

“A concise, exquisite, and tidy inquiry into our common desire to protect against the other. Wells serves up a masterful and provocative treatise about the nature of free speech and the power of the written word.”

Get On Book Banning here!

DARK LIKE UNDER

Dark Like Under by Alice Chadwick was reviewed in the Observer on March 2. The review is available to read online here.

Miriam Balanescu writes,

“Chadwick’s cast of children, on the precipice of adulthood, are caught in the crosshairs of adult politics . . . In the refraction of their various viewpoints, Chadwick is adept at finding the lesser tragedies bursting at the seams, amounting to a clever and compassionate debut.”

Preorder Dark Like Under here!

HEAVEN AND HELL

Jón Kalman Stefánsson, author of Heaven and Hell, was interviewed on the Across the Pond podcast about the book. The episode was posted on March 4, and you can listen to it in full here.

Grab Heaven and Hell here!

The Bibliophile: The publisher and the diving bell

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Photo: Author Mark Anthony Jarman poses at a flea market in Firenze, Italy, with a diving helmet similar to the one on the cover of his book Burn Man. Courtesy of Mark.

Normally, January and February are slower months in a publisher’s schedule, allowing more time for manuscript reading, planning, and at least snatches of the daydreaming upon which our industry—or at least this press—depends. This has not been the case this year. This has been the busiest first couple of months of a calendar year I can remember. Indeed, I sometimes have trouble remembering what month we’re in; this past Tuesday I wrote down the date as November 25th and didn’t catch it for several hours: November felt right to me. That it is already the last day of February leaves me fearful of drowning, as I know what the coming weeks and months bring.

I start each week writing down on a fresh gathering of pages in my Midori notebook everything that’s on my plate, whether it be editorial, publicity, administration, correspondence, or something tied with the bookstore, a list that often runs over 2-3 pages and which I’ll be lucky to get through a quarter of by the time Friday rolls around. As if Friday marks the end of anything. Of late, the list is longer the following Monday than it had been the previous. There are emails that have been sitting for weeks, that I dutifully re-enter so as not to lose sight of; manuscripts that accumulate in daunting digital piles, to be read and edited both; contracts that need negotiating; publicity and marketing lists that need doing; copy that needs approval; pitches that need to be made; and this barely scrapes the surface of it all. Despite these efforts things slide out of sight and mind, buried pages deep in my inbox, until they resurface in a burst of panic when I’m trying to go to bed. We do our best; we do a lot; often, it doesn’t seem good enough.

There’s been a lot of talk recently across various magazines and Substacks about the crisis of independent publishing, perhaps the most relevant being the series of posts about the demise of New Star over at Ken Whyte’s excellent SHuSH Substack. But what no one seems to want to acknowledge is how much work publishing has always been, and that it has become increasingly more so. Canadian publishers have seen their market access decimated by decisions not of their own making, which has made them more reliant on funding that has, increasingly, become via inflation or cutbacks or changes in funding priorities inadequate to the task at hand. As a group, I’ve never known a harder-working bunch than those who keep Canadian independent publishing afloat. Every book we produce and promote strikes me increasingly as a minor miracle.

Photo: Setting up at Osteria Marco restaurant at Winter Institute, with early ARCs of The Sorrow of Angels by Jón Kalman Stefánsson. Courtesy of Emily Bossé.

I’m lucky to have such great staff, who’ve stepped up to cover some of the obligations normally on my plate. Dominique and Emily have just returned from Denver, where they attended the American Bookseller Association’s Winter Institute, pitching our books to independent booksellers for days. It’s one of my favourite events of the calendar year, filled with many of my favourite people, and one of the biggest investments we make in our books each year in the United States. It’s worth every penny, and every bit of sleep deprivation. The week after next Vanessa will be taking my usual place at the London Book Fair to meet with agents and publishers and translators and the occasional author: it coincides with the London launch of Alice Chadwick’s Dark Like Under, which Vanessa signed on for June publication in North America, which makes me even more pleased that she’s able to go in my stead, though I am saddened by the fact that it means I will miss meeting with my international cast of regulars. Ashley’s been bailing me out preparing reports for an Ontario Arts Council grant due next week, corralling me into making awards submission decisions, and aiding Vanessa with a monster index for Mark Bourrie’s Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre, among many other tasks that few may notice but without which nothing here would work as well as it does.

Photo: Newly-arrived ARCs of Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre by Mark Bourrie.

David and Nora have been busy mailing off review copies and direct orders, and Ahmed’s been busy managing all of the publicity for the launch of Ira Wells’s On Book Banning, which has seen exceptional first-week coverage, including interviews on Tara Henley’s Substack, Paul Wells’s Podcast, as well as other coverage at Quill & Quire, the Miramichi Reader, a sold out TPL launch, and much more. All while he lays the ground for the launch of one of our most important novels of the season next week.

Below, please find a short excerpt from the opening pages of Ira Wells’s On Book Banning, which among many other things offers an attempt to “sharpen” the arguments about why books matter. It is, to my mind, another minor miracle of a book.

Dan Wells,
Publisher

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Photo: First page of the introduction in On Book Banning by Ira Wells. Designed by Ingrid Paulson.

Introduction: The New Censorship Consensus

In the spring of 2022, the principal of my children’s elementary school told a group of parents gathered to discuss a library audit that she wished she could get rid of “all the old books.” The bulk of the library’s holdings were, from her perspective, too Eurocentric, too male, too heteronormative. I understood these concerns, which were broadly shared among parents and teachers. Still, the prospect of liquidating several thousand library books struck me as obviously wrong—offensive not only to me personally, but also to the liberal democratic values that (however shakily) underpin our society.

I wanted to say something, but quickly checked myself: Was there not a strong chance that my opposition to removing these “harmful” books would be taken as closet racism? Or that my defense of “liberal values” in this context—a children’s library, with its tiny chairs and animal posters—would come off as patently absurd? I briefly imagined how foolish I might appear—holding forth on democratic ideals like some sad imitation of Gregory Peck or Henry Fonda, everyone around me curling their toes with embarrassment.

Then the moment passed, the meeting broke up, and I was left chewing on my questions: What was so special about a bunch of old books? Were they, in fact, worth defending? Or was my fondness for these antiquated objects a product of my own nostalgia or upbringing—a sign that it was me who was antiquated?

It’s true that I grew up in a bookish household, although I was not a bookish child. There were years of sports, video games, and adolescent hijinks of a tame, middle-class variety, years in which I had no career aspirations beyond making the NHL. Eventually, I found myself yearning for a more literary life, which led to the study of English. In graduate school I crossed paths with extraordinary readers—including a roommate who once read a novel while tying his shoes: He laced up one shoe, noticed a book that interested him, read it cover to cover, then laced up the other shoe and went about his day.

I read slowly by comparison, but voraciously. My job now involves teaching novels and short stories to enthusiastic university students, many of whom are budding bibliophiles; at home, I’ve read aloud to my own children almost every night for more than a decade and will keep doing so until the audience dries up. Many of my friendships were initiated or solidified over the giving or receiving of books, and I have now accumulated more than I might reasonably read in my lifetime. Somewhere along the way, I came to think of these objects as self-evidently valuable. I had lost (if I ever really had) the arguments to explain why books matter, and why the banning and destruction of literature is so odious and socially corrosive.

It’s time to revive and sharpen those arguments. Book censorship is on the rise. We’ve all seen the news stories—the frequent headlines about book banning in schools or public libraries, about the takeover of school boards, about novels that are no longer teachable on university campuses, publishers pulling or issuing bowdlerized editions of suddenly controversial classics, authors who face cancellation. Not all these phenomena constitute “banning” per se, but they all fall under what we might call the new “censorship consensus,” in which books are called upon to justify their existence through demonstrations of their moral value.

Many people who consider themselves book lovers seem comfortable with the new censorship consensus. Indeed, they no longer need an external authority to tell them which books ought to go. In the summer of 2024, after Andrea Robin Skinner, one of Alice Munro’s daughters, came forward with the story of her harrowing sexual assault at the hands of Munro’s husband (and Munro’s complicity over years in covering up the abuse), readers took to X to declare that Munro had been expunged from their shelves. “I just can’t . . . ,” one user posted, above a photo of a garbage can filled with Munro’s Nobel Prize–winning books. We’ve long struggled with questions about how to frame the art of people who do things we abhor, but it was the lack of struggle that seemed notable in this case—at least among those who had decided that Munro’s work was now trash.

Books have always been challenged, but the current eruption of censorship feels like something new. “Book Bans Continue to Surge in Public Schools,” went an April 2024 New York Times headline, which found that rates of book banning were doubling year over year.* According to PEN America, thousands of book removals occurred in 2023, in forty-two states, both Democratic and Republican. PEN has now identified more than ten thousand instances of books being removed from U.S. schools but is quick to clarify that the true number is likely much higher: One well-known study conducted by the American Library Association estimated that between 82% and 97% of all library challenges go unreported.1 Much of this book banning appears to be fueled by outright bigotry: “Overwhelmingly, book banners continue to target stories by and about people of color and LGBTQ+ individuals,” PEN notes. “30% of the unique titles banned are books about race, racism, or feature characters of color. Meanwhile, 26% of unique titles banned have LGBTQ+ characters or themes.”2

Photo: For folks in the Windsor area, join us at Biblioasis Bookshop for the On Book Banning launch next Thursday!

Book bans are as old as the book itself. In my country, state-sponsored book censorship began with the passage of the Customs Act in the first session of the Canadian Parliament in 1867. That Act prohibited the importation of “books and drawings of an immoral or indecent character”; the criminal code further forbade the exhibition of any “disgusting object.”3 The United States outlawed using the Postal Service for “obscene, lewd, and lascivious” material—prohibitions backed by measures including confiscation, customs seizure, civil and criminal prosecution, and police arrests.4

Where book banning once largely involved the legal and disciplinary apparatus of the state, the new censorship consensus works through both state actors and a constellation of special interest groups operating inside and outside of institutions. Their target is libraries: public libraries, in which all taxpayers have a stake, and especially school libraries, which can be uniquely vulnerable due to chronic funding shortages and lack of full-time librarians able to cultivate their collections over time.

Libraries are natural quarry for anti-government organizations, including Moms for Liberty and No Left Turn in Education. Legal challenges against books, of the sort that once banned Ulysses and Lady Chatterley’s Lover from American shelves, are costly and hindered by decades of First Amendment jurisprudence that steadily broadened the sphere of expressive freedom. Libraries, by contrast, are soft targets. Any citizen can mount a challenge. The instructions for doing so are often posted on the library website. Today’s lawmakers are still more preoccupied with the dangers of online speech than with book bans (although that is rapidly changing in some quarters).

We should be clear on the stakes. When parental rights organizations attack libraries, they are attacking one of the last public institutions committed to intellectual freedom. While it’s true that more books are now available online, we court disaster by assuming that the internet—which is volatile and ephemeral and frequently weaponized against users across the globe—has replaced libraries as key intellectual infrastructure for liberal democracies.

Battles over book banning are especially contentious in school libraries, for obvious reasons. We compel children to attend school, and kids are more impressionable, so materials must be “age appropriate”—an inherently debatable category. Those who would cleanse the school library frame their efforts as an appeal to save children from harm.

Photo: A display of frequently banned books, including Maus by Art Spiegelman, and The Bluest Eye and Beloved by Toni Morrison, at Biblioasis Bookshop.

Beneath the surface of these disputes lies a deeper conflict over our national and communal history. One reason why book banners so frequently attack historical fictions—including Maus, Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel about his father’s experience as a Holocaust survivor; Beloved and The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison’s haunting novels of American racial trauma, and countless other texts at the intersection of race and history—is that the banners are fighting for control of our collective past. At the same time, in seeking control over the narratives that children will carry into adulthood, the banners are fighting for their vision of the future. Attacks on school libraries are, among much else, future-oriented attacks on liberal democracy and its vital institutions.

*

*Similar trends have been playing out in Canada. According to a report from the organization Freedom to Read called “A Rising Tide of Censorship,” Canadian libraries reported 118 “intellectual freedom challenges” in 2022–23, which represented a 50% increase from the previous year, which had itself seen a 50% increase from the year before that. These numbers, the report warned, “likely represent a very small portion of actual censorship efforts in Canadian libraries.”

***

In good publicity news:

  • Ira Wells, author of On Book Banning, was featured in a number of outlets for Freedom to Read Week:
  • Baldwin, Styron, and Me by Mélikah Abdelmoumen (trans. Catherine Khordoc) was reviewed in That Shakespearean Rag: “A valuable examination of certain points of dissension or disagreement ongoing in our culture.”
  • The Passenger Seat by Vijay Khurana was excerpted in LitHub, and reviewed in Books + Publishing: “An unusual and deftly written literary thriller.”
  • Dark Like Under by Alice Chadwick was reviewed in the Daily Mail: “An unpretentiously elegiac novel, it hymns nature’s solace and the power of human connection with memorable grace”; the Guardian: “[An] ambitious and affecting debut . . . Dark Like Under is impressively subtle, sensual and sympathetic.”; and in the TLS: “Gripping . . . [a] mature, glorious book.”

***

1

Alexandra Alter, “Book Bans Continue to Surge in Public Schools,” The New York Times, April 16, 2024 https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/16/books/book-bans-public-schools.html.

2

Kasey Meehan and Jonathan Friedman, “Banned in the USA: State Laws Supercharge Book Suppression in Schools,” PEN America, April 20, 2023.

3

Brenda Cossman, “Censor, Resist, Repeat: A History of Censorship of Gay and Lesbian Sexual Representation in Canada,” Duke Journal of Gender, Law & Policy 21.1 (2013).

4

See Rosen v. United States (1896), qtd. in Jennifer Elaine Steele, “A History of Censorship in the United States,” Journal of Intellectual Freedom and Privacy 5.1 (2020): https://journals.ala.org/index.php/jifp/article/view/7208 /10293.

The Bibliophile: “I Cannot Praise a Fugitive and Cloister’d Virtue”

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***

“I cannot praise a fugitive and cloister’d virtue, unexercis’d & unbreath’d, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race.”
—John Milton, Areopagitica

Over the past few weeks I’ve been on my phone reading the papers and various magazines and Substacks so much that my usage is up more than 177%. It’s difficult knowing how to act or be when faced with such a deluge of threats, which is probably the point of it all in the first place. In Windsor, 25% tariffs will quickly devastate both the wider community and my family, many of whom work in the auto industry; and with approximately 70% of the press’s distributed sales coming via the United States this year, the threat of tariffs leave us vulnerable. And these seem increasingly like lesser matters when compared to an American president who seems either incompetent, in the pocket of foreign or oligarchic interests, evil, or some combination of all three.

But, hey, at least we won the hockey game.

I have believed all my life in the power of books, if only because they have had so much power over me. Whether it be the work of a writer like Jón Kalman Stefánsson, who will remind me, almost as an aside, that “The ocean is cold blue and never still, a gigantic creature that breathes, most often tolerates us, but sometimes not, and then we drown; the history of humankind is not terribly complicated,” or that of a Jeannie Marshall or Mark Kingwell or Caroline Adderson, all of these and so many others (yes, including many we’ve not (yet) published) have taught me, repeatedly, to try to put aside my hubris and sense of certainty and to see the world anew. Each has, in recent years, in different ways, snapped the world for me into a slightly different focus. What more can we ask of our writers and their books? I have believed books can change the world, because they have so often changed mine. I’ve tried to keep that at the forefront in my work as a publisher, whether it be of fiction or, increasingly, of nonfiction. It was the animating impulse during the early days of the pandemic, and after the murder of George Floyd, for starting our Field Note pamphlet series. And it’s at the root of so much of the nonfiction we are publishing this year, from Mark Bourrie’s Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre through to Marcello Di Cintio’s Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers, Don Gillmor’s On Oil, and Elaine Dewar’s Growing up Oblivious in Mississippi North. It’s our hope that these books will both inform and move the needle towards justice: however vague a concept this may be, most of us can at least agree on its general direction.

Photo: On Book Banning by Ira Wells. Cover designed by Ingrid Paulson.

In recent months, I have, at least at my worst moments, started doubting the ability of books to change much of anything. I remain convinced that books still have much to impart—as I said in my note last week, Mark Kingwell’s argument about conviction addiction explains for me better than anything I’ve read in newspapers and magazines and so very many Substacks what has led us to this particular historic moment—but I am deeply concerned that their reach, their public lives, have become dangerously shortened and constrained and I am not at all certain how to combat that. The reasons for this shortening are legion: disintermediation and its aftereffects, including political polarization, the dominance of foreign multinationals within the book industry itself, which greatly affects what readers have access to, and generalized exhaustion. It is perhaps also tied to the fact that the cold blue seems less and less tolerant, that for a variety of reasons one feels on the verge of drowning. It’s not, as with most things, that complicated.

Though I’ve also been struggling with a contradiction of sorts. Why is it, at the time that books have never seemed less central to people’s lives that the efforts to ban them have become increasingly common? On the left and on the right, in Canada and the US, book banners (however they may deny such a label) have made books and libraries, school and public, a central battleground to contest a range of social and political issues: religious and parental freedom, LGBTQ rights, issues of representation and inclusion and identity, access to diverse political arguments, and much else besides. And book banners on both the left and the right use many of the very same arguments to justify their exclusion of certain kinds of literature. It is all part of what Ira Wells, in his new Field Note On Book Banning (publishing next week in Canada, and in June in the US and abroad) calls the new censorship consensus. In attempting to ban access of certain populations to certain books, both sides are trying, to paraphrase Orwell, to control both the past, present, and future through a rewriting of all three, and each are convinced that they are on the right side of history (see above: Mark Kingwell and conviction addiction), though both are contributing equally to the undermining of democracy and our ability to think for ourselves. As Ira shows, there is nothing new in this, and if we examine the history of censorship (and the historical arguments against it) we will see why we can’t let the banners and censors win. And in that, too, perhaps be reminded of the conviction that makes what we do as publishers and readers and supporters of bookish culture so important in the first place.

Below, please find an interview that Ahmed Abdalla, publicist at Biblioasis, conducted with Ira about On Book Banning: Or, How the New Censorship Consensus Trivializes Art and Undermines Democracy.

Dan Wells,
Publisher

***

A Biblioasis Interview with Ira Wells

Photo: Ira Wells, courtesy of the author.

Can you tell me a little bit about yourself for readers approaching your work for the first time?

I am a professor of literature at Victoria College in the University of Toronto, a father of two school-aged kids, and a devoted, dyed-in-the-wool reader. I’m a book person.

What prompted you to write On Book Banning?

There were two moments. First, as I write in the book, my children’s elementary school undertook an equity-based “library audit,” during which our principal “joked” that she wished she could get rid of “all the old books.” Clearly, she was not alone in this thinking: the next fall, Peel District School Board, which consists of more than two hundred schools, undertook an equity-based book-weeding process in which some schools appear to have purged all books written before 2008.

Second, an episode I do not write about in the book, involves a talk on free speech that was delivered at the University of Toronto in 2023. The talk went off without a hitch—there was nothing even remotely controversial about the content or delivery—but I was struck, after the fact, to discover that our excellent students are deeply skeptical about the value of expressive freedom. Many students today believe that governments and other authorities should censor those harmful views; they do not understand why people with the “wrong” views should ever have a microphone or platform. My sense is that most young people today have never grappled with the foundational arguments (by John Milton, J.S. Mill, Frederick Douglass, and others) for free speech—arguments I wanted to outline clearly and succinctly, alongside the shocking and brutal history of censorship, which is the historical rule, not the exception. Of course, I was aware of the massive surge in censorship playing out in Florida and other jurisdictions across the United States—which may seem like a totally separate phenomenon, but which I argue is actually just another manifestation of the impulse to censor.

You start this book from the point of view of a parent whose children’s school was implementing a book-weeding process and give your first hand experience with it and the equity toolkit. How did this experience as a parent influence your thoughts on censorship and the structure of the book?

Yes, I joined a committee of parents who used the Toronto District School Board Equity Toolkit as part of this somewhat mysterious audit. (I say somewhat mysterious because the purpose of this exercise was never entirely clear to those who were involved—perhaps it was meant to educate us, the parents.) As someone who loves imaginative literature, and children’s literature, I was struck by the extent to which the toolkit manages to eliminate the imaginative and magical qualities of children’s lit. You get the sense that administrators want children’s lit to consist of little manifestos for the causes approved by the administrators. It’s basically a view of literature as propaganda. It’s alarming that those who are in charge of teaching the next generation of children how to read and think about books are doing so in these terms. I suspect that many children will turn off of reading entirely, which is of course already happening—they’re saddled with addictive technology that can make it hard to focus on anything for more than fifteen seconds. Childhood today sucks, and we’re making it worse.

What do you think the rise in book bans from both conservatives and progressives is saying about how we view literature? I know you also mention that part of the reason book banning thrives is when books and reading are devalued. Could you elaborate on that and why you think reading is being devalued?

I think that both conservatives and progressives see the library, and especially the school library, as a microcosm of society. They think—or rather believe, because all of this is playing out at the level of belief, rather than rational thought—that they can reshape society by transforming the library. They think of library books as levers they can pull to exert some kind of change in our culture. It doesn’t work that way, of course—John Milton argued more than four hundred years ago that “bad” ideas are perfectly capable of spreading without books—but this kind of library censorship does amount to a kind of symbolic violence, a way of signalling who does or doesn’t belong, a way of projecting social violence onto a scapegoat. At the same time, censorship thrives when books, and especially imaginative literature, are devalued. That is to say, when we reduce books to one putative “message,” that is a step in the direction of censorship, because it becomes easier to ban the books that convey the wrong messages. Once we accept that books and other art forms are delivery mechanisms for good or bad political content—and combine that assumption with the idea that we’re in a state of political emergency, that we’re facing existential stakes our very lives are on the line—then it can feel morally imperative to liquidate the “bad” messages, the bad books. Again, all of this is predicated on the idea that literature is reducible to messages (another mistake made by the toolkits), which they aren’t. The best novels are endlessly fascinating precisely because they are internally conflicted. They contain multiple voices and multiple messages.

What do you make of the idea that those who want to ban books never seem to refer to their actions as banning books/censorship? How does that inform their thinking?

According to the Ontario School Library Association, censorship “is the removal, suppression, or restricted circulation of literary, artistic, or educational images, ideas, and/or information because they are morally or otherwise objectionable. While the selector seeks reasons to include material in the collection, the censor seeks reasons to exclude material from the group.” That seems pretty clear to me. Whether you’re pulling Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer, or William Golding’s Lord of the Flies—if you’re removing a book because it is “morally or otherwise objectionable,” that’s censorship, according to the OSLA. If you’re using an equity toolkit to “seek reasons to exclude material,” you’re practicing censorship. It’s all clear-cut. Of course, conservative and progressive book banners believe that censorship is something practiced by the other side. The conservatives believe that they are anti-pornography or anti-LGBTQ+ indoctrination; the progressives believe that they are anti-racist and anti-colonial. Both are convinced that they are right, and that their own righteousness legitimates, or even necessitates, their censorship. As I argue in On Book Banning, both groups are convinced they are saving children from harm. Instead, they are introducing new sources of harm.

In the book, you suggest we need to find a way to distinguish between purposefully offensive language and works that contain language that could offend but it makes sense historically or artistically that it is there. How should schools approach this?

I think it’s important to approach these questions with sensitivity, nuance, and an attention to historical context. I also believe that children, especially middle and high school students, are capable of understanding that social norms and language have changed over time. We do a disservice to students by whitewashing or sanitizing history. Students should be able to read Lawrence Hill. They should be able to read Toni Morrison. Teachers should be encouraged to teach these writers, not punished for doing so. Educators use the concept of “harm” in a very blunt way. It can refer to anything that might be legitimately traumatizing to something that might induce mild discomfort, if that. We shouldn’t treat students as fragile receptacles of information; instead, we should teach them that history, social norms, and language have evolved over time. Educators should be in the business of de-mythologizing, rather than re-mythologizing.

Censorship has never really gone away—it reflects a desire for social control, and each generation has to renew the fight for expressive freedom, which is the cornerstone of artistic expression and democracy.

You give a wide history of censorship in the book and it seems that arguments around censorship have hardly changed. Some people have always wanted to censor others because of language they deem offensive (with varying reasons as to why they find it offensive). What do you make of that? And did anything surprise you in your research?

Concepts like “obscenity,” “pornography,” and so on, are highly malleable. Less than a hundred years ago, James Joyce’s great novel Ulysses was banned as obscene; it’s hard to imagine anyone objecting to that book today. “Obscenity” is a living standard, which is to say that it shifts with the times. This cuts two ways. Yes, the zone of expressive freedom expanded in the postwar years, but there’s nothing permanent about those victories: censorship may be on the verge of a major comeback, especially with the revival of Comstock laws in the US. And of course, expressive freedom has never applied equally to all people. Some readers may be surprised to learn about the brutal persecution of LGBTQ+ publishers and booksellers which continued into the 1980s and 1990s. Censorship has never really gone away—it reflects a desire for social control, and each generation has to renew the fight for expressive freedom, which is the cornerstone of artistic expression and democracy.

Where do you think censorship will go from here? Do you think attitudes about book banning and the new censorship consensus will change? Either for better or for worse?

I wish I could say I thought things will get better. I do think that people are getting fed up with being told what they or their children are allowed to read. That said, the forces of censorship are ascendent in the US. The degree to which Trump will implement Project 2025 is an open question, but that document encourages the prosecution of teachers and librarians for dissemination of “pornography” as they define it. As the fall of Roe reveals, our legal victories are always tenuous. It can all be undone. In all likelihood, Trump will appoint two more Supreme Court justices. Historically, censorship and abortion have been linked—and it’s all possible that legal censorship is now on the cusp of a generational revival. I hope that On Book Banning may provide a useful reminder of the counterarguments, as well as the stakes. We’re going to have our work cut out for us. In the meantime, let’s leave the kids alone to read what they will.

***

In good publicity news:

  • May Our Joy Endure by Kev Lambert (trans. Donald Winkler) was reviewed in the TLS: “This is a novel that makes readers take mordant notice of the world around them—but it is more than a mere succession of clever scores on self- aggrandizing elite progressivism.”
  • Heaven and Hell by Jón Kalman Stefánsson (trans. Philip Roughton) was reviewed on WOSU’s The Longest Chapter: “Some novels are so extraordinary, it’s hard to do them justice in a review. This is one of them.”
  • Roland Allen, author of The Notebook, was interviewed on The Art of Manliness podcast, about the history and power of the notebook.
  • The Full-Moon Whaling Chronicles by Jason Guriel was reviewed in New Verse Review: “Guriel’s story, at its core, is not about the individual characters but about how an imagined book extends its imaginative influence into an imagined future world.”

The Bibliophile: Books for Black History Month

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In celebration of Black History Month, we’re highlighting our books by Black writers, along with some additional reads. If you’re on the lookout to expand your knowledge in nonfiction, read stories that take you around the world from the Caribbean to Angola, or discover strikingly new poetry, then have a browse through the titles below and find something to add to your reading list—for this month, and beyond.

Ashley Van Elswyk,
Editorial Assistant

***

They Call Me George by Cecil Foster, cover designed by Michel Vrana, and On Property by Rinaldo Walcott, designed by Ingrid Paulson.

Nonfiction

They Call Me George: The Untold Story of Black Train Porters and the Birth of Modern Canada by Cecil Foster

Smartly dressed and smiling, Canada’s black train porters were a familiar sight to the average passenger—yet their minority status rendered them politically invisible, second-class in the social imagination that determined who was and who was not considered Canadian. Subjected to grueling shifts and unreasonable standards—a passenger missing his stop was a dismissible offense—the so-called Pullmen of the country’s rail lines were denied secure positions and prohibited from bringing their families to Canada, and it was their struggle against the racist Dominion that laid the groundwork for the multicultural nation we know today. Drawing on the experiences of these influential black Canadians, Cecil Foster’s They Call Me George demonstrates the power of individuals and minority groups in the fight for social justice and shows how a country can change for the better.

On Property by Rinaldo Walcott

That a man can lose his life for passing a fake $20 bill when we know our economies are flush with fake money says something damning about the way we’ve organized society. Yet the intensity of the calls to abolish the police after George Floyd’s death surprised almost everyone. What, exactly, does abolition mean? How did we get here? And what does property have to do with it? In On Property, Rinaldo Walcott explores the long shadow cast by slavery’s afterlife and shows how present-day abolitionists continue the work of their forebears in service of an imaginative, creative philosophy that ensures freedom and equality for all. Thoughtful, wide-ranging, compassionate, and profound, On Property makes an urgent plea for a new ethics of care.

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From left to right: Standing Heavy and Comrade Papa by GauZ’ (trans. Frank Wynne), with covers designed by Nathan Burton, and The Pages of the Sea by Anne Hawk, designed by Kate Sinclair.

Fiction

The Pages of the Sea by Anne Hawk

On a Caribbean island in the mid-1960s, a young girl copes with the heavy cost of migration.

When her mother emigrates to England to find work, Wheeler and her older sisters are left to live with their aunts and cousins. She spends most days with her cousin Donelle, knocking about their island community. They know they must address their elders properly and change their shoes after church. And during the long, quiet weeks of Lent, when the absent sound of the radio seems to follow them down the road, they look forward to kite season. But Donelle is just a child, too, and though her sisters look after her with varying levels of patience, Wheeler couldn’t feel more alone. Everyone tells her that soon her mother will send for her, but how much longer will it be? And as she does her best to navigate the tensions between her aunts, why does it feel like there’s no one looking out for her at all? A story of sisterhood, secrets, and the sacrifices of love, The Pages of the Sea is a tenderly lyrical portrait of innocence and an intensely moving evocation of what it’s like to be a child left behind.

Standing Heavy by GauZ’ (trans. Frank Wynne)

A funny, fast-paced, and poignant take on Franco-African history, as told through the eyes of three African security guards in Paris.

All over the city, they are watching: Black men paid to stand guard, invisible among the wealthy flâneurs and yet the only ones who truly see. From Les Grands Moulins to a Sephora on the Champs-Élysées, Ferdinand, Ossiri, and Kassoum find their way as undocumented workers amidst political infighting and the ever-changing landscape of immigration policy. Fast-paced and funny, poignant and sharply satirical, Standing Heavy is a searing deconstruction of colonial legacies and capitalist consumption and an unforgettable account of everything that passes under the security guards’ all-seeing eyes.

Comrade Papa by GauZ’ (trans. Frank Wynne)

Mourning the recent deaths of his parents, a young white man in nineteenth-century France joins a colonial expedition attempting to establish trading routes on the Ivory Coast and finds himself caught between factions who disagree on everything—except their shared loathing of the British. A century later, a young Black boy born in Amsterdam gives his account, complete with youthful malapropisms, of his own voyage to the Ivory Coast, and his upbringing by his father, Comrade Papa, who teaches him to always fight “the yolk of capitalism.” In exuberant, ingenious prose, GauZ’ superimposes their intertwined stories, looking across centuries and continents to reveal the long arc of African colonization.

All by by Ondjaki, trans. Stephen Henighan: Granma Nineteen and the Soviet’s Secret (designed by Kate Hargreaves), Good Morning Comrades, and Transparent City (designed by Zoe Norvell).

Good Morning Comrades by Ondjaki (trans. Stephen Henighan)

Luanda, Angola, 1990. Ndalu is a normal twelve-year old boy in an extraordinary time and place. Like his friends, he enjoys laughing at his teachers, avoiding homework and telling tall tales. But Ndalu’s teachers are Cuban, his homework assignments include writing essays on the role of the workers and peasants, and the tall tales he and his friends tell are about a criminal gang called Empty Crate which specializes in attacking schools. Ndalu is mystified by the family servant, Comrade Antonio, who thinks that Angola worked better when it was a colony of Portugal, and by his Aunt Dada, who lives in Portugal and doesn’t know what a ration card is. In a charming voice that is completely original, Good Morning Comrades tells the story of a group of friends who create a perfect childhood in a revolutionary socialist country fighting a bitter war. But the world is changing around these children, and like all childhood’s Ndalu’s cannot last. An internationally acclaimed novel, already published in half a dozen countries, Good Morning Comrades is an unforgettable work of fiction.

Granma Nineteen and the Soviet’s Secret by Ondjaki (trans. Stephen Henighan)

By the beaches of Luanda, the Soviets are building a grand mausoleum in honour of the Comrade President. Granmas are whispering: houses, they say, will be dexploded, and everyone will have to leave. With the help of his friends Charlita and Pi (whom everyone calls 3.14), and with assistance from Dr. Rafael KnockKnock, the Comrade Gas Jockey, the amorous Gudafterov, crazy Sea Foam, and a ghost, our young hero must decide exactly how much trouble he’s willing to face to keep his Granma safe in Bishop’s Beach. Energetic and colourful, impish and playful, Granma Nineteen and the Soviet’s Secret is a charming coming-of-age story.

Transparent City by Ondjaki (trans. Stephen Henighan)

In a crumbling apartment block in the Angolan city of Luanda, families work, laugh, scheme, and get by. In the middle of it all is the melancholic Odonato, nostalgic for the country of his youth and searching for his lost son. As his hope drains away and as the city outside his doors changes beyond all recognition, Odonato’s flesh becomes transparent and his body increasingly weightless. A captivating blend of magical realism, scathing political satire, tender comedy, and literary experimentation, Transparent City offers a gripping and joyful portrait of urban Africa quite unlike any before yet published in English, and places Ondjaki, indisputably, among the continent’s most accomplished writers.

***

The Day-Breakers by Michael Fraser and UNMET by stephanie roberts, both designed by Ingrid Paulson.

Poetry

UNMET by stephanie roberts

Leaning deliberately on the imagined while scrutinizing reality and hoping for the as-yet-unseen, UNMET explores frustration, justice, and thwarted rescue from a perspective that is Black-Latinx, Canadian, immigrant, and female. Drawing on a wide range of poetics, from Wallace Stevens to Diane Seuss, roberts’s musically-driven narrative surrealism confronts such timely issues as police brutality, respectability politics, intimate partner violence, and ecological crisis, and considers the might-have-been alongside the what-could-be, negotiating with the past without losing hope for the future.

The Day-Breakers by Michael Fraser

“It is not wise to waste the life / Against a stubborn will. / Yet would we die as some have done. / Beating a way for the rising sun wrote Arna Bontemps. In The Day-Breakers, poet Michael Fraser imagines the selflessness of Black soldiers who fought for the Union during the American Civil War, of whom hundreds were African-Canadian, fighting for the freedom of their brethren and the dawning of a new day. Brilliantly capturing the rhythms of their voices and the era in which they lived and fought, Fraser’s The Day-Breakers is an homage to their sacrifice and an unforgettable act of reclamation: the restoration of a language, and a powerful new perspective on Black history and experience.

***

1934 by Heidi LM Jacobs, designed by Michel Vrana; Baldwin, Styron, and Me by Mélikah Abdelmoumen (trans. Catherine Khordoc), designed by Ingrid Paulson; and The Utopian Generation by Pepetela (trans. David Brookshaw), designed by Zoe Norvell.

Other reads for Black History Month

1934: The Chatham Coloured All-Stars’ Barrier-Breaking Year by Heidi LM Jacobs

The pride of Chatham’s East End, the Coloured All-Stars broke the colour barrier in baseball more than a decade before Jackie Robinson did the same in the Major Leagues. Fielding a team of the best Black baseball players from across southwestern Ontario and Michigan, theirs is a story that could only have happened in this particular time and place: during the depths of the Great Depression, in a small industrial town a short distance from the American border, home to one of the most vibrant Black communities in Canada. Drawing heavily on scrapbooks, newspaper accounts, and oral histories from members of the team and their families, 1934: The Chatham Coloured All-Stars’ Barrier-Breaking Year shines a light on a largely overlooked chapter of Black baseball. But more than this, 1934 is the story of one group of men who fought for the respect that was too often denied them. Rich in detail, full of the sounds and textures of a time long past, 1934 introduces the All-Stars’ unforgettable players and captures their winning season, so that it almost feels like you’re sitting there in Stirling Park’s grandstands, cheering on the team from Chatham.

Baldwin, Styron, and Me by Mélikah Abdelmoumen (trans. Catherine Khordoc)

In 1961, James Baldwin spent several months in William Styron’s guest house. The two wrote during the day, then spent evenings confiding in each other and talking about race in America. During one of those conversations, Baldwin is said to have convinced his friend to write, in first person, the story of the 1831 slave rebellion led by Nat Turner. The Confessions of Nat Turner was published to critical acclaim, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1968, and also creating outrage in part of the African American community.

Decades later, the controversy around cultural appropriation, identity, and the rights and responsibilities of the writer still resonates. In Baldwin, Styron, and Me, Mélikah Abdelmoumen considers the writers’ surprising yet vital friendship from her standpoint as a racialized woman torn by the often unidimensional versions of her identity put forth by today’s politics and media. Considering questions of identity, race, equity, and the often contentious public debates about these topics, Abdelmoumen works to create a space where the answers are found by first learning how to listen—even in disagreement.

The Utopian Generation by Pepetela (trans. David Brookshaw)

Lisbon 1961. Aware that the secret police are watching them, four young Angolans discuss their plans for a utopian homeland free from Portuguese rule. When war breaks out, they flee to France and must decide whether they will return home to join the fight. Two remain in exile and two return to Angola to become guerilla fighters, barely escaping capture over the course of the brutal fourteen-year war. Reunited in the capital of Luanda, the old friends face independence with their confidence shaken and struggle to build a new society free of the corruption and violence of colonial rule.

Pepetela, a former revolutionary guerilla fighter and Angolan government minister, is the author of more than twenty novels that have won prizes in Africa, Europe, and South America. The Utopian Generation is widely considered in the Portuguese-speaking world an essential novel of African decolonization—and is now available in English translation for the first time.

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A Note on Question Authority by Mark Kingwell

Reader, if you’re like me, you’re probably trying to make sense, whether via the reading of entrails or essays, of the Trump and Musk train wreck and all it entails. Lest our American readers fear I’m throwing stones—and based on what we know of this substack, we have more American readers than Canadian ones—we are in the middle of something that may prove as worrisome here. (Please see last week’s Bibliophile for further insight.) Though we’ve been posting the Bibliophile on Substack for the better part of four months, I’ve only started personally using it in the last few days, devouring essays and insights by the likes of Anne Applebaum, Timothy Snyder, Paul Wells, David Moscrop, Nora Loreto, Paul Krugman, and many others: whatever else may separate these writers from one another, however they may differ on the root cause of what ails us, what they all seem to agree on is that we’re, on both sides of the 49th, in a whole mess of shit.

But despite the overwhelmingly varied offerings of Substack, not everything worth reading can be found here. When it comes to outlining the first causes for our current predicament, I still find that one of the best things I’ve read in recent memory comes via . . . a book. Mark Kingwell’s Question Authority: A Polemic About Trust in Five Meditations, which published in the US this past Tuesday, offers, for my money, one of the most intelligent analyses of what underpins our division and discord: we are, all of us, Kingwell argues, on the left and on the right, too often animated by an unshakeable belief in our personal righteousness and superiority, or what Kingwell calls doxaholism: an addiction to conviction.

Question Authority by Mark Kingwell (cover by Michel Vrana). Pictured here in Biblioasis Bookshop.

Evidence of this addiction is everywhere: around the family dinner table as much as in the partisan jibes of Trump or Trudeau or Poilievre: it makes real thought, conversation, and the trust essential to finding solutions to the real problems we face impossible. Our addiction to conviction undermines our faith in essential institutions and one another; it lubricates our descent into a range of defeating particularisms that make us even more vulnerable to manipulation. And there are those currently in power, or on the cusp of it, who’ve been very adept at this manipulation.

But this is not all that Kingwell offers: in addition to his diagnosis, he suggests an antidote, or at the very least the beginning of one, what he calls compassionate skepticism. Rather than retreating further into the particularisms of identity or grievance, Kingwell argues that we need to recentre ourselves with humility, into what he calls the ethical habit of “constructive disbelief governed by (an) awareness of our shared vulnerability.” If the past months have shown us anything, surely, it’s that we are all increasingly vulnerable, even if unequally so, to matters well outside our control: it’s in an acknowledgment of this truth that we’ll find strength.

Speaking of David Moscrop, he did an excellent interview with Mark for the Jacobin a couple of months ago about Mark’s new book: you can read it here. And find Mark’s book wherever it is you go for such things.

Dan Wells,
Publisher

***

In good publicity news:

Media Hits: ON BOOK BANNING, HEAVEN AND HELL, THE NOTEBOOK, and more!

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IN THE NEWS

ON BOOK BANNING

On Book Banning by Ira Wells has received a starred review in Quill & Quire! The review was posted online on February 12, and can be read here.

Reviewer Shazia Hafiz Ramji writes,

“What emerges in this deceptively slim and powerful volume is the voice of a devoted reader—On Book Banning is a testament to the life-altering power of books and ideas.”

Get On Book Banning here!

HEAVEN AND HELL

Heaven and Hell by Jón Kalman Stefánsson, translated by Philip Roughton, was reviewed in Under the Radar. The review, which gave the book an 8/10 rating, was posted online on February 9, and you can read it here.

“Despite its short 216 pages, Heaven and Hell and Stefánsson’s writing are imbued with weight, the weight of the sea, the weight of death, the weight of the moon, the weight of life’s consequences.”

Get Heaven and Hell here!

QUESTION AUTHORITY

Mark Kingwell, author of Question Authority, was interviewed by Jason Jeffries on the Bookin’ Podcast on February 8. You can check out the full episode here.

Get Question Authority here.

THE NOTEBOOK

Roland Allen, author of The Notebook, was interviewed for an episode of RadioWest, “Da Vinci knew it—Notebooks are *the* killer app for creative thinking,” on February 6. You can listen to the full interview here.

Roland Allen was also interviewed by Shawn Breathes Books on YouTube. The episode was posted on February 7, and you can watch it here.

Get The Notebook here!

MAY OUR JOY ENDURE

May Our Joy Endure by Kev Lambert, translated by Donald Winkler, was reviewed in The Observer on February 9. You can read the full review here.

Hephzibah Anderson writes,

“Winner of the Prix Médicis, Lambert’s sharp, provocative third novel embeds ever-timely themes—greed, hypocrisy and privilege—in a narrative that blends satire and lyricism, whimsy and voyeurism.”

Grab May Our Joy Endure here!

ON BROWSING

On Browsing by Jason Guriel was mentioned in an article from Current Affairs. The article, “How Bookstores Change the World,” was posted online on February 10, and can be read here.

Get On Browsing here!

The Bibliophile: Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre

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***

Late one evening in 2023 I received a Facebook message from a pair of high school friends I hadn’t seen since graduation more than thirty years before. They were heading down from Chatham on a day-long cruise on their Harleys and were going to stop by the bookstore, and they were wondering if I’d be around. I made sure I was, and when they arrived, we went to the Walkerville Brewery to catch up. It was a wonderful couple of hours: both these men, despite our losing contact for decades, were fellows I had wondered about from time to time, good men who, when boys, helped bring me through very rough patches. I even lived with one for a while when my own home life was fraught. When they left that aft, we promised to keep in touch, and later that eve came an invitation to a WhatsApp group called, simply, The Boys. My two friends were connected to half a dozen others from high school, and they used the group to keep in touch, pass jokes and memes, and arrange meeting times at the local bar. Most of it was typical middle-aged silly fun. I didn’t participate much, but I got a kick out of the back and forth, sharing a bit of these guys’ lives.

But there was one thing that surprised me. With increasing regularity, various members of this group shared political posts, almost all of them focusing on Prime Minister Trudeau’s latest gaffe or supposed idiocy; others attacked Liberal policies on the pandemic response, the housing crisis, and the carbon tax. More than once, I was tipped off to some new “scandal” via these messages before some variant of the same story turned up in the pages of the Globe and Mail or the National Post. The messages were deeply partisan, and most (but not all) couldn’t have withstood much more than a quick Google, let alone a proper fact-check. But that didn’t matter, because there was no fact-checking. Several times I almost said something, then thought better of it: I did not want to get into a political debate, nor did I feel it was my place. I stopped engaging much and just watched, growing more and more fascinated and concerned.

Occasionally, someone would share a political story that wasn’t Canadian at all. After the last Russian election, a member of the Boys shared an interview between a Russian-supported online news agency and a Russian propagandist explaining that Putin had actually earned his resounding election victory as a result of the genuine love and faith entrusted to him by Russian voters, and that Russia had a stronger democracy than either Canada or the US. One of the boys responded with something akin to “When Putin defeats Ukraine I hope his next stop is Canada, where he can help finally rid us of Trudeau.”

These were not boys, or men, I would have ever expected to be overtly politically engaged. Our parents tended to think about politics dutifully and when they needed to: it wasn’t a topic of casual interaction. And we certainly weren’t political as kids, more interested in the latest hardcore sound (my ears still ring from 1988’s Anthrax concert), or scoring a mickey of something to drink in the park on Friday night. As men, they all work hard, demanding jobs; they have children and wives and mortgages; they look forward to Friday night at Chuck’s, a few pops and more laughs—who couldn’t use more of both? But here they were, passing along slickly made political memes and videos with increasing regularity, whether they were of Conservative or Russian origin, bashing the government and championing the person that everyone said would be the next prime minister of Canada: Pierre Poilievre. For the Boys, this couldn’t happen fast enough.

*

Photo: Mark Bourrie reading from Crosses in the Sky at the Biblioasis Spring Launch at Biblioasis Bookshop, May 2024.

Towards the end of last May, Biblioasis hosted a book launch in Windsor. Mark Bourrie, whose Crosses in the Sky we had just published, was among the authors, and the next morning he and I met for coffee. Conversation naturally turned to his next project. Mark wanted to gather, revise, and expand some of the work he’d previously published on Great Lakes shipwrecks; he had an idea for a book on African exploration and another on a strange American assassin: they were all of interest.

Mark had also previously pitched me several times on a Field Note about the crisis facing Canadian media, and the conversation switched to this. I told him about my Boys WhatsApp group, and how I feared that the app was being used to misinform and radicalize the men and others like them, and that no one seemed to be talking about it. But Mark reminded me that he had explored exactly this in books like Kill the Messengers and The Killing Game. And then he told me how the Conservatives had developed massive alternative media networks to amplify their message, allowing them to directly reach voters outside of traditional channels: what I had come across was just one small part of it. Pierre Poilievre, Mark argued, had mastered the use of social media to reach people through YouTube, where he’d posted thousands of videos over his career, and through other social media channels: his videos and messages were full of misinformation that he was rarely called on, but that were viewed between tens and hundreds of thousands of times. Poilievre had had the benefit of almost everything Canada offered, and yet he’d long been the angriest man on the political stage, constantly flinging rage. Mark said that he was terrified about what a Poilievre government might mean for the country: he feared that it would result in the cementing of a Trump-like political culture in Canada, and that many of the most vulnerable, including a lot of people who, as has been the case with Trump, would likely vote for Poilievre would suffer enormously. Poilievre was a partisan who had not substantially altered his political views since, as a teenager, he’d been exposed to the work of Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman. He was Canada’s great divider, and we needed to show people, before the next election, what he really stood for.

It was probably around this point that I suggested that, rather than writing a Field Note on the decline of Canadian media, Mark write one on Pierre Poilievre. I imagined something short and quick and polemical. We tossed the idea around for a while before he left. A few days later I received a short email, saying that he’d do it. We set the publication date for late Spring, to give ourselves a few months before the anticipated Fall 2025 election.

Photo: Three books from our Field Notes series: On Class by Deborah Dundas, On Property by Rinaldo Walcott, and the latest addition, On Book Banning by Ira Wells.

But what started as a Field Note morphed quickly into a full-length political biography. First pages arrived in December: we were at the early stages of editorial when Chrystia Freeland resigned as finance minister and the crisis seemed ready to topple the government and trigger an early election. I consoled myself with the idea that, rather than having the first critical biography of Poilievre—Andrew Lawton’s, from last year, at times seems to border on hagiography—we’d have the first critical biography of the new prime minister of Canada. Mark worked out when he thought the election would be called and asked what we would need to do to get the book done before that became the case. I told him, and he said that he could do it.

So we worked incessantly for the better part of two months, through December and the Christmas break, January and into the first week of February, writing, editing, rewriting. It was an immense, almost impossible amount of work, with the resulting manuscript expanding to flesh out its portrait not only of Poilievre, but of the Canada that has brought him to the brink of power. The thesis of this book is that Poilievre has always been what he is: a rigid partisan and attack dog and divider, or in the parlance of David Brooks, who, in a pandemic-era New York Times column on the political forces shaping the modern world, helped to give this book its title: a ripper.

Here’s the working cover copy:

As Canada heads towards a pivotal election, bestselling author Mark Bourrie charts the rise of Opposition leader Pierre Poilievre and considers the history and potential cost of the politics of division.

Six weeks into the Covid pandemic, New York Times columnist David Brooks identified two types of Western politicians: rippers and weavers. Rippers, whether on the right or the left, see politics as war. They don’t care about the destruction that’s caused as they fight for power. Weavers are their opposite: people who try to fix things, who want to bring people together and try to build consensus. At the beginning of the pandemic, weavers seemed to be winning. Five years later, as Canada heads towards a pivotal election, that’s no longer the case. Across the border, a ripper is remaking the American government. And for the first time in its history, Canada has its own ripper poised to assume power.

Pierre Poilievre has enjoyed most of the advantages of the mainstream Canadian middle class. Yet he’s long been the angriest man on the political stage. In Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre, bestselling author Mark Bourrie, winner of the Charles Taylor Prize, charts Poilievre’s rise through the political system, from teenage volunteer to outspoken Opposition leader known for cutting soundbites and theatrics. Bourrie shows how we arrived at this divisive moment in our history, one in which rippers are poised to capitalize on conflict. He shows how Poilievre and this new style of politics have gained so much ground—and warns of what it will cost us if they succeed.

Books should start hitting shelves at the end of March.

*

Photo: A hand places a card into a ballot box. Credit: Element5 Digital, Pexels.com.

As we watch what Trump and Musk are doing in the US, and the license the last few weeks have given Poilievre and his team to make similar statements about cutting government bureaucracy; gender essentialism; deporting migrants; and the problems with Canadian foreign aid, it’s become even more apparent that this is a pivotal national election. And that’s before even considering the question of who is the better leader to guide the country through Trump’s proposed economic sanctions and provide a real alternative to what we see happening in the United States. If Poilievre is a ripper, who will be our much needed weaver? Only time will tell.

I’m immensely proud of the work that Mark has put in to make this book happen, and of the intelligence, care, and compassion that is central to it. I think Ripper offers a harsh but fair portrait of a talented politician built for opposition, but one who would make, especially at this particular moment in our history, a terrible first minister. But it’s an equally harsh portrait of who we as a people have increasingly become. Working on it has been a privilege that’s given me much pause; I hope it does the same for each and every one of you.

Dan Wells,
Publisher

***

20 Bookstores for 20 Years: The City & The City Books

The City & The City Books in Hamilton, Ontario, is an energetic and highly curated store that offers an impressive collection of independently published titles from across North America and beyond. Owners Tim and Janet cultivate a welcoming atmosphere where you’ll feel at home coming in out of the cold to hunt down a hidden gem and enjoy lively conversations about your latest read (Check out their book club that meets every other month at the Hearty Hooligan!) Read on for why Dan sees The City & The City Books as a home away from home, and why owner Tim loves Patrick McCabe’s Poguemahone.

Photo: The bright interior of The City & The City Books.

Dan on The City & The City Books: I first met Tim and Janet nearly two decades ago at a mutual friend’s book launch, the evening spent in ever-tightening circles talking about books and music. Almost immediately I felt a sense of kinship, so it wasn’t much of a surprise when I learned that they had left Big Smoke with the idea of opening an independent bookstore in Hamilton, Ontario. Nor is it a surprise that their shop is as good as it is, offering exactly the right mix of the anticipated and unexpected, with a particularly strong selection of the best independently published titles from across North America, and even further afield. Hamilton is a city blessed with a handful of excellent bookshops—including Epic and King W—but I have a hard time not thinking of Tim and Janet’s The City & The City as my home away from home, no matter how infrequently I get to darken its doorstep.

Photo: Owner Tim Hanna holds up his Biblioasis pick, Poguemahone.

Why Tim loved the “unhinged spirit” of Poguemahone: “A rollicking 600 pages of Patrick McCabe’s—greatest talker since Francis Brady in The Butcher Boy. A free verse epic to be sang, yelled and danced. A book that forces you up out of the reading chair; to stomp around and read to the rafters.”

***

In good publicity news:

  • Heaven and Hell by Jón Kalman Stefánsson (trans. Philip Roughton) was reviewed in the New York Times: “The good news is that Heaven and Hell is the first book in a trilogy, and there is more of this beguiling life to come.”
  • The Passenger Seat by Vijay Khurana was named an March 2025 Indie Next Pick, and reviewed in the Literary Review of Canada: “The Passenger Seat will both mesmerize and refuse comforting resolution.”
  • The Pages of the Sea by Anne Hawk was included in the CBC Books list “25 Canadian books to read during Black History Month 2025 and beyond.”
  • Hello, Horse by Richard Kelly Kemick was reviewed in the Literary Review of Canada: “Kemick’s unique voice shines . . . By using dark humour to sharpen the impact of otherwise grim scenarios, he traverses the extremes of slapstick comedy and gory tragedy.”
  • Near Distance by Hanna Stoltenberg (trans. Wendy H. Gabrielsen) was reviewed in the Winnipeg Free Press (“sparse, direct and discomforting prose”) and The Complete Review (“offers a strong character- and relationship-portrait”).

Media Hits: HEAVEN AND HELL, NEAR DISTANCE, THE PASSENGER SEAT, and more!

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IN THE MEDIA!

HEAVEN AND HELL

Heaven and Hell by Jón Kalman Stefánsson, translated by Philip Roughton, (Feb 4, 2025) was reviewed in the New York Times, just in time for the book’s pub date!

Joh Self writes,

“Stefánsson’s narrative voice is the book’s most striking quality. It has something in common with the ‘slow prose’ of Jon Fosse: run-on sentences, rich in repeated motifs, that tap into different layers of thought. A typical line in Philip Roughton’s translation is flexible and supple, telescoping from close-up to wider view . . . Once the reader is settled into the rhythms of Stefánsson’s prose, we’ll go anywhere with him.”

Get Heaven and Hell here!

THE NOTEBOOK

The Notebook by Roland Allen (Sep 3, 2024) was reviewed in the New Criterion! Amit Majmudar writes,

“Roland Allen has really chased the notebook everywhere it has gone in civilization . . . The history’s far-flung subtopics and divagations are arranged chronologically, and they all benefit from Allen’s unerring ear for the memorable anecdote. So the overall feel of reading a single narrative holds throughout, since the book has two through lines: the notebook itself in all its varying contexts, and the consistently engaging style of the author.”

Grab a copy of The Notebook here!

THE PASSENGER SEAT

The Passenger Seat by Vijay Khurana (Mar 11, 2025) was reviewed in the Literary Review of Canada.

Kyle Wyatt writes,

“The Passenger Seat will both mesmerize and refuse comforting resolution.”

Grab The Passenger Seat here!

HELLO, HORSE

Hello, Horse by Richard Kelly Kemick (Aug 7, 2024) was also reviewed in the Literary Review of Canada.

Alexander Sallas writes,

“Innovative is the joy that Kemick seems to take in juxtaposing the grotesque with the comical . . . Kemick’s unique voice shines with these moments of tonal whiplash. By using dark humour to sharpen the impact of otherwise grim scenarios, he traverses the extremes of slapstick comedy and gory tragedy.”

Get Hello, Horse here!

NEAR DISTANCE

Near Distance by Hanna Stoltenberg, translated by Wendy H. Gabrielsen (Jan 14, 2025), was reviewed in the Winnipeg Free Press.

Reviewer Sharon Chisvin wrote,

“Karin and Helene are stymied by their own recalcitrance, resentments and insecurities, and equally hesitant to admit to their own faults and failures. They behave like real people.”

Near Distance was also reviewed in the Complete Review.

“Near Distance offers a strong character- and relationship-portrait . . . The scenes from a life add up, in this compact novel, to a complete and yet all-too-human, unfulfilled life.”

Get Near Distance here!

The Bibliophile: The wonders we can create

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***

In anticipation of Heaven and Hell’s pub date this Tuesday, we’re following up last week’s excerpt with an interview with Icelandic author Jón Kalman Stefánsson, conducted by publicist and all-star interviewer Dominique.

On another note, if you have any thoughts on what you might like to see in a future Bibliophile—the behind-the-scenes of book publishing, features on backlist or frontlist books, whatever you’re curious about—feel free to reach out and let us know! We want to know what you most want to read about.

Ashley Van Elswyk
Editorial Assistant

***

Jón Kalman Stefánsson. Photo Credit: Einar Falur Ingólfsson.

A Biblioasis Interview with Jón Kalman Stefánsson

Heaven and Hell is a testament to the power of literature: tragedy strikes because of poetry, but the boy is also able to find a reason to carry on because of books—in returning the Milton to its original owner and in the company of readers he finds once he arrives. Can you tell us a bit about how books, as well as the friendships and communities that form around books, have changed your life or given you hope?

I was, as a child and a teenager, an eager reader, and for me libraries were places of wonder, adventure, and shelter. I think I was what we could call a born reader: it’s in my blood, the love for literature, this hunger, need, for the worlds and the wonders we can create and find in words. Books were for me both, at perhaps the same time, some kind of get-away transport, and something that enlarged my life and my thoughts. And I believe that one of the main purposes of literature is namely to do all that: enlarge our life, help us to forget our self, make us see the world and our own lives in a new, often unexpected light, help us to travel around the world, get to know other times, different cultures, ideas. Those who read a lot of books, both fiction and non-fiction, and of course poetry, from all over the world, are the only ones who truly can be called cosmopolitans. And those who read little, and perhaps never foreign literature, can be easy prey for populist politicians who get their power from prejudice, discrimination, hatred and fear for those who are slightly different from them; politicians who want us to fear variety, instead of embracing it as we should do.

It’s been a while since Heaven and Hell was originally published in Iceland. Has your relationship to this work changed since the beginning? What does it mean to you now, considering the scope of your work?

Yes, I wrote Heaven and Hell almost twenty years ago, so many things have changed since then: both in my own life and in the world. The book is the first one in a trilogy, and the next two came out in 2009 and 2011, so these worlds travelled inside me for around six years. Since then, I’ve written six novels, and I think that one changes—hopefully—a bit with every book one writes. I have to admit that I seldom think of my older books: they just are there, living their own lives, and have no need for me anymore. They are part of me, but they are at the same time totally independent every time they meet a new reader. I’m fond of them, glad if they are doing well, and hope that they’ll change or affect the lives and thoughts of the readers.

A stack of Heaven and Hell by Jón Kalman Stefansson, translated by Philip Roughton. Photo courtesy of our Biblioasis Bookshop staff.

A lot about this book reminded me of epic poetry—the movement of the language (the plentiful, rhythmic use of commas, the repetition of “I am nothing, without thee”), the “hero’s journey” at the center of the book. How important is poetry to your prose writing? Are there any particular poets whose influence you see in your writing?

Poetry is very important to me; I started my writing career as a poet, published three books of poetry before I turned over to prose. In a way, I think that I use, though subconsciously, the technique and the inner thinking of poetry while writing prose; therefore, poetry lies in the veins of my prose. I think as a poet while writing as a novelist. I also see my novels partly as a piece of music, a symphony, a requiem, a rock or hip-hop song. There lies so much music, both in the language and the novel itself: its structure, style, breath. And the structure is for me just as important as the stories; one can sometimes call it one of the characters.

A lot of poets have influenced me throughout time. I read poetry constantly, and never travel without having some books of poetry with me. They can be Icelandic, European, South or North American, Asian . . . and from all time periods. I guess that poets like Vallejo, Szymborska, Borges, Tranströmer, Zagajewski and many more have influenced or inspired me; the same goes for lyrical novelists, like, for example, José Saramago and Knut Hamsun.

I like the coexistence, in the lives of your characters, of the physically rigorous and the intellectual. These characters are in a constant struggle against the elements, but many of them are simultaneously leading these rich, bookish lives. And the books they read (Paradise Lost, for example) seem far less escapist than immersive—like an extra set of eyes over the world. How important is the natural world to the intellectual world of books, and vice versa, in your work?

Books have in my view always been part of life, the world; not something sidelong, but flowing through life, affecting it. We sometimes forget that some of the most famous persons in world history are characters in books, novels: Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment; Don Quixote; Achilles; Oliver Twist; Anne Karenina . . . People who read novels are constantly meeting new people, new characters, who affect them, influence them, move them with their thoughts, words, destiny, in short: become part of their life, their inner world. I sometimes say that what we call reality and then fiction/literature are like a couple dancing together; and occasionally the dance becomes so intense, that they seem to almost melt together and then it’s impossible to see which is which. Therefore: literature reflects life, and life reflects literature.

I think I was what we could call a born reader: it’s in my blood, the love for literature, this hunger, need, for the worlds and the wonders we can create and find in words.

I was in a class once in university where the professor would have us make a playlist for every book we read. I liked that idea, and still find myself doing it. I know that music is very important to you—you created Death’s Playlist for Your Absence Is Darkness, and you’ve written a book about The Beatles. I’m not asking you to create an entire playlist for Heaven and Hell, but does this book (or the trilogy as a whole) evoke any particular songs for you?

Seems to me that this professor did a good job; a wonderful idea! Yes, music is very important for me. I love making playlists, for myself, for my wife and I, my friends, my kids, who influence me all the time by playing for me the music they are listening to. I’m always eager to get to know new artists, both those who are contemporaneous to us, in hip-hop, rock, jazz, classical, and then also getting to know artists and composers from the past. And my novels are often filled with music, references to music, songs that characters are listening to, or it simply comes to my mind while writing, forcing itself into the story, becoming part of it. I’m not sure that there were any particular songs linked to Heaven and Hell, but I think that my running songs from that time—I’m a runner and I always have a special song list for my runs—and while running, my thoughts about the novel I’m working on at that time flow around in me, mixing with the songs, which sometimes affect or create new ideas. And my running songs from that period were for example songs like Jesus of the Moon by Nick Cave; Where is My Mind by Pixies, Back to Black by Amy Winehouse; but while working on the novel songs like Falla by Nana, Aria from Pastorale in F Major by Bach, both played by the great Pablo Casals, and Gnossiennes by Satie; and I guess that the atmosphere of that music coloured, in one way or another, what I was writing, and how.

And we ask this every time, but I always love hearing the answer—what are you reading and enjoying right now?

I’m usually reading many books at the same time, and right now I could name: Human Acts by Han Kang; The Gospel According to Jesus Christ by José Saramago, one of those authors who has followed me for a long time; I’m reading this book for the second time because I read it in Danish some fifteen years ago, and was very taken by it then. It’s great to read it again, but I’m afraid that I’m a bit more critical towards this fine novel now; Urd by a Norwegian poet, Ruth Lillegraven, a strong, fascinating book of poetry telling a story of two women across different periods of time; The Confessions of Augustine of Hippo, written about 400 AD, a book that has influenced our way of thinking, if not feeling, regrettably in some ways; and then always some books of poetry: Szymborska, Werner Aspenström, a great Swedish poet, and the poems of Enheduanna, the earliest known name in world history, from around 2280 BC, who wrote her poems almost 1500 years before the first letter was drawn in the Old Testament.

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20 Stores for 20 Years: Source Booksellers

After a brief hiatus, we’re starting up our 20 bookstores to celebrate 20 years of publishing posts again! Today, we’d like to celebrate our neighbours in Detroit: Source Booksellers. Owner Janet Webster-Jones spent 40 years as an educator in Detroit public schools before she set up Source’s brick and mortar location in 2002. Janet now runs the store alongside her daughter Alyson, and they are a midtown institution! Read on for why our publisher Dan loves Source, and why Alyson chose The Utopian Generation by Pepetela (trans. David Brookshaw) as her favorite Biblioasis book.

Biblioasis publisher Dan Wells poses with Source Booksellers’ Alyson Turner and Janet Webster-Jones.

Dan on Source Books: I’m not sure there’s a bookseller I admire more than Janet Jones at Source. Whenever I’m feeling exhausted by the state of the world, or the state of the industry, I take inspiration from her example. Now well into her ninth decade, she remains a veritable fount of inspiration, joy, enthusiasm and love, for books, literature, and for her Cass Corridor community. Alongside her daughter, Alyson, a very fine and energetic bookseller in her own right, Source is set to remain an inspiration for years to come.

Alyson poses with her Biblioasis pick, The Utopian Generation.

And here’s why Alyson chose The Utopian Generation: “My heart landed on celebrating the creative and brave translated novels we get from Biblioasis. Yes the Canada Reads ’24 winner in French, The Future, which rethinks Detroit, MI, is a delight to read and sell. Yet another recent release that is hard to put down, The Utopian Generation gives us a peek into an African struggle for decolonization. Bravo to Biblioasis for Twenty Years of indie publishing just across the river!!!!”

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In good publicity news:

  • The Notebook by Roland Allen was reviewed in the New Criterion: “Fascinating . . . [a] wide-ranging and well-researched book.”
  • Your Absence is Darkness by Jón Kalman Stefánsson (trans. Philip Roughton) was reviewed in The Scandinavia Review: “[An] epic story of love, legacy and grief.”

The Bibliophile: Tell me it’s not healthy to read books

/in /by

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I wrote a little bit in a previous installment of the Bibliophile about my excitement for Heaven and Hell by Jón Kalman Stefánsson, translated by Philip Roughton, so I’ll keep this intro brief. I don’t think it’d be anything groundbreaking to say that most—if not all, hopefully—of the folks reading this are fans of books, and Heaven and Hell is at its core a paean to the power of books and the friendships and communities that coalesce around them. Stefánnson’s characters memorize lines from a poem before heading out to sea, read to each other aloud to stave off the darkness, and quietly come together to think and dream in silent companionship. They save each other and themselves again and again with literature.

Heaven and Hell is a story for anyone who’s felt saved by books, and we hope you’ll enjoy a glimpse of this in the following excerpt.

Ashley Van Elswyk
Editorial Assistant

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Heaven and Hell by Jón Kalman Stefánsson. Cover designed by Natalie Olsen.

The Boy, the Sea and the Loss of Paradise

I

Bárður and the boy sometimes catch a glimpse of the group ahead of them and modify their pace in such a way that they draw farther apart rather than closer together, the two of them travel by themselves, it’s best that way, so much that needs to be said intended for just the two of them, about poetry, about dreams and the things that cause us sleepless nights.

They have just crossed over the Impassable. From here it is approximately a half-hour’s walk home to the hut, for the most part along the stony beach where the sea snaps at them. They stand high up on the slope, put off the descent, look out over more than ten kilometres of cold blue sea that tosses and turns as if impatient at the head of the fjord, and at the white beach opposite. The snow never fully leaves it, no summer manages to melt the snow completely, and still folk live wherever there is even a trace of a bay. Wherever the sea is fairly accessible there stands a farm, and at midsummer the little home-field surrounding it turns green, pale green areas of tussocky ground stretch up the mountainside and yellow dandelions kindle in the grass, but even further away, to the north-east, they see more mountains rise into the grey winter sky: these are the Strands, where the world ends. Bárður removes his bag, takes out a bottle of brennivín, they both have a gulp. Bárður sighs, looks off to the left, looks at the ocean itself, deep and dark, he doesn’t think at all about the end of the world and the eternal cold, but instead about long, dark hair, how it blew in her face in early January and how the most precious hand in the world brushed it aside, her name is Sigríður, and Bárður trembles a bit inside when he speaks the name to himself. The boy follows his friend’s glance and sighs as well. He wants to accomplish something in life, learn a language, see the world, read a thousand books, he wants to discover the core, whatever that might be, he wants to discover whether there is any core, but sometimes it’s hard to think and read when one is stiff and sore after a difficult fishing voyage, wet and cold after twelve hours’ working in the meadows, when his thoughts can be so heavy that he can hardly lift them, then it’s a long way to the core.

The west wind blows and the sky slowly darkens above their heads.

Dammit, the boy blurts out, because he is standing there alone with his thoughts, Bárður has set off down the slope, the wind is blowing, the sea churns and Bárður is thinking about dark hair, about warm laughter, about big eyes bluer than the sky on a clear June night. They have come down to the beach. They clamber over large rocks, the afternoon continues to darken and press in on them, they keep going and hurry the final minutes, and are a hair’s breadth ahead of the twilight to the huts.

These are two pairs of new-ish huts with lofts located just above the landing, two sixereens overturned on the beach and lashed down. A large, rough crag extends into the sea just beyond the huts, making landings there easier but overshadowing the main fishing huts, which are a half-hour’s walk away, thirty to forty huts and more than half of them fairly new like theirs, with sleeping lofts, but a number of them from a former time and one-storeyed, the crews sleep and bait the lines and eat in the same space. Thirty to forty buildings, perhaps fifty, we don’t remember exactly, so much is forgotten, confused: we have also learned little by little to trust the feeling, not the memory.

Dammit, nothing but adverts, mutters Bárður. They have entered the hut, gone up to the loft, sit on the bed, there are four beds for the six men and the Custodian, the woman who takes care of the cooking, the wood-burning stove, the cleaning. Bárður and the boy sleep head-to-foot, I sleep with your toes, the boy says sometimes, all he has to do is turn his head and his friend’s woollen socks are in his face. Bárður has big feet, he has pulled his feet up beneath him and murmurs, nothing but adverts, meaning the newspaper published in the Village, which comes weekly, is four pages long, the last page frequently covered with advertisements. Bárður lays the paper aside and they finish removing from their bags everything that makes life worth living if we exclude, in their case, red lips, dreams and soft hair. It’s not possible to put red lips and dreams into a bag and carry them into a fishing hut, you can’t even buy such things, yet there are five shops in the Village and the selection is dizzying when things are at their best at midsummer. Perhaps it will never be possible to buy what matters most, no, of course not, that is unfortunately not the case, or, to put it better, thank God. They have finished emptying their bags and the contents lie on the bed. Three newspapers, two of them published in Reykjavík, coffee, rock candy, rye bread, sweet rolls from the German Bakery, two books from the library of the blind old sea captain—Niels Juel, Denmark’s Greatest Naval Hero and Milton’s Paradise Lost in the translation of Jón Þorlaksson—in addition to two books they had bought jointly at the Pharmacy from Dr Sigurður, Travelogue of Eiríkur from Brúnum and Jón Ólafsson’s textbook of the English language. Sigurður has a pharmacy and bookshop in the same house, the books smelling so much of medicine that we are cured and freed from ailments simply by catching a whiff of them, tell me it’s not healthy to read books. What do you want with this, asks the Custodian, Andrea, picks up the textbook and starts leafing through it. So we can say, I love you and I desire you in English, Bárður replies. That makes sense, she says, and sits down with the book. The boy came with three bottles of cure-all, one for himself, one for Andrea, the third for Árni, who hadn’t arrived yet, same as Einar and Gvendur, they had planned to spend the day visiting various huts, rambling, as it’s called. Pétur the skipper, on the other hand, spent the entire day in the hut, cleaning his waterproofs and rubbing them with fresh skate liver, mending his sea-shoes, went out once to the salting house with Andrea, they spread a sail over the ever-growing saltfish stack, it has grown so high that Pétur doesn’t need to bend over at all while they’re at it. They’ve been married for twenty years and now his waterproofs hang down below, hang among the fishing gear, a strong odour comes off them now but they will become soft and malleable when they set out tonight. A tidy man, that Pétur, like his brother, Guðmundur, skipper of the other boat, about ten metres between their huts but the brothers don’t speak to each other, haven’t done so in a good decade, no one knows why.

A splash of colour greets the reader upon opening.

Andrea puts down the book and starts heating coffee on the stove. There had been absolutely no coffee that morning, which is truly troublesome, and in a short time the aroma of coffee fills the loft, it slips down and overwhelms the odours of fishing gear and unwashed waterproofs. The trapdoor lifts and Pétur comes up with his black hair, his black beard and his slightly slanting eyes, his face like tanned hide, comes like the Devil from down in Hell up here into the Heaven of coffee, with an almost cheerful expression, it’s no small thing what coffee can accomplish. Pétur smiled for the first time when he was eight years old, Bárður once said, and the second time when he first saw Andrea; we’re waiting for the third time, concluded the boy. The trapdoor lifted again, the Evil One is seldom alone, muttered the boy, and the space appeared to shrink after Gvendur came all the way up, so broad-shouldered that no woman could embrace him properly. Einar follows at his heels, half as large, thin but incredibly strong, incomprehensible whence this slender body derives its power, perhaps from savageness, because his black eyes even shoot sparks in his sleep. So there you are, says Andrea, and pours coffee into their mugs. Yessir, says Pétur, and blathered away the entire day. They don’t need an entire day to do that, says the boy, and the mugs in Andrea’s hands shake a bit as she suppresses a laugh. Einar clenches his fists and shakes them at the boy, hisses something so unclear that barely half of it can be understood, he is missing several teeth, his dark beard imposing, grown halfway over his mouth, his ragged, thin hair nearly grey, but then they drink their coffee. Each sits on his own bed and the sky darkens outside. Andrea turns up the light in the lamp, windows at both gables, one frames a mountain, the other the sky and sea, they frame our existence, and for a long time nothing is heard but the surge of the sea and the pleasant slurping of coffee. Gvendur and Einar sit together and share one of the newspapers, Andrea scrutinizes the English textbook, trying to enlarge her life with a new language, Pétur just stares at nothing, the boy and Bárður both have their own papers, now only Árni is missing.

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From the Devil’s “Notes to Self”

A prose poem by Jón Kalman Stefánsson
translated by Philip Roughton

. . . discord, envy, borders, land mines, Trump’s phone number, Orban, Netanyahu and all the rest, burn the Koran in Copenhagen, or just anywhere, remember to buy new trousers, call Mom, more discord, never forget, also national purity, change is harmful, buy an album by the Bee Gees, tell Elon Musk that he’s the best, the smartest, the Great Wall of China’s an awesome idea, use that for a slogan, those who are dissimilar and different are a threat, every person must be his own Great Wall of China, could work as a slogan, a hot idea, remember my appointment with the physiotherapist tomorrow morning, arrogance is absolutely awesome, use it more often, remember praise, great idea to ban books, support it, important to call it by another name, spread that idea, call it thoughtfulness, that books shouldn’t be uncomfortable, the same with theater, music, emphasize that everything should be safe, mustn’t hurt, shock, awesome idea, on a par with the Great Wall of China, remember to buy a bottle of vodka for Dad, praise, jealousy, suspicion, vanity, put them as wheels beneath people, me doing the steering, I think it’s all on the right track, hardly anything that can stop us, more later . . .

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In good publicity news: