Biblioasis Seeks Press Volunteers for Fall 2015

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Biblioasis needs a few good volunteers! Our press office handles nearly every step a manuscript takes on its path to becoming a widely-read book, including acquisition, editing, typesetting, cover design, stock management, publicity, and bookstore sales. Literary titles published by Biblioasis have been reviewed recently in The New York Times Book Review, The Wall Street Journal, The Globe & Mail, The Toronto Star, and other major outlets. Volunteering here offers an opportunity to work and learn at one of Canada’s leading independent presses. Students interested in the publishing industry are strongly encouraged to apply.

Responsibilities:

  • Assisting with author event coordination, including travel arrangements.
  • Bibliodata and stock level monitoring.
  • Logging reviews, press, and other media hits.
  • Updating and maintaining the press website.
  • Assisting with local, national, and international market research.
  • Assisting with catalog and advanced review copy mailings.
  • Assisting with miscellaneous administrative tasks.

Requirements:

  • Excellent attention to detail.
  • Ability to work independently on a range of short-, medium- and long-term tasks with minimal supervision.
  • Good verbal and written communications skills.
  • Knowledge of Microsoft Office, Excel, and PowerPoint.
  • Proficiency with social media.

What We Can Offer:

  • Travel and lunch stipend.
  • Employee discount on all books in the bookstore.

What We’d Ask of You:

  • A commitment of at least four hours each week.

Access to a car is preferred but not required.

To apply for the position, please email your cover letter and resume to gmunroe@biblioasis.com. Deadline: August 21, 2015.

Interviews Galore

coverInheritance9781771960168-frontcoverIn Another Country - front

 

It’s been a busy couple of weeks for us here at Biblioasis, so we’ve got a lot to share with you.

On May 22nd, David Constantine’s In Another Country was reviewed by the National Post’s Philip Marchand who wrote “Constantine[‘s]… background in verse has helped him to hone a very lean style, with maximum effect.”

Over the weekend Russell Smith’s Confidence was reviewed by The Star:

“Thankfully, Russell Smith has no interest in the prevailing wheat germ ethos of CanLit. Here, finally, is fiction we can swallow for taste, not nutrition … Here, finally, is a Canadian fiction writer who admits that humans, even Canadians, have sex hard-wired into the DNA…”

Russell Smith also made some waves on CBC Radio One’s q with Shad yesterday. If you missed it, listen here and let us know your thoughts!

The North Shore News interviewed Shawn Curtis Stibbards who recently launched his debut novel, The Video Watcher, set in Vancouver.

And lastly, be sure to check out Alex Boyd’s “One Question Interview” with Kerry-Lee Powell, author of Inheritance, here.

Inheritance

Praise for David Constantine’s IN ANOTHER COUNTRY

 

In Another Country - front

We are pleased to announce that David Constantine’s In Another Country received a starred review in Publishers Weekly
this week. Here’s an excerpt:

A brilliant selection [of stories] … The diverse characters [in this collection] include ex-monks, shamed canons, prostitutes, squatters, successful businessmen, and university professors, but a common thread of silent suffering and dignity ties them all together. The tragic and the beautiful in each of their experiences is heightened by the author’s impeccable eloquence and poetic imagery.”

Constantine’s collection is also receiving praise from booksellers across North America. Laurie Greer from Politics and Prose says that Constantine’s stories “pulse with the sounds and rhythms of water, rhythms that draw characters and readers alike into uncommon and exceptionally profound emotional depths,” while Stephanie Crowe of Page and Palette writes “This is an absolutely marvelous collection of stories that go to the heart of the human experience. Beautifully written, Constantine’s ability to paint his literary picture is unmatched. This collection is a real winner and not to be missed!”

Be sure to check out Constantine’s North American debut with In Another Country which will be available on June 9th in Canada, and July 14th in the U.S.

 

 

Praise for Confidence and My Shoes Are Killing Me

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We have new reviews for Russell Smith’s Confidence and Robyn Sarah’s My Shoes Are Killing Me to share with you!

 

My Shoes Are Killing Me was reviewed by 49th Shelf and by Jeweller’s Eye.

“Natural, musical, meditative, warm, and unexpectedly funny, this is a restorative and moving collections from one of Canada’s most well-regarded poets.”—49th Shelf

“As [Wallace] Stevens writes in The Plain Sense of Things, ‘The absence of the imagination had itself to be imagined.’ Robyn Sarah is one of our poet’s in Canada who has attended most readily and vigorously to this hard work, and we are forever indebted to her for it.” —Jeweller’s Eye

 

Confidence was reviewed by The Globe & Mail, the Quill and Quire, Morley Walker from The Winnipeg Free Press, Shelagh Rogers on CBC Radio One’s The Next Chapter, W Dish, and in THIS Magazine.

“Smith, a long-time Globe and Mail columnist, is a gifted anthropologist of the urbane. Those gifts are on full display throughout Confidence.” —The Globe and Mail

“Darkly hilarious … Russell Smith continues his assault on what he sees as the tame sensibility of Canadian literary fiction … Confidence finds Smith at the top of his game.”—Morley Walker, The Winnipeg Free Press

“In the world of these stories, love is a game, secrets pile up, needs go unmet, compromises and negotiations are constantly being made … [Yet the final pieces] soften the book’s unflinching tone and deliver, finally, emotional resonance by hinting at vulnerable humanity and the truest, simplest desires behind the exhaustive chase of pleasure.”—Quill & Quire

“When I pick up a book by Russell Smith I’ve come to expect to read about sex, and ambition, and a city that can be exciting and superficial, and glitters with the promise that it doesn’t always deliver. There is all that in his new collection of short stories.” —Shelagh Rogers, CBC Radio One’s The Next Chapter

“Darkly funny, Confidence skewers modern relationships with just enough hope and romance left at the bottom of Pandora’s box to remind us why we suffer through the tribulations of love…This is not the stodgy CanLit you were assigned in school – Russell Smith’s writing is sharp and sultry…” —W Dish

“It’s a delicious darkness that pervades Russell Smith’s latest short store collection, Confidence… Unflinchingly honest reading.” —THIS Magazine

 

 

New Reviews for Kathy Page, Catherine Chandler, and Cynthia Flood

Red Girl Rat Boy

Glad and Sorry Seasons

Paradise and Elsewhere

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We are pleased to announce that Kathy Page’s Paradise & Elsewhere,, Catherine Chandler’s Glad and Sorry Seasons, and Cynthia Flood’s Red Girl Rat Boy have all been reviewed in Canadian Literature!

 

“The genius of [Page’s] book is the way magic seeps into the stories. It seems so inevitable. Somewhere deep in the ancient part of our brains, there must still be a grasp of the connectedness of all things, of the endless flux of creation and destruction.” —Amanda Leslie-Spinks, Canadian Literature

“Chandler boasts a strong collection of poetry that presents an argument for a return to older poetic forms to further explore the experiences of women and women writers in the present.” Philip Miletic, Canadian Literature

“Linguistic dexterity is Flood’s primary strength.” —Sam Knowles, Canadian Literature

 

 

 

 

 

An Interview with Russell Smith

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Russell Smith’s recent interview with Canada Writes for Confidence is up and can be found here.

If you haven’t picked up Smith’s Confidence yet, we think Morley Walker’s glowing review might convince you to:

http://bit.ly/1GUuYOO

 

Frank O'Connor

 

The Freedom in American Songs

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We would like to congratulate Diane Schoemperlen, Russell Smith, and Kathleen Winter for making the 2015 longlist for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award!

Follow the link below to see which other authors made this year’s list:

Frank O’Connor

Join Us This Saturday for Windsor’s Authors for Indies Event

authorsforindiesWe are excited to announce that Biblioasis will be the Windsor host of the Canada’s first-ever Authors for Indies Day and would like to invite you all to join us in-store this Saturday between noon and 6pm!

Authors for Indies Day is a free event that will kick off with over 600 writers participating at 120 independent bookstores across Canada. Here at Biblioasis, we are fortunate enough to be hosting Susan Holbrook, Dawn Kresan, and Paul Vasey who will be greeting customers and recommending their favourite books to everyone who joins us. Coffee and snacks will be provided.
We hope to see you there!

Mia Couto’s Response to the Anti-Immigrant Tragedies in South Africa

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Mia Couto, whose forthcoming collection of nonfiction Pensatives: Selected Essays (available from Biblioasis in Canada on June 15th and in the US on July 14th) is an environmental biologist from Mozambique, is the author of 25 books of fiction, essays and poems in his native Portuguese. In 2014 he received the $50,000 Neustadt Prize for Literature, and in 2015 he was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize.

On April 18th, 2015, the editor of the Mozambique News Agency, Paul Fauvet, posted an English translation of author Mia Couto’s open letter to South African President Jacob Zuma concerning the killing of foreigners in his country.

We think that some of you might be interested in reading Couto’s response to the killings in South African, which we’ve included below. You can also read more about the situation in this article from The Guardian.

 

To: His Excellency President Jacob Zuma

We remember you in Maputo, in the 1980s, from that time you spent as a political refugee in Mozambique. Often our paths crossed on Julius Nyerere Avenue and we would greet each other with the casual friendliness of neighbours. Often I imagined the fears that you must have felt, as a person persecuted by the apartheid regime. I imagined the nightmares you must have experienced at night when you thought of the ambushes plotted against you and against your comrades in the struggle. But I don’t remember ever seeing you with a bodyguard. In fact it was we Mozambicans who acted as your bodyguards. For years we gave you more than a refuge. We offered you a house and we gave you security at the cost of our security. You cannot possibly have forgotten this generosity.

We haven’t forgotten it. Perhaps more than any other neighbouring country, Mozambique paid a high price for the support we gave to the liberation of South Africa. The fragile Mozambican economy was wrecked. Our territory was invaded and bombed. Mozambicans died in defence of their brothers on the other side of the border. For us, Mr President, there was no border, there was no nationality. We were all brothers in the same cause, and when apartheid fell, our festivities were the same, on either side of the border.

For centuries Mozambican migrants, miners and peasants, worked in neighbouring South Africa under conditions that were not far short of slavery. These workers helped build the South African economy. There is no wealth in your country that does not carry the contribution of those who today are coming under attack.

For all these reasons, it is not possible to imagine what is going on in your country. It is not possible to imagine that these same South African brothers have chosen us as a target for hatred and persecution. It is not possible that Mozambicans are persecuted in the streets of South Africa with the same cruelty that the apartheid police persecuted freedom fighters, inside and outside the country. The nightmare we are living is more serious than that visited upon you when you were politically persecuted. For you were the victim of a choice, of an ideal that you had embraced. But those who are persecuted in your country today are guilty merely of having a different nationality. Their only crime is that they are Mozambicans. Their only offence is that they are not South Africans.

Mr President

The xenophobia expressed today in South Africa is not merely a barbaric and cowardly attack against “the others”. It is also aggression against South Africa itself. It is an attack against the “Rainbow Nation” which South Africans proudly proclaimed a decade or more ago. Some South Africans are staining the name of their motherland. They are attacking the feelings of gratitude and solidarity between nations and peoples. It is sad that your country today is in the news across the world for such inhuman reasons.

Certainly measures are being taken. But they are proving inadequate, and above all they have come late. The rulers of South Africa can argue everything except that they were taken by surprise. History was allowed to repeat itself. Voices were heard spreading hatred with impunity. That is why we are joining our indignation to that of our fellow Mozambicans and urging you: put an immediate end to this situation, which is a fire that can spread across the entire region, with feelings of revenge being created beyond South Africa’s borders. Tough, immediate and total measures are needed which may include the mobilization of the armed forces. For, at the end of the day, it is South Africa itself which is under attack.

Mr President, you know, better than we do, that police actions can contain this crime but, in the current context, other preventive measures must be taken. So that these criminal events are never again repeated.

For this, it is necessary to take measures on another scale, measures that work over the long term. Measures of civic education, and of exalting the recent past in which we were so close, are urgently needed. It is necessary to recreate the feelings of solidarity between our peoples and to rescue the memory of a time of shared struggles. As artists, as makers of culture and of social values, we are available so that, together with South African artists, we can face this new challenge, in unity with the countless expressions of revulsion born within South African society. We can still transform this pain and this shame into something which expresses the nobility and dignity of our peoples and our nations. As artists and writers, we want to declare our willingness to support a spirit of neighbourliness which is born, not from geography, but from a kinship of our common soul and shared history.
Maputo, 17 April 2015
Mia Couto

Inheritance

Kerry-Lee Powell’s Inheritance shortlisted for 2015 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award

We’re thrilled to announce that Inheritance by Kerry-Lee Powell has been shortlisted for the 2015 Gerald Lampert Award for Best First Book of Poetry! Congratulations to all the other authors: Kayla Czaga, Sylvia D. Hamilton, Stevie Howell, Suzannah Showler, Anne-Marie Turza.