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

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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: Like a lock fitting into place

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An interview with Hanna Stoltenberg, author of Near Distance

This week marked our first release of 2025—the exquisite, aching Near Distance by Hanna Stoltenberg, translated from the Norwegian by Wendy H. Gabrielsen. I first read this novel about eight months ago (before I even started working at Biblioasis) and have been eagerly awaiting its publication. Because of all their flawed humanity, the characters in Near Distance—particularly Karin, the cool, often self-absorbed mother—have continued to linger in my life: sitting at the bar across the street from my home, or smoking outside a jewellery shop. Karin’s realness makes her one of the best literary characters I’ve encountered in a while.

I had the chance to ask Stoltenberg a handful of questions, and her responses show a deep level of care to the development of her characters and craft.

Dominique Béchard
Publicist

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Presenting our first book of 2025: Near Distance by Hanna Stoltenberg, translated by Wendy H. Gabrielsen. Cover designed by Natalie Olsen.

Near Distance begins with a kind of prologue, a brief chapter on the changed relationship between mother and daughter, as portrayed through their smoking rituals; Karin and Helene used to smoke together, but Helene has quit and now Karin smokes alone. I’m always interested in how beginnings become beginnings. At what point in the writing process did this scene appear, or was it the first thing you wrote? What else can you say about the shape of the book and how it came together?

The “prologue” was actually the last thing I wrote. For me the novel began with the image of Karin waking up next to a one-night-stand and walking home alone in the wet snow. The night before I had been out to a bar with some friends and became captivated by a woman who was on a date with a garrulous man she clearly didn’t know well. Every time he left the table to buy drinks or use the bathroom, her expression shifted, becoming softer yet less compliant. Those glimpses of “private faces” in public interest me. The woman walking home developed into Karin, and I began writing scenes from different points in her life: as a young mother, on a family vacation in Germany, during a brief affair, on a “girls’ trip” with her grown daughter. Eventually the relationship between Karin and Helene became the focus point, and my editor wisely suggested I add a scene with Helene in the beginning. After a few unsuccessful attempts I wrote the smoking scene and it was like a lock fitting into place, I knew the novel was finished.

You’ve previously said that Karin is based on fathers you knew growing up—that her character eschews conventional ideals of motherhood and care. Can you say more about how you envision Near Distance as upending or playing with conceptions of gender and emotional labour?

When I started writing about Karin, I was getting to know her and at the same time I felt like I had a deep understanding of who she was. As I moved her through different situations with different people, my main concern was rendering her thoughts and emotions as truthfully and precisely as I could. Which is to say, I didn’t necessarily have those fathers in mind then. Later, however, I thought a lot about how Karin’s and Helene’s relationship is shaped by societal expectations, one of them being that a mother’s love is expressed through tireless devotion and selfless care. Would a different, less fraught relationship have been possible simply by changing Karin’s gender?

It can be difficult to reconcile the idea of care as a natural, authentic expression of love and a moral obligation with the fact that the majority of care work is done by women, whether paid or unpaid. Today, at least in Norway, most couples co-parent 50/50 after a split, but when I grew up “the weekend dad” was the norm. My siblings and I spent every other weekend at my dad’s—the rest of the time, while my mom took care of us, he was free to do as he pleased—and it never made me, or anyone else—question his love or character. Whereas if a mother didn’t have main custody of her children, people would assume she did something horrible. Although parenthood is more equal today, a selfish mother is still considered unacceptable in a way a selfish father isn’t. Rachel Cusk has previously said that in the Outline trilogy she tried to write a female consciousness that is not shaped by oppression. I think it’s similarly interesting to explore female love that is not structured around nurture and care.

Hanna Stoltenberg. Credit: Julie Pike.

How would you like a North American reader to approach your work? What—if anything—should they know about life in Norway and how it might differ from life in Canada or the US?

I believe the themes and subjects in the novel are recognizable and relevant to readers from both Canada and the US, but the wealth and comfort of Scandinavian societies, for me, is significant. The community represented by the welfare state paradoxically relieves us of some of the duty to take care of each other. It also removes a lot of the struggle. Instead, we are free to seek out the meaning of life through individual self-realization, whether that be wellness retreats or erotic desire, which can feel both meaningful and unbearably hollow.

John Self, in The Guardian, writes that your “elegant prose . . . gives plot a bad name.” Near Distance isn’t without plot, of course, but characterization and language seem to be at the forefront. In this way, it could be said to participate in the tradition of writers like Rachel Cusk and Gwendoline Riley. What excites you the most about literature? What are your priorities when writing?

The writer Kathryn Scanlan has stated that she tries “to write a sentence as unbudging and fully itself as some object sitting on a shelf in my office.” That is an ambition I share. I can admire a writer’s intelligence, imagination and sense of composition, but never more so than when it’s on display within a sentence.

I think it’s similarly interesting to explore female love that is not structured around nurture and care.

Atmosphere is important in Near Distance. Critics have described the book as stark, anxious, tense. But atmosphere is difficult to pin down and depends largely on what the reader brings to the work. It’s also interesting how this tense atmosphere counters the novel’s wellness subplot: Helene and Endre’s involvement in the world of self-care. Did you set out to create a particular atmosphere (if so, how?), or did it manifest on its own?

I wanted to observe the contrast between the groping, failing intimacy between mother and daughter and the smooth, commercialized care of strangers, be it on the plane, in the shops or in the world of self-care. In London, Karin and Helene visit a large clothing store and pay for the services of a personal shopper, a young woman named Rosie. With a mixture of standard phrases and feminine efficiency, Rosie establishes a relaxed intimacy with Helene that Karin is completely shut out of. As you point out, how you experience the novel’s atmosphere largely depends on whether you are inclined to read that scene as simply two women shopping—as some readers have—or something more sinister. For me, there is something bleak about how the self-care-industry capitalizes on your most private feelings (shame, self-loathing, loneliness) while also being obsessed with personal boundaries. Like the question posed by a wellness guru in the novel: “If you don’t look after yourself, who will?”

Writing a book is often viewed as an essentially solitary activity. What does having a translator feel like? You speak English, so I imagine that it must feel particularly strange to experience your work through another. Did it ever feel like an imposition? Or was it liberating?

As I said above, when I write I work and rework the language in order to achieve “unbudging” sentences, held in place by rhythm and sound. Sometimes I know the shape and feel of a sentence before I know what I want to say. Like Don DeLillo “I’m completely willing to let language press meaning upon me.” Therefore, being translated can feel like a massive loss of control. When it doesn’t, that is because of Wendy’s attentive and precise work, which I feel very lucky to benefit from. She has managed to transfer the novel’s tone and atmosphere perfectly, and also to create something subtly different and exciting.

Finally, what are you reading these days?

I recently had my second child, and at the moment a novel’s actual weight has become an important factor when filtering through my reading options: I need to be able to hold it in one hand while feeding or lulling a baby to sleep with the other. Luckily, I have much to choose from, as I tend to favour compact narratives. Three slim, but substantial novels I’ve recently read are The Anthropologists by Ayşegül Savaş, Sitt Marie Rose by Etel Adnan, and Famous Questions by Fanny Howe.

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In good publicity news:

The Bibliophile: 2025 Staff Picks

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In which! The crew of the good ship Biblio sails into the new year with a preview of some of their most anticipated 2025 titles. (Yes, we made them choose. No, they didn’t like it.)

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Vanessa’s Picks

 

Cover design by Kate Sinclair.

Dark Like Under by Alice Chadwick

My new year’s resolution was to not complain about having to choose from among our books, and so I guess that’s all I’m allowed to say about that. Instead I’ll say how excited I am that we’ll be sharing Alice Chadwick’s debut with you. It’s a circadian novel, set over the course of a single day in the 1980s, and it follows a large cast of characters at an elite secondary school in a rural English town as they grapple with the surprising death of a beloved member of the faculty. It’s a book about resilience and connection, systems and resistance, renewal and what we leave behind, and a work of great poetic insight, keenly sensitive to paradox: that the old ways oppress while the ancient can illuminate, that the pastoral can be claustrophobic as well as restorative, that time is both a line and a circle. The form itself works into and against the conventions of Western narrative, the Western mind: in following the hours of the clock, around which human action revolves, we are reminded that although the earth turns circles inside of circles, somehow we still believe we travel a straight line, even in spite of having watched the hands sweep around and around. It’s the kind of fiction, and vision, that is for me the antidote to the disaffected irony and fashionable despair of a great deal of contemporary fiction, a book that risks all those old-fashioned ideas: generosity, forgiveness, love—even hope.

Cover design by Ingrid Paulson.

On Oil (Field Notes #10) by Don Gillmor

If you’d told me a year ago that I would spend a late afternoon inhaling a nonfiction book about the history and culture of oil in North America, stopping only because it was time for dinner and picking it back up to finish as soon as the dishes were done, I’d have been, admittedly, surprised. But if you’d told me Don Gillmor was the author, I wouldn’t have argued. Gillmor, a novelist, memoirist, historian, children’s author, journalist, and, it turns out, former roughneck, can do just about anything. In On Oil, Gillmor draws on the latter two professions to chart the rise and imminent fall of the oil industry, beginning with firsthand experience on oil rigs during the seventies oil boom in Alberta and traveling across the continent and then the globe to show the complex and maddening means by which oil has captured government interests and profoundly impacted—for better, and more often for worse—life on Planet Earth. The picture, I found out, is both more and less grim than one might think, but I’ve always been with Francis Bacon on difficult truths: knowledge is power.

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Ahmed’s Picks

 

Cover design by Zoe Norvell.

The Passenger Seat by Vijay Khurana

This was the first book I read as an official Biblioasis employee and I was floored. It was the prose that first did it, beautifully tense, controlled, electric. And then the questions this novel raises—about masculinity, violence, personal responsibility—all lingered in my mind for weeks after. We follow two young men who hit the road with no real plan other than to get away from their lives and their town. But, moment by moment, we see how they become more and more violent, until they cross a line from which they can never return. It’s all a game to them and it makes you wonder if we could ever learn anything from those who commit such violent acts. There are no neat and tidy answers, but I think that’s what’ll keep me coming back to this book. It’s a tragic story that stays with you because it insists we don’t look away anymore.

Cover design by Ingrid Paulson.

On Book Banning (Field Notes #9) by Ira Wells

The increase in book bans across the country is startling and alarming. Some people want to ban books with LGBTQ+ characters because they think those books are indoctrinating their children. And some people want to ban classics and important contemporary works because they contain language deemed offensive today. I wonder what books will be left on the shelf. Probably bland ones. With the forces of censorship seemingly getting stronger, I’m really grateful for what Wells does in this short book. It’s both a history lesson and passionate defense for the right to read. From ancient to recent cases, Wells walks us through the history of censorship and shows how and why book bans are making a comeback. On Book Banning is an excellent distillation of how we treat books today and how book bans are connected to the need to control others. It’s a useful reminder of why the freedom to read is crucial and what we lose when it is taken away. A very important read today and, I think, for the years to come.

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Dominique’s Picks

 

Cover design by Ingrid Paulson.

Baldwin, Styron, and Me by Mélikah Abdelmoumen, translated from the French by Catherine Khordoc

I read Baldwin, Styron, and Me in two sittings; the book’s hybrid form is addictive—it’s at once a memoir of Québecois identity, a literary history of the friendship between James Baldwin and William Styron, and a thoughtful critique of race, cultural appropriation, and the possibility for meaningful disagreement and debate. Abdelmoumen is a champion of resisting certainty, and her commitment to this is refreshing and inspiring (and important as we enter the increasingly politically-fraught new year).

Cover design by Ingrid Paulson.

UNMET by stephanie roberts

I’ve already read this collection a few times, and it’s impressive. roberts’ poems lean against surrealism without losing their humanity, their creatureness, their affinity for the real. And these sentences are just so pleasurable to read: they sinew and worm into a world-expanding illogic. I’ll be reading her first collection, rushes from the river of disappointment, soon. I’m thrilled UNMET is making its way into the world next year; I think roberts is one of Canada’s best, most original voices.

Cover design by Ingrid Paulson.

Dust: More Lives of the Poets (with Guitars) by Ray Robertson

I love reading about music almost as much as listening to it. And Robertson writes from a loving, considerate space that avoids the hyper-analytical, that instead creates a kind of music to live alongside the music. I can tell from this book’s setlist (Alex Chilton, Captain Beefheart, Muddy Waters, etc.) and from his previous Lives of the Poets (which includes some truly beautiful pieces on Gram Parsons and Townes Van Zandt), that this book will be a fount of joy and discovery for me in the new year.

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Ashley’s Picks

 

Cover design by Natalie Olsen.

Heaven and Hell by Jón Kalman Stefánsson, translated from the Icelandic by Philip Roughton

Your Absence Is Darkness was one of my favourite reads of last year, so I was quite pleased to find out that we’re not only publishing more of Stefánsson’s work, but a full trilogy is on the way. Heaven and Hell is a brilliant start to The Trilogy About the Boy, with everything I loved from Your Absence returning here, in perhaps what some might find a more accessible introduction to his writing (translated in excellent form by Philip Roughton). Stefánsson has this way of describing the world—from the way two distant lovers look up at the same moon, to the chill of a stormy ocean soaking a man to the bone, to the slow loss of sight—that really strikes a reader, and makes me consider things in a different way. It’s poetic and straightforward, and complements the emotions woven through the story, of the boy’s struggle with life or death, and the ways in which he connects with the people around him and remembers those who have passed. I look forward to reading more of this journey.

Cover design by Ingrid Paulson.

Sacred Rage: Selected Stories by Steven Heighton

I first learned of this forthcoming collection of the late Steven Heighton’s stories in the form of a handwritten table-of-contents, passed along from editor John Metcalf, to our publisher Dan, and then along to me—for compilation. Consequently, I’ve gotten to know this collection quite well already, having spent the last few months gradually acquiring, scanning, and cleaning up the converted text of a majority of these stories from older editions without available digital files. Heighton takes his readers across the world, from the back kitchen of a chicken restaurant to an onsen in Japan. Reading a collection in bits and pieces, before it’s been neatly woven together in order and packaged in its usual final book form, is a strange but exciting experience; I can say I’ve read Sacred Rage already in one sense, but what I’m looking forward to most is the day we receive our printed copies in-office, so I can finally sit down and enjoy these brilliantly written short stories—without the need to hunt for missing characters and lost italicizations—and be properly reintroduced to Heighton’s best works.

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Emily’s Picks

 

Cover design by Natalie Olsen.

Near Distance by Hanna Stoltenberg, translated from the Norwegian by Wendy Harrison Gabrielson

I’m not a reader who is typically drawn to a domestic drama or narrative centered around motherhood. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve read plenty of amazing literary books about just these things—but they’re rarely a narrative I find myself naturally delighting in. I was surprised and delighted as soon as I opened Near Distance by Hanna Stoltenberg (trans. Wendy Harrison Gabrielson). Taut and sparse, it’s the story of a mother (Karin) who has largely opted out of her daughter’s (Helene) life. When Helene asks Karin to travel with her to London, the result is an emotionally tense and very uneasy road trip story. It’s cold, sparse, and elegant, and made me chuckle darkly several times. What luck to start 2025 with such a beautiful and understated bang—Near Distance would have been a one sitting read for me had life not interrupted.

Cover design by Fiachra McCarthy.

Old Romantics by Maggie Armstrong

If you read our holiday Bibliophile, you may remember I’m a short story superfan. I won’t wax poetic about the form again, but you need to know that Old Romantics is a remarkably good story collection made even more remarkable by the fact that it’s debut. From the very first story, Maggie Armstrong made me laugh out loud in recognition (I mean we’ve all either been someone or known someone whose terrible boyfriend wouldn’t even chip in for a slice of pizza, right?) Witty and wry, the stories offer a distinctly literary and nuanced take on the popular “sad girl” genre. As I read through, I recognized shades of Fleabag and Halle Butler in the character variations. And impressively, while the stories stand alone taken together they are “a novel in stories” about an artist’s growth and maturity. Every character’s name is an alternative form of “Maggie,” and the reader gets the sense they’re watching the author grapple with Irish patriarchy and history in real time. When you pick up Old Romantics you’re not only picking up a very good book—you get to enjoy the next great voice in Irish literature.

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Dan’s Picks

 

Cover design by Ingrid Paulson.

I’m no more able to tell you what my favourite books for 2025 will be than I was able to declare my favourites from the past year. This is complicated further by the fact that the 2025 list is still taking shape. We’re still reading in the hopes of locating an international title or two for fall, and there are a handful of Canadian titles that may or may not be ready in time for the latter part of the 2025 season. And we have at least one title that we’re not in a position to announce anything about quite yet, though I promise it will stir things up something fierce.

What I can promise is a list that rivals all others before it, brimming with exceptional works of short fiction and novels and poetry and translations and history and cultural and social criticism, our yearly Best Canadian anthologies, and seasonal ghost stories (with a special addition in that department, to be revealed at a later date). It’s a heady mix of the new and familiar. As difficult as it is for me, I won’t repeat anything about the titles that others have highlighted above (except to say that there isn’t a person reading this who shouldn’t have Jón Kalman Stéfansson’s Heaven and Hell high on their to-be-read list: this series, of which this is only the introductory volume, is one of the great modern classics by my estimation, finally available here for the first time). But there are a few forthcoming titles from this fall that most staff haven’t had the opportunity to read quite yet. These include Russell Smith’s long-awaited and quite savagely propulsive new novel Self Care, about a young woman who gets involved, against her better judgement, with an incel; there’s a meditation on the spirit of sport in a new Field Note, On Sports, by David Macfarlane, that captures well my own ambivalence about what has long been one of my very favourite things; there’s a new work of memoir/cultural investigation by Elaine Dewar, tentatively titled Growing Up Oblivious in Mississippi North, about which I should say little else for now; and an important, timely, and moving investigation into the lives of migrant workers in Canada in Marcello Di Cintio’s Precarious. With, as I said, more to come.

Cover design by Kate Sinclair.

The best way to ensure that you don’t miss any of these publications is to either pre-order them from your favourite independent (it’s so easy to do, especially with those shops that use the Bookmanager interface), or to take out a subscription directly from the press: we have several options available, that cover all aspects of our list. There’s no better way to ensure that independent publishers can continue to do the work that we do in this increasingly precarious time.

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In good publicity news:

The Bibliophile: We all went over our assigned word count

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In lieu of an intro: in which we pick our favourite books of the year!

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Vanessa’s Picks

It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time may end up being the title of my publishing memoir—this would be an entry in the Act of Ignorant Enthusiasm subgenre that arises from the publication of Dan’s publishing memoir of that name, should we ever find the time to write books—and it’s what I thought when Ashley reminded us we’d agreed we’d all write about our favourite books of the year. How to choose, let alone remember what we’ve spent the last year doing, when my tasks today include the layout for a book that’s coming out in June and compiling a list of the titles we’ll be publishing between September 2025 and March 2026. The truth is that I can’t pick: they’re all good books, and I learned something from each of them, and so in lieu of the usual year-end list, I humbly present: my 2024 Weird Production Superlatives List.

Photo: The Hollow Beast by Christophe Bernard (trans. by Lazer Lederhendler), May Our Joy Endure by Kev Lambert (trans. by Donald Winkler) and Barfly by Michael Lista.

The Book with the Best First Round Cover Comps: The Hollow Beast by Christophe Bernard, translated from the French by Lazer Lederhendler

The Hollow Beast was the first book we did with Jason Arias, who received as a main objective: “Darkly comic adventure: screwball comedy with menace, a la Don Quioxte meets Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Or Thomas Pynchon done by Looney Tunes.” Jason clearly got the assignment, and it was one of those too-hard-to-choose just one, but eventually we made up our minds. (And Jason would go on to repeat this feat several more times for 2024 titles.)

The Book That Wore It Best, Typeface Edition: Barfly and Other Poems by Michael Lista

I had a tremendously good time in getting to both edit and design (aka: pulling a Steeves) Michael Lista’s long-awaited third collection. It’s typeset in Dante, an old-style serif named for its first use in an edition of Boccaccio’s Life of Dante. Featuring a weary 21st-century traveller beset by torments (buzzing flies, cultural apparatchiks, “belated Anglo-Saxon set on farms,” Anne Carson everywhere!), it’s a ruthless collection, no less so by virtue of the savage wit executed in Lista’s version of terza rima, which is not terza rima at all, but an irregular couplet that wanders and snaps shut like a trap.

The Book with the Best Second Round Cover Comps: May Our Joy Endure by Kevin Lambert, translated from the French by Donald Winkler

I didn’t have to think . . . well, at all about who to send this one to: the amazing Zoe Norvell had already knocked it out of the park with Lambert’s first two books. May Our Joy Endure is a radical departure for Lambert, featuring violence of an entirely different order: the insidious, often beautiful brutality of privilege and extreme wealth. We were slightly stumped on the first round, though Zoe landed on the typeface, Carol Gothic, which she said was inspired by Saltburn. The key: the baroque cover of Lambert-influence Michel Houellebecq’s Serotonin, which reminded us of historical markers of wealth, which Zoe made fresh with what is now a signature Lambert neon yellow.

Photo: Question Authority by Mark Kingwell and The Pages of the Sea by Anne Hawk.

The Book I Barely Touched But Can’t Stop Talking About: The Pages of the Sea by Anne Hawk

We shared the text files with Weatherglass, the UK publisher, and our new friend Kate Sinclair gave us that gorgeous cover in a quick second round revision, and I didn’t have to do much other than send it to print. Which has left me free to pitch this book to everyone who will listen: if you like Marilynne Robinson or Zora Neale Hurston, coming-of-age stories or novels of manners, historical fiction about untold lives, Caribbean literature, debut work, or books by brilliant Black voices, this one is for you.

The Book I Think About Every Day, and Not Because I’m Flashing Back to Typesetting 400pp In a Single Day: Question Authority: A Polemic about Trust in Five Meditations by Mark Kingwell

You know those books that split your life into Before and After? This is one of mine. How lucky am I, this and every year, that it’s my job to help make books like these and help to put them in your hands.

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Ashley’s Picks

Photo: Crosses in the Sky by Mark Bourrie and Love Novel by Ivana Sajko (trans. Mima Simić.

Love Novel by Ivana Sajko, translated by Mima Simić

Our first title of 2024 was this delightfully acerbic book—short and far from sweet, like a literary sour candy. I read it in an hour on the train while, rather amusingly, sitting across from someone reading a romance. Talk about two very different kinds of love novels! I was drawn in by the tension surrounding this unnamed couple, lovers turned new parents, caught in the deeply unfortunate circumstances of having failing careers in an increasingly unlivable society: rent is past due, they’re scrabbling for odd jobs in theaters and papers, and neither can manage to connect with the other the right way. The emotion of this story was surprisingly relatable in parts, and I’ve found myself going back to it several times this year. This Love Novel may not have a happily-ever-after, but it’s the kind of punch-in-the-jaw book that will linger with you.

Crosses in the Sky: Jean de Brébeuf and the Destruction of Huronia by Mark Bourrie

As a big history reader, Crosses in the Sky was on my TBR list from the beginning—I then had the pleasure of acting as publicist, so I shall try to keep this piece relatively impartial! What a history this is. Told in a narrative style and utilizing contemporary writings, interspersed with maps and artwork from across the centuries, Crosses in the Sky is the story of how and why the Jesuits came to “New France,” what happened when they arrived, and how these encounters have shaped settler relationships with Indigenous people to this day. I was only vaguely familiar with the story of Jean de Brébeuf, at least the bare bones of his unfortunate end, so I really enjoyed being able to dive into the full story and especially the historical context of Brébeuf’s mission and the Indigenous people who very often get overlooked when this “legend” is told.

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Emily’s Picks

Photo: A Way to Be Happy by Caroline Adderson and A Case of Matricide by Graeme Macrae Burnet.

A Way to Be Happy by Caroline Adderson

Loving short stories is almost a guaranteed way to get your heart broken when you work in sales. I’ve been a lifetime lover of this genre that suits my busy brain perfectly. What’s better than a skillfully constructed piece of art you can devour before your head hits the pillow or the ice melts in your glass? So it was especially delightful to start at a press this year where the short story is celebrated and sought after. Caroline Adderson’s A Way to Be Happy was the first story collection I got to read as part of Biblioasis, and it is special. I had never read Adderson before, and was immediately embarrassed I hadn’t read her sooner. She is so obviously a master of her craft. Each story, though varied in time, place, and theme, has a core of empathetic observation. Whether she is writing about people you might avoid eye contact with on the subway, or the inmates of a 19th century asylum, she sketches her characters with a generosity of spirit and humor that shades her darker stories with hints of light. It was a pleasure to “discover” an author I should have known long ago.

A Case of Matricide by Graeme Macrae Burnet

I’m not a mystery reader, per se, but I love a good puzzle, a police procedural, and a tormented main character. While I had read Graeme Macrae Burnet’s books before, I had never read any of his books starring Inspector Gorski until I picked up A Case of Matricide. Gorski seems like a fairly average bumbling small town police inspector at first glance. He’s tired of the social constraints that have kept him where he is, and is in firm denial about his worsening alcoholism. He is also tormented by guilt over a trivial childhood transgression involving his mother’s mustard spoon, and its absence from her table condiment set presses heavily on his conscience to an alarming degree. The cycle of investigations, mustard spoon obsession, too many aperitifs and Friday night dinners crescendo to a reveal so shocking I yelped “what?,” and immediately had to reread a few pages. Throughout the whole story, Burnet expertly weaves in the meta threads he has made his signature. What if this whole story is the found manuscript of an author in the story who is a stand-in for the actual author of the story? And what if it’s a translation? How can we possibly trust the unreliable narrator who is writing and the character who is conveying his thoughts to us, the reader? The answer is never completely clear, but it’s a lot of fun to puzzle out.

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Ahmed’s Pick

Photo: Your Absence Is Darkness by Jón Kalman Stefánsson (trans. Philip Roughton).

Your Absence Is Darkness by Jón Kalman Stefánsson, translated from the Icelandic by Philip Roughton

The first Stefánsson I’ve read and one that I’ll prattle on about to anyone who’ll listen. It felt like a dream. A man wakes up in a church with no memory of who he is let alone how he got there with a mysterious man who could be Death or the Devil. I was absorbed from the start. Trying to understand himself, the narrator winds up with a large cast of characters who love deeply in a cold, small part of Iceland where everyone is connected and haunted by their pasts. Stefánsson is able to make you care for every one of them. We move through lives across generations and everyone’s story is so beautifully realized. Reading it felt like I was discovering this strange and wonderful thing and I wanted to stay for as long as I could. But what really gets me about this book is the music throughout it, which unites them and shapes the story. Stefánsson has written a ballad as a novel.

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Dominique’s Picks

Photo: Comrade Papa by GauZ’ (trans. Frank Wynne) and Sorry About the Fire by Colleen Coco Collins.

Sorry About the Fire: Poems by Colleen Coco Collins

This is a startlingly good collection, head-and-shoulders above most recent poetry because it does more than simply put words to use, but actually revels in the strangeness of language. Words from the book will suddenly appear to me while I’m doing mundane tasks like washing the dishes—words like haustoria, dehiscence, weft . . . And I love that these poems encourage a thousand slow re-readings to disinter their thousand possible musics. I read almost one hundred poetry collections this year, and nobody writes like Collins.

Comrade Papa by GauZ’, translated from the French by Frank Wynne

Somehow, I hadn’t heard of GauZ’ before starting work at Biblioasis, but the first few chapters of Comrade Papa immediately felt like a revelation to me. As soon as I finished it, I picked up Standing Heavy. And I intend to read these in their original French because, as someone who’s tried her hand at French to English translation a number of times, Frank Wynne’s talent for transcribing style seems inexplicable—I’m so curious to know what Anouman’s malapropisms (“the lumpenproletariat,” “the retching of the earth,” etc.) are like in their original French. Anyone who isn’t reading GauZ’ (and Frank Wynne) are seriously missing out.

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Dan’s Picks

Photo: The entire Biblioasis 2024 books list.

A decade or so ago, Mark Medley expressed exasperation in the Globe and Mail over my general enthusiasm for our list, writing that “in almost a decade writing about the Canadian industry, [he’d] never met a publisher so convinced of the greatness of their every book; [he’d] grown exasperated with [me] more than once when [I] told [him] that the slate of books the company was about to publish was the “best” [we’d] ever produced.” It seems, Medley claimed, I say the same thing every year.

Perhaps this is true, and perhaps this is true because our list has gotten better every year. Though I fear every year might be the high-water mark, and that there may be no way to continue to sustain what we’ve cobbled together, somehow, with the help of Vanessa and John and everyone else who makes Biblioasis what it is, we pull it off. One of the lessons of this year is that publishing is hard; and, harder to accept than that, that it will always be so; but another is that there’s reason to be constantly hopeful. Despite appearances, we’re nothing if we’re not eternal optimists.

The problem with putting together a year-end list of my favourite books is that, as Mark suggests, most of our books are, in fact, favourites. And never has there been a year where this is more the case. I loved Ivana Sajko’s Love Novel (translated by Mima Simić) for the way that it burned, furious, at the injustices of the world, the only things keeping me from suffocating its life-giving humour and compassion; I loved Alex Pugsley’s The Education of Aubrey McKee for its playfulness and the way that he blended forms in this funny, moving, brilliantly-timed coming-of-age novel; discovering the work of Jón Kalman Stefánsson in Philip Roughton’s masterful translations has been a revelation that has subtly shifted my relationship to word and world, with the exceptional Your Absence Is Darkness only the first of many books by this Icelandic author you’re going to be seeing on our list over the coming years: in a world that continues to shift darker, his words bring much-needed light. I took great pleasure in Richard Kelly Kemick’s inventive horseplay in Hello, Horse; immense joy from Donald Winkler’s fine translation of Kev Lambert’s brilliant third novel, May Our Joy Endure; and was made very happy indeed to finally be able to work with Caroline Adderson on a very fine new collection of stories, A Way to Be Happy. And then, to round out the year, there was Graeme Macrae Burnet’s subtly sideways A Case of Matricide, which has left me feeling shadowed by my own Gorski-like doppelganger all year. And that’s just (most of!) our fiction list!

Our list is not just getting better; it’s also getting broader. One of the things I am most proud of as a publisher is the breadth of our list, that the best fiction and nonfiction rub shoulders almost every month. The past year showed this as well as any year in our history, with Mark Bourrie’s National Bestseller Crosses in the Sky continuing its stylish reconsideration of the history of first contact in Canada; Roly Allen’s The Notebook forcing us to come to terms with the way the smallest, most unsuspecting of inventions has radically helped to reshape the world and how we relate to it; Mark Kingwell’s Question Authority, his most ambitious work of philosophical analysis, by my reckoning, in decades, offering possible remedies for our current addiction to conviction, and a reminder that it’s often in our shared vulnerabilities that we find most strength; and Bruce Whiteman’s Work to Be Done shows him to be one of our most perceptive and elegant critics.

And I haven’t even talked about our poetry list, the Best Canadian series, or the Christmas Ghost Stories (which are celebrating their tenth anniversary this year!). Though, backlist being a fiction, there’s time (despite the end of my allotted word count) yet: if I’m going to make an early New Year’s resolution, as a reader and publisher, it’s to be less prone to the pressures of what’s new and hyped: expect a lot more, in future Bibliophiles, dwelling on the riches of the past, which are as new to you, if you’ve not had the pleasure of reading them yet, as anything else will be.

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In good publicity news:

The Bibliophile: Holiday Haunting

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10 Years of Seth’s Christmas Ghost Stories

Ten years ago, Biblioasis partnered with world-renowned cartoonist Seth to resurrect the Victorian tradition of telling ghostly tales during those dark winter nights around Christmas time. Beginning in 2015 with The Signalman, by (who else?) Charles Dickens, and expanding through the years with stories from writers such as Shirley Jackson, M. R. James, and Arthur Conan Doyle, Seth has brought to life a series of beautifully selected and illustrated, pocket-sized volumes that’s grown into a beloved staple of many readers’ holidays. One of the perks of acting as publicist for this series every year is seeing the excited responses from readers and reviewers alike when they learn the newest trio has arrived.

Photo: The 2024 Christmas Ghost Stories illustrated by Seth include Podolo by L. P. Hartley, Captain Dalgety Returns by Laurence Whistler, and The Amethyst Cross by Mary Fitt.

The development of each of these little books spans several months: they’re chosen by Seth early on in the year, and then the text is dug up from online archives or, in some cases, transcribed from the pages of decades-old collections, by myself. Two of this year’s stories, Podolo and Captain Dalgety Returns, required permission from the authors’ estates, both of which were glad to see their loved ones’ works continue to find new homes. It’s a joy to get the chance to read these old stories, and working on the series has given me a renewed appreciation for the many different variations of horror, and also introduced me to works I likely never would have heard of otherwise. Gradually, the evocative illustrations are completed and the books expertly typeset by our managing editor, Vanessa, so that by the time late summer comes to an end, three new stories have joined the Haunted Bookshelf.

In celebration of the Christmas Ghost Stories anniversary, I had the opportunity to interview Seth, whose love of Victorian ghost stories and thoughts about the series after ten years we’d like to share here today. So pour yourself a cup of hot chocolate, settle in, and enjoy a little spookiness with your holiday cheer.

Ashley Van Elswyk,
Editorial Assistant

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A Biblioasis Interview with Seth

Photo: World-renowned cartoonist Seth, 2019. Credit: Samuel Sanchez.

Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol often comes up in relation to your Christmas Ghost Stories series, and I think that’s what most people go to first when they think of a Christmas ghost story. But where did your own interest in Victorian ghost stories come from? Have you always been drawn to them, or did you learn about the surrounding traditions and develop a fascination from there?

Y’know, it took me a while to even make that Christmas Carol connection myself. That story is so familiar now that it takes a moment to step back and see it, in a fresh light, as a ghost story rather than simply a redemption story. But, let’s put that aside because, clearly, the Christmas Carol has very little to do with my interest in the Victorian ghost story. Looking back, I really owe this interest to Edward Gorey. When I was a young cartoonist, just finding my way in the early 1980s, I had discovered several great cartoonists who were super famous but brand new to me at the age of twenty-one (or so). One of these was Edward Gorey and I adored his work (still do). So naturally I was purchasing anything of his I could find (or afford). One thing that crossed my path was a collection of Victorian ghost stories he’d edited and illustrated called The Haunted Looking Glass. The copy I found was remaindered in Edwards Bookstore (a long defunct but wonderful Toronto bookstore) for about a dollar. I bought it for the drawings and didn’t read it for a couple of years, but when I did read it I was quite frightened by the stories. I’m not kidding here. I read them at bedtime and I found a couple of them downright scary. Like, don’t go to the bathroom alone scary! This seems funny to me now because I don’t find too many of these old ghost stories all that frightening any longer. My appreciation of them is more complex than that nowadays. That said, a good creepy image is always essential to a good ghost story.

But anyway, after reading that book (with such limited knowledge of the history of the genre) I just kind of figured . . . “well, that’s all the Victorian Ghost Stories there are.” I moved on. A few years later I found another anthology, and then another, and in no time I realized I was looking actively for classic ghost stories, and that is when I started to dig around and learn the history and get a real scope of how many of these stories were written, and why they were written—to be read at Christmas! Today I understand that the genre is huge. We will never run out of wonderful old ghost stories.

So you’ve read a great number of classic ghost stories now, from England to Canada and beyond. What elements make a story stand out enough for you to select it for your series in particular?

Well, the most boring prerequisite for the series is length. It can’t be too long and it can’t be too short. Surprisingly, this removes a great number of excellent ghost stories. I often read a story and while reading it, pray earnestly that it is not going to turn out to be too long or too short. But setting aside that prosaic element, I will say that the number one thing I am looking for is atmosphere. I like a ghost story to be both eerie and cozy. This may sound like an odd combination but I think it is the essential quality of a classic ghost story. Modern horror tends to be more visceral. Often trying to be uncomfortable—or even aiming for the repugnant. It goes for the guts. I’m more tender-hearted, even a bit squeamish. I like the kind of story that merely sends a chill up the neck or even just elicits a feeling of immortal melancholy. The classic ghost story is related, somewhat, to the classic era of detective stories (think Agatha Christie). Those stories are not hard crime cases. They are not hard-hitting police procedurals. They are cozy crimes set in comfortable upper middle class dining rooms. There is some cross over with the old classic ghost stories. They are meant to unsettle . . . but not so much as to make you feel ill. I am generalizing here, I can immediately think of exceptions, E. F. Benson’s grosser tales for example, but for the most part what you are reading in a classic ghost story is an extension of the gothic tales of a century earlier. Stories about dark corridors and empty moors. Stories about dusty secret histories found in dusty libraries. Even in the more modern of these kinds of tales you will find that the locations may have changed (a country estate house might become a Canadian farm house) but the dark hallways and the fleeting figure are still there. At least in the stories I like and choose for the series.

Photo: An eerie scene from Podolo, illustrated by Seth.

Is there a story, or even a particular writer, you’ve really wanted to select for the series but haven’t been able to or had a chance yet? Perhaps one a little too recent, or too long, as you’ve mentioned?

There are dozens of stories I have x-ed off the list for those reasons (and others). Sometimes it’s a heartbreak. There was such a one by H. Russell Wakefield called “Blind Man’s Buff” that I found really chilling and perfect for the series . . . but far too short. Just a few pages. Recently there was a story by Edith Nesbit (if memory serves) that I liked quite a bit—very weird and moody—but it had some rather dated race-related writing in it, and while I am not about censoring the past, I decided to pass on it. This brings up a point. Should the past be cleaned up or suppressed when its values do not meet our current values? And the answer is obviously no. So, how do I square passing up this story? The answer is surprisingly easy. If I were doing a multi story volume I would have included it without much worry. However, when you select a story to stand alone in a single volume, you are placing a stronger focus on that story, and while not exactly giving these dated qualities a stamp-of-approval you are putting them out there with very little context and giving it centre stage . . . and that that gives me a little pause. To be honest, I wouldn’t have lost much sleep selecting this story—it was a minor quibble over a single reference to a dated bias—just enough to make you cringe—but not enough to make you put the book down as irredeemable. Still, for this format—why not simply pick a work that causes no such distress? I may still use one of her stories. “Man Sized in Marble” is an excellent ghost story.

Another reason for not picking something is availability. I really wanted a story by Robert Aickmann but I don’t think (again, if memory serves) a deal could be worked out with the estate. Bummer. Another criteria, they must be supernatural! Often, when reading a story I will be thinking, “here is a winner,” and then at the very end it turns out to be a Scooby-Doo (not a real ghost). What a let down. Story cancelled.

Finally, not just supernatural—but a ghost (or ghost-ish). So, no vampires, no werewolves, no mummies etc. !!!

Were the books always intended to be partially illustrated the way they are, or, given your extensive work in comics and graphic novels, did you ever consider fully illustrating the short stories at any point?

I never considered fully illustrating these books like a graphic novel. Not because it wouldn’t work (it certainly could) but mostly because of two simple reasons. One—I don’t want that much of myself front and centre in these books. I want the stories to live inside their own reality. In other words, my own style would get in the way for the reader who is imagining things themselves when they read it. The way it was meant to be. This is essentially why I try never to draw any of the characters from the stories and, if possible, I only hint at the ghost itself. I think these elements should be supplied by the reader’s imagination. As the series has gone along I have tried, more and more, to simply supply decorative drawings of the locations of the events in the story. And little else. The second reason, two—drawing a comic version of anything is very laborious and takes a lot of time and effort. Instead of three little ghost books each year you’d end up with one every four years (if you are drawing comics at my pace!). It just isn’t realistic for me. Ultimately, even setting aside the time concerns I think these little books work best when they are minimally decorated. I don’t want the drawings to intrude—I try to not even draw events from the story—I only wish to stimulate the imagination—not supersede it.

Could you talk a little more about your illustrative process? For example, what goes into deciding which scenes to illustrate, or how you choose which elements or settings are the best fit for one of the iconic covers?

It’s pretty straight-forward at this point. In the earliest volumes of the series I struggled a little more with what to draw. Mostly because I was trying, for a few books, to illustrate the story. I don’t do that any longer. As I mentioned before—I’m only setting the stage for the ghost tale now. So, when I read the story I list the places the story occurs. If there is more than one location, I try to draw them all. Ideally, you have four spreads, each with a different place that shows up in the story. Sometimes that’s not possible because the setting is more limited so I’ll have to improvise a bit. Maybe an exterior shot and an interior shot and then a couple of evocative images—say an important detail—like a window the character peers out of. Something. Anything but simply illustrating an event in the story. The key thing is, while reading the story, I try to pick up on a few evocative images but nothing that is crucial. Mostly landscapes. Occasionally objects. Never the main characters. Almost never the ghost (though sometimes you can’t avoid drawing the ghost!). With the landscapes I try to keep them mundane . . . but also to infuse them with a little bit of creepiness. Mostly this is done by giving a cloudy sky or by the mere emptiness of the scene.

Photo: Aftermath of a fright in Captain Dalgety Returns, illustrated by Seth.

For the covers I have a slightly different approach. Here I am less worried about being literal. The covers are often very literal. The Amethyst Cross has an amethyst cross on it. The House By the Poppy Field has a house by a poppy field. The Sundial shows a sundial. Now, obviously, they don’t all work out so nicely and simply. Sometimes you have to search for an image—for example Podolo has a kind of cat demon icon for the cover. It is entirely unliteral (no such image occurs in the story) but I am trying merely to capture a flavour or tone of the book and sometimes you have to root around to find something that grabs. This “grabbing,” of course, is the main graphic element of these little covers. They have to be iconic (because they are tiny books) and they have to be punchy so as to grab the eye and make you look at them. I try to keep them as brightly coloured and dead simple in design as possible. Like a matchbook cover. Bold, uncluttered, and clean. Also, and this is my own concern, I don’t want them to look like the covers of almost all ghost books from the past. In other words, I don’t want fussy drawings that suggest old steel engravings. Most ghost story illustration goes that route. So, for me, I lean into my own style but also make it as perfectly clean and crisp as I can. Doing, in my opinion, the opposite of what is expected of a ghost story image.

What’s surprised you the most about the series, as you celebrate its tenth anniversary? It’s been featured in publications from the Globe and Mail to the Washington Post, and every year we hear from people who have now taken to reading them at Christmas with their loved ones. Did you ever imagine it would grow to be as beloved a tradition (again!) as it is today?

As always, sitting here in my basement studio, I feel rather detached from whatever I do once it goes out into the world. Even reading reviews or reader’s opinions doesn’t connect somehow. I suspect this is because I am aware that the life of a book (or a series) is usually something the creator or editor (or whatever) never gets to know. What I mean by this is that most of the readers will have a private experience with the work and never put out a “report” that you can read. I know, for myself, that the books and films and comics and paintings I love most in the world are a private experience. I haven’t spent any time reviewing them on Goodreads or writing blogs about them. The authors (should they be living) would never know how much pleasure they have given me. So, I take it upon routine that I will never know who really felt what about anything I am working on. Not in the true sense. But, to try and answer your question—the thing that has surprised me the most is simply that ten years have gone by (in a flash) and that there are more than twenty of these little books now. That makes me happy. I like to see them piling up.

And finally, do you have a favorite ghost story out of all the ones you’ve selected for the series so far?

That’s a tricky question. I like different stories for different reasons.

I’m fond of The Toll House because I find it quite scary. I like The Apple Tree because it is uncomfortable. I like Morgan Trust because it is so charming. As you can see I could probably give a little reason for every selection of why they might be a favourite. I guess, if I had to pick I would select The Story of a Disappearance and an Appearance by M.R. James. Selecting James is a no-brainer since he is generally considered the ne plus ultra of ghost story writers . . . but I like this one so much because it is very odd and has, at its centre, an ugly dream that is very effective. One of those perfect stories that works best in the mind of the reader and would probably fail as a movie because you’d ruin it by nailing the imagery down too clearly. It’s creepy.

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Subscriptions update!

A late arrival to the subscription box offerings is here: the inaugural Choose-Your-Own Club! For the reader who’s firmly decisive, can’t be constrained to one genre, and doesn’t need any more surprises. Pick any five Biblioasis titles you want from our 2025 list—for yourself, or as a gift for a loved one.

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20 Stores for 20 Years: Mac’s Backs-Books on Coventry

Photo: The welcoming storefront of Mac’s Backs Books

A book lover’s dream, Mac’s Backs-Books on Coventry is located in Cleveland where they boast three floors of new and used books. They are truly a community book store, and offer a free meeting space to local organizations. Learn more about what our publisher Dan appreciates about Mac’s Backs-Books and bookseller extraordinaire Grace Harper, and why Grace chose A Ghost in the Throat as her top Biblioasis pick.

Dan on Mac’s Backs-Books on Coventry: “Though Cleveland is only a few hours from Windsor, I’ve only been a couple of times, and on neither occasion had the chance to hit a bookstore, Mac’s Backs or otherwise. But if I am to judge a bookstore by the quality of its booksellers—as we should: bookstores are only as good as the booksellers who work in them—then Mac’s Backs-Books on Coventry must be in the top ranks. Our main contact there has always been Grace Harper, who is a super-reader, ranging widely across almost every conceivable genre, and writes with the insight of the most generous readers and critics. Last year, she made the trip to Windsor to see our own store; we’ll soon have to return the favour!”

Why Grace Harper thinks A Ghost in the Throat deserves a spot on your TBR list: “This is a female text.” This declaration is stated and restated throughout Doirann Ní Ghríofa’s fierce treatise. The focus is a poem by eighteenth-century Irish noblewoman Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, who, on discovering that her husband had been murdered, drank handfuls of his blood, then wrote an epic lament about him. Part memoir, part historical fiction, part literary criticism, the book relates Ní Ghríofa’s obsessive quest to find out about this remarkable woman. Between changing diapers, nursing, cooking, and laundry, she researches, translates, and writes. Little is known of Ní Chonaill’s life, so Ní Ghríofa is left to imagine, to dream, to speculate, and to invent her character. In the process, she finds a kindred spirit, one whose pain flows like her own mother’s milk. The poem, a banshee’s wail of anger and deep sorrow, is printed in its entirety. This achingly personal book will stay with the reader long after the last page is turned.”

Photo: Bookseller Grace Harper holds her Biblioasis pick, A Ghost in the Throat.

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In good publicity news:

The Bibliophile: A Good Short Story

/in , /by

Want to get new excerpts, musings, and more from The Bibliophile right away? Sign up for our weekly online newsletter here!

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The make-up of Best Canadian Stories 2025

“What makes for a good short story?” So asks this year’s editor Steven W. Beattie, in the opening lines of his introduction to Best Canadian Stories 2025. It’s a tough question, even for someone who’s been entrenched in short stories from all kinds of print and online publications for the better part of a year. Is a good story technically brilliant? Poignant? Does it make you feel strongly, laugh or cry? Is it a story you read over and over again without really knowing why, but goodness, just starting it one more time still fills you with anticipation, and leaves you thinking, wow. For my own part, despite several years of assisting with the production of these books, and my own forays into short story writing with varying success, I don’t have a clue how to definitively answer that kind of question. At the very least, however, I do know what makes for making an anthology of short stories.

Photo: Best Canadian Stories 2025 selected by Steven W. Beattie.

The role of editor for these anthologies is not one I envy, but the process of watching them come together piece by piece over the course of several months, slowly and then in something like a torrent as production moves forward, is kind of magical. There is, of course, the harvesting of all of these wonderful online and print publications—and here I’ll say to those editors who would like their journals or magazines to be considered: please send issues! (Apologies to those reading who have already endured frequent follow-ups.) The deployment of acceptances to writers is almost always the nicest part of this process, whether they’ve been included before, like our pals Kate Cayley and Mark Jarman, or are new to the series, like Cody Caetano or Kawai Shen.

I’ve read their stories many times during the course of selection: thumbing quickly through the pages as journals arrive at our office, then as they come to me again in Word Docs, and PDFs from excited contributors, and again through several rounds of proofing, until finally, I get to read them in their final form as a finished book that now has a place on my own shelf at home. There is a dazzling range of short fiction represented in these pages—Saad Omar Khan’s “The Paper Birch,” a story of a young boy’s belief and determination to help cure his sister’s cancer; or “Couples’ Therapy,” Christine Birbalsingh’s vignette of a woman whose couples’ therapy session goes frustratingly wrong; or “Funny Story,” Liz Stewart’s non-stop comedic trip to the hospital resulting from an unfortunate bedroom incident. The one I’ve chosen here today is Glenna Turnbull’s “Because We Buy Oat Milk.” I can’t say I know what exactly a “good short story” is, but I can say without a doubt that I’ll be enjoying each of these stories many more times in the years to come, as I have with all of our past BCS anthologies.

And I would be a terrible editorial assistant if I didn’t add that BCS comes in a delightful bundle with the other anthologies, a perfect gift for the literary-minded!

Ashley Van Elswyk,
Editorial Assistant

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Because We Buy Oat Milk

Glenna Turnbull

Each morning starts with a cup of coffee, because who can function without that first hit of caffeine—but not too much caffeine so just a half-caf latte for me that I make at home because it’s cheaper and doesn’t create more waste with those takeout single-use cups, and not with cow’s milk because cow’s milk was meant for baby cows, that’s what Eric says, and never almond milk, because, well, Eric is convinced the almond milk industry is run by the mafia and uses too much water—water that Eric would rather secretly snake out when nobody is looking, late at night in well-hidden hoses that slither into the cedar hedges they tell you never to plant in the Okanagan because of the drought and the fires that rage here—fire season, heat domes, we are doomed, but especially doomed if we put cow’s milk in our coffee so we only buy oat milk because mares eat oats and goats eat oats and little lambs eat ivy and the ivy grows up on the side of the house, its tendrils gripping on for dear life but Eric says it will crumble the bricks if we leave it but we can’t kill it because its leaves are filters for all the carbon monoxide we are producing, the greenhouse gases which have very little to do with the greenhouse Eric built in the backyard which then became my job to tend, to make sure the bugs don’t get in and if they do then I have to kill them because it’s okay to kill the bad bugs just not the good bugs and then everything gets watered with more of the water we’re not supposed to be using but it’s okay, because if we grow stuff in our yard then we aren’t contributing to the greenhouse gas problem by having to drive to the store. Except to buy oat milk. We don’t grow oats.

Eric leaves for work like he does every weekday at ten to seven in the morning in his orange Ford pickup truck and I don’t point out the amount of carbon monoxide he puts into the air as he lets it sit idling in the driveway for five minutes to warm the engine up or that the truck burns oil or that rust really isn’t orange at all but more of a brown colour, brown like the leaves that the house-eating ivy turned after the heat dome we had last summer, or maybe it was the wildfire smoke, so thick we couldn’t see the houses half a block away, that made its colour change, and I had to keep the kids indoors, letting them play on the computer or build things with Legos as they watched television so they wouldn’t be breathing that brown into their lungs—lungs already strained from wearing masks in school all year long—well, that Ethan and Emma had to wear but not Ellie because I kept Ellie home with me as Eric said she didn’t really need to go to kindergarten, that I could teach her way more at home and he didn’t want her first experience of school to be scary, with everyone hidden so only their eyes showed what they were thinking, which I actually kind of liked in a way because it is harder for most people to lie with their eyes than it is with the rest of their face. I try to always believe what I’m saying is really true and make sure my eyes remain fixed straight ahead as I talk but not too fixed because if I stare back too hard, then Eric will know if I’m lying, right?

Ellie started grade one this fall and with the cost of food and the interest rates climbing faster and higher than the house-swallowing ivy, Eric says I need to go back to work full-time because really, how long does it actually take to do bookkeeping for my few remaining clients since Covid coughed up the rest of their businesses like a giant hairball and what else do I do all day but run errands and make meals and go grocery shopping for oat milk and squish the bad bugs in the greenhouse? He thinks I do nothing because he came home from work early one day last spring sick with Covid and discovered I had the TV turned on while making supper so he is convinced I sit around the house all day watching soap operas but really it’s only General Hospital and I’ve been watching that since I was a child when I’d sit underneath my mother’s ironing board and she’d forget I was there and I learned about way more things than I would have if I’d been in kindergarten, things like affairs and passion and love and betrayal and how to lie without looking like you’re lying when you say things like, yes, I still love you, or I couldn’t be happier, or of course he’s your son! It’s also where I first learned about abortions.

Making lunches, no peanut butter for Ellie as someone in her class has a nut allergy, so I put in cucumbers and carrots from our greenhouse and yogurt from the same store we buy the oat milk from and not the soy yogurt that is so gross nobody will eat it, but the one with the catchy jingle in the commercials that play during General Hospital. Eric says it’s okay if there are still a few cows on the planet trapped working in the dairy industry, enough to make the cow’s-milk yogurt he likes which comes in the little plastic containers that kids eat with little plastic spoons that all get thrown in the garbage when they’re half-done because, really, who has time at their school to clean out all those little plastic containers and wash all those little plastic spoons and then haul them all to the recycling bin along with all the plastic bags everyone’s sandwiches came wrapped in, but it’s okay because we don’t have plastic straws anymore and Ellie, Ethan, and Emma can grow up teaching their children to only drink oat milk as they wander through the barren spaces where old-growth forest once stood on Vancouver Island, or the burnt black toothpick-like Okanagan woods that were once green, a different tone of green from the greenhouse-plant green or the ivy green or the greenhouse-gases green, a colour they might only read about in books if there are still books—oh please let there still be books!

Drive the kids to school because we’re too late to walk, pumping more exhaust into the air, then it’s time to walk Einstein—Einstein, who doesn’t live up to the potential of his name, because Eric said if we got a dog it simply had to be a doodle because, well, everyone else has doodles now as they don’t shed which makes them so much cleaner but you have no idea what happens when a doodle like Einstein sticks his head into the water dish and the hairs surrounding his muzzle soak up the liquid faster than a cannula pump, his fur like an old-fashioned wringer mop that hasn’t been wrung out so he leaves a trail of water across the kitchen floor like a greenhouse slug that has to be squashed, then I need to get out our Bee mop with its artificial sponge head to clean up but Eric says all this helps to keep our kitchen floor clean—Mr Clean, Lysol, Vim, all the cleaners lined up all neatly hunkered in their bunker in a trench under the sink, a little army in their plastic bottles full of chemicals and perfumes that mingle with the Downy Unstoppables poured into the laundry so our clothes stink like an old woman’s purse for weeks instead of only days because Eric likes to smell perfumy-clean, especially after standing out back behind the greenhouse smoking the cigarettes he thinks I don’t know about but I do because really, how can you sleep with someone and not smell the nicotine oozing out of every pore in his body when he sweats on top of you even when you say it isn’t a safe time and he needs to stop and that you really mean it, then you lay under the blankets and find you can’t sleep because your mind won’t stop thinking about the Brazilian rainforest or Fairy Creek or your extended family in Ukraine being blown up in their sleep or oil companies announcing record billion-dollar profits at the same time we’re told we aren’t reducing our carbon emissions enough to keep global warming under 1.5 degrees or the unwanted life that might be brewing in your belly and it’s sweltering in here because Eric has turned the mattress pad up to high and he is radiating nicotine-infused heat like the atomic waste they keep burying around the world created by all the clean energy nuclear power plants that aren’t really clean or leafy green at all, forging their power out on those long straight lines that span across the sky like lines on a musical staff or lines on a street, lines that get crossed, lines across a Covid test. Or a pregnancy test.

I caught Eric siphoning gas out of the old lawn mower because it’s now over two dollars a litre, and he got mad when I said it should cost even more so more people will park their cars and ride their bikes to work but not the electric bikes because Eric said they use child labour to make the batteries and here in North America our children can’t even pick up their toys, and if I step on one more piece of Lego I might just throw them all in the garbage or at least the recycling bin because they’re made of plastic but the recycling company says you can’t recycle plastic toys so what do you do with the unwanted Legos or the children who won’t pick them up and what do Americans do now that Roe v. Wade is gone and they can’t afford a fourth child?

Separate the whites from the colours but then add them in anyway because you know Eric gets upset if you waste energy running the washing machine when it’s not a full load and then climb back up the basement stairs, careful to watch for Einstein’s water marks and navigate the small pieces of Lego that wait like bees to sting your feet except the bees are disappearing, and what will pollinate the fruit trees so heavily sprayed with pesticide for codling moths and aphids and leaf curlers, hair curlers, curling irons, ironing board, soap operas, lying, lying with my eyes to Eric when he asked this morning if my period came yet.

O Canada, our home and native land, Native land, Native, First Nation, residential schools and treaties and promises, here, have a blanket that wasn’t properly separated in the laundry to cut down on the washing bill, wrap your baby up tight and rock it to sleep, deep sleep, to sleep my baby, to sleep forever, my Canada, O Canada where I thankfully still have control over my body so when my doctor confirmed it was no bigger than a garden slug or small piece of Lego, I could choose.

At the Kelowna General Hospital, which is very different from General Hospital, I walk past the protesters who circle around and around outside its doors like privileged children who don’t have to pick up their toys, around and around like a merry-go-round, round and round the mulberry bush, each carrying signs that tell me I’m about to become a murderer and will burn in hell, pop goes the weasel, that Roe was a hoe and Wade, being a man, knew oh so much better, then I check into the same front desk that I checked into while in labour with each of my three kids before the elevator whisked us up to the third-floor delivery rooms but I don’t head to the delivery room today—instead, I go down a different hallway to the special area set aside for all of us careless flippant about-to-be murderesses who just went and got ourselves pregnant again because it’s always our fault it happens (didn’t you say no?), and I put on the robe that ties in the back (but did you really mean it?), and I want to leave my socks on because it’s cold in the room, but the nurse says they have to come off because somehow having warm feet might interfere with the ability of the cannula pump to suck this fetus out of me, this little Lego piece that doesn’t fit into our family plan, family planning we learned in high school—how to put condoms on bananas and how to say no, say it like you mean it, say it with your eyes, just say no, to just say no, to say, to just say. No!

I lie there patient as a cactus waiting for my turn to come around and I stare straight into her eyes as I tell the nurse yes, I have a lift home, because it’s not a complete lie—I don’t tell her I’m the driver and that I need this to be done in time to meet Ellie, Ethan, and Emma at the school gates with Einstein on his leash and a smile on my face as if everything is fine fine fine even if my eyes are bloodshot and I reek of sadness.

Back at home, I send Ethan out to the greenhouse to pick cucumbers and tomatoes and turn on General Hospital so my brain can switch off, my cramping body slumped across the couch and I listen as Ellie and Emma giggle upstairs sneaking pieces of their Halloween candy, and even though I keep thinking about the poison and chemicals they’re pouring into their little bodies, the artificially flavoured sugar that’s coloured with products I can’t even pronounce, I can’t seem to rally enough to stop them and it’s not until Einstein starts whining at the back door that I finally give in and begin to peel myself up off the sofa, the bulky blood-soaked pad between my legs feeling thick as a hotdog bun.

I swing my legs over the edge of the cushions and my foot comes hammering down onto a tiny piece of Lego no bigger than a small garden slug, and the full pain of the day takes over, thick as a blanket of forest fire smoke, swaddling me in brown, crumbling like a brick house, taking me down down down.

—from PRISM international

Glenna Turnbull’s short fiction has appeared in PRISM international, Riddle Fence, The New Quarterly, Cliterature, Luna Station Quarterly, and, once upon a time, in Room. She was shortlisted for the TNQ Peter Hinchcliffe award and earned an honourable mention. She was also shortlisted for EVENT’s Let Your Hair Down speculative fiction contest, and in 2023 won PRISM’s Jacob Zilber Short Fiction prize. Her non-fiction has appeared in HomeMakers, Reflex, the Same, and Okanagan Life and been read on CBC radio. She put herself through university by taking one course per semester while raising two boys as a self-employed single parent. She graduated from UBC Okanagan at the age of fifty with a BA majoring in English and creative writing. Glenna had a weekly column called Arts Seen that ran for more than a decade. She currently works as a freelance writer, photographer, and stained glass artist and lives in Kelowna, British Columbia, with her two dogs and grown children. Her story “Because We Buy Oat Milk” came spilling out of her one morning as she sat drinking coffee, listening to the CBC news, and worrying about the state of our planet. Her debut novel, Finding Sally’s Cove, is forthcoming with Breakwater Books.

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20 Stores for 20 Years: Upstart & Crow

We return to our 20th anniversary celebration of 20 independent stores that have supported us with Upstart & Crow, a dream of a bookstore on Granville Island. Not only thoughtful booksellers, the folks at Upstart & Crow also run a creative studio and literary incubator. Ian Gill, one of U&C’s founders, chose The Power of Story by Harold R. Johnson as the Biblioasis book that moved him the most, and our publisher Dan shared how Upstart and Crow inspires his own practices as a bookseller.

Photo: The book displays within Upstart and Crow’s bright and inviting interior.

Dan on Upstart & Crow: “I have owned my own bookstore for more than a quarter of a century and have ordered almost every single title that lines its shelves: I still walk through those doors expecting something unexpected that may change my life (& there often is). I’ve not yet had the pleasure of walking through Upstart & Crow’s doors, but I already have a sense of how transformative that will be: their commitment to literary community, to excellent books, to writers in translation, and to rethinking how a bookstore should be has been inspiring, and strengthens my hope for the future of bookselling in this country. I have nothing but respect and gratitude for Robyn, Zoe, Ian, and the rest of the U&C crew, and all of us at Biblioasis look forward to seeing where they take bookselling next.”

And here’s why Ian Gill thinks The Power of Story is a must-read: “Oh how I wish Harold R. Johnson hadn’t left us so early, how I wish I could be in conversation with him again, maybe this time around a campfire. Luckily, Harold bequeathed us The Power of Story, a campfire inspired meditation whose subtitle says it all: On Truth, the Trickster, and New Fictions for a New Era. It is first among many brilliant Biblioasis books that we carry at Upstart & Crow. To share it with others is a small but important way of keeping the conversation going. We miss you, Harold.”

Photo: Co-founder Ian Gill shows off his Biblioasis pick, The Power of Story: On Truth, the Trickster, and New Fiction for a New Era by Harold R. Johnson.

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For the Holidays…

Looking for your next great Biblioasis read? Struggling to pick the perfect gift for a book-loving loved one?

Then you’ll be thrilled to find out that our 2025 Subscription Club boxes are here! Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Translation, and Surprise—pick a box for yourself or as a gift to someone else, and choose your desired forthcoming titles (or be brave and let us make the choices!)

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In good publicity news:

The Bibliophile: Small (or Large) Machines

/in , /by

Want to get new excerpts, musings, and more from The Bibliophile right away? Sign up for our weekly online newsletter here!

***

Introducing Best Canadian Poetry 2025

It’s been a few years since it fell to me to send the acceptances for the three Best Canadian anthologies: Ashley Van Elswyk, our editorial assistant, has lately managed this massive and potentially unwieldy task with her usual good humour and organizational grace. But as I recall, the poets’ responses tended to be the most entertaining. These ranged from effusive thanks directed to the messenger, who truly deserved none—all credit to series editor Anita Lahey and our guest editors, who annually make the selections, buoyed by seemingly bottomless stores of enthusiasm and curiosity—to what amounted to gentle phishing accusations, so surprised are some writers to learn they’ve made the year’s list. I have certainly felt the same way on the receiving end of one of those magical emails dispatched from the mysterious island of editors: Who are you, really, and why are you subjecting me to such a cruel joke? Writing is failure, as a wise soul reminds us, but every now and then—annually, for at least fifty Canadian poets—maybe it isn’t, and readers of Best Canadian Poetry are the rich recipients of these successes.

Photo: A stack of the new Best Canadian Poetry 2025 selected by Aislinn Hunter, with longtime series editor Anita Lahey.

Occasionally a writer would ask me what it was we meant by “best,” or by “Canadian,” though I can’t remember a poet asking what we meant by “poetry.” I doubt this is because we each have an answer ready. It’s far more likely that we are glancing sideways at each other and hoping not to be asked, either because we haven’t a clue at the moment, or because we know precisely and with a fierce certainty we’d either be embarrassed to assert or afraid to argue for and fail to defend. On my brighter days I believe and happily insist that what poetry is is an attempt to understand what poetry is, and on my darker ones I lament the same. On my pedantic days, of which one is Friday, November 22, I am partial to the offerings of William Carlos Williams—“A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words”—and Robert Frost: “a momentary stay against confusion.” I like the Williams for the veneer of exactitude it undercuts at the same time it declares itself, how its metaphor invites extending. Small like a pencil sharpener, or like a really big humidifier? Large like Linotype, or like a particle accelerator? Yes, and yes, and yes and yes. Frost, of course, is Frostier: as the key turns in the sonnet’s lock, for at least that instant, something has tumbled into place.

Inevitably our BCP editors must face this question and its endless answers again and again as they compile their initial list of one hundred poems and meet over a period of months to discuss and refine that selection to just fifty. I don’t envy them their task—every poem, and every acknowledged answer, means another crossed off the list—yet those decisions yield yet another entryway, another place to stand. Having completed her selection for BCP25, Aislinn Hunter, this year’s guest editor, writes in her introduction:

I believe that poems behave like living things. They open and close, they shift and grow. Poetry’s essential elements move into us—letter and word shapes swimming past retinal neurons and along phonological and lexical routes, eventually meeting neurons and synapses that light up the forest / the temple / the mess hall of our brains. Language—poetry’s essence—changes our physiology, which is to say that a poem’s doing to us is as real as rain on skin. Of course, the power of the art we’re meeting matters, as does the state of alertness we’re in.

In our disembodied age, in which we are increasingly more likely to encounter one another as pixels than as people, what a beautifully embodied understanding of the ways that poems can do their work on us, can remind us how to slow and even stop, if only for a momentary stay.

And so, Dear Reader, I leave you with three of my favourites from this year’s edition: Molly Peacock’s “Honey Crisp,” Bertrand Bickersteth’s “A Poem about Black Boy’s Horse,” and “He/him” by Y.S. Lee. Each is accompanied by the poet’s biography and their comments on the making of the poem, a favourite feature among BCP readers old and new. I hope they’ll find you, wherever you are, and leave you feeling a little bit more real, open to yourself and to the world we share.

p.s. Books, I’m told, make great holiday gifts, especially ones that come price-bundled and beautifully wrapped in Ingrid Paulson’s superb Best Canadian Series design.

Vanessa Stauffer,
Managing Editor

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Honey Crisp

Molly Peacock

Hello wizenface, hello apple,
understudy in the fridge
since March (it’s September).
Hello wrinkly red cheeks,
I’ll bet you’re almost a year old,
born last autumn,
kept in the fruit storage built
half-underground on the farm,
then, in the snow, sold to me.
Hello my honey crisp (well,
my honey, no longer crisp . . .),
are you asking why you
haven’t been eaten by now?

Because that man hewed to his routines:
an apple for lunch every day,
the same red punctuation.
You were earmarked for the date
he slipped from my arms & we both
slid to the floor, red angel, are you
listening? 911, hospital, hospice,
and ten days later (you were
about six months old then),
he died and was carried
to a cold shelf.

Hello smiley-stem, hello days
moving you from spot to spot.
Hello week where I forgot
and left you at the back and
went about my new life.
Greetings new groceries!
Their jumble causes a re-
arrangement of your bin,
so I have to pick you up
—would you rather
have been eaten and
lived on as energy?
Not yet, not yet, my pomme.
Hello soft wrinkled
face in my palms.

—from The Walrus

Molly Peacock lives in Toronto and has published eight books of poems, including The Widow’s Crayon Box (W. W. Norton, 2024). She inaugurated The Best Canadian Poetry series in 2008 with Tightrope Books, editing it until 2017, and is delighted to return as a contributor. Peacock is also the author of two biographies of women artists, The Paper Garden (Emblem Editions, 2011) and Flower Diary (ECW Press, 2021), and the memoir Paradise, Piece by Piece (Riverhead, 1998).

Of “Honey Crisp,” Peacock writes, “After my husband died, I cried for twenty-eight days straight. On the twenty-ninth day, I woke without tears, picked up a blue mechanical pencil, and began to write the poems that would become The Widow’s Crayon Box. ‘Honey Crisp’ literally began when I walked to the refrigerator. There was my husband’s last apple—I couldn’t throw it out. In the back of my mind was William Blake, who spoke to a Tyger. Could I write a poem where I spoke to the apple, telling it what happened to my husband, reminding it of its origins, how I bought it, and why it would never be eaten? That idea could go very, very wrong! But widowhood made me fearless. I pulled out a purple pad (what other colour do widows use?) and drafted the poem. It amazed me that if I was simple and direct, like a seventeenth-century poet talking to an animal, I could infuse the poem with all I felt. P.S. The apple stayed in the fridge after the poem. I painted a watercolour of it. Then put it back. A long time after that, I buried the almost-dried apple with the geraniums in my balcony garden.”

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A Poem about Blackboy’s Horse

Bertrand Bickersteth

Boy’s horse stepped in a badger’s hole, lost her footing
and fell. Boy was flipped

in the air. His foot caught in the stirrup. He felt a pain
shoot through his ankle,

felt the inertia of his flight take over the topography, twist
westerly, still tilting to the east.

His body was a loose spigot pivoting around the fulcrum
of a meaningless ankle.

He felt his fingers slipping through her withers, felt the fear
of the horse rushing to the ground

above him. He couldn’t stop any of it. Couldn’t stop himself
from imagining the unknowable

impact or the whistle of weight to follow. He knew what was
coming. He knew the soil

he was headed for. Knew its knowledge. The chemistry of
its creativity: mildly gleysolic

chernozem, churning life and his livelihood as he knew it.
Knew it, too, as foreign, as far

from familiar as he was from family. He tried to imagine a family
but their image burst into the falling

air before him, before fading, as always, into the darkness
of dirt. Then came the weight

of sadness and the piercing pain of the forgone, unmentioned,
unmurmured, like that flash of green,

that patch of wild timothy whose individual blades know nothing
of their shared past,

know nothing of their sibling entanglement, nothing at all
of their intertwined roots

whose domain is the catacombs beneath the crust, whose action
is downward groping, like fingers of ancestry,

a blind quest in the sorrow of soil, forever fumbling, forever finicking
for the unknowable mother of darkness.

—from The Fiddlehead

Bertrand Bickersteth lives in Moh’kins’tsis (Calgary) in Treaty Seven. He is the author of The Response of Weeds (NeWest Press, 2020), which was the recipient of multiple awards, including the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and the Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry. He currently teaches at Olds College and is writing a collection of poems on Black cowboys.

Of “A Poem about Blackboy’s Horse,” Bickersteth writes, “After suffering from a year-long bout of writer’s block—brought on by the murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020—I eventually found my way back to writing through the topic of Black cowboys. I was struck by how iconic cowboys are to the west and yet how unknown the existence of Black cowboys is (yes, Black cowboys here in Canada). I began writing a series of poems fleshing out their histories and, for some reason, I became obsessed with the moment of death in one of their lives. John Ware, the most famous/unknown cowboy in Canada, died tragically, ironically, when his horse tripped and fell on top of him. I was compelled to write poems that repeated this moment from different vantages. I think knowing that our national awareness of Black cowboys was doomed to die, I wanted to hold on to him as long as I could, stubbornly pause everything in the moment before the end, desperately cling to that moment when his Black life still mattered.”

***

He / him

Y. S. Lee

At seventeen, you almost crashed the Firebird
on a road whose name we’ve long forgotten.
Flare of yellow in the headlights, then
you stood on the spongy brakes,
wrenched the wheel hard right. We lurched
into stillness, just shy of the ditch

In the minute afterward
engine ticking
cicadas silenced
you asked, Does life feel real to you now?
I think I laughed. I definitely thought
No

When you tell me your big news
it’s like that moment when the optometrist
flicks one final lever and the soggy letters
suddenly surface, bold and sleek
against a field of light. Oh,
there you are.

—from Grain

Y. S. Lee lives in Kingston, Ontario. She is the author of a poetry chapbook, Exit Permit (Anstruther Press, 2023), and a winner of Contemporary Verse 2’s Foster Poetry Prize. Her fiction includes the award-winning YA mystery series The Agency (Candlewick Press) and a forthcoming picture book, Mrs. Nobody (Groundwood Books).

Lee writes, “I wrote ‘He/him’ for my high-school bestie when he came out as a trans man. I was thrilled for him and wanted to celebrate his identity. Gender transition is sometimes seen as slow and arduous, but I also want to keep sight of what a triumph it is. Plus, he and I did our share of impulsive stuff as teens and I’m interested in how even dumbass near-disasters can offer moments of insight, if we pay attention.”

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20 Stores for 20 Years: Interabang

The second independent bookstore we’re celebrating as part of our “20 stores for 20 years” anniversary project is Interabang Books, located in Dallas, Texas. Lori Feathers, bookseller extraordinaire, chose the genre bending memoir A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa as her favorite Biblioasis pick, and our publisher Dan shared why he knew Lori would be an amazing advocate for our books from their first meeting.

Photo: The eye-catching front entrance of Interabang Books invites all to come in and browse for their next read.

Dan first met Lori at  the 2019 Winter Institute where she quickly became a vocal champion for Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport—and went on to champion many more of our books. Dan says, “I’ve met few other people as committed to the vocation of bookselling, and to independent publishing and literature in translation, as Lori. She’s fearless as a bookseller and literary critic; and as a champion of exceptional books, her enthusiasm and commitment knows no bounds and has resulted in some of my favourite literary things, including her podcast (with Sam Jordison) Across the Pond and her North American edition of The Republic of Consciousness Prize. I wasn’t surprised to learn that she’s also a dancer: she’s as nimble and elegant as they come.”

And here’s why Lori chose A Ghost in the Throat as her favorite Biblioasis book: “More than almost any other book that I’ve read in the past few years, Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s beautifully bewitching A Ghost in the Throat has stayed with me. In it a young, stay-at-home mother becomes obsessed with another woman, long deceased. Her muse is Eibhlín Dubh who, as a young mother herself, composed a legendary, 18th-century lament for her murdered husband, The Keen for Art O’Laoghaire. Although centuries and social class separate the two women, the narrator is irresistibly drawn to Dubh’s Keen. Ghost depicts the narrator’s quest to uncover the essence of Eibhlín Dubh from a history in which she has been silenced. This extraordinary book reclaims Dubh for posterity, reanimating her via Ní Ghríofa’s extraordinary and resonant writing.”

Photo: Lori Feathers posing with her Biblioasis pick, A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa.

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In good publicity news:

The Bibliophile: An Existential Tragedy

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Want to get new excerpts, musings, and more from The Bibliophile right away? Sign up for our weekly online newsletter here!

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Graeme Macrae Burnet’s A Case of Matricide

Graeme Macrae Burnet first came across my radar when his second novel, His Bloody Project, made the Booker shortlist in 2016. Though I picked up a copy at the time, I never did get around to reading it: one of the unexpected consequences of jumping from the frying pan of bookselling to the fire of publishing is that my reading life has become constrained almost exclusively to books that we’re considering and/or publishing. So when, in late 2021, I learned that Graeme had a new book forthcoming, I asked Sara Hunt, the very fine publisher at Saraband in Scotland, if I could see a copy. Case Study left me feeling as if I were trapped in some kind of askew, Hitchcockian universe: when I started reading, I was certain that what had been sent to me was a novel; but by the time I’d read the preface and part of the first notebook I had put the manuscript aside and starting Googling to see if Collins Braithewaite was in fact a real person. My initial searches confused me further, as there seemed to be indications that he was a now forgotten acolyte of R. D. Laing; and even when I finally determined that Collins Braithewaite was a fictional creation, I couldn’t shake the sense that the boundary between what was real and what was imagined had been made more permeable than it had heretofore been. I loved the book, put in an offer with the agent, and luckily for all of us got it: by the time we published it in November 2022, it had already been nominated for the Booker Prize and voted an IndieNext selection by booksellers in the US; that year it saw rave reviews in the New York Times (where it made the Times 100 list), Wall Street Journal, New Yorker and elsewhere, and it continues, now two years later, to discover new readers every week.

As we were preparing to publish Case Study I allowed myself to go back and read Graeme’s other three books (for research!), including His Bloody Project and his two Gorski installments: each was animated by the same intelligence, social and psychological insight, subversion of expectation (more on which, anon), and playful reshaping of genre. All are crime novels of a kind: in GMB’s literary world, the usual boundaries between fiction and fact, high and low culture, genre and literary work, tend to become meaningless. He asks a lot of his readers, I think, because he respects them so much: and one of his asks is that they put aside their usual preconceptions about what is and what isn’t literature and worth reading.

Photo: Graeme Macrae Burnet at Mysterious Bookshop in 2022. Pictured with His Bloody Project, Case Study, and the first two Inspector Gorski novels: The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau and The Accident on the A35.

A Case of Matricide is Graeme’s fifth novel and first since his Booker-nominated Case Study. Matricide is also the last novel in his trio of Simenon-inspired books exploring the life of the small-town provincial Inspector Georges Gorski. If in the first two novels, published by another press in North America, Gorski was a detective of promise and a certain acuity, he is in the current one increasingly a man undone: divorced from his high-class wife, living with his dementia-struck mother in a too-small apartment, and increasingly giving in to his thirst for an out-of-the-way bar’s dark corners. When a doppelganger of sorts shows up in his small town of Saint-Louis and begins tailing him, and then a long-time resident calls, convinced her son is about to murder her, and then an industrialist with likely criminal connections turns up dead of a suspected heart attack, Gorski tries to shake off his own entanglements and sense of complicity to pursue his hunch that these things are interconnected. But this attempt to reclaim agency proves impossible, resulting in an unexpected and tragic act, which forces Gorski to come to terms with the man he quite possibly has always been.

Though operating within the framework of a certain kind of genre novel, Burnet’s A Case of Matricide is much more of a literary existential tragedy. It’s as if Camus’s Meursault has been reborn as a late-20th-century provincial detective, undone by guilt and addiction. These Gorski police procedurals are used less to determine who-done-it and why, and more to explore questions of class, self-determination, and the ability of anyone to ever really escape their origins. Burnet also uses them to play a range of meta-fictional games in a way that will be familiar to readers of His Bloody Project and Case Study: for example, he purports to be not the book’s author but its translator (with the author listed as Raymond Brunet, an anagram of his own name); and that the books were written decades ago, only discovered after the suicide of the author, and only published after the author’s mother’s death (given the title of the novel, for quite obvious reasons). All of his previous books have been literary puzzles, and this one is no different: it took this reader weeks, over multiple readings, to untangle what was going on. Indeed, this process is still, nearly a year after first reading it, ongoing, and not just with me: I had a conversation last week with John Metcalf, one of the earliest readers of the book, where he started talking about it once again, explaining how Gorski’s story and what occurs within it continues to take on new shapes. When was the last time a crime novel, or any work of literature, did that for you?

In the final pages of Matricide, Burnet also subverts in a fashion I’ve never seen before the usual expectations of this kind of crime novel and how they are supposed to end, in a way that is both literarily and emotionally effective and much more reflective of the nature of power and the way that most of us, however we may view ourselves, tend to acquiesce to it. I don’t want to say any more than this, but I would love to know what readers think about this ending when they finish the final chapter.

GMB’s A Case of Matricide is certainly for lovers of intelligent crime fiction; but it will also appeal to those for whom crime fiction isn’t their usual bag. When Vanessa read Matricide, she mused aloud that perhaps she might really love crime fiction after all. I suspect that this isn’t the case: that what she loves is the work of Graeme Macrae Burnet. So do I; and so, if you give Matricide a chance (and though this isn’t the first Gorski book, and it may well be the last, I don’t think that they have to be read in order: and I’m not just saying that because the publisher of the first two books also publishes Melania Trump, Robert F Kennedy Jr, and Rand Paul!) may you.

To learn more, read this short interview conducted by Dominique Béchard with Graeme. And then go pick up a copy for your nearest independent. There are fewer better ways to spend a blustery November weekend.

Dan Wells,
Publisher

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Photo: Graeme Macrae Burnet, sweeping the competition at shuffleboard in Chicago during his Fall 2022 North American tour.

An Interview with Graeme Macrae Burnet

A Case of Matricide is undeniably a crime novel, but it might not be classified as a crime novel by voracious readers of the genre. How would you respond to the division (which is at least present in the North American market) between genre fiction and literary fiction?

I agree that A Case of Matricide is a crime novel (or that it at least wears the garb of a crime novel), but it is perhaps not a conventional one. Throughout the writing of the three books of the Gorski trilogy, I’ve been conscious of the fact that I am writing within the crime genre, but that I perhaps subvert the conventions of the genre or to some extent play with the expectations of the readers, such as the resolution of the crime or mystery. Normally in a crime novel the detective figure (who is to some extent a surrogate for the reader) moves from a position of not-knowing to knowing, but in these books we don’t always know much more than we did at the beginning. I’m more interested in the detective figure—Georges Gorski in this case—investigating himself and coming to know something about himself that he was not aware of at the outset. There is also the meta-fictional side of the novels (I pose as the translator of a fictional French author’s work), which is perhaps somewhat unusual in the crime genre.

In terms of the division between genre fiction and literary fiction, as a writer perhaps with one foot in both camps, I make no distinction whatsoever in terms of my writing practice. I put every bit as much work into the Gorski novels as I do into my ostensibly literary novels (His Bloody Project and Case Study). The Gorski novels are not potboilers for me (actually in financial terms, they’re quite the opposite), but a literary project that I have spent about eight years writing. Here in the UK, there is certainly something of a distinction between crime and literary fiction in terms of literary kudos, but I think that’s eroded a bit in recent years, and I’ve been gratified with the seriousness with which critics over here have treated A Case of Matricide. I think in Europe, there has always been less of a division. Perhaps this is due to writers like Georges Simenon, Friedrich Dürrenmatt and Josef Škvorecký, who brought some serious literary chops to the crime genre. The French existentialists, and later some of the directors of the French nouvelle vague, were also very enamoured by the American hard-boiled fiction of Chandler, Hammett and the like, so I think the distinction has always been more porous there.

Though A Case of Matricide more obviously wears the cloak of crime fiction than some of your other work, playing with (and subverting) the usual expectations of the form, crime is still central to your more literary work as well. His Bloody Project is built around a historical crime; and Case Study is a crime novel of another kind, in which a young woman is convinced that a psychotherapist persuaded her sister to commit suicide. Indeed, in some ways your literary work deals with more sensational crimes than your crime fiction itself does. What is the role of crime in your literary world, and how and why do you handle it differently in your two writerly modes?

I agree with you about His Bloody Project, although if pressed I would call it ‘a novel about a crime’ rather than a crime novel, as I don’t think it shares the structure of more generic crime fiction. Having said that it is certainly the book of mine in which a violent crime has the greatest centrality. I struggle to see Case Study as a crime novel at all. I don’t think it has a crime novel structure and if a crime has been committed (and we never really know if that’s the case), I don’t think it has the same importance, as the novel develops, as the murders in His Bloody Project.

As to the second part of your question, regardless of what genre I may or may not be writing in, I don’t see myself as having different writerly modes. I approach the material in exactly the same way, which is that I try to inhabit the mind of the central character as much as possible—to see the world from their point of view. The crimes in my books are of importance primarily in the impact they have on the characters involved. A crime, by its nature, is a dramatic or violent event, so it’s likely to have the effect of throwing the world of the characters off-kilter, of placing them in unfamiliar or uncomfortable situations. So perhaps that is my attraction to crimes: that they force the characters into a position where they have to question or challenge themselves. In relation to A Case of Matricide, perhaps what is unusual is that Gorski—a cop—continually feels ill-at-ease and sometimes powerless. What interests me are his mental processes—his angst, if you like—as he goes about his investigative work, rather than the results themselves.

You’ve previously mentioned that you care most about character, that this is at the forefront when writing a book. Can you tell us more about how Gorski came to be, and perhaps why he’s progressed in some of the ways he has? (Without revealing too much, of course!)

Absolutely! For me, character is the most important aspect of any novel, whatever the genre. It’s the characters that draw us through the story, and in my books determine how the story unfolds. And no matter how clever or ingenious a book, I think it requires characters that elicit a reaction from readers (whether of empathy or loathing). Even after the details of the plot are forgotten, it’s the characters that remain in the minds of readers.

Georges Gorski first appeared as a secondary character in the first book of the trilogy, The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau. He turns up at the apartment of the protagonist, Manfred Baumann, to question him about his connection to the disappearance of a local waitress. But I was intrigued by him and began to give him his own chapters. Then in the process of writing the book, he ended up sharing roughly equal billing with Manfred. By the time we reach A Case of Matricide he is absolutely the central character—aside from some interludes that provide a little breathing space between the main acts of the story, he’s in every scene.

I think of Gorski not as a cop, but as a man who happens to be a cop, and what I’m interested in exploring is not so much the unraveling of the events of the book, but the effect these events have on him as an individual. I’ve also, over the course of writing these books, become more and more fond of him. I feel his unease and am pained by his frequent humiliations and feelings of inadequacy. He’s not a detective in the tradition of Holmes or Poirot with their moments of insight and deduction. Nor is he in the tradition of the wise-cracking, alpha male who will beat a confession out of a suspect. He is a plodder, wedded to procedure. He has come to accept that he is something of a mediocrity, who has found his level as Chief of Police in a small town, where there is very little in the way of violent, dramatic crime.

Photo: A Case of Matricide by Graeme Macrae Burnet, third in the Inspector Gorski trilogy. Cover designed by Natalie Olsen.

Comparable to Raymond Brunet, the fictional author of this book, you’ve said that A Case of Matricide is the hardest book you’ve ever written. Why do you think that is?

I think A Case of Matricide was hard to write for two reasons. My two other novels, His Bloody Project and Case Study, were to some extent high concept books with a quite grand structural idea, and the feeling that there is a big idea behind a book helps you to keep going in the inevitable black periods of the writing process. In contrast, the Gorski novels—aside perhaps from the metafictional bracketing—are quieter books, more concerned with the minutiae of everyday interactions in an unremarkable town in France, so I was often haunted by the thought that no one would possibly be interested in a cop investigating something as trivial as the suspicious death of a lapdog or awkwardly flirting with the pretty florist in the shop below his apartment. But strangely enough, people do seem to be interested, and I must say that since A Case of Matricide has appeared here in the UK, I don’t think I have ever had such a positive and emotional response to a book.

The other reason the book was hard to write is that the book goes to some pretty dark places and of course, as the author, you must also go to these places, so it was quite emotionally draining.

You write about obsessive people: detectives, writers. I imagine that you see yourself as an obsessive writer (correct me if I’m wrong). How does it feel to conclude a lengthy project such as the trilogy? Is it freeing or difficult to no longer have to worry about Gorski?

I don’t particularly see myself as obsessive, or as an obsessive writer. Writing is a pretty grim process for me. I have to find ways to force myself to do it, but perhaps there is an element of obsession in the fact that I continue to do something I find so difficult.

It feels good to have completed such a big project. To me a trilogy is quite a special thing—as De La Soul said, Three is the magic number—and while A Case of Matricide can certainly be read in isolation from the other books, I wanted the three installments to kind of talk to each other and form a sort of organic whole. But while it feels good to have completed the project, I will miss mentally inhabiting the streets and bars of Saint-Louis (a real place of course). Despite the town’s ordinariness and the fact that I am continually rude about both it and its inhabitants, I’ve grown increasingly fond of it over the years.

What are you reading these days?

I devour everything written by Annie Ernaux, a writer whose hem I am not fit to touch. I also came across a book called Forbidden Notebook by Alba de Céspedes, written in the 1950s, but only just translated and published here by Pushkin Press (I love indie presses!). It tells the story of a housewife in postwar Rome and her relationships with her husband, boss and teenage children. It’s a novel of tremendous guile and subtlety—a masterpiece. Aside from that I read quite a lot of nonfiction, mostly recently on what was going on in central and eastern Europe during the Cold War, a period that fascinates me.

Who would you cast as Gorski if the book or trilogy were made into a film?

There’s a danger in this of putting a particular image of a character into readers’ heads, as I want everyone to be able to imagine Gorski as they see fit, but if you’re twisting my arm the Charles Aznavour of Tirez sur le pianiste.

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In good publicity news:

  • Comrade Papa by GauZ’ (trans. Frank Wynne) was reviewed in the Wall Street Journal: “GauZ’ avoids moralizing and is always alive to the humor and peculiarity of his stories.”
  • Near Distance by Hanna Stoltenberg (trans. Wendy H. Gabrielsen) was reviewed in Kirkus Reviews: “Grimly fascinating . . . Page after page leaves the reader anxiously waiting for the other shoe to drop.”
  • Heaven and Hell by Jón Kalman Stefánsson (trans. Philip Roughton) was given a starred review in Kirkus Reviews: “A moving story of loss and courage told in prose as crisp and clear as the Icelandic landscape where it takes place.”
  • Roland Allen, author of The Notebook, appeared on several podcasts including Read to Lead, Something You Should Know, and Virtual Memories Show.
  • Seth’s Christmas Ghost Stories were included in So Many Damn Books podcast’s Holiday Gift Guide 2024 episode, beginning at 26:30.
  • A Way to Be Happy by Caroline Adderson was reviewed in FreeFall: “This clever and meticulously crafted collection from a writer who has mastered her art is a pleasure to read.”

The Bibliophile: Conviction Addiction

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Mark Kingwell on compassionate skepticism and the project of justice

I’ve been reading Mark Kingwell since a beloved customer brought a laundry basket of books to my newly opened bookstore in 1998, on the top of which was a signed copy of In Pursuit of Happiness. I read everything by Mark thereafter, and when I started running a literary festival he was among the first authors I invited. When, a few years later, I thought about putting out a shingle as a publisher, I wrote to him about starting a pamphlet series; he was polite in declining, though when I approached him with a similar idea during the pandemic, he helped get the Field Note series started. Working with him, as I have now on seven books, including his just-launched (in Canada; the US pub date is February 11) Question Authority: A Polemic about Trust in Five Meditations, has been both one of the biggest honours and challenges of my professional and intellectual life, in part because his writing has challenged me to rethink (and then rethink again) my assumptions; even if I had not published Question Authority I would have argued that it is his most urgent and essential book in decades, perhaps since the publication of The World We Want. After the election result in the US, and knowing what this could mean for the forthcoming one in Canada, it has become more so.

Left: Mark Kingwell signing books at Bookfest Windsor, 2002. Right: Mark reading at the Capitol Theatre.

In Question Authority Kingwell returns to the public square of civility and diagnoses the biggest challenge facing democratic ideals as what he calls doxaholism, or the addiction to conviction. This is a nonpartisan ailment, affecting both progressives and conservatives, and Kingwell shows how it makes progress on real issues impossible by making compromise equally so, while also undermining faith in essential institutions across the board. If this analysis was all that the book provided it would be worth reading, but he also posits an antidote, what he terms compassionate skepticism, the virtue or (old Humean that he is) ethical habit deploying “constructive disbelief governed by awareness of our shared vulnerability.” Rather than retreating into a range of particularisms, which have tended to further a doxaholic cycle, Kingwell tries to resuscitate Enlightenment universalism as defined by compassion and humility. He is sanguine about the risks we face, and the difficulties we will experience correcting course, but he is also hopeful that, by risking and being aware of our shared vulnerability, we can begin to let go of our misguided distrust in all things and begin the necessary work of building a more just, wise, and open-minded society.

There is so much more to say about Question Authority, things that may become future Bibliophile entries, but for now we’ll leave you with this brief excerpt about compassionate skepticism and how we can each participate in the project of justice.

Dan Wells,
Publisher

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Photo: Question Authority: A Polemic about Trust in Five Meditations by Mark Kingwell. Cover designed by Michel Vrana.

An Excerpt from Question Authority

Introduction

The trust question raises a challenge we must issue to ourselves. That challenge is to approach the duties of civic life with a sense of commitment. In this endless blame game, we must ultimately point the finger at ourselves. That means, as I shall argue, a combination of respect for the collective enterprise and a healthy measure of critical assessment of those engaged in it. We have seen a great deal of the latter lately, and not enough of the former. Distrust of authority is not a viable theory of civic identity; it must be balanced with a sense of responsiveness to the needs of others.

I will label the resulting quality, a virtue or ethical habit, compassionate skepticism. I mean by that the deployment of constructive disbelief governed by awareness of shared vulnerability. It counts as a virtue because it is, to use Aristotelian language, a habituated trait of character that is also a disposition to act. To possess such a quality is to act upon its urgings, and vice versa. Cultivating the disposition, fashioning roles and habits that make for its flourishing, is the work of all of us. We live in a time when many of the strongest habits we have are bad—bad for us, bad for others, bad for the environment, bad for politics, bad for everything we care about. But humans are creatures of habit, and breaking harmful ones is hard work.

I will lean heavily on the idea of habit in what follows, in part because trust itself is a matter of good habits, often exhibited against all odds. The remarkable thing about human societies is that they function at all, given all the primitive tendencies working against them. Even at the level of basic cognition, we are far more likely to incline to superstition and misinformation than to execute the hard work of tracking true knowledge and forging a stable rational subject. As the philosopher Dan Williams notes, “lies, conspiracy theories, misinformation, bias, pseudo-science, superstition and so on are not alien perversions of the public sphere.” On the contrary, “[t]hey are the epistemic state of nature that society will revert to in the absence of fragile—and highly contingent—cultural and institutional achievements.”

That contingency is precisely what occupies me in these pages: the sheer unlikelihood and fragility of our social cooperation. Also, per the corollary point, I flag throughout these pages the urgency of avoiding any slide back into a state of nature that is at once epistemic and political. I mean that wasteland of alternative facts and competing rationalities, all fought on a razed battleground that might once have been a rational public sphere, called public life. Make no mistake about this paradox of human existence: there is every reason for people not to be rational. In terms of basic urges and instincts, we have to acknowledge that logical reasoning and truth-seeking do not come naturally to us. They are possibilities of our nature, but not, as it were, the resting state. And yet, our rational capacity has long been considered the best part of ourselves—especially when it is conjoined with the kind of “unselfing” that makes for connection with other people and with ideas beyond self-interest. Reason and emotion are not contraries but partners. Moreover, we sometimes find ourselves precisely in those moments when we seem most alien to ourselves. Only a reflective, textured account can make sense of that common feature of being a person.

Pursuing these lines of thought, gathering the threads, teasing out what we might call the ethico-cognitive potential of consciousness within all the daily dross and distraction, requires the telling of a good story. I mean a story about ourselves and the world, and about how the two fit together. Story is itself so basic to the human mind that we find ourselves unable to experience life without its shapes and tropes. Personal identity, with its attendant burdens of responsibility and choice, is unthinkable without the continuity of narrative. And just as repetition can aid us when we need guidance, so narrative can provide shape to our temporal thrownness. Habit and narrative are closely linked in the project of individual life, in short, as they are in politics understood as shared life. The conjunction both offers and demands good pattern recognition, but it also then demands the recognition of good patterns over bad.

I realize this is all quite abstract—an inevitable feature of doing philosophy even of the applied or practical variety. My hope is that the details of what follows will clarify everything contained in these introductory paragraphs. For now, the best way to answer all these complex (and never-ending) challenges will be to form new habits to replace old, harmful ones—or, more accurately in the present case, to revive and cultivate potential but endangered habits of trust and responsibility. These positive human habits have been comprehensively frayed, by technology’s disconnection-through-connection, by the polarization of public discourse, and by the reduction of everything to a kind of abstracted video game where other people are no longer seen as entirely real. Habits are powerful, but they are not inevitable. The first step is recognizing how they come to take hold of us. The second step is then to challenge them. The third is to execute this program of recovery with better habits—habits of flourishing, including trust in each other and in the institutions we all need to meet the complexities of twenty-first-century life.

 

Left: Mark Kingwell, 1984. Right: Mark Kingwell, 2024.

Authority must be questioned so that it becomes better, not in order to tear down all possible guidelines for living. We need good rules, good games governed by the rules, and better players to play the games—real people, actual citizens, not avatars or handles. Politics is, after all, a very serious game of justification, wherein participants must offer arguments, if sometimes only implicit ones, for why they have something that someone else does not. Unlike many other games, but in common with the best of them, this game allows for winners and losers but also embraces the wisdom that sometimes true achievement lies in the defeat of any need for victory. Thus do we transcend competition to create community and even glory.

Such high-toned sentiments invite immediate skepticism, I realize. Most of us are well versed in skepticism already. It is the dominant habit of the age. Indeed, the restless urge to question everything might be considered the keynote of both modern and postmodern realities: questioning things is what got us here, but it is also what now makes for confusion. Compassion is another story. Its etymology suggests an idea of fellow feeling, or empathy; but there is also a suggestion, with use, of a relevant command—that compassion entails not just recognition of another’s suffering, but a positive duty to relieve it. In this manner, compassionate skepticism may take its place alongside other, more familiar political virtues like reasonableness and civility.

Compassion is that rare thing, a strong feeling with an equally strong rational basis. Its arousal is, in part, a recognition of shared vulnerability. But that recognition also calls forth an ethical and political response, itself a conjunction of feeling and reason. I experience pain at the pain of others; their suffering causes me to suffer. Absent sociopathic deficit, this is the natural order. Kant and other rationalist philosophers remind us that our fellow-travellers on the moral plane are other rational agents—or, at least, we and they wish to be so. One of the things we have learned to accept since Kant’s time is that the class of rational agents may not all be human.

Even more important than this extension of care and regard is a point that Kant tends to discount altogether. He focuses on our rational powers, and hence our responsibilities. But reason is also a burden, and sometimes a weakness in ourselves. Reason can mask the more fragile inwardness of consciousness, that part of ourselves that includes an awareness of both weakness and wonder in the world. Once we know it, we cannot unknow the fact of suffering.

The game is better when all of us have skin in it. Good games beget good players, and good players in turn bolster and maintain the game’s health. The crisis of trust begins at home. What kind of player are you?

***

In good publicity news:

  • The Notebook by Roland Allen was reviewed in the New York Times: “A revealing document of a relationship so intimate as to be sacred: that of the writer and the page.”
  • Near Distance by Hanna Stoltenberg (trans. Wendy H. Gabrielsen) received a starred review from Publishers Weekly: “Stoltenberg debuts with a stunning portrait of a strained mother-daughter relationship . . . It’s a winner.”
  • A Way to Be Happy by Caroline Adderson was reviewed by NPR book critic Kassie Rose in The Longest Chapter: “An impressive collection.”
  • May Our Joy Endure by Kev Lambert (trans. Donald Winkler) was reviewed in the Literary Review of Canada’s Bookworm: “Amanda Perry called the award-winning original, Que notre joie demeure, ‘stylistically adventurous.’ That also rings true for the seamless translation by Donald Winkler, who renders Lambert’s shifting aesthetic modes and formal experimentation with verve.”

The Bibliophile: Confessions of a Literary Schlub

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In addition to two other fine books, Mark Kingwell’s Question Authority and Graeme Macrae Burnet’s A Case of Matricide—more on both soon enough—this month we also launch our yearly installment of the Best Canadian anthologies: Essays, Poetry, Stories. This is our eighth year publishing Best Canadian Stories, which we took over from Oberon when they closed shop; and it’s our sixth publishing Best Canadian Poetry and Best Canadian Essays, which had previously been published by the now-shuttered Tightrope Books. I’ve been a long admirer of the Best American anthologies—I have the better part of two-thirds of a complete run of Best American Stories, going back now more than a century, at home—and I’d hoped that having all three anthologies under one roof might provide opportunities to market and grow the readership for these Canadian versions. As with almost everything in publishing, that’s easier said than done. Publishing is hard; publishing anthologies is, somehow, much harder. This is a shame, because every year there are unexpected riches to be found in each, work you’re unlikely to have found, especially in this age of algorithmic overload, otherwise.

Photo: Behind the scenes of Best Canadian, a glimpse at our shelves of Canadian publications from which the editors select works for each anthology.

Of the three anthologies, the one that seems to have the hardest time finding readers is Best Canadian Essays. This, too, is a shame: it’s become my favourite. There are essays from previously published installments that I still find myself thinking about: from 2020, edited by Sarmishta Subramanian, Michelle Orange’s “How it Feels to Be Free,” which has even more relevance five days out from another panic-inducing presidential election; Christina Sharpe’s “Beauty Is a Method,” which served as my introduction to this writer’s brilliance; Michael LaPointe’s “The Unbearable Smugness of Walking,” which I still think he should have agreed to expand into a Field Note. From 2021, edited by Bruce Whiteman: Mark Kingwell’s meditation on grief, “The Ashes.” From 2023, edited by Mireille Silcoff: Kathy Page’s “That Other Place,” about acquiring an unwanted passport into the land of the unwell, and Sarmishta Subramanian’s “Going the Distance,” on the way that Covid remade friendships. From 2024, edited by Marcello Di Cintio: Gabrielle Drolet’s “In Defence of Garlic in a Jar,” which has made my relationship to food prep so much easier (no small thing!). Any of these essays would have been worth the proverbial price of purchase; for free, then, you get the baker’s dozen or so that comes with them.

“In tackling the role of editor for the Best Canadian Essays series,” 2025 editor Emily Urquhart writes in her introduction, “I read work in literary and journalism magazines, in newspapers, online journals and zines, and in publications that I couldn’t begin to classify. How many essays?  Maybe hundreds . . . I tracked my progress through sticky notes and marginalia, and by the precarious piles of magazines stacked on my office floor, which shot up like skyscrapers in a fast-developing city. This vast reading was an act of divination . . . [from which] after nearly a year of reading, a cluster of singular works came forth.” This is exactly the opposite of the algorithmic processes we all publicly decry and to which we are privately addicted: the editorial process is personal, considered, considerate, and unsystematic. But the resulting gathering is as wide-ranging and finely focused as one could hope for, covering in unexpected ways the range of human, and humane, concerns.

“An essay might rant,” Emily concluded, “hold strong opinions, or be a call to action. It can be futile, or constructive, or both. It can be personal and distant all at once. It can entertain, instruct, or educate. It can resonate. It can resolve, or it can fade into the ether. It can laugh. It can weep. It can howl with indignity. Essays . . . are changeable and chameleon-like: they adapt with the times, and they reinvent themselves.” And they can help us reinvent ourselves, too.

The writing life is woven through Emily’s selection, including essays by Sadiqa de Meijer on losing her notebook, Rebecca Kempe on a poetry reading she seems incapable of escaping, and this painfully funny essay, by Tom Rachman, on the perils (there are so few pleasures) of literary promotion, “Confessions of a Literary Schlub,” which we dedicate to all of our writers currently or soon to be on the road—Caroline Adderson, Lisa Alward, Richard Kelly Kemick, Catherine Leroux, Alex Pugsley, and Jón Kalman Stefánsson, just this week alone!—in this last manic rush of the festival circuit season. Have courage! At least the stingrays always show!

Dan Wells,
Publisher

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Photo: Best Canadian Essays 2025 selected by Emily Urquhart. Cover designed by Ingrid Paulson.

“Confessions of a Literary Schlub”

by Tom Rachman

As my flight descended over the turquoise Caribbean, I asked myself, Who’d go to the Cayman Islands and attend a literary event of mine? I soon learned the answer: nobody. Just empty chairs and an awkward bookseller. “Maybe you could swim with stingrays tomorrow?” she suggested. “They always turn up.”

Promoting a book can derange you. After years of quiet toil and noisy typing, you clutch a published book, and step forth to meet the public, eight billion humans who, mystifyingly, seem not to know that your new novel just came out.

Occasionally, someone treats you like the important writer you long to be (but probably aren’t). They rave about your prose and frown attentively when you speak. It’s an adrenaline shot to your ego. Then, you’re at a signing table, the pile of hardcovers all unsold, and everyone has gone. You’re just another needy nobody, your ego mashed underfoot.

Now and then, a literary novelist is swept to fame. But most are swept by the polar wind of indifference. To avert oblivion, authors today attempt to twist themselves into hucksters, the spokesmodels for their books, sales rep of their inner lives.

I’d like to blame tech. I try to blame it for everything. When the internet bulldozed the traditional press, it squashed book coverage too. But the internet flung up alternatives, from literary websites to BookTok to public readings on Zoom.

Finally, novelists didn’t need the gatekeepers. They could shout for attention themselves. On the downside, they had to shout for attention themselves.

Publishers and agents— rarely certain why one decent book soars when a thousand more go plop—pressured authors to become more accessible, not merely slouching around festivals and bookshops, but thrusting themselves forward for inspection on Goodreads and Twitter and making themselves reachable via direct message. The writerly myth altered.

Previously, biographies and gossip imagined The Novelist as a tormented character, pungent from debauchery, infidelity, booze. Now, the writers who prevailed seemed assertively nice: the endearing quirks, the correct politics.

Being beastly never made anyone talented at writing. Nor does being kind to cats. My point is: the skill set for literature is not necessarily the skill set for promoting it.

Imagine Dostoevsky, nagged to update his Facebook page. Or Emily Dickinson at a poetry slam, posting on Instagram. Or Kafka addressing his fans on YouTube: “Hey, guys! Brutal wakeup today: I open my eyes, and I’m, like, an insect—what is up with that?! Check out my new story, #Metamorphosis. Hit ‘like,’ and subscribe below!”

Consider the case of Suzanne Young, author of a young-adult horror novel, who turned up for her reading in Phoenix, and found that she outnumbered the audience. Young tweeted a photo of the deserted store, with the caption, “If you ever want to see a career low point, this is it. Crying my entire way home.”

Photo: Suzanne Young’s viral tweet about her reading with no audience.

She didn’t sob for long. Her tweet went viral, and she ended up on NBC Nightly News, living a plot twist worthy of feel-good fiction: because nobody turned up, she had a hit.

What is the moral of her story? That the internet can save us? Or that bookstore readings are a waste, and you’re better off hyping yourself online?

For today’s author, the trail of shamelessness begins before the novel is published—perhaps before it’s written. Developing an online fanbase inhibits your writing, but your career may depend upon it. (Before her sorrowful event, Young already had more than twelve thousand Twitter followers, who helped circulate her post, ultimately seen by 7.9 million people.)

Once you’ve produced a manuscript, your self-abasement picks up, as you beg blurbs from any noted writer you’ve chanced to meet and failed to alienate. This means published ex-classmates from the creative writing MFA; or prominent authors who taught you there; or the bestselling novelist you importuned at a literary festival.

Superficially, the blurb is a recommendation to readers. But it’s also a flex, showing that a novel’s author is connected, high-status, has cool friends.

Every blurb request is inappropriate. You’re demanding twenty hours or more from a busy professional, all to serve your interests, and with questionable impact. Moreover, you’re asking an author to mislead their readers, given that most blurbs are plainly dishonest: there simply isn’t that much genuine gushing.

Next, you must badger your followers and family to preorder your novel, as advanced sales cue the publisher to take it seriously and promote yours rather than the flood of other books released at the same time. To attract coverage, you need a narrative behind the narrative—that your fiction is actually non-fiction in disguise, inspired by your messy divorce, your messy kids, your drug bust, your life in the burbs, your PTSD, your OCD, your impotence, your incontinence, your pet marmot Ernesto.

What you mustn’t say is that you just made up the story, that it came purely from imagination. Fellini, I once heard, falsified personal anecdotes to publicize his movies. I’ve been tempted to try this, to spin yarns and present myself as charismatic. But I can’t bring myself to lie. I remain a schlub making cups of tea in my kitchen.

You also must write for free. Now that the media has fragmented into many outlets of varied intent, you cannot hope that a mighty publication will crown your book. Even the cover of the New York Times Book Review has far less effect than it had. Once, it meant instant bestseller. Today, with everyone reading on phones, there is no “cover” in the same way.

So, you churn out self-publicizing content in disguise, everywhere from upstart literary blogs to old-media websites—free contributions like “The 7 Best Books on the Subject I Just Wrote About.” This bewilders me, that you’re supposed to promote your book by exhorting people to buy other books. You must pray they’ll notice your mini-bio and click the Amazon link.

Needless to say, you schlep to any event that’ll have you. The organizers are delightful; they revive your faith in contemporary literature and restore your longing for a place in it. Then, you’re looking out from a lectern at seven people, three of whom are personal friends. You wonder if any of this makes sense.

Book events expose a fundamental flaw in promoting fiction: novelists tend to be mumblers with bad haircuts who can’t bring their writing to life before a crowd and are inarticulate when answering questions about the craft. Some are performers; some are insightful; some, inspiring. More are the dinner guest nobody notices, but who has thoughts, and gathers them, composes them, types them in private, revises and revises—and only then, finds the words.

One of my first bookstore readings was at Politics & Prose in Washington, DC. Beforehand, the organizers stashed me in a sideroom alongside a staffer on break, whose calm contrasted with my terror. In minutes, I’d need to declaim about literature. I had no right. I was an imposter.

After the event, my sister rushed over, assuring me I hadn’t humiliated myself. “You didn’t seem nervous at all,” she said.

“Tranquilizers,” I confided. “I took many tranquilizers.” According to a recent survey conducted by the Bookseller magazine, the majority of debut authors say book publication damaged their mental health. At least one respondent ended up on meds.

But writing careers have always been marked more by failure than glory. And blurbs, public readings, mass indifference—all that preceded the internet era.

Is any of this truly new?

When it comes to contemporary literature, you hear debates about identity and appropriation, about awards and autofiction. But what matters is the competition: those words and pictures and videos heating the device in your pocket, which vibrates so impatiently, goading you to check its stories.

While the internet is the most powerful marketing tool that writers have ever had, the internet is also devastating to an art that requires close concentration.

Once, brainy types read contemporary novels for amusement, to ponder what it meant to be human, to shock themselves at what others did privately, to join the intelligentsia, to march into the debate. This role is rarely taken by a novel today.

A subculture of ultraliterary types does still rally around the latest darlings of fiction. A bigger constituency buys the novels selected for TV book clubs or by prize juries. Most years, a screen-adapted literary work joins the bestseller list. But beneath those few titles are stacks and stacks of disappointment.

The study of literature dwindles too, as with the rest of the humanities. According to a report in The Times of London, one university had two hundred English-literature undergrads a decade ago; now, it’s down to thirty.

When I meet bookish types with young-adult offspring, many speak of how their kids devoured fiction when little, but have since abandoned it. What those middle-aged bookish types are ashamed to add is that they themselves—with extensive culture and extensive bookshelves—scarcely read fiction anymore.

One culture critic told me that he still reviews novels because that way he is forced to read them. Authors have made similar admissions to me.

Will Lloyd, a journalist at the political and literary magazine the New Statesman, noticed that he’d read plenty of books lately—and none was a novel. So, he spent a week quizzing the literary types he knew, asking whether they were reading fiction, if they discussed it with friends, if they sought it out for social insights. Among forty people, only two said yes.

I feared that I was an imposter in writing. I’ve come to wonder if all literary novelists are imposters now, barging into the far edge of the culture, holding up reams of pages, saying, I wrote something—look at it!

How presumptuous: engaging in make-believe, asking strangers to admire it. Those strangers too have something to say, and nowadays can, commenting, filming, liking, downvoting.

What’s odd about being a novelist today is that the position retains a shimmer of prestige with only a glimmer of audience.

Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it’s just my writing that is shrivelling away. Maybe I’m projecting my eclipse onto the field.

I wouldn’t fight that charge. I’m tired of fighting for attention, imploring strangers to care about what I cared about, pleading for a hearing of my voice in an art that seems quieter and quieter, that is missing the point somehow.

A New York book editor told me that publishing had always been this way: a few megahits support all those below. Even writers at the top are rarely satisfied. Philip Roth, who had success after success, died bitter that he hadn’t won the Nobel Prize, the editor remarked, wondering just how much would be enough to quench authors.

A few weeks ago, I visited a smattering of London bookshops at the request of my British publisher. Sheepishly, I approached staff, mentioning that I was supposed to sign my new novel. They hunted down a few copies. I always feel absurd autographing books.

But it’s thrilling too, if you don’t look down: that someone was crazy enough years ago to fly me to the Cayman Islands for a reading.

I’ve been an imposter, unsure what I was doing here, frazzled by a caterwauling, distracted, outraged world, my thoughts firing, hesitating to say them—so I put them onto paper, fighting with sentences, removing commas only to replace them, judging myself a failure, hating that I minded, despairing at my irrelevance, writing to cure myself, wanting to say something that’d make others listen, trying, trying, mostly failing.

A writer.

“Confessions of a Literary Schlub” by Tom Rachman first appeared in the Globe and Mail.

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20 Stores for 20 Years: The Bookmark

It’s Biblioasis’ 20th anniversary this year, and we wanted to celebrate 20 independent bookstores who have helped us make it this far! This week we’re featuring The Bookmark, who has locations in Fredericton, Charlottetown, and Halifax. Mike Hamm from the Bookmark Halifax stepped up to tell us about his favourite Biblioasis book, How to Build a Boat by Elaine Feeney, and our publisher Dan Wells wanted to share one of the reasons why we love the Bookmark (and Mike!). Read on to learn more about Mike’s favourite book and our first “20 stores for 20 years” store.

Photo: Interior of The Bookmark, colourfully decorated with balloons.

When Dan published Biblioasis’ first book in 2004, Salvatore Ala’s Straight Razor and Other Poems, one of the first sales calls he made was to Mike Hamm at The Bookmark Halifax: “I know now how lucky I was to start with such a generous bookseller. Mike and The Bookmark were willing to support us from the get-go, at a time when most, reasonably, couldn’t be bothered; and they have continued to do so for twenty years, whether it be for local writers like Alexander MacLeod (Light Lifting), Kris Bertin (Bad Things Happen), or for the hundreds of other books we’ve published.”

And here’s why Mike chose How to Build a Boat as his favorite Biblioasis book: “The excitement surrounding Elaine Feeney’s writing intensified with the release of How to Build a Boat. When Biblioasis published this magnificent novel in the leadup to the holiday season, I had found my perfect book to recommend. Its poignancy, grace and insight into the delicate nature of human relationships captivated me and many others. Thank you, Biblioasis, for not only bringing us amazing talent from all across Canada but representing the best authors from around the globe.”

Photo: Bookmark Halifax manager Mike Hamm poses with his Biblioasis pick, How to Build a Boat by Elaine Feeney.

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In good publicity news: