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The Bibliophile: There’s no box for a detail like this on a census

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Photo: Front and back covers of Baldwin, Styron, and Me by Mélikah Abdelmoumen, translated by Catherine Khordoc. Designed by Ingrid Paulson.

Introducing Mélikah Abdelmoumen’s Baldwin, Styron, and Me

As a reader, as a human, I’ve always been attracted to stories or ideas that are neither one thing nor the other, that walk, out of inclination or obligation, a fine line between taken-for-granted assumptions and identities. Perhaps, in part, this is a result of coming from the places I do, the places I’ve called home: these smaller, industrial, working-class Rust Belt towns dismissed by almost everyone else in the country, which are a very short distance from the American border. Growing up, I had no idea that we did things differently down here, that, out of some sort of alchemical mixture of geography, history, landscape, and radio and television signals, we southern Ontarians had developed as distinct an identity as had Canadians from places where theirs are more readily acknowledged, whether it be Newfoundland or Quebec or Alberta. I remember Fred Eaglesmith once telling me that there was something about how American radio waves carried across Lake Ontario when he was growing up that made it easier for him to tune into the country and bluegrass stations from Kentucky and Tennessee than it was to receive the Toronto signals from barely an hour down the road. This accident helped shape him into the man (and the musician) that he became, and bred an affinity for the fields and mountains of Appalachia over the straight, puritanical streets of Canada’s biggest city. There’s no box for a detail like this on a census. And yet it can be everything. There’s a local writer who once pitched me on a book (unfortunately never finished) whose main thesis was that the people of this part of the country were AmeriCanadians, a hybridized identity that in no way undermines our devotion or loyalty to Canada but that reflects all the factors that have shaped us and the different ways we interact and relate to the world. Despite the natural anger and patriotism we all feel as a result of the current American regime’s rhetoric and threats—and places like Windsor feel these far more keenly at the moment than most others in the country, I assure you—this still tracks. We may be choosing for now not to do our regular trips to the Detroit Institute of Arts for Friday Night Live; we may have let our subscription to the Paradise Jazz Series lapse; but it is also, for me, both morally and psychologically problematic to be expected to turn our backs on key relationships that have played such a role in making us who we are. And the expectation to do so is an unreasonable one.

I’m still trying to work this out; I hope that it makes sense.

There’s this idea that I came across in Mélikah Abdelmoumen’s just-published Baldwin, Styron, and Me (translated by Catherine Khordoc) that has become central to how I think of these matters: that of the frontier dweller. Abdelmoumen quotes the Lebanese-French writer Amin Maalouf from In the Name of Identity:

Wherever there are groups of human beings living side by side who differ from one another in religion, colour, language, ethnic origin or nationality; wherever there are tensions, more or less long standing, more or less violent, between immigrants and local populations, Blacks and Whites, Catholics and Protestants, Jews and Arabs, Hindus and Sikhs, Lithuanians and Russians, Serbs and Albanians, Greeks and Turks, English-speaking and French-speaking Canadians, Flemings and Walloons, Chinese and Malays—yes, wherever there is a divided society, there are men and women bearing within them contradictory allegiances, people who live on the frontier between opposed communities, and whose very being might be said to be traversed by ethnic or religious or other fault lines.

Who, these days, does not bear within them contradictory allegiances? Baldwin, Styron, and Me is a book about living with such, acknowledging them, and more importantly, despite the tremendous cost such effort entails, remaining true to them. It’s about not letting others, with their limited conception of who you are, define you, whether it be via a census or a checklist or otherwise. In the same way that the amalgamation of Abdelmoumen’s hometown of Chicoutimi with La Baie into Saguenay does not erase key particularities that made those places distinct, or a resident’s memory of them as such, memories that can be passed down from generation to generation, the amalgamation of certain key traits or aspects of our individual and collective histories and lives does not erase anything either. We all maintain contradictory allegiances, or if we’re honest with ourselves should: this book serves as a timely reminder of this.

Photo: Still from Mélikah’s interview below, featuring portraits of James Baldwin and William Styron.

But Baldwin, Styron, and Me is at the same time one of my favourite things, a book about books, a book about the power of books, and about the way that the discovery of a writer and their work at the right moment can transform how one relates to the world. This happened when Mélikah discovered the works of James Baldwin. Who among us has not had a similar moment reading Baldwin’s work? (And for those who haven’t, I envy you the pleasure of the discovery: your time will come, and perhaps this book will serve as both catalyst and introduction). But Baldwin, Styron, and Me is also a work of literary historical investigation and recreation, telling the story of how one particular literary friendship between the grandson of a slave and the grandson of a slaveowner transformed the lives and work of both, while at the same time serving as a reminder that many of the debates we are having about literature and who has the right to write what are part of a much longer historical conversation. It is a generous and humane work of imagination, both “a personal and courageous meditation” (Lawrence Hill) and “a balm for this time and a welcome visit with new and old relations,” (Jesse Wente) a book that anticipates and encourages discussion and disagreement.  

Mélikah’s niece put together a short video profile and interview with Mélikah about the book: rather than this week linking to an interview or excerpt we thought we’d share it with you here.

Dan Wells,
Publisher

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Narrating Identities: An interview with Mélikah Abdelmoumen

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In good publicity news:

    • Baldwin, Styron, and Me by Mélikah Abdelmoumen was featured in Lit Hub for its pub date!
    • On Book Banning by Ira Wells was featured in two Canadian School Library Journal articles, “The Language of Censorship” and “Censors Are Targeting Schools.” Ira Wells was also interviewed on the Get Lit radio show.
    • Heaven and Hell by Jón Kalman Stefánsson (trans. Philip Roughton) was reviewed in the Literary Review of Canada: “An artfully crafted and arresting novel . . . Stefánsson excels at turning small places into the absolute centre of the world.“
    • Near Distance by Hanna Stoltenberg (trans. Wendy H. Gabrielsen) was also reviewed in the Literary Review of Canada: “A thoughtfully paced debut, and Stoltenberg moves between past and present with apparent ease.“

The Bibliophile: Along for the ride

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dan Wells,
Publisher

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A Biblioasis Interview with Vijay Khurana

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why did you decide to call it The Passenger Seat?

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

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

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

Photo: Interior image from The Passenger Seat.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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In good publicity news:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dan Wells,
Publisher

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A Biblioasis Interview with Ira Wells

Photo: Ira Wells, courtesy of the author.

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

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

What prompted you to write On Book Banning?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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In good publicity news:

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

The Bibliophile: 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:

Media Hits: THE NOTEBOOK, OLD ROMANTICS, CHRISTMAS GHOST STORIES, and more!

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IN THE NEWS!

THE NOTEBOOK

The Notebook by Roland Allen (Sep 3, 2024) was included in the New Yorker‘s list of “The Best Books of 2024!” The list was published online on December 4, and is available to read here.

The Notebook was also included in the Globe and Mail‘s “Holiday Books Gift Guide for 2024!” The listed was posted online on December 6, and you can check it out here.

Nathalie Atkinson writes,

“[Allen] charts the evolution of notebooks as a repository for thought and follows the crucial role logbooks, diaries and journals have played in humanity’s development.”

Ryan Holiday featured The Notebook in his list of “The (Very) Best Books I Read In 2024.” The list was posted on December 8, and you can read it here.

Holiday calls it,

“[A] lovely book about one of the most transformative pieces of technology ever invented.”

Grab The Notebook here!

OLD ROMANTICS

Old Romantics by Maggie Armstrong (Apr 1, 2025) was featured in the Irish Independent on December 4 for the article, “Novels not to be missed,” available to read here.

Aingeala Flannery wrote,

“A dazzling snapshot of Dublin in the early 21st century, full of wry social observation . . . it will appeal to anyone who likes clever, modern, writing about womanhood.”

Preorder Old Romantics here!

QUESTION AUTHORITY

Mark Kingwell, author of Question Authority (Nov 5, 2024), was interviewed by Deborah Dundas in the Toronto Star. The interview was published online on December 7, and you can read it here.

Get Question Authority here!

SETH’S CHRISTMAS GHOST STORIES

Seth’s Christmas Ghost Stories 2024 (Oct 29, 2024) were reviewed in Cemetery Dance. The review was published online on December 4, and you can read it in full here.

Blu Gilliand writes,

“It’s become a favorite December tradition for me—reviewing the new set of Seth’s Christmas Ghost Stories as delivered to my stocking each year by the fine folks at Biblioasis. This year’s package contains tales of dread that will raise goosebumps on your arms faster than the coldest winter wind . . . These stocking-sized one-sit reads really are a great way to spend those quiet moments when you can find them among the holiday craziness.”

Grab all three 2024 Christmas Ghost Stories here!

THE PAGES OF THE SEA

The Pages of the Sea by Anne Hawk (Sep 17, 2024) was listed as a Guardian Best Fiction Book of 2024. The article was published on December 7, and you can read it here.

Justine Jordan writes,

“This fresh perspective on the Windrush generation uses dialect to convey [a] young child’s thoughts with vivid immediacy.”

Grab The Pages of the Sea here!

CROSSES IN THE SKY

Crosses in the Sky by Mark Bourrie (May 21, 2024)was featured in the Toronto Star on December 4, for Heather Mallick’s “Five of my best reads of 2024.” Check it out here!

Mallick writes,

“Canada’s greatest historian has done it for a third time, stripping the carcass of Canadian history and leaving readers horrified, riveted, in shock . . . A triumph.”

Get Crosses in the Sky here!

SORRY ABOUT THE FIRE

Sorry About the Fire by Colleen Coco Collins (Apr 2, 2024) was included in the California Review of Books’ “31 Outstanding Poetry Books from 2024,” which you can view here.

David Starkey writes,

“Readers interested in entering [Collins’s] manically creative world must be prepared to relinquish their preconceptions of how words and sentences ought to be linked together.”

Get Sorry About the Fire here!

The Bibliophile: An Existential Tragedy

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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: “I’m being a smartass, but it’s true.”

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If you’re not yet acquainted with GauZ’, the Franco-Ivorian novelist and author of International Booker-shortlisted Standing Heavy, you are in for an early Halloween treat. And if you are: you’re likely anticipating a trick or two, GauZ’ being a writer in no short supply thereof.

I first encountered GauZ’s work late last fall, when Dan passed along a PDF of the debut that would in March make its way onto the shortlist. It’s a slim novel, 180ish pages, and I read it over the course of a Friday evening and Saturday morning, pausing only when I had to wrestle unbound pages back from my partner, whose eye kept catching on the titled vignettes that make up some of the sections of this kaleidoscopic story of three Ivorians working as security guards in Paris. With titles ranging from “Babies” and “The Moustache Theory” to “Right Buttocks” (followed, of course, by “Left Buttocks”), I couldn’t blame him: written from the perspectives of the guards themselves, these passages are brief observations of the curious behaviours of Western shoppers, and together comprise a shrewd, deeply funny, always unexpected ethnography, compiled by our intrepid discoverers, of the strange land in which they’ve found themselves. No surprise: GauZ’ is also editor-in-chief of News & Co, the satirical economic newspaper.

Photo: Standing Heavy (2023) and Comrade Papa (2024) by GauZ’, translated from the French by Frank Wynne. Both covers designed by Nathan Burton.

Comrade Papa is the second of GauZ’s novels to find English publication, also in brilliant translation by the inimitable Frank Wynne—truly this pair, perfectly matched as they are in intelligence and linguistic wit, should be known as one of the great duos in translated literature. In this sophomore glow-up, GauZ’ doubles down on satire and turns his canny anthropological eye in part to the past. Comrade Papa is both an unexpectedly slapstick historical novel and a charmingly comic, contemporary coming-of-age story, alternating between the perspectives of a young 19th-century Frenchman who joins a colonial expedition to the as-yet-untouched Ivory Coast and a young Black boy born to Communist parents in contemporary Amsterdam. He writes neither story as one might expect: the colonial narrative is vividly voiced and politically complex as our hero navigates between factions who disagree on everything (except their shared hatred of the British), while the child narrator of the contemporary sections, whose monologue is rife with comic malapropisms (“the yolk of capitalism” and “the lumpy proletariat” are two of my favourites), demonstrates how the long arc of the colonization finds its expression in surprising ways, and with unexpected ends. This intertwining of narrative styles and fact with folktale, writes Nadifa Mohamed for the New York Times, comprise a “gleaming mosaic,” and for the Guardian, John Self calls the narrative “funny, ebullient, often chaotic,” and even better than Standing Heavy. For TLS, Lara Pawson writes: “Only a bold writer in command of their talent could take on such a perilous and vast subject and come out, with laughter and love, on top . . . If you are foolish enough to open this book with a set of assumptions about where it will go, prepare to be wrong-footed . . . Expect to see GauZ’ back on the shortlists with this superlative work of fiction.”

We certainly agree, and we hope—now that you’re duly prepared for mischief—you’ll treat yourself to Comrade Papa’s pair of unexpected adventures. In the meantime, we thought you might enjoy our exclusive interview with the man himself.

Vanessa Stauffer
Managing Editor

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Photo: Franco-Ivorian author GauZ’

A Biblioasis Interview with GauZ’

Hey GauZ’, would you like to start by telling us a bit about yourself?

Anyway, my name is GauZ’, and I’m a Franco-Ivorian writer. Ivoiro-French. I can say both. And for almost ten years, I’ve been writing books that are a total proclamation of style. I make people think. This is what matters most in the world. What matters most in literature is style: it’s style that appeals to the reader’s intelligence, it’s style that appeals to the reader’s empathy, it’s style that reminds the reader that the cause you’re defending implicates them too. I believe that what makes me an author is this style that I have to offer: the capacity to marvel, to write dialogue that sparks, to capture the beauty of gestures, things like that.

Comrade Papa is your second novel with Biblioasis, what inspired you to write a historical novel?

I started from a very simple question, in fact. Who are the people who came to colonize us 150 years ago? And I realized that, in fact, they’re people who are a lot like us. By us, I mean Africans. In other words, they were peasants who, in the middle of France in the nineteenth century, were also under the heel of the French bourgeoisie. Colonial domination as it expanded across the globe was still a project of the European upper class. So when does the peasant who goes to Africa become “civilized,” or become a member of the bourgeoisie? And that’s how I came up with the story of this young man who leaves the backwaters of rural France to make his fortune in Africa. Just as today, Africans come to Europe to pursue their destiny, there was a time when the idea of immigration was European, in the sense that it was something lower class people could do to make something of themselves. I also wanted to weave the story of the young man Dabilly, who goes to the colony that would become Côte d’Ivoire, with the story of a child in Europe today, because childhood represents the present and also the future, going to Côte d’Ivoire more than a century later. I wanted the novel to have the geographical trajectory of the immigrant to Africa and also to follow the human trajectory from childhood to youth to adulthood, which is universal.

The great novels of colonial exploration by Joseph Conrad, among others, inspired the hyper-literary style of your novel, Comrade Papa, even if the events of the plot bring no glory to the central character (young Dabilly suffers from diarrhea, stupidity, heat, etc.). Can you tell us about your choice to write a historical novel in a style that evokes the early twentieth century, and your almost satirical way of doing it?

First off, I wanted to write something no one would expect after Standing Heavy. And two, in each of my novels the style follows from the story—the novel imposes its style on the author. Comrade Papa imposed its style right away. I wanted to give the sense that the novel was like a letter the main character Dabilly was actually writing at the time. I read a lot of correspondence, in particular the letters of former colonial administrators. They had two writing styles, when they wrote the big administrative reports, they were writing in a grandiose nineteenth century style. And when they wrote to their buddies their style was different: more touching, more direct, and without circumlocutions. There was the official speech of triumphant France. Where they would report, we secured victory over this Black chief in such and such a village, it cost so many lives to pacify people in such a region, we have brought honor to the Republic. But when they would write to their buddy, they might say, I’m heartbroken. I met an incredible girl. The others like her too. She’s a bit easy, a bit loose, and it kills me because I’m falling in love. I couldn’t believe when I was reading these letters that men had traveled on a ship to another continent and couldn’t understand the difference in sexual mores between the society they’d left and the one in this new place. In their letters, they confided to their friends about their confusion, their loneliness, their feelings. Some of them even wrote about their children, when officially, they weren’t supposed to have any. I read a heartbreaking letter from an otherwise repulsive guy. The guy’s racism was totally disgusting, but when his twelve-year-old kid died, bitten by a snake, you know I almost cried. This time spent in the archives helped me discover the novel’s style. When Dabilly is still in France, first in the country, where his parents are millers suffering from pneumonia from breathing in flour for twenty years, and then when he works in the factory in Châtellerault, the writing is reminiscent of Zola, of the way his writing makes the reader see how mechanization creates working class conditions. Then when you get on the boat it’s like Conrad: first you meet the motley crew, and then you start to understand that Dabilly’s mission is deep in the bush. The problem with Conrad, and he’s a brilliant writer, is that the Africans are stock characters. So as Dabilly begins to penetrate into the interior of Côte d’Ivoire, and the reader understands how observant the character is, the style becomes more ethnographic. Many ethnographic texts from that time are hyper-racist but it’s in these descriptions that you get the best sense of the men, both the colonizers and the peoples they were interacting with and their traditions. So that’s how the novel progresses stylistically.

To write the child narrator, all I had to do was think about what I was like as a kid. He’s got a problem. Not with knowledge, but with language. He speaks as his parents speak in rigidly Marxist terms. He’s seven, he’s missing his mother, who’s like some kind of ghost in the story. And they’re in Holland, which is the country that invented the African slave trade. Slavery and colonization are purely capitalist enterprises, and racism against Africans was invented to justify the practice of slavery. To excuse the fact of turning men into beasts of burden. So that’s why the kid leaves his home in Holland to make the journey backwards towards his own culture. A child who only hears Marxist speeches from his parents. So he speaks like that. I went through a period like that, when I couldn’t speak anything other than Marxist phrases, so it was easy for me to find the humor in that.

Books that allow their reader to feel the way history is acting on the characters and the story are rare, you know? And so I wanted to write something that I missed when I read the big books set in faraway lands: a sense of historical perspective.

The novel tells the story of a mixed-race European boy who discovers Africa in this contemporary moment, and a white European (his ancestor) who discovers Africa as part of the French conquest of the Ivory Coast—these are two characters who make journeys that will change their lives forever, and who discover the African landscape and peoples after thinking about and investing in African mythologies in their own personal ways. Can you tell us a little about the structure of your novel and these parallel journeys? 

In fact, what writers often neglect to do is to allow the reader a way to gain a kind of historical perspective on the story being told. I’ve read a lot of novels, a lot of good, good books. Take War and Peace. There’s not a lot of historical perspective in War and Peace. And in a lot of travel and adventure novels, there’s none at all, you enter the story and then stay there. In fact, because you’re so deep inside the story you can’t draw any conclusions about history and about what it all means. Books that allow their reader to feel the way history is acting on the characters and the story are rare, you know? And so I wanted to write something that I missed when I read the big books set in faraway lands: a sense of historical perspective. So that’s why I put this little kid and his story in the novel. I wove the two stories knowing full well that they were going to have to link up in the end and in that connection between the two stories the reader would feel the weight of history. Because history is alive. It lives on in us: whether European, African, or American. No matter your race. A White American lives in the shadow of their violent history as much as a Black American. But it’s rare that a writer will allow that personal history the reader carries with them to resonate with the novel. I wanted this hyper-personal thing to link these two characters who are diametrically opposed from the start. There’s nothing to make you think that this child of Marxist parents in Holland is a mixed race kid. And there’s nothing to make you think this White guy in the nineteenth century who gets on a boat to Africa is going to stay there and have a family. This book is full of surprises. The colonial history of Côte d’Ivoire, it’s not a nice story, but I wanted to give the reader a nice dramatic surprise.

The main character is one of the guys who came to Africa from France as part of the famous “mission civilisatrice” that justified the colonial project. The character of Dabilly is not a commander, he’s poor, ordinary, an economic migrant, who makes a bet like those who go to Europe or the United States at that time. Did you conceive the character of Dabilly before you started writing the novel, or after you’d started? How did you get into his point of view and sensibility?

It was super easy. It’s weird how easy it was to imagine myself in the shoes of a twenty-year-old kid who wanted to go and try his luck somewhere else. Dabilly did exactly what I did when I got my master’s degree in Abidjan. I said to myself, this place is too small for me. So there you have it. And in fact, that’s why people say that I’ve removed the colour from this character, but all I had to do was think of him as a working class guy, a young guy, who’s on the move. Who wants to build a future. It’s like all young people in Africa. All I had to do was look at myself and my friends. And to push the empathy further, I had to find a place of origin for him. I looked at the map of France and I wanted him to come from a hard knock place: there were three very hard places at that time: Brittany, Corsica, and Loire. I remembered I had a buddy who lived in a town called Abilly. So I called my character Dabilly. I went there, walked around, went to the town hall and read the registers from the nineteenth century. The peasants did not have it easy. The mill where the character’s parents work—the ruins still exist. I could imagine the suffering of the millers and their families when they died from pneumonia after twenty years of inhaling flour dust. I followed the route Dabilly would take after they died. It’s funny, in Europe, every time someone wants to change their destiny, they head west. And on the way west, there was Châtellerault where he works in a factory and first heard of Africa, then La Rochelle. And it just so happens that La Rochelle is the colonial town that founded the Ivory Coast. So the story was all lined up. He leaves from La Rochelle by ship and arrives in Grand Bassam. My hometown. The book starts with the waves, because the break posed a real problem to explorers. France colonized the Ivory Coast territories late because of the power of those waves. To write the book all I had to do was put myself in the guy’s shoes, there, in front of my house, on the beach, to see how difficult it was going to be for him to come to Grand Bassam. So I wanted to both reckon with the power of those waves that have drowned many people and at the same time I wanted to make his arrival a bit ridiculous, as the arrival of the White people in their wool uniforms must have been. They’re the ones who wrote the books, so they always have heroic arrivals, but really, it’s quite ridiculous to arrive wet in the sand, in stockings, short pants, and a feathered hat.

The Kroumens, the Agnis and other peoples of the land that became Côte d’Ivoire have different languages, economies, traditions and jokes, and in your novel they trade with the colonizers, often in very advantageous ways—so the fiction of the civilizing mission is belied a little, and in a rather funny way. It’s very well done. The fiction of colonization runs the risk of characterizing Africa as a single country. Was it important for you that the novel be panoramic in terms of places and characters to resist this narrative?

I like the term panoramic. The novel could only be panoramic because in Africa our countries are very diverse. Take Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, everyone’s the same, really. Even the forest is the same as the men who live in the forest, both are unfathomable: characterized by darkness, danger, fear, and languor. I like Conrad, but you can see that he didn’t couldn’t see the difference between people. Whereas I grew up going to school with people there were fifteen ethnic groups. The question of difference doesn’t even arise—it’s a part of life. By the age of six or seven, I’d already heard a dozen languages. So that’s why the child narrator who comes from Holland to Côte d’Ivoire, that’s why he adapts so well, because he’s learned to hear different languages, so he knows how to work with the language. Because of all these differences, naturally, we learn, we learn to converse with people who aren’t like us, to find what brings us together rather than what makes us different. And that’s why Africa is always negotiating. Negotiation is a civilizational value across the African continent because of its panoramic diversity. And so I had to write this novel in a way that would show the differences between the people of Côte d’Ivoire.

Literary writers today seem to be plagued by a kind of cynicism. They’ve understood everything. They don’t hope or believe in anything. But in fact, amidst the violent acts that one civilization has perpetrated on another it’s true that there are people who have forged bonds of love.

You did a lot of archival research in preparing to write your novel. How did this research inform your thinking on colonial history and the question of how this history is received today? Did you think about how your European, African, and now American readers would perceive this history and how you could play on these perceptions?

The plan for this book was to tell the story of colonization as the people experiencing it when the colonizer’s first arrived perceived it. This is a narrative told on a human scale. I wanted to avoid getting into grand theories, in fact, by writing about human adventures that everyone can understand. Because you quickly understand what it’s like to be lost. You quickly understand what it’s like to feel emptiness and to feel love. The French people that were sent over as part of the so-called “mission civilisatrice.” They weren’t civilized. They were poor country bumpkins. Just a group of clueless people who had incredible power in their hands and who used and abused it. All in the name of the capitalist economic model. But the leaders of these improvised colonial forces didn’t belong to any other civilization beyond the one they were inventing on the soil they claimed as their own. Well, that’s not true, they also belonged to the civilization of greed. Which followed logically (laughs). And that’s where all my research led me. I had to take on the heaviness of colonial history to be able to make light and to tell human stories in a colonial context. It was important that the colonial context be well defined in the novel: that the reader understands what’s going on, that they imagine the places, that they truly see the men for the first time. That there’s empathy for both the colonizer and the colonized: because these are merely the men. And that the reader also sees everything that is exchanged between them and that the importance of everything that was exchanged becomes clear. The story of contact is a story of exchange. Many of the Africans the colonizers were trading with believed these white men were passing through and that it was good to talk to them and to trade with them. That’s what an economy is: the ability to exchange tangible and intangible goods. And Africans had thriving economies that existed without the context of systematic domination. In fact, the Africans realized too late that the person with whom they believed they were trading with on an equal footing had come for a different reason entirely. So in a way it’s simple. The story of contact is a story of exchange but what’s more, is that in order to fully understand the subtleties of that period, it’s not enough to study African colonization, you also have to study the civilizational context of Europe in the nineteenth century, going back to the Napoleonic Wars. They should give me a doctorate in history, I’m being a smartass, but it’s true.

Love and family are the ties that bind the two narratives (one contemporary, the other historical) in this novel, so while the story is often funny, it’s tenderness that carries the reader to the conclusion. We always talk about wars as the events that determine history. What role does love play in the history of France and Côte d’Ivoire, and in your novel, Comrade Papa?

The great lesson is love. The love this young man has for a woman: his wife, his lover, who becomes a mother. I didn’t want to add violence on top of violence. I think the reader knows the horror of the colonial situation and sees the violence described in the book. To get them through the novel, I wanted to give them the tenderness of family and of love because it’s so universal. We don’t call on love enough! We don’t call on empathy enough! We don’t call on tenderness enough! Literary writers today seem to be plagued by a kind of cynicism. They’ve understood everything. They don’t hope or believe in anything. But in fact, amidst the violent acts that one civilization has perpetrated on another it’s true that there are people who have forged bonds of love. This is what can allow us to think about colonization and contact as something that happened to people like you and me. I wanted the child narrator to discover his love for his mother, and his grandmother’s love as well. He pieces together one hundred years of unsuspected family history and it’s very touching. When I finished writing the last chapter, I cried. I’m not ashamed to say that I had tears in my eyes when I finished my story. It allowed me to see how sincere I was. I believe sincerity is a form of intelligence.

Finally, what are you reading now?

Right now, I’m reading poetry and philosophy. Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract. It’s a bit hard going and yet it’s brilliant. I’m also reading the poetry of Léon-Gontran Damas, one of the founders of the Négritude movement with Léopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire. I’m committing poems to memory for the first time and it’s really worth doing. His first collection Pigments and his last collection Black Label, are just pure genius.

***

In good publicity news:

  • The Notebook by Roland Allen was reviewed in the New Yorker: “Allen’s narrative moves fluidly as he recounts the evolution of the notebook’s use.”
  • A Case of Matricide by Graeme Macrae Burnet was reviewed in the Guardian: “This quirky blend of psychological thriller and smalltown life is both thought-provoking and entirely convincing.”
  • May Our Joy Endure by Kev Lambert (trans. Donald Winkler) was featured in Lavender Magazine: “Worth the ride.”
  • A Way to Be Happy by Caroline Adderson was featured in Scout Magazine: “A collection of unique, entertaining and multi-layered stories.”

The Bibliophile: Honouring the Reading

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A writer is never really writing alone. You learn from everything you read and this is a way of honouring that reading.
—Caroline Adderson

Facebook is, as I said last week, a useful tool for a flagellant, but it’s also useful at alerting us on occasion to what we’ve forgotten. So even though I knew our twentieth anniversary or birthday or whatever you want to call it was quickly upon us, what I was no longer sure of was the exact date. I remember that the day that the boxes of Salvatore Ala’s Straight Razor and Other Poems were wheeled through the door of our first bookshop at 1519 Ouellette Ave. by the Canpar delivery man was only a day or two before Thanksgiving, 2004. I remember the moment that we carefully cut through the packing tape and pulled back the flaps, to be awed by the unvarnished beauty of all of those straight razors looking back up at us. I remember closing the shop for the rest of the day to celebrate, and heading out with Dennis Priebe, my production manager, fellow bookseller, and friend, and Sal to celebrate. And I remember carrying that book with me all Thanksgiving weekend, from family function to family function, so proud I was (and remain) of this first publication.

Photo: Straight Razor by Salvatore Ala, the first book of many to come from Biblioasis. In paperback and a limited edition hardcover.

What I didn’t remember was the date. But Facebook is indeed very good at that, and this week popped up with a memory telling me that it was October 7. So, now, it seems, we are officially twenty! Not as old as those geezers at ECW, who will be celebrating their fiftieth anniversary this fall at a party with musical performances by Dave Bidini, Rik Emmett, and others: Allied Forces! Now that makes me feel old! (There’s a great profile of ECW here, for those interested in reading more.) But old enough. Twenty years, I’ve joked perhaps once too often, is the equivalent of a life sentence; I’m not sure if or when I’ll ever get paroled, but what I am certain of is that I don’t have another thirty in me. The longer I do this, the more amazed I am by those who’ve done it far longer.

Our next books after publishing Salvatore Ala’s Straight Razor and Other Poems were a series of limited edition short fiction chapbooks, the first three of which were by Leon Rooke, Clark Blaise, and Caroline Adderson. Caroline’s contribution, published in January, 2005, was a short story called Mr Justice, which was later gathered in her second collection, Pleased to Meet You. I’ve already written in an earlier installment of The Bibliophile about my discovery and love of Caroline’s work, but she’s also one of the writers we’ve been associated with longest. I still don’t quite understand how it is that she’s not among our most celebrated writers. But the great thing about that is that her work is still there, waiting to be discovered. So, please, on this Thanksgiving weekend, do so: trust me when I say it’s one of the easiest ways you can make yourself happy.

Photo: Mr Justice by Caroline Adderson, in a limited edition paperback and hardcover. No. 4 in the Biblioasis Short Fiction Series, readied for the press by John Metcalf.

Last week, I was able to spend a couple of days with Caroline as she toured down the 401, launching her new collection, A Way to Be Happy, alongside Richard Kelly Kemick’s Hello, Horse in Windsor and Toronto before she headed off to Ottawa and Montreal. The interview I recorded with Caroline and Richard was excellent, and, if I ever find the time to transcribe it, might make a future installment of this newsletter: the conversation ranged widely, from writing across genres, to what people get wrong about short fiction, to where their ideas come from, to the role of humour in both authors’ work, to what they each wish they’d known when they started writing. In the meantime, I thought I’d include an earlier interview we did with Caroline, in anticipation of the launch of A Way to Be Happy.

Dan Wells,
Publisher

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An Interview with Caroline Adderson

Photo: Caroline Adderson, reading from A Way to Be Happy at Biblioasis on October 2, 2024.

Can you tell me a little bit about yourself?

I’m a writer of all kinds of things, predominantly fiction for adults, both novels and short stories. I also write for children and have published one non-fiction book. But my real love is short stories.

As I read A Way to Be Happy, I was reminded of some great writers, including Alice Munro, George Saunders, and Claire Keegan, and was excited by your literary allusions to Emily Dickinson, Anton Chekhov, and more. Can you talk about some of your literary influences, and the role they play in your work, particularly in A Way to Be Happy?

I sometimes feel like I’m moving against the current. The trend today seems to be autofiction and writing from one’s lived experience. But I’ve never really done that. To me, writing is an act of empathy. I’m interested in trying to feel what it is to be someone entirely different from me. As I’ve gone along in my career, I’ve felt the need to do this even on a sentence level, to move past my own words and incorporate, or riff on, other texts. I wouldn’t say that the writers that are referenced in A Way to Be Happy have influenced my prose style per se. But since you mentioned Alice Munro, she definitely has. Whenever I’m faced with a technical problem, I turn to Munro.

When I read, I read with a pencil, underlining the sentences I admire, then transcribing these random sentences in a notebook. I often turn to this list for inspiration. I’m always encouraging students to do this too, so that they might pay more attention to the words they use and feel what style is from the inside, which is what happens when you copy something out.

Most of the stories in A Way to Be Happy contain an element of inter-textual experimentation. Sometimes it’s a little puzzle. Sometimes it’s the title, such as “All Our Auld Acquaintances Are Gone.” It’s not like Robbie Burns inspired the story, but the reference, I hope, sets up an ironic and even melodic line that runs through it. If the reader happens to recognize a reference, then the implications of that text are imported into the story. It’s really something I’m doing for myself, to keep growing in my craft, to keep learning, and to be part of “literature” in general. A writer is never really writing alone. You learn from everything you read and this is a way of honouring that reading.

The empathy for your characters is tangible, which is a unique feat given how varied your work is, and how many of your characters are ones that aren’t always visible—or focalizers—in literature. Can you tell me about the experience of inhabiting perspectives, voices, and experiences other than your own, and your approach to finding empathy for such a wide cast of characters?

I don’t find it very hard. I’m one of those people who weeps at the news and lies awake at night worrying about people I have no personal connection to. Part of being a decent human being is caring about others. And when you care about other people, you’re curious about them, curious about how they live, and how they think and feel. The pandemic was, among other things, great for practicing this. I found myself challenged by opinions I found repellant and divisive, and had to remind myself that I had these writerly skills. What if I opened my heart? What if I tried to understand why they think that way? What happened that put them in that position? That’s what I’m trying to do on the page, which is easier than in real life!

You’ve mentioned in a previous interview (with The Artisanal Writer, 2021) that for you, the most pleasurable aspect of writing is the visitation of the idea and the second is revision. When writing A Way to Be Happy, were there any stories inspired by a particularly memorable idea? Any first drafts you especially enjoyed revising?

Spoiler alert! The story “Charity” was one. It was, in a way, a gift. A friend of mine had a bone marrow transplant then, several years later, met his donor, a lawyer in New York City. Of course, he asked his donor why he’d signed up. It turned out that he didn’t even remember doing it. He went to a Jewish high school; as part of their religious education, they had to do a mitzvah. He was completely surprised when the call came so long after the fact. I thought the forgetting was pretty interesting. The idea of charity is, too, because the person who performs a charitable act definitely gets something from the transaction. Eventually I started thinking about a character whose forgotten good deed is actually the very thing that saves his life. So that was “the idea”. Then I had to figure out who this person was and what his background was like. I thought of Quoyle in Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News, the first page of which I teach in a class on beginnings. He’s this hapless guy who Proulx intricately describes without ever actually saying what he looks like. I named Robbie after him. But as I was writing, Proulx began to unconsciously morph into Prufrock. At first it was just the sound of the two names, but then I realized there were other similarities despite Prufrock being at the end of his life and Robbie at the beginning. At that point I began to use the poem more deliberately to influence the prose. In earlier drafts of the story, I wove whole lines throughout it. I thought it was really clever until I gave it to friends to read and they said it was annoying and distracting. In subsequent drafts, I excised, and excised, and excised. There’s a lot still there but it’s embedded so deeply now its effect is mainly in the rhythm of the sentences. I love working like this, moving the words around and playing with the language, trying to get it to do something beyond just tell the story.

In various stories, you make reference to distinctly Canadian stores like Winners and La Vie en Rose, which allows some readers to place the characters in Canada immediately. At the same time, a reader unfamiliar with these brands can piece why they are mentioned. When crafting a story, do you consider how your reader experiences piecing together the details? And perhaps more broadly, what bearing does the idea of an anticipated reader have on your work?

Unfortunately, not very often. I think I’d be a more successful writer if I actually considered who in the world would want to read about these people. I’m writing for the characters. I feel it’s my duty as a writer to tell, as truthfully and accurately as possible, what happened to this person who does not, in fact, exist. What a reader will make of it, I only think about it after the fact. As in: What?! You’re repelled?

Lastly, what are you reading now?

I’ve decided that I only want to write novels that are two hundred pages or less, so this year I’m only reading novels that are two hundred pages or less. I’m discovering and rediscovering all these wonderful books based on this rather arbitrary criterion. The Vegetarian, by Han Kang. Fantastic. I reread Elke Schmitter’s Mrs Sartoris. I met her at a festival years ago. Nadine Gordimer’s The Late Bourgeois World. Penelope Fitzgerald. I’ve read everything by her and am working my way through her oeuvre for the third time now. Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John. Oh, I loved Ivana Sajko’s Love Novel, which Biblioasis published. Mary Robinson’s Ha!. I’d never read her. It was just a scream, and I love punctuation in titles. Sarah Bernstein’s Study for Obedience. There’s a very interesting Spanish book by Andrés Barba, called Such Small Hands, about murderous girls in a convent orphanage. James Welch’s Winter in the Blood was wonderful. Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the Attic. It’s told in second person plural from the point of view of Japanese picture brides. Mrs Caliban was fun. William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow. A brilliant, brilliant book. I reread The Emigrants by W. G. Sebald. I could go on and on . . .

***

In good publicity news:

Media Hits: A WAY TO BE HAPPY, THE EDUCATION OF AUBREY MCKEE, THE NOTEBOOK, and more!

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IN THE NEWS!

A WAY TO BE HAPPY

A Way to Be Happy by Caroline Adderson (Sep 10, 2024) has received a starred review from Kirkus Reviews! The starred review will appear in their August print issue, and was published online on July 4. Check it out here.

Kirkus writes,

“Adderson . . . is a deft, masterful storyteller whose literary fiction surely deserves more attention.”

Order A Way to Be Happy here!

HELLO, HORSE

Hello, Horse by Richard Kelly Kemick (Aug 6, 2024) was listed in Reactor‘s “Can’t Miss Indie Press Speculative Fiction for July and August 2024.” The article was posted on July 3, and you can read it here.

Tobias Carroll writes,

“These stories include a number of strange visions of the not-so-distant future—and throw some ghosts into the mix as well. “

Get Hello, Horse here!

THE NOTEBOOK

Roland Allen, author of The Notebook (Sep 3, 2024), was interviewed on Ryan Holiday’s podcast The Daily Stoic. The episode aired on June 26, and is available to listen to here.

Order The Notebook here!

THE HOLLOW BEAST

The Hollow Beast by Christophe Bernard, translated by Lazer Lederhendler (Apr 2, 2024), was reviewed in the Manhattan Book Review. The review was published online for their June issue, and is available to read here.

Reviewer Eric Smith writes,

“Bernard’s hilarious tome is a hundred-proof fever dream of bizarre scenarios and Canada’s most outlandish cast of characters . . . But readers beware. Your technicolor nightmares will be fueled by The Hollow Beast.”

Grab The Hollow Beast here!

AWARD NEWS!

THE EDUCATION OF AUBREY MCKEE

The Education of Aubrey McKee by Alex Pugsley (May 7, 2024) has been longlisted for the 2024 Toronto Book Awards! The longlist was announced on July 4, and you can read it here.

Toronto Public Library has created a special reading list of the 2024 longlisted titles, here. The shortlist for the 2024 Toronto Book Awards will be announced later this summer and a winner will be named in a prize ceremony November 7.

Grab The Education of Aubrey McKee here!

Or, check out the first book, Aubrey McKee, here.

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