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The Bibliophile: A Good Short Story

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The make-up of Best Canadian Stories 2025

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

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

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

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

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

Ashley Van Elswyk,
Editorial Assistant

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Because We Buy Oat Milk

Glenna Turnbull

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—from PRISM international

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

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20 Stores for 20 Years: Upstart & Crow

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

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

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

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

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

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For the Holidays…

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

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

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In good publicity news:

The Bibliophile: Small (or Large) Machines

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Introducing Best Canadian Poetry 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vanessa Stauffer,
Managing Editor

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Honey Crisp

Molly Peacock

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

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

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

—from The Walrus

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

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

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A Poem about Blackboy’s Horse

Bertrand Bickersteth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—from The Fiddlehead

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

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

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He / him

Y. S. Lee

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

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

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

—from Grain

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

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

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20 Stores for 20 Years: Interabang

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

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

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

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

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

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In good publicity news:

The Bibliophile: An Existential Tragedy

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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.

***

In good publicity news:

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

The Bibliophile: Conviction Addiction

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Mark Kingwell on compassionate skepticism and the project of justice

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

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

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

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

Dan Wells,
Publisher

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

An Excerpt from Question Authority

Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

In good publicity news:

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

The Bibliophile: The Notebook by Roland Allen

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During the 2023 London Book Fair I made what has become one of my favourite pilgrimages: to Hampstead Heath to meet the publishers of Sort of Books, Mark Ellingham and Nat Jansz. I became acquainted with Mark in 2019, when we took Canadian rights for Andri Snær Magnason’s On Time and Water, a book about global warming that Mark had acquired for Profile Books. When acquiring books, one also often acquires friends along the way: Mark and Nat rank among the best of these.

Before becoming an acquiring editor of nonfiction for Profile and starting up Sort of Books with Nat, Mark had been the creator and publisher of the Rough Guide series of travel and cultural books. Growing increasingly anxious about the environmental costs of rampant tourism and his company’s own contribution to the same, Mark sold the company and used the profits to devote himself to a different type of publishing program. That 2019 afternoon when we first met had been grey and threatening, the tall grass his dog led us through soaking the only pair of shoes I had with me, the dampness later rising up my legs as the Booker Prize ceremony that had brought me to London progressed, so that by the time the winner was announced, I was rather feverish. But the hours I spent with Mark wandering the heath, and then eating lunch at the Wells Tavern, were more than worth it, and, during the long days and weeks and months of the pandemic, took on an especially golden resonance.

The April day in 2023 when we next met was quite beautiful, and after another walk with the dog, and another lunch, we finished up with coffee in the front room of Nat’s and Mark’s house, which doubles as Sort of’s centre of operations. One of the pleasures of these fairs is talking with other people who understand the particular challenges and pitfalls of independent publishing, as well as its equally particular pleasures, which include the discovery of new books. At one point Mark put down his coffee and motioned me over to his computer: “Come take a look at this.” And he proceeded to tell me about Roland Allen’s The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper.

There is, at least for me, a covetous aspect to being a publisher: you learn of a book and feel an immediate quickening, a desire to have it for your list, or to be part of it in some fashion. This feeling overwhelmed me on first learning of The Notebook. Here, Mark told me, was the first book of its kind, a history of the notebook and the radical ways it has changed how we relate to both the world and to ourselves through a wide range of disciplines, from accounting and art to exploration, medical care, policing, and science. In the parlance of the antiquarian trade, I love BABs, or books about books, and here was a BAB quite unlike any other. Reading it transformed my own understanding of the role of this humble invention—but just as importantly, it’s changed how I use my own notebooks on a daily basis.

And judging from the response to the book since we first published it in September, I’m not alone. The Notebook has received rave reviews in the likes of Kirkus, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and The New Yorker; Ryan Holiday has sung its praises; and it’s been quite easily our best-selling book of the season.

There are so many wonderful stories within these pages, but one of my favourites concerns the zibaldone, an invention that changed our relationship, before the printing press, to literature, making it possible, in the world before print, for work by the likes of Dante and Boccaccio to travel far beyond the communities for which they wrote. Since reading this, I have begun to keep my own zibaldone as a notebook distinct from my others; perhaps some of you, once you finish reading this, will do the same.

Dan Wells
Publisher

Photo: The Notebook by Roland Allen, with a cover designed by Louis Gabaldoni.

Excerpt from Chapter 4: Ricordi, ricordanzi, zibaldoni

Notebooks in the home, Florence 1300–1500

No-one knows exactly when the gloriously sonorous noun zibaldone appeared, or what it originally meant. The earliest record of the word, in the mid-fourteenth century, refers to it as Florentine slang, without further definition, and we can only infer from context that it means something like ‘mess’ or ‘jumble’. The fifteenth-century merchant and art patron Giovanni Rucellai referred to his own zibaldone as ‘una insalata di più herbe’, a salad of many herbs, which gives an impression of something variegated and wholesome. But by then it had also become firmly attached to the notebook in one of its most enduring applications. For this informal culinary term came to signify a personal anthology, or miscellany.

The basic principle was simple: when you found a piece of writing that you liked, or found useful, you copied it out into your personal notebook. You could copy out as much or as little as you wanted, neatly or not, and refer to it a little, or as much, as you wanted. The collection could be poetry or prose, fictional or factual, thematic or random, religious or profane, in Latin or Tuscan, or any mixture of any of these components; you could even draw pictures in it. The notebook itself could be large or small, luxurious or utilitarian. Some better-off writers, such as the author Boccaccio (the son of a Bardi banker), had zibaldoni made of expensive parchment, and paid professional scribes to do the writing for them. Many users illustrated them, or commissioned elaborate initial capitals to open every new excerpt: surviving examples often have gaps where their owners never got round to completing that task.

Mostly they were kept by men, but not all were, and we can assume that many wives, sisters and daughters would have had access to the books kept by the men of the house. For zibaldoni, although always idiosyncratic and personal to their owner, were not necessarily private, or intimate: you would share the highlights of your own with your friends, and if you saw something that you liked in theirs, you’d copy it over. You could sell a full zibaldone, or hand it down to your heirs, and in many examples one can see where the father stopped writing and the son took over.

Some even caused family disputes. ‘This book was written by Piero di Ser Nicholo di Ser Verdiano, for his own contemplation, and that of his family, etc. in the year of Our Lord 1458’ reads an inscription at the beginning of one notebook, before writing that Piero intends the book to go to Girolamo di Piero Arighi, presumably his son. Beneath this is a crossing-out, and under that another hand writes ‘Note that you are lying through your teeth like the scoundrel you are, and you are a crazy windbag.’ Was that inserted by Girolamo’s brother, Bartolomeo, who elsewhere in the zibaldone claims ownership?

The son of a banker, Boccaccio could afford to pay scribes to compile his zibaldoni. This playful layout has extracts from the Roman poet Flacco.

What did people write in their zibaldoni? In a word: everything. Poems in Latin, poems in Tuscan, prayers, excerpts from books, songs, recipes, lists, you name it. Lisa Kaborycha, who has studied them extensively, points to one fifteenth-century example which, entirely typically, contains material as various as ‘remedies and recipes, interpretations of dreams, astrological predictions, advice on the best times for planting, Pseudo-Saint Bernard’s Epistle to Raymond, prayers, poems, ballads and a number of sonnets by Coluccio Salutati, Antonio Pucci, and Dante.’ Armando Petrucci, another expert, celebrated the zibaldone for preserving ‘gate tolls and currency exchange rates . . . alongside medical recipes, devotional tracts, lauds, and love lyrics’.

Rucellai compiled his zibaldone with his sons in mind: for their benefit, it contained moral precepts, advice on business and civic duties. In his, the sculptor Ghiberti collected translations of Vitruvius and Pliny, drawings of Roman architecture, a history of Florentine and Sienese art, and his own memoirs. Through these he interlaced his own theoretical ideas—on optics, proportion, anatomy—clearly intending the collection to form the basis of a humanist art education. His grandson Bonaccorso, who inherited them along with the family business, left his own notebooks, which quote from his grandfather’s and add numerous diagrams of bells, cannon, cranes and hoists. So no two zibaldoni are the same.

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Florentines loved their new hobby. Looking at the zibaldoni in the archives, researchers can track how the notebooks grew in popularity over time, peaking in the fifteenth century as Florence enjoyed its second heyday as the hub of Europe’s intellectual life. Books had now become everyday items, and this had profound effects on how ordinary people enjoyed the written word. Literature, previously only available in monasteries, universities, courts and a few other privileged locations, now moved into the home: the kitchen table and shop counter joined the tilted desk of the scriptorium as a place where a book could be read, or written. People read in a new way in these new locations too. They enjoyed a wave of authors writing in their local tongue—not just Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio, but a host of other writers forgotten today—and, unlike a student or a cleric in an institution’s library, they could read privately, even in bed.

We should note, too, that the labour involved in copying out a chunk of literature changes the way the copyist relates to it. Transcribing a poem or letter forces the writer to read it multiple times, paying attention to the fine details of word selection and word order, and to consequently enjoy what one scholar calls ‘a more intimate and meaningful experience than they could have with purchased texts’. You only take on the significant labour of such copying if you really enjoy the text, and you then find that you come to know it and appreciate it much better.

How did this new habit relate to the continuing work of traditional scribes? Historian Ross King has described a thriving culture of high-end manuscript production in Florence, where professional scribes and notaries—and the secretaries of some rich men—produced formal manuscript copies, nearly always on parchment, to order. Such copies could be extremely beautiful, and the booksellers who commissioned them for their wealthy clients took great care about their texts. King relates, for instance, how the great bookseller Vespasiano da Bisticci (1421–98) would compare multiple extant copies of an ancient book—for instance, Pliny’s Natural History—in order to make sure that his new version was as faithful as possible to its author’s intentions. Scribes moved their pens differently, dropping the baffling vertical strokes of traditional gothic script and adopting the beautifully lucid ‘antique’ or humanist style, recommended by Vespasiano’s contemporary Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459) in its place.

Bonaccorso Ghiberti recorded many of the machines that Brunelleschi developed for the construction of the dome of Florence cathedral.

Funded by wealthy patrons like Cosimo de’ Medici,* and scouring Europe’s monasteries for rare Dark Age survivals of classical texts, Vespasiano, Poggio and their peers kept up a steady supply of beautiful manuscripts filled with fresh translations, rediscoveries and new literary works. The presence of the papal court in Florence for several years also drew scholars to the city, and stimulated a rich intellectual life centred on the new libraries and bookshops where bookworms met to discuss their reading. This high-end literacy undoubtedly had a profound impact on European culture, giving the Renaissance its intellectual heft, and King celebrates its heroes, such as the legendary fourteenth-century scribe who produced one hundred copies of Dante’s Divine Comedy, whose sales contributed to his many daughters’ dowries.

But such painstaking efforts in expensive parchment codices could only ever find an elite audience. For Dante to become widely read, universally celebrated and the foundation of a new literature—in short, for Dante to become Dante—scribal reproduction would not alone suffice. His writings were transmitted to a much larger, more diverse, audience, by thousands of ordinary people copying favourite texts from zibaldone to zibaldone, reading and re-reading them at home, and sharing them with friends and family. And they copied not in the formal gothic or antique scripts that took years to master, but the rapid cursive scripts used by merchants and notaries; people who had to write accurately, but also quickly.

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So notebooks democratised literature by giving readers another way to read; but they also gave writers another way to write. Petrarch (1304–74), another favourite of zibaldone keepers, adopted the habits and materials of notaries, the legal professionals who formed a crucial part of the mercantile ecosystem, and today’s scholars can trace his ideas as they progress from notes on loose leaves of paper to rough copies in paper notebooks and finally to completed books in a definitive version on prestigious parchment.* The intermediate stage, in the notebook, was creatively the most important and could last a while: Petrarch worked on the verses in Il Canzoniere for forty years (this was an age before publishers’ deadlines). Such labours definitely paid for themselves: by the time of his death, the poet had been crowned poet laureate in Rome.

In the zibaldoni of Petrarch’s friend Boccaccio (1313–75), we can see how the notebook helped writers in other ways, giving them a place to collect influences for future reference and quotation. As a young man, Boccaccio endured a miserable commercial apprenticeship at the Bardi bank, where his father was a partner, before breaking away to write full-time. He left no fewer than three zibaldoni, two written by scribes on parchment, and one rough notebook, known as the Zibaldone Magliabechiano, that he kept himself. Scholars have pored over them to discern his influences and their impact on his work, including the Decameron, and they betray an impressive depth of reading: a life of Mohammed, Euripides, Pliny, letters to and from Petrarch, and so on. In turn, his own work would feature in many zibaldoni, juxtaposed with—thrown into dialogue with – classical authors like Aristotle, Cicero and Seneca.*

***

Was Florence unique in all this? Yes and no. Notebook-keepers across Europe also made their own informal personal anthologies: examples survive from Scotland to Poland, and a vast majority of such books must have been lost or pulped many centuries ago. In the late 1300s, Dutch and German adherents of the devotio moderna—‘modern devotion’—movement were encouraged to keep rapiaria. The name for these notebooks derives from the Latin rapere, meaning to seize; we might call them ‘grab-bags’. In these devotional notebooks, the pious collected phrases or ideas from their scriptural reading, and added their own spiritual insights; the act of writing led to further rumination, helping the writer benefit from the wise words they copied. The Imitation of Christ—a hugely popular book—started life as the rapiarium of its author, Thomas à Kempis, a monk from Zwolle. Most rapiaria remained private, though, and were often buried with their owners, and the practice died out within a century.

But the people of Florence (and its environs) grasped the possibilities faster and more fully than anywhere else. Enriching their lives by ensuring that their favourite literature was always near at hand, they made it possible for a new writer to quickly find a wide audience. Most households had a book or two on a shelf and book-copying and production here outstripped that of every other city in Europe. One study of the period by the scholar Christian Bec shows that in the posthumous inventories of 582 deceased Renaissance Florentines, no fewer than 10,574 books were listed: an average of eighteen each.

Small wonder that Florence made a congenial home for the scholars, who would turn rediscovered classical texts into the keys of Renaissance humanism. In the city’s yeasty literary culture they could find a receptive readership, confident in their vernacular, ready for the translations, glosses and new works that humanists created, for they had already been enjoying the ancients for generations, ‘and knew the value of their wisdom’. Here too, new literary practice developed: authors could easily collect models and inspirations for their own work, could adapt the techniques of lawyers and merchants to help them hone it, and then rapidly find a wide audience in a well-read population that shared ‘content’ that we would today call viral.

Ricordi, ricordanzi and zibaldoni arrived in the thirteenth century as Florence established its commercial pre-eminence, grew in popularity over the course of the fourteenth as the city’s first great writers and painters made their impact, and peaked in the fifteenth, as the Renaissance flowered. In all three genres, and in the innumerable hybrid notebooks that refused to fit neatly into any category, Tuscans rich and poor recorded their place in society and celebrated a burgeoning culture of which they were justly proud.*

Footnotes:

  1. By 1444, when Cosimo opened the new library of San Marco, filling it with manuscripts he also donated, the tribulations that his predecessor Foligno had detailed were far behind.
  2. It is striking to note that notaries were trained to strike through phrases as they transferred them from their working draft (bastardello) to the final version, just as bookkeepers struck through transactions which had been reconciled to debit and credit. Petrarch’s father and grandfather had both been notaries.
  3. There’s more to literature than poetry, of course. Just ten years before Dante started work on the Divine Comedy, Marco Polo was coming up with Europe’s first international narrative non-fiction bestseller. Locked up in a Genoese jail with his amanuensis Rustichello da Pisa, Polo wrote his autobiographical Travels in around 1298. Sadly, we have no autograph manuscript and know nothing of how they composed the work.
  4. Literacy rates are notoriously difficult to prove, but there is strong evidence that they were higher in Florence than nearly everywhere else. Eight out of ten 1427 tax returns, for instance, were written by the taxpayer responsible, indicating a high rate of writing skill among property-holders. The historian Ronald Witt concluded that the city enjoyed rates of literacy ‘not seen again in Europe for another three or four centuries’.

Photo: Author Roland Allen signing copies of The Notebook at the Windsor book launch in Biblioasis Bookshop, September 30.

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In good publicity news:

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 . . .

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In good publicity news:

The Bibliophile: What A Publisher Does

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Over the years, whenever I’ve been asked what it is exactly a publisher does, I’ve had a range of answers, depending on how I’m thinking about my role and function at the time. Of late, I’ve described myself as a professional enthusiast. Enthusiasm is probably the state that most links publishing and bookselling for me: finding that book that I can get behind and trumpet into the hands of readers as loudly and as confidently and generously as I can. I take immense pleasure in the discovery of a new (or new-to-me) writer, and in the ability to engender in others that same anticipation and pleasure.

It’s perhaps for this reason that I listen so much to booksellers, and trust them more than I do academics and critics: they still read as I do, or at least as I try to do: for pleasure, excitement, the feeling of quickening when something unexpectedly connects or opens with the turn of the page. I listen to them about what I should be reading (if I could ever get out from under the manuscript pile), but also, just as much, what we should be thinking about publishing. Booksellers have turned me on to several of my favourite Biblioasis authors, and I’m grateful for it.

Photo: May Our Joy Endure, Querelle of Roberval, and You Will Love What You Have Killed by Kev Lambert.

It was in 2018 or 2019, at the Salon des Livres that one such bookseller urged me to look at the work of Kev Lambert. It bothers me that I can’t remember his name at this time, nor even the bookstore he worked at: it was a French language bookstore in Quebec City, and he was there working the Salon for a couple of publishers. During a break he took me by the arm and guided me to a couple of publisher’s booths, including Heliotrope’s, picking up Kev’s just-released Tu aimeras ce que tu a tué. Kev, he told me, was the most original and fearless author to come out of Quebec in at least a generation, and that if this book was anything to go by was a writer we should commit to early. His enthusiasm was contagious, so I sent it immediately to my most trusted reader, who sent me one of the most enthusiastic (and strangest) reader reports I’ve ever had the pleasure to receive. Below: a short excerpt:

Well, I’m rather glad you don’t have to run books by a corporate publishing committee, because I have no idea how to explain this book cogently, let alone come up with a one-line pitch, but I one hundred per cent think you should buy it. Essentially it’s a gay coming-of-age in which the narrator may or may not be a ghost, and lots of children die, who may or may not come back as ghosts. And it’s the funniest, weirdest thing I’ve read for a long time…..It’s The Returned [if that French TV series about dead children coming back to their village made Canadian shores; it became a cult hit in Britain] meets Clerks meets… [hmmm, this is nothing like Houellebecq but it would definitely appeal to people who love Houellebecq]. It’s so weird I’m struggling to come up with book comparisons, it often reads like a film. … And, bloody hell, this guy has written, at 25, one of the most original things I’ve read for quite a while.

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Translation is, for me, as a monoglot (my kids so regularly tell me that I speak country French that I now no longer try to speak it at all), an act of faith, especially faith in the readers and publishers I’ve come to trust. So we took a leap and published Kevin’s first book, and when I read it in Donald Winkler’s excellent translation (You Will Love What You Have Killed) I had to agree both with my bookseller guide and first reader: this was one of the most strangely original things I’d read. It was like the revenge of the Gashlycrumb Tinies (A is for Amy who fell down the stairs / B is for Basil assaulted by bears). This was a violent, comic, tragic, and lyrical world quite unlike any other. Their next novel, Querelle of Roberval, upped the ante: a novel of a labour strike in a Quebec milltown, it read like a Greek tragedy, ending with infanticide and the striking workers quite literally preparing to eat their rich bosses. It caused a furor in France where it won the de Sade Prize and was shortlisted for the Medici, and in English the Writer’s Trust prize, again in Donald Winkler’s inestimable translation.

This brings me to their third novel May Our Joy Endure, which was published earlier this month, and defies every expectation set by their first couple, beyond, that is, its breathtaking originality. The French version was a sensation, was a Goncourt finalist, and won the Médici and a range of other key awards. Kev has told me that they consider this exploration of the lives of the ultrarich their most violent novel to date, but it is a much more nuanced violence, and because of that so much more unsettling. “Writing Querelle left me with this big question about bosses and the rich,” Lambert told Steven Beattie in an interview for Quill & Quire. “My idea was to try and see the people who were invisible in Querelle. It made sense for me in a social way, because really rich people don’t want to be seen. They don’t want us to see how they live, where they live, what their day-to-day lives can look like.” But he also chose to approach these characters and their situations with as much empathy as possible. “I wanted to challenge the idea that humanizing the person you critique is giving them credit,” Lambert told Beattie. “We hear this sometimes in political or media circles. But I think it’s a fake or a wrong idea.”

This is only one of the things that makes May Our Joy Endure such an important book, and in the words of another reviewer, André Forget in The Walrus, “reveals Lambert to be one of our most subtle and perceptive novelists.” Calling the book “gorgeous, lyrical, and tender—a ballet performed in an abattoir,” Forget explains as well as anyone why Kev Lambert is so essential, and so refreshing in this hyper-politicized literary moment: they eschew playing it safe, pat answers and solutions, which also explains why it is that Biblioasis will continue to follow them anywhere.

Dan Wells
Publisher

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