All Things Move: Learning to Look in the Sistine Chapel by Jeannie Marshall will be launching in Rome at Almost Corner Bookshop! Jeannie will be reading and discussing the book on Monday, April 3 at 6:30PM CEST.
More details here.
Pick up your copy of All Things Move here!
A deeply personal search for meaning in Michelangelo’s frescoes—and an impassioned defence of the role of art in a fractured age.
What do we hope to get out of seeing a famous piece of art? Jeannie Marshall asked that question of herself when she started visiting the Sistine Chapel frescoes. She wanted to understand their meaning and context—but in the process, she also found what she didn’t know she was looking for.
All Things Move: Learning to Look in the Sistine Chapel tells the story of Marshall’s relationship with one of our most cherished artworks. Interwoven with the history of its making and the Rome of today, it’s an exploration of the past in the present, the street in the museum, and the way a work of art can both terrify and alchemize the soul. An impassioned defence of the role of art in a fractured age, All Things Move is a quietly sublime meditation on how our lives can be changed by art, if only we learn to look.
Jeannie Marshall is a writer who has been living in Italy with her family since 2002. A nonfiction author, journalist, and former staff features writer at the National Post in Toronto, she contributes articles to Maclean’s and the Walrus and has published literary nonfiction in The Common, the Literary Review of Canada, Brick, and elsewhere.
Come on down to LaHave Books, where poet Luke Hathaway will be reading from his latest collection, The Affirmations. Luke will be joined in reading and conversation by fellow poets Lisa McCabe and Michael Goodfellow. The event will take place on Saturday, April 8 at 4PM ADT.
Get your copy of The Affirmations here!
Winner of the 2021 Confederation Poets Prize • One of The Times’ Best Poetry Books of 2022 • A CBC Best Poetry Book of 2022
“…a trans-mystical work of love and change…”—Ali Blythe, author of Hymnswitch
The mystics who coined the phrase ‘the way of affirmation’ understood the apocalyptic nature of the word yes, the way it can lead out of one life and into another. Moving among the languages of Christian conversion, Classical metamorphosis, seasonal transformation, and gender transition, Luke Hathaway tells the story of the love that rewired his being, asking each of us to experience the transfiguration that can follow upon saying yes—with all one’s heart, with all one’s soul, with all one’s mind, with all one’s strength … and with all one’s body, too.
Luke Hathaway is a trans poet who teaches English and Creative Writing at Saint Mary’s University in Kjipuktuk/Halifax. He has been before now at some time boy and girl, bush, bird, and a mute fish in the sea. His book Years, Months, and Days was named a best book of 2018 in The New York Times. He mentors new librettists as a faculty member in the Amadeus Choir’s Choral Composition Lab, and makes music with Daniel Cabena as part of the metamorphosing ensemble ANIMA.
Jeannie Marshall, author of All Things Move: Learning to Look in the Sistine Chapel (April 4, 2023), will be reading from the book with Birch Bark Editing for their InConversation series! After, she and poet Judith Baumel (Thorny) will talk about the book’s deeply moving meditation on art, religion and life. This virtual event will take place over Zoom on Tuesday, April 11 at 7PM.
More details and registration link here.
Order your copy of All Things Move here!
A deeply personal search for meaning in Michelangelo’s frescoes—and an impassioned defence of the role of art in a fractured age.
What do we hope to get out of seeing a famous piece of art? Jeannie Marshall asked that question of herself when she started visiting the Sistine Chapel frescoes. She wanted to understand their meaning and context—but in the process, she also found what she didn’t know she was looking for.
All Things Move: Learning to Look in the Sistine Chapel tells the story of Marshall’s relationship with one of our most cherished artworks. Interwoven with the history of its making and the Rome of today, it’s an exploration of the past in the present, the street in the museum, and the way a work of art can both terrify and alchemize the soul. An impassioned defence of the role of art in a fractured age, All Things Move is a quietly sublime meditation on how our lives can be changed by art, if only we learn to look.
Jeannie Marshall is a writer who has been living in Italy with her family since 2002. A nonfiction author, journalist, and former staff features writer at the National Post in Toronto, she contributes articles to Maclean’s and the Walrus and has published literary nonfiction in The Common, the Literary Review of Canada, Brick, and elsewhere.
Join author Clark Blaise at the Imagination Festival, where he will be discussing his recent book This Time, That Place with host Laura Rohard! The event will take place at the Morrin Centre on Saturday, April 15 at 5:30PM ET.
Tickets and details here.
Order Clark’s books now at La Maison Anglaise and the Festival will receive 30% of the sale! Click here.
Or, get your copy of This Time, That Place from Biblioasis here!
Check out Clark Blaise’s other works here.
“Blaise is probably the greatest living Canadian writer most Canadians have never heard of.”—Quill & Quire
“If you want to understand something about what life was like in the restless, peripatetic, striving, anxiety-ridden, shimmer cultural soup of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries,” writes Margaret Atwood, “read the stories of Clark Blaise.” This Time, That Place draws together twenty-four stories that span the entirety of Blaise’s career, including one never previously published. Moving swiftly across place and time, through and between languages—from Florida’s Confederate swamps, to working-class Pittsburgh, to Montreal and abroad—they demonstrate Blaise’s profound mastery of the short story and reveal the range of his lifelong preoccupation with identity as fallacy, fable, and dream.
This Time, That Place: Selected Stories confirms Clark Blaise as one of the best and most enduring masters of the form—on either side of our shared borders.
Clark Blaise (1940–), Canadian and American, is the author of 20 books of fiction and nonfiction. A longtime advocate for the literary arts in North America, Blaise has taught writing and literature at Emory, Skidmore, Columbia, NYU, Sir George Williams, UC-Berkeley, SUNY-Stony Brook, and the David Thompson University Centre. In 1968, he founded the postgraduate Creative Writing Program at Concordia University; he after went on to serve as the Director of the International Writing Program at Iowa (1990-1998), and as President of the Society for the Study of the Short Story (2002-present). Internationally recognized for his contributions to the field, Blaise has received an Arts and Letters Award for Literature from the American Academy (2003), and in 2010 was made an Officer of the Order of Canada.
Biblio Bash 2023 is a fundraiser in support of the Toronto Public Library, and featuring celebrated guest authors including our very own Deborah Dundas (On Class, May 5, 2023), Emily Urquhart (Ordinary Wonder Tales, Nov 1, 2022), and Stephen Marche (On Writing and Failure, Feb 14, 2023). Save the date for Thursday, April 20 at 5:45PM (ET).
More details here.
Get your copy of Ordinary Wonder Tales here!
Get your copy of On Writing and Failure here!
Preorder your copy of On Class here!
Deborah Dundas is a journalist who grew up poor and almost didn’t make it to university. In On Class, she talks to writers, activists, those who work with the poor and those who are poor about what happens when we don’t talk about poverty or class—and what will happen when we do.
Stories about poor people are rarely written by the poor—and when they are written they tend to fit into a hero narrative. Through hard work, smarts, and temerity, the hero pulls themselves up by their bootstraps in a narrative that simply provides an easy exception: look, we don’t have to give you more, you just have to work harder. On Class is an exploration of the ways we talk about class: of who tells the stories and who doesn’t, and why that has to change. It asks the question: What don’t we talk about when we don’t talk about class? We don’t talk about luck, or privilege, or entitlement. We don’t talk about the trauma that goes along with being poor.
Deborah Dundas is the Books Editor at the Toronto Star and has been contributing reviews there and to other publications for more than 18 years.
“This book is magical in every sense of the term.”—Amanda Leduc, author of The Centaur’s Wife and Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space
A journalist and folklorist explores the truths that underlie the stories we imagine—and reveals the magic in the everyday.
“I’ve always felt that the term fairy tale doesn’t quite capture the essence of these stories,” writes Emily Urquhart. “I prefer the term wonder tale, which is Irish in origin, for its suggestion of awe coupled with narrative. In a way, this is most of our stories.” In this startlingly original essay collection, Urquhart reveals the truths that underlie our imaginings: what we see in our heads when we read, how the sight of a ghost can heal, how the entrance to the underworld can be glimpsed in an oil painting or a winter storm—or the onset of a loved one’s dementia. In essays on death and dying, pregnancy and prenatal genetics, radioactivity, chimeras, cottagers, and plague, Ordinary Wonder Tales reveals the essential truth: if you let yourself look closely, there is magic in the everyday.
Emily Urquhart is a journalist with a doctorate in folklore. Her award-winning work has appeared in Longreads, Guernica, and The Walrus and elsewhere, and her first book was shortlisted for the Kobo First Book Prize and the BC National Award for Canadian Nonfiction. Her most recent book, The Age of Creativity: Art, Memory, my Father and Me, was listed as a top book of 2020 by CBC, NOW Magazine and Quill & Quire. She is a nonfiction editor for The New Quarterly and lives in Kitchener, Ontario.
Writing is, and always will be, an act defined by failure. The best plan is to just get used to it.
Failure is a topic discussed in every creative writing department in the world, but this is the book every beginning writer should have on their shelf to prepare them. Less a guide to writing and more a guide to what you need to continue existing as a writer, On Writing and Failure: Or, On the Peculiar Perseverance Required to Endure the Life of a Writer describes the defining role played by rejection in literary endeavors and contemplates failure as the essence of the writer’s life. Along with his own history of rejection, Marche offers stories from the history of writerly failure, from Ovid’s exile and Dostoevsky’s mock execution to James Baldwin’s advice just to endure, where living with the struggle and the pointlessness of writing is the point.
Stephen Marche is a novelist, essayist and cultural commentator. He is the author of half a dozen books, and has written opinion pieces and essays for the New Yorker, the New York Times, The Atlantic, Esquire, The Walrus, and many others. He lives in Toronto with his wife and children.
Join author Mark Bourrie at the Windsor Yacht Club! Mark will be attending a lunch at the club, where he will be reading and signing copies of his books, Big Men Fear Me and Bush Runner. The event will also feature an interview with Mark by Windsor’s own poet laureate, Peter Hrastovec. The event will take place on Saturday, April 22 at 12PM ET.
Tickets are $40 per person. To purchase tickets call the WYC Office at 519-945-1863.
More details here.
Get your copy of Big Men Fear Me here!
Get your copy of Bush Runner, here!
The remarkable true story of the rise and fall of one of North America’s most influential media moguls.
When George McCullagh bought The Globe and The Mail and Empire and merged them into the Globe and Mail, the charismatic 31-year-old high school dropout had already made millions on the stock market. It was just the beginning of the meteoric rise of a man widely expected to one day be prime minister of Canada. But the charismatic McCullagh had a dark side. Dogged by the bipolar disorder that destroyed his political ambitions and eventually killed him, he was all but written out of history. It was a loss so significant that journalist Robert Fulford has called McCullagh’s biography “one of the great unwritten books in Canadian history”—until now.
In Big Men Fear Me, award-winning historian Mark Bourrie tells the remarkable story of McCullagh’s inspirational rise and devastating fall, and with it sheds new light on the resurgence of populist politics, challenges to collective action, and attacks on the free press that characterize our own tumultuous era.
WINNER OF THE 2020 RBC TAYLOR PRIZE • AS SEEN ON GLOBAL NEWS-TV’S THE MORNING SHOW
Murderer. Salesman. Pirate. Adventurer. Cannibal. Co-founder of the Hudson’s Bay Company.
Known to some as the first European to explore the upper Mississippi, and widely as the namesake of ships and hotel chains, Pierre-Esprit Radisson is perhaps best described, writes Mark Bourrie, as “an eager hustler with no known scruples.” Kidnapped by Mohawk warriors at the age of fifteen, Radisson assimilated and was adopted by a powerful family, only to escape to New York City after less than a year. After being recaptured, he defected from a raiding party to the Dutch and crossed the Atlantic to Holland—thus beginning a lifetime of seized opportunities and frustrated ambitions.
A guest among First Nations communities, French fur traders, and royal courts; witness to London’s Great Plague and Great Fire; and unwitting agent of the Jesuits’ corporate espionage, Radisson double-crossed the English, French, Dutch, and his adoptive Mohawk family alike, found himself marooned by pirates in Spain, and lived through shipwreck on the reefs of Venezuela. His most lasting venture as an Arctic fur trader led to the founding of the Hudson’s Bay Company, which operates today, 350 years later, as North America’s oldest corporation.
Sourced from Radisson’s journals, which are the best first-hand accounts of 17th century Canada, Bush Runner tells the extraordinary true story of this protean 17th-century figure, a man more trading partner than colonizer, a peddler of goods and not worldview—and with it offers a fresh perspective on the world in which he lived.
Mark Bourrie is an Ottawa-based author, lawyer, and former journalist. He holds a master’s in Journalism from Carleton University and a PhD in History from the University of Ottawa. In 2017, he was awarded a Juris Doctor degree and was called to the Bar in 2018. He has won numerous awards for his journalism, including a National Magazine Award, and received the RBC Charles Taylor Prize in 2020 for his book Bush Runner: The Adventures of Pierre Radisson.
Emily Urquhart, author of Ordinary Wonder Tales, will be appearing at GritLit in Hamilton! Emily will be running a creative writing workshop at the Homewood Suites by Hilton Hamilton on Saturday, April 22 at 12:30PM (ET).
More details here.
Grab your copy of Ordinary Wonder Tales here!
“This book is magical in every sense of the term.”—Amanda Leduc, author of The Centaur’s Wife and Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space
A journalist and folklorist explores the truths that underlie the stories we imagine—and reveals the magic in the everyday.
“I’ve always felt that the term fairy tale doesn’t quite capture the essence of these stories,” writes Emily Urquhart. “I prefer the term wonder tale, which is Irish in origin, for its suggestion of awe coupled with narrative. In a way, this is most of our stories.” In this startlingly original essay collection, Urquhart reveals the truths that underlie our imaginings: what we see in our heads when we read, how the sight of a ghost can heal, how the entrance to the underworld can be glimpsed in an oil painting or a winter storm—or the onset of a loved one’s dementia. In essays on death and dying, pregnancy and prenatal genetics, radioactivity, chimeras, cottagers, and plague, Ordinary Wonder Tales reveals the essential truth: if you let yourself look closely, there is magic in the everyday.
Emily Urquhart is a journalist with a doctorate in folklore. Her award-winning work has appeared in Longreads, Guernica, and The Walrus and elsewhere, and her first book was shortlisted for the Kobo First Book Prize and the BC National Award for Canadian Nonfiction. Her most recent book, The Age of Creativity: Art, Memory, my Father and Me, was listed as a top book of 2020 by CBC, NOW Magazine and Quill & Quire. She is a nonfiction editor for The New Quarterly and lives in Kitchener, Ontario.
Join us in Fredericton at the Broken Record Music Room to celebrate Best Canadian Stories 2023! Editor Mark Anthony Jarman will host the event which will include readings from several contributors. The event will take place on Tuesday, April 25 at 7PM AT.
Grab your copy of Best Canadian Stories 2023 here!
Check out the rest of the Best Canadian series here!
ABOUT BEST CANADIAN STORIES 2023
Selected by editor Mark Anthony Jarman, the 2023 edition of Best Canadian Stories showcases the best Canadian fiction writing published in 2021.
A collection that takes us into a firey near-future and a notorious feminist’s personal past, from a near-drowning to a fake breakdown, through mothers who fail us to crummy jobs, to thieves, to grief, to revenge with a bottle of tabasco sauce. With work by established practitioners alongside that of lesser-known writers, this year’s Best Canadian Stories shows how the short form can evoke the experience of a person on the brink. Including 2023 Metcalf-Rooke Award winner Caroline Adderson, and featuring, in tribute, two stories by the late Steven Heighton, this year’s collection draws together beloved Canadian practitioners of the form and thrilling new voices to continue not only a series, but a legacy in Canadian letters.
Mark Anthony Jarman is the author of Touch Anywhere to Begin, Czech Techno, Knife Party at the Hotel Europa, 19 Knives, and the travel book Ireland’s Eye. He has published fiction and creative nonfiction in Europe, India, and North America. Jarman is a graduate of The Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a fiction editor for The Fiddlehead literary journal in Canada.
Jorge Carrión (Against Amazon, Bookshops) will be speaking at Book Culture! The event, hosted by fellow author Casey Plett (On Community, Nov 2023), will take place on Tuesday, April 25 at 7PM.
Get your copy of Against Amazon here.
Get your copy of Bookshops here.
ABOUT JORGE CARRION
Jorge Carrión is a writer and literary critic. He studied at the University of Pompeu Fabra, where he now teaches literature and creative writing. His published works include essays, novellas, novels and travel writing, and his articles have appeared in National Geographic and Lonely Planet Magazine. Bookshops was a finalist in the Premio Anagrama de Ensayo, 2013.
ABOUT AGAINST AMAZON AND OTHER ESSAYS
A history of bookshops, an autobiography of a reader, a travelogue, a love letter—and, most urgently, a manifesto.
Good bookshops are questions without answers. They are places that provoke you intellectually, encode riddles, surprise and offer challenges … A pleasing labyrinth where you can’t get lost: that comes later, at home, when you immerse yourself in the books you have bought; lose yourself in new questions, knowing you will find answers.
Picking up where the widely praised Bookshops: A Reader’s History left off, Against Amazon and Other Essays explores the increasing pressures of Amazon and other new technologies on bookshops and libraries. In essays on these vital social, cultural, and intellectual spaces, Jorge Carrión travels from London to Geneva, from Miami’s Little Havana to Argentina, from his own well-loved childhood library to the rosewood shelves of Jules Verne’s Nautilus and the innovative spaces that characterize South Korea’s bookshop renaissance. Including interviews with writers and librarians—including Alberto Manguel, Iain Sinclair, Luigi Amara, and Han Kang, among others—Against Amazon is equal parts a celebration of books and bookshops, an autobiography of a reader, a travelogue, a love letter—and, most urgently, a manifesto against the corrosive influence of late capitalism.
ABOUT BOOKSHOPS: A READER’S HISTORY
Jorge Carrión collects bookshops: from Gotham Book Mart and the Strand Bookstore in New York City to City Lights Bookshop and Green Apple Books in San Francisco and all the bright spots in between (Prairie Lights, Tattered Cover, and countless others). In this thought-provoking, vivid, and entertaining essay, Carrión meditates on the importance of the bookshop as a cultural and intellectual space. Filled with anecdotes from the histories of some of the famous (and not-so-famous) shops he visits on his travels, thoughtful considerations of challenges faced by bookstores, and fascinating digressions on their political and social impact, Bookshops is both a manifesto and a love letter to these spaces that transform readers’ lives.
You are invited to join Biblioasis Publishing at Supermarket Bar Toronto to celebrate the launch some of our spring 2023 books: On Writing and Failure by Stephen Marche, Instructions for the Drowning by Steven Heighton, Way to Go by Richard Sanger, Pascal’s Fire by Kristina Bresnen, Dreaming Home by Lucian Childs, On Class by Deborah Dundas and All Things Move by Jeannie Marshall.
This exciting multi-book event will take place on Wednesday, April 26 at 7PM ET. RSVP on Facebook here!
Check out On Writing and Failure here!
Check out Instructions for the Drowning here!
Check out Way to Go here!
Check out Pascal’s Fire here!
Check out Dreaming Home here!
Check out On Class here!
Check out All Things Move here!
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