Come join us for a conversation about contemporary bookselling! Bookstore owner Josh Cook (Porter Square Books, Cambridge, MA) author of The Art of Libromancy, will be joined by fellow bookstore owner and author of How to Protect Bookstores and Why, Danny Caine (Raven Bookstore, Lawrence, KS) in conversation, hosted by Biblioasis owner and publisher, Daniel Wells. Books will be for sale (and for signing!) and refreshments will be provided. The event will take place on Monday, October 16 at 7PM.
More details here!
Get your copy of The Art of Libromancy here!
A Lit Hub Most Anticipated Book of 2023 • ESQUIRE’s August 2023 Book Club Pick
“If books are important to you because you’re a reader or a writer, then how books are sold should be important to you as well. If it matters to you that your vegetables are organic, your clothes made without child labor, your beer brewed without a culture of misogyny, then it should matter how books are made and sold to you.”
With Amazon’s growing power in both bookselling and publishing, considering where and how we get our books is more important now than ever. The simple act of putting a book in a reader’s hands—what booksellers call handselling—becomes a catalyst for an exploration of the moral, financial, and political pressures all indie bookstores face. From the relationship between bookselling and white supremacy, to censorship and the spread of misinformation, to the consolidation of the publishing industry, veteran bookseller and writer Josh Cook turns a generous yet critical eye to an industry at the heart of American culture, sharing tips and techniques for becoming a better reader and, of course, recommending great books along the way.
Josh Cook is a bookseller and co-owner at Porter Square Books in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he has worked since 2004. He is also author of the critically acclaimed postmodern detective novel An Exaggerated Murder and his fiction, criticism, and poetry have appeared in numerous leading literary publications. He grew up in Lewiston, Maine and lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.
Irish author Elaine Feeney joins us for the Windsor launch of her Booker Prize-longlisted novel How to Build a Boat (Nov 7, 2023)! Elaine will be reading from her book, followed by a conversation with host Vanessa Stauffer of Biblioasis Press, audience Q&A, and book signing. Refreshments will also be provided. The event will take place at Biblioasis Bookshop on Monday, October 23 at 7PM.
More details here.
Order How to Build a Boat here!
Longlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize • One of the Globe and Mail’s “Sixty-Two Books to Read This Fall”
A funny and deeply moving novel about a boy, his dream, and the people who lend him a hand, by the acclaimed author of As You Were
Jamie O’Neill loves the colour red. He also loves tall trees, patterns, rain that comes with wind, the curvature of many objects, books with dust jackets, cats, rivers and Edgar Allan Poe. At age thirteen, there are two things he especially wants in life: to build a Perpetual Motion Machine, and to connect with his mother, Noelle, who died when he was born. In his mind these things are intimately linked. And at his new school, where all else is disorientating and overwhelming, he finds two people who might just be able to help him.
How to Build a Boat is the story of how one boy and his mission transforms the lives of his teachers, Tess and Tadhg, and brings together a community. Written with tenderness and verve, it’s about love, family and connection, the power of imagination, and how our greatest adventures never happen alone.
Elaine Feeney is a writer from the west of Ireland. Her 2020 debut novel, As You Were, was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize and the Irish Novel of the Year Award and won the Kate O’Brien Award, the McKitterick Prize, and the Dalkey Festival Emerging Writer Award. Feeney has published three collections of poetry including The Radio Was Gospel and Rise, and her short story “Sojourn” was included in The Art of The Glimpse: 100 Irish Short Stories, edited by Sinéad Gleeson. Her work appears widely in The Moth, The Paris Review, The Stinging Fly, Poetry Review, and elsewhere. Feeney lectures at the University of Galway.
Join us at Biblioasis Bookshop for the launch of Casey Plett‘s On Community (Nov 7, 2023)! Casey will be reading from her new book, followed by a discussion hosted by publisher Dan Wells, and an audience Q&A. Books will be available for signing, and there will be refreshments! The launch will take place on Thursday, October 26 at 7PM.
More details here.
Order On Community here!
ONE OF CBC BOOKS CANADIAN NONFICTION TO READ IN THE FALL
We need community to live. But what does it look like? Why does it often feel like it’s slipping away?
We are all hinged to some definition of a community, be it as simple as where we live, complex as the beliefs we share, or as intentional as those we call family. In an episodic personal essay, Casey Plett draws on a range of firsthand experiences to start a conversation about the larger implications of community as a word, an idea, and a symbol. With each thread a cumulative definition of community, and what it has come to mean to Plett, emerges.
Looking at phenomena from transgender literature, to Mennonite history, to hacker houses of Silicon Valley, and the rise of nationalism in North America, Plett delves into the thorny intractability of community’s boons and faults. Deeply personal, authoritative in its illuminations, On Community is an essential contribution to the larger cultural discourse that asks how, and to what socio-political ends, we form bonds with one another.
Casey Plett is the author of A Dream of a Woman, Little Fish, and A Safe Girl to Love, the co-editor of Meanwhile, Elsewhere: Science Fiction and Fantasy From Transgender Writers, and the publisher at LittlePuss Press. She has written for the New York Times, Harper’s Bazaar, the Guardian, Globe and Mail, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, the Winnipeg Free Press, and other publications. A winner of the Amazon First Novel Award and the Firecracker Award for Fiction, and a two-time winner of the Lambda Literary Award, her work has also been nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize.
Leave a Reply
Want to join the discussion?Feel free to contribute!