2025 - Biblioasis

The Bibliophile: A Conversation with Ira Wells

May 30, 2025/in Latest News, The Bibliophile/by biblioasis

From the Biblioasis launch of On Book Banning

In March, Ira Wells joined us for the Windsor launch of On Book Banning. We recorded Ira’s discussion with our publisher, Dan Wells (no relation), and we’re delighted to bring it to you here as we look forward to its publication in the US this Tuesday, June 3.

Ashley Van Elswyk
Editorial Assistant

Our bookshop chalkboard welcomes guests to the launch of On Book Banning.

DAN WELLS: Your book, Ira, opens with a very personal story: that of a parent, you, sitting in a child’s library chair, your knees up around your ears in their school library, one of the occasions that certainly instigated the writing of the book. Would you mind starting the evening by telling us a little bit about this experience, and what the result was?

IRA WELLS: It did, yeah, not all great stories begin with an email from a school principal, but this one does. I received an email in 2022 from the principal of my kids’ elementary school indicating that they were initiating something called a “library audit.” And there was something about that phrase that struck me as interesting. By this point, we’d already been hearing a lot about the book banning that had been taking place in Florida and other places in the southern United States, and I wondered if “library audit” wasn’t just an innocuous, boring-sounding description, and if it came to Toronto, if that is what they would call it—a “library audit.” It turned out to be a little more complicated than that.

So, I joined a parent committee to see what was going on and we were given something called a TDSB—Toronto District School Board—Equity Toolkit, which we were going to use to evaluate books. Then we were asked to pick ﬁve books off the shelves more or less at random. And a couple of things jumped out at me immediately in this exercise. One is that if you were to actually use this toolkit, to go through and apply it to every book in the library, there is not enough time in your life to do it. And so at a certain point the principal became somewhat exasperated and said, “I just wish we could get rid of all the old books.” And I thought she was maybe kidding. At least, I hope that she was.

But the following fall, in the Peel Region (which is in the Mississauga area), in some school libraries, up to 50 percent of the books had been removed from the shelves. They really had gone through and got rid of all the old books, which was somewhat horrifying. But that’s the genesis of On Book Banning. I was working on something else, but the moment where I realized I needed to pay more attention to this was when all those books were liquidated from the shelves of Peel Region, because I realized I didn’t really have the vocabulary or the arguments to respond. I’m an English professor, but I didn’t have at the tip of my tongue the words to articulate why books matter, why banning them is wrong, and why we need to pay attention when this is happening in our society. Because it’s not just an American problem: it’s also happening here. That’s why I wanted to dive deeper into it.

DW: So, when you were sitting there in the library before the Peel cull, one of the things they did, if I remember correctly, is basically decide that any book that had been published more than fifteen years prior was too old to be on the shelves. They considered it “dangerous,” right?

IW: The situation in Peel was this: there was a student named Reina Takata, who was a Grade 10 student at Erindale Secondary School in Mississauga. She was the kind of girl who went to the library, ate her lunches in the library, was very familiar with the library. She came back after summer vacation in Grade 10 and realized that, in her estimation, half of the books were gone.

The CBC picked this story up and reported on it. We don’t actually know—there are 259 schools in Peel Region—we don’t know and will never know how many books were removed during this process. But we do know two things. One, as Dan said, they had settled upon this fifteen-year lifespan, so anything that had been published more than fifteen years beforehand was ripe for removal. And the second thing we know is, because these books were deemed “harmful,” they could not be donated to families in need, they could not be given to jurisdictions that could have used them. They were boxed up more or less like toxic waste and disposed of.

DW: We’ll get back to this idea of harm later on because I think it’s kind of central to how both the right and the left have talked about what they’re doing. Both the examples that we’ve started with are, I guess one could argue, examples of the left banning books or removing books from libraries. You also talk about things that have happened in Florida and elsewhere in the us. Do you want to give a bit of background about that side as well?

IW: Absolutely, and I think in some ways this may be the more familiar version of the book banning story. At least it was to me until I started paying more attention. There are a number of parents’ rights organizations, like Moms for Liberty, No Left Turn in Education, and there are Canadian counterparts. They’re sometimes described as anti-government organizations. And they got very interested in the content of school libraries during covid. They’re particularly concerned with books they call LGBTQ indoctrination. This could be anything that has a queer character, even, so something like Drama by Raina Telgemeier—a graphic novel that is very popular with the kids—or, not to mention, anything that has a sort of sex-ed dimension to it. But anything with a queer character. They’re also very interested in race, so anything that sort of smacks of what they would call critical race theory, or anything that casts slavery in a negative light. Including Toni Morrison. They go after these books, and they do it in a very specific way. They have game plans: they meet up in the parking lot beforehand, they have matching T-shirts, they divvy up their questions, and it’s almost like tailgating, and there’s this culture around it. They converge on school council meetings and they use their allotted five minutes, and they drag these meetings out—sometimes they’re seven hours long—and they’ve been pretty successful at getting books off the shelves.

So, this is the right-wing version, the evangelical version, the populist version. They do delightful things, like they’ve started to harass teachers directly by providing a list of books to a teacher and saying, “If you teach any one of these books, we’re going to sue you or bring some sort of legal action against you.” I’ve heard of lawsuits, the threat of lawsuits, against people who have the Little Free Libraries you may have seen around. If you have something they deem obscenity in those Little Free Libraries, they’ll threaten a lawsuit. And they will often threaten librarians with legal action or just make their lives a living hell. The free speech organization pen America has been very attentive to this and has been tracking the number of challenges. In 2023 or 2024, they put the number at ten thousand challenged titles. But there is also some research that shows between 83 and 97 percent of book challenges are never reported. So it’s almost certainly much, much higher than what we know.

What I found very interesting about the Canadian progressive version and the evangelical version is that they both seem to construe books as a source of contagion, as a source of harm, and they both advocate the same solution, which is to censor them, to get them off the shelves. I was very struck by the fact that you’ve got these two groups: progressive educators in Ontario and Southern evangelicals who appear to be political opposites in every possible way. Yet they think about books in a very similar way, and they have the same problem, which is they think books are causing harm to children, and they have the same solution, which is to ban them.

DW: I’m sure the principal in your children’s school would be horrified if you pointed out to her she was using arguments that a DeSantis conservative would use in Florida, and yet they were basically identical. Just for different purposes. But there’s something else that I think unites both the DeSantis conservative evangelical movement and maybe the more liberal one: they both deny that what they are doing is book banning—we should probably define book banning. And how does it relate to what you call in this book the “new censorship consensus”?

IW: That’s a good point, Dan. No one considers themself a censor, no one identifies as a book banner, which is why I think it’s really important to go back to the definition. The American Library Association defines book banning as the removal of a title from the shelves because someone deems it harmful. And what strikes me about that definition is how precisely it is describing the rationale of well-intentioned people on the political right and on the political left who believe that they are removing sources of harm from libraries.

I should say that the action the Peel Region took they described in their own words as an “equity-based book weeding process.” And that’s another term that we should unpack. Because weeding is actually something that librarians do. Weeding is a legitimate part of developing a library collection, and it refers to things like, if a book is falling apart, you weed it, if a book is out of date you weed it. It is a legitimate process, but again, to go back to the definition: the American Library Association says that while weeding is an essential part of the development collection process, it is never a deselection tool for controversial material. They want to have a very sharp line between censorship, which is not legitimate, and weeding, which is. And so, when the Peel Region says “oh we’re just doing this weeding process and getting rid of all the books we don’t find equitable,” that’s in fact an abuse of the weeding process and they are book banning.

Photo: Ira Wells’s interview with CBC Edmonton AM on book bannings.

DW: I want to also step back a bit and talk a little bit about this idea of harm. I have a sensitivity and appreciation for some of the arguments that are made about the idea of harm. You know, the idea that some books, some words, some language, can be triggering. What’s your response to that? What’s your response to the idea that what they’re really trying to do is not just ensure that everybody is represented in the library, but they’re trying to protect people from harm?

IW: It’s a good question, and it’s an unavoidable one. I would just preface my answer by stating that I don’t want to be misconstrued as saying that we should only have old books in the libraries or that we should only have what we would think back on as the kinds of books that we remember from our childhoods. I’m not advocating that at all. I think we should have diverse libraries, I think that the children who go to our schools need to be able to go to the libraries and find books that tell stories that they relate to, which includes having very diverse collections. I fully believe that children should see their own stories reflected in those pages. It’s not at all hard to find stories of LGBTQ-identifying people who say that they read a story or they engaged with a narrative about a queer character and that it changed their life, it validated their life, and that it saved their life. It’s not at all hard to find stories of people saying, “That book saved my life.” I think we should listen to them, and we need to be damn sure that those books aren’t banned and taken off the shelves.

Now, to the point about harm and what we do in the inverse case where someone says this book is causing harm—there are policies and procedures in place which are being abused in places like Pensacola, Florida, which is a place I look at in the book, where parents will use the book-challenging process to say “This book is not an appropriate book because it’s actually child pornography.” Or it’s LGBTQ indoctrination. The mechanisms that we have in place to take harmful books off the shelves are often weaponized against the material that we should be saving. So, that’s the first thing I would say.

The second thing I would say, and I’m just leaning into the policies of the school boards and of the libraries themselves, is that harm is not something that can be experienced subjectively by the person who is making the complaint. What I mean by that is, if I’m a parent and I’m outraged about something that I’m seeing in a book and it offends me, my offense, my personal offense, is not a legitimation, is not a rationale, for removing a book from the library or from the school. Because we cannot give every single parent veto power to remove books from the libraries or every single citizen veto power to remove books from the libraries. We live in a very large, very diverse, pluralistic society, and if we give that kind of veto power to one group, we have to give it to all groups, and this is not a paradox that we can work our way out of. We either defend freedom of information, which may include material that is found offensive, or we don’t, but I don’t think we want to live in a world in which everyone gets a veto power over what you get to read.

Standing room only for Ira’s Windsor launch.

DW: You tell some great stories about writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates, who read Macbeth and found it gave him insight into Baltimore, life on the streets in Baltimore. One of the unintended consequences even of the Peel cull and picking the fifteen-year window is that there were many books that all of us would acknowledge need to be on every library’s shelves, like The Diary of Anne Frank or Obasan, or works of Canadian history that were cut. That were removed merely by being published before that date. And it seems to me that this approach is based on a lack of awareness of how publishing works. There seems to be this idea that we can remove old books because the new ones will fill all the gaps, but quite often, especially in Canada, because of the constraints on publishing, that isn’t possible either. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that.

IW: Yeah, absolutely. As you mentioned, the category of “classic” was one that the progressive educators in Peel were particularly hostile to. I know this because they had a little manual that they distributed internally that was then leaked, which is in the footnotes of the book. They instruct people who are doing this equity-based weeding process to cast particular skepticism towards what they call classics. Which they say are inherently Eurocentric and heteronormative and bad in other ways. I would just say a couple of things about that. One is that they are using the word classic as it was used about a hundred years ago, and I’m not kidding about that. Like when people talked about “great books” programs in 1925, that I think is what they have in mind. But certainly since the 1960s, the Western canon has been diversified and challenged, and certainly as far as University of Toronto students are concerned in 2025, the category of classic includes Toni Morrison, includes James Baldwin, includes Ralph Ellison, includes so many of the people who would be banned for being outdated in this new rubric.

By coming up with this arbitrary date, by saying “Okay, our libraries, our school libraries, will include everything published in the last fifteen years,” I think the rationale is that they are thinking the books need to reflect the life experiences of the students. And so if the students are fifteen, the books should be published within the last fifteen years. Obviously that leads to a presentism that is kind of horrifying for many of us, in the idea that children would never read the same books as their parents, that you wouldn’t be learning about Japanese internment, you wouldn’t be reading The Diary of Anne Frank. Or, if you were, you would only be reading about it through a very presentist sort of perspective. But to your point, Dan, the Canadian publishing industry could not replenish a library every fifteen years, especially a children’s library. It would leave us much more dependent on American content, and we will lose so much. It’s kind of mind-boggling in its naivete to assume we can simply replenish libraries every fifteen years.

DW: At one point in the book you explain that censorship confronts us with literature’s opposite, and I wondered if you might say a little bit about what you meant by that.

IW: Well, Dan challenged me to actually describe what I like about literature, which is hard for someone who has tried to make that the centre of his life. But one way that I came to think of it: literature asks us, it leaves us, with questions, it prompts more dialogue. If you read a really great book, you want to talk about it. You want to talk about it in a book club. When you close the book, you want to Google it. You want to find out what other people have been saying about it. You want to go on Goodreads. My students would go on BookTok, on TikTok or whatever, but the point is that it opens conversations, it spurs more dialogue.

When you really think about the best books, they’re never reducible to a single message. They’re always full of voices, especially novels. Novels are full of voices, they’re never reducible to a single political point, and this I think is censorship’s opposite. Censorship wants to limit something to a single propagandistic message that we can either be for or against. Censorship confronts us with answers, it has all the answers. It closes conversations rather than opening them. So I think that censorship, and the way that it pretends to have all the answers, and the way that it tries to shut people up, is essentially the opposite of what I love about literature and what I think draws us to literature itself.

DW: Is there a difference between freedom of expression and freedom, or the right, to read? I mean, is there any tension there? This is just a question I was thinking about this evening; we didn’t really talk about that too much while editing the essay, but do they entail different rights or different responsibilities?

IW: I think they are two versions of the same right, and I’ll explain what I mean by that. What I found hard to articulate to that school principal is why I find book banning so offensive. Why do I find it so personally offensive? And undemocratic, in fact. And also illiberal, which is maybe something else. If freedom means anything in our society, it means the freedom to cultivate our own minds, to think what we want to think, to determine the course of our thoughts and our education, and all that is tied in with what we read. And book banning and censorship are not only about deciding what you’re allowed to read, but about deciding what you’re allowed to think, and what kind of a mind you’re allowed to cultivate for yourself. Which is such a profoundly illiberal idea, that someone would interfere with the process in which you are cultivating your own mind.

I think that is a profoundly problematic idea and is what book banners and censors are trying to do. But I think it relates to your point, Dan, about freedom of expression. Because why do we have freedom of expression in our society? It’s not only because you have the right to think and speak what is on your mind. It’s about my right to hear it. And that, I think, makes it complementary to your point about the right to read.

DW: We are all gathered here in a bookstore—let’s assume we all value books. I, as a publisher, as a bookseller, as a reader, have made a very large commitment to literature and books as part of my life. And yet, I’ve been struggling with a contradiction of sorts that I’m hoping you can help me with. I still wonder why it is that at a time that books—for some people, present company excluded—have never seemed less central to the average person’s life, when people have so much access to so much else via the internet, when information has never seemed more free . . . whatever that means. Why, at this moment in time, has the effort to ban books become so increasingly common?

IW: I have to push back on one point, because I don’t think the internet is particularly free. Maybe we can talk more about that in a second, but here’s the statistic that sent chills up my spine and we’ll see if it has the same effect on you. There’s something called the American Time Use Survey that is done by the Department of Labor. Essentially they look at how many minutes per day Americans—it’s an American survey—spend on any given thing. It turns out, and they break this down by every demographic and age and so on, for students, so people between the ages of fifteen and nineteen, the average American spends 9 minutes a day reading and about 4 to 4.5 hours on their smartphones. So, to your point, why is it at this moment where students, high school students, are spending about 9 minutes a day reading for pleasure, are we that worked up about what it is they’re reading? When for a third of their waking lives they are on TikTok or they are on social media and we have no control over—well, most of us—have no control over what our children are doing on those things?

Display courtesy of our crafty and creative booksellers, who excel at unexpected shelftalkers and papercraft. (No books were harmed.)

I think there’s something compensatory going on. In a sense that it’s precisely because we have no control. It’s so ephemeral, what kids are experiencing online. You see something that may offend or bother you: it’s there one minute and it’s gone the next. Where do you go if you’re upset by something that you see, where do you protest? Well, people think they’ve found an answer in books because there’s somewhere, there’s a library, there’s a physical place that they can go. They feel like they can exert some kind of control, right? If you’re the sort of person that thinks that LGBTQ literature is going to indoctrinate your child, there’s very little you can do about the online world. But you can go to your children’s school and make a stink about it and pull a book or two from the shelves.

Even if this might seem absurd on its face, as if it could actually work, we need to think about how censorship is working. It’s working in a couple of different ways. It might not work in the sense that it might not be preventing your children from actually accessing that material, which, yes, they will find online. But it might work by keeping it out of their hands at an impressionable life stage. Or, it might work as a way of bringing a political community together to say “We don’t stand for this sort of thing.” In other words it allows for a community to congeal against a scapegoat. That’s another kind of work that censorship is doing. I think that regardless of where you are on the political spectrum, be it left or right, there is a bad habit of thinking about libraries as microcosms of society and books as levers. Where if we want to make society a little more of this or a little less that, the way we’ll go about this is by pulling this book, pulling that book, and that’s going to exert some sort of change on society.

As John Milton recognized over four hundred years ago, bad ideas can spread perfectly easily without books. And they do.

DW: There is an element of symbolic violence in how a lot of people approach book banning. But you brought up Milton, which leads right into my next questions. One of the most interesting and best parts of this book is a survey of at least two thousand years of censorship, from the Romans through Milton and right up to the great twentieth-century censorship trials of Joyce and Lady Chatterley’s Lover and others. I love Milton’s argument that if you put truth and falsehood out there in the world, truth will win out. I am less certain, at this moment in time, still, that that may be true. Milton was saying that relatively shortly after the printing press and the rise of literacy and books as a new technology. We’re now in a new era faced by a new technology that is changing our relationship to truth. And I’m less and less certain as I look at the world, especially at this particular moment, that truth will win out against falsehood. So I guess I’m looking for assurance more than anything at all? That maybe the classic Miltonian arguments still have relevance? Help me.

IW: Well I’m going to be the really pedantic and annoying English professor and say we should turn back to the text. Because what Milton actually says is “Whoever knew, in a free and open encounter, truth to be submerged by falsehood.” But the key part of the phrase is in a free and open encounter, whoever knew truth to be beat by a falsehood. So, Milton is saying if you just let truth and falsehood fight it out, truth will rise to the top. It’s an inspiring idea, and Dan doesn’t believe in it.

DW: I’m just concerned!

IW: But to me the key part of that phrase in the context of social media is “a free and open encounter.” Because I don’t believe that our social media algorithms constitute a free and open encounter. I think that those algorithms are driving certain kinds of content to the top and that what constitutes truth on the internet is certainly not what John Milton would consider truth, and maybe you too.

But, okay, one more thought to leave you with on this is that in the heat of the covid misinformation fever, someone—and I think it was someone in the Biden administration—decided that the lab leak theory was racist and nonsense and was misinformation and it shouldn’t be on Twitter. And I’m not particularly educated on any of this but I do know that the working theory the FBI now has is something along the lines of the lab leak theory. And so, the idea is that if we censor this, we get it wrong. And this is part of what makes censorship so insidious. We get it wrong, and we get it wrong so often that I would err on letting truth and falsehood battle it out even if it’s not a free and open encounter.

DW: I’ll just ask one more question. Given what we’re facing, how can we future-proof our freedom to read and our freedom of expression?

IW: Funding libraries, funding librarians, giving them our full support. Defending our librarians so that they can defend our intellectual freedom, ensuring that there are librarians in schools, ensuring that the schools are properly funded. So many schools these days don’t have a proper school librarian, they’re just not funded. The school libraries aren’t getting the funding that they need, the public libraries aren’t getting the funding that they need, and if you don’t have someone there who knows the collection, who can safeguard it, who knows why books were selected in the first place, you lose the advocate for the library. I think that would be one big thing.

But I think that also we need to get over our trepidation around defending expressive freedom. I consider myself a person of the left, and people of my political orientation have largely given up on free expression, and especially on free speech. Because that has become such a toxic phrase for so many people because of right-wing demagogues who have taken it up. Or you will hear the argument that free speech has never applied to some groups, which is true. That if you look at the history, which I do in this book, that there has been persecution of gay and lesbian and queer bookstores and queer writers and queer presses all throughout history and well into the 1990s. In Canada! So people will say, well there’s never been free speech, there’s never been freedom of expression, this is a hypocritical idea! And my point is that just because there has not been a golden age of free expression does not mean that we can give up on the ideal of free expression, because once we do that we are in serious trouble. And maybe that’s where I would leave that.

In good publicity news:

The Pages of the Sea by Anne Hawk has been shortlisted for the RSL Christopher Bland Prize for debut writers over fifty.
Elaine Feeney, author of Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way was interviewed about the book in Image.
Mark Kingwell, author of Question Authority, was interviewed in the University of Toronto’s faculty news.
On Oil by Don Gillmor was reviewed in Resilience: “Informative and engaging . . . wonderfully captures the gritty realities of life on the rigs and the frenetic energy of oil boomtowns like those in Alberta.”
A Way to Be Happy by Caroline Adderson was featured in That Shakespearean Rag’s 31 Days of Stories 2025.

Best Canadian Series 2026

May 27, 2025/in Latest News, The Bibliophile/by biblioasis

Announcing this year’s contributors for all three anthologies!

Every spring comes with the job of preparing our annual Best Canadian Series anthologies. The hardest part is done throughout the previous year by our guest editors, who have the momentous task of reading and choosing, out of hundreds, the essays, poems, and stories that will be featured—what they consider to be the best works of English-language Canadian literature. For my part, I’m pleased to have the privilege of informing our selected contributors of their inclusion—it’s one of my favourite things about working on this series, letting them know that their writing has been seen and appreciated in this way.

Today, we’re announcing the seventy-six contributors who have been selected for the 2026 editions, publishing November 18, 2025. These wonderful writers come from all across Canada, from Vancouver to St. John’s; are at various levels of their careers, from established names to rising stars; and have appeared in a wide range of print and online journals, magazines, and newspapers, all credited below.

A wholehearted congratulations to all of them for their work.

Ashley Van Elswyk
Editorial Assistant

Best Canadian Essays 2026

Selected by Brian Bethune

Hollie Adams, “A Partial List of Inconvenient Truths” (Geist 127)

Peter Babiak, “The Grief of Mourning Sentences” (subTerrain 97)

Chris Banks, “Black Hammers Falling” (The New Quarterly 169)

Ronna Bloom, “Catfisher Dharma” (Brick 113)

Andreae Callanan, “All the Ghosts a Voice Can Summon” (Riddle Fence 53)

Kelsey Gilchrist, “Driver’s Test” (The Ampersand Review 6)

Cynthia Gralla, “I’m Childless, Not Kinshipless” (Prairie Fire 45.3)

Basma Kavanagh, “An Elegy with an Ode at Its Centre: Poets, Planarians & the Practice of Attention” (Prairie Fire 45.2)

Mark Kingwell, “Intolerable Beauty” (Border Crossings 165)

Kyo Maclear, “Speaking to Trees” (Brick 114)

Stephen Marche, “For my father-in-law Bob Fulford, life was columns” (Globe and Mail)

Shane Neilson, “Diagnosis Day” (The Fiddlehead 298)

Ian Roy, “Have a Good Life” (The New Quarterly 171)

Darryl Whetter, “Meat Bingo” (Camel 2)

Best Canadian Poetry 2026

Selected by Mary Dalton, with series editor Anita Lahey

John Wall Barger, “Darwin Awards Song” (EVENT 53.2)

Ronna Bloom, “Checkpoint of the Mouth” (Queen’s Quarterly 131.3)

Nicholas Bradley, “To the Border Agent Who Confiscated My Book of Poetry” (Grain 51.4)

Petra Chambers, “My answer to the question ‘how are you?’ at the grocery store” (Contemporary Verse 2 46.3)

Carolina Corcoran, “Surfacing, Copenhagen Harbour” (Prairie Fire 45.1)

Kayla Czaga, “Painkiller” (Room 46.4)

Danielle Devereaux, “Lending Library, Heaven” (Geist 128)

Irina Dumitrescu, “Criseyde” (Times Literary Supplement, October 2024)

Puneet Dutt, “Lucky” (The Fiddlehead 298)

Darrell Epp, “That’s Not A Pinata, That’s a Hornet’s Nest” (The Nashwaak Review 50/51)

Susan Glickman, “What I Learned from Living Abroad” (The New Quarterly 170)

Ariel Gordon, “A mudlarker’s diary” (subTerrain 98)

Jennifer Gossoo, “Nôhkom” (FreeFall 34.2)

Sue Goyette, “an excerpt from Monoculture: A commentary of monologues” (Riddle Fence 51)

Richard Greene, “On the Use of the Sextant” (The Walrus, June 2024)

Glenn Hayes, “It Is Not Heart to Essay”(The Malahat Review 228)

Henry Heavyshield, “Storytelling for Young Warriors” (EVENT 53.2)

Dave Hickey, “Real Estate Sign” (The Malahat Review 225)

Nancy Huggett, “We’re Doubling Down, Says Darren Woods” (Prairie Fire 45.1)

Kevin Irie, “How To Pack for Internment (150 Pounds)” (The New Quarterly 172)

Emily Kedar, “Yellow Felt Stars” (The Malahat Review 225)

Conor Kerr, “Fancy University Boy” (The Fiddlehead 298)

Evelyn Lau, “Cursing, Flailing” (Geist 126)

Sylvia Legris, “In the Wake of” (Granta 167)

Steve McOrmond, “The Science of Skipping Stones” (EVENT 52.3)

Estlin McPhee, “Gay Messiah” (EVENT 53.1)

M.W. Miller, “Looking for Something Written, the Ideal Reader” (subTerrain 98)

Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi, “Uber-Eats Ghazal” (EVENT 53.2)

George Moore, “Local Fishermen” (Queen’s Quarterly 131.2)

Paul Moorehead, “Requirement Galore” (Horseshoe II.ii)

A.F. Moritz, “Quibble with Hegel” (The Malahat Review 228)

Megan Morrison, “Some Questions” (Grain 52.1)

Erín Moure, “Flourish (May 2022)” (carte blanche 50)

Cassandra Myers, “Squeal” (The Malahat Review 225)

Shane Neilson, “How to lose the audience” (The Malahat Review 226)

Nofel, “In Arabic” (Geist 127)

David O’Meara, “Recess” (The Walrus, June 2024)

John O’Neill, “The News” (Prairie Fire 45.2)

Michael Ondaatje, “Lock” (The Walrus, March/April 2024)

Craig Francis Power, “Walking My Three-Year-Old to Nanny’s Place, Easter Sunday 2017” (The Malahat Review 228)

John Reibetanz, “Clams” (The Fiddlehead 299)

Ozayr Saloojee, “The Little Things” (Janus Unbound 3.2)

Vivek Sharma, “Imaginary Breakfast with Real People” (The Fiddlehead 301)

Sue Sinclair, “Pfeilstorch” (Riddle Fence 53)

Karen Solie, “Prime Location” (The Walrus, July/August 2024)

Misha Solomon, “Yoo-Hoo” (Riddle Fence 53)

Susan White, “Some Late for Them to Be at the Fish” (Riddle Fence 53)

Erin Wilson, “Ode to Joy” (Queen’s Quarterly 131.4)

Jaeyun Yoo, “have you seen my father” (The Fiddlehead 299)

Patricia Young, “The Thing with Wings” (The Dalhousie Review 103.3)

Best Canadian Stories 2026

Selected by Zsuzsi Gartner

Shashi Bhat, “Keeping It Fresh” (Room 47.4)

Julie Bouchard, translated by Arielle Aaronson, “What Burns” (Granta Online, May 2024)

Randy Boyagoda, “Wo” (The Walrus, May 2024)

Grant Buday, “The Light Never Shuts Up” (The Fiddlehead 300)

Petra Chambers, “Containment” (PRISM international 62.3)

Sophie Crocker, “Castor & Pollux” (The Malahat Review 228)

Bill Gaston, “Jack’s Christmas Dinner” (The Malahat Review 226)

Evan J, “Camouflage and Fame” (The Ex-Puritan 65)

Aaron Kreuter, “Tasmanian Shores” (Prairie Fire 44.4)

Alex Leslie, “The Formula” (Plenitude, November 2024)

Erin MacNair, “Sand Penis” (subTerrain 96)

D.F. McCourt, “One Way Out” (The Ex-Puritan 64)

Rishi Midha, “We Are Busy Being Alive” (subTerrain 97)

Kaitlin Reuther, “A Language of Shrugs and Sparks” (The Malahat Review 227)

Margaret Sweatman, “Sounding a Name” (Prairie Fire 45.3)

In good publicity news:

Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way by Elaine Feeney was reviewed in the Daily Mail: “Powerful . . . [a] visceral, stimulating tale that is likely one of the most original you’ll read.” Elaine was also featured in The Journal and the Irish Independent.
Baldwin, Styron, and Me by Mélikah Abdelmoumen (trans. Catherine Khordoc) was reviewed in the Midwest Book Review: “Original, exceptional, thought-provoking.”
On Oil by Don Gillmor was reviewed in Rabble: “A valuable contribution to our shared public conversation about oil, climate change and the unwholesome interpenetration of the fossil fuel industries and our political masters.”
Vijay Khurana, author of The Passenger Seat, wrote a piece on the book’s true crime inspiration for the Toronto Star.

The Bibliophile: On the Road

May 16, 2025/in Latest News, The Bibliophile/by biblioasis

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***

Road trip narratives are often associated with freedom, independence, a desire to find something, or perhaps change something. They are filled with people hitting the open road, carefree, escaping their everyday lives in search of something greater.

One of my favourite aspects of Vijay Khurana’s The Passenger Seat is how it turns the cliched road trip story on its head. The novel follows two teenagers who want to get away from their small town for the summer. They are free from responsibilities and obligations, but soon realize they are trapped with each other in an enclosed space for miles. We feel their claustrophobia and the tension it brings. The games they play with each other as the road stretches endlessly in front of them become much darker as all that freedom and open space allows for their dissatisfaction with the world to grow.

Photo: The Passenger Seat by Vijay Khurana. Cover designed by Zoe Norvell.

The Passenger Seat is a road novel for the atomized generation, the ones who’ve grown up in a world where, since everything can be a game, nothing needs to matter, including other’s lives.

John Warner, in his review for the Chicago Tribune last week, I think put it best when he said the novel feels “not so much written as conjured, as though the author has absorbed something from the larger ambient culture and distilled it into the characters and narrative. The result is like being put under a spell, an invitation to join some other mind in a shared dream.”

Vijay himself speaks about the paradoxes of the road trip and the novel much better than I ever could, and you can hear him do so in a recent radio interview with WPR’s BETA and on the podcasts Across the Pond and Beyond the Zero. Or if you’re like me and prefer print interviews, you can read this one from the Berliner.

But now as we head into the May long weekend, the unofficial kick-off to the summer, the time of year most of us start to think of getting back on the road, we thought we’d share with you an excerpt from The Passenger Seat.

Ahmed Abdalla,
Publicist

An Excerpt from The Passenger Seat

The road though! Endless becoming, a colour palette always and somehow never changing, grey to green to brown to blue to other, occasionally red, very occasionally yellow, whoosh, repeat, repeat, something comes the other way with headlights on, the beauty of headlights in daylight, fence, field, these lane markings like perforations maybe, as if the road or the whole world could unzip any moment now, if there were such a thing as a moment when you’re driving, which Teddy realizes there isn’t. It’s just one long stretch. The road and its contradictions: boredom and excitement, you sit still but you’re moving, there’s a good kind of silence even with the engine noise and the German metal Adam has them listening to. Teddy’s mom used to call this sitting and thinking time. But all Teddy wants to think about is how the world keeps rushing toward them then dropping harmlessly into their wake. Adam is a good driver. He speeds often, especially to pass the empty logging trucks that must be on their way back to tree farms farther north. Adam tells Teddy the German metal is political, but it’s in fucking German so how can Adam know? The singer’s definitely angry, though. Teddy can’t decide if Adam’s tastes are more adult or more childish than his own. Is what Teddy likes, let’s say Arkells, more grown-up or just more boring? Funny that people call things middle of the road. That’s where they are now, as Adam passes another rig and swings back in before the line of oncoming traffic can snag them. Somebody beeps, and Teddy lets out a hum to match. Wasn’t that a bit close, he thinks but doesn’t say. He thinks about rhythm and speed, about the fact that they don’t know where they’re going.

At a gas station they buy energy drinks and for an hour they talk eagerly over the music, looking for ways to express how free they feel. Then comes the crash, spiralling silences in which the music speaks for them and Teddy nearly falls asleep. Towns go by, billboards, fruit trees, fences. The images don’t stop when he closes his eyes, and when he opens them again he sees something amazing. Two horses are standing nose to nose in a field, perfectly still, like somebody glued them together. They look like statues or oversized toys. One of them is wearing a halter around its head, the other isn’t. Somehow this makes Teddy think of the French they had done at school, how pointless it was because no one could remember anything by the time the next class came around. The recap would take more than half the time, the teacher getting more and more frustrated. But what did she expect? To Adam he says, over the music, Do you remember when you asked that French teacher if the word for cat also meant pussy? Adam laughs, then says, Wait, are you sure that was me? I don’t remember that. It was absolutely you, Teddy says. They hadn’t been proper friends back then, but he remembers it, his green pencil case, how the boys all laughed and the girls groaned and the teacher just went on as though Adam hadn’t said anything. She was telling them about two words that sounded almost the same, and you had to be careful or you’d end up telling somebody about your horses. She was showing off, trying to make the class laugh, but Adam stole her thunder with the pussy comment. Thinking about it now, years later, Teddy decides that Adam’s comment was actually pretty smart. It was really about how pointless the whole situation was, how they were all wasting their time, the teacher included.

They’re going too fast to have the windows open and the truck’s AC is broken. You only need it two weeks of the year anyway, Adam jokes. But surely these will be those weeks. It’s late afternoon and the sun is still well above the trees. On a long, mild hill the truck seems to struggle until Adam drops a gear. Teddy feels sweat on his neck and in his little pocket of chest hair. Away to the right are miles of quiet forest, places where nobody ever goes, probably full of bugs and bears. He hates himself for not being able to drive.

Stopping is glorious, a chance to move and to fart and to breathe. They both balance on shin-high posts beside a trash can, performing a laughing parody of martial art, for no reason other than the joy of controlling their bodies, of coordinating, synchronizing. Slowly the game becomes a competition, who can jump one-legged from post to post without falling. Knowing their phones will eventually fail them, they buy a map and unfurl it on the truck’s hood, captain and first mate. They can go anywhere they want. Teddy plants a finger at the tiny pink words HOT SPRINGS, feeling the engine’s heat through the waxy paper. Adam steers them north and east, away from the coast where they spent their boyhoods. Inward, toward what comes next. As the sun finally hits the treetops, Teddy tears open a softened chocolate block and passes it to Adam by the row. It leaves sweet muck on their hands, and later, as he stares out the window into the dusk, Teddy realizes he is sucking his thumb. The more the light goes, the more it is his own face he sees in the glass, lit by the blue stereo glow, already a ghost.

Each town they pass through is smaller than the last, recognizable brands slowing to a trickle. They stop for the night on the outskirts of one place, at a bend in the river that looks deserted enough. Adam says they’re far enough from the town that no one will bother them but close enough that they can walk back to that bar they passed. They’d probably get served in a town that small. He parks beside a low track that runs into a sea of pebbles and what looks like a ford through the black water. Teddy can imagine it flooding. Even with the driving done he remains a passenger, watching as Adam unfolds the tarpaulin and ties its ends to the truck’s raised trunk. There’s only one good tree, so Adam squats by the river and lets the water fill one of his new canisters. Then he lugs it back to use as an anchor. Teddy is impressed, and determined to make his own contributions. He doesn’t want to end up with the domestic jobs while Adam does the fun stuff, but with no other options he gets the camp stove out of its mesh sack and tries to remember how the pieces slot together. The burner hisses when he finally lights it, a memory of childhood, of hunger and the happiness of being somewhere other than home. This, he thinks, will be the summer his mother finally leaves his father and goes off with Ron; maybe he will arrive back to find everything dealt with, like how he avoids the kitchen until he knows the dishes are done. He hears the click of a bourbon bottle opening for the first time. Adam has scored three from his cousin, Teddy doesn’t know on what terms. Fuck, Teddy says. We don’t have a can opener. Yeah we do, Adam says, handing him his utility knife. Teddy repeatedly pushes its hook through the metal lid, making notch after notch until he has torn a jagged mouth. Probably he did it wrong, but Adam doesn’t say anything.

They sit with scalding cans between their knees, two mouths making plenty of noise. In brief moments of quiet Teddy hears other things, birds crying in the dark and the persistent river. They pass the bourbon back and forth, and Teddy is happy. He is part of a team. You think we can make it to the Arctic? asks Adam. You mean the ocean? Yeah, Adam says. Jesus, Teddy says, how far is that? Adam’s voice is defensive. It doesn’t take that long, maybe a week. A week there and a week back, Teddy says doubtfully. He doesn’t mention how much it would cost in gas because then Adam would try to buy half the rifle off him again, which would defeat the purpose of having it. Plus he wonders what happens if they get bored, have a fight, or just get sick of each other. He leans back and looks at the stars beyond the tarp, telling himself to relax and enjoy the ride. It’s a lot of driving to do on your own, he says eventually. Maybe, Adam says, not taking the bait. Adam suggests again that they walk to the bar, but this time it sounds more hypothetical. Both of them have taken root in their camping chairs, staring like old men at the darkness that must be the river. By the time the bourbon is a quarter gone, they’re both half-asleep. They lay their mats and sleeping bags side by side in what Adam calls the camper, a rigid bubble bolted to the rear part of the truck. When Teddy closes his eyes he sees the blue flame from the camp stove, then the blue light from the car stereo, then the horses. How weird they looked, how fake, but they were definitely real.

In good publicity news:

Don Gillmor, author of On Oil, was interviewed in The Tyee. On Oil was also reviewed in the Miramichi Reader: “Well-researched . . . [and] warns us that should we keep worshipping at the Oil & Gas altar, our story won’t have a happy ending.”
Catherine Khordoc, translator of Mélikah Abdelmoumen’s Baldwin, Styron, and Me, was featured in an article on translation on the Carleton website.
A Way to Be Happy by Caroline Adderson was listed as one of CBC Books’ “14 Canadian short story collections to read for Short Story Month.”
Near Distance by Hanna Stoltenberg (trans. Wendy H. Gabrielsen) was reviewed in On the Seawall: “Stoltenberg’s dual control of and surrender to the psyche of her novel most impressed me.”
A Case of Matricide by Graeme Macrae Burnet was reviewed in the Winnipeg Free Press: “It’s depressing, intriguing and quite engrossing.”

The Bibliophile: Two Nice People

May 2, 2025/in Latest News, The Bibliophile/by biblioasis

It’s Short Story Month, and we’re celebrating with one of the excellent stories from the recent linked collection Old Romantics by Maggie Armstrong. For those who missed it, our managing editor Vanessa wrote an unbeatable introduction to the book in an earlier post, which accompanies an interview between Maggie and publicist Ahmed well worth checking out, so I shall simply say we hope you enjoy this slice of Old Romantics’ arresting charm.

Ashley Van Elswyk
Editorial Assistant

Two Nice People

I was burying my little boy in sand when the policeman came right up to us. He cut out the sea and sky and I thought, what have I done now?

‘Hello there,’ he said, bending to our level. He was a shiny, compact kind of man, got up in hi-vis, shell tracksuit bottoms, sporty trainers; his summer uniform, I guessed. He didn’t wear the hat, but I knew from the badges on his arms and chest.

‘How are things here now don’t worry—because these days with everything people might see a policeman and think, Oh, I’m in trouble or something.’

‘Heh—no.’ I sat up straight and folded up my legs in such a way that he would not see any pubic hair. My swimming togs were very old and didn’t fit me properly. How many of them were here this time? I looked around but it was just this one policeman. ‘I’m Sergeant Pat Hourican,’ he was saying. Or Houlihan? O’Halloran? I didn’t really want to know his name.

‘I’m on duty up at the station on the main drag. And—hello there? This is your little fella?’

We both looked at the boy, buried to the waist. He was patting, imperiously, the sand around his body. Sand had got in everywhere, into his hair, his ears, eyebrows, nostrils. Once he noticed we were watching him he broke away and walked up to the dune to pick up stones and things. His only piece of clothing was a UV tank top with clouds and rainbows on it, and his little ass was coated in wet sand.

‘We’re obviously contented anyway, ha,’ the policeman said. He looked at me again. ‘Now, it’s a hot day, and very crowded out here.’ His eyes were bright like candle flames; his nose and cheeks were sunburned, as if all he did was patrol beaches.

‘Are ye visitors to the area, or . . . ?’

‘Yes. I come here all the time, I grew up here. We’re not just on holidays.’ I wanted to convey my separateness out here, and the policeman nodded; he understood.

‘I hear you, not exactly blow-ins.’ He edged closer on a taut calf muscle. ‘So. I just had a call there at the station, and I came to check if you were alright.’

‘Oh!’ Somebody came, I thought.

‘A call from a gentleman you may have met on the beach today.’

A gentleman. I couldn’t think of any gentleman.

‘A man who was a little bit concerned.’

‘Oh dear.’

The policeman nodded regretfully. ‘About the two of ye here, yes.’

‘Oh.’

The policeman looked inside me now, and I felt very peculiar, very bad, like I was being poisoned by my own friends. The boy was busy, collecting shells, seaweed, bits of rope and other debris. I saw the sleepy crowds, the tide, white horses, shimmering sea. Our patch of things. Mangled towels, opened suncream, sand-coated flask. Lunchbox, no lid; chocolate-smeared Wagon Wheel wrappers, one filled with a sand pie. In the game, you had to eat the sand pie and be sick. But I hadn’t played the game this time. Why had I not played the game this time? My book, a classic love story I was keen to finish and have read, was discarded, face down on its pages.

‘I’m sorry to have disturbed you, but I’m just responding to the call,’ the policeman went on. ‘So I hope it’s OK if I have a word with you here, ask a few questions. Just to find out what the story is.’

He took a pad of paper from a pocket in his jacket and he gave me a gallant little nod.

It was a half-truth, that I grew up here. We used to come here on our holidays, to a farm along an avenue where sheepdogs leapt, blackberries clustered in the briars, and bright-green cow-dotted fields, hiding flat white mushrooms, led right down to the rocky shore, and to the sea; and on hazy afternoons straw bales were tossed by the farmer onto trailers and the air was thick with pollen and wild perfumes.

The previous winter, I’d ended up very suddenly alone with my small son. Now it was time for freedom, time to be seen—maybe to be given some reward for tough endurance. Always I felt owed some happy time, some crock of gold, had no doubt but that it awaited us. The Airbnb, a bedroom and kitchenette, was clean and tasteful, and the farm just up the road looked much the same as I’d remembered it. They let us pick eggs and give a carrot to the horse. The weather was incredible, in fact it was a dangerous heatwave, with red warnings on the news. Every day we dragged ourselves into the car, and to the beach to cool off in the sea.

Today was the hottest day. In France, that week, four people died, and two in Spain. Here, people went around in a daze.

Up on the cliffs, the cars were sprawling from the car park onto the road and grass and golf links. The bins were overflowing, and long drooping queues of colourfully dressed families trailed from the Mr Whippy and chip vans. CAUTION, BEWARE OF BEING CUT OFF BY INCOMING TIDES, the sign read. We parked in a ditch and, holding hands, climbed the steep path down the cliffside to the beach. A sign said: DANGER, SUDDEN DROP BELOW.

On trips alone with my small son, to a beach or park, on planes or train journeys, I used to go up close to other families or friendly looking people. I had a beady eye for friendship on these traipses, for that gleam of openness and understanding that just might lead to company. At this beach, I pulled the boy around, checking faces under hats until we found a spot. It was a whole extended family. Mums, dads, aunts, uncles and kids, passing around crisp packets and soft drinks. The women stretched out on towels, the dads having conversations looking straight ahead of them, out to sea, the boys throwing a ball or digging a moat. They had castle moulds, pirate ships, sticky rackets, balls, snorkels—and we hadn’t thought of bringing any beach toys. I placed our bags in their periphery.

DANGER, COLLAPSING SAND DUNES. CAUTION, INCOMING TIDES. I unrolled our towels, shook the sand away. I set out the boy’s lunchbox: a peanut-butter sandwich sliced in triangles; four apple quarters turning brown; two Wagon Wheels, both already melted in their packets. And his turquoise water flask, decorated with pink octopi. The flask was stainless steel and the lunchbox bamboo, so—doing everything the right way here.

We had absolutely everything we needed. I looked around for something missing, something to stoke my anxiety, nothing came to mind. I got hold of him, coated him with Factor 50, put his cap on, stretched his limbs into his swimming trunks and rainbow top. He took his swimming trunks back off again, and sat down to play. He took his cap off, threw it away. Sun lit up his golden hair, and the shadows of his long eyelashes swept his face in lavish streaks.

I took out my paperback and looked for my page. I had forgotten water. His flask was full, but none for me. I looked up at the cliff, and the distance made my mouth feel dry. I lay back under the burning sun. You can’t have everything. I reached for his flask, but he got to it first.

Carefully, the boy unscrewed the flask, looked inside it, then tipped it upside down into the sand. He shook it hard to empty out the last few drops, then buried all the water, squatting right into his ankles. I unstuck my tongue from the roof of my mouth and pulled myself to standing.

‘Come on.’ I took his hand. The tide was so far out it took forever, pebbles pushing at our heels, before we reached the water. We waded out and farther out. The sea was shallow, murky, strewn with seaweed and dead crabs. We went a little deeper, then with his arms around my neck and his legs around my body we plunged in. The waves surged and tossed him up and down and he broke away, gasping, flapping his arms and kicking his legs until he was completely separate from me, gulping and spitting seawater, laughing, showing every tooth inside his gums. I’ve never had the strength to test it, but it seems there is no limit to the fun this boy is capable of having. He snips up cables, opens teddies with a joyfulness he shouldn’t be deprived of. Sometimes he bursts out laughing in his sleep.

There is not much to report about the day now that I’ve sat down to try. The sun shone, birds called; I worried about the sun, about sunburn, I worried that I didn’t worry half as much as someone should. I worried about all the wrong things. The group beside us, they knew how to live—their bored and diligently playing children, a woman drinking Diet Coke, reading from her phone, on her back a tattoo of a bat with its wings spread.

He was running up and down, playing in the water of a little stream that trickled from the cliffs into the sea. It occurred to me that I should put his cap back on, and his swimming trunks. The sun shone down, and I turned from right to left to let it cook me on both sides. I felt its hot rays cutting through the parting on my scalp. Fizzy drink, I thought. Iced lemonade. Cold beer. Ice cubes. Cold glass of water.

The men, arms draped around knees, had their conversations. Talked of these extremes in temperature. Of boats at sea—or county councils. Planning applications, objections to the plans. They talked about the schools, they talked about the coaching—the hoops you had to go through. Most likely all of that. One had dark hair. I moved along the towel to get a closer look. He had a beard. He had a beard and yet—the face. Easy-going—small, hooked nose, cheeks stretched now, dark impressive beard—eyes that seemed sad, or just afraid. He was heavier now, but distinguished, by the beard, kind of—time had passed, but he’d remember me as well. I’d already pulled myself to sitting and was clambering forwards on the sand.

‘Excuse me? Hi?’

They turned to look at me.

‘Hi. Did you study Arts in UCD? Ten years ago—no, fifteen.’

The bearded man leaned back. His friend or brother glanced from me to him, the bearded man pointed at himself but I knew already. His face, up close, distorted into someone else’s.

‘Sorry,’ he said, looking at his friend or brother. ‘We’re from—!’ The name of a town. I hadn’t heard of it. His friendly Northern accent forgave everything. They laughed it away. I laughed back, and they turned back to face the sea. The boy at his marsh of sand, pouring in the seawater, mixing up his elements. Running to and fro in an ecstatic hurry.

I held up the book to block the sun, checking on him with one eye. My novel was insufferably long and heavy in my hand. I’d been reading this one for about four years, even though it was a classic and a bestseller. The book jacket, its technicolour drawing of a frightened woman running from a burning house, had come apart from being

carried around. I’d seen the Netflix adaptation, so the story held no mystery anymore, I knew who murdered who and why they did it, knew there was a shipwreck coming, two shipwrecks, that in the end a human skeleton would be fished out of the bottom of the sea.

I read a paragraph from start to finish, and the effort could have killed me. Half the words were cast in shadow, and the tiny print felt harmful to my eyes. The boy was lining up some rocks along the stream now, rushing, in great hurry.

DANGER, GOLF BALLS FLYING. I thought to take a little break from looking, so that I could be right here, just sink into this time. One eye was still open; now it drooped and rested closed and everything was calm. This way I could employ my hearing at its most acute. I could appreciate the heat, and air, the sound of waves, for what they were. DANGER, OR CAUTION, BEWARE OF BEING CUT OFF BY INCOMING TIDES. You can really open all your senses, absorb the moment, take time, when you’re allowed to close your eyes. I stretched an arm, found the book, and placed the pages on my face.

‘DO YOU HAVE A SMALL BOY, THREE, BLOND??? A SMALL BOY, THREE, BLOND???’

Loud like torchlight or a speeding car. I sat up.

He was on his hunkers, talking in a phone.

‘SHE’S HERE, I’VE FOUND HER.’

Pink man, yellow thinning hair. Short, doughy build. He had a job at hand. He didn’t have a whistle round his neck but it seemed that in some other situation he would have had a whistle, and a first-aid pack, and ID.

‘HE’S WITH US, HE’S OVER BY THE WATER!’

The beach had emptied. I reached around for things, then threw myself to standing. My legs were stilts. My legs weren’t working properly. Half-words fell out—not what I’d have said if I’d had time to collect all my thoughts. But I understood the urgency, and I would not begrudge these people their distress. One foot found the sand, and then another, and I ran, with difficulty, on stilts.

My little boy was standing, seeming very little and confused, at the shore, beside a woman in a sarong. She was talking in a high-pitched voice about the water, eyes wide in mine, with her hair neatly brushed and her hand on the shoulder of my little boy. I pulled him in and picked him up.

The policeman wasn’t particularly enjoying any of this either, I was to understand.

‘And do ye mind me asking, are ye alone together on your holidays?’

‘Oh yes. But lots of help around. Lots of family.’

‘Oh yes surely, good to hear, it takes a village doesn’t it.’ He made some scribbles in his notepad.

‘A village.’

‘Well to rear a child, doesn’t it.’

‘Oh, sorry, yes. You’re telling me!’

‘And how did ye get down here, was it in the car today?’

‘We parked illegally, Garda.’

‘Well I think now you wouldn’t be the first, heh heh.’

‘No, heh.’

‘The car park is choc-a-bloc, alright.’ He seemed to look inside me, with a tilt, and the most inveigling compassion.

‘Are you alright?’ He looked in my pupils and gave a quick high-pitched laugh.

‘Garda,’ I said. ‘What do you want?’

‘Right. Well, this afternoon I received a phone call. What happened was you, ehm, your child, came to the attention of a gentleman on the beach here, and a lady, two nice people. They said to me that you were there with a book, that you had your face inside the book. Physically, inside the book. Not just looking at the book, but unconscious, underneath the book.’

‘I was reading, Garda.’

‘OK, listen, when you got up off the ground, you seemed disoriented. They said you weren’t making any sense, they said—look. OK—I’ll tell you. They said you looked a bit dishevelled.’

‘Dishevelled.’ We both looked down at my appearance, which was of course dishevelled, a worry almost. All our stuff. Scattered everywhere. I shut my knees together and hugged them to my chest.

‘But look sure, you seem very well. And he’s a great lad.’

‘I am very well. I’m—I’ve just been burying my kid in sand here.’

I reached out for my beach bag, and opened it, and found my sunglasses. Tears burst out behind the frames while he told me about his kids.

‘They are a handful, boys. I’ve two myself at home, I have your sympathy, I’m sure.’

‘They’d send you to an early grave,’ I wept, laughing. Tears burst from my face. He wasn’t to know.

‘Oh, you’re preaching to the converted you are.’ He shut his notepad.

Before he left, I asked him where the two nice people were. I would like to thank them one more time for coming to our rescue. He pointed at the cliffs, where the rocks were clustered in a jagged ring, where the man and woman had been watching. I shook out our towels.

On the way home, we stopped and bought the last remaining can of 7up and two Cornettos from the petrol station. The moment we arrived back in the Airbnb, it filled with sand. I stood at the shower, rinsing down the boy, who twirled and laughed under the warm spray. I scrubbed him clean, washed the sand into the plughole, dried him off, then unwrapped his ice cream while he hopped from foot to foot with his arms outstretched.

That night he watched YouTube Kids while I finished all the bottle in the fridge. Then I uncorked something special, organic and spumante I’d saved specially for the holiday. The evening darkened, the boy fell asleep. I picked up the phone.

‘No, this time I’m going to ask you some questions!’ I was on the grainy bedspread, in déshabillé, dishevelled if you like, white flesh exposed to nobody, hair tangled in saltwater, a cone of melted ice cream tipped over on the bedside table. ‘I’m going to want phone numbers,’ I said. ‘Names and phone numbers!’ The boy slept on like a little angel. I drank the wine down to its last few vinegary droplets and flopped back, laughing, and waves crashed on my skull.

In good publicity news:

UNMET by stephanie roberts was reviewed in the Adroit Journal: “One emerges from the agile linguistic theatrics of this book [UNMET] feeling requited, met, seen, and inspired—a sensation that moves from writer to reader.”
On Oil by Don Gillmor was excerpted in The Walrus.

Biblioasis: Poetry Manuscript Submissions Now Open May 1-May 31!

May 1, 2025/in Latest News/by biblioasis

Poets, send in your collections! Our 2025 reading period for poetry manuscripts is now open until Saturday, May 31st, or we reach two hundred submissions—whichever comes first.

Biblioasis poetry submission guidelines:

We can only consider unpublished work. Individual poems in the manuscript may have appeared in journals or anthologies, but the collection as a whole must not have appeared in either print or digital editions.
Manuscripts should range between 48 and 100 pages in length.
Manuscripts must be entirely human-created. We do not accept work that was written, developed, or assisted in any capacity by artificial intelligence (AI) tools such as ChatGPT.
Only one submission per writer will be reviewed. Multiple submissions will be deleted unread.
Only electronic submissions will be accepted. To submit, please email your manuscript as an attachment to submissions@biblioasis.com. PDF, .doc, .docx, and .rtf files are accepted. We will send confirmation that your submission has been received. Please send your manuscript only once: revised and updated versions will not be read, so make sure you’re happy with your text before sending.
Please include a cover letter outlining your previous publications and relevant experience. Include your cover letter as the first page of your manuscript.
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From Our Bookshop to Yours

May 1, 2025/in Latest News/by biblioasis

Photo: *The Bibliophile* #7 arrives just in time for Independent Bookstore Day.

The launch of the seventh print issue of The Bibliophile, Biblioasis’s charmingly irregular press publication, coincides with 2025’s Independent Bookstore Day. California bookseller and writer Samantha Schoech organized the first Independent Bookstore Day as a regional celebration in 2014, but it expanded into a national event the following year, making this year Independent Bookstore Day’s tenth anniversary. The event was born out of the urgent need for advocacy and awareness at a time when the very existence of such bookstores was threatened, and it was an opportunity as well to celebrate their role within the literary, local, and wider communities they serve.

Ten years ago, the demise of independent bookstores across the English-speaking world was believed to be inevitable. The previous decade had been disastrous. Decimated by large, conglomerate chains such as Barnes and Noble and Borders in the US and Indigo in Canada, undercut at every turn by Amazon, and facing inflationary costs that made it even more difficult for booksellers to survive in the communities they’d long served, things had gotten so bad by 2009 that the American Bookseller Association saw its membership drop by nearly 50 percent. The same year, the Canadian Booksellers’ Association disbanded. There was a sense that bookstores—and perhaps printed books themselves—were anachronisms that no longer served a necessary function in a digital age.

Independent bookstores have long been one of the few places where capital and culture coexist, even if not always comfortably. Most are run as for-profit ventures, though making money has almost never been their primary motivation. One of my many working definitions of independent publishing has been “Idealism, and how to pay for it”: this applies equally to most of independent bookselling. Booksellers do what they do for a range of reasons beyond the mercenary: love, advocacy, as a form of community engagement and outreach, a commitment to making the world, starting with their individual neighbourhoods, a better place. Bookstore owners regularly make decisions which can never be justified via an accountant’s spreadsheet; they stock independently published literature as a form of cultural service (and because they believe in its value); they work with and encourage local writers and artists; they keep books they believe in on the shelves far longer than their conglomerate cousins, increasing the likelihood that they will be discovered; they take an active interest in the success of the books they love, and the customers they know will love those books as much as they do; they allow their shops to be third spaces. Booksellers are at the front lines, alongside librarians, in the battles over censorship and freedom of expression. And this list only begins to capture the ways that bookshops contribute. Every bookshop reflects the individual predilections and passions and decisions of the people who run them; each reflects the individual communities they serve. If you are blessed to have more than one independent bookstore in your community, you’ll find books on the shelves of one that you will never find in the other, and vice versa, books you would likely never have otherwise discovered.

Perhaps it is for these reasons, among many others, that independent bookstores have experienced a renaissance over the last decade, over which time hundreds have opened across the continent, with a new generation of booksellers figuring out, individually and collectively, how to make this business work, striking a balance between idealism and commerce and in the process showing us different ways businesses can operate. And readers, who understand the importance of freedom of choice, and who thrill to the possibility of analog discovery, the power of the browse, are supporting them in greater measure every year. Perhaps this is happening because we all know better now what’s been lost, and what’s worth fighting for. And this, too, is a reason to celebrate Independent Bookstore Day. The survival of these individual businesses gives us so much—including, at this politically uncertain time, hope.

Happy Independent Bookstore Day.

Dan Wells,
Bookseller and Publisher

20 Bookstores for 20 Years: Leviathan Bookstore

Our 20 Bookstores for 20 Years feature today is Leviathan Bookstore and bookseller extraordinaire James Crossley! Leviathan is the newest store on our list—after eight months of stocking a two hundred square foot pop-up space, they moved to a brand new location in the South Grand Business District of St. Louis, Missouri and their grand reopening was just last month, in March. When you drop by, you’ll be welcomed by a surprising variety of books from the biggest bestsellers to the tiniest hidden gems, and plenty of cozy corners where you can pour over idiosyncratic pages. In his twenty-plus years of being part of the book business, co-owner/bookseller James has been a Biblioasis supporter no matter where he is. Read on for Dan’s praise of Leviathan Books and to discover why The Discovery of Honey by Terry Griggs remains James’ favorite Biblioasis book.

Left: The brand new interior of Leviathan Bookstore. Right: Co-owner James Crossley with his Biblioasis pick.

Dan on James Crossley and Leviathan Bookstore: I first met James Crossley in Minneapolis at a bar in the closing hours of Winter Institute perhaps close to a decade ago now. After a beer or two loosened our tongues, we got to talking about everything under the sun, though never straying very far from the world of books (and baseball). Since that time, he has come to be one of my favourite and most trusted readers, booksellers, and humans, as close as I may come to experiencing American transcendentalism in the flesh. After a career selling and managing books for others, he has, with his partner in love and literature, Amanda Clark, finally been able to open his own. There’s no store I look forward to seeing more.

James on why The Discovery of Honey is his Biblioasis pick: “It was love at first line when Terry Griggs and I met. The Discovery of Honey lofted me instantly into the air with narrative verve, buffeted me with the same rough tenderness it metes out to its irrepressible young heroine, and set me back down stunned, smiling, and satisfied. I wish I could read it again for the first time.”

In good publicity news:

The Passenger Seat by Vijay Khurana was reviewed in a number of outlets this week:
- Wall Street Journal: “[A] quietly frightening debut . . . The Passenger Seat inhabits both characters’ states of mind, at times mesmerizingly, depicting their braggadocio, their resentments and their paranoia.”
- Globe and Mail: “Powerful and extremely well written . . . nuanced, propulsive, literary, unsettling, haunting.”
- Midwest Book Review: “An impressive level of literary excellence.”
- Necessary Fiction: “[A] striking novel.”
- The Guardian: “Confident, precise and simmering with intellectual energy. The Passenger Seat flirts with allegory but never renounces an urgent relationship to contemporary configurations of masculinity.”
Ira Wells, author of On Book Banning, was interviewed on CBC Ideas for the episode “Libraries are fighting for their freedom—and our democracy.”
On Oil by Don Gillmor was excerpted in Lit Hub and the Toronto Star.
Mark Bourrie, author of Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre, was interviewed in The Hill Times and CBC News.
Old Romantics by Maggie Armstrong was reviewed in the West Trade Review: “Displays first-person prose of stunningly high quality and a belief in language at once arresting and propellant.”

The Bibliophile: The ghost in the machine

April 17, 2025/in Latest News, The Bibliophile/by biblioasis

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

***

It surprised me that the most riveting book I’ve read this year is on a topic I knew nothing about and didn’t think I would care to know much about anyway. But Don Gillmor hooked me. That won’t surprise anyone who has read him before. In On Oil, Gillmor, a journalist and former roughneck, takes us through the rise and fall of the oil industry. He had a front row seat to Alberta’s oil boom in the ’70s while working on the oil rigs and he uses that perspective to show how it transformed the province and the wide-ranging influence oil has had across the world. It has given some countries immense wealth and power. It has also corrupted governments, started wars, and worsened our environment.

Photo: On Oil by Don Gillmor. Designed by Ingrid Paulson.

Reading this book I learned that one of the first oil companies was started by a devout Baptist and some of the biggest oil companies were run by Christian evangelicals, which aided in building the mythology of oil as the key to a kingdom on earth. And now, as Gillmor says, “we find ourselves in a landscape that looks increasingly like the Book of Revelation. ‘A third of the earth was burnt up, and a third of the trees were burnt up, and all green grass was burnt up.’”

Please enjoy this short excerpt from On Oil, which will be released on April 22.

Ahmed Abdalla,
Publicist

***

Babylon

In boardrooms in Houston, Calgary, Kuwait, and a dozen other oil capitals, and on the floor of the New York and Chicago Mercantile Exchanges, oil was a global chess game where commodity futures were sold and bartered, oil shipped and traded. Millions of barrels lurched across the globe each day, traders hunched over streaming charts, puzzling over contracts for difference. Over the years, oil has won wars, started others, been a force for nationalism and colonization, and provided a stubborn mythology. It is the one true global religion. A glimpse of oil’s reach can be seen in America’s oil industry. Under Joe Biden, it produced 13.3 million barrels per day, enough to meet the US’s own needs. But in 2023 it imported 8.51 million barrels per day (bpd) from dozens of countries, and exported 10.15 million bpd to 173 countries. The oil network envelops the world in a complex web of shipping and refining capacity and capability, depending on cost-effectiveness and the grade of oil. Part of this is economic; it can be cheaper to import from countries with lower labour and capital costs and fewer environmental regulations. And part of it is chemistry; the heavy, sour (high sulphur content) oil that the US was importing from Venezuela and Mexico when it still needed to import oil requires a specific kind of refinery. Some of the refineries on the Gulf coast are equipped to process that oil (along with Canadian bitumen), as opposed to the light, sweet oil that Texas produces. Refineries take years to build and are expensive—between US$5 and 15 billion. With the exception of a small North Dakota refinery that came online in 2020, no US refineries have been built since 1976. Past the economics and chemistry, there are the geopolitics. Countries (Russia, Saudi Arabia, the US) sell oil at advantageous prices to other countries to gain influence and status. It is the world’s most pervasive diplomatic tool.

Photo: We’re hiring a new sales coordinator! See our website for more details.

Canada’s oil landscape is equally byzantine. Canadian pipelines tend to run south rather than east, so Ontario and Quebec get their oil from an evolving patchwork of sources that shifts depending on economics and politics. Since 1988, eastern Canada has imported more than $500 billion in foreign oil, coming from the US, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Nigeria, Norway, and others. The landscape can shift quickly. In 2012, Quebec got 92 percent of its oil from Kazakhstan, Angola, and Algeria, and just 1 percent from Alberta. Five years later, it was getting 44 percent of its oil from Alberta, the result of Enbridge’s Line 9 pipeline.

It binds us all. Oil has a pulse, it evolves and migrates, transforming cities and governments, entire countries. It fuelled economic growth and triggered recessions and gave us the romance of the open road. But at its source, in Texas and Oklahoma and Louisiana and in camps in the Arctic, and outside Medicine Hat, it was men trudging onto the drilling floor, labouring in the heat or cold amid a symphony of engine noise, wrestling with drill pipe, spinning chains, tongs and slips, the kelly hose bobbing above them as they punched another hole in the earth. Even for us, oil remained an abstraction. I never saw it; there were no dramatic gushers, black oil spewing from the earth, coating everything. It powered our cars and homes and was used in the manufacture of a thousand products, from plastics to fertilizers to Aspirin. It powered our lives: We are Hydrocarbon Man, Homo Oleum. Yet it remains unseen, the ghost in the machine.

***

After graduating from university, I worked on an oil rig for a hundred straight days, with what was probably the oldest crew in the oil patch, weathered, gnarled men in their late sixties, one in his seventies, ancient for rig work, their lives a country and western song. Pete, the wobbly seventy-two-year-old derrickman, came home to find his wife gone, along with all the furniture, appliances, and curtains. There was a note on the floor: “Your dinner’s in the oven.” There was no oven. The driller was a ropy-muscled troll who had worked on the killing floor of a meat-packing plant but quit finally, saying it took too much of you, all that death. My fellow roughneck was a farmer whose modest crop had been lost to drought. He was in his late sixties, with a deeply lined face, a face that could hold a spring rain, as my grandmother might have said. Between connections he would roll a cigarette and walk to the edge of the lease and smoke and stare at the horizon.

Photo: Check out Don Gillmor’s new feature in Maclean’s.

I went up in the derrick when Pete was drunk or too hungover to climb the thirty metres onto his perch. We were south of Calgary and I was ten storeys off the ground, a view of the Rockies to the west and limitless prairie to the east, farms and ranches laid out like a Mondrian painting, a glorious solitude.

With my first paycheque I bought a plane ticket to Europe, then counted the days like a convict. Four months later, I was sitting on a beach on the Greek island of Crete, blobs of sticky oil dotting the sand around me. A tanker carrying crude oil from Libya had run aground off the south coast of Crete and here was the residue. Only two months earlier, the Amoco Cadiz had split apart off the Brittany coast in France, spilling 230,000 tonnes of oil, at that point the largest spill in history. Twenty thousand birds were killed and millions of sea creatures. Two months after the spill, six thousand French soldiers were still cleaning up the coastline.

The 1970s was a banner decade for oil tanker spills. More happened in that decade than any decade before or since. It was peak spill, with an alarming 788 of them (by contrast, the 2010s saw 63 spills). Millions of tonnes spilled into the seas. The world was awash in oil.

***

In good publicity news:

Don Gillmor, author of On Oil, was interviewed on TVO’s The Agenda, and wrote the article “Why Trump Needs Canadian Oil” for Maclean’s.
Ripper was mentioned in The Hill Times: “A bracing reminder of some of the reputations Poilievre has ruined, the malicious fictions he has promoted, [and] the tiresome slogans he stitches into every utterance.” Mark Bourrie was also featured in Vancouver CityNews’s Bookshelf.
Question Authority by Mark Kingwell was reviewed in the New York Journal of Books: “A master of words . . . [Kingwell] writes with deep affection and hope for humanity and openly shares his darkest and brightest moments along life’s bumpy road.”
A few of our titles appear in the Literary Review of Canada’s May 2025 issue:
- Review of On Book Banning by Ira Wells: “Persuasively explains how book banning reduces and devalues art and how it constitutes an attack on intellectual autonomy and on ‘your right to determine the future of your own mind.’”
- Review of Baldwin, Styron, and Me by Mélikah Abdelmoumen (trans. Catherine Khordoc): “Demonstrates the good faith conversations being held within a cultural scene that is both local and transnational in its outlook.”
- Review of UNMET by stephanie roberts: “With a resolute inward stare, Roberts reveals the cumulative nature of life.”

Media Hits: UNMET, The Passenger Seat, Baldwin Styron and Me, and more!

April 15, 2025/in Latest News/by biblioasis

IN THE NEWS!

UNMET

UNMET by stephanie roberts was reviewed in a poetry feature in the Literary Review of Canada. The review will appear in their May print issue, and is available online here.

Emily Mernin writes,

“In alternately nervous and incisive modes, roberts explores the profound contradictions behind even the most clear-eyed criticisms or desires . . . With a resolute inward stare, roberts reveals the cumulative nature of life.”

UNMET was reviewed in The Woodlot on April 7, and you can read the full review here.

Chris Banks writes,

“[roberts’] language is ‘surprise-drenched’ . . . this fantastic book is a piling on of surprising images and poetic structures and creative desires allowing both reader and poet the opportunity to rise above the Dollar Store desolation and grief and human injustice that plague our society.”

UNMET was featured on the CBC Books list of “39 Canadian poetry collections coming out in spring 2025.” You can check out the full list here.

Get UNMET here!

ON BOOK BANNING

On Book Banning by Ira Wells was reviewed in the Literary Review of Canada. The review will appear in their May print issue, and is available online here.

Keith Garebian writes,

“With this slim volume, Wells lays out cogent arguments against culture warriors who continue to warp our children’s relationship to literature . . . Wells persuasively explains how book banning reduces and devalues art and how it constitutes an attack on intellectual autonomy and on ‘your right to determine the future of your own mind.'”

Ira Wells spoke on an episode of TVO’s The Agenda for the segment “How Does Book Banning Hurt Democracy?” You can watch the full segment here.

Get On Book Banning here!

ON OIL

Don Gillmor, author of On Oil, was interviewed on TVO’s The Agenda on April 10. You can watch the full segment “Should Canada Rethink Its Relationship to Oil?” here.

Don Gillmor wrote an article, “Why Trump Needs Canadian Oil,” for Maclean’s on April 8. Read the full article here.

On Oil was also featured on the CBC Books list of “29 Canadian books you should be reading in April.” You can view the full list here.

Get On Oil here!

BALDWIN, STYRON, AND ME

Baldwin, Styron, and Me by Mélikah Abdelmoumen (translated by Catherine Khordoc) was reviewed in the Literary Review of Canada. The review will appear in their May print issue, and is available online here.

Amanda Perry writes,

“Abdelmoumen’s work . . . demonstrates the good faith conversations being held within a cultural scene that is both local and transnational in its outlook.”

Grab Baldwin, Styron, and Me here!

THE PASSENGER SEAT

The Passenger Seat by Vijay Khurana was listed in the Guardian‘s “Best Australian books out in April.” The list was published on April 4, and can be viewed here.

Steph Harmon calls it,

“A tense and gripping power struggle of toxic masculinity, as the teenagers push each other further and further down a violent road of no return.”

The Passenger Seat was reviewed in Rabble on April 10, in the article “Walk like a man: Toxic masculinity in crime fiction, fact and spoken word.” You can read the full review here.

“The structure of the book and its lyrical prose combine to make telling points about toxic male bonding and its relationship to sexist violence, all without any counterproductive lecturing or explicit judgements. The magisterial way that Khurana uses the classic elements of noir crime writing to challenge and subvert those very elements is impressive.”

Grab The Passenger Seat here!

RIPPER

Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre by Mark Bourrie was featured a The Hill Times article about Poilievre on April 14. Check out the full piece here.

Susan Riley writes,

“Former political journalist Mark Bourrie’s new book, Ripper, is a bracing reminder of some of the reputations Poilievre has ruined, the malicious fictions he has promoted, [and] the tiresome slogans he stitches into every utterance.”

Ripper and author Mark Bourrie were featured on Vancouver CityNews’s NewsRadio Bookshelf on April 13. You can listen to the short interview or read the article here.

John Ackermann notes,

“The book is a more pointed treatment of its subject than Andrew Lawton’s Pierre Poilievre: A Political Life, which came out last year when the Tories were still riding high in the polls.”

Ripper was mentioned in Dan Garner’s Substack as a book to check out. You can read the full article here.

“If it weren’t for Mark and a small number of others willing to make sacrifices, popular Canadian history would have vanished entirely from book stores.”

Get Ripper here!

OLD ROMANTICS

Old Romantics by Maggie Armstrong was reviewed in the Winnipeg Free Press on April 5. Check out the full review here!

Ron Robinson writes,

“Armstrong offers fine, astute turns of phrase in her writing . . . The reader’s delight in the stories may range, then, from ‘you go, girl’ to a censorious ‘it will all end in tears’ depending on your age and experience.”

Grab a copy of Old Romantics here!

COMRADE PAPA

Comrade Papa by GauZ’ (translated by Frank Wynne) was reviewed in the Winnipeg Free Press on April 12. You can read the full review here.

Zilla Jones writes,

“This is a postcolonial novel that questions the dominant narrative with humour and heart.”

Grab Comrade Papa here!

QUESTION AUTHORITY

Question Authority by Mark Bourrie was reviewed in the New York Journal of Books, which can be read here.

Karen R. Koenig writes,

“A master of words who is well-versed in philosophy, political science, sociology, and psychology, [Mark Kingwell] writes with deep affection and hope for humanity and openly shares his darkest and brightest moments along life’s bumpy road. Though this is a serious book requiring thoughtful reading, Kingwell’s wit will make readers laugh out loud at him and at themselves.”

Get Question Authority here!

SORRY ABOUT THE FIRE

Sorry About the Fire by Colleen Coco Collins won 3rd Prize in the Alcuin Award for Excellence in Book Design in Canada’s Poetry category! The award was given to the book’s designer, Natalie Olsen. You can view the full list of winners here.

Grab Sorry Abou the Fire here!

THE HOLLOW BEAST a finalist for the French-American Translation Prize!

April 11, 2025/in Latest News/by biblioasis

We’re thrilled to share that on April 10, the French-American Foundation announced the finalists for the 2025 French-American Translation Prize, which included The Hollow Beast by Christophe Bernard, translated by Lazer Lederhendler!

Since 1986, the French-American Foundation has awarded the Translation Prize for the best translation from French to English in both fiction and nonfiction, guiding these important works of French literature to the American market. The prize is awarded to translators to recognize and celebrate their work.

Winners of the 38th Annual Translation Prize will be announced in May 2025 and celebrated at an Awards Ceremony in June in New York City. The Translation Prize, funded by the generous support of the Florence Gould Foundation, is one of the flagship programs of the French American Foundation.

Grab a copy of The Hollow Beast here!

ABOUT THE HOLLOW BEAST

Finalist for the 2024 Governor General’s Literary Award in Translation • Finalist for the 2025 French-American Translation Prize • A Globe and Mail Most Anticipated Spring Title

Don Quixote meets Who Framed Roger Rabbit in this slapstick epic about destiny, family demons, and revenge.

1911. A hockey game in Quebec’s Gaspé Peninsula. With the score tied two-two in overtime, local tough guy Billy Joe Pictou fires the puck directly into Monti Bouge’s mouth. When Pictou’s momentum carries them both across the goal line in a spray of shattered teeth, Victor Bradley, erstwhile referee and local mailman, rules that the goal counts—and Monti’s ensuing revenge for this injustice sprawls across three generations, one hundred years, and dozens of dastardly deeds. Fuelled by a bottomless supply of Yukon, the high-proof hooch that may or may not cause the hallucinatory sightings of a technicolor beast that haunts not just Monti but his descendants, it’s up to Monti’s grandson François—and his floundering doctoral dissertation—to make sense of the vendetta that’s shaped the destiny of their town and everyone in it. Brilliantly translated into slapstick English by Lazer Lederhendler, The Hollow Beast introduces Christophe Bernard as a master

Photo Credit: Monique Dykstra

of epic comedy.

ABOUT LAZER LEDERHENDLER

Lazer Lederhendler is a full-time literary translator specializing in Québécois fiction and non-fiction. His translations have earned awards and distinctions in Canada, the UK, and the US. He has translated the works of noted authors, including Gaétan Soucy, Nicolas Dickner, Edem Awumey, Perrine Leblanc, and Catherine Leroux. He lives in Montreal with the visual artist Pierrette Bouchard.

The Bibliophile: Scathing, surgical, and colourfully entertaining

April 11, 2025/in Latest News, The Bibliophile/by biblioasis

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

***

Mark Bourrie’s Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre has quickly become a national bestseller; this week, it sits at #3 on the Canadian Nonfiction list. Despite initial worry that the election call would hinder the media’s ability or willingness to cover a critical biography of the Opposition leader, it’s great to see Bourrie’s hard work pay off. And we’re especially grateful for all the journalists who are showing up to write thoughtful, non-partisan coverage during this increasingly terrifying period. We’re also grateful to the people who are taking the time to read books like Ripper ahead of election day (or any day): we all have to stay vigilant.

Dominique Béchard,
Publicist

***

Ripper: Ottawa Launch

The Walrus

“Poilievre is a pro-American libertarian who moralizes the sufferings of the marginalized, insists the free market has inherent genius, drives wedges between the regions of the country, and exploits class envy. By the early winter of 2025, the political gears of the country changed. The political fight in Canada quickly became about who was best to face the external threat and whose ideas were best to help Canadian families and businesses at a time of real danger. On April 28, we’ll know if his brand of politics will survive the very crisis it claimed to prepare for.”
—Mark Bourrie, excerpted from Ripper

Globe and Mail

“Mark Bourrie has produced a searing but convincing critique of the Conservative Leader’s shortcomings that will give pause to anyone outside the diehard Poilievre base.”
—Charlotte Gray

“In his pull-no-punches book, Mr. Bourrie portrays Mr. Poilievre as one serious ripper: mean, sneering, insulting, truth-evading, skilled at whipping up mass anger.”
—Marsha Lederman

“If Pierre Poilievre is going to win, shake [the comparison to Trump] he must. This book, with all its pungent reminders of his record, will make it harder to do.”
—Lawrence Martin

“‘It’s an intense subject, the future of Canada—there isn’t anything more important than that, and at a time of revolution, which I think we are in,’ [Bourrie] says . . . The story was there; he just needed to collate the pieces.”
—Josh O’Kane

Photo: Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre by Mark Bourrie. Cover designed by Ingrid Paulson.

Toronto Star

Bestsellers Lists: #3 on the Canadian Nonfiction list, and #7 on the Original Nonfiction list.

Interview with Mark Bourrie and Stephen Maher, excerpted:

Stephen Maher: One of the pleasures of your book is the attention it pays to the social and economic forces Poilievre has harnessed. You argue persuasively that Trudeau let Poilievre become a champion for the working class by neglecting their concerns and failing to communicate. But every incumbent government around the world had a similar crisis. Was it really Trudeau’s failure, or was it just that the situation created an opening for a person such as Poilievre?

Mark Bourrie: I think it’s a systemic failure among centrists, people on the left and even the union movement to maintain a good, strong relationship with shop floors. And we saw that folks realized there was this great big working-class vote out there that wasn’t being tended to. And the Liberals, after the first year of COVID, could not communicate with anybody. They were just so disconnected. Canadian conservatives went to the United States and learned this stuff, but it was also something that former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson was able to pick up on. It’s something that the Brexiteers were able to pick up on, as well as the AFD in Germany.

Winnipeg Free Press

“Despite [the rush to print], the work never seems rushed. It is lengthy and historically detailed while relying on media, secondary sources and parliamentary debates.”
—Christopher Adams

The Tyee

“This book is a phenomenal effort, carefully researched and nicely written. Ripper should be widely read by everyone who cares about the value of casting an informed vote on April 28.”
—Michael Harris

Hill Times

“Every Liberal in their war room, every journalist covering the campaign and—should he win—every stakeholder doing business with an eventual Poilievre government owes it to themselves to read Bourrie’s Ripper so that they can have a clear picture of who Poilievre is, how he came to be, and how that past is almost certain to shape his decision-making going forward.”
—Jamie Carroll

CBC Windsor Morning

Cult MTL

“The page-turner is crack for political junkies.”
—Toula Drimonis

NB Media Co-op

“Mark Bourrie’s new book is a detailed and surgical examination of the man who could be Canada’s next prime minister.”
—Gerry McAlister

UnHerd

“In a scathing but comprehensive recent biography, Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre, the historian Mark Bourrie points out that his [Poilievre’s] thinking on most subjects has not advanced much since adolescence.”
—Michael Ledger-Lomas

Canuckleheads Podcast

That Shakespearean Rag

“By positioning Poilievre in the context of the global social and economic cleavages that permitted him him to attain power, Bourrie transcends a simple biography and creates a snapshot of our riven historical moment, one that should prove illuminating for anyone looking around in abject confusion and wondering how we got to this particular point.”
—Steven W. Beattie

Ken McGoogan

“Ripper has no business being so detailed and wide-ranging, so authoritative and convincing, so brilliantly analytical and colourfully entertaining.”

On Substack:

“Bourrie writes an honest and comprehensive account of Poilievre’s and offers a look at where he might take the country. The book is no hagiography, but nor is it a hatchet job (a lesser author might have been less disciplined). It’s a fitting, if disconcerting, election primer.”
—David Moscrop

“His [Mark Bourrie’s] latest book RIPPER isn’t just a biography—it’s a field guide to fascism wrapped in a Canadian flag soaked in Axe body spray.”
—Dean Blundell

“[Ripper] is far from a hatchet job. Bourrie appreciates Poilievre’s cunning and instinct for the jugular—he just doesn’t like him too much.”
—Ethan Phillips, Oversight

“Bourrie’s critical of Poilievre . . . But he reflects on Poilievre’s strengths and weaknesses, informed by close observation of the Conservative leader’s entire career.”
—Paul Wells

“Bourrie’s style is accessible, the prose is clear and sparse . . . Bourrie’s dry wit brings a chuckle now and then.”
—Margaret Shkimba

“[E]xcellent instant bestseller.”
—Rose Simpson, Rose’s Cantina

Archive for year: 2025

From the Biblioasis launch of On Book Banning

In good publicity news:

Announcing this year’s contributors for all three anthologies!

Selected by Brian Bethune

Selected by Mary Dalton, with series editor Anita Lahey

Selected by Zsuzsi Gartner

In good publicity news:

An Excerpt from The Passenger Seat

In good publicity news:

Two Nice People

In good publicity news:

20 Bookstores for 20 Years: Leviathan Bookstore

In good publicity news:

Babylon

In good publicity news:

IN THE NEWS!

Ripper: Ottawa Launch

Globe and Mail

Toronto Star

Canuckleheads Podcast

On Substack:

Archive