Photo: Mark Bourrie (courtesy Canada’s National History Society)
Mark Bourrieis an Ottawa-based author, lawyer, and journalist. He holds a master’s in journalism from Carleton University and a PhD in history from the University of Ottawa. In 2017, he was awarded a Juris Doctor degree and was called to the bar in 2018. He has won numerous awards for his journalism, including a National Magazine Award, and received the RBC Charles Taylor Prize in 2020 for his book Bush Runner: The Adventures of Pierre-Esprit Radisson. His most recent books include Big Men Fear Me: The Fast Life and Quick Death of Canada’s Most Powerful Media Mogul, the national bestseller Crosses in the Sky: Jean de Brébeuf and the Destruction of Huronia, and Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre.
The Governor General’s History Award for Popular Media: the Pierre Berton Award recognizes individuals who have helped increase understanding of Canadian history through popular media, including but not limited to publications, film, radio, television, theatre, or digital media platforms. The $5,000 Pierre Berton Award, as it is also known, is administered by Canada’s National History Society, with the support of the Government of Canada through the Department of Canadian Heritage, and Power Corporation of Canada.
In their press release, president and CEO of Canada’s History Society Melony Ward praises,
“Mark Bourrie makes our country’s history as vivid as anything happening today. He embraces the complexity of the past to create works that brim with conflict, struggle, and larger-than-life characters, all firmly grounded in research.”
The eleven recipients being honoured by this year’s history awards, will receive their awards from Governor General Mary Simon at an upcoming ceremony in Ottawa.
A huge congratulations from all of us at Biblioasis to Mark!
https://www.biblioasis.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/Bourrie_PierreBerton.jpg8002000biblioasishttp://biblioasis.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/BIBLIOASIS-Logo-500x500-White-300x300.pngbiblioasis2026-01-20 13:07:252026-01-20 13:07:27Mark Bourrie wins the 2025 Governor General’s History Award for Popular Media: The Pierre Berton Award
We’re thrilled to share that today, the National Book Critics Circle Award announced their finalists for the 2025 Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize, which includes Wendy H. Gabrielsen’s translation of Near Distance by Hanna Stoltenberg! View the full list of finalists on their website, here.
As judge Mandana Chaffa describes, the Barrios shortlist features “remarkable books by notable authors, which are only available to English readers because of the gifted translators and committed publishers who bring them to life.”
The NBCC’s Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize, launched in 2022, seeks to highlight the artistic merit of literature in translation and recognize translators’ valuable work, which expands and enriches American literary culture by bringing world literature to English-language readers. The prize honors the best book of any genre translated into English and published in the United States.
A finalists reading will be be held on March 25, 2026; the awards ceremony and reception will be on March 26, and is open to the public.
A Finalist for the 2025 Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize
For her entire life, Karin has fled anything and anyone that tries to possess her. Her job demands little, she mostly socializes with men she meets online, and she’s rarely in touch with Helene, her adult daughter. But when Helene’s marriage is threatened, she turns, uncharacteristically, to her mother for commiseration, and a long weekend away in London. As the two women embark on their uneasy companionship, Karin’s past, and the origins of her studied detachments, are cast in a new light, and she can no longer ignore their effects—on not only herself and her own relationships, but on her daughter’s as well.
An unnerving, closely observed study of character—and the choices we do and do not make—Near Distance introduces Hanna Stoltenberg as a writer of piercing insight and startling lucidity.
Wendy Harrison Gabrielsen moved to Oslo in 1987 after completing an MA in Translation at the University of Surrey. She has translated works of fiction as well as nonfiction, and in 2022 she was awarded the Wigeland Prize by the American-Scandinavian Foundation for an excerpt from her translation of Hanna Stoltenberg’s Near Distance.
Hanna Stoltenberg (born 1989) grew up in Oslo and studied English at the University of Bristol. She is a regular contributor to the Norwegian literary journal Vinduet and works as an editor at the Munch museum. Her first novel, Near Distance (Nada in Norwegian) was published in 2019. It won the prestigious Tarjei Vesaas first book award and the NATT&DAG Oslo prize for best literary work. She is currently working on her second novel.
https://www.biblioasis.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/NBCC_Near-Distance_finalists.jpg8002000biblioasishttp://biblioasis.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/BIBLIOASIS-Logo-500x500-White-300x300.pngbiblioasis2026-01-20 12:31:522026-01-20 12:31:54NEAR DISTANCE shortlisted for the NBCC 2025 Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize!
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We took an extended break this year at the Bibliomanse, and my own was extended further still by five inches of snow in Paris and Amsterdam, even if a short purgatory in Dante’s city is nothing to kvetch about. Besides, it came with the added benefit of having a couple of drinks with the author of our first title of the season, Mark Anthony Jarman.
Photo: Our globetrotting publisher Dan Wells (left) meets up with Mark Jarman (right) in Florence.
Still, I’m not sure I’ve ever been so happy to be back behind this desk and working on new books, while planning to help broaden the spotlight to include some of our previously published ones as well. (Backlist is Bullshit.) This is only my third full day in office this year (if you don’t count my cramped work at 35,000 feet over the Atlantic) and I’m grateful for many things as we begin 2026, including the great people I get to work with during the creation of these many books, and their enthusiasm and willingness to try new things as we continue to figure out how to make this most difficult of professions make sense, while having a little fun along the way.
Rather than overwhelming you with the complete list of everything we have coming over the first half of this year, or even during the Winter Season, we thought we’d share the first three titles we’re publishing in 2026, breaking this preview up over a few posts over the coming weeks.
A mischievous medley of stories that blur the lines between the real and the imagined.
Photo: Smash & Grab: Stories by Mark Anthony Jarman. Cover designed by Kate Sinclair.
Smash & Grab brings together fourteen new stories . . . or performances . . . or pieces by one of the most inventive prose stylists at work today, blurring the line between the real and the imagined. His first new collection of short fiction in more than a decade—and first since we collected the best of his previous work in Burn Man: Selected Stories, a book that saw rave reviews from the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Kirkus, Globe and Mail, and elsewhere—these are stories that work their own musical magic distinct from that of any other writer today, stories shaped like strange loops, which gather in the reader’s mind as a collage might, layering word and image.
Photo: Smash & Grab alongside Mark Jarman’s previous book, Burn Man: Selected Stories (cover designed by Michel Vrana).
His language, as Jarman himself said of one of his literary idols Barry Hannah, is “a weird mixture of Elizabethan and cracker”; his world, whether it is set in Venice or the deep south or on the bloody moon, is violent and bizarre and always slant. Reading an excellent Jarman story—and this book has several of them—will leave you slightly off-kilter. It doesn’t matter what they’re about—the summary of some of them have the feel of a barroom joke: ie, a former military policeman, a veterinarian, and a French poet walk into a bar and debate the Vietnam War—it’s the experience of them that counts. So go ahead . . . experience them. Smash & Grab is already finding its way into bookstores, though it only officially launches five weeks from now.
by Ivana Sajko, translated from the Croatian by Mima Simić
An extended soliloquy of self-examination, upheaval, loss, hope, disillusionment, ambition, and failure; and a profoundly stark and furious novel.
Photo: Every Time We Say Goodbye by Ivana Sajko, translated by Mima Simić. Cover designed by Ingrid Paulson.
We discovered Ivana Sajko when her first book in translation, Love Novel, made the Dublin Literary Award shortlist a few years ago. Three of us read it here in as many days, more or less each in a sitting, and each of us were blown away, in the fantastic translation by Mima Simić, by its energy and humour, its compassion and rage. We went on to publish it in February 2024 as our own anti-Valentine to the literary world.
Photo: Love Novel by Ivana Sajko, translated by Mima Simić. Cover designed by Jason Arias.
Reading Sajko is intense and claustrophobic, pleasurable and energizing. A longtime playwright and theatre director, her work often takes the form of a dramatic monologue, which is the case in her next novel, Every Time We Say Goodbye, which we will be publishing in March. A man on a train, propelled from his small town on the eastern edge of Europe to Berlin by a pattern of violence from which he is trying to flee, meditates feverishly on everything that has brought him to this point, moving further and further away from the only person he’s ever loved.
Ivana Sajko, photo credit: Peter Stamer.Mima Simić, photo credit: Bronwyn Lewis
Reading Sajko is not for the faint of heart: Every Time We Say Goodbye is a bruising book, a book relevant to this moment and time, but also one that is deeply personal, since all failings begin as such. Yet despite this, there is hope here, as the narrator moves fatefully on towards his final destination, and this feeling has lingered with me in my memory as much as the bleakness and blackness her narrator refuses to look away from. There are very few writers to whom we are as committed as Sajko. Read this book, and Love Novel, and everything that follows: she is one of the very best writers working in any language.
In On Sports, journalist David Macfarlane considers the origins of his love of sport against his discomfort with their commodification.
Photo: On Sports by David Macfarlane. Cover designed by Ingrid Paulson.
On Sports, the latest volume in our Field Notes series, reads like a conversation between friends at the ballpark in those golden days before the kiss cam and college co-eds with T-shirt cannons spoiled the fun; a book that feels of the sun on your forehead and the breeze in your hair, beer and laughter on your lips; a book that celebrates communion and friendship and the beauty of these games—whether it be baseball or football or soccer or tennis or cricket—that we’ve designed to distract ourselves from the end of the world. It is a book about what 7Up tastes like when drunk from the Grey Cup, which, true story, a young Macfarlane once found in the china cabinet at a childhood friend’s house, and into which they poured their favourite soft drink, raising it to their lips like their heroes, detecting notes on the palate of lime, dust, and Silvo. It’s about everyday heroism and the near impossibility of language to properly capture athletic excellence. It’s about the beauty of excellent sports copy; the ephemerality of even the biggest sports story; how it remains perpetually powered by the eleven-year-old still residing in all of us. It’s a book about rediscovering the spirit of sport before online gambling and the manufactured spectacle that most professional sports have become suffocates the last of it.
Photo: David Macfarlane.
I came to sports late as a kid, but became one of the most fanatical of sports fans, especially for baseball: I could probably still quote Rick Monday’s and Fergie Jenkins’ and Mike Schmidt’s 1983 baseball stats from the back of their OpeeChee cards. But over the years I’ve become increasingly ambivalent about sports. Macfarlane shares and acknowledges this ambivalence, but also reminds us of their beauty and humanity. Less an argument than a gentle, generous meander, On Sports has helped once again make me a sports fan, and I think it could appeal broadly to anyone who feels wonder about what feats humans can perform with their bodies, or, otherwise, almost all of us.
Photo of far side of the moon: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/Arizona State University.
Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers by Marcello Di Cintio was reviewed by Anne Logan on I’ve Read This: “Unflinchingly presents an inequitable Canadian system that contradicts what we consider Canadian values of kindness and acceptance.”
Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre by Mark Bourrie was reviewed in Alberta Views: “Read this book for Bourrie’s wrathful takedown of the egotism, infighting, backbiting and corruption that threaten Canadian democracy.”
https://www.biblioasis.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/unnamed-scaled.jpg6172560biblioasishttp://biblioasis.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/BIBLIOASIS-Logo-500x500-White-300x300.pngbiblioasis2026-01-16 16:04:062026-01-16 16:04:09Biblioasis Winter Preview: Part I
It is almost impossible this year for me to separate the books we’ve made from the manner and condition of their making. Slow learner (the title of my publishing memoir) that I am, 2025 was the year that I learned, or at least finally realized, that publishing will never get easier. It’s also the year I made my peace with that, its problems and frustrations and challenges also giving shape to some of its primary pleasures. I’ve had a sentence or two from Andrew Steeves taped to my door since 2019, sent to me by another publisher at an earlier point of (supposed) crisis, that suggested as much: this was the year I came to understand this more fully.
Photo: Quote from Andrew Steeves, taped to Dan Wells’s office door.
There’s a question I’ve been thinking about a lot in recent months, as I’ve grappled with the various challenges 2025 brought to the fore, something I hope to write about more in the Bibliophile throughout the coming year if I can find the time (time being the most precious of resources): What is publishing for? I’m not sure it’s a question I asked when I shifted Biblioasis into the publishing sphere twenty-one years ago: that was brought about almost exclusively on the backs of ignorance and ego. For better or for worse, there’s a lot less of both around here these days. There have been moments where I feared I lost the plot a bit, in which I needed to rethink what it is we’re trying to accomplish; but looking at our list over this past year, I no longer worry that this is the case. The plot has perhaps thickened, become more expansive; we’ve learned a lot about what we can do, and what we should; we’ve learned that we can and should expect more of ourselves, and of the books that we publish. And I think this year, with its wide range of titles and subjects, covering history, politics, culture, fiction, poetry, criticism and much else, attests to this. It was the best and worst of years; and yet, still one of the best. I’m grateful for (almost) all of it.
Rather than repeating what others have already highlighted in the earlier installments of this series of Holiday Book Guide posts, I thought I’d focus on half a dozen things not yet discussed, but that also speak to the full range of our publishing commitments, and offer evidence, I hope, for how we’ve grown and developed since those earlier, more ignorant days. If you haven’t already, please do check out the first parts of this series, as there’s some most excellent suggestions to be found therein.
Photo: Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre by Mark Bourrie. Designed by Ingrid Paulson.
Around this time last year, when it would have been nice to be winding down, the heavy lifting began in earnest on one of the key books of our 2025 publishing year, Mark Bourrie’s Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre. Conceived only six months earlier over coffee in my back yard after a launch, initially as a much shorter Field Note, we worked with its author (and, truth be told, worked its author) through Christmas and the usual holiday break, then through January and early February, to get the book out in advance of the impending election. We’d assumed that we would have until summer or fall 2025 to produce the biography, but events, as they often do in both politics and publishing, conspired against us, forcing us to get the book finished in record time. We learned a lot in the process about this kind of publishing, about politics, and about our own limitations and the costs of pushing so far past them. We were able to get it out a few weeks before the election, and I think it’s fair to say that the book played a big role in the coverage of the ensuing campaign. I was amazed by Mark’s ability to pull it all together, doing a few years of research and writing in under eight months. Elaine Dewar told me that she believed Ripper contributed to Poilievre’s unexpected defeat in the election; whether or not this is true—Poilievre played a very big role in the outcome himself—this type of publishing feels like the kind of thing we have a responsibility to take on, and I’m grateful that I have been able to work with writers like Mark to tackle these kinds of books when they are needed. I expect that there will be more books like it in the future.
Photo: On Oil by Don Gillmor. Designed by Ingrid Paulson.
One of the reasons we began the Field Notes series back in 2020 was to try and become more engaged, more responsive and responsible publishers, and in 2025 we published two of my favourite books in the series. Ashley wrote a couple of weeks ago about Ira Wells’s On Book Banning, so I’ll spend a paragraph here on Don Gillmor’s On Oil. I think On Oil is easily one of the most elegant and engaging books in the whole series, a mix of memoir, investigation, and meditation of our tortured relationship with a substance that is pushing the world to the brink of collapse. Don was a roughneck in his university years, and he writes of his experiences in that community with humour, intelligence, and sympathy; but it’s his short precis of the history of oil extraction, its relationship to the evangelical movement in both Canada and the United States, and how early we understood that our oil dependence was contributing to global warming (and how quickly both oil companies and government agencies rushed to cover this up, though they were fully cognizant of the consequences) that makes this book such a revelation, and an essential part in the series. It may not seem to be the most engaging of subjects, and—wherever you are on the political spectrum—you may figure that you know enough already about oil, and where you stand on the issue. Don’s book will challenge your assumptions and entertain in equal measure. It should have made every Best of the Year list out there: it’s certainly on mine.
Photo: Sacred Rage by Steven Heighton. Designed by Ingrid Paulson.
It is hard to believe that it’s been more than three-and-a-half years since we lost Steven Heighton. I miss him. So it was a consolation this year to be able to bring out his selected stories, Sacred Rage, gathering fifteen stories from across his four collections, and I hope cementing his reputation as one of the best short story writers this country has produced. He told John Metcalf, his editor for both his first two and last two books, before he knew that he was ill, that returning to the short story after years of trying to be a novelist was like returning home, that it was in the story, more than even poetry, that he felt that he’d made his most important contribution to literature. Anyone who reads the stories in Sacred Rage will have a hard time disagreeing with him.
Photo: Precarious by Marcello Di Cintio. Designed by Kate Sinclair.
I first conceived of the idea of doing a book on migrant workers and their lives more than a decade ago. The first writer we brought on to tackle the subject, whose family began in the fields as farm workers in the early post-WWII years and who now, a couple of generations later, owned some of the larger greenhouses in the area, retreated from it after talking with his family: the personal costs of writing the book as he intended would have been too great. But it always remained at the back of my mind, and after working with Marcello Di Cintio on Drivena few years ago I knew that I’d found the right person to tackle the migrant project. Marcello brought an incredible curiosity, humanity, and sympathy to his subjects; a willingness to dig deep, to ask uncomfortable questions, and to do the hard investigative work essential to a book like I was proposing. His Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workerswas everything I hoped it would be, a propulsive, informative, and righteously angry examination of the lives of those often brought to this country to do the work that Canadians don’t want to do.
Photo: Dust: More Lives of the Poets (with Guitars) by Ray Robertson. Designed by Ingrid Paulson.
I’ve worked with Ray Robertson now for seventeen years, since we republished his novel Moody Food in 2008, still one of the best rock and roll novels, to my mind, ever published. It shocked me to realize that Dust: More Lives of the Poets (with Guitars)was the eleventh book we’ve done with him over that time, by far the most books we’ve published by any author. Dust picks up where his initial Lives of the Poets (with Guitars) left off, and though there are a few artists without guitars here—James Booker and Nico—that gathered assemblage will still get your foot tapping, and introduce you to artists that you might not otherwise have heard of. My favourite essay in the collection is on the Toronto Rockabilly artist Handsome Ned: I’m looking forward to spending some of the holidays getting better acquainted with his music.
Photo: The Best Canadian 2026 anthologies. Designed by Ingrid Paulson.
Lastly, we completed our latest installment of our Best Canadian anthologies, and this year’s installments are as good as any that have come before. I’ve long admired Mary Dalton as a poet; she shows, in Best Canadian Poetry, that she’s an equally fine editor. Zsuszi Gartner in Best Canadian Stories has pushed the boundaries of my understanding of what a good short story can do, and I’ve been amazed by and grateful for her enthusiasm and promotional verve: her good work has made this year’s anthology one of our best-selling collections to date. Every year, Best Canadian Essays seems the neglected child of this gathering, which is unfortunate, because it is to my mind, year after year, the most consistently excellent of the three, and this installment is no exception: Brian Bethune has brought together a wonderful gathering of essays covering everything from catfishing and climate change to motherhood and mental health. It’s worth picking up from your local indie the next time you’re in the shop. Or better yet, pick up all three!
There is no Ripper to prepare this holiday, thankfully, even if there is, as always, too much work to do. We’re all looking forward to a much needed break, with family, friends, and good books. If you’re hungry for the latter, you could do worse than picking up a couple of the above, or any of the other choices presented in earlier installments of the Holiday Gift Guide. Thank you for reading, and we wish you a Merry Christmas and a wonderful new year, and we’ll see you in 2026.
Dan Wells, Publisher
Biblioasis 2026 Subscription Clubs
A few sharp-eyed folks may have already caught a glimpse of this announcement on our socials or website, but we’re pleased to announce that our 2026 Subscription Clubs are now available!
Every subscription comes with five titles, plus bonus Biblioasis ephemera from buttons to ARCs and more (the Limited Editions Club has a few extra goodies). They make a great gift for your favourite bibliophile, or the perfect treat for yourself to enjoy throughout the year. Whether it’s stories and essays filled with humour, loss, and reconnection; a literary detective novel; an exploration of sports; striking new poetry; or translations from across the globe, you can trust you’ll find a book to add to your shelves.
You can view each subscription club on our website, and in the process, get a sneak peek at what titles we have in store for 2026.
On Book Banning by Ira Wells was included in the Winnipeg Free Press’s list of best books of 2025: “A pocket-sized provocation for educators to help arm themselves against those who wish to remove books from libraries.”
The Passenger Seat by Vijay Khurana was picked as one of London Magazine’s best books of 2025: “Khurana’s glass-cut, rhythmic sentences plunge you into a world of obsessive friendship and insecurity, a game of one-upmanship that feels eerie in its innocence.”
Sacred Rage by Steven Heighton was reviewed in the Literary Review of Canada: “Formally brilliant, ranging from the hilarious to the heartbreaking . . . if there is any justice in this literary world, Heighton’s legacy will be his love of language, evident on every page.”
We’re thrilled to share that today, the National Book Critics Circle Award announced their longlist for the 2025 Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize, which includes Wendy H. Gabrielsen’s translation of Near Distance by Hanna Stoltenberg! View the full longlist on their website, here.
The NBCC’s Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize, launched in 2022, seeks to highlight the artistic merit of literature in translation and recognize translators’ valuable work, which expands and enriches American literary culture by bringing world literature to English-language readers. The prize honors the best book of any genre translated into English and published in the United States.
A finalists reading will be be on March 25, 2026, with the awards ceremony and reception on March 26.
Longlisted for the 2025 Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize
For her entire life, Karin has fled anything and anyone that tries to possess her. Her job demands little, she mostly socializes with men she meets online, and she’s rarely in touch with Helene, her adult daughter. But when Helene’s marriage is threatened, she turns, uncharacteristically, to her mother for commiseration, and a long weekend away in London. As the two women embark on their uneasy companionship, Karin’s past, and the origins of her studied detachments, are cast in a new light, and she can no longer ignore their effects—on not only herself and her own relationships, but on her daughter’s as well.
An unnerving, closely observed study of character—and the choices we do and do not make—Near Distance introduces Hanna Stoltenberg as a writer of piercing insight and startling lucidity.
Wendy Harrison Gabrielsen moved to Oslo in 1987 after completing an MA in Translation at the University of Surrey. She has translated works of fiction as well as nonfiction, and in 2022 she was awarded the Wigeland Prize by the American-Scandinavian Foundation for an excerpt from her translation of Hanna Stoltenberg’s Near Distance.
Hanna Stoltenberg (born 1989) grew up in Oslo and studied English at the University of Bristol. She is a regular contributor to the Norwegian literary journal Vinduet and works as an editor at the Munch museum. Her first novel, Near Distance (Nada in Norwegian) was published in 2019. It won the prestigious Tarjei Vesaas first book award and the NATT&DAG Oslo prize for best literary work. She is currently working on her second novel.
https://www.biblioasis.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/NBCC_Near-Distance_web.jpg8002000biblioasishttp://biblioasis.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/BIBLIOASIS-Logo-500x500-White-300x300.pngbiblioasis2025-12-18 13:52:342025-12-18 13:58:37NEAR DISTANCE longlisted for the NBCC 2025 Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize
This week’s anticipated holiday post has been interrupted to hand-bind copies of Richard Kelly Kemick’s madcap tale of SCD (Seasonal Compulsive Disorder), “Playing God.”
We will resume our regular programming next week.
—The Biblioasis Crew
Photo: Prepping labels for the front cover of the chapbook edition of “Playing God” by Richard Kelly Kemick.Photo: Chapbooks waiting to be sewn together.Photo: Jeff and Ashley hard at work sewing and cutting labels.Photo: It’s all coming together . . .Photo: Publisher Dan Wells even emerged from the editorial pit to trim chapbooks!
In good publicity news:
Passenger Seat by Vijay Khurana appeared on the New York Times list of the staff’s “Favorite Hidden Gem Books of 2025,” recommended by Greg Cowles: “This taut, terrific novel—Khurana’s debut—ratchets up the tension in a classic formula . . . I’ve been recommending it for months to anybody who likes Richard Ford and Andre Dubus III.”
Marcello Di Cintio, author of Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers, was interviewed for CBC Ideas in the episode “Your tomatoes have a backstory and it’s not always pretty.” Precarious also made the Hill Times’s list of “Top 100 Best Books in 2025.”
Baldwin, Styron, and Me by Mélikah Abdelmoumen (trans. Catherine Khordoc) was listed in BOMBMagazine’s 2025 Small Press Gift Guide: “For the person who treats literary friendships like high-stakes contact sports.” The book was also picked by critic Steven W. Beattie for Quill & Quire’s “Notable Books of 2025”: “Part memoir, part literary criticism, part admiring portrait of Baldwin, one of the author’s heroes, Abdelmoumen’s book resonates clearly with our own contentious moment.”
Seth’s 2025 Christmas Ghost Stories were featured in the Chicago Tribune’s holiday book guide: “An addicting revival of the Victorian-born tradition of reading scary stories at holidays.” The stories also got a shout-out from longtime fan Patton Oswalt on social media!
Every Time We Say Goodbye by Ivana Sajko (trans. Mima Simić) was reviewed in the Irish Times: “Sajko vividly captures the way in which travel suspends both time and place in scenes that are at once real and dreamlike . . . Every Time We Say Goodbye is a threnody to leave-taking—elegant, mournful, and profoundly human.”
Benbecula by Graeme Macrae Burnet was listed in the Washington Post’s list of “11 new paperbacks to add to your shelf.”
https://www.biblioasis.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/unnamed-scaled.jpg6172560biblioasishttp://biblioasis.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/BIBLIOASIS-Logo-500x500-White-300x300.pngbiblioasis2025-12-12 15:15:582025-12-12 15:16:01The Bibliophile: Playing God
We’re back with the second part of our Biblioasis staff picks, and I’m certain it will come as no surprise to anyone that we’ve decided to make this a three-part series.
There are just too many good books to share!
Please enjoy a few more of our favourites from 2025 that we think you should check out—and maybe you’ll find that perfect book gift in time for the holidays. Next week, look forward to our final recommendations, and a word from our publisher Dan Wells.
Ashley Editorial Assistant
Hilary Ilkay
Sales Coordinator
Self Care by Russell Smith, designed by Kate Sinclair.
By far the spiciest book I read this year, Russell Smith’s first novel in a decade is a propulsive, disquieting portrait of a young generation unable to make genuine connections and live authentically. Set in Toronto, Self Care stages an unlikely encounter between a burnt out, ennui-suffering freelancer named Gloria and a self-deprecating incel named Daryn. Through their increasingly troubling relationship, Smith explores power and sex and the harm posed by online communities and discourses. You will not be ready for the ending, which will get under your skin for days afterward.
Dominique Béchard
Publicity & Marketing Coordinator
L: UNMET by stephanie roberts, designed by Ingrid Paulson. Centre: Near Distance by Hanna Stoltenberg (trans. Wendy Gabrielsen), designed by Natalie Olsen. R: Baldwin, Styron, and Me by Mélikah Abdelmoumen (trans. Catherine Khordoc), designed by Ingrid Paulson.
UNMET is an incredible poetry collection that doesn’t compare to anything else I’ve read. roberts employs an impressive range of registers—slipping from earnestness, to irony, to playfulness, to anger . . . But always, it strikes me, in service of the unexpected. The surprising leaps of diction and syntax make me feel like I’m leaning precariously over the known world into the open-hearted absurd. And I feel like an improved, more malleable human coming out of these poems.
In 1961, James Baldwin spent several months as a guest in William Styron’s home. During this time, Baldwin encouraged Styron to write The Confessions of Nat Turner from the perspective of the slave; it would go on to win a Pulitzer, but also elicit controversy from the African-American community. Abdelmoumen doesn’t take sides, but rather creates space for dialogue about race and cultural appropriation that avoids binary thinking. This book champions a definition of identity that is “in a constant state of flux,” that depends first and foremost on listening to others—what she calls “the beauty of cross-pollination.” I’m not someone who is prone to optimism, but the hope at the heart of Abdelmoumen’s book softened last winter’s sharp edges. It would make a great new year read for anyone who wants to shake the bleak, the rigid, the alone.
I read an ARC of Near Distance almost two years ago, before knowing I’d soon be working at the press. Though under a hundred pages, the tense, encroaching malaise of Stoltenberg’s debut novel has stayed with me. Near Distance portrays the tenuous relationship between a mother, Karin, and her adult daughter, Helene. Stoltenberg told me that Karin was based on the fathers she knew growing up: casually uninvolved, inclined to focus on themselves, emotionally distant. For such a short book, the character of Karin is so complex and strikingly herself; I still think of her frequently.
Ahmed Abdalla
Publicist
L: Benbecula by Graeme Macrae Burnet, designed by Kate Sinclair. R: Heaven and Hell and The Sorrow of Angels by Jón Kalman Stefánsson (trans. Philip Roughton), designed by Natalie Olsen.
I’ve talked quite a bit about my love for Benbecula in a Substack post from last month, but the first time I read Benbecula, I read it in one sitting, and then I read it again. It’s a first person account of a murder and its aftermath in a small community. An incredibly engrossing read that I found difficult to put down. Sometimes if I walk past the copy in my apartment, I’ll pick it up and reread certain sections. I don’t know what it says about me that enjoyed this story of madness so much, but here we are. This story of real life triple murder on a remote Scottish island in the 19th century becomes a Jekyll and Hyde–like tale about madness and the slippery nature of identity. It’s a novel approach to true crime, darkly funny at times, about a man, living alone, haunted by memories and voices, slowly sinking into madness. The nonfiction afterword where Burnet describes the real life case and his research was also a delight to read.
The first two books in Jón Kalman Stefánsson’s Trilogy About the Boy (look out for the third one, The Heart of Man, that’s set to be released June 2026) harkens back to the old Icelandic sagas. It’s the story of an unnamed boy in a remote Icelandic fishing village who loves nothing more than poetry and reading. In the first book, Heaven and Hell, his only friend dies, and he begins a journey that takes him out of the lonely fishing village and into a new community where he finds friendship and hope. The Sorrow of Angels has him embark on a new quest, with an alcoholic, melancholic mailman, across a brutal winter in order to deliver some important mail. It’s the stuff of epic: of men in search of themselves, battling against nature and despair. The whole trilogy is really a testament to the power of literature and the communities found around it. Stefánsson’s voice is absorbing and immersive throughout, and Philip Roughton has done an amazing job translating it into English. I think he’s so unlike any writer I’ve read recently, and to me that is among the highest of compliments. He’s an original, crafting these intense and lovely lyrical, small-scale epics, with wonderfully written character studies. Read him for all the beautiful ways he describes walking through snow.
Ashley Van Elswyk
Editorial Assistant
On Book Banning by Ira Wells, designed by Ingrid Paulson.
In this slim Field Note, Ira Wells offers surprisingly rich historical and contemporary context alongside personal experience to a topic that can sometimes seem like a vast, irremovable threat. Before reading Wells’s book, when I thought of book bannings I thought of the United States, or Alberta. The censoring of queer and diverse titles and authors, of older books, or of uncomfortable topics, wasn’t something that happened in places as close to home as the libraries and schools of Southwestern Ontario. But On Book Banning made me think more about what’s happening to our crucial centres of learning, and helped expand my knowledge of what book banning is, what constitutes it, and where we can take action to better prevent it. Here, Wells offers a passionate defense of our right to read, and we should all take that defense to heart before we lose these beautiful sources of knowledge and wonder.
Seth’s Christmas Ghost Stories 2025 were reviewed in Cemetery Dance: “Beautiful and uniquely collectible . . . Another fine set of Christmas ghost stories, perfect for the gray, dreary days that lead us into the magic of the holidays. As always, they are highly recommended.” The three Ghost Stories were also recommended on the So Many Damn Books podcast, and in the Washington Post’s Book Club newsletter.
On Book Banning by Ira Wells was reviewed in Alberta Views: “This slender volume makes for excellent conversational kindling. More than a definitive treatise or clear prescription for protecting the right to read, it serves as a starting point for serious thinking about the question.”
As we come to the end of another busy year, we’re taking a look back at the incredible books we’ve published throughout 2025. Some were anticipated, others were unexpected but welcome drop-ins. There were debuts and long-awaited returns; authors from Canada, Ireland, Iceland, and beyond; and a rich berth of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.
There’s been so much to read, in fact, that we’ve decided to split our staff recommendations across two weeks! So please enjoy this first half of our Biblioasis Holiday Book Guide, and keep an eye out for more great works next Friday. We hope you’ll find something new here for your holiday TBR.
Ashley Van Elswyk Editorial Assistant
Hilary Ilkay
Sales Coordinator
L: Voices of Resistance by Batool Abu Akleen et. al., designed by Ingrid Paulson. R: Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way by Elaine Feeney, designed by Kate Sinclair.
Elaine Feeney hooked me from the title, which is taken from Anne Carson’s translation of Sophocles’s tragedy Electra, and she didn’t disappoint. This is a novel of immense depth and substance, interweaving the present grief and past trauma of a family with western Ireland’s violent history. Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way explores the difficulty of homecoming, the relationship between domesticity and femininity, the vicissitudes of love, and losing oneself in order to discover oneself anew. Expect lyrical, dazzling prose with incisive dialogue and a wry sense of humour.
In the welcome proliferation of voices from Palestine receiving publication and translation, Voices of Resistance stands out as a deeply moving and powerful account of life in Gaza. Featuring the day-by-day diaries of four women—Batool Abu Akleen, Sondos Sabra, Nahil Mohana, and Ala’a Obaid—the book signifies a refusal to be silenced or erased and to let unfathomable loss and constant acts of violence give in to nihilism and despair. As the women suffer displacement and fear for their lives and those of their loved ones, they affirm community, solidarity, love, and hope for a different future. This is a must read.
Dominique Béchard
Publicity & Marketing Coordinator
L: Big of You by Eline Levine, designed by Ingrid Paulson. R: We’re Somewhere Else Now by Robyn Sarah, designed by Vanessa Stauffer.
You can’t go wrong with a Robyn Sarah collection. These are plainspoken, thoughtful, gently philosophical poems. I’m left with a warm uncertainty after reading them: everything cast by doubt, yet in a way that feels vital and forgiving. Favourite poems are “In the Medical Building Lobby Café,” “An Abdication,” and the long, final poem “In the Wilderness,” which turns from the lyrical precision of her earlier poems, towards something opaque, shapeshifting, and uncontainable.
The sentences are just so incredible—the ways in which they twist around their speakers, revealing a suite of strange, charismatic, deeply unique characters. Elise Levine writes like nobody else, which sounds like a throwaway thing to say, but trying to come up with a comp (or even a blurb) for Levine feels like a disservice to the breadth of her writing. The story “Cooler” blew up any preconceptions I had about what a short story could do, and the last story, “Witch Well,” broke my heart. If you’re bored with the millions of formulaic books out there, this is the one to bring back that old, fundamental love of literature.
Ahmed Abdalla
Publicist
L: Old Romantics by Maggie Armstrong, designed by Fiachra McCarthy. R: The Passenger Seat by Vijay Khurana, designed by Zoe Norvell.
Maggie Armstrong told me that an “old romantic” is a hapless fool who continually authors their own destruction by way of repeated mistakes and self delusion. They tend not to make good friends, but they are rich for fiction. Old Romantics is an arresting collection of linked short stories about one such hapless fool and about love’s beginnings and ends. The collection follows Margaret from young adulthood to middle age, depicting all the drama, heartache, and trivial misfortunes that come her way. These stories are delectable and addictive, with witty, sardonic lines and entertaining scenes, they made me laugh and cringe as I recognized in Margaret the fool I have sometimes been. It’s hard to talk about what makes something funny, but I hope you’ll trust me when I say Armstrong’s dark comedy is first-rate.“The Dublin Marriage” was a particular standout story for me and one I often go back to.
This was the first book I worked on when I started at Biblioasis, so I suspect it will always have some kind of hold on me personally. It’s a damn fine piece of writing that grabs you by the shoulders, shakes you, and engages in questions—about masculinity, violence, identity, loneliness—that we tend to shy away from. It’s about two young men on an aimless summer road trip and the murders they commit for reasons they can’t even explain. It covers uncomfortable ground and gives no easy answers, but reading Khurana is a pleasurable experience for his distinctive voice and how he renders the claustrophobia of being on the open road. Perhaps not the most festive of books, but it will linger in your mind for months, maybe years, maybe forever.
Ashley Van Elswyk
Editorial Assistant
L: Dark Like Under by Alice Chadwick, designed by Kate Sinclair. R: Christmas Ghost Stories 2025, selected & designed by Seth.
I’ve been banging the drum for years about how fun these spooky little books are, and I’m at it again today! This year’s trio presents such a great range of ghost stories, and while the melancholic but beautiful Lady Ferry looks to be a favourite among readers, and The Mistress in Black is a tragic but cathartic schoolhouse tale not to be ignored, I’d have to say my personal pick is Lucky’s Grove, which involves a classic demonic haunting and takes place over Christmas (gather ’round the blazing tree!). And of course, I can’t go without praising Seth—this series wouldn’t exist without his fine illustrations, striking covers, and eye for classic ghostly tales.
We’ve published a number of stellar novels over 2025, but if I’m going to recommend one I was really drawn into, it’s Alice Chadwick’s debut Dark Like Under. In this circadian novel, Chadwick takes us through a single day following the students and staff of a rural English school in the 80s after the unexpected death of one of the teachers. The teens are restless, grappling with their own personal troubles and relationships with one another, and everyone is dealing with the sudden change in their lives. The characters of Tin and Robin are particularly fascinating to follow, complex but sympathetic. Chadwick’s voice is grounded and real, and there’s some truly beautiful writing in here as she deftly tackles grief, hope, and the hard path to moving forward.
Elaine Feeney, author of Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way, is the An Post Irish Book Awards’ Library Association of Ireland Author of the Year winner! Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way was also reviewed in the Winnipeg Free Press: “With richly textured description, Feeney takes readers through several layers of troubled Irish history and suffering across generations.”
Benbecula by Graeme Macrae Burnet was reviewed in the Winnipeg Free Press: “Continues Burnet’s stringent deconstruction of the crime genre, which began with His Bloody Project . . . Burnet catches the somewhat formal 19th-century cadences of Malcolm’s voice and wrings a kind of bleak, beautiful poetry from the harsh, impoverished lives of the MacPhee family.”
Jón Kalman Stefánsson virtually joined the Winnipeg Free Press book club to talk about Heaven and Hell. Its sequel, The Sorrow of Angels, was reviewed in roughghosts: “Stefánsson’s language is poetic, his characters are pushed to their limits—physically and emotionally—and the remoteness and ruggedness of the remote reaches of northern Iceland a century ago is portrayed with relentless intensity. A thoroughly enjoyable read.”
https://www.biblioasis.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/unnamed-scaled.jpg6172560biblioasishttp://biblioasis.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/BIBLIOASIS-Logo-500x500-White-300x300.pngbiblioasis2025-11-28 15:10:582025-11-28 15:11:00The Bibliophile: The Biblioasis Holiday Book Guide (Part I)
We’re excited to share that Baldwin, Styron, and Me by Mélikah Abdelmoumen, translated by Catherine Khordoc, is one of the three finalists for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction! The finalist announcement was made this morning on Tuesday, November 18, and can be viewed here.
The other two nonfiction finalists are There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America by Brian Goldstone and Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li. Read more in the ALA’s full finalists press release here.
The two medal winners for Fiction and Nonfiction will be announced on January 27, 2026. A celebratory event will take place at the ALA Annual Conference in June 2026 in Chicago.
The Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction, established in 2012, recognize the best fiction and nonfiction books for adult readers published in the US in the previous year and serve as a guide to help adults select quality reading material. They are the first single-book awards for adult books given by the American Library Association and reflect the expert judgment and insight of library professionals who work closely with adult readers. The winning authors (one for fiction, one for nonfiction) receive a $5,000 cash award.
Shortlisted for the 2026 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction • Finalist for the 2025 Governor General’s Literary Award in Translation • Finalist for the 2025 John Glassco Translation Prize
In 1961, James Baldwin spent several months in William Styron’s guest house. The two wrote during the day, then spent evenings confiding in each other and talking about race in America. During one of those conversations, Baldwin is said to have convinced his friend to write, in first person, the story of the 1831 slave rebellion led by Nat Turner. The Confessions of Nat Turner was published to critical acclaim, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1968, and also creating outrage in part of the African American community.
Decades later, the controversy around cultural appropriation, identity, and the rights and responsibilities of the writer still resonates. In Baldwin, Styron, and Me, Mélikah Abdelmoumen considers the writers’ surprising yet vital friendship from her standpoint as a racialized woman torn by the often unidimensional versions of her identity put forth by today’s politics and media. Considering questions of identity, race, equity, and the often contentious public debates about these topics, Abdelmoumen works to create a space where the answers are found by first learning how to listen—even in disagreement.
Mélikah Abdelmoumen was born in Chicoutimi in 1972. She lived in Lyon, France, from 2005 to 2017. She holds a PhD in literary studies from the Université de Montréal and has published many articles, short stories, novels, and essays, including Les désastrées (2013), Douze ans en France (2018), and Petite-Ville (2024). She worked as an editor with the Groupe Ville-Marie Littérature in Montreal until 2021. She was the editor-in-chief of Lettres québécoises, a Québec literary magazine, from 2021 to 2024. Baldwin, Styron, and Me is her tenth book (and the first to be translated).
Catherine Khordoc is a professor of French and Canadian Studies at Carleton University in Ottawa. She is the author of Tours et détours: Le mythe de Babel dans la littérature contemporaine (University of Ottawa Press, 2012). She also considers herself in many ways a frontier-dweller.
https://www.biblioasis.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/Baldwin_Carnegie_shortlist.jpg8002000biblioasishttp://biblioasis.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/BIBLIOASIS-Logo-500x500-White-300x300.pngbiblioasis2025-11-18 13:16:452025-11-18 13:20:15BALDWIN, STYRON, AND ME a finalist for the 2026 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction!
Our editors for the latest editions—Brian Bethune, Mary Dalton, and Zsuzsi Gartner—have all shown such enthusiasm and care during the selections for these anthologies (revisit our contributor announcement), and in the months since, through production and publicity, as we head towards publication next Tuesday, November 18.
On that note, we’d also like to highlight the various launches happening across Canada for each book. For those in the area, we hope you’ll join our contributors and editors in celebrating great Canadian literature and poetry:
Best Canadian Storiesin Vancouver (Nov 18 at 6:30PM)
Best Canadian Poetryin St. John’s (Nov 30 at 7:30PM)
A combined Best Canadian Poetry 2025/2026 event in Vancouver (Dec 11 at 7PM)
Best Canadian Essays in Toronto (Jan 2026: time and date TBA!)
In today’s Bibliophile, we’d like to present a few brief excerpts from the introductions, letting each editor share, in their own words, a little of their journeys to finding the poems, essays, and stories that they considered to be the best.
When Margaret Atwood’s Jimmy, the protagonist of Oryx and Crake, struggles to help a new species of genetically engineered homo sapiens grasp artistic representation, he eventually tells them, “Not real can tell us about real.” Very true, and a neat encapsulation of the ancient borderline between fiction and nonfiction. And then there are essays, literal “attempts” at reality, which put a lie to the whole notion.
Even in eras which appear, in the full blindness of retrospection, to have been rule-bound days, essays were always among the most protean of literary forms. During times of social, cultural, and economic upheaval like our own, which seems determined to replicate Auden’s “low, dishonest decade” of the 1930s at double the pace, essays are slippery indeed. There surely never was an editor of an essay collection who had a good, working definition of what is and is not an essay. Or, for that matter, didn’t introduce their choices without muttering about the genre’s highly permeable edges.
I am honoured to follow that tradition. Some questions about definition are easy to answer. Can there be too much “I” and not enough other perspective in a work for it to be called an essay? No, just no. For all the varied topics in this volume, from childlessness to catfishing to suicide to mourning, to name a few—the most entrancing essays are intensely personal. Exactly as they have been since Michel de Montaigne introduced the modern world’s first essais: he may be discussing such subjects as war horses, inequality, and cannibalism, he tells readers, but “I am myself the matter of my book.”
That barely scratches the surface, though. What about too little “I” and too many thoughts from others—is it an essay or journalism? How much “not real”—composite characters, timelines subject to torque, heavily edited dialogue and the like—is allowable in a piece of “real” writing that can still be called an essay, nonfiction by definition? To which Montaigne once again provides the only answer: que sais-je? In the end, there’s nothing else to do when defining an essay’s boundaries but to channel your inner Potter Stewart, the US Supreme Court justice who simply gave up on identifying obscenity: “I know it when I see it.”
This is what I saw in the essays here. Beautiful writing, acute observation, thought-provoking arguments. And a deep interiority, a kind of personal revelation, sometimes overt, sometimes inadvertent, at times compellingly ambiguous. Sometimes, “real” presents the same human uncertainty and possibility “not real” does.
Dear Reader, in making your star-nosed way through this anthology, looking for “something written” (to echo the ideal reader of M. W. Miller’s poem), you will likely make observations and linkages other than my own. Think of the following account as one side of a conversation with you. Reading anthologies myself over the years I’ve developed a habit of leaping headlong into the works assembled; afterwards I settle comfortably into the introduction, eager to engage with the anthologist’s commentary, aware that it might send me back to the poems with some new questions, or some new perspective. Maybe that method will work for you, too?
*
Let me tell you about the star-nosed mole. It’s a curious creature, one I’ve come to associate with the process of searching out the energies pulsing in a genuine poem, whether one is maker or reader. The star-nosed mole spends most of its time in damp underground tunnels. It goes by touching, feeling its way along, navigating by means of the twenty-two fleshy tentacles (the star) at the end of its snout. Those tentacles have over 100,000 nerve fibres; the star-nosed mole has the most sensitive touch organs of any known mammal. Its nose has been called “the nose that sees.” Constantly on the move in its search for food, it is a voracious eater, needing to consume 50 percent of its body weight every day. According to The Guinness Book of Records, it is, among the mammals, the fastest eater on earth.
There’s a headlong, unwilled quality to the activity of the star-nosed mole, a blind searching quality that seems to me akin to the energies operating in the creating of a poem, as well as in the process of discovery involved in reading a good poem. When Dennis Lee, in his essay “Cadence, Country, Silence,” gives the name cadence to the particular aspect of poetry which he tries to summon forth, he is attempting to describe something similar:
I speak of “hearing” cadence, but the sensation isn’t auditory. It’s more like sensing a constantly changing tremor with your body: a play of movement and stress, torsion and flex—as with the kinaesthetic perception of the muscles.
In my reading for Best Canadian Poetry 2026 I quested like the star-nosed mole, snout aquiver for the vital pulse. I aimed to read without program, without preference for particular poetics, region, gender, age, or ethnicity—not with the territorial sweep of the eye but sniffing and snuffling along for the spoor of the genuine.
There were certain touchstones, such as Edward Hirsch’s observation that “the lyric poem exists somewhere in the region—the register—between speech and song.” As well, the myriad manners in which form may fuse with content became apparent in the course of my explorations. The poems which distinguished themselves drew in a variety of ways upon the range of resources available to the poet: among them line- and stanza-shaping, image, figure, and voice.
There is, of course, a variety of themes and types of poems. Some of the types and techniques to be found are: ghazal; ode; monologue; catalogue poems, prose poems; dream narratives; pieces inspired by diary format and online comments format; pieces drawing on vernacular and dialogue. A surreal element operates in several poems, as does humour, often of a wryly ironic sort. The dominant mode is free verse, with its music derived from chains of consonance and assonance. In some instances, anaphora drives the rhythm. The couplet, that wily stanza with its capacity to evoke now confinement and now a ramped-up surging energy, is a frequent structural device.
At this point, looking back over the terrain of the gathering I’ve made, I’m feeling my way among the poems once again, in a mole-like sensing of the contours of the collection—and recognizing again the truth of Adam Sol’s observation, made in his How A Poem Moves: A Field Guide for Readers of Poetry, that this is a golden age for the art of poetry.
Once upon a time, a short-story hunter tasked with seeking out the most wonderful stories in the land from the previous year found herself in a burning boreal forest; in Ceylon before Sri Lanka was Sri Lanka; inside a computer game in eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twenty-first-century Quebec; on a freezing mountaintop in Tasmania; in a sweltering monastery in Mexico; and on a barren, unnamed moon. The story hunter watched a woman fall from an opera-theatre balcony, waited for a bull moose behind a pine-beetle blind, and partook of an unconventional Christmas feast. She stalked stories with tranquilizer darts and with a butterfly net, as some stories were as fierce as eight-year-old girls, others as elusive as the scent of moon dust. She hunched next to mountain streams scooping stories by hand like a grizzly scoops salmon, tossing back the fry too undeveloped yet to satisfy her vast appetites.
Many of these marvels were not easy to find, hidden as they were amidst the forests of sameness and swamplands of meh. The cities and suburbs and ex-urbs hid stories as well. The story hunter donned mufti and went knocking door to door to find the stories inside houses where the air was crisped to sixty-four degrees while temperatures blistered outside, houses where detoxing teens oozed drugs through their pores, houses divided into apartments where the online world was more satisfying than anything IRL, and apartments in a nineteenth-century heritage building set ablaze.
Like the naturalists and scientific explorers of the Victorian era, the story hunter discovered new lexicons: the ciphers of amateur cyber cryptographers, the close parsing of CNN.com and NYT required of aspirational newcomers to Manhattan, the deceptively simple language of gaming commands, the non-linear communication style of the Intergalactic Federation of Research Camaraderie, the coded meanings of emojis, and the lingua franca of children wielding their otherworldly power at the beach: Boomshaka. Lingwalla. Boomwalla!
Boomwalla, indeed! The story hunter had tumbled down a rabbit hole and was surrounded by an eclectic array of stories all deserving her full attention, like Alice in the midst of her furred and feathered coterie. And like the Dodo after the mad Caucus-race, the story hunter determined that all were winners and all must have prizes. She hopes the authors will accept these accolades in lieu of sugary confections and a thimble.
In other good publicity news:
Benbeculaby Graeme Macrae Burnet was reviewed in the Chicago Tribune: “Burnet has written the novel from a smattering of historical documents described in an afterward, and he has brewed a powerful spell imagining the darkness surrounding these events . . . For the right reader, Benbecula will be a powerful experience.” Burnet was also interviewed about the book in the Scotsman.
Every Time We Say Goodbye by Ivana Sajko (trans. Mima Simić) was reviewed in the Irish Times: “However grim the subject matter, the writing remains exceptionally good, with long, majestic sentences that curl unpredictably around the subject. This profound novel is superbly translated by Simić.”
Baldwin, Styron, and Me by Mélikah Abdelmoumen (trans. Catherine Khordoc) got a shout-out in the Irish Times: “An intriguing set of essays by a leading Quebec writer who explores the conflicted legacies of William Styron and James Baldwin to reflect on identity politics in the contemporary world.”
Self Care by Russell Smith was reviewed in the Winnipeg Free Press: “Self Care isn’t just poking fun. It is also, in many ways, deeply sympathetic to its characters, who are struggling with a world very different from the ones their parents grew up in.”
Heaven and Hell by Jón Kalman Stefánsson was reviewed in roughghosts: “[Heaven and Hell] combines old-fashioned drama with contemporary literary sensibility, a tale of loss and bravery that makes for a truly glorious read.” Its sequel, The Sorrow of Angels was excerpted in Lit Hub.
Big of You by Elise Levine was excerpted in Open Book: “A masterclass from an author that has few equals in the form . . . Full of disarming tenderness, Big of You showcases Levine’s signature brilliance through language and craft.”
