Biblioasis: Poetry Manuscript Submissions Opening May 1-May 31!

Poets, get your collections ready! Our 2025 reading period for poetry manuscripts will begin on Thursday, May 1st, and remain 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  • We can only consider unpublished work.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.
  • Simultaneous submissions are fine! If your manuscript is accepted by another publisher, kindly reply to your submission email to let us know your good news so that we can withdraw it from our consideration.

This is not a contest and we do not guarantee that any manuscripts will be accepted for publication. If your manuscript isn’t quite ready for this reading period, we encourage you to continue working on it and submit it during our next period: we want to see your best work.

The Bibliophile: Something there is that doesn’t love a wall

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Announcing the publication of UNMET by stephanie roberts (and our next open reading period for poetry manuscripts)

April is National Poetry Month here in Canada, and for our southern* neighbours, and I can’t think of a better way to celebrate than with the work of stephanie roberts, herself a citizen of both countries, and of Panama as well. We published UNMET, her sophomore collection, on Tuesday, April 1, though it’s a joke only as much as the Rose Garden events of Wednesday, April 2, can be called liberatory for any average inhabitant of Earth. As a dual citizen myself, born and raised and poetry-educated in the States, the question of national identity in art—what we mean by Canadian or American poetry—is often on my mind, to say nothing of times like these, in which allegiances, and the rejection thereof, are in overdrive.

Photo: UNMET by stephanie roberts. Cover design by Ingrid Paulson

Though her citizenships are not the subject of this collection, roberts’s vision does indeed contain multitudes, crossing—erasing—borders between styles and tones and modes. Rather than a title poem, this is a collection with title poems: seven, to be exact, called by or including the word “unmet.” It’s a contronym of sorts, at least conceptually: referring to that which is failed, thwarted, unfulfilled—love, desire, justice—but also to what may yet be possible. Similarly, its modes are capacious: roberts writes lyric, and surreal collage, and narrative equally well; addresses historic wrongs, and present frustrations, and the potential of the future; her voice is by turns vulnerable, powerful, playful, elegiac, at times wildly funny (“Of course I’m including the banana in the sale!”). Alongside her utterly unexpected turns of phrase, it’s this range that first caught my eye when the manuscript crossed the transom of our first open reading period,** and it’s what continues to reward me as I read these poems again and again, remembering what poetry is for: to challenge and console, argue and accept. To resist and to rest. To resist, sometimes, by resting.

Is it fruitless to wax poetic about poetics in April 2025? I’d suggest we should set art aside right around the time we determine it’s not the right moment for the production and consumption of food and the protection of clean water. In my former life, in what now feels like the halcyon days of the American university system, I once gave a poetry class a final exam consisting of a single question: What is poetry for? I didn’t have an answer. I only wanted a way to inspire original close reading of the poems we’d been studying rather than regurgitated lecture notes. It worked, and though I can’t recall a single argument advanced, this morning the answer feels obvious: it’s for right now. And for all the other nows. “This is what comes of taking dreams / off the horizon,” roberts writes in “Mall of the Sirens.” “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, / that wants it down,” Frost writes in “Mending Wall,” a poem unwittingly co-opted by unironic bumper stickers proclaiming “Good fences make good neighbors.” What that something is, he does not explicitly say. But I’d hazard there are many answers to this question as well, one of them being: poetry.

Read a poem or two today. Read a few: you can start with stephanie roberts. Maybe endeavour to commit something to memory. Resistance comes in many forms, and there’s no tariff on what we import into the sovereign territory of the heart.

Vanessa Stauffer,
Managing Editor

***

Excerpts from UNMET

When Harold Offers a Fist Bump

I stare. May 2020, on top of everything
the cool takes a rise for Kalahari desert.

I shower three times a day, and at night
bounce sexual fantasies about air-conditioner
installers off the ceiling.

When the heat is remedied by rain
no Cinco de Mayo is great enough.

We finally got together a year late
between waves and pre-vaccine. I break
lockdown without knowing what to do
with my hands anymore. Forget lips.
No two-cheek kiss. Now a pseudo bow,
not at waist but a little bit more than nod.

Mad chirps and neon brights feather
a backyard biome. Outside our interiors we
talk poetry and past relationship bullshit.
My neighbours on their Balconville fake-
drunk singing like kids who curse for attention.

I can’t remember what absolute agreement
drives his extended fist. It emerges
like a train, in slow motion, on a track
I am tied to. How to look away? How
do we manage not to keep wrecking
everything? A moment the brain
refuses to provide the correct French word
at the correct French moment; it can’t
knit a hand grenade into
a reasonable story. South of us
they had yet to slalom into the madness
of the later part of the year, when they
hit half a million with a slight shrug
from inside a body bag.

We get up
from the tables of our lives so abruptly
we knock over the chair behind us.

Who was the last man I touched?
What risk was right?

for Harold Hoefle

An Open Book interview with stephanie roberts.

George Junius Stinney, Jr.

In the third stanza he exits the poem,
black tears wishbone
ball lightning.

“On reflection,” he said, from the bottom
of his sepulchre, small dark brown fingers
stroking a hairless chin,
“I do not think it was
the hate what took my life.”
He straightens himself
on his slab of metamorphosed limestone.
It was the:

Cops kill white people all the time

I’m sure there’s another side to this story

If you just obey nothing will happen to you

My family came here legally

POC are the establishment now

I’m not racist but

“I reckon the stack and press of all that not-racist
eventually crowned that steel and wire diadem
upon my brow Bible at my bottom.”

Lord raise cool sponge to the opening of ebony thirst;
extend a pink hand that smiles without teeth.
White crimes of obedience click as silent syntax to
the flat and sharp sentences of death.

Decades without name, no headstone
no footstone, no identity to his rest lest the Samaritans
lynch even his bones after Old Sparky’s revered kiss.

In his final stanza he rises red and exonerated
named in the hearts of the fawn born
not as static electricity but as bolt
that strikes open the door.

An Ex-Puritan interview with stephanie roberts.

I Taste Good and Bad

At the end of a cartoon, one of the characters looks to the camera
And tells us take courage, tells us be vulnerable with
The ones we love. It comes to this—memento
Mori from a talking banana. I didn’t need it to tell you the truth
And what surprise when this sparked happiness can’t make you care.
When hurt I learned not to look in your eyes;
If I wanted to make you disappear I said I didn’t feel well.
Is the present road a grocery store or a walk through a needled forest?
By August, tho masks are briefly still required,
They remove the minimum-wager, at the door,
And management trusts us to sanitize our carts, our hands.
The man ahead of me walks in without stopping
While I squirt and rub the lubey gel, marvelling at how
It’s possible we aren’t blanketed in our own screams. I guess
I marvel because I want to participate, right now, add some
Shatner’s Captain Kirk, head-thrown-back, fists-pumping-
For-volume, screams. I loved you from genesis to revelations
Which silenced you like snowfall. Christians ponder what person
In their right mind could see god in all the old guy’s glory
And not worship? It seemed to them Lucifer was
By every definition criminally insane. We believe
If people could see our entirety they would run in disgust.
If we like surgeons could see our identical spaghetti
Spinal chords and the harms we suffered as children,
They might forgive us our cheats and bigotry.
In a tender and misguided way you euthanized love
Rather than suffer our inevitable parting you were mixing up
Gin and tonic style. The same ethos undergirds our invention
Of Satan the way we spread peanut butter on toast, when
We’re starving, an end to the unbearable mystery of living
The meaning of cancer and car crashes which pokes at us
Like the delicate edge between blade and grass, wind and wind,
Content and content, produce and produce, recreate and recreate,
And lead and lead. Yogurt is half-off so I fill my cart,
The neon-pink stickers beckon as if dairy goods on the edge
Of edibility need lipstick. And what says yogurt like pickles?
I burn old journals, manuscripts, and letters, unwilling to relive
A past with its whimsical relevance or obstinate irrelevance. Why
Try to kill the already so unlikely? Why not rather hope
And purchase this absolutely tremendous jar of garlic pickles.
And now, I Gotta Get Me Some™ chocolate syrup, and leave
The infliction of sorrow to god’s eager hand. I’m not asking
You to give what you haven’t got, like a beaver’s dam,
I’m telling you I can make something of unlikely ingredients.
I have somehow done so before and the earth turned
As usual. I am tempted to buy toothpaste.
My hand hovers over the red, white, or blue boxes, and
Spearmint goes in the cart. I was once in a church of surprise
Birthday parties and practical jokes. They were maniacal about it.
One birthday, the pastor’s young wife had to go change
Out of her nightgown; it’s not right that someone should look
That attractive so unprepared. Youth, its own beauty.
And once that same Beauty filled chocolate cupcakes
With creamy white toothpaste because that was what we were
Doing those days, biting hilariously into all the time in the world.
I go to the self-checkout and scan the boxes of toothpaste,
Scan my points card then place everything back in the cart before
Pushing it all into the ditch by the parking lot. I don’t know
What is obvious. I don’t know if you can see what I have suffered
To be ready to be me. I understand now how painfully too-good-
To-be-true slices, a papercut to the tongue. It hasn’t been easy
For either of us to arrive at my hand in yours. How far we keep
Coming thru zoos of zebras and pandas, misaligned decades,
Madness and marriage to be both at this sentence. Why discount
All this choice as fate? I don’t know what’s in a fly’s mind.
What makes it buzz my head and hands instead of
The maple-syrup-soaked leftovers at the next table. Flies can’t care
About which humans are murderous. Only desire. If you let me
Feed you I would fill your mouth with such tart sour sweet minty
Tenderness you wouldn’t believe it.

***

In good publicity news:

  • UNMET by stephanie roberts was reviewed in The Miramichi Reader: “A constancy is [roberts’s] vitality of alert, surprising, and precise language.” roberts was also interviewed in The Ex-Puritan and Open Book.
  • Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre by Mark Bourrie was reviewed in
    • The Globe and Mail by Charlotte Gray: “A searing but convincing critique.
    • The Hill Times: “Every Liberal in their war room, every journalist covering the campaign . . . owes it to themselves to read Bourrie’s Ripper.”)
    • That Shakespearean Rag: Bourrie transcends a simple biography and creates a snapshot of our riven historical moment.”)
    • The Tyee: “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.
    • Bourrie was also interviewed for the Toronto Star.
  • The Passenger Seat by Vijay Khurana was reviewed in The Tyee: “In Cold Blood meets Grand Theft Auto with the psychological complexity and moral anguish of Dostoevsky and inputs from third-wave feminists.
  • Ira Wells, author of On Book Banning, was interviewed in The Jacobin.

***

* Technically our northern neighbours, here in Windsor.

** Speaking of: poets with book manuscripts should keep an eye out here and on our socials, as we’ll be sharing the guidelines for our May 2025 reading period imminently.

Media Hits: RIPPER, UNMET, ON OIL, and more!

IN THE NEWS!

RIPPER

Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre by Mark Bourrie was reviewed by Charlotte Gray in the Globe and Mail on April 1. You can read the full review here.

Gray writes,

“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.”

Ripper was also reviewed in the Hill Times on April 2. Check out the full review here.

Mark Bourrie was featured in the Toronto Star in conversation with Stephen Maher. The article was published online on March 29, and you can read it here.

Get Ripper here!

UNMET

UNMET by stephanie roberts was reviewed in The Miramichi Reader on April 1. Check out full review of this poetry collection here.

Pearl Pirie writes,

“[roberts] admirably permits wide swathes of herself on the page, yet without being didactic or maudlin and without overwriting.”

stephanie roberts was interviewed by Olive Andrews for The Ex-Puritan‘s Winter 2025 issue. Read the full interview here.

Andrews writes of the collection,

“The poems are both singular and vast, wading through moments, objects, and places with visceral clarity while guiding the reader through the thrashing waves of its overarching themes: loneliness, pandemic, domestic violence, ecological crisis, police brutality, and more. The work is grounded and groundbreaking, pointed and sprawled. “

stephanie roberts was also interviewed for Open Book‘s ‘Poets in Profile’ on March 28. Check out the interview here.

Open Book writes,

“stephanie roberts returns with another complex and stunning work that looks at both the seen and unseen, and explores social issues through lyric and line in a truly singular way.”

Grab UNMET here!

ON BOOK BANNING

Ira Wells, author of On Book Banning, was interviewed by David Moscrop this week in The Jacobin. The article, “The Shared Logic of Censorship,” discussing censorship and what’s being done to combat it, can be read here.

From the interview, Wells says:

“Education involves building up critical thinking facilities and faculties. Indoctrination involves breaking them down. Education involves inculcating independent thinking. Indoctrination involves submission to doctrine.

We need to rediscover that distinction. And we need to revive the best spirit of our democracy.”

Grab On Book Banning here!

ON OIL

On Oil by Don Gillmor was featured on LitHub‘s list of “10 Nonfiction Books to Read in April.” Check out the full list here.

LitHub writes,

“Gillmor . . . draws a line from the greed and hubris at the heart of that first explosion straight to the present day—and beyond.”

Get On Oil here!

THE PASSENGER SEAT

The Passenger Seat by Vijay Khurana was reviewed in The Tyee, for the article “There’s Power in Male Bonding. Must There Be Menace?” The review was posted on March 28, and you can read it here.

Tom Sandborn writes,

“Khurana employs classic tropes of the buddy road trip and crime novel/true crime genres while giving them a critical 21st-century twist—think In Cold Blood meets Grand Theft Auto with the psychological complexity and moral anguish of Dostoevsky and inputs from third-wave feminists.”

Get The Passenger Seat here!

OLD ROMANTICS

Old Romantics by Maggie Armstrong was excerpted in LitHub. The chapter “My Success” can be read in full here.

Old Romantics was also given a pre-review by Kassie Rose in The Longest Chapter, which can be read here. Rose writes,

“I had other books lined up to read, but the narrator of all the stories in Old Romantics hooked me.”

Maggie Armstrong was interviewed by Tadgh Hoey in Brooklyn Rail, which you can read in full here.

Hoey writes,

“Reading [Old Romantics] left me vacillating between almost spitting out my coffee to laugh and feeling sunken and eviscerated at the recognition of Margaret’s many personal, professional, and romantic disappointments and the scalpel-like precision with which Armstrong renders them page after page.”

Grab Old Romantics here!

MAY OUR JOY ENDURE

May Our Joy Endure by Kev Lambert (trans. Donald Winkler) appeared on CBC The Next Chapter’s list of three books in translation to check out now. You can read the article here.

Reviewer Robert Wiersema says,

“[The translation] flows beautifully … it has a metrical rhythmic quality that is very unusual in English. So I think that’s Winkler’s translation from the French, at work.”

Grab May Our Joy Endure here!

The Bibliophile: Romance is a season in hell

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I’ve recently returned from my first London Book Fair, an event I found as chaotic, and stimulating, and frustrating, and inspiring, and just plain old fun as Dan had indicated I might. Talking with editors, agents, and translators from all over the world gives me only the paradoxical sense of its smallness: no matter the size of their organization or their territory, the language of their books or the size of the advances their authors command, everyone working in publishing faces a comically similar set of problems practical and existential both. And no matter how fatigued by the whirlwind of interaction or taciturn their sales strategy, it’s easy to get a smile from someone simply by asking about the last book they really loved, or the one they’ve just encountered that they can’t wait to go home and read. Books! We love them! What could be hard about that?

Well, for one, there’s the persistent need to successfully articulate that ardor. There’s no question I find more difficult to answer than “What are you looking for?” And there’s little else anyone wants to know about an acquisitions editor. Poetry’s not, for once, the problem: After reading the hundreds and hundreds of manuscripts submitted during two open submission periods, I’ve settled on “an original and urgent relationship with language.” As anyone who’s encountered a two-year-old knows, the problem with answers is that they beget more questions, so: What do I mean by original? That I’ve never seen it before, or have encountered it only rarely and think there should be more of it. (Thus far no one’s asked what I’ve never seen before, though I would appreciate that level of faith in my clairvoyance.) By urgent: the sense that this utterance had to be made, that the poem is the only way the poet could find to stop speaking, or—and this is what I tend to prefer—the only way to start.

When it comes to fiction, my instinctual answer inclines towards breathtakingly vapid. I’m supposed to be able to specify subgenres and subjects and the sorts of authors I prefer, but the truth is that I just want it to be good, and good . . . I guess I know it when I see it. By the third day of LBF, exhausted by the frenetic pace of my schedule and slightly alarmed by an ill-fitting manuscript I’d just glanced at after feeling confident its representative and I were simpatico, I finally just said to one agent, “I want the sentences to be good.” Luckily she turned out to be a poet as well, and only laughed and nodded and turned straight to a page in her catalog, knowing what I meant.

In our age of malignant certainty, when we have perfected the practice of judging just about everything and everyone we encounter by cover or codification, maybe failures of discernment aren’t the worst sin. But they don’t make for very interesting insight into publishing, and so I’ll beg off answering via poetry once again: “No ideas but in things,” Dr Williams wrote, so let me present this thing. What I’m looking for is Maggie Armstrong and her debut story collection, Old Romantics. This is the first fiction title I acquired start to finish, from soliciting the manuscript to signing the contract. It is simultaneously a book of hideously entertaining—this being the exact descriptor that caught my eye in the catalog of the inimitable Tramp Press, Maggie’s UK publisher—literary short stories, wickedly funny in their honesty about love, sex, family, class, ambition, work, motherhood, and a linked collection with the emotional and narrative heft of a novel.

Photo: Old Romantics by Maggie Armstrong. Cover designed by Fiachra McCarthy.

The stories in Old Romantics all concern a woman named Margaret and follow her chronologically, if without strict continuity, through first love, first bad date, first job, first extremely bad date . . . Characters, as well as jokes, recur even as the narration switches between first and third-person. These are stories—and a heroine—that doggedly insist on Romantic, and romantic, ideals, yet repeatedly defer to the illusory nature thereof with cold-eyed Modernist clarity, and then leap agilely into a postmodern metafictional mode to arrive at an unvarnished and complex portrait of a single woman trying to understand, and to be, exactly who she is. It’s a Künstlerroman unlike any I’ve read before, about a female artist who must first come of age, and then to terms, with the life she’s been assigned by virtue of her gender: only after all of that can she come to her calling. It’s a trajectory little described, perhaps very well because so many women who aspire to lives in the arts are derailed along the way, and in Armstrong’s hands it is moving and funny and a triumph of invention and simple determination.

Did I mention funny? Witness fictional Margaret struggling with her prose style whilst the real Maggie demonstrates an incomparable metafictional wit (emphasis mine): “I found the sight of such bland sentences distressing—they all began with I, and ended me—and slammed the notepad shut as if its contents had offended me”. “It was a lightweight story I was working on,” Margaret continues, “to do with infantile and everyday desires, a slow descent into disappointment, with attempted anal penetration at the close.” The marshalling of syntactical expectation as the list progresses from the benign to the shocking, the soft chime of rhyme (slow / close; infantile / anal), the trochaic crescendo of “anal penetration at the close” to end the sentence, combine in an intelligence, ironic wit, and musicality I can’t ever seem to get enough of. In another story, a youthful Margaret makes some bad decisions and finds herself alone with a more experienced, intoxicated and/or unscrupulous man, a confusion of agency and passivity that Armstrong articulates through a blackly comic grammatical enactment: “This had taken place. Patch had had sex with me.” And throughout, brilliant description and metaphor abound: “A fluffy female bathrobe hulked around the door”; “She gazed back at him like a sedated hawk”; “Her chest banged like a broken toy.”

What am I saying here? The sentences are good. Really, really good. They are what I’m looking for, and I couldn’t be more proud that we can call them ours.

Vanessa Stauffer,
Managing Editor

***

Old Romantics comes out on Tuesday—just in time for April Fools’ Day! To celebrate the upcoming release, here’s publicist Ahmed with an interview with Maggie Armstrong.

Photo: Maggie Armstrong. Credit: Bríd O’Donovan.

A Biblioasis Interview with Maggie Armstrong

Can you tell me a bit about yourself and how this collection came about?

Well I have been writing short stories for about ten years, possibly fifteen. I used to perform at spoken word things around Dublin, but I was working as a journalist at the time. It wasn’t until 2020 that I actually started to publish stuff. This book came about from those short stories. A publisher came to me, had read one in a magazine called Banshee and asked if I had any more. That was Sarah from Tramp Press and that led to this collection.

I heard you had made some changes to the stories since the collection was first published in Ireland last year. Could you tell me about that?

Oh, sure. I was sort of thinking they’d be subtle changes that nobody would notice. They were so subtle.

So why did you make them anyway?

Because I’m never happy with anything. I will perennially rewrite everything. I feel terrible for editors that I’ve worked with. It feels like I’m disregarding all of their hard work and insights, but I just can’t help myself once I get my hands on something. A text seems to read differently and sound differently every time you look at it.

I knew that while I was revising it that it was sort of fruitless because I’ll never be happy with a published book. I like getting up and reading stories and I always change words here and there every time I read something live. A text remains malleable to me forever.

How would you define an old romantic?

An old romantic is a damn hapless fool who continually authors their own destruction by way of repeated mistakes and self-delusion. Or a fantasist who’s swallowed a love potion and been let loose on the town. This kind of character is not great to have in your personal life, but it’s a rich study for fiction.

I can see that in Margaret. A lot of the stories seem to test Margaret’s sense of reality with her ideals of romance. What kind of role does romance have in Margaret’s life and what does this say about her?

I think romance drives all of her actions and appetite. It dictates her decisions and it often robs her of agency. Feeling controls her rather than thought. Some of us are driven by a feeling rather than by practical considerations, which can be interesting to examine. To follow the path of a life somehow enslaved to desire and feeling and what possibly amounts simply to dopamine, the hormones, the chemicals that are sometimes leading us one way or another.

What kind of change do you see in Margaret as the stories progress?

There’s a book that I really adore by Elizabeth Bowen called The Death of the Heart. It was published in 1938 and it’s to do with a young woman called Portia whose life is on the margins and who moves to London and falls in love and is jilted and rejected by her much older lover and she has to grow up overnight and realize just how cold and hard this world is. And I think that happens to the anti-hero of my book. The heart is shattered halfway through. We see as soon as Walls comes on the scene, he’s a real menace to her belief system, and he really dismantles this fairytale of being swept off her feet. He dismantles it and leaves her high and dry and puts her life at risk in a speeding car. He is a destructive person given to extremes. That’s when we see a change happen. I think the axis turn of those stories is pivotal. Once there is a situation where there is control and cruelty in a relationship, nothing is ever going to be the same. And then of course our protagonist goes from out of that frying pan into the fire of Sergio who she has her children with.

It’s like the labyrinth, or the snake pit, where you go in and cannot find your way out. You know the Minotaur?

The myth where Theseus goes down into a labyrinth to fight the creature?

Yes, exactly. In the underworld of dates and liaisons this book tries to depict, I feel like it’s all Minotaurs and all monsters and there is a maze you’re trying to get out of. Romance is a season in hell from which you emerge a broken and changed person. Oh, that sounds so terrible.

I’m wondering if you could also speak about the form of these stories and the genre of autofiction in general. These stories obviously invite comparisons to your own life, but they also take metafictional turns with sly comments from the narrator or characters acknowledging that this is fiction. It’s a unique take on the genre.

I love a first person voice. I love the intimacy and the immediacy of slipping into someone’s consciousness like that, and indeed unconscious, and moonlighting as them. I have just adored, and maybe I shouldn’t even start mentioning names because then I can get carried away, and I have mixed relationships with all of them, and these aren’t necessarily my influences, but I’ve loved Annie Ernaux, Rachel Cusk, Deborah Levy, Ben Lerner. I’ve loved Karl Ove Knausgaard and the whole phenomenon of the life saga that he put on paper. That great project of oversharing that he went about really struck home with so many people.

I was never able to write a story until I did it in a first person voice. I had tried out the omniscient narrator thing and it went very badly. It always read like some Edna O’Brien pastiche, like I was just copying from my literature textbooks. The first person felt more like a guilty pleasure and I never believed anyone would publish it. I never thought it was something that anyone would take seriously. I felt it was somehow frowned upon in literary circles to write autofiction because maybe there’s an assumption that if you can only write your own story that you lack empathy, that you’re not able to imagine what other lives and communities are like, or maybe that you lack imagination because you simply can’t think of any other plots. Or just that you’re in love with yourself, because you find yourself so fascinating that you would genuinely be content to spend your entire day narrating your own life.

So all of these felt like obstacles to calling this real work. Then I just went for it. I thought to hell, I’m really enjoying writing this. And the finished product has no resemblance to my own life. It may be inspired or be drawn from it and the only reason for that is because I have pure unrestricted access to my own experience and consciousness. I can access it just sitting here and through my extremely unreliable memories and notebooks. It’s all there and it’s very rich material I find. I’ve always found life hard. It never came naturally to me, just being a person in the world. I have often gotten into scrapes and funny situations. I was exhausted by just my own escapades or my own sagas that I just thought: listen, at least I can get a bit of copy out of them.

I suppose writing more what you’d call autobiographical fiction is a bit of a highwire act. And it’s a dark art. I can’t vouch for the ethics of fictionalising the real, as opposed to pure invention. You have to be very careful what goes in your stories and what stays out. I’ve learned just because something terrible happened does not mean that it’s fair game for fiction.

You say you could only start writing in the first person, but some of the stories are in third person. Why the switch for some of them?

Honestly, I became disturbed by the material that I was reading. I no longer wanted to be associated with the author of these stories and did not like the tone I was taking. I felt particularly the story “Trouble” where you have extraordinary upheaval and cognitive dissonance, with a young woman, aka my fictional alter ego Margaret, who’s having an affair with a real charlatan and at the same time entering into a very serious relationship with a highly unsuitable married father of two. Reading this kind of dark testimony, it was like the room started to turn. I felt I couldn’t any longer inhabit this voice because it was all just so odd. The narrator’s level of dislocation from her actions did not feel honorable. So in order to process it in the form of a story, I needed to tell it in the third person. Does that make any sense?

Photo: First page of “Trouble” in Old Romantics.

Almost like you needed some distance to really be able to tell it?

Then even the distance of the third person didn’t feel quite right. The protagonist’s name is Margaret so clearly some of these things kind of almost happened to me, but then that’s weird to talk about yourself in the third person. Children talk about themselves in the third person, and mad Shakespearean characters. It was just an odd voice. That’s not to say I’m admitting that these are entirely myself. It’s a very distorted claustrophobic universe which happens to be very familiar to me and similar to the tiny universe of Dublin where I’ve lived my whole life.

Also there’s something about an “I” voice that’s hard to pull off, where you have to remain sort of likeable to your reader and vaguely charming to hold their attention and keep their commitment to the book. The kind of stuff Margaret was up to was not likeable nor commendable.

Margaret also spends a lot of time trying to be a writer and thinking about all these important authors. The classic Irish ones (Joyce, Beckett, O’Casey) and the Russians (Dostoevsky, Chekhov). But she seems disenchanted with them or maybe just the idea of them. What kind of influence have they had on you?

All of the big books that appear in these stories come in for a reason. I grew up with parents who read constantly and voraciously, particularly my mother. Her face was behind a very big book as she sat on the sofa most of my childhood, or she was howling laughing or reading passages aloud. Her favourite outlet from her four children was going to her book club. We grew up reading a lot and time was frittered away with literature.

Then I went to study English, and I had quite a lot of attention difficulties at school. It was a very odd choice to go do something academic because I love doing practical things and I always struggle to sit at a desk, but I read English for four years at Trinity. Nothing but books. Weighted and crushed by books. I have to a comical degree been haunted by books my whole life.

Both of my parents died in the last few years and we recently dismantled their bookshelves, which was a very sad and truly physically demanding job. Carrying boxes of books with my children buckled in the back and trying to manage everyone and all the books. I continue to not know how to keep track of books everywhere I go. This is kind of long-winded, but I’m not sure how to see that whole tradition of Western literature now and the great doorstoppers that we grew up with. They were written by men of letters, let’s say Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Dickens, who had no domestic responsibilities, who likely had servants, maids, cooks, secretaries in some cases. They didn’t have the internet, they had few distractions and the intricacies of their sentences within these formally robust paragraphs testify to that. I’m just interested that the novel form has held for so long and that we’re still expected, while our lives are so fragmented in so many ways, and our attention is so divided and splintered, we’re still expected to make sense of the world through the bastion of the novel, a form which was invented in far more fallow circumstances.

Is that why you chose to write linked short stories as opposed to a novel? I suppose people could read this as a novel, since it follows the same character, but they are distinct and also stand on their own.

Yeah, they’re great for short attention spans. A short story is perfect for the age of TikTok, a platform I have never in my life even glimpsed. I’m too distracted by other things. But I think the short story form sort of chose me. Many writers of course begin with short fiction in their apprenticeship. Same as with any craft. My nephew is studying carpentry at school—he started by making a spice rack, not a bed or a cabinet. I will one day soon make a cabinet, I’m sure of it, but I would never have got anywhere with a project more mammoth than a spice rack. Actually I was doing both short stories and novels at the same time, I’ve written two novels that I’m never going to publish, they ended up so unhinged and full of plot holes. With stories you can free yourself of the wider responsibilities of world-building. Then it was just a happy accident that Old Romantics turned out to be a linked collection. One of my fears was that all the stories were all similar and had a similar emotional thrust and that the same character was recurring. They all had the same obsessive, monomaniacal quality. And actually, that turns out to be not the worst thing about it. That’s what has really hit home with a lot of people. People enjoy tracing the adventures of short story characters as much as they do those of any series. I mean I really love John Updike’s Maples stories, Jenny Zhang’s Sour Heart, Alice Munro’s The Beggar Maid, all linked collections.

What are you hoping people take away from reading these stories?

I hope people take nothing but a pleasant memory of being lost in a book briefly.

***

In good publicity news:

The Bibliophile: Under Pressure

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***

This week we’ve invited Ottawa-based lawyer and journalist Mark Bourrie, author of Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre, to contribute today’s Bibliophile. As an election call draws near and copies of the book make their way onto shelves (and into the Globe and Mail), Mark offers a brief look at how he came to write this political biography.

Ashley Van Elswyk
Editorial Assistant

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

Writing books is a bad habit that I’ve wanted to break for a long time. I started doing it just after I quite smoking. Authors chase their own kinds of dragons. The next book always seems like such a good idea. Then it comes out into a world where your countrymen, patriots all now, camp out overnight to buy American thrillers and tell you on social media that they’re certainly not going to buy your book. The subject is too unpleasant.

You learn to live with that. After all, your idea for that next book is a “can’t miss.” And that’s in normal times. Which these aren’t.

Last May, Dan Wells and I sat down together on a lovely spring day on the patio of a coffee shop in Walkerville, the best part of Windsor. I was in town to launch Crosses in the Sky: Jean de Brébeuf and the Destruction of Huronia, a biography of a mystic missionary priest that’s really an account of how European-Indigenous relations were toxic from the start.

The geography of this story is important. We were an easy walk from Detroit. My grandparents met in that city. I’ve got cousins all over Michigan. There’s a statue of Lewis Cass, my first cousin eight times removed, downtown. (He was Michigan’s governor and the first Democratic Party nominee to fail to win a presidential election). Windsor is Detroit’s southern suburb. It’s a place that is neither fully in Canada or the States.

Photo: Mark Bourrie reading from Crosses in the Sky at Biblioasis Bookshop for the Biblioasis Spring Launch event, May 2024.

It seemed clear to me that the story arc of 2024 was the return of Donald Trump. Not only was he coming back, but the Constitution bound him to just one term. Electoral politics would not be a factor in White House decisions.

In Canada, the Prime Minister had stayed too long, as they usually do. Conventional wisdom said Pierre Poilievre, the nerd equivalent of a hockey goon, couldn’t possibly lose. It wasn’t just Poilievre’s campaign skills—admittedly, the best we’ve seen in modern memory—but also the new media environment that gave him the advantage. Toxic media in a toxic time.

And, I yammered at Dan after my eighth or ninth coffee of the day, Canada—at least at the federal level—was one of the last Western countries to resist the movement fronted by Trump, Putin, Orban, Wilders, Farage, Le Pen and the rest. In 2014, I’d written a book about Stephen Harper’s information control and manipulation. In many ways, Harper was a scout for Trump’s movement, which still does not have a decent name. Now, it seemed, we were going to endure a more extreme, vindictive regime, verging on fascism. A sort of Fascism Lite.

So let’s do a book, I said to Dan, even though I was already on the road trying to keep Crosses in the Sky on the Canadian bestseller lists and was (am) convinced that writing non-fiction books is the worst thing to do with my time. Summer was coming. I had an old sailboat in the water and a second home, a 180-year-old farmhouse in Quebec, that needed renovation. I’d just come off a brutal defamation trial, representing a former porn star who was being sued for “me too” posts about her ex. Part of the trial turned on whether he deliberately harmed the women in his life with his massive penis.

Let’s leap ahead. Sometime in August, about noon on one of those 30-degree, 90 per cent humidity days that are surprisingly common in Ottawa, I got a call from the marina. My boat, the caller said, was doing something weird. When I got to the dock, I saw how my 26-foot sailboat was very low in the water. Inside was 18 inches of Ottawa River that needed to be hand-bailed.

I hadn’t been to the boat in six weeks. The water came from a leak in the toilet water intake line, no more than mist, really. At home, I had maybe 75,000 words of my 40,000-60,000 word book drafted, and a wife adjusting to life with a newly broken ankle.

A few weeks later, I was back, scrubbing the inside of the boat, feeling guilty about stealing time from the book. At the end of the day, I hooked up a borrowed pressure washer, something I’d never used before, and swiped the side of the boat. It was a life-changing experience, the most fun I had all summer. The pressure washer that I got for Christmas sits in a box in the shed.

All of this happened when Dan and the Biblioasis folks were running on a schedule based on the idea that we’d have an election in October 2025, the “fixed” date. But, while it’s arguable that Canada is not broken, our election dates certainly are not fixed. I still had the manuscript—now pushing over 100,000 words—when Trump was re-elected. I gave it to Dan at the beginning of December.

But events . . . Trump had noticed Canada and was ruminating about annexation. Chrystia Freeland pulled a caucus coup. It was clear we’d have an election before the fall.

Everyone worked their asses off. Everyone came through on this book. The editors, the cover artist, the printers, the bookstores all did things in weeks that they usually need months for. We got Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre into stores this week. And, frankly, it’s a better book than I thought it would be.

Now, I just need to cope with two things: my car, which may or may not have a broken transmission; and the knowledge, imparted to me last night by a Cate Blanchett video on YouTube, that “ripper” has a meaning in Australia that was previously unknown to me. The Law of Sheer Perversion, which runs my life, has a very weird sense of humour.

—Mark Bourrie

***

***

In good publicity news:

  • Ripper by Mark Bourrie was covered in the Globe and Mail’s article “Inside Biblioasis and Mark Bourrie’s mad rush to get a Pierre Poilievre bio on shelves.” Mark was also interviewed about the book on David Moscrop’s Substack.
  • Ripper by Mark Bourrie and Old Romantics by Maggie Armstrong both appeared on the Globe and Mail’s spring books preview.
  • Baldwin, Styron, and Me by Mélikah Abdelmoumen (trans. Catherine Khordoc) was reviewed in The Miramichi Reader: “By knitting together this literary history with her own personal experiences, Abdelmoumen has created something new and vital.
  • Near Distance by Hanna Stoltenberg (trans. Wendy H. Gabrielsen) was reviewed in roughghosts: “Closely observed, well composed . . . a very confident debut.
  • Ira Wells, author of On Book Banning, was interviewed on the Quillette and Canadaland podcasts, and was featured in the Toronto Star.

THE PAGES OF THE SEA shortlisted for the OCM Bocas Prize in Fiction!

We’re thrilled to share that this week, The Pages of the Sea by Anne Hawk was announced as making the fiction category shortlist for the 2025 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature! The announcement was made on Sunday, March 16, and can be read in full here.

The judges stated,

“[The Pages of the Sea] brings new energy and form to a familiar Caribbean childhood, that of the pain and desolation of the child left behind when a parent migrates . . . The prose has an immediacy that matches the girl’s intensity, as well as her confusion about what secrets the adults around her appear to be hiding.”

The winners in the three genre categories will be announced on 6 April, and the overall winner will be announced on 3 May at the 2025 Bocas Lit Fest.

The OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature is an annual award for literary books by Caribbean writers, first presented in 2011. Books are judged in three categories: poetry; fiction—both novels and collections of short stories; and literary nonfiction. A panel of three judges for each genre category determine category shortlists and winners, before the three category winners are then judged by a panel of four judges—consisting of the chairs of the category panels and the prize chair—who determine the overall winner. The author of the book judged the overall winner will receive an award of US$10,000. The other category winners will receive US$3,000.

Get your copy of The Pages of the Sea here!

ABOUT THE PAGES OF THE SEA

Shortlisted for the 2025 OCM Bocas Prize in Fiction • A Globe 100 Best Book of 2024 • A Guardian Best Fiction Book of 2024 • A CBC Best Fiction Book of the Year

On a Caribbean island in the mid-1960s, a young girl copes with the heavy cost of migration.

When her mother emigrates to England to find work, Wheeler and her older sisters are left to live with their aunts and cousins. She spends most days with her cousin Donelle, knocking about their island community. They know they must address their elders properly and change their shoes after church. And during the long, quiet weeks of Lent, when the absent sound of the radio seems to follow them down the road, they look forward to kite season. But Donelle is just a child, too, and though her sisters look after her with varying levels of patience, Wheeler couldn’t feel more alone. Everyone tells her that soon her mother will send for her, but how much longer will it be? And as she does her best to navigate the tensions between her aunts, why does it feel like there’s no one looking out for her at all?

Credit: Panagiotis Ziakas

A story of sisterhood, secrets, and the sacrifices of love, The Pages of the Sea is a tenderly lyrical portrait of innocence and an intensely moving evocation of what it’s like to be a child left behind.

ABOUT ANNE HAWK

Anne Hawk grew up in the Caribbean, the UK and Canada. She has worked as a journalist, a paralegal and was for many years a secondary school teacher. She is married and lives in London. The Pages of the Sea is her first novel.

The Bibliophile: There’s no box for a detail like this on a census

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Photo: Front and back covers of Baldwin, Styron, and Me by Mélikah Abdelmoumen, translated by Catherine Khordoc. Designed by Ingrid Paulson.

Introducing Mélikah Abdelmoumen’s Baldwin, Styron, and Me

As a reader, as a human, I’ve always been attracted to stories or ideas that are neither one thing nor the other, that walk, out of inclination or obligation, a fine line between taken-for-granted assumptions and identities. Perhaps, in part, this is a result of coming from the places I do, the places I’ve called home: these smaller, industrial, working-class Rust Belt towns dismissed by almost everyone else in the country, which are a very short distance from the American border. Growing up, I had no idea that we did things differently down here, that, out of some sort of alchemical mixture of geography, history, landscape, and radio and television signals, we southern Ontarians had developed as distinct an identity as had Canadians from places where theirs are more readily acknowledged, whether it be Newfoundland or Quebec or Alberta. I remember Fred Eaglesmith once telling me that there was something about how American radio waves carried across Lake Ontario when he was growing up that made it easier for him to tune into the country and bluegrass stations from Kentucky and Tennessee than it was to receive the Toronto signals from barely an hour down the road. This accident helped shape him into the man (and the musician) that he became, and bred an affinity for the fields and mountains of Appalachia over the straight, puritanical streets of Canada’s biggest city. There’s no box for a detail like this on a census. And yet it can be everything. There’s a local writer who once pitched me on a book (unfortunately never finished) whose main thesis was that the people of this part of the country were AmeriCanadians, a hybridized identity that in no way undermines our devotion or loyalty to Canada but that reflects all the factors that have shaped us and the different ways we interact and relate to the world. Despite the natural anger and patriotism we all feel as a result of the current American regime’s rhetoric and threats—and places like Windsor feel these far more keenly at the moment than most others in the country, I assure you—this still tracks. We may be choosing for now not to do our regular trips to the Detroit Institute of Arts for Friday Night Live; we may have let our subscription to the Paradise Jazz Series lapse; but it is also, for me, both morally and psychologically problematic to be expected to turn our backs on key relationships that have played such a role in making us who we are. And the expectation to do so is an unreasonable one.

I’m still trying to work this out; I hope that it makes sense.

There’s this idea that I came across in Mélikah Abdelmoumen’s just-published Baldwin, Styron, and Me (translated by Catherine Khordoc) that has become central to how I think of these matters: that of the frontier dweller. Abdelmoumen quotes the Lebanese-French writer Amin Maalouf from In the Name of Identity:

Wherever there are groups of human beings living side by side who differ from one another in religion, colour, language, ethnic origin or nationality; wherever there are tensions, more or less long standing, more or less violent, between immigrants and local populations, Blacks and Whites, Catholics and Protestants, Jews and Arabs, Hindus and Sikhs, Lithuanians and Russians, Serbs and Albanians, Greeks and Turks, English-speaking and French-speaking Canadians, Flemings and Walloons, Chinese and Malays—yes, wherever there is a divided society, there are men and women bearing within them contradictory allegiances, people who live on the frontier between opposed communities, and whose very being might be said to be traversed by ethnic or religious or other fault lines.

Who, these days, does not bear within them contradictory allegiances? Baldwin, Styron, and Me is a book about living with such, acknowledging them, and more importantly, despite the tremendous cost such effort entails, remaining true to them. It’s about not letting others, with their limited conception of who you are, define you, whether it be via a census or a checklist or otherwise. In the same way that the amalgamation of Abdelmoumen’s hometown of Chicoutimi with La Baie into Saguenay does not erase key particularities that made those places distinct, or a resident’s memory of them as such, memories that can be passed down from generation to generation, the amalgamation of certain key traits or aspects of our individual and collective histories and lives does not erase anything either. We all maintain contradictory allegiances, or if we’re honest with ourselves should: this book serves as a timely reminder of this.

Photo: Still from Mélikah’s interview below, featuring portraits of James Baldwin and William Styron.

But Baldwin, Styron, and Me is at the same time one of my favourite things, a book about books, a book about the power of books, and about the way that the discovery of a writer and their work at the right moment can transform how one relates to the world. This happened when Mélikah discovered the works of James Baldwin. Who among us has not had a similar moment reading Baldwin’s work? (And for those who haven’t, I envy you the pleasure of the discovery: your time will come, and perhaps this book will serve as both catalyst and introduction). But Baldwin, Styron, and Me is also a work of literary historical investigation and recreation, telling the story of how one particular literary friendship between the grandson of a slave and the grandson of a slaveowner transformed the lives and work of both, while at the same time serving as a reminder that many of the debates we are having about literature and who has the right to write what are part of a much longer historical conversation. It is a generous and humane work of imagination, both “a personal and courageous meditation” (Lawrence Hill) and “a balm for this time and a welcome visit with new and old relations,” (Jesse Wente) a book that anticipates and encourages discussion and disagreement.  

Mélikah’s niece put together a short video profile and interview with Mélikah about the book: rather than this week linking to an interview or excerpt we thought we’d share it with you here.

Dan Wells,
Publisher

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Narrating Identities: An interview with Mélikah Abdelmoumen

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In good publicity news:

    • Baldwin, Styron, and Me by Mélikah Abdelmoumen was featured in Lit Hub for its pub date!
    • On Book Banning by Ira Wells was featured in two Canadian School Library Journal articles, “The Language of Censorship” and “Censors Are Targeting Schools.” Ira Wells was also interviewed on the Get Lit radio show.
    • Heaven and Hell by Jón Kalman Stefánsson (trans. Philip Roughton) was reviewed in the Literary Review of Canada: “An artfully crafted and arresting novel . . . Stefánsson excels at turning small places into the absolute centre of the world.
    • Near Distance by Hanna Stoltenberg (trans. Wendy H. Gabrielsen) was also reviewed in the Literary Review of Canada: “A thoughtfully paced debut, and Stoltenberg moves between past and present with apparent ease.

The Bibliophile: Along for the ride

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***

Next week, Vanessa will be attending the London Book Fair for the first time in my absence. I’m torn between relief and remorse, and excitement for Vanessa. I wish I could have been there for her first trip. Though the event itself happens in an inhuman environment, some kind of cross between an airport hanger and a processing plant, it’s nevertheless one of the most human-oriented of occasions. It’s both exhausting and invigorating. I will miss being there, jostling for floor space with my fellow indie publishers, raising a glass at the end of a long day with more of the same. Many of the people I’ve met through these fairs have become close friends and confidantes. I care about them deeply, and having missed Frankfurt in October I mourn that it’ll have been more than a year before I see any in person.

But I will also miss the raison d’etre for the fair: the books. The hunt for them, wandering the aisles and looking at what’s on display, flipping through the catalogues, listening intently to the enthusiastic pitches of those who care about what they publish as much as we care about what we do. The quickening that happens when you happen upon something unexpected, that might be a natural fit for our list. It’s a kind of magic. Many of the most important international books we’ve discovered have resulted from these fairs and from the relationships that they’ve helped cement: Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport, Roy Jacobsen’s Barrøy series, Elaine Feeney’s novels, the works of Jón Kalman Stefánsson. I learned about Roland Allen’s The Notebook spending a couple of hours strolling around Hampstead Heath as Mark Ellingham’s wolfhound loped pleasurably ahead of us through the grasses. It’s one of my favourite London memories.

Photo: The Passenger Seat by Vijay Khurana. Designed by Zoe Norvell.

The discovery of Vijay Khurana’s The Passenger Seat didn’t occur in such an idyll: I first read it in a narrow bed in my discount Frankfurt hotel room in mid-October, 2023, shivering under the too-thin sheets. Or at least that’s when I read the first sixty or so pages: I hadn’t realized that the manuscript Vijay’s agent, Philip Gwyn Jones, had sent was incomplete, and was not at all pleased to have to turn out the light without knowing what happened next. I accosted Philip first thing the next morning when I got to the fairgrounds, begging him for the rest, so intent was I on what happened to (though their names were different in that iteration) Teddy and Adam.

Teddy and Adam have been with me ever since. “There are books,” George Orwell wrote, “that one reads over and over again, books that become part of the furniture of one’s mind,” and The Passenger Seat is one of these for me. It goes to deeply uncomfortable places in its examination of male friendship and identity and our relationship with violence. From its opening apocryphal Mailer epigraph (“When two men say hello on the street, one of them loses.”) to its final despondent sentence, it never looks away from the ugly vulnerability that propels us too often to do our worst. Using the frame of real-world events—the 2019 Bryer-Schmegelsky spree killings—it risks imagining what can never be known, and in doing so gets at truths that might not otherwise be possible. And it asks the reader what can be learned from two broken boys/men: up to now, too often, the answer has been not enough.

The Passenger Seat has been adopted enthusiastically by American booksellers, who have made it both an Indies Introduce and an Indie Next pick. Douglas Riggs of Bank Square Books called it “a plunge into a pitch-black abyss . . . (that) feels so real it may as well be a cursed memoir.” It launched this week with a New York Times review which called it “unsettling and powerful.” It is both of these things, and like the best books, will leave no one who risks its pages indifferent.

Please read on for an excellent interview with the author, conducted by Ahmed Abdalla.

Dan Wells,
Publisher

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A Biblioasis Interview with Vijay Khurana

Could you tell me a little about yourself and how this novel came about?

I’m a fiction writer and translator from Germany. I was born in Australia but I’ve lived in quite a few different places. I’ve lived in the US, the UK, and Cambodia for about a year. But I’ve lived on and off for the last decade in Berlin.

This book’s genesis really came about when I was doing an MFA at the University of East Anglia. I noticed I was writing a lot of short stories about male friendships, and about the ways in which sexuality influences and shapes friendships among heterosexual young men and some of those stories included an aspect of violence, of young men dehumanizing those around them in various ways. I went from those short stories to looking at a larger piece of writing.

Photo: Vijay Khurana in the wilderness. Credit: Madeleine Watts.

I know it was partly influenced by true events. Could you speak about the relationship between fact and fiction and what made you want to write about this?

There was an incident I read about in North America where two young men did a similar thing to what I was thinking about. I was influenced by that, but also by those short stories that I had been writing. The book takes a few cues and images from real events. There’s a road trip aspect that is similar to some of the things I was reading about. There’s an image in the novel of Teddy and Adam using a digital camera and being obsessed with this idea of filming and experiencing the world through that medium of recorded video. That’s another thing that came from real events. Then the second part of the book is wholly fictional.

Why did you decide to call it The Passenger Seat?

It felt very much from early on that The Passenger Seat was the perfect title for this book. If you’re in the passenger seat, you’re not in control, and you’re also potentially not responsible for what happens in that vehicle. There’s this whole idea of passivity and abdication of responsibility that runs through the novel. There’s this question between Teddy and Adam of which one of them is actually in control and which one of them is responsible for the things they end up doing. One of the things I’m really interested in is to get at the idea that the male friendship itself is part of some of the problems with violence and dehumanizing among young men. But I think by the end of the novel, I’d like the reader to ask this question about why it’s called The Passenger Seat and what questions are there then about who was active and who was along for the ride. Who was culpable? And in what ways was everyone basically culpable?

There is a sharp shift in the narrative from the Teddy and Adam story to the Ron and Freeman one, where the former story ends unexpectedly. Both sections seem to be about men who don’t stop their friend from committing violence because of that idea of passivity and control. But one section is definitely much more violent than the other. How do you see these two sections as related and what are you trying to say by having them together in the novel?

In some ways I’m interested in asking what is the difference between the men that society tends to look at as being “essentially good” despite their faults and other men that society might deem to be so beyond understanding and so monstrous that they really have nothing to teach us. That we, the rest of society, are so unlike them that there is no redeeming them and there’s no sense that they might be able to teach us something about ourselves. The second part of the novel is exactly that, and it does have an element of Ron reflecting on a specific moment where his friend was committing domestic violence. He is pretty sure it’s happening, but he has sort of enough plausible deniability about the situation that he decided to not do anything about it. He asks himself about that and yet doesn’t really come to any conclusions about his own responsibility. I’m definitely comparing those two friendships and the ways in which the performance of masculinity itself can lead men, through the guise of friendship, to do things that are not productive, helpful or good.

Photo: Interior image from The Passenger Seat.

What do you think it means to perform masculinity and what does it reveal about the men in the novel? I’m thinking about all the references to audience and being watched. They seem to think a lot about how they will be perceived and what kind of man they want to be thought of.

In terms of trying to figure out what kind of man you are expected to be and what kind of man you might want to be when you are very young, it makes friendships you have with other young men really important. I think especially young men can only see themselves mediated through someone else. They can see themselves mediated through a friend, an enemy, through someone who’s envious of them, disgusted at them, through someone who, in a public space, perceives them as being disrespectful or threatening or going against some sort of social etiquette. This is something that happens a lot in various ways that may not be as stark as the ways in which I depict these characters, but performing in order to get a reflected sense of oneself is really common.

It’s also not just about performing masculinity as a way of understanding what kind of man you are, but it’s also about performing masculinity in terms of playing a role that you could see as absolving you from the consequences of your actions. If you’re just playing a role or playing a game or seeing yourself as a story, then it becomes easier to go through life without a sense that your actions have real consequences for other people. Hence there’s a lot of focus not just on that video camera, but also there’s a specific video game that these two young men play, which I’m not using to say that video games make young men violent, but it’s more that idea of mediation, of playing a role, of going through life as an avatar rather than as yourself.

And then also, the windshield itself, which I think has an interesting parallel with cinema. If you’re on a road trip, you’re looking through that windshield and everything you experience is mediated by the glass. You’re in the world, but you’re not really in the world, and that’s something else I was getting at.

That also makes me think of Adam’s refrain of “fun and games” whenever they’re together. It’s like all their actions are supposed to be taken as playful. So it further blurs reality and gameplay. They’re both in the world and not seriously in it.

And I think it’s also for him almost a defense mechanism at times. The way he feels he can get through life is to treat things as if they don’t really matter, especially at the beginning. It seems like something that he says to himself in order to help him cope with things not necessarily being in his control or to pretend that he’s okay with something that he finds challenging. But yes, game playing is absolutely a huge part of it. There’s even a line when they first start using the rifle, a comparison to how really young children will share their toys with pride and reluctance. That idea of playing games, using toys, is a big part of going through life when you are scrambling to work out what life is and who you are in it.

While Teddy and Adam are friends, a lot of their thoughts about each other seem to be comparing what the other has or lacks. Could you talk about the competitive aspect in male friendships and how this plays out in the novel?

There’s always this very fine line between play and competition. When something is played, it does not actually have an aim or a goal or an ambition. But once it becomes a game, then it might have rules, a goal, a winner, a loser. I think that competition is obviously a big part of how many young men have a sense of themselves, as a winner or a loser or someone who is good at something or not. It’s probably to some extent just human nature to contend with others, to want to best somebody at something, even something completely pointless. In the novel there’s a moment where they are perched on these fence posts beside a car park and they mess around for a while but then suddenly they are actually playing a game with a winner and a loser. They’re trying to hop from one to the other as many times as they can without falling. Or later they end up playing a game where they’re kicking an orange peel and trying to kick it as far as they can and further than the other one. Games for them are something they take refuge in as a language almost, as a way of communicating with each other, because they maybe lack more sophisticated ways of doing that. And of course they also take refuge in the idea of games once they have done something that is life-changingly tragic.

Learn more about Vijay Khurana and The Passenger Seat in another new interview with Open Book!

Violence seems to be a threshold that Teddy and Adam are building up to pass. We see them in different situations getting a bit more violent either with their words or their actions, trying to one up each other. But once Teddy does shoot those two people, a scene that is very drawn out in the novel, their relationship changes and also the rest of the violence happens off the page. How does that level of violence change them and their friendship?

One thing I was really conscious of with this novel is that I didn’t want to just “get inside the head” of someone who would do something like that because that would be to some extent a fool’s errand. But I think that I was trying to work out not just what these two characters would do after doing something extremely violent like that, but also what their relationship and the change in their relationship might say about other men or all men in general and how they would attempt to keep moving through space having done something like that.

They react in different ways. Teddy becomes increasingly passive and submissive almost as a way of dealing with what he’s done. Adam, for different reasons, tries to become much more dominant, while also at various times trying to treat what they did as a game, as something that didn’t really matter, and he has his own background and ideas that help him towards that position. After it happens, their relationship changes in a few ways. But for me, they’re both just hurtling towards the end of that section, which, if the reader doesn’t know it at the time, is essentially their deaths.

And why did you decide not to show the rest of their violent acts?

There are a couple of reasons. I was a journalist for a while and I worked in radio and have always been quite interested in the way that the media turns tragedy like this into its own kind of consumable narrative. So one reason is that I wanted to write some part of the novel from the point of view of a voracious media cycle, which is in the book as we get towards the end of the first section.

Another thing is that it was very difficult to write all these things and to write these characters who are in many ways just really terrible people doing really terrible things. I didn’t want to make the violence seem like page-turning excitement. In order to avoid that, and in order to concentrate on the ideas behind what was happening rather than the violence itself, having had a scene which I think had to be there, I didn’t want to then give more space on the page to violence that might just feel like it was for the sake of a narrative or anything like that.

What were you looking to say about how the media talks about male violence?

One of my main thoughts when I first started writing this is just how often this kind of thing happens. It just happens over and over and over again, and what I mean by “it” is young men, not always together, but often together with other young men, doing violent things. There is this idea that the media is fundamentally interested in certain things. The main one being trying to appeal to a lot of consumers of that medium, so it’s definitely going to create a narrative that suits its own aims and that combined with the fact that young men so often commit violent acts, I think that leads to quite an unnuanced depiction of some of these events. It’s often kind of lazy and emotionally manipulative in a way that is maybe unproductive for asking the really important questions, which is why does this keep happening? Why do we not seem to be learning anything from these repeated things happening?

I really enjoyed the rhythm of the book and how each sentence kind of flows nicely into the next as well as how the characters speak to each other and the language within their friendship. Could you speak about your style and how you decided to shape the novel?

Some of it is the sort of slightly taciturn rhythms of communications between male teenagers. Some of it is the rhythm of the road trip. There are rhythms to being in a car and driving down a highway or a road. So some of that I wanted to get into the prose. I like books where each sentence has its own kind of drama or tension. Or it might have a pleasing aspect if there’s some kind of alliteration in there or it might have a disharmonious or dissonant kind of quality as well. And the pace of a sentence also matters. The sounds of that sentence can reflect somebody’s state of mind or an action or the passing of time and how people’s experience of the passing of time is happening. There’s a whole lot of stuff that I really enjoy doing with a sentence.

Road trips in stories are usually associated with a desire to find something or change yourself, often a coming-of-age story. And this novel is kind of a coming-of-age story, just in a much darker sense. Do you have any thoughts about that?

I’m really interested in the paradoxes of the road trip. It tends to be about coming of age and becoming an adult to some extent. But at the same time, the road trip is so much about not actually engaging seriously and responsibly with the world around you, which we could understand to be a big part of adulthood. The very fact of just passing through different towns without properly stopping or engaging with them is like an abdication of adulthood.

I knew early on that I didn’t want their road trip to have a serious or specific goal. It sort of has these different goals but neither Teddy nor Adam properly commits to any of them. Adam has this idea that he might just leave home and never go back. He has this idea of maybe going and getting a job in a mine and completely leaving his old life behind. But you can tell that it’s still a childhood fantasy rather than actual ambition. There’s also that idea of running to something versus running from something and a lot of road trip narratives are a combination of both.

A road trip is about being completely free and wide open spaces, but it’s also about the utter claustrophobia of being stuck in a really small space often with someone else. It’s also about forcing a relationship to change under conditions of tiredness, or boredom, or whatever else. I also thought back to the road trips I took when I was around Teddy and Adam’s age. I thought a lot about the ways in which my friendships and relationships were impacted by those trips and some of the feelings of just what it was like to be in a vehicle. And I knew that the road trip was definitely what I wanted to use to explore those ideas about masculinity and violence.

We usually learn to be adults by watching our parents, but, for different reasons, both Teddy and Adam reject their fathers as figures to aspire to. Where do you think they get their ideas of masculinity and how does this affect them?

One of things I really wanted to avoid doing was telling a kind of trauma narrative where somebody does something terrible to somebody else and then you learn that they had had something terrible done to them. I didn’t want to tell a story where two young men don’t have father figures and therefore their manhood becomes twisted in such a way that it becomes polluted. But at the same time, they do both essentially turn away from their fathers. I wanted to get beyond the father figure, which is maybe the most obvious masculine example. I was more interested in getting at the many other examples that men see and emulate, including the male friend. I didn’t want to weigh things too heavily towards the idea of the father-son dynamic because that would have weighted the book in a very specific way. In fact, the idea of fatherhood is most present in the second section, when we find out that Ron has this fantasy that he could have been a stepfather if things had turned out differently, whereas in fact Ron never actually had the courage to commit to that role when he had the chance. It was kind of a game for him, too.

What are you hoping people take away from reading this novel?

I think I want them to read it again. I want them to feel like there might be undercurrents and links and things that a reader might not necessarily pick up on first read. Little ties between different characters, recurring images and things like that. And also that the experience of reading the prose will be a pleasurable one. I’m of two minds about saying “pleasurable” because the book is really not necessarily a pleasurable book. It’s about some quite disturbing stuff. But having said that, the idea of reading sentences and finding them to be in some way aesthetically interesting, is always part of reading, at least for me.

Also, I hope I am asking some interesting and difficult questions that the reader will be left saddled with after they’ve finished this book. I didn’t want to write a book where the problems that the book raises get resolved by the end. I wanted to write a book where people have to walk away holding all of that stuff in their head, holding those questions, juxtapositions and paradoxes. I hope readers might walk away asking some questions about the connections between friendship and violence and how men perform their masculinity in ways that often see them avoiding responsibility.

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In good publicity news:

Media Hits: THE PASSENGER SEAT, DARK LIKE UNDER, ON BOOK BANNING, and more!

IN THE NEWS!

THE PASSENGER SEAT

The Passenger Seat by Vijay Khurana was reviewed in the New York Times! The review was published online on March 2, and can be read here.

Reviewer Teddy Wayne calls it,

“Unsettling and powerful . . . If the inciting episode reads as an overdetermined proof of male one-upmanship, Khurana’s execution of it is nevertheless gripping.”

Vijay Khurana was also interviewed on the ABA’s Indies Introduce podcast interview series, which spotlights debut authors. The episode was posted on Mar 4, and can be listened to here.

Grab The Passenger Seat here!

ON BOOK BANNING

On Book Banning by Ira Wells was excerpted in The Walrus on March 2, which can be read here.

On Book Banning was also reviewed in the Winnipeg Free Press. The review was posted on March 1, and can be read here.

Matt Henderson writes,

“A concise, exquisite, and tidy inquiry into our common desire to protect against the other. Wells serves up a masterful and provocative treatise about the nature of free speech and the power of the written word.”

Get On Book Banning here!

DARK LIKE UNDER

Dark Like Under by Alice Chadwick was reviewed in the Observer on March 2. The review is available to read online here.

Miriam Balanescu writes,

“Chadwick’s cast of children, on the precipice of adulthood, are caught in the crosshairs of adult politics . . . In the refraction of their various viewpoints, Chadwick is adept at finding the lesser tragedies bursting at the seams, amounting to a clever and compassionate debut.”

Preorder Dark Like Under here!

HEAVEN AND HELL

Jón Kalman Stefánsson, author of Heaven and Hell, was interviewed on the Across the Pond podcast about the book. The episode was posted on March 4, and you can listen to it in full here.

Grab Heaven and Hell here!

The Bibliophile: The publisher and the diving bell

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Photo: Author Mark Anthony Jarman poses at a flea market in Firenze, Italy, with a diving helmet similar to the one on the cover of his book Burn Man. Courtesy of Mark.

Normally, January and February are slower months in a publisher’s schedule, allowing more time for manuscript reading, planning, and at least snatches of the daydreaming upon which our industry—or at least this press—depends. This has not been the case this year. This has been the busiest first couple of months of a calendar year I can remember. Indeed, I sometimes have trouble remembering what month we’re in; this past Tuesday I wrote down the date as November 25th and didn’t catch it for several hours: November felt right to me. That it is already the last day of February leaves me fearful of drowning, as I know what the coming weeks and months bring.

I start each week writing down on a fresh gathering of pages in my Midori notebook everything that’s on my plate, whether it be editorial, publicity, administration, correspondence, or something tied with the bookstore, a list that often runs over 2-3 pages and which I’ll be lucky to get through a quarter of by the time Friday rolls around. As if Friday marks the end of anything. Of late, the list is longer the following Monday than it had been the previous. There are emails that have been sitting for weeks, that I dutifully re-enter so as not to lose sight of; manuscripts that accumulate in daunting digital piles, to be read and edited both; contracts that need negotiating; publicity and marketing lists that need doing; copy that needs approval; pitches that need to be made; and this barely scrapes the surface of it all. Despite these efforts things slide out of sight and mind, buried pages deep in my inbox, until they resurface in a burst of panic when I’m trying to go to bed. We do our best; we do a lot; often, it doesn’t seem good enough.

There’s been a lot of talk recently across various magazines and Substacks about the crisis of independent publishing, perhaps the most relevant being the series of posts about the demise of New Star over at Ken Whyte’s excellent SHuSH Substack. But what no one seems to want to acknowledge is how much work publishing has always been, and that it has become increasingly more so. Canadian publishers have seen their market access decimated by decisions not of their own making, which has made them more reliant on funding that has, increasingly, become via inflation or cutbacks or changes in funding priorities inadequate to the task at hand. As a group, I’ve never known a harder-working bunch than those who keep Canadian independent publishing afloat. Every book we produce and promote strikes me increasingly as a minor miracle.

Photo: Setting up at Osteria Marco restaurant at Winter Institute, with early ARCs of The Sorrow of Angels by Jón Kalman Stefánsson. Courtesy of Emily Bossé.

I’m lucky to have such great staff, who’ve stepped up to cover some of the obligations normally on my plate. Dominique and Emily have just returned from Denver, where they attended the American Bookseller Association’s Winter Institute, pitching our books to independent booksellers for days. It’s one of my favourite events of the calendar year, filled with many of my favourite people, and one of the biggest investments we make in our books each year in the United States. It’s worth every penny, and every bit of sleep deprivation. The week after next Vanessa will be taking my usual place at the London Book Fair to meet with agents and publishers and translators and the occasional author: it coincides with the London launch of Alice Chadwick’s Dark Like Under, which Vanessa signed on for June publication in North America, which makes me even more pleased that she’s able to go in my stead, though I am saddened by the fact that it means I will miss meeting with my international cast of regulars. Ashley’s been bailing me out preparing reports for an Ontario Arts Council grant due next week, corralling me into making awards submission decisions, and aiding Vanessa with a monster index for Mark Bourrie’s Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre, among many other tasks that few may notice but without which nothing here would work as well as it does.

Photo: Newly-arrived ARCs of Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre by Mark Bourrie.

David and Nora have been busy mailing off review copies and direct orders, and Ahmed’s been busy managing all of the publicity for the launch of Ira Wells’s On Book Banning, which has seen exceptional first-week coverage, including interviews on Tara Henley’s SubstackPaul Wells’s Podcast, as well as other coverage at Quill & Quire, the Miramichi Reader, a sold out TPL launch, and much more. All while he lays the ground for the launch of one of our most important novels of the season next week.

Below, please find a short excerpt from the opening pages of Ira Wells’s On Book Banning, which among many other things offers an attempt to “sharpen” the arguments about why books matter. It is, to my mind, another minor miracle of a book.

Dan Wells,
Publisher

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Photo: First page of the introduction in On Book Banning by Ira Wells. Designed by Ingrid Paulson.

Introduction: The New Censorship Consensus

In the spring of 2022, the principal of my children’s elementary school told a group of parents gathered to discuss a library audit that she wished she could get rid of “all the old books.” The bulk of the library’s holdings were, from her perspective, too Eurocentric, too male, too heteronormative. I understood these concerns, which were broadly shared among parents and teachers. Still, the prospect of liquidating several thousand library books struck me as obviously wrong—offensive not only to me personally, but also to the liberal democratic values that (however shakily) underpin our society.

I wanted to say something, but quickly checked myself: Was there not a strong chance that my opposition to removing these “harmful” books would be taken as closet racism? Or that my defense of “liberal values” in this context—a children’s library, with its tiny chairs and animal posters—would come off as patently absurd? I briefly imagined how foolish I might appear—holding forth on democratic ideals like some sad imitation of Gregory Peck or Henry Fonda, everyone around me curling their toes with embarrassment.

Then the moment passed, the meeting broke up, and I was left chewing on my questions: What was so special about a bunch of old books? Were they, in fact, worth defending? Or was my fondness for these antiquated objects a product of my own nostalgia or upbringing—a sign that it was me who was antiquated?

It’s true that I grew up in a bookish household, although I was not a bookish child. There were years of sports, video games, and adolescent hijinks of a tame, middle-class variety, years in which I had no career aspirations beyond making the NHL. Eventually, I found myself yearning for a more literary life, which led to the study of English. In graduate school I crossed paths with extraordinary readers—including a roommate who once read a novel while tying his shoes: He laced up one shoe, noticed a book that interested him, read it cover to cover, then laced up the other shoe and went about his day.

I read slowly by comparison, but voraciously. My job now involves teaching novels and short stories to enthusiastic university students, many of whom are budding bibliophiles; at home, I’ve read aloud to my own children almost every night for more than a decade and will keep doing so until the audience dries up. Many of my friendships were initiated or solidified over the giving or receiving of books, and I have now accumulated more than I might reasonably read in my lifetime. Somewhere along the way, I came to think of these objects as self-evidently valuable. I had lost (if I ever really had) the arguments to explain why books matter, and why the banning and destruction of literature is so odious and socially corrosive.

It’s time to revive and sharpen those arguments. Book censorship is on the rise. We’ve all seen the news stories—the frequent headlines about book banning in schools or public libraries, about the takeover of school boards, about novels that are no longer teachable on university campuses, publishers pulling or issuing bowdlerized editions of suddenly controversial classics, authors who face cancellation. Not all these phenomena constitute “banning” per se, but they all fall under what we might call the new “censorship consensus,” in which books are called upon to justify their existence through demonstrations of their moral value.

Many people who consider themselves book lovers seem comfortable with the new censorship consensus. Indeed, they no longer need an external authority to tell them which books ought to go. In the summer of 2024, after Andrea Robin Skinner, one of Alice Munro’s daughters, came forward with the story of her harrowing sexual assault at the hands of Munro’s husband (and Munro’s complicity over years in covering up the abuse), readers took to X to declare that Munro had been expunged from their shelves. “I just can’t . . . ,” one user posted, above a photo of a garbage can filled with Munro’s Nobel Prize–winning books. We’ve long struggled with questions about how to frame the art of people who do things we abhor, but it was the lack of struggle that seemed notable in this case—at least among those who had decided that Munro’s work was now trash.

Books have always been challenged, but the current eruption of censorship feels like something new. “Book Bans Continue to Surge in Public Schools,” went an April 2024 New York Times headline, which found that rates of book banning were doubling year over year.* According to PEN America, thousands of book removals occurred in 2023, in forty-two states, both Democratic and Republican. PEN has now identified more than ten thousand instances of books being removed from U.S. schools but is quick to clarify that the true number is likely much higher: One well-known study conducted by the American Library Association estimated that between 82% and 97% of all library challenges go unreported.1 Much of this book banning appears to be fueled by outright bigotry: “Overwhelmingly, book banners continue to target stories by and about people of color and LGBTQ+ individuals,” PEN notes. “30% of the unique titles banned are books about race, racism, or feature characters of color. Meanwhile, 26% of unique titles banned have LGBTQ+ characters or themes.”2

Photo: For folks in the Windsor area, join us at Biblioasis Bookshop for the On Book Banning launch next Thursday!

Book bans are as old as the book itself. In my country, state-sponsored book censorship began with the passage of the Customs Act in the first session of the Canadian Parliament in 1867. That Act prohibited the importation of “books and drawings of an immoral or indecent character”; the criminal code further forbade the exhibition of any “disgusting object.”3 The United States outlawed using the Postal Service for “obscene, lewd, and lascivious” material—prohibitions backed by measures including confiscation, customs seizure, civil and criminal prosecution, and police arrests.4

Where book banning once largely involved the legal and disciplinary apparatus of the state, the new censorship consensus works through both state actors and a constellation of special interest groups operating inside and outside of institutions. Their target is libraries: public libraries, in which all taxpayers have a stake, and especially school libraries, which can be uniquely vulnerable due to chronic funding shortages and lack of full-time librarians able to cultivate their collections over time.

Libraries are natural quarry for anti-government organizations, including Moms for Liberty and No Left Turn in Education. Legal challenges against books, of the sort that once banned Ulysses and Lady Chatterley’s Lover from American shelves, are costly and hindered by decades of First Amendment jurisprudence that steadily broadened the sphere of expressive freedom. Libraries, by contrast, are soft targets. Any citizen can mount a challenge. The instructions for doing so are often posted on the library website. Today’s lawmakers are still more preoccupied with the dangers of online speech than with book bans (although that is rapidly changing in some quarters).

We should be clear on the stakes. When parental rights organizations attack libraries, they are attacking one of the last public institutions committed to intellectual freedom. While it’s true that more books are now available online, we court disaster by assuming that the internet—which is volatile and ephemeral and frequently weaponized against users across the globe—has replaced libraries as key intellectual infrastructure for liberal democracies.

Battles over book banning are especially contentious in school libraries, for obvious reasons. We compel children to attend school, and kids are more impressionable, so materials must be “age appropriate”—an inherently debatable category. Those who would cleanse the school library frame their efforts as an appeal to save children from harm.

Photo: A display of frequently banned books, including Maus by Art Spiegelman, and The Bluest Eye and Beloved by Toni Morrison, at Biblioasis Bookshop.

Beneath the surface of these disputes lies a deeper conflict over our national and communal history. One reason why book banners so frequently attack historical fictions—including Maus, Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel about his father’s experience as a Holocaust survivor; Beloved and The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison’s haunting novels of American racial trauma, and countless other texts at the intersection of race and history—is that the banners are fighting for control of our collective past. At the same time, in seeking control over the narratives that children will carry into adulthood, the banners are fighting for their vision of the future. Attacks on school libraries are, among much else, future-oriented attacks on liberal democracy and its vital institutions.

*

*Similar trends have been playing out in Canada. According to a report from the organization Freedom to Read called “A Rising Tide of Censorship,” Canadian libraries reported 118 “intellectual freedom challenges” in 2022–23, which represented a 50% increase from the previous year, which had itself seen a 50% increase from the year before that. These numbers, the report warned, “likely represent a very small portion of actual censorship efforts in Canadian libraries.”

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In good publicity news:

  • Ira Wells, author of On Book Banning, was featured in a number of outlets for Freedom to Read Week:
  • Baldwin, Styron, and Me by Mélikah Abdelmoumen (trans. Catherine Khordoc) was reviewed in That Shakespearean Rag“A valuable examination of certain points of dissension or disagreement ongoing in our culture.”
  • The Passenger Seat by Vijay Khurana was excerpted in LitHub, and reviewed in Books + Publishing“An unusual and deftly written literary thriller.”
  • Dark Like Under by Alice Chadwick was reviewed in the Daily Mail“An unpretentiously elegiac novel, it hymns nature’s solace and the power of human connection with memorable grace”; the Guardian: “[An] ambitious and affecting debut . . . Dark Like Under is impressively subtle, sensual and sympathetic.”; and in the TLS: “Gripping . . . [a] mature, glorious book.

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1

Alexandra Alter, “Book Bans Continue to Surge in Public Schools,” The New York Times, April 16, 2024 https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/16/books/book-bans-public-schools.html.

2

Kasey Meehan and Jonathan Friedman, “Banned in the USA: State Laws Supercharge Book Suppression in Schools,” PEN America, April 20, 2023.

3

Brenda Cossman, “Censor, Resist, Repeat: A History of Censorship of Gay and Lesbian Sexual Representation in Canada,” Duke Journal of Gender, Law & Policy 21.1 (2013).

4

See Rosen v. United States (1896), qtd. in Jennifer Elaine Steele, “A History of Censorship in the United States,” Journal of Intellectual Freedom and Privacy 5.1 (2020): https://journals.ala.org/index.php/jifp/article/view/7208 /10293.