Media Hits: A WAY TO BE HAPPY, MAY OUR JOY ENDURE, CHRISTMAS GHOST STORIES, and more!

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IN THE NEWS!

A WAY TO BE HAPPY

A Way to Be Happy by Caroline Adderson (Sep 10, 2024) was reviewed in The New Indian Express. The review was published online on Sep 21, and is available to read here.

Reviewer Saurabh Sharma writes,

“A Way to Be Happy is immensely refreshing, as it not only explores the uniqueness but also showcases the unpredictability of the everyday in a manner only a few writers manage to do.”

A Way to Be Happy was reviewed in McGill University’s The Tribune on September 10. Check out the full review here.

Isobel Bray writes,

“Adderson’s prose is straightforward but doesn’t flatline; every word choice feels intentional. When she goes into detail, it is perfectly placed to highlight her characters’ idiosyncrasies, making the reader empathize with their struggles.”

A Way to Be Happy appeared on the Globe and Mail‘s Fall Book Preview on September 20! Check out the full list of titles here.

Critic Emily Donaldson writes,

“Though her writing is incisive, emotionally astute, slyly funny and award-winning, it still feels like Adderson hasn’t quite gotten her due as one of this country’s best short-story writers.”

Grab A Way to Be Happy here!

MAY OUR JOY ENDURE

May Our Joy Endure by Kev Lambert, translated by Donald Winkler (Sep 3, 2024), was reviewed in The Walrus! The review was published online on September 19, and you can read it in full here.

Reviewer André Forget writes,

“At a time when many fiction writers feel pressure to write socially useful literature, Lambert’s refusal to deal in solutions feels like an invigorating slap in the face.”

Kev Lambert was interviewed by Sonali Karnick on CBC’s All in a Weekend! The interview was posted online on September 22, and you can listen to the full segment here.

May Our Joy Endure was included on the Globe and Mail‘s Fall Book Preview on September 20! See the full list of titles here.

Critic Emily Donaldson writes,

“‘Febrile,’ ‘provocative’ and ‘incendiary’ are among the breathless adjectives used to describe the novels of this young writer from Chicoutimi . . . [May Our Joy Endure] (a Prix Goncourt finalist) is a social satire involving an architect who faces extreme unanticipated blowback for her plans for a major Montreal public works project.”

Get May Our Joy Endure here!

SETH’S CHRISTMAS GHOST STORIES

Seth‘s Christmas Ghost Stories (Oct 29, 2024) were featured in Guelph Today! The article included an interview with Seth about the series 10th anniversary alongside mentions of this year’s stories: Podolo, The Amethyst Cross, and Captain Dalgety Returns. The article was published on September 21, and you can read it here.

Seth says of the series,

“If you go back far enough, you realize, oh yes, Christmas is in winter, a dark time for telling ghost stories . . . A story should have a strong sense of place, a real feeling of atmosphere, and needs to be creepy in some way.”

Get all three 2024 Christmas Ghost Stories here!

THE PAGES OF THE SEA

The Pages of the Sea by Anne Hawk (Sep 17, 2024) was included on the Globe and Mail‘s Fall Book Preview on September 20! See the full list of titles here.

Critic Emily Donaldson calls the book,

“[A] finely observed debut.”

Get The Pages of the Sea here!

A CASE OF MATRICIDE

A Case of Matricide by Graeme Macrae Burnet (Nov 12, 2024) was also included on the Globe and Mail‘s Fall Book Preview on September 20! See the full list of titles here.

Critic Emily Donaldson writes,

“The multiple Booker-nominated Scottish novelist has made a project of undermining the certainties and assumptions we bring to fiction by blurring truth and artifice. In this third book featuring the melancholic, insecure Inspector Gorski, the latter finds himself drawn to the case of a woman in a small French town who’s convinced that her novelist son is plotting her demise.”

Get A Case of Matricide here!

A FACTOTUM IN THE BOOK TRADE

A Factotum in the Book Trade by Marius Kociejowski was featured in Canadian Writers Abroad on September 17. Check out the full review here.

Reviewer Wayne Grady writes,

“[A] mesmerizing memoir of fifty years as an antiquarian bookseller . . . A Factotum in the Book Trade thus pays homage to an era of bookselling that is fast fading from memory.”

Get A Factotum in the Book Trade here!

The Bibliophile: What A Publisher Does

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***

Over the years, whenever I’ve been asked what it is exactly a publisher does, I’ve had a range of answers, depending on how I’m thinking about my role and function at the time. Of late, I’ve described myself as a professional enthusiast. Enthusiasm is probably the state that most links publishing and bookselling for me: finding that book that I can get behind and trumpet into the hands of readers as loudly and as confidently and generously as I can. I take immense pleasure in the discovery of a new (or new-to-me) writer, and in the ability to engender in others that same anticipation and pleasure.

It’s perhaps for this reason that I listen so much to booksellers, and trust them more than I do academics and critics: they still read as I do, or at least as I try to do: for pleasure, excitement, the feeling of quickening when something unexpectedly connects or opens with the turn of the page. I listen to them about what I should be reading (if I could ever get out from under the manuscript pile), but also, just as much, what we should be thinking about publishing. Booksellers have turned me on to several of my favourite Biblioasis authors, and I’m grateful for it.

Photo: May Our Joy Endure, Querelle of Roberval, and You Will Love What You Have Killed by Kev Lambert.

It was in 2018 or 2019, at the Salon des Livres that one such bookseller urged me to look at the work of Kev Lambert. It bothers me that I can’t remember his name at this time, nor even the bookstore he worked at: it was a French language bookstore in Quebec City, and he was there working the Salon for a couple of publishers. During a break he took me by the arm and guided me to a couple of publisher’s booths, including Heliotrope’s, picking up Kev’s just-released Tu aimeras ce que tu a tué. Kev, he told me, was the most original and fearless author to come out of Quebec in at least a generation, and that if this book was anything to go by was a writer we should commit to early. His enthusiasm was contagious, so I sent it immediately to my most trusted reader, who sent me one of the most enthusiastic (and strangest) reader reports I’ve ever had the pleasure to receive. Below: a short excerpt:

Well, I’m rather glad you don’t have to run books by a corporate publishing committee, because I have no idea how to explain this book cogently, let alone come up with a one-line pitch, but I one hundred per cent think you should buy it. Essentially it’s a gay coming-of-age in which the narrator may or may not be a ghost, and lots of children die, who may or may not come back as ghosts. And it’s the funniest, weirdest thing I’ve read for a long time…..It’s The Returned [if that French TV series about dead children coming back to their village made Canadian shores; it became a cult hit in Britain] meets Clerks meets… [hmmm, this is nothing like Houellebecq but it would definitely appeal to people who love Houellebecq]. It’s so weird I’m struggling to come up with book comparisons, it often reads like a film. … And, bloody hell, this guy has written, at 25, one of the most original things I’ve read for quite a while.

***

Translation is, for me, as a monoglot (my kids so regularly tell me that I speak country French that I now no longer try to speak it at all), an act of faith, especially faith in the readers and publishers I’ve come to trust. So we took a leap and published Kevin’s first book, and when I read it in Donald Winkler’s excellent translation (You Will Love What You Have Killed) I had to agree both with my bookseller guide and first reader: this was one of the most strangely original things I’d read. It was like the revenge of the Gashlycrumb Tinies (A is for Amy who fell down the stairs / B is for Basil assaulted by bears). This was a violent, comic, tragic, and lyrical world quite unlike any other. Their next novel, Querelle of Roberval, upped the ante: a novel of a labour strike in a Quebec milltown, it read like a Greek tragedy, ending with infanticide and the striking workers quite literally preparing to eat their rich bosses. It caused a furor in France where it won the de Sade Prize and was shortlisted for the Medici, and in English the Writer’s Trust prize, again in Donald Winkler’s inestimable translation.

This brings me to their third novel May Our Joy Endure, which was published earlier this month, and defies every expectation set by their first couple, beyond, that is, its breathtaking originality. The French version was a sensation, was a Goncourt finalist, and won the Médici and a range of other key awards. Kev has told me that they consider this exploration of the lives of the ultrarich their most violent novel to date, but it is a much more nuanced violence, and because of that so much more unsettling. “Writing Querelle left me with this big question about bosses and the rich,” Lambert told Steven Beattie in an interview for Quill & Quire. “My idea was to try and see the people who were invisible in Querelle. It made sense for me in a social way, because really rich people don’t want to be seen. They don’t want us to see how they live, where they live, what their day-to-day lives can look like.” But he also chose to approach these characters and their situations with as much empathy as possible. “I wanted to challenge the idea that humanizing the person you critique is giving them credit,” Lambert told Beattie. “We hear this sometimes in political or media circles. But I think it’s a fake or a wrong idea.”

This is only one of the things that makes May Our Joy Endure such an important book, and in the words of another reviewer, André Forget in The Walrus, “reveals Lambert to be one of our most subtle and perceptive novelists.” Calling the book “gorgeous, lyrical, and tender—a ballet performed in an abattoir,” Forget explains as well as anyone why Kev Lambert is so essential, and so refreshing in this hyper-politicized literary moment: they eschew playing it safe, pat answers and solutions, which also explains why it is that Biblioasis will continue to follow them anywhere.

Dan Wells
Publisher

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Keep up with us!

Media Hits: A WAY TO BE HAPPY, COMRADE PAPA, CROSSES IN THE SKY, and more!

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IN THE MEDIA

A WAY TO BE HAPPY

A Way to Be Happy by Caroline Adderson (Sep 10, 2024) was reviewed in the New York Journal of Books on September 10! You can read the full review here.

Townsend Walker writes,

“Caroline Adderson’s stories are delicious: they zip and bubble, and a number are touched with tenderness.”

Caroline Adderson was interviewed by Margaret Gallagher on CBC North by Northwest. The interview was posted online on September 15, and you can listen to the segment in full here.

Caroline Adderson also gave an interview for Open Book, which was posted online on September 10. You can read the full interview here.

Open Book writes,

“For those who love short stories, they’ll be thrilled to read the new collection by Adderson, which has recently been longlisted for the Giller Prize, and marks a return to her collaborations with fabled editor John Metcalf. This new collection, A Way to be Happy (Biblioasis), has a remarkable cast of characters that come to life through Adderson’s stunning prose.”

Grab A Way to Be Happy here!

COMRADE PAPA

Comrade Papa by GauZ’, translated by Frank Wynne (Oct 8, 2024), has been reviewed in Publishers Weekly. The review was published online on September 16, and you can read it here.

Publishers Weekly call the book:

“[A] fresh and witty portrait of colonial and postcolonial Africa.”

Order Comrade Papa here!

CROSSES IN THE SKY

Crosses in the Sky: Jean de Brébeuf and the Destruction of Huronia by Mark Bourrie (May 21, 2024) has been reviewed in Canada’s History! The review was published online on September 11, and is available to read here.

Senior editor Kate Jaimet writes,

“Bourrie’s colloquial writing style and storytelling skill make Crosses in the Sky . . . an interesting and accessible retelling of an important chapter in Canadian history.”

Grab Crosses in the Sky here!

MAY OUR JOY ENDURE

May Our Joy Endure by Kev Lambert, translated by Donald Winkler (Sep 3, 2024), was reviewed in the Miramichi Reader! The review was published online on September 8, and you can read it here.

Brett Josef Grubisic writes,

“Abrasive, funny, critical, spirited, and, above all, the show-stopping output of a unparalleled literary talent, it’s a challenging novel whose every page offers something to savour and value.”

Get May Our Joy Endure here!

The Bibliophile: Why We Published It

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***

Editors’ note: While The Bibliophile was taking its summer nap, we were wide awake and thinking about some kinds of features we’d like to run in this space. Thus, this week’s installment is the first in a charmingly irregular series we should probably call “Why We Published It,” which debuts with Vanessa’s response to Anne Hawk’s The Pages of the Sea.

Photo: You can pre-order a copy of The Pages of the Sea today!

As a kid growing up in southeastern Pennsylvania in the 1980s, I spent a lot of time by myself. We lived on the rural outskirts of an already rural place, four miles from a town of fewer than 1,600. Between the turquoise waters of the public swimming pool—what was to me, at age six, the hallowed centre of the known universe—and the farmhouse I grew up in: cornfields and fields of tobacco and soy, rolling hills and the rocky glens and old-growth trees that stair-step the lower third of the the county down to the wide Susquehanna. A trip into town to the grocery store or drive-through at the bank was a source of excitement, and seeing my father’s brown Ford Ranger emerge from behind the woods at the top of the ridge that formed the southern edge of the little valley we lived in engendered a chanting sort of song that I’d sing as he made the left hand turn onto our little road, technically two lanes, but closer to one and a half, and into the long stone drive at the end of a day he’d spent pumping gas and changing tires at the gas station in town.

When I was eight or nine, my father got a new job, one that required he wake at 4:30 in the morning and drive an hour to a welding shop where, from what I could tell, he spent the day burning tiny holes in his t-shirts. Around this time, my mother stopped her part-time work cleaning houses and took a night shift stocking shelves at the grocery store. Now she slept all day, and left for her job as my father was coming home, exhausted, from his. What did I know, what did I know, as Robert Hayden asked, of the sacrifices they made, what it took from them to meet their responsibilities the best they could? Not much, if anything at all.

I did know there was a meadow with a modest herd of Holsteins and that sometimes there was a bull, and when that was the case I could not climb the metal gate or slip under the barbed wire to take the old dirt footpath along the dry creek to the tree with the bent trunk, the moss-covered one I liked to sit on. I knew I had to make myself lunch in the summer, and quietly, so as to not wake my mother, and when she was promoted, for her hard work, to a daytime position, I knew where we kept the key to the front door to let myself in after school. I can’t remember if I was told to lock it behind me: probably not. But other than these rules and similar, and school, and church most Sundays, I was left almost entirely to my own devices. I swung on the tire swing that hung from the weeping willow, and played in the sandbox, and practiced with my youth-sized recurve bow, shooting at a stack of haybales against the barn. I kicked a soccer ball against a wall and practiced free throws in the driveway and shot my BB gun at the stop sign on top of the hill, straining to hear the faint ping. I walked the fencerows back towards the deeper woods as far as I was not afraid to go, and I read stacks and stacks and stacks of books.

***

Books: have we come round, at last, to the point? The Pages of the Sea, a debut novel by Anne Hawk, landed in my inbox one day in April courtesy of Dan, who’d received it from the good people at Weatherglass Books, an independent press in the UK. I took a galley home and started reading that night. (Some childhood habits, happily, never change.) In the opening scene, Wheeler, the novel’s young protagonist, is sitting outside watching her aunt, Celeste, go in and out of the house:

We quickly learn that Wheeler and her two sisters have recently moved into the house they now share with their two aunts and three cousins because their mother has gone overseas to work in England, and “[e]ach month a postal order arrived from England covering the sisters’ room and board.”

When Tant’Celeste speaks to Wheeler, it’s to ask a question she can’t answer: where the rest of the children have gone. When Wheeler doesn’t respond, Celeste sends her to look for them, and when she returns alone, she’s not sure what to make of her aunt’s response:

It’s a beautiful piece of exposition, these opening four pages: Hawk immerses us in Wheeler’s world, capturing the child’s discomfort in the unfamiliar situation and her uncertainty about the mysterious actions and emotions of adults, and establishing both conflict and setting, one inextricable from the other. Wheeler’s interior monologue, written in the rich cadences of her native Caribbean English, with dialogue rendered in the same, voice the lived experience of a time and place and together join a standard English narration in what Hawk describes as a collaboration between Englishes that complement and often overlap each other. It’s a technique that puts me in mind of Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston’s brilliant vernacular novel of the American South, which starts gazing out towards a metaphorical sea and then introduces a young protagonist growing up without a father or mother, and of another of our favourite Biblioasis books: Roy Jacobsen’s The Unseen, with its inventive English translation, by Don Bartlett and Don Shaw, of an untranslatable Norwegian dialect—and another novel that begins with a small girl living on a small island, wondering about the world of adults. Like both of those books—one a classic of Modern literature, one an International Booker finalist and bestselling Biblioasis novel—this one welcomes its readers into its world on its own terms from a position of imaginative generosity and of love. It’s often said a great book teaches you how to read it: let me be one of the first, and certainly not the last, to say this is a great book.

For reasons likely obvious by now, my response was: sign it up. And so I couldn’t be more pleased to be writing this to you, Dear Reader, the week before the Canadian publication of Anne Hawk’s brilliant debut novel, The Pages of the Sea. I hope it will find you, wherever you are and wherever you are from, and it will remind you what literature is for. And I hope you’ll stay tuned for September 27, when The Bibliophile will feature an original essay by Anne Hawk on Caribbean English.

BC readers: Upstart & Crow will host the launch of The Pages of the Sea on October 3, 2024 at 7:00PM.

Vanessa Stauffer
Managing Editor

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Media Hits: THE NOTEBOOK, A WAY TO BE HAPPY, MAY OUR JOY ENDURE, and more!

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IN THE NEWS!

THE NOTEBOOK

The Notebook by Roland Allen (Sep 3, 2024) was excerpted in Lit Hub on September 9. You can check out the excerpt, “Paper Trail: On the Cross-Cultural Evolution of the Notebook” here.

Roland Allen was interviewed by Piya Chattopadhyay for CBC Sunday Magazine. The interview was posted on September 8, and you can check it out in full here.

Grab The Notebook here!

A WAY TO BE HAPPY

A Way to Be Happy by Caroline Adderson (Sep 10, 2024) has been longlisted for the Giller Prize, and is showing up on a number of lists! Publishers Weekly (Sep 5), CBC Books (Sep 4), and Quill & Quire (Sep 4) have all posted about the longlist.

A Way to Be Happy was also highlighted in the Georgia Straight as one of the five books on the Giller longlist by BC authors. You can check out that article here.

A Way to Be Happy was reviewed in the BC Review on September 4. You can read the full review online here.

Reviewer Bill Paul writes,

“For each story, Adderson expertly develops a detailed setting . . . [and] the author carefully constructs vivid characters from every walk of life. Each one of them making their way to some undetermined fate.”

Grab A Way to Be Happy here!

MAY OUR JOY ENDURE

May Our Joy Endure by Kev Lambert, translated by Donald Winkler (Sep 3, 2024), was mentioned in the New York Times in an interview with writer Garth Greenwell. The article was published online on September 5, and you can read the it here.

Kev Lambert was interviewed by Steven W. Beattie about May Our Joy Endure for Quill and Quire, published online on September 5, 2024. You can read the full interview here.

Lambert says in the interview,

“I wanted to challenge the idea that humanizing the person you critique is giving them credit. We hear this sometimes in political or media circles. But I think it’s a fake or a wrong idea . . . I’m starting to think that we should try to have empathy. Which doesn’t mean stop criticizing or saying everything’s fine because we have empathy. But I think it gives you an understanding of humans that is more accurate and more useful for political engagement.”

May Our Joy Endure was listed as one of The Walrus‘s “Best Books of Fall 2024.” The article was published online on September 4, 2024, and you can read it here.

Contributor Michelle Cyca writes,

“Who hasn’t wished a little divine retribution upon the ultrarich for all their sins? Kevin Lambert’s third novel, nimbly translated by Donald Winkler, is an icy, cerebral social novel . . . showcasing Lambert’s gimlet eye for the delusions and designer preferences of the 1 percent.”

May Our Joy Endure also appeared on the Daily Kos‘s list of “Contemporary Fiction Views: A new book season is about to begin,” posted online September 3. You can check out the full article here.

Grab May Our Joy Endure here!

THE PAGES OF THE SEA

The Pages of the Sea by Anne Hawk (Sep 17, 2024) was included in the Toronto Star‘s list of “25 books worthy of a place at the top of your to-read pile.” The list was published on September 1, 2024, and you can view it here.

Get Pages of the Sea here!

UTOPIAN GENERATION

The Utopian Generation by Pepetela, translated by David Brookshaw (Aug 13, 2024), was reviewed in the Literary Review of Canada. The review will appear in print in their October issue.

The LRC writes,

“A classic post-colonial text . . . This sweeping novel, which moves in roughly ten-year increments from 1961 to 1991, tells the steadily absorbing story of ‘how a generation embarks on a glorious struggle for independence and then destroys itself.'”

Get The Utopian Generation here!

CROSSES IN THE SKY

Crosses in the Sky: Jean de Brébeuf and the Destruction of Huronia by Mark Bourrie (May 21, 2024) was reviewed in The Millstone on August 29. Read the full review here.

Edith Cody-Rice writes,

“[A] fascinating and engrossing tale . . . a meticulously researched book . . . It told me, on nearly every page, something I did not know about the history of this province, of the lives lived here in the 17th century.”

Crosses in the Sky was also mentioned in an interview between actress & director Kaniehtiio Horn and interviewer Jim Slotek in Original Cin, posted on September 5. Check out the article here.

Grab Crosses in the Sky here!

CASE STUDY

Case Study by Graeme Macrae Burnet was included in the Globe and Mail‘s list of “Books we’re reading and loving in September.” The list was published on September 5, and you can check it out here.

Ian Brown writes,

“Graeme Macrae Burnet’s Case Study (longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize) is the best type of novel: the sharply crafted, deeply intelligent but compulsively readable kind . . . As soon as you stop reading, you’ll want to read it again.”

Get Case Study here!

Preorder Burnet’s forthcoming book, A Case of Matricide, here!

The Bibliophile: The Happiness Update

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***

I first came across Caroline Adderson‘s work in university. I’d recently fallen in love with the short story—“Do you want to read some good shit?” my second-year creative writing prof had asked, putting Clark Blaise’s Tribal Justice and A North American Education into my hands: I did, it was some good shit, and I was very hungry for more of the same. I was also hungry for a job that didn’t involve picking flecks of metal out of my flesh at the end of every shift, a job that didn’t have me dreaming of sulphurous light and didn’t leave my hand clenched throughout the night around the trigger of an invisible welding gun. I wanted to work in a bookshop. But no one seemed to want me to work in one. I wasn’t cool enough to work at South Shore Books, and the lady on Park Street who sold leftist philosophy scared me so much I couldn’t muster the courage to drop off a resume. The Bookmark and the chain stores downtown and at the mall never called me back. And Anne Beer at the Bookroom at the Court couldn’t afford staff, though she’d be happy to train me as a bookseller if I volunteered. So I did, riding my bike down to her shop one Sunday for my first shift. I spent all of it dragging an industrial carpet cleaner across her floors, wondering all the while what exactly this had to do with being a bookseller (Anne: I understand completely now). When I was finished, she let me select a few books as compensation. I remember grabbing a blue cloth hardcover of Jowett’s translation of Plato’s Dialogues, and then I started browsing in the CanLit section. This was a new concept to me. And there was Blaise, Man and His World, and from the same publisher, with the weird little figure on the spine, a story collection called Bad Imaginings, by Caroline Adderson. I’d never heard of her, but the stories sounded interesting and it was cheap, so I added it to the pile.

Photo: Caroline Adderson’s newest collection of short stories, A Way to Be Happy, comes out September 10!

If Blaise had been my gateway to the pleasures of the short story, it was perhaps Adderson who made me an addict. I read her first collection with intense pleasure, marveling at the range and style and humour. So many short story writers’ work seemed to me at the time to be set within the slightly fluctuating boundaries of their personal universes: in Bad Imaginings, one travelled galaxies, moving back and forth through time and historical situations. Here were stories that were rich and clear-eyed and playful and generous, stories that felt, and widely.

I’ve read almost everything that Caroline’s written since, all of her adult work and even, in bed with one of my children, much of her kid lit (Very Serious Children is a family favourite). All of it shows the same generosity and playfulness. I loved her novels, especially A History of Forgetting and Sitting Practice (we have republished a new version of the former, alongside Bad Imaginings: each is worth picking up). In 2006, another collection, Pleased to Meet You, was as rich and varied as her first. After that, the odd story would show up in magazines, The Walrus and The New Quarterly and elsewhere, and we even published a couple in CNQ: Canadian Notes & Queries, and these I read (and sometimes reread) devoutly. But as time passed—and a lot of it did, nearly two decades worth—I became increasingly impatient for a new collection. This, for me, has always been Gold Mountain.

Photo: Check out some of these previously published books by Caroline Adderson!

This makes next Tuesday’s publication of Caroline’s A Way to Be Happy an especially gratifying experience. As a massive fan, I’ve waited too damn long. As a publisher, there’s no one in the country I’d wanted to work with on something new for a longer time. The stories in A Way to Be Happy range as widely and wildly—from a nineteenth-century women’s prison for the insane that gives me Small Things Like These vibes (though less cold, less moralizing, and with far more humour and compassion); to a story of a terminally ill Russian hitman, on what is almost certainly his final job, scouring his memory for something to take him into the darkness; to a story of two addicts crashing posh New Year’s Eve parties to rob the guests in hopes of funding their eventual recovery—as anything in her previous collections. The story “Homing” has made me cry every single time I’ve read it—and I’ve read it a lot!—and not from sadness but from hope, relief, and happiness. That’s a hard trick to manage, but Adderson does it. This is as generous (yes, that word, again) and as adventurous and as humane a collection as there can be.

Almost all of us have reservations, especially within the publishing industry, over the centrality of prizes in our literary culture. As a publisher, the relief I feel when a book of ours is nominated is almost immediately overwhelmed by a wave of disappointment and bitterness for those others on our list that didn’t make (apt phrase, this) the cut. (When the Giller people called to tell us Caroline’s book had made it onto the longlist, I had to bite my tongue not to respond with “And…?”) But I am nevertheless deeply grateful that Caroline’s work has been highlighted by the Giller jury, and if the nomination brings her more readers and more critical acclaim, as it should, because she deserves both, then I am doubly grateful. As I would be if you, dear reader, ordered the book from your local independent or through the website (or wherever else you get your books) after you finished this. Whether you read it cover to cover, or dip in a story at a time, I’m certain that reading this collection offers a way for you to be happy, as reading and working on it and now publishing it has made me so. And who, these days, couldn’t use a little help in that department

Dan Wells
Publisher

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THE WORLD AT MY BACK longlisted for the National Translation Award in Prose!

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We’re thrilled to share the news that The World at My Back by Thomas Melle, translated from the German by Luise von Flotow, has been longlisted for the 2024 National Translation Award in Prose! The longlist was announced on September 5, and you can view the full announcement here.

The judges citation reads,

“With The World at My Back, author Thomas Melle takes us into the harrowing world of bipolar disorder, chronicling the effect it has had on him and his relationships. Yet he does this with such remarkable aplomb that the reader now laughs, now cries at his predicament. As an author, playwright, and translator, Melle is very much embedded in the cultural life of a German writer, and it is against that backdrop that the episodes swing from manic to depressive to clinical—all cleverly captured in Luise von Flotow’s remarkably nimble translation.”

The NTAs are awarded annually in poetry and in prose to literary translators who have made an outstanding contribution to literature in English by masterfully recreating the artistic force of a book of consummate quality. Established in 2018, the NTA, which is administered by American Literary Translators Association (ALTA), is the only national award for translated fiction, poetry, and literary nonfiction that includes a rigorous examination of both the source text and its relation to the finished English work.

The shortlists for the National Translation Awards will be announced on October 10th, and the winners will be announced on October 26th at an Awards Ceremony as part of ALTA’s annual conference, ALTA47: Voices in Translation, in Milwaukee, WI. The winning translators will receive a $4,000 cash prize each.

Grab your copy of The World at My Back here!

ABOUT THE WORLD AT MY BACK

Longlisted for the 2024 National Translation Award in Prose • A Finalist for the German Book Prize • Translated into Eighteen Languages

Addicted to culture, author Thomas Melle has built up an impressive personal library. His heart is in these books, and he loves to feel them at his back, their promise and challenge, as he writes. But in the middle of a violent dissociative episode, when they become ballast to his increasingly manic self, he disperses almost overnight what had taken decades to gather. Nor is this all he loses: descending further into an incomprehensible madness, he loses friendships and his career as a novelist and celebrated playwright, but the most savage cruelty is that he no longer either knows or understands himself.

Vulnerable and claustrophobic, shattering and profoundly moving, Thomas Melle’s The World at My Back is a book dedicated to the impossibility of reclaiming what has been lost, its lines both a prayer and reminder that, on the other side of madness, other possibilities await.

ABOUT THOMAS MELLE

Born in Bonn, Germany, Thomas Melle studied at the University of Tübingen, the University of Texas at Austin, and the Free University of Berlin. His novels Sickster and 3000 Euros were finalists for German Book Prize in 2011 and 2014 respectively. Melle is also a prolific playwright and translator. His translations from English to German have ranged from plays by William Shakespeare to novels by William T. Vollmann. The World at My Back, also a finalist for the German Book Prize, was a bestseller in Germany. It was made into a highly successful stage play, and has been translated into eighteen languages. Thomas Melle lives in Berlin.

ABOUT LUISE VON FLOTOW

Luise von Flotow teaches translation studies at the University of Ottawa School of Translation and Interpretation. Her recent translations include, from German, They Divided the Sky by Christa Wolf, and Everyone Talks About the Weather…We Don’t by Ulrike Meinhof; and, from French, The Four Roads Hotel by France Théoret. She has twice been a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Literary Translation.

A WAY TO BE HAPPY longlisted for the 2024 Giller Prize!

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Biblioasis is thrilled to share that Caroline Adderson‘s A Way to Be Happy (Sep 10, 2024) has been longlisted for the 2024 Giller Prize! The longlist was announced this morning, on September 4 at 11:30 AM, and you can view the full list here.

In a statement, Biblioasis publisher Dan Wells writes,

“All of us at Biblioasis couldn’t be happier for Caroline. I’ve been a fan of Caroline’s work, and her short fiction in particular, since first coming across her initial collection, Bad Imaginings, in a used bookstore when I was in university: I found the stories in that collection—which we eventually reissued at the press—smart, elegant, sharp-eyed, and generously funny. The same is true of the stories in this, her third collection, A Way to Be Happy, which is as wide-ranging and deeply imagined as a collection can be, and should serve to cement Caroline’s reputation as among the leading writers in the country.”

The Giller Prize is awarded annually to a Canadian novel or short story collection published that year. The winner receives $100,000 and the shortlisted authors each receive $10,000. The shortlist will be announced on Wednesday, October 9, and the winner will be announced Monday, November 18. This year’s 2024 Giller jury was comprised of authors Kevin Chong and Noah Richler, and singer-songwriter Molly Johnson. Previous winners of the prize include Sarah Bernstein, Suzette Mayr, Esi Edugyan, André Alexis, Michael Ondaatje, and Souvankham Thammavongsa.

Get your copy of A Way to Be Happy here!

ABOUT A WAY TO BE HAPPY

Longlisted for the 2024 Giller Prize

Short stories about disparate characters consider what it means to find happiness.

Credit: Jessica Whitman

Credit: Jessica Whitman

On New Year’s Eve, a pair of addicts robs a string of high-end parties in order to fund their own recovery. A recently separated woman relocates to a small northern town, where she receives a life-changing visitation, and a Russian hitman, suffering from a mysterious lung ailment, retrieves long-buried memories of his past. In the nineteenth century, a disparate group of women coalesce in the attempt to aid a young girl in her escape from a hospital for the insane. These are but some of the remarkable characters who populate these stories, all of them grappling with conflicts ranging from mundane to extraordinary. Caroline Adderson’s A Way to Be Happy considers what it means to find happiness—and how often it comes through the grace of others.

ABOUT CAROLINE ADDERSON

Caroline Adderson is the author of five novels (A Russian Sister, Ellen in Pieces, The Sky Is Falling, Sitting Practice, and A History of Forgetting), two previous collections of short stories (Pleased to Meet You and Bad Imaginings), as well as many books for young readers. Her award nominations include the Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, two Commonwealth Writers’ Prizes, the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Rogers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and the Scotiabank Giller Prize longlist. The recipient of three BC Book Prizes, three CBC Literary Awards, and the Marian Engel Award for mid-career achievement, Caroline lives and writes in Vancouver.

 

Media Hits & Awards: ON CLASS, MAY OUR JOY ENDURE, THE NOTEBOOK, and more!

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IN THE NEWS!

MAY OUR JOY ENDURE

May Our Joy Endure by Kevin Lambert, translated by Donald Winkler (Sep 3, 2024), appeared on Lit Hub‘s list of “27 new books out today.” The list was published on September 3, and you can check it out here.

The list features Heather O’Neill’s blurb:

“Baroque and philosophical, May Our Joy Endure captures the sensibilities and excesses of the elite. A novel about the housing crisis told from the perspective of those causing it . . . Lambert’s writing is lyrical and rapturous. In this book, he proves himself a satirical and whimsical Robespierre, hailing from small town Quebec.”

May Our Joy Endure also featured on All Lit Up‘s list of “Book Recommendations to follow The Rage Letters.” The article was posted on August 28, and you can read it here.

Grab May Our Joy Endure here!

THE NOTEBOOK

The Notebook by Roland Allen (Sep 3, 2024) was excerpted in The Walrus. The excerpt, titled “Moleskine Mania: How a Notebook Conquered the Digital Era,” was published online on August 30, and you can read it in full here.

Roland Allen contributed a feature to the Globe and Mail, which published online on August 30. You can check out the article, “In a world of screens, the humble notebook remains the best way to learn,” here.

The Notebook was also reviewed in Angelus News on August 30. You can read the full review here.

Reviewer Heather King writes,

“[The Notebook] celebrates the age-old practice of writing things down—numbers, images, thoughts, dreams—and charts the evolution of this handy, humble little item that many of us consider indispensable.”

Grab The Notebook here!

THE FUTURE

The Future by Catherine Leroux, translated by Susan Ouriou (Sep 5, 2023) was featured on CBC Books’ list, “These 14 writers recently won some of Canada’s biggest literary awards.” The list, which highlighted The Future‘s 2024 Canada Reads win and Carol Shields Prize longlisting, was posted on August 30, and you can read it here.

Grab The Future here!

THE PAGES OF THE SEA

The Pages of the Sea by Anne Hawk (Sep 17, 2024) appeared on Toronto.com’s list of “25 books worthy of a place at the top of your to-read pile.” The list was posted on September 1, and you can read it in full here.

Grab The Pages of the Sea here!

CROSSES IN THE SKY

Crosses in the Sky: Jean de Brébeuf and the Destruction of Huronia by Mark Bourrie (May 21, 2024) was featured on 49th Shelf‘s list of recommendations, “Grappling With History.” The article was posted on August 26, and you can check it out here.

Marianne K. Miller writes,

“Mark Bourrie tackles the mythology around the Jesuit missionary priest, Jean de Brebeuf. It is a different story than the one you thought you knew.”

Get Crosses in the Sky here!

HELLO, HORSE

Hello, Horse by Richard Kelly Kemick (Aug 6, 2024) was reviewed in Everything Zoomer! The review was posted online on August 15, and you can read it here.

Everything Zoomer writes,

“The year 2024 has Richard Kelly Kemick, whose wild imagination and fresh insights cast a spell in Hello, Horse; every entrancing story casts off in a different direction, with a genuine ‘wait? what?!’ moment you did not see coming . . . Kemick, a poet and playwright and National Magazine Award gold medal-winner, is one to watch.”

Grab Hello, Horse here!

AWARDS NEWS!

ON CLASS

We’re thrilled to share that On Class by Deborah Dundas is a nominee for the 2024 Heritage Toronto Book Award. The nominees were announced on September 3, 2024, and you can check out the full list here.

The Heritage Toronto Book Award highlights the breadth and depth of Toronto’s heritage, covering topics from music history, to public infrastructure, to immigration and multiculturalism. The award ceremony will take place on Monday, October 28, 2024 at The Carlu (444 Yonge Street).

Grab a copy of On Class here!

The Bibliophile: May You Enjoy Your Stuff

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

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Lots of exercises are tricky: distinguishing your backlist from your frontlist; packing up your life and moving to another city; burpees. In last week’s newsletter, Vanessa helped with the first item. This week, I plan to help with the second. May god help you with the third.

I have had at least seven different mailing addresses across three cities over the last ten years. It might not be surprising then that I’ve become proficient at packing my life into boxes and bags and have completely given up on owning hangable artwork (I get tattoos now). To clarify, I never set out to be a digital nomad or minimalist. My circumstances have dictated that I choose which physical things to own very carefully. Having (approximately) exactly what you need makes the packing and moving process a lot less painful than it otherwise would be. You don’t want to trip while you’re carrying a box of deteriorating Teflon non-stick pans down a winding staircase (true story).

Photo: You can pick up a copy of May Our Joy Endure September 3, 2024.

These days, I tend to only keep material goods that bring a high degree of utility and aesthetic value to my life. The mugs that I own, for instance, are all different sizes and represent my various interests from wabi-sabi interior design to Star Wars. I also tend to only keep books I would re-read, find beautiful to look at, and are comfortable to hold. Until our author interview with Kev Lambert, I hadn’t paid too much conscious attention to what these items say about me. Kev, by the way, is the author of Que Notre Joie Demeure, a runaway bestseller that was shortlisted for the 2023 Goncourt Prize, and won the 2023 Médicis Prize (making Kev the first Canadian writer in a couple of generations to win this most prestigious of French awards). Donald Winkler’s translation into English, May Our Joy Endure will be available September 3, 2024. The novel transports readers into the lives of the ultra-privileged, primarily following Céline Wachowski, an internationally renowned architect who is accused of destroying struggling neighborhoods in Montreal with her plans for a newly commissioned project—the Webuy Complex. In a time of widening wealth disparity and rising costs of living, Céline’s depicted lavish lifestyle is simultaneously alluring and terrible. When we asked about their intentions behind these details in May Our Joy Endure, Kev shared some nice food for thought about our relationship to material things:

Q:

Let’s talk about the stuff in this novel, from the fashion (Comme des Garçons, Vivienne Westwood and Marie St. Pierre), to the books (from Lacan, to Tremblay, to Proust), to the wine, (they don’t drink white, they drink Sancerre), to the architectural materials (one of the characters has Corten Steel on the front door of his house which is beautiful but he fears was too trendy and is now dated). This is a novel about material culture that is very detailed in terms of what our culture is made of and how it is all put together. Why are these details important to both the novel’s aesthetic and its ambivalent perspective on cultural “makers” to use an ascendant if dubious term.

A:

There’s a sociological aspect to these decisions: these are all signs of distinction. Céline is ultra-rich but she doesn’t see herself as vulgar. Even if Céline is, in fact, nouveau riche because her money isn’t old, she certainly doesn’t want to be seen as nouveau riche, because she wants to be seen as a kind of radical aesthetic figure of the avant-garde. She has to communicate this in her style. She couldn’t wear Chanel because it’s too conservative and classic. So there’s an aspect of the referentiality that is character development. While I’m critical of these objects that are completely caught up in a capitalist culture of consumerism, there are still brilliant people who have thought about these clothes in an aesthetic way. You don’t need to own the object to see it and to understand its value. These materials in the novel also operate as a kind of intertextuality—the fashion designers the characters wear, the art on their walls, the food they eat, the opening nights they attend, it’s never insignificant. It’s a way of winking at the reader, of encouraging them to gain some critical distance from the world of Céline and of the novel at one moment and of pulling them in closer the next.

Photo: Kev’s Biblioasis books May Our Joy Endure, Querelle of Roberval, and You Will Love What You Have Killed.

So, as it is at the conclusion of a move, there seems to be much to unpack in May Our Joy Endure. The things we own might be valuable insofar as they: help us do things, mean something to us, and reflect us back into the world. To make matters more complex, this value might change over time as when our phone batteries die and cease to function (thanks to planned obsolescence) or when you can suddenly pull a leopard print coat from the back of your closet to look cool on a night out (thanks to the trending ‘mob wife aesthetic’). And presumably, we tend to hold onto our valuables and are more willing to let go of the less valuable. Quick—you can only grab three things on your way out of your burning home—what are you rescuing? The exercise of moving homes forces you to entertain a less intense version of this thought experiment, though it still confronts you about your relationship to everything you own.

Unlike the nouveau riche characters in May Our Joy Endure, I have grown into the habit of gently decluttering regularly and being very slow to purchase or borrow new-to-me things. My turnover of things has decreased, which in turn, has increased my awareness and appreciation for the things I have. It just so happens that this also reduces the stress associated with packing up your life and moving onto your next chapter since you already have a good idea of what to bring.

Julia Lei
Publicist

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