Archive for category: Latest News

 

Most days she’s here working her magic to get attention for other people’s books, but today we’re overjoyed to announce that Casey’s own book, Little Fish (Arsenal Pulp Press), has won Amazon Canada’s first novel award! We’re absolutely thrilled for you, Casey!!

Read all about it here and here.

 

STIGMATIZED, SILENCED EXPERIENCE: Mike Barnes’s Braille Rainbow and Shane Neilson’s New Brunswick candidly explore disability, abuse, physical pain, and mental illness. Both poets’ speakers struggle to love, or even to recognize, themselves:

          the bitterest irony is the self

          imitating itself at every level

          until even emptiness fails to inhabit

writes Barnes; Neilson echoes,

          The fable

          of a man is told in two versions, one for ear

          and one for hand. We come from the same

          land but differ. Pain and love I do not understand.

Each may come closest to self-acceptance in his empathy with the downtrodden and forgotten—labourers, displaced nations, linguistic minorities, the homeless, the (in Barnes’s words) “shocked, drugged, poor.” Both speakers’ bodies vibrate in resonance with violences of the past:

          I do

          impressions of you, Father, with my fist

writes Neilson, and Barnes echoes,

          [you] blackened her memory with chars and twists

          I have longed to visit upon you with fists.

And yet both poets write of attending with great compassion at the bedsides of the ill and dying. Neilson, a physician, is helpless beside his mother’s deathbed:

          Voiceless, with a tube

          in her throat, my mother wrote:

          Will I live? . . .

          Wheeze makes onomatopoeia

          of witness. We. My answer a plural plea

          of a rural, unwritten No.

Barnes, whose most recent previous book is a memoir of caring for his mother at the end of her life, could be writing the same scene in “Tangent: Lines by a Bed”:

          In. Out? Spirit bubble in your throat the whole

          globe’s turning. Hold it, floating, a moment longer.

In Barnes’s “Secure Ward,” it’s impossible to tell whether the speaker is the patient or the carer. Neilson’s speaker is the same:

          On a good day, sense rejects us.

          But then trajectory alters. Beds

          change to church, riverbank, hospital.

          These speakers both heal and are ill.

These books do not compete, but complement one another: if New Brunswick is a work of modernist erudition and collage, then Braille Rainbow is one of Buddhist acceptance and commitment to the here, the now. New Brunswick returns obsessively to the province of Neilson’s birth and practically exhausts its timeline, from 1534 to today. Braille Rainbow announces the futility of revisiting the past, seeking peace through a minute, scale-shifting attention to

          this place made only of

          particulars: one bed, one bureau, two scuffed

          chairs

—allowing a tiny bug to become the

          dome

          of some microscopic faith.

Without knowing one another’s projects, Barnes and Neilson imitate one another at odd moments. Both call out to ancestors literal and figurative; both poets’ broken speakers allow themselves to imagine redemption.               But in the harshest cry, I’ve heard

          the right word, love . . .

          Think of care, love,

          do we use that word,

          do we use it enough?

And Barnes echoes,

          Hold hands when one or both of you

          is going into the dark, and hold hands when one

          of you doesn’t come back. Keep holding hands

          a little longer when an official- or kind-sounding voice

          tells you it’s time to go, because it

          isn’t quite. Not yet. Hold hands.

This spring, we at Biblioasis offer two painful, breaking poetic voices that despite themselves, somehow, hold one another’s hands.

 

Elise Levine’s book of wry, bittersweet, character-driven stories, This Wicked Tongue, will be available in US bookstores on June 25. It’ll be in Canadian bookstores on May 28. But we can’t wait! We want Elise Levine now!

To tide us over, Elise Levine kindly consented to answer a few of our questions.

 

A Biblioasis Interview with Elise Levine, author of This Wicked Tongue

For those who are coming to your work for the first time, can you tell us a little about yourself and your writing?

This Wicked Tongue is my fourth book. My first is the story collection Driving Men Mad, and sandwiched between these two story collections I’ve had two novels published, Blue Field and Requests and Dedications. My fiction is highly compressed, employing charged, layered language and narratives that are propulsive and elliptical. Formally stylized, my work is, however, predominantly character-driven, excavating lives gripped by estrangement and imperilled by silence, and yet urged toward the need to transcend and engage.

I’ve always written about driven characters: obsessive risk-takers seeking to free themselves from tangled emotional legacies; marginalized, pressured characters. This Wicked Tongue examines the urge to break faith with expectations and rewrite the scripts of the past. The stories feature my most formally exploratory fiction to date, at times employing hybrid narrative techniques as well as fabulist elements and fairy-tale motifs. The stories also range from flash to near-novella-length. I’m currently working on The Takeaway, two linked novellas. They’re a mix of crime novel, flash prose, and prose poem. Yes, they’re pretty weird.

The stories in This Wicked Tongue vary widely in their settings, from medieval England to a future dystopian landscape to various places in contemporary North America. Do you have a favourite place and time for setting stories? How do you know what place and time each story belongs in?

I’m really interested in how our environments shape and even at times seem to mirror us. It’s as if we somehow mysteriously find our truest or maybe falsest (who’s to say?) selves in places that speak to our psychological needs during pressured times in our lives.

I don’t have a favourite setting that I fall back on, but for This Wicked Tongue I gravitated to settings that amplify the characters’ sense of literal or psychological leave-taking or return, critical experiences which provide a linking motif for the collection as a whole.

When I first get the idea for a story, character and setting are usually among the first elements that occur to me, seemingly out of the blue. As I develop the story, I increasingly realize why the setting is integral to the character—that it, how much it helps to reveal the character. Over many (so many!) drafts I try to sharpen this dynamic between setting and character, in hopes of translating this to the reader.

Some characters recur in more than one story. What draws you back to a character? Is Martin, for example (who appears in one story as a preteen boy and another as a grown man facing his mother’s mortality and his husband’s desire for children), likely to crop up in future story collections or possibly in a novel of his own?

I return to characters when I feel there’s unfinished business—when there’s another entire but related facet of their story to explore. The ideas keep coming, and I can’t stuff them all in one story without it collapsing under the weight of details and emotional unfoldings, and “infoldings”, as I think of them—the interior layers hidden within.

Martin, oh Martin! He really needed the space of two relatively long stories. So much going on with that guy. But I’m sure he won’t reappear. Some of the beauty of short stories compared to novels is how the brevity serves poignancy as we hover at the edge of possibility, doom or gloom. In Martin’s case, it seemed best to leave him at twin poised moments between who he is, who he might become.

How does This Wicked Tongue explore gender concerns?

I think all the stories in This Wicked Tongue are implicitly and in some cases explicitly concerned with gender. The characters grapple with and chafe against the constraints of received notions of how to be in the world, in particular the circumscribing conventions regarding masculinity and woman- or girlhood. It’s a significant—though not the only—factor in how some of the characters live out impaired ways of being that inflict and self-inflict emotional damage. Or how some of the characters seek ways to break faith with expectation, envisioning and risking new lives and worlds in which they might suffer more, or heal.

You often show your characters’ least flattering thoughts, impulses, and actions. Can you talk about why exploring characters’ less likable sides is important to you?

Yes! Making bad choices, and by extension being one’s own best villain, seems to have powered much of narrative in the Western tradition, from ancient Greek tragedy on down. Make a bad choice, be less than who you might have been, but learn who you really are, beyond the self-delusions. Or don’t learn—this can provide an equally illuminating experience for the audience.

I’m equal opportunity when it comes to the gender of my characters and their capacity to be stupid, manipulative, well-intentioned but ineffective, blind, cruel. And also, sentimental, clear-eyed, smart, loving, compassionate, visionary, ethical, goofy, wry. I believe bad-assery in whatever shape or form knows no bounds nor should it.

I’m also very interested in the various literary traditions and tropes of women as monsters, which I interpret broadly as humans who refuse to conform to gendered expectations, from the Sirens on up through mermaids and femmes fatales to contemporary mean girls — feminized figures with voices (and who enact corresponding deeds) socially deemed either terrifically unpleasant or so captivating they lure the unsuspecting to their deaths. So much anxiety seems to still revolve around what are perceived as contesting voices.

What are you reading right now?

Right now I’m reading a linked story collection by Gabino Iglesias called Coyote Songs. It’s been described as barrio noir and horror, and features stories about la frontera, life along the Mexico-US border.

I’m not a great multi-tasker, so I tend to read only one book at a time and concentrate on it — so I’ll mention some books I’ve read recently, and loved. A Lucky Man by Jamel Brinkley. Jen George’s The Babysitter At Rest. Something for Everyone by Lisa Moore. Han Kang’s The White Book. Zolitude by Paige Cooper. Jenny Xie’s Eye Level. Sabrina Orah Mark’s Wild Milk. Also Last Days by Brian Evenson. And Danez Smith’s Don’t Call Us Dead.

 

Lucy Ellmann’s hilarious chapbook I Dated Graham Greene is almost ready for Independent Booksellers Day! Are you?

If you haven’t got your copies of this beautiful little chapbook yet ($7.00 USD/$8.00 CAD), email thummer@biblioasis.com.

 

I never feel too sure I know what I’m doing in a bookstore. The Country of the Pointed Firs. These are places for bookish people, people who can’t get enough of books. I have plenty of books at home that I haven’t read yet. Bibliophiles. They wallow in the smell of books, the look of books, the aura of books, the passive readiness of books to be found and bought and absorbed. Or collected, anyway. Books mean a lot to me, or they do in retrospect, but when confronted with a plateful, I take them with a pinch of salt. The Painter of Signs.

* * *

National Independent Bookstore Day is April 27, 2019.

We’ll be celebrating at Biblioasis Bookshop as well as by publishing “I Dated Graham Greene” by Lucy Ellmann, author of Ducks, Newburyport, as a limited-edition chapbook, available for sale only at independent bookstores.

Bookstore stress triggers:

⏵Self-hatred, about my own ignorance of writers’s names and whole divisions of human thought: theosophy, astronomy, archery, accounting, Antarctica, animal husbandry, systems analysis, steam trains, Manga, orchids, forensics, and party-planning.

⏵Embarrassment, about how slowly I read and therefore how curtailed my reading has been, over my lifetime.

⏵Bewilderment, when I can’t find my way around. This happens to me no matter how small the store is.

⏵Amnesia, trying to remember all the books I meant to seek out.

⏵Fear of not finding what I want or, if I do find it, begrudging the cost.

⏵Disappointments, especially common in those halfempty bijou bookshops that only have one copy of no more than a hundred titles, curated for the color of their covers and how good they look facing outwards on the shelves.

⏵Geriatric affronts, when they don’t have the children’s books I remember.

⏵Bruising encounters with bookstore staff. Some are so gruff, some suspicious, some are eager beavers, some are never off the phone.

⏵Déjà vu, with all the usual suspects filling the shelves, as lurid as detergent packets: the cookbooks, thrillers, bestsellers, sci-fi, and exhaustive accounts of wild swimming, and the same in their audio versions. A good bookshop should teach a little taste, not just load you down with genre escapism and advice on adultery or cleaning your computer.

⏵Disgust, finding books like The Lovely Bones or anything by John Grisham given pride of place and a personal recommendation handwritten by an underling. While real novelists languish for want of a dime! In reality, though, fiction doesn’t sell. Cat books sell.

⏵Surprise in finding how prolific other contemporary writers are. Some people sure can pound the stuff out.

⏵A sudden sense of defeat, following such shocks. Feeling crushed, I start to plod around, searching the shelves for unlovely bones.