The Bibliophile Archives

The Mechanics of Obliviousness

April 24, 2026/in Latest News, The Bibliophile/by biblioasis

An excerpt from one of the last interviews with Elaine Dewar

I was heading down I-75 in Michigan on a short family vacation almost four years ago to the day that I am writing this note when my phone rang. It was Elaine Dewar. She’d been contacted by an Indigenous psychologist and teacher of Native Studies, Roland Chrisjohn, who had worked on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and he had urged her to investigate what he claimed were a series of unethical experiments conducted on Indigenous students by McGill psychologist Ewen Cameron as part of MK-Ultra. I was almost embarrassed to admit that I had no idea what she was talking about. She filled me in on the background. Her nose was tingling, she said; she could smell a big story, and though she wasn’t yet exactly sure of its contours, she knew she was on the cusp of something important. I had already worked with Elaine on two previous books and I knew enough to trust her instincts. I told her to keep at it and to let me know if she discovered anything.

Oblivious: Residential Schools, Segregated Hospitals, and the Use of Indigenous Peoples as Slaves of Race Science *by Elaine Dewar. Cover designed by Ingrid Paulson.*

What Elaine discovered is the subject of her final, most personal, and arguably most important book, Oblivious: Residential Schools, Segregated Hospitals, and the Use of Indigenous Peoples as Slaves of Race Science. If she found no evidence that Ewen Cameron conducted such experiments on Indigenous students, she found ample evidence that a range of unethical and race-based experiments had been performed over several decades on large swaths of Canada’s Indigenous population, often under false pretenses, dangling health care as a lure to command obeisance. As she dug, she also learned about the segregated Indian hospital system, which brought her back to her childhood in Saskatchewan as the daughter of a doctor, and challenged her to question how it is that she had remained so oblivious to what was happening to Canada’s Indigenous people for so long. So Elaine turned her fierce journalistic eye on herself to fact-check what she knew, what she should have known, and what governmental and psychological machinery had contributed to her own (and all of our) obliviousness in what she came to think of as Mississippi North.

The resulting book is many things: it’s a memoir of a young Jewish girl who grew up in the post-war prairies—the best place and time to be Jewish in the history of her people—and the story of how she became one of the fiercest investigative journalists this country has seen. It’s also an investigation into decades of unethical race-based experiments conducted by leading academics, institutions, and the government that did irreparable harm to Indigenous communities. It’s an investigation into the segregated Indian hospital system which existed in Canada for most of the twentieth century and still remains largely unknown outside of academic study; and it reveals that we gave control of substantial parts of Indigenous healthcare in the country between the mid-50s and 70s to a former Nazi doctor immersed in that regime’s ideas of hygiene, who came to the country in the early 1950s as a farm labourer before getting his accreditation and heading to the North, where he wielded tremendous authority over Indigenous people. It’s a book about the serial betrayal of trust, and the damage that continues to the present day as a result of it; and what must be done to acknowledge it if we’re ever going to repair the relations between Canada’s Indigenous people, our institutions, and the rest of our population. And perhaps most importantly, it’s an investigation into what she calls variously the machinery and architecture of obliviousness, the policies and beliefs and institutions and stories that allowed people not to see, or to quickly forget, the evidence that our country was complicit in the genocide of its Indigenous people.

*Photo: Elaine Dewar in hospice, with Greg Kelly and Nahlah Ayad from CBC.*

Elaine Dewar died after a short battle with an aggressive cancer in September 2025. I went to Toronto to work with her in hospice to finalize editorial before she ended her life via MAID; working with her over those days was one of the greatest and hardest pleasures of my professional life. I try to keep her example front of mind when I feel overwhelmed: her intelligence, care, humour, and rage at injustice continued until the end. As did her faith in her readers. It was you, about to embark on this, her last book, which provided her solace; that she’d been given enough time to do this necessary work and lay out her case. In this way, Oblivious is both a private and public accounting. Like Elaine, I too place my faith in you, and together this book will teach us to face up to what most of the time we’d prefer not to see, in the perpetual hope that we can together continue to move the needle in the direction of justice.

With respect and appreciation,

Dan Wells
Publisher

*Don’t miss our Toronto launch of Elaine Dewar’s* Oblivious *next week (April 29, at 6PM) at Massey College.*

Below is part of an interview between Elaine Dewar and friend and journalist Marci McDonald, recorded on September 15, 2025.

MM: How did this whole thing begin?

ED: I got an email from a guy named Roland Chrisjohn who, in his younger years, was one of the founders of AIM Canada. So, back in the 1970s, he was already an activist with regards to Indigenous people. He sent me an email demanding that I investigate the genocide of Indigenous people in Canada by the government of Canada. And I sort of looked at the email, and the question in my head was: “Delete or not delete?” Is this just another guy who has questions he can’t resolve for himself and can’t let it go, or is this a guy who actually knows something? And it turned out he knew quite a lot, starting with what a genocide really is. So that’s how it started: one email, one query.

What was the most shocking revelation to you?

That there was a whole group of so-called “Indian hospitals” that were set up, mainly in the west between 1945 and 1981, where Indigenous people were treated in substandard conditions, by doctors and nurses who often did not have qualifications. And that I had walked by one of them probably every day for two weeks and never noticed the word “Indian” hospital—as in, segregated hospital—at all.

It said that I lived in a segregated society that was so perfect in its segregation that I never noticed. It resonated with everything going on in the United States with the civil rights movement, with what happened to Jews in Germany between 1933 and 1945 . . . It was inconceivable to me that we lived in the same society.

Now, this began with an assignment to find out if there was a genocide, which is a very charged word. And before I read your book, I didn’t know that it was coined in relation to the Holocaust. At what point did you realize that these two seemingly disparate narratives had a link?

The thing that disturbed me about the use of the word [genocide] was numbers. I was looking at 6 million people, at least, who were murdered between 1942 and 1945. Compare that to what the Truth and Reconciliation Commission put forward as the possible numbers of deaths in the residential schools: between 3,000 and 4,500 over the course of 150 years. So 6 million in 3 years or 3,000–4,500 across 150 years. As soon as I looked at these numbers, I thought we can’t be talking about the same phenomenon. And yet, when I read John Milloy’s book—which he drew from the research he did for the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples in the 1990s—the meanness, the torture, the unbelievable cruelty of the residential school system really began to change the shape of the ideas in my head about what a genocide is.

It also mattered that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission called it a cultural genocide, which is not a term in Genocide Convention law. Cultural genocide, in [Milloy’s] view, was a way of escaping the truth. I wasn’t so sure about that, because Lemkin—who actually created the word—his view was that the genocide in Germany began with the rules and laws and regulations post the Nazi election of 1933, that cultural genocide is the precursor of physical genocide. And what Canada was doing was wiping out the cultural history, the sense of self, that makes Indigenous people Indigenous people. The point was to get rid of all of it, to turn them into taxpaying, non-revenue-receiving Canadians.

So that’s a theoretical / thematic link. When did you find there might be an actual link?

I was reading up on the science done by Nazi physicians on Jews, Slavs, prisoners of war. And what I saw was a level of cruelty that was just unspeakable. But not that far off the beaten path, in northern Canada . . . entire Indigenous communities became human subjects. The lure of medical care was used to allow physicians, physical anthropologists, nutritionists, to have free access on the grounds that they were acting in a beneficent way.

They [Indigenous people] were specimens, slaves of race science . . . No permissions. We know, from the survivors, that they thought they were just being treated for medical issues . . . except that it hurt.

*Photo: Elaine’s office table, with her research for Oblivious lined up chapter by chapter.*

What about Otto Schaefer?

Otto Schaefer had a very interesting history, which he tried very hard to cover up. He was studying as a medical student in Nazi Germany, at Heidelberg. He studied under the leaders of Hitler’s hygiene program, which was their science of race. And their race science was based on the notion that Aryans were somehow the top rung of human beings, and everybody else was way down below, and at the very bottom were what were called Untermenschen, meaning ‘sub-humans’. Jews are described as sub-humans; Slavs are described as sub-humans; and to sub-humans, in Germany, anything could be done.

And Schaefer came to Canada why?

He apparently read Rasmussen and Boas, who were early investigators of Inuktituk societies. And he told everybody that that’s what he really wanted to do: to come to Canada and study the Inuit.

He ends up, within two years, in charge of the Arctic, in charge of medicine delivery to both Dene and Inuit communities across the North. By 1974, I believe, he’s in charge of research all across the Arctic for the government of Canada.

And he gets an Order of Canada the same year as my mum and dad. That was one of the more disturbing moments: when I realized it was the same year [1976].

This ends up as an indictment of the Canadian medical society. Willful ignorance, willful blindness . . .

Racism. The notion that some people are better than others. That some people deserve protection, and others do not. The CMA apologized to an Indigenous community in British Columbia, and I read the documents that they posted to explain the nature of their apology. What they clearly did was go through their own archival material to see how often they asked any questions about the health of Indigenous people, and what was being done and not being done. They missed almost all of it: they didn’t ask any questions. I don’t know how much deeper of an indictment I can come up with than that.

What do you want people to take away from this book?

That we can’t be oblivious to each other, that we have to respond to suffering. We have to look at it, in its face, and respond to it, and not run away.

*Photo: Elaine’s writing desk, with more chapters of* Oblivious.

You talk about the mechanics of obliviousness. What does that mean?

One of the things I was really anxious to understand: Was any of this written about anywhere? And two things were just astonishing to me. One: there was almost no actual history written about Indigenous peoples in this country until John Milloy followed on his research for the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. And that’s in the 1990s. And the other thing: What about my senior colleagues? Did they write about this? Did they investigate it? Did they do anything about it?

The mechanics of oblivion and obliviousness seem to me about leaving things out of the narrative. And by leaving things out, you create the capacity to ignore what’s in front of your face. It’s not written about, not in a really thorough way. It’s not described with language particular to us. There is no history; there’s nothing until the 1990s.

So, all those years I’m oblivious, it’s because we’re leaving things out of the story. Because they’re uncomfortable.

So how do we change that?

We better be uncomfortable. We better be better journalists. We better remember who’s afflicted.

In good publicity news:

Smash & Grab by Mark Anthony Jarman was reviewed in The Miramichi Reader: “You may be caught in the middle of a Jarman story wondering what exactly is going on, but you will never be caught in the middle of a Jarman story bored. Jarman’s language here, as always, is pyrotechnic.”
The Notebook by Roland Allen got a shout-out from Ryan Holiday on MSN NOW, as part of his recommended reading list.
Sacred Rage by Steven Heighton was reviewed by Anne Logan in I’ve Read This: “I think of Heighton as a true artist in every sense of the word . . . It’s a fitting tribute to a writer lost too soon.”

Our seasons

April 17, 2026/in Latest News, The Bibliophile/by biblioasis

An interview with David Macfarlane, author of On Sports

Photo: *On Sports* by David Macfarlane. Cover designed by Ingrid Paulson.

The other week, in The Tyee, the writer Cole Nowicki wrote an excellent essay about sports and money, using David Macfarlane’s new book, On Sports, as a way to explore the ineffable magic of sports, fandom, and the ways money spoils the fun. It’s a great piece and I recommend you all read the full thing, but I’ll highlight this lovely bit of praise from Nowicki because it describes exactly what I love about this book:

“On Sports is a showcase of [Macfarlane’s] breezy control over the nuts and bolts of professional and amateur athletics, their cultural import as well as the rhythms (and seasons) of sports writing.

The book makes its most memorable connections when Macfarlane, with his often beautiful prose, tunes into that deeper emotional frequency—the personal, communal, spiritual and profound—that sports are uniquely capable of hitting.”

On Sports eloquently examines the ways money has worsened our enjoyment of sports today, but it’s Macfarlane’s personal anecdotes, about his childhood and his days as a sports reporter, that make this a fun and special read.

I was reminded this week that the NHL playoffs start tomorrow. And I think On Sports is the perfect book to read during the game’s commercial breaks. Its chapters are short enough and Macfarlane’s words are infinitely more engaging than the gambling ads they’ll push on you.

I had the chance to ask Macfarlane a few questions about his book and you can read his responses below.

All best,

Ahmed
Publicist

A Biblioasis Interview with David Macfarlane

Author of On Sports

Can you start by telling me a bit about yourself and how this book came about?

From (approx.) 1980 to 2010 I worked primarily as a magazine/newspaper writer. I covered a wide range of subjects, but always enjoyed sports-writing assignments—even winning a few Sports Writing awards over the years. I’ve admired sports writers almost as long as I’ve admired athletes.

This is a book about your love of sports but also your discomfort with them today, primarily because of money (the gambling, the ticket prices, the salaries). Of sports, you write that “Athleticism is what redeems them. And money is what fucks them up.” What do you think is the worst way that money has fucked them up? What have we lost because of it?

No shortage of possible answers, but I guess it has to be gambling that is the worst—gambling as condoned by professional sports leagues and broadcasters. There are lots of other money-related problems: the cost of tickets; the demands of advertisers; the gap in earning power between male and female pros. But gambling is the nasty genie that we won’t get back in the bottle. I hope I’m wrong, but I think professional sports will be largely about gambling in the future. This is an enormous change. There was a kind of purity to sports—pure in that athleticism was the most important aspect. No more.

Windsor folks: Come see David at his launch at Biblioasis Bookshop on May 4, alongside Alex Pugsley (*Silver Lake*) and Don Gillmor (*Cherry Beach*)!

In the book you mention that the biggest story in sports today is the popularity of women’s sports. Why do you think that is? You also mention that going to a PWHL game was the most fun you’ve had recently at a professional game. Is because they’re not as fucked up by money yet, or is it something else?

It’s an over-used term, but I think toxic masculinity plays a big role in professional sports. But I don’t think the source, at least not the primary source, is the athletes. My theory (based entirely on anecdotal evidence) is that it is the ring of men (always men) who always surround athletes—the broadcasters, the advertisers, the publicists, the agents, the commentators, the journalists, the managers, etc.—who propagate and celebrate the bro myth. Because it gives them the kind of narrative hook that salesmen need. And perhaps there’s nothing inherently wrong with the bro myth other than how tedious it gets, but I find that it gets very tedious indeed. It was a great (and unexpected) relief to go to a PWHL game and discover that it was gone—and that good, exciting hockey remained.

Toronto readers can meet David at his other launch on May 7 at The Supermarket alongside Don Gillmor (*Cherry Beach*).

Can you talk about seasons? The book is broken up into seasons, and I know your friend, the writer Alison Gordon, who is mentioned throughout the book, was adamant about baseball never going over its regular schedule. And as a kid, it seems as though you would measure time by what sports you were playing. Why did you decide to structure the book as different seasons? And how important are seasons for how we think about sports?

To be born when I was, into a middle class North American family, made the overlay of sports on the calendar almost automatic. And that’s simply because kids played outside, and the weather dictated our recreational activity. Football, hockey, baseball were our seasons—summer being less single-minded in its athletic presentation. In this way, sports were almost always connected to weather. This is a deep, almost spiritual connection, and Alison was offended that baseball saw fit to extend its season, for no reason pertaining to baseball, into a season that had nothing to do with curve balls and double plays. No ball player and no fan in (let’s say) 1954 ever thought that the season was too short. It wasn’t. Like the dimensions of a baseball diamond, it was perfect. To malign perfection, for the sake of money, is (so Alison believed) a sin.

You mention that part of what you loved most about sports was reading about the games in newspapers, and you talk a lot about your favourite sports writers in the book. I see On Sports as kind of an homage to great sports writing. How did those sports writers influence how you watch and/or think about the games? And how have they influenced your own writing?

Around the time that I was starting to think I wanted to become a writer, I began noticing examples of what I now categorize as “good writing.” I’m not quite sure what that is in its specifics—some combination of cadence, clarity, wit, and love of language—but it was sports writing that first drew my attention to skillful, informative, entertaining prose. Of course, that may have had something to do with the fact that sports writing was almost all I was reading at the time. Nonetheless, until I hit James Bond, there were no books I found more exciting (thank you public library) than books about players, or teams, or coaches or games. And when I began writing for magazines, it was reading Roger Angell on baseball and Herbert Warren Wind on golf and John McPhee on tennis (all New Yorker writers) who opened the possibilities (for me) of what today is called long-form journalism. And I ended up having the same experience as a writer that I’d had as a reader. After a slog of political and business profiles, I was assigned a story on Maple Leaf Gardens. And writing about sports reminded me that writing (like reading) can be fun.

In good publicity news:

Benbecula by Graeme Macrae Burnet has been shortlisted for the 2026 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction and longlisted for the 2026 Crime Writers Association Historical Dagger Award!
Smash & Grab by Mark Anthony Jarman was reviewed in the Literary Review of Canada: “Jarman gathers disparate threads, memories, and digressions into something greater than the sum of its parts. As much as the outside world may disturb, in these pages, readers will find a rich inner life on full display.”
Who Else in the Dark Headed There by Garth Martens was also reviewed in the print Literary Review of Canada: “The language is sensory, emotive, and inexplicably captivating. Arresting fragments emerge from a relentless invocation of half scenes, stitched together with the singular logic of poetic memory (which is to say, with mystery.)”
The Passenger Seat by Vijay Khurana was reviewed in The Fiddlehead: “The performative nature of masculinity is something that Khurana captures with skill . . . The Passenger Seat, while no light read, is a genuine artistic statement—a simple story with deep resonances. While Adam and Teddy take the road to nowhere, this story might take the rest of us somewhere, somewhere better.”
Best Canadian Poetry 2026 edited by Mart Dalton was reviewed in The Miramichi Reader: “Best Canadian Poetry is an annual treat. I love the cream-skimmed aspect, the cross-section of what people are thinking about and how they are expressing it. It’s a sort of snapshot of the Canadian poetic zeitgeist.”

Night shift with the bicycle cops

April 10, 2026/in Latest News, The Bibliophile/by biblioasis

An interview with Don Gillmor, author of Cherry Beach

Cherry Beach *by Don Gillmor. Cover designed by Kate Sinclair.*

Don Gillmor’s latest book—a layered literary crime thriller called Cherry Beach—comes out next Tuesday and has already been leading our Canadian sales for the past couple of weeks. It recently made the CIBA Booksellers’ List—a list of favourite spring releases voted on by indie Canadian booksellers. It’s always extra special when indie bookstores vote for books by indie presses, and honestly kind of annoying when they don’t. (6/20 of the books on this spring list are indie, but who’s counting?)

Cherry Beach is one of those novels that succeeds at being for all kinds of readers. Gillmor, who’s written on a wide range of topics over the course of his career—as a journalist, as well as a novelist—knows how to fill a story with the tidbits of information that make up the substance of real life. I learned some Toronto geography; I also learned how to make a nice jalapeño marinade for my pork tenderloin. On the one hand, this is a propulsive, gripping detective story. On the other, Cherry Beach has the qualities I love of a plotless literary novel, including the interiority of a lonely, slightly-delusional protagonist I can relate to.

Readers have been comparing Cherry Beach to The Wire for the ways it characterizes a city (Toronto in this case, instead of Baltimore), and the ways it balances racial and economic tensions while gradually revealing a complex, shadowy network of crime. But it’s also interesting to me that a 263-page book could even be comparable to a show that takes approximately 60 hours to watch. Yet it is. Gillmor doesn’t waste space, and I’m still thinking through some of the book’s connections, as the intensifying summer heat of the novel seeps into the hours spent away from it.

I had the pleasure of sending Don Gillmor a handful of questions about Cherry Beach, which he graciously answers below.

Dominique,
Publicity & Marketing Coordinator

A Biblioasis Interview with Don Gillmor

Author of Cherry Beach (April 14, 2026)

You’ve written many kinds of books (literary novels, a memoir, books for children, a field note about oil, a fictionalized history of Canada). What made you want to write a crime novel?

I’ve always wanted to write a detective novel. In university, I began reading some of the classic detective novels from the 1930s, 40s and 50s—Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, Chester Hines. It was partly a relief from Eighteenth Century British Literature courses. At the time I thought it would be interesting to write one. It took me a while to get around to it.

How much of Cherry Beach is based on true events and real people?

There are parts of the novel that are informed by, if not based on, real events or people. Years ago, when I was doing a lot of journalism, I wrote an article for Toronto Life on 51 Division, which was then sometimes called the Punishment Station because bad cops from other divisions were sent there. At the time, they were also experimenting with community policing—mostly young cops on bicycles engaging with the community. So there was a clash of cultures—two very different views on policing. To a degree, I revived that idea in Cherry Beach. I went out on the night shift with the bicycle cops and there are a few scenes that are taken from that experience, including the opening conversation with the sex worker. I also went out in police cars with the hardcore cops in the division. An interesting perspective.

I wrote a magazine article that took me to Kingston, Jamaica, looking for a suspected murderer (I didn’t find him), but the trip into the red hills and the conversation with the Justice Minister are based on my own experience there.

And Torontonians may recognize aspects of a former mayor.

*Toronto readers! Don’t miss Don’s launch at The Supermarket with fellow Biblioasis author David Macfarlane (*On Sports).

In Cherry Beach, Toronto is essentially the main character, and we witness its character development throughout the book. How was writing the character of Toronto different from writing a human character (or was it the same)?

I wanted the city to be a large part of the book. In part because it’s a complex place, claiming to be the most multicultural city in the world. So we’re sort of a global experiment. In many ways, we’re a grand success. But there remains a lot of work to be done. There are issues of affordability and racism, and our traffic is amongst the worst in North America.

As a reader, I always enjoy seeing cities from a literary perspective, whether it’s Dennis Lehane’s Southie neighbourhood in Boston, or Elmore Leonard’s Detroit, or the Venice of Donna Leon. So I wanted to look at Toronto from the perspective of its extremes—the privileged and the underclass. There was a time when the richest and poorest neighbourhoods (Rosedale and Regent Park respectively) were essentially adjacent to one another, though the area has since gone through major changes.

*Don Gillmor’s other book with Biblioasis,* On Oil, was recently announced as a finalist for the Writers’ Trust Shaughnessy Cohen Prize.

Detective Jamieson Abel is a great cook, and this book is full of wonderful recipes. I’m interested to know more about your decision to include this aspect of his character.

It’s mostly an extension of my own interest in cooking. I learned to cook as a matter of survival—a series of girlfriends with many wonderful qualities, but no interest whatsoever in cooking. So I started to learn. Cooking opens up a world. I think it’s one of the reasons for the success of cooking shows; they form a kind of community and bridge cultures. Abel is quite isolated—a single, middle-aged man who has alienated much of the department he works for. Cooking is a way for him to engage with the world.

What were some of your influences for Cherry Beach, literary or otherwise?

There are two different directions as far as influences go. On the one hand, Jamieson Abel is (sort of) in the tradition of what were once called hard boiled detectives—Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer, Chandler’s Philip Marlowe et al. But there is also a tradition of literary novelists like Kate Atkinson, John Banville, and Michael Redhill, who all write detective novels as well. I understand the appeal of crime fiction for literary novelists, but it presents certain challenges as well. As a rule, literary novelists don’t have to concern themselves with plot. But with crime fiction, you need plot, and it has given me a fresh appreciation for those writers who do it well.

*Bonus pic of our office dog Sammy with his copy of* Cherry Beach!

In good publicity news:

Cherry Beach by Don Gillmor has been included in the CIBA Spring 2026 Booksellers List: “If the dayglo film-filtered cover of an aging high rise on a summer day doesn’t intrigue you, maybe a comparison to The Wire but ‘make it Toronto’ will do the trick. Cherry Beach is a propulsive genre mash-up of Canadian crime and literary fiction.” (Robyn York, Beach Reads Bookshop)
On Sports by David Macfarlane was featured in The Tyee: “A showcase of [Macfarlane’s] breezy control over the nuts and bolts of professional and amateur athletics, their cultural import as well as the rhythms (and seasons) of sports writing.”
Every Time We Say Goodbye by Ivana Sajko (trans. Mima Simić) was reviewed in On the Seawall: “Mima Simić translates all of this with clarity and verve . . . alternately riveting and heartbreaking.” The book was also featured in Electric Lit’s list of 15 Must-Read Small Press Books of Spring 2026: “Every sentence sings with emotional resonance and is imbued with the protagonist’s regret . . . a master class in both economy of language and expansiveness of feeling.”
Decadence by Richard Kelly Kemick was reviewed in Publishers Weekly: “Kemick’s wit and curmudgeonly self-regard is offset by his palpable adoration of his partner, Litia, evoking the work of David Sedaris. It’s a weird and rewarding ride.”

In strange company

April 2, 2026/in Latest News, The Bibliophile/by biblioasis

Poems from Who Else in the Dark Headed There by Garth Martens

Who Else in the Dark Headed There by Garth Martens. Cover designed by Ingrid Paulson.

Since it’s Poetry Month, and we’re standing at the threshold of the long Easter weekend, I want to write a little something in defense of literary suffering.

So much of my job involves trying to get people to read our books. And there’s always a vague external pressure to swaddle my book pitches in positive language. Readers want hope to shine through our frequently bleak books. And people are often less willing to engage with difficult texts, texts that require long hours alone flailing through another’s dimly-lit interiority. There’s an unspoken publicity agreement that despair, suffering, etc. be made palatable to a potential audience.

Yet literary portrayals of suffering seem valuable and interesting to me regardless of any transcendent qualities the mind feels compelled to impose on them. And what makes suffering interesting to read isn’t its universality: it’s the weird, inaccessible, hyper-particular reaches of a stranger’s consciousness. I want more of that. Not the performative, uplifting attempt to reach as many readers as possible, for a text to be seen as a knowable quantity. I want literature that feels alien, difficult to understand, that I have to circle again and again, banging my head against the walls of, trying to get further in. Earned moments of affinity or empathy feel so much more vital than the stuff popularized in the name of the heartwarmingly universal.

This has nothing to do with needing a little escapism, which is valid. I spend a desperate amount of time, like anyone, trying to put some distance between myself and all reminders of being a body-mind complex hurtling through time. That’s why I watch as much hockey as I do. But the Victoire clinching their playoff spot last night, and the Habs’ six-game winning streak, isn’t what keeps me going. Those are small pleasures—a little thrill for the prefrontal cortex.

What does keep me going, rather, has been consistent my entire life. It’s the unusual, painful companionship I found in Woolf when I was fourteen, or again in the poet Paul Celan when I was twenty-two, or again—just last year—when our managing editor, Vanessa, sent me Garth Martens’ poetry manuscript. It’s something about what happens when I’m alone with a voice that keens its own indescribable aloneness. The ease with which understanding comes—between reader and text, author and world—has so little to do with the kind of affinity that feels miraculous and life-altering.

With that, I’ll leave you with a handful of Garth Martens poems from his forthcoming collection Who Else in the Dark Headed There (April 14). I hope they reach you with the force of their individual darkness, and keep you in strange company over the long weekend.

Dominique
Publicity & Marketing Coordinator

Excerpts from Who Else in the Dark Headed There

*Interior table of contents for* Who Else in the Dark Headed There.

Late Winter

Gloved, I undercut
the snowcrust, its changeable
emergencies,
until the shelves fell.

Worlds that mirror this one
swung like white revolving doors.
Deciduous rods,
snow: it lifted higher: higher.

What rough potato
overrode the limit of the pail?
From what
precarity is it chored up?

Ice-strip on the move,
on high
or on my tongue,
not here, but here.

A tug of breath from a tap.
A snort through dense hedges.
Transfusion
of allusive, useless ideas.

Snow leapt and plunged.
I waited for the rendezvous.
I waited for the switch.

Dilemmas

Nobody asks for them.
They come
unpermitted. The sickroom

sweats on every hard bud
and somnolent,
those cut loose by those departed.

With a spade, the boy turns up
a tidy
padlock of steam.

A sole strand
air-slips
as through a keyway.

His whole life mist
rinses
and perspires: rock, barrel, bough. Alters

his world: a nook, a bridge,
an apple tree
whose full bearings

are shadowless, odd trespasser.

Distaff Side

She left behind a vanity mirror.
The boy held it face-up
at his chest. Walked without seeing his feet

as if upside down, as if blank, into
blurred
big blades, chunks of wall. Nauseous.

It bears saying he didn’t need
to do it to feel—a rush, out of place
or in danger in this house.

This was the closest he got
to putting on make-up,
erased from the waist down.

In deprived air, he detected
heated dust in the drapes, a pang
of flight. Wasp-like focus or glare.

From the bay window he beamed drivers.
Not to hurt them. To see
in their flinch a second face.

Afterwinter

Blowing gas through a wand,
I see a fruitfly drift into the seal.
I remember canola’s upstart gold flow. It went
as far as justified, our one
paved road in six directions.
Past this, there is of one
element not enough
and of another too much. Swans
in the flooded field.
Investors sprinting
pints of treacle
among tired farmers. Gossip
like crushed egg. That too,
for hold-outs who refuse their glass of milk.
And me? In a near playground
a pink, hooded jacket foisted on a bollard
like one doubled over
in despair. There is inside me a Pillarist
who infinitely extends
this moment of the gut punch. It’s far
from overrated, far from fair.
So full of my own blood
I am nauseous as anyone
who sells too well their steal.

In good publicity news:

Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers by Marcello Di Cintio has been named a finalist for two 2026 Alberta Literary Awards: the City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book Prize and the Wilfrid Eggleston Award for Nonfiction. Huge congrats to Marcello!
Cherry Beach by Don Gillmor was listed in Toronto Life, and was reviewed in The Seaboard Review: “A largely captivating novel, the sentences by turns clipped and spare or expansive and stunning. And befitting of an author who’s spent so much time in journalism, Gillmor doesn’t pull any punches. The world he gives is an ugly one, much like our own.”
Every Time We Say Goodbye by Ivana Sajko (trans. Mima Simic) was reviewed in roughghosts: “The relentless nature of the narrative style heightens the emotional intensity of this novel, allowing for an in depth portrait of one man’s past and present to emerge in a relatively limited space.”

The sound of the crowd

March 27, 2026/in Latest News, The Bibliophile/by biblioasis

Welcoming baseball season with an excerpt from On Sports by David Macfarlane

On Sports by David Macfarlane (Field Notes #11). Series designed by Ingrid Paulson.

It’s the start of baseball season. I’m sure most of you already knew that. I don’t watch much baseball these days. To be honest, I don’t even really remember the rules, and can’t remember if I ever have. I love the movies though (Bull Durham, Field of Dreams, Angels in the Outfield, etc.) and have seen them countless times. They bring to mind happy memories. As a kid, they inspired me to play sports (badly) and watch games live, which gave me and my friends something to look forward to as the seasons and years went on. We’d rendezvous in the playground to discuss how our team (be it the Winnipeg Jets, Goldeyes, or the Bombers) were doing and what they should be doing better. Like I’m sure many of you have. But that was back then. Today watching pro sports can feel like kind of a drag. Like most things nowadays, too much money and greed has ruined a good thing. Now it’s harder than ever to enjoy sports because of online gambling, the increased cost of tickets to attend a game or even just to stream it, and the noise and spectacle that only distracts you from the game itself in an attempt to keep your attention to sell you more ads.

Something you may not know is that this week also saw the publication of David Macfarlane’s On Sports in Canada (it’s out in the US on April 7th), the latest addition to our Field Notes series. On Sports is a book that responds to our collective exhaustion with the commodification of sports, but in a charming, meandering way. This is a nostalgic book. At times it almost feels like an elegy to a time when watching sports was about the games and the athletes and less about people’s parlays and the TV incessantly hitting you with BetMGM ads. But it’s also rather funny and heartwarming. I found it to be a delightful love/hate letter from someone who cares deeply about sports and the amazing things athletes can do, and who is also deeply disappointed with the commercialisation of competition. Reflections on some of the biggest stories in the sports world are interspersed with anecdotes from his childhood and his days as a sports writer, and it’s wonderful how he’s able to weave all these threads together to paint of picture of what sports have meant to us and what they no longer mean today.

Personally, my experience with sports the last few years had been just occasionally glancing at the TV in whatever bar my friends and I happen to be in that day and sometimes commentating on what’s happening on screen but not really paying attention. Or rewatching Bull Durham. But reading On Sports, I was reminded of all the significant impressions sports have left on my own life, which is a beautiful thing a book can give you, and left me somewhat hopeful as reading how much Macfarlane cares for baseball, hockey, football or any sport really, made me pay more attention to them in a way I had almost forgotten how to do.

So to kick-off the start of the season, please find below a short excerpt from an early part of the book, where Macfarlane reminisces about attending a Blue Jays spring training game and reflects on the joys of being amongst fans just watching a baseball game.

All my best,

Ahmed
Publicist

Spring

An excerpt from On Sports

*Interior of* On Sports, featuring the chapter excerpted below.

I don’t know much about sports—not in the way that people who know about sports know about sports. But I do know enough to know that what you never want to do is pretend to know a lot about sports around people who really do know a lot about sports. They’ll let you know.

Case in point: A sunny afternoon in 1983, at a baseball game at the Toronto Blue Jays spring training ballpark in Dunedin, Florida. With a runner at second, Toronto’s catcher Buck Martinez had popped an innocuous-looking flare into the centre gap between infield and outfield. What resulted (wild throw to third; no less wild to home) were jittery pre-season defensive goofs.

As a result, Martinez had ended up on third, as surprised as anyone to be standing there without so much as a scuff of baseline dirt on his pants. That was when a sporty fellow (lime-green polo shirt, cargo shorts) a few rows down from my seat stood and shouted, “Attaboy, Buck.”

I don’t think Mr Lime-Green expected to be heard so clearly by so many people. His exclamation happened to coincide with a momentary pause in the cheering, as if all the happy Toronto fans were catching their breath at the same time. Mr Lime-Green was suddenly conspicuous.

Having inadvertently claimed the attention of the crowd, he felt compelled to say something more than “attaboy.” Baseball is a sport that traditionally demands a certain wit and knowledge from its more outspoken audience members. So Mr Lime-Green added, jauntily and with sustained volume, “Johnny Bench has got nothing on you.”

That got a reaction. Specifically, it got a reaction from a leathery faced, old-school baseball fan (UAW ball cap, scorecard) two rows in front of me, a little closer to home plate. Mr Union Cap turned slowly and deliberately. He repeated the name he’d just heard and affixed not just a stern question mark but also, somehow, italics: “Johnny Bench?”

I’m not remembering the game. I can’t recall who won, or even what team Toronto was playing. What I can bring very clearly to mind, though, is that voice. It was unmistakably American. Gravelly. Unadorned. At a guess, I’d say Ohio and a lot of Luckies.

It came from an older generation of voices—voices you might have heard on an aircraft carrier in the Pacific in ’43. Or maybe on the line at a Ford plant in Dearborn or the coke ovens in Pittsburgh after the war. It didn’t talk a lot, that voice. But it knew claptrap when it heard it. It knew who was a hero and who wasn’t. It was a voice that, when it was reluctantly put to use, had something to say. The voice of a no-bullshit collectivity of America that is, alas, long gone. Lost and by the wind grieved. Missing in the din of podcasts and comments and panel debate. That tough old Lucky Strike voice. Is there a sadder lyric in the American songbook than “Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?”?

*For more on sports, check out David Macfarlane’s recent op-ed on hockey in the* Globe and Mail.

Martinez getting to third without so much as a pro forma slide on a midfield bloop that should have been a single, if that, was the cause of giddy celebration among Blue Jays fan—which is to say, in Dunedin, almost everybody. A hometown crowd’s volume doesn’t distinguish much between crazy-good luck and skill. A stand-up triple is a stand-up triple.

I thought I heard something in the cheering that was more than robust applause. There was a cocky effervescence that I wasn’t sure I’d heard from a Toronto crowd before. To call it a swagger would be an exaggeration—an Americanization, in fact—but it was a happy assertion of Canadianness that you wouldn’t have heard from northern visitors to Florida of previous generations—especially in regards to something as American as baseball. At least that’s what I wrote in my article, although it should be taken into account that I was a magazine writer looking for a story and inclined, therefore, toward meaningful explanations of things that may have had no meaning at all. The crowd’s cheerfulness may only have been the burble of sun-screened holidayers. Toronto fans simply happy to be warm.

Mr Union Cap did not burst the bubble of the crowd’s enjoyment. He was on the funny side of serious, but only just. There was something good-natured in his gruffness, as if he recognized that he was a stock character—a curmudgeonly, old-school baseball fan of the sort who was (as I did not then realize) an endangered species.

Before the advent of powerful sound systems and giant screens, sporadic volleys of unscripted commentary bounced back and forth between fans in the stands. There were always a few such self-appointed colour commentators per section, some of whom were funny, some of whom were knowledgeable, some of whom were both. They had something to say in a sort-of public, sort-of performative way.

The first real baseball game I went to (meaning a game with lights, players in uniform, umpires, ads on the outfield fence, green grass, red-dirt base paths, and thirty-five cent admission) was in the summer of 1960, in Grand Falls, Newfoundland. I was eight years old, in the company of my grandfather. Not a small man. Rarely seen without battered fedora and briar pipe. Known by everybody in Grand Falls. He was, shall we say, a colourful figure, and his voice was a voice with audibility in a crowd—perhaps because it was a few octaves lower than most.

“No need for a mound,” he garumphed as Corner Brook’s lanky pitcher unfolded his beanpole of a frame from the visitors dugout. “Dig him a hole, lads. Dig him a hole.”

Not the funniest line in the world, but one that has stayed with me all my life because I think it was the first time I heard somebody talk like that—a joke, a comment, an observation, made at a volume intended for public consumption but as if in a living room of friends, which is how ball parks used to sound.

By the end of the Grand Falls game, I’d concluded that half the fun of baseball was what my grandfather said about the players on the field and what the people around us said to my grandfather.

A lost art—killed by the kiss-cam. Drowned-out by ads and promotions. But there was a time when the expression of deep baseball insight from somebody a couple of rows over was part of the general fun of a ball game. They were characters, those guys. It was hard to know with old-school baseball fans if they were acting like they were in a Damon Runyan story or that’s the way they really were.

Mr Union Cap had something to say. It was what you used to expect at a ball park—a voice that knew baseball cutting through the cheerful hubbub of a crowd. Possibly, the tremolo of excitement in the Dunedin stands that afternoon was only the fun (rare then, almost extinct now) of going to a non-blaring, non-big-screen-dominant, non-merch- selling, non-ad-blasting ballpark to watch ballplayers play baseball. On a nice spring day. Undistracted by electronic loudness and pixelated screens and ads and contests and walk-up songs and who knows what all.

My friend, the writer Alison Gordon, who died unexpectedly in 2015, covered the Blue Jays for the Toronto Star for five seasons. (By way of establishing Gordon’s unusual range of life experiences, I shall here insert a segue-defying biographic detail: Some years before Alison Gordon became the first female reporter in the American League, she was in the hotel bedroom in Montreal with Yoko Ono and John Lennon when they recorded “Give Peace a Chance.” One of those voices is hers.)

Gordon had her likes and dislikes, and much as she loved baseball she didn’t care for the bombast of a contemporary ballpark. She once proposed to Blue Jays executives that a single home-game per season be designated Old-Fashioned Day and the ballpark be allowed to sound like ballparks used to. Ballparks where you could say something, if, that is, you had something to say. Ballparks where you could cheer when you felt like cheering. And jeer when you felt otherwise.

And what happened to her proposal, I asked her at the last baseball game we attended together. She passed me the unshelled peanuts while Mötley Crüe or AC/DC or Metallica loudly walked-up the next batter. What do you think happened, she shouted pleasantly.

A quaintly lower decibel level was one of the things that made spring training so much fun. Those old Florida ballparks were smaller, friendlier, quieter, more intimately idiosyncratic.

Spring training was a magical idea. It was proof to the skeptical Canadian that, even though it might seem otherwise (in the north, in February) planet earth wasn’t frozen in space. Winter, as far as Alison Gordon was concerned, was the dark side of the moon—a time to sip a whisky by the fire, talk with friends, laugh, and wait for the season to turn. As it would, of course. Eventually. But spring came earlier in Florida than it does in Toronto. It used to be fun to meet it at a ball game.

In good publicity news:

Two of our Field Notes, On Book Banning by Ira Wells and On Oil by Don Gillmor, have been shortlisted for the Writers’ Trust Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing! Biblioasis’s nominations were also covered in the Winnipeg Free Press.
The Passenger Seat by Vijay Khurana has been flying through one round after another in the 2026 Tournament of Books! This morning it won the Zombie Round and will advance to the Championship final. Go Vijay!
Cherry Beach by Don Gillmor received a starred review in Kirkus: “Gillmor really knows his stuff—in a dazzling range of areas. A layered portrait of a changing city in the guise of a gripping crime novel, for fans of Tana French and Dennis Lehane.”
Silver Lake by Alex Pugsley (The Aubrey McKee Novels #3) also received a review in Kirkus: “Pugsley’s tone throughout is wry and self-aware, the ideal combination for capturing Aubrey’s mix of ambition and angst . . . A smart, witty Hollywood tale.”
Smash & Grab: Stories by Mark Anthony Jarman was reviewed in the Winnipeg Free Press: “Jarman continues his mastery of the form, with seemingly no limits to his fervid imagination . . . brilliantly and seamlessly tackling any genre, from memoir to offbeat sci-fi to manic surrealism.”
Robyn Sarah, author of We’re Somewhere Else Now: Poems 2016–2024 was interviewed on CKCU FM for Versefest Ottawa.
Marcello Di Cintio, author of Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers, was interviewed about the book on the Track & Food podcast.

The Bibliophile: Every Sentence a Journey

March 6, 2026/in Latest News, The Bibliophile/by biblioasis

An interview with Ivana Sajko, author of Every Time We Say Goodbye

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*Photo:* Every Time We Say Goodbye by Ivana Sajko (trans. Mima Simić). Cover designed by Ingrid Paulson.

We first became aware of Ivana Sajko’s work when her previous novel showed up on the shortlist for the 2023 Dublin Impac Award. We read here in office the two or three books that had yet, that year, to find a North American publisher, but it was Ivana’s that made the rounds the fastest. The manuscript passed from hand-to-hand-to-hand-to-hand over the course of the week, each of us tearing through it in a single sitting. This wasn’t just because of its size, coming in as it did at barely one hundred pages: it was its manic, frenetic energy, its humour, its black, beating heart, its humanity. This was something quite different than anything else we’d read, a voice so superbly translated by Mima Simić that it did not read like a translation at all. Love Novel was a brutal, brilliantly immersive experience, and we were thrilled to have her, and it, for our list. I decided then that I would follow her anywhere and work to bring and break her out in English. I sensed then what I am convinced of now: that Ivana Sajko is as good a writer as any at work today in any language.

The publication of her new novel, Every Time We Say Goodbye, again in an exceptionally energetic translation by Mima Simić, merely confirms my opinion. Sajko is an author who demands to be read by those who love the work of Tokarczuk and Ernaux, among others, though Sajko’s voice is very much her own. In a world racked by so much death and destruction, this is a novel about the most painful death of them all: the death of love. As our narrator leaves his homeland of Croatia for Berlin, watching the countryside slide by his window, he attempts to avoid the full crushing heartache of this more private death, and his role in its occurrence, by reflecting on the recent history of Europe and his inability as a failed journalist to document what is happening in a way that might affect change: this is a novel very much about our current terrifying moment. But lest you feel that this is too bleak, there is a real thread of hope running through the book as well, even if it is only the hope of starting anew knowing the mistakes that have brought you to this point, and your determination in the face of habit and exhaustion not to give in to the same destructive impulses again. Simić’s translation of Sajko’s prose moves with the same rhythm of the train her protagonist is escaping on, offering its own very real pleasures as it pins you, in its extended sentences, to your seat, determined to make you look clearly at what has been wrought.

Published on Tuesday, today it received a rave review in the New York Times, while also making the Globe and Mail’s Spring reading list. Below, we have a short clip of Ivana reading from this book, as well as an excellent interview conducted by Ahmed Abdalla.

Dan Wells,
Publisher

An Interview with Ivana Sajko

Author of Every Time We Say Goodbye (trans. Mima Simić)

*Photo: Ivana Sajko. Credit: Peter Stamer.*

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

I am a playwright and prose writer who has been living in Berlin for over ten years. Before that, I moved around Europe, and whenever I returned to Croatia it was most often to the Adriatic coast, which always had a huge influence on my life. From there comes my close relationship with the sea, its blueness, with the Mediterranean province and the conflict between its positive and negative sides. Every Time We Say Goodbye is my fourth novel, written during the first year of lockdown in Berlin, when we were living in a kind of vacuum, with enough time to reflect on our fragility, to mourn our losses, and to reimagine how the post-Covid society could look like (seems we missed that particular opportunity).

What readers of the English translation cannot fully experience is that the book was written in the masculine grammatical gender. Most Slavic languages allow narration from a specific gender—masculine, feminine, or neuter (although neuter is typically associated with inanimate objects, so while it is grammatically possible to write from it, it sounds semantically strange). Those of us who grew up with a Slavic language—as I did with Croatian—know how deeply we are shaped by the gender through which we have to speak. Choosing to write in the masculine somehow altered the course of the novel as it unfolded. It helped me step outside myself, and outside the female voice I had always used, the voice with an entirely different tone and destiny. I would not dare to call this a trans experience, but it certainly made me aware of how strongly we are determined by language. Language truly makes us who we are—not only in social interaction, but also in the most intimate sense.

Every sentence in the book is like a long journey, moving through different spaces and times. But isn’t that also the way we remember?
Ivana Sajko

But how did the book come into being? I think that with every book I return to certain obsessive motifs of mine: the departure, and the experience of the foreigner. In Berlin, for example, one can clearly distinguish different categories of being a foreigner, one can differentiate between an emigrant, an expat, a refugee, a tourist, and these categories are often predetermined by national, religious, or even racial prejudices. As for me, I have been an emigrant for most of my life, but my artistic profession enabled me to do it with dignity and to call it my decision, not my necessity. That was my rebellion—to leave. My family history is traditionally one of emigration. They originated from the small city at the Adriatic coast from where they traveled as far as Argentina, returning only in the 1940s. In Yugoslavia, emigration meant going to Germany. I grew up with emigrant stories, and perhaps I was simply waiting for the right moment to write my own.

In the book, he’s someone who chooses to leave. But he does encounter those for whom it’s not a choice.

Yes, there are always those who are forced to leave their homeland—because of war, because of poverty—and those who leave because they have imagined a better place. This second option carries a certain romantic aura; it recalls a time when American writers moved en masse to Paris, traveled through Europe, and created the literary male figure of the foreign wanderer who owns nothing but a typewriter, cigarettes, and—to make the style more convincing—a hat. That male figure has accompanied me while I was young, and I envied him, because very few women were ever allowed such freedom. Perhaps this is also why I chose to write in the masculine gender: to appropriate that position of power and choice for myself.

Anyhow, the question of those who are forced to leave is one of the great questions of our time, and it places us before a moral test. Especially in Europe, where the arms industry profits enormously in the very countries from which refugees come. These millions of refugees continually confront us with a tragedy in which we are, if nothing else, implicated through our silence and inertia. I live in the center of Berlin, and across the street from my building there is a reception center for refugees from Ukraine. When I lived in Zagreb in my early twenties, on the same street there was a hotel housing war refugees from eastern Croatia. In this sense, exile is not an abstract or distant concept for me; it has always been my neighbourhood.

In my Berlin district there are very few Germans. Most residents are Arabs and people of Turkish origin. Their families have lived in Berlin for several generations, yet do not hold citizenship, do not vote, and do not participate in shaping the fate of the country they depend on. On the one hand, neighbourhoods like mine are vibrant and alive; they fascinate tourists because they show how cultures, religions, and languages can coexist. But beneath this colourful multicultural label lie deep inequalities and unresolved issues.

Can you talk about the structure and why you chose to write each chapter as one long sentence?

I tend to write long sentences, because my inner experience of text and writing is essentially an experience of music and composition. This may stem from the theatre, which is my professional background: for many years I performed on stage with musicians, and I wrote texts almost aloud, repeating and varying them until they would fit my own throat (so to say), the rhythm of my breathing, the dynamics of my speech.

Every sentence in the book is like a long journey, moving through different spaces and times. But isn’t that also the way we remember? When we sink into memory we are caught in a stream which is volatile, full of ellipses, fictions, inner conflicts. Memory is not structured into sentences and paragraphs. Memory is carried by chance and emotion, like a rushing stream of water. I wanted to tame that torrent into a rhythmic flow that would guide the readers, their attention and their feelings. This approach is akin to directing a text in the theatre, where the director ultimately guides the spectator’s gaze.

One of the epigraphs to the novel is a quote from the playwright Goran Ferčec saying he’s only interested in writing that exhausts the world. Is that what you’re trying to go for? To exhaust this one man’s entire world as a way of moving forward?

Moving forward while looking back, because with the distance, things, people and relationships appear differently.

I have never been a writer of grand narratives. I am more interested in exploring micro-situations and human states. I am driven to find the richness of great conflicts and unexpected interpretations in seemingly unremarkable, pale moments—to dig deep and to discover a scandal in the middle of nowhere, or to uncover disputes and arguments in the silence, among the unuttered sentences. These are my passions as a writer.

The same is true of this book. It follows a man on a train journey, between point A and point B, between the place he has left and the place he has not yet reached—in the in-between space of disappointment and hope. And although he does nothing much but sit in his seat, there is the history of his family across several generations unfolding before us. The history marked by departures and violence.

I’ve heard you describe this book as kind of hopeful, but there’s a lot of dark stuff in there. I’m wondering where you see that? Is it in the idea of leaving and starting fresh?

Yes, I truly believe that hope lies at the core of this book. Hope that it is possible to break the chain reaction of the recurring destinies, and that it is indeed possible to heal the inherited traumas. In this book, there is a way out. And it starts at the beginning, from the beginning, from zero, almost in a Zen Buddhist sense: point is in emptying the cup before you can fill it with tea again.

I found it interesting in the book that you never name where he’s from, but you do name where he’s going. Why is that?

The place I come from—Croatia—is heavily exoticized from the perspective of Western Europe, where I now live. On the one hand, Croatia is often subsumed into the mythical territory of the Balkans, imagined as a cursed part of Europe steeped in barbarism; on the other, it is viewed through the lens of the civil war in which Yugoslavia collapsed during my youth. My wish is to avoid this kind of exoticization, partly because I do not want to condone the idea that European barbarism is tied to its Southeast, when it is in fact deeply embedded in the historical legacy of west Europe: its imperialism, the theft of cultural heritage and material resources from other peoples, as well as contemporary forms of barbarism: the silence surrounding the genocide in Gaza, the racism directed at Syrians in distress, and the cowardice shown in defending democracy and international law, which for years have been attacked from one side by Putin and from the other by Trump. For this reason, I do not want to write from a national perspective in my books. And honestly, I no longer truly have one. I have lived in many European cities and I consider myself a European writer who observes this small, complicated, and often arrogantly self-assured European nest with a critical eye. At the table in our kitchen, German, English, and Croatian are spoken simultaneously, and that is why I consciously write about Europe, rather than about Croatia alone.

Can you talk about the influence of film in the book?

Lars von Trier’s film Europa is the code that grants entry into the novel, the keynote that sets the tone for the journey the book offers, a journey in which the train, rushing forward, in fact moves backward. I often draw on other people’s art, music, visual works, films. This is also my way of entering into dialogue with artists I admire and who inspire me.

Is there anything you hope people take away from reading this book?

I would like readers to carry with them the belief that the end can be the beginning, that there is immense beauty even in sorrow, that there is a memory of love after the love is gone, that a failure opens millions of new possibilities and that in every place of loss, something still blooms.

In good publicity news:

Every Time We Say Goodbye by Ivana Sajko (trans. Mima Simić) received two great excellent publicity during it’s pub week:
- Review in the New York Times: “[A] captivating new novel . . . translator Mima Simić shows great dexterity in her rendering of Sajko’s lyrical, run-on sentences. They hurtle forward like a TGV, making manifest Iv.’s struggle to speak of his despair and the continent’s.”
- Featured in the Globe and Mail’s Spring Books Preview: “The form suits the novel’s action, which involves a disillusioned Croatian journalist travelling by train to Berlin, where he reflects on a Europe in crisis, personal trauma and the losses that have left him alienated from his work, past and sense of belonging.”
Oblivious by Elaine Dewar was also included in the Globe and Mail’s Spring Books Preview: “Dewar’s last book (completed shortly before she died last year) exposes, in new ways, the pitiless machinery behind residential schools, segregated hospitals and race-based exploitation that took place on the Prairies—all while settlers’ descendants invited west by the government prospered on the same lands.”
Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers by Marcello Di Cintio was reviewed in Alberta Views: “Recommended reading for anyone who is concerned about the treatment of migrant workers in Canada. But . . . a must-read for anyone who has never thought much about the migrants living among us.”
On Sportsby David Macfarlane was mentioned in Toronto Life: “On Sports explores his personal love of the game and distaste for the commercialization of competition.”

The Bibliophile: There and Back Again

March 2, 2026/in Latest News, The Bibliophile/by biblioasis

A week at Winter Institute, and reconnecting with booksellers across the border.

I realize that the Bibliophile has been pretty quiet so far in 2026, which is all the evidence you need for how busy things have been at the Bibliomanse proper, and no week illustrates this as much as this last one.

*Our intrepid sales coordinator Hilary, decked in Backlist to the Future swag, manning the Biblioasis booth at Winter Institute.*

Saturday I worked with Jeff, our operations coordinator, from 7 am till past 9 at night to re-ready everything for the American Bookseller Association’s Winter Institute in Pittsburgh after UPS, who promised a 2-3 day delivery (Pittsburgh is only 4.5 hours from Windsor, about an hour closer to us than Toronto), failed to get our books to the city on time. The boxes took 13 days before they finally arrived mid-fair, looking like they’d barely escaped a war zone. Winter Institute is one of our biggest investments in American bookseller relations every year, the place where we launch several forthcoming books: to be there without any stock would have been a disaster (which was the word I used with UPS when I tried, with increasing frustration, to illustrate the D in our tracking code—D is for Disaster—to the displeasure of our off-shore quote-unquote customer service clerk). I cancelled my flight and left Sunday in my son’s CRV between the second and third period of the Men’s Gold Medal hockey game, worried that the border guards might not let me cross: the border has become increasingly erratic over the last six months and crossing with commercial goods is dependent very much on the agent one gets. Mine thankfully was quite decent, happy my paperwork was in order so that he could get back to watching the game. I wondered if my experience would have been different had I left after the game had finished.

*Our books arrive midway through the 2nd day of the 3-day fair. General cheering ensues.*

The days since have run between 16-20 hours as I tried to manage the day-to-day, alongside promoting our books and authors as part of Meet the Presses, a three day book fair in which we met hundreds of booksellers across the US, refining our pitches in real time and pressing books into eager hands (and transforming skeptical booksellers, hopefully, into superfans).

It’s both exhausting and exhilarating. But to see the genuine excitement that readers feel for forthcoming books like Richard Kelly Kemick’s Decadence, Ivana Sajko’s Every Time We Say Goodbye, Don Gillmor’s Cherry Beach, Melissa Harrison’s The Given World, and Jón Kalman Stefánsson’s The Heart of Man, the concluding volume in his Trilogy About the Boy, among many other titles, recharges the spiritual batteries, as does the general awareness among American independent booksellers for Biblioasis and our titles.

Kristen Ramirez (Exile in Bookville) and Jake Cumsky-Whitlock (Solid State) on the most sluggish shuffleboard table on the continent)

When we started going to this years ago, booksellers knew nothing about us; now, many search us out specifically. We hosted, alongside our bookselling and publishing compatriot Drawn & Quarterly, a wonderful Duck-pin bowling party on Monday; a dinner with booksellers both familiar and new on Tuesday; then joined our American compatriots Seven Stories and Two Dollar Radio in another dinner on Wednesday before heading to another party that evening where I joined Peggy Burns of Drawn & Quarterly in pouring Fireball Whiskey into booksellers’ maws (and down their chins) through an intricate ice sculpture.

Dan with Peggy Burns at the IBC afterparty

After a year hiatus, we unveiled the new edition of our improved bookseller trading cards, and, tired of the perpetual frontlist hustle, tried to engage booksellers (with some real success) in our Backlist to the Future campaign, more on which will follow.

A sampling of featured booksellers from the Indie Bookseller Trading Cards: Series #3. Pictured here: Brad Johnson (East Bay), Pete Mulvihill and Kevin Ryan (Green Apple), Annie Metcalf (Magers and Quinn), and Erin and Drew Pineda (27th Letter).

There were impromptu meetings with booksellers and our American distributors, with American media, other Canadian and American publishers, and even with a couple of our favourite writers, including Daniel Mason and Douglas Stuart.

A visit to Pittsburgh’s fabulous White Whale, where Josh Cook’s *Art of Libromancy* was on display, among many other titles.

There were bookstore visits, and great conversations throughout all four days. As a bookseller I haven’t seen in years told me when we said goodbye, the last day felt like the end of summer camp, with repeated hugs and tears as we packed our tents and readied to go home. But I was grateful for the time I got to spend among some of my favourite people in the world, and I look forward to the next time I get to do so.

I have so much more to unpack about the past week, things I wish I had the time to better explore, and hope to do so in a later Bibliophile. We need to talk about the total lack of Canadian booksellers at this event (D&Q and Biblioasis were the only two this year, and we were really there in a publishing capacity) and the dangers of letting what is going on alienate us from our American compatriots on the front line of the fight against fascism. Books are a battleground in both countries for very obvious reasons, and we’d be much better keeping the lines of communication open between our communities than cutting them off in a fit of nationalistic spite. When we allow the current American administration to separate us, we are giving them exactly what they want.

*Marcello Di Cintio’s* Precarious *on display at White Whale.*

I’d like to write about the essential connection events like Winter Institute make clear between independent publishers and booksellers, and how we could work better together for the betterment of both, and about the real hope and possibility that comes from talking with one another. I have so many ideas from conversations with Javier and Kristin Ramirez (Exile in Bookville), James Crossley (Leviathan), Kate Layte (Papercuts), Lori Feathers (Interabang), Carrie Koepke (Skylark), Sam and Emma Kaas (Norwich), Greg Kornbluh (Downbound), Miriam Chotiner-Gardiner (Three Lives), Bryan Seitz (Literati), and so many others. But that will have to keep. I think the only thing that kept me from driving off the highway on the return home was Barq’s root beer, chocolate, the Messthetics and the Ramones (Hey Hey Hey, why is it always this way just keeps cycling on my internal jukebox).

But before I go, two quick things for Bibliophile readers: our first book of 2026 officially launched this Tuesday. Mark Anthony Jarman’s Smash & Grab, a literal grab bag of fictions united solely by Jarman’s febrile imagination and wordplay, will be a treat for fans old and new. And our second, Ivana Sajko’s brilliant Every Time We Say Goodbye, launches next Tuesday: it’s already been assigned for a NYT review, and we’re expecting this to become one of the handsell titles of the year. So please head to your favourite independent wherever you are, and pick up a copy of each. I promise that neither will disappoint.

Dan Wells,
Publisher

*(L)* Smash & Grab by Mark Anthony Jarman. Cover designed by Kate Sinclair. (R) Every Time We Say Goodbye by Ivana Sajko, trans. by Mima Simic. Cover designed by Ingrid Paulson.

In excellent awards news:

As we were finishing up this week’s missive, we learned that Ira Wells, author of On Book Banning: Or, How the New Censorship Consensus Trivializes Art and Undermines Democracy, has won the 2026 Freedom to Read Award from the Writers Union of Canada!

The award is presented annually by TWUC in recognition of work that is passionately supportive of access to books and the freedom to read. Wells was nominated for the Freedom to Read Award by a fellow Canadian author, and the nomination reads (in part):

Author Ira Wells, born in Alberta, is well-known for his long-held stance against censorship. This is witnessed by his record of publications, which often touch on the subject of societal thought control. His most recent book, On Book Banning is an extended exploration of the ways libraries have been ransacked, often under the guise of “protecting children.”

Congratulations to Ira!

The Bibliophile; A Certain Faith

January 31, 2026/in Latest News, The Bibliophile/by biblioasis

On Tuesday morning I took the 5:35 train to Toronto to spend the day down in Elaine Dewar’s home office, helping the family sort through papers and ready things for a possible archive acquisition. It was strange to be down there again: though the bookshelves were a little more bare than they had been in September, her desks were as she had left them when she took a break to go on vacation last August; when she went to the hospital she never expected that she’d not be back down there again.

*Photo: Elaine Dewar’s piles of notebooks and research material for* Oblivious, as she had left it.

I put together some bankers boxes and got to work, and as I began to read and sort and label I was reminded repeatedly of her fierce dedication to what she understood to be her journalistic vocation. There were the dozens of notebooks recording the interviews that went into the making of Oblivious: Residential Schools, Segregated Hospitals, and the use of Indigenous Peoples as Slaves of Race Science, that we will be publishing later in April; the files of fact-checking, the piles of books that looked as if they’d been torn through in a rage: they were folded and scored and bent and scribbled on, though organized in piles directly related to what she was working on. There were boxes of newspaper clippings and academic research papers; the folders of freedom for information requests and her correspondence with officials about their delays or withholdings; there were notes-to-self about things to follow-up on. There was a budget for the production of the book that she had produced for a funding body as part of a grant application: working on a shoestring, she estimated the book would cost her more than $75,000.00. Between advance and some small works-in-progress grants I could direct her way I may have got her close to a third of that amount. I know that she got a Canada Council grant and some additional provincial funding, but far too much of that total would have come out of her own pocket. Which is, far too often, what is required of Canadian writers, especially of researched nonfiction.

*Photo: A copy of the November 1987 issue of* Toronto Life *magazine, featuring Elaine Dewar’s profile “The Mysterious Reichmanns.”*

I filled 10 bankers boxes with the materials that went into the making of Oblivious, and then moved onto boxing up other documents, including some early essays I found by a teenage Elaine Landa where her voice and vocation was already evident. But what I’ve been thinking about since I located them was approximately a foot of documents tied to the Reichmann trial that resulted from her November 1987 Toronto Life profile “The Mysterious Reichmanns: The Untold Story.” This resulted in the Reichmann’s suing Elaine and Toronto Life, as I’ve heard more than one commentator say, into the stone age, costing her a book deal with Random House worth, if memory serves, $60,000, an estimated $250,000 in other lost revenue, the destruction of years of work, damage to her reputation, and an inhuman amount of stress. Lesser mortals, which means almost all of us, would have crumpled under the weight of it all, as was no doubt expected of Elaine. And yet in these surviving documents, and in the supreme court dispositions and typescripts, which must total close to 800 pages, you can see Elaine fighting back and continuing to kick against the pricks, refusing to give up her sources, maintaining her dignity and fighting for her profession and her own professional life. Sitting down in that cold and increasingly bare office, I couldn’t help but cheer her on forty years after the fact. I felt such an appreciation for how she conducted herself, not just for herself but for all of us. And though almost no one under a certain age remembers this trial or knows of its significance, what Elaine endured helped to change the shape of libel law in this country and made it safer for writers to do the work that they needed to get to the truth, and, as Elaine believed, to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.

*Photo: The first page of the article, “The Mysterious Reichmanns.”*

Among the notes I found was a request she made for me to have Mark Bourrie read her manuscript for libel when it was finished. So I sent a note off to Mark about it, forgetting that at that moment he was receiving the Pierre Berton Award from the Governor General. He gave a speech at its reception that he’s just posted on his own excellent Substack, which you can read here, but which I will selectively quote from below because it ties into something I’ve been thinking about since finding those files in Elaine’s office:

I want to talk about the fact right now we are in the midst of a revolution. Anybody who chooses to ignore it is simply going to find that out later. This is “elbows up” time in Canada. You would not know it from our policy-setters, who have let our country’s publishing and historic story-telling wither. We will be celebrating at the Canadian Museum of History tomorrow. Not everyone in the building will be happy—67 people in that organization have been told they are going to lose their jobs because of federal cuts.

. . .

I would like to be able to do more advocacy. We need to find ways to get the word out about our books. We need to fix the problems with the Copyright Act that, effectively, gave schools the “right” to take our work without paying. And we need to have a funding system that takes the financial risk of producing public history off the shoulders of families like mine.

Photo: Her Excellency the Right Honourable Mary Simon, Governor General of Canada, presents the Governor General’s History Awards at Rideau Hall, Ottawa, on January 23, 2026. Photo Credit: PO 2 Louis Dubé, Rideau Hall © OSGG, 2026

The problem, of course, is that it has always been thus, at least when it comes to the cultural life of this country. Change has always been dependent on individuals, families, or small groups who resist the powerful or the indifferent and push forward despite the very real costs of doing so. I don’t anticipate at this moment that we’re in for substantial change for the better, however much I wish it were otherwise. Mark Carney may have quoted Thucydides and Václev Havel in his Davos speech, but almost a year into his leadership of the country I don’t think I’ve yet heard him say anything in defence of Canadian culture. If we’re going to improve things, we’ll have to take matters into our own hands, and this is why the examples of people like Elaine Dewar and Mark Bourrie (and so many of my small press publishing colleagues) mean so much to me at the moment. It’s difficult, it’s impossible, but they carry on. Which reminds me of a quote I first read on Derek Weiler’s arm, taken from an Irish writer I’ve since grown to love.

You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.

Greg Kelly, CBC Ideas producer, was in town yesterday to give a speech to the University of Windsor’s Humanities Research Group. Titled “Quiet Piggy: Private Codes as Public Discourse,” it was about the breakdown between the private and public and the hijacking of so-called authentic expression in the service of authoritarianism. During his conclusion he spoke of the necessity of action as a form of faith. There’s no guarantee that what we do will make any difference, though we know quite clearly what the consequences of our inaction are. It is through the slow accretion of our efforts, hopefully alongside others, that things change. This is a faith I can accept as my own. Perhaps it’s the remaining glow from my Italian sojourn, but I remain hopeful that we can continue to nudge the cultural needle in the right direction. After all, what choice do we have?

Dan Wells,
Publisher

In good publicity news:

Benbecula by Graeme Macrae Burnet was featured in the Historical Novels Review: “While Benbecula is a tragic story of murder, the empathy that the author feels for his characters and the circumstances that they’re living in is beautifully expressed . . . Consider this reader fully engaged by Benbecula.”
Smash & Grab by Mark Anthony Jarman was reviewed in Quill & Quire: “Jarman packs more into his sentences than any half dozen other authors combined . . . [Smash & Grab’s] cumulative riches are plentiful and unique to one of the most invigorating and unconventional writers of short fiction around.”
On Sports by David Macfarlane was reviewed in The Seaboard Review: “An authentic and resonant read, On Sports should appeal to sports fans who have had their misgivings about sport and where it’s headed, though anyone interested in sports more generally might enjoy reading about Macfarlane’s experiences, his emotional connections to sport, and his philosophical musings about its pros and cons.”
Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers by Marcello Di Cintio was reviewed by Anne Logan on CBC’s The Homestretch.
The Passenger Seat by Vijay Khurana is a shortlisted contender in The Tournament of Books! Will Vijay win the Rooster? We certainly hope so!

Biblioasis Winter Preview: Part I

January 16, 2026/in Latest News, The Bibliophile/by biblioasis

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***

We took an extended break this year at the Bibliomanse, and my own was extended further still by five inches of snow in Paris and Amsterdam, even if a short purgatory in Dante’s city is nothing to kvetch about. Besides, it came with the added benefit of having a couple of drinks with the author of our first title of the season, Mark Anthony Jarman.

Photo: Our globetrotting publisher Dan Wells (left) meets up with Mark Jarman (right) in Florence.

Still, I’m not sure I’ve ever been so happy to be back behind this desk and working on new books, while planning to help broaden the spotlight to include some of our previously published ones as well. (Backlist is Bullshit.) This is only my third full day in office this year (if you don’t count my cramped work at 35,000 feet over the Atlantic) and I’m grateful for many things as we begin 2026, including the great people I get to work with during the creation of these many books, and their enthusiasm and willingness to try new things as we continue to figure out how to make this most difficult of professions make sense, while having a little fun along the way.

Rather than overwhelming you with the complete list of everything we have coming over the first half of this year, or even during the Winter Season, we thought we’d share the first three titles we’re publishing in 2026, breaking this preview up over a few posts over the coming weeks.

Smash & Grab

by Mark Anthony Jarman

A mischievous medley of stories that blur the lines between the real and the imagined.

Smash & Grab brings together fourteen new stories . . . or performances . . . or pieces by one of the most inventive prose stylists at work today, blurring the line between the real and the imagined. His first new collection of short fiction in more than a decade—and first since we collected the best of his previous work in Burn Man: Selected Stories, a book that saw rave reviews from the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Kirkus, Globe and Mail, and elsewhere—these are stories that work their own musical magic distinct from that of any other writer today, stories shaped like strange loops, which gather in the reader’s mind as a collage might, layering word and image.

Photo: *Smash & Grab* alongside Mark Jarman’s previous book, *Burn Man: Selected Stories* (cover designed by Michel Vrana).

His language, as Jarman himself said of one of his literary idols Barry Hannah, is “a weird mixture of Elizabethan and cracker”; his world, whether it is set in Venice or the deep south or on the bloody moon, is violent and bizarre and always slant. Reading an excellent Jarman story—and this book has several of them—will leave you slightly off-kilter. It doesn’t matter what they’re about—the summary of some of them have the feel of a barroom joke: ie, a former military policeman, a veterinarian, and a French poet walk into a bar and debate the Vietnam War—it’s the experience of them that counts. So go ahead . . . experience them. Smash & Grab is already finding its way into bookstores, though it only officially launches five weeks from now.

Every Time We Say Goodbye

by Ivana Sajko, translated from the Croatian by Mima Simić

An extended soliloquy of self-examination, upheaval, loss, hope, disillusionment, ambition, and failure; and a profoundly stark and furious novel.

Photo: *Every Time We Say Goodbye* by Ivana Sajko, translated by Mima Simić. Cover designed by Ingrid Paulson.

We discovered Ivana Sajko when her first book in translation, Love Novel, made the Dublin Literary Award shortlist a few years ago. Three of us read it here in as many days, more or less each in a sitting, and each of us were blown away, in the fantastic translation by Mima Simić, by its energy and humour, its compassion and rage. We went on to publish it in February 2024 as our own anti-Valentine to the literary world.

Photo: *Love Novel* by Ivana Sajko, translated by Mima Simić. Cover designed by Jason Arias.

Reading Sajko is intense and claustrophobic, pleasurable and energizing. A longtime playwright and theatre director, her work often takes the form of a dramatic monologue, which is the case in her next novel, Every Time We Say Goodbye, which we will be publishing in March. A man on a train, propelled from his small town on the eastern edge of Europe to Berlin by a pattern of violence from which he is trying to flee, meditates feverishly on everything that has brought him to this point, moving further and further away from the only person he’s ever loved.

Ivana Sajko, photo credit: Peter Stamer.

Reading Sajko is not for the faint of heart: Every Time We Say Goodbye is a bruising book, a book relevant to this moment and time, but also one that is deeply personal, since all failings begin as such. Yet despite this, there is hope here, as the narrator moves fatefully on towards his final destination, and this feeling has lingered with me in my memory as much as the bleakness and blackness her narrator refuses to look away from. There are very few writers to whom we are as committed as Sajko. Read this book, and Love Novel, and everything that follows: she is one of the very best writers working in any language.

On Sports

by David Macfarlane

In On Sports, journalist David Macfarlane considers the origins of his love of sport against his discomfort with their commodification.

On Sports, the latest volume in our Field Notes series, reads like a conversation between friends at the ballpark in those golden days before the kiss cam and college co-eds with T-shirt cannons spoiled the fun; a book that feels of the sun on your forehead and the breeze in your hair, beer and laughter on your lips; a book that celebrates communion and friendship and the beauty of these games—whether it be baseball or football or soccer or tennis or cricket—that we’ve designed to distract ourselves from the end of the world. It is a book about what 7Up tastes like when drunk from the Grey Cup, which, true story, a young Macfarlane once found in the china cabinet at a childhood friend’s house, and into which they poured their favourite soft drink, raising it to their lips like their heroes, detecting notes on the palate of lime, dust, and Silvo. It’s about everyday heroism and the near impossibility of language to properly capture athletic excellence. It’s about the beauty of excellent sports copy; the ephemerality of even the biggest sports story; how it remains perpetually powered by the eleven-year-old still residing in all of us. It’s a book about rediscovering the spirit of sport before online gambling and the manufactured spectacle that most professional sports have become suffocates the last of it.

I came to sports late as a kid, but became one of the most fanatical of sports fans, especially for baseball: I could probably still quote Rick Monday’s and Fergie Jenkins’ and Mike Schmidt’s 1983 baseball stats from the back of their OpeeChee cards. But over the years I’ve become increasingly ambivalent about sports. Macfarlane shares and acknowledges this ambivalence, but also reminds us of their beauty and humanity. Less an argument than a gentle, generous meander, On Sports has helped once again make me a sports fan, and I think it could appeal broadly to anyone who feels wonder about what feats humans can perform with their bodies, or, otherwise, almost all of us.

Photo of far side of the moon: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/Arizona State University.

In good publicity news:

Cherry Beach by Don Gillmor was featured in the Quill & Quire’s 2026 Spring Preview, and the Winnipeg Free Press’s list of upcoming 2026 books.
Oblivious by Elaine Dewar was also listed in the Winnipeg Free Press’s 2026 books list.
Every Time We Say Goodbye by Ivana Sajko (trans. Mima Simić) was reviewed in Publishers Weekly: “Sajko’s blackhearted modernist novel is worth a look.”
Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers by Marcello Di Cintio was reviewed by Anne Logan on I’ve Read This: “Unflinchingly presents an inequitable Canadian system that contradicts what we consider Canadian values of kindness and acceptance.”
Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre by Mark Bourrie was reviewed in Alberta Views: “Read this book for Bourrie’s wrathful takedown of the egotism, infighting, backbiting and corruption that threaten Canadian democracy.”
Baldwin, Styron, and Me by Mélikah Abdelmoumen (trans. Catherine Khordoc), We’re Somewhere Else Now by Robyn Sarah, and On Book Banning by Ira Wells all made The New Quarterly’s Favourite Books of 2025 list.

The Bibliophile: The Biblioasis Holiday Book Guide (Part III)

December 19, 2025/in Latest News, The Bibliophile/by biblioasis

It is almost impossible this year for me to separate the books we’ve made from the manner and condition of their making. Slow learner (the title of my publishing memoir) that I am, 2025 was the year that I learned, or at least finally realized, that publishing will never get easier. It’s also the year I made my peace with that, its problems and frustrations and challenges also giving shape to some of its primary pleasures. I’ve had a sentence or two from Andrew Steeves taped to my door since 2019, sent to me by another publisher at an earlier point of (supposed) crisis, that suggested as much: this was the year I came to understand this more fully.

Photo: Quote from Andrew Steeves, taped to Dan Wells’s office door.

There’s a question I’ve been thinking about a lot in recent months, as I’ve grappled with the various challenges 2025 brought to the fore, something I hope to write about more in the Bibliophile throughout the coming year if I can find the time (time being the most precious of resources): What is publishing for? I’m not sure it’s a question I asked when I shifted Biblioasis into the publishing sphere twenty-one years ago: that was brought about almost exclusively on the backs of ignorance and ego. For better or for worse, there’s a lot less of both around here these days. There have been moments where I feared I lost the plot a bit, in which I needed to rethink what it is we’re trying to accomplish; but looking at our list over this past year, I no longer worry that this is the case. The plot has perhaps thickened, become more expansive; we’ve learned a lot about what we can do, and what we should; we’ve learned that we can and should expect more of ourselves, and of the books that we publish. And I think this year, with its wide range of titles and subjects, covering history, politics, culture, fiction, poetry, criticism and much else, attests to this. It was the best and worst of years; and yet, still one of the best. I’m grateful for (almost) all of it.

Rather than repeating what others have already highlighted in the earlier installments of this series of Holiday Book Guide posts, I thought I’d focus on half a dozen things not yet discussed, but that also speak to the full range of our publishing commitments, and offer evidence, I hope, for how we’ve grown and developed since those earlier, more ignorant days. If you haven’t already, please do check out the first parts of this series, as there’s some most excellent suggestions to be found therein.

Photo: *Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre* by Mark Bourrie. Designed by Ingrid Paulson.

Around this time last year, when it would have been nice to be winding down, the heavy lifting began in earnest on one of the key books of our 2025 publishing year, Mark Bourrie’s Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre. Conceived only six months earlier over coffee in my back yard after a launch, initially as a much shorter Field Note, we worked with its author (and, truth be told, worked its author) through Christmas and the usual holiday break, then through January and early February, to get the book out in advance of the impending election. We’d assumed that we would have until summer or fall 2025 to produce the biography, but events, as they often do in both politics and publishing, conspired against us, forcing us to get the book finished in record time. We learned a lot in the process about this kind of publishing, about politics, and about our own limitations and the costs of pushing so far past them. We were able to get it out a few weeks before the election, and I think it’s fair to say that the book played a big role in the coverage of the ensuing campaign. I was amazed by Mark’s ability to pull it all together, doing a few years of research and writing in under eight months. Elaine Dewar told me that she believed Ripper contributed to Poilievre’s unexpected defeat in the election; whether or not this is true—Poilievre played a very big role in the outcome himself—this type of publishing feels like the kind of thing we have a responsibility to take on, and I’m grateful that I have been able to work with writers like Mark to tackle these kinds of books when they are needed. I expect that there will be more books like it in the future.

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

One of the reasons we began the Field Notes series back in 2020 was to try and become more engaged, more responsive and responsible publishers, and in 2025 we published two of my favourite books in the series. Ashley wrote a couple of weeks ago about Ira Wells’s On Book Banning, so I’ll spend a paragraph here on Don Gillmor’s On Oil. I think On Oil is easily one of the most elegant and engaging books in the whole series, a mix of memoir, investigation, and meditation of our tortured relationship with a substance that is pushing the world to the brink of collapse. Don was a roughneck in his university years, and he writes of his experiences in that community with humour, intelligence, and sympathy; but it’s his short precis of the history of oil extraction, its relationship to the evangelical movement in both Canada and the United States, and how early we understood that our oil dependence was contributing to global warming (and how quickly both oil companies and government agencies rushed to cover this up, though they were fully cognizant of the consequences) that makes this book such a revelation, and an essential part in the series. It may not seem to be the most engaging of subjects, and—wherever you are on the political spectrum—you may figure that you know enough already about oil, and where you stand on the issue. Don’s book will challenge your assumptions and entertain in equal measure. It should have made every Best of the Year list out there: it’s certainly on mine.

Photo: Sacred Rage by Steven Heighton. Designed by Ingrid Paulson.

It is hard to believe that it’s been more than three-and-a-half years since we lost Steven Heighton. I miss him. So it was a consolation this year to be able to bring out his selected stories, Sacred Rage, gathering fifteen stories from across his four collections, and I hope cementing his reputation as one of the best short story writers this country has produced. He told John Metcalf, his editor for both his first two and last two books, before he knew that he was ill, that returning to the short story after years of trying to be a novelist was like returning home, that it was in the story, more than even poetry, that he felt that he’d made his most important contribution to literature. Anyone who reads the stories in Sacred Rage will have a hard time disagreeing with him.

Photo: Precarious by Marcello Di Cintio. Designed by Kate Sinclair.

I first conceived of the idea of doing a book on migrant workers and their lives more than a decade ago. The first writer we brought on to tackle the subject, whose family began in the fields as farm workers in the early post-WWII years and who now, a couple of generations later, owned some of the larger greenhouses in the area, retreated from it after talking with his family: the personal costs of writing the book as he intended would have been too great. But it always remained at the back of my mind, and after working with Marcello Di Cintio on Driven a few years ago I knew that I’d found the right person to tackle the migrant project. Marcello brought an incredible curiosity, humanity, and sympathy to his subjects; a willingness to dig deep, to ask uncomfortable questions, and to do the hard investigative work essential to a book like I was proposing. His Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers was everything I hoped it would be, a propulsive, informative, and righteously angry examination of the lives of those often brought to this country to do the work that Canadians don’t want to do.

Photo: Dust: More Lives of the Poets (with Guitars) by Ray Robertson. Designed by Ingrid Paulson.

I’ve worked with Ray Robertson now for seventeen years, since we republished his novel Moody Food in 2008, still one of the best rock and roll novels, to my mind, ever published. It shocked me to realize that Dust: More Lives of the Poets (with Guitars) was the eleventh book we’ve done with him over that time, by far the most books we’ve published by any author. Dust picks up where his initial Lives of the Poets (with Guitars) left off, and though there are a few artists without guitars here—James Booker and Nico—that gathered assemblage will still get your foot tapping, and introduce you to artists that you might not otherwise have heard of. My favourite essay in the collection is on the Toronto Rockabilly artist Handsome Ned: I’m looking forward to spending some of the holidays getting better acquainted with his music.

Photo: The Best Canadian 2026 anthologies. Designed by Ingrid Paulson.

Lastly, we completed our latest installment of our Best Canadian anthologies, and this year’s installments are as good as any that have come before. I’ve long admired Mary Dalton as a poet; she shows, in Best Canadian Poetry, that she’s an equally fine editor. Zsuszi Gartner in Best Canadian Stories has pushed the boundaries of my understanding of what a good short story can do, and I’ve been amazed by and grateful for her enthusiasm and promotional verve: her good work has made this year’s anthology one of our best-selling collections to date. Every year, Best Canadian Essays seems the neglected child of this gathering, which is unfortunate, because it is to my mind, year after year, the most consistently excellent of the three, and this installment is no exception: Brian Bethune has brought together a wonderful gathering of essays covering everything from catfishing and climate change to motherhood and mental health. It’s worth picking up from your local indie the next time you’re in the shop. Or better yet, pick up all three!

There is no Ripper to prepare this holiday, thankfully, even if there is, as always, too much work to do. We’re all looking forward to a much needed break, with family, friends, and good books. If you’re hungry for the latter, you could do worse than picking up a couple of the above, or any of the other choices presented in earlier installments of the Holiday Gift Guide. Thank you for reading, and we wish you a Merry Christmas and a wonderful new year, and we’ll see you in 2026.

Dan Wells,
Publisher

Biblioasis 2026 Subscription Clubs

A few sharp-eyed folks may have already caught a glimpse of this announcement on our socials or website, but we’re pleased to announce that our 2026 Subscription Clubs are now available!

This year, we’re offering bundles for Fiction, Nonfiction, Surprise, Choose-Your-Own, alongside new addition to the line-up: The Limited Editions Club, which features five selected titles, each in a specially-designed series edition, signed by the author.

Every subscription comes with five titles, plus bonus Biblioasis ephemera from buttons to ARCs and more (the Limited Editions Club has a few extra goodies). They make a great gift for your favourite bibliophile, or the perfect treat for yourself to enjoy throughout the year. Whether it’s stories and essays filled with humour, loss, and reconnection; a literary detective novel; an exploration of sports; striking new poetry; or translations from across the globe, you can trust you’ll find a book to add to your shelves.

You can view each subscription club on our website, and in the process, get a sneak peek at what titles we have in store for 2026.

In good publicity news:

Near Distance by Hanna Stoltenberg (trans. Wendy H. Gabrielsen) was longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award’s 2025 Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize!
On Book Banning by Ira Wells was included in the Winnipeg Free Press’s list of best books of 2025: “A pocket-sized provocation for educators to help arm themselves against those who wish to remove books from libraries.”
The Passenger Seat by Vijay Khurana was picked as one of London Magazine’s best books of 2025: “Khurana’s glass-cut, rhythmic sentences plunge you into a world of obsessive friendship and insecurity, a game of one-upmanship that feels eerie in its innocence.”
Sacred Rage by Steven Heighton was reviewed in the Literary Review of Canada: “Formally brilliant, ranging from the hilarious to the heartbreaking . . . if there is any justice in this literary world, Heighton’s legacy will be his love of language, evident on every page.”
Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers by Marcello Di Cintio was reviewed in the Literary Review of Canada’s Bookworm.
Batool Abu Akleen’s diary entries from Voices of Resistance: Diaries of Genocide were excerpted in The Walrus.
Who Else in the Dark Headed There by Garth Martens (April 2026) was featured in Publishers Weekly’s Spring 2026 Poetry Preview.