The Bibliophile: Conviction Addiction

Mark Kingwell on compassionate skepticism and the project of justice

I’ve been reading Mark Kingwell since a beloved customer brought a laundry basket of books to my newly opened bookstore in 1998, on the top of which was a signed copy of In Pursuit of Happiness. I read everything by Mark thereafter, and when I started running a literary festival he was among the first authors I invited. When, a few years later, I thought about putting out a shingle as a publisher, I wrote to him about starting a pamphlet series; he was polite in declining, though when I approached him with a similar idea during the pandemic, he helped get the Field Note series started. Working with him, as I have now on seven books, including his just-launched (in Canada; the US pub date is February 11) Question Authority: A Polemic about Trust in Five Meditations, has been both one of the biggest honours and challenges of my professional and intellectual life, in part because his writing has challenged me to rethink (and then rethink again) my assumptions; even if I had not published Question Authority I would have argued that it is his most urgent and essential book in decades, perhaps since the publication of The World We Want. After the election result in the US, and knowing what this could mean for the forthcoming one in Canada, it has become more so.

Left: Mark Kingwell signing books at Bookfest Windsor, 2002. Right: Mark reading at the Capitol Theatre.

In Question Authority Kingwell returns to the public square of civility and diagnoses the biggest challenge facing democratic ideals as what he calls doxaholism, or the addiction to conviction. This is a nonpartisan ailment, affecting both progressives and conservatives, and Kingwell shows how it makes progress on real issues impossible by making compromise equally so, while also undermining faith in essential institutions across the board. If this analysis was all that the book provided it would be worth reading, but he also posits an antidote, what he terms compassionate skepticism, the virtue or (old Humean that he is) ethical habit deploying “constructive disbelief governed by awareness of our shared vulnerability.” Rather than retreating into a range of particularisms, which have tended to further a doxaholic cycle, Kingwell tries to resuscitate Enlightenment universalism as defined by compassion and humility. He is sanguine about the risks we face, and the difficulties we will experience correcting course, but he is also hopeful that, by risking and being aware of our shared vulnerability, we can begin to let go of our misguided distrust in all things and begin the necessary work of building a more just, wise, and open-minded society.

There is so much more to say about Question Authority, things that may become future Bibliophile entries, but for now we’ll leave you with this brief excerpt about compassionate skepticism and how we can each participate in the project of justice.

Dan Wells,
Publisher

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Photo: Question Authority: A Polemic about Trust in Five Meditations by Mark Kingwell. Cover designed by Michel Vrana.

An Excerpt from Question Authority

Introduction

The trust question raises a challenge we must issue to ourselves. That challenge is to approach the duties of civic life with a sense of commitment. In this endless blame game, we must ultimately point the finger at ourselves. That means, as I shall argue, a combination of respect for the collective enterprise and a healthy measure of critical assessment of those engaged in it. We have seen a great deal of the latter lately, and not enough of the former. Distrust of authority is not a viable theory of civic identity; it must be balanced with a sense of responsiveness to the needs of others.

I will label the resulting quality, a virtue or ethical habit, compassionate skepticism. I mean by that the deployment of constructive disbelief governed by awareness of shared vulnerability. It counts as a virtue because it is, to use Aristotelian language, a habituated trait of character that is also a disposition to act. To possess such a quality is to act upon its urgings, and vice versa. Cultivating the disposition, fashioning roles and habits that make for its flourishing, is the work of all of us. We live in a time when many of the strongest habits we have are bad—bad for us, bad for others, bad for the environment, bad for politics, bad for everything we care about. But humans are creatures of habit, and breaking harmful ones is hard work.

I will lean heavily on the idea of habit in what follows, in part because trust itself is a matter of good habits, often exhibited against all odds. The remarkable thing about human societies is that they function at all, given all the primitive tendencies working against them. Even at the level of basic cognition, we are far more likely to incline to superstition and misinformation than to execute the hard work of tracking true knowledge and forging a stable rational subject. As the philosopher Dan Williams notes, “lies, conspiracy theories, misinformation, bias, pseudo-science, superstition and so on are not alien perversions of the public sphere.” On the contrary, “[t]hey are the epistemic state of nature that society will revert to in the absence of fragile—and highly contingent—cultural and institutional achievements.”

That contingency is precisely what occupies me in these pages: the sheer unlikelihood and fragility of our social cooperation. Also, per the corollary point, I flag throughout these pages the urgency of avoiding any slide back into a state of nature that is at once epistemic and political. I mean that wasteland of alternative facts and competing rationalities, all fought on a razed battleground that might once have been a rational public sphere, called public life. Make no mistake about this paradox of human existence: there is every reason for people not to be rational. In terms of basic urges and instincts, we have to acknowledge that logical reasoning and truth-seeking do not come naturally to us. They are possibilities of our nature, but not, as it were, the resting state. And yet, our rational capacity has long been considered the best part of ourselves—especially when it is conjoined with the kind of “unselfing” that makes for connection with other people and with ideas beyond self-interest. Reason and emotion are not contraries but partners. Moreover, we sometimes find ourselves precisely in those moments when we seem most alien to ourselves. Only a reflective, textured account can make sense of that common feature of being a person.

Pursuing these lines of thought, gathering the threads, teasing out what we might call the ethico-cognitive potential of consciousness within all the daily dross and distraction, requires the telling of a good story. I mean a story about ourselves and the world, and about how the two fit together. Story is itself so basic to the human mind that we find ourselves unable to experience life without its shapes and tropes. Personal identity, with its attendant burdens of responsibility and choice, is unthinkable without the continuity of narrative. And just as repetition can aid us when we need guidance, so narrative can provide shape to our temporal thrownness. Habit and narrative are closely linked in the project of individual life, in short, as they are in politics understood as shared life. The conjunction both offers and demands good pattern recognition, but it also then demands the recognition of good patterns over bad.

I realize this is all quite abstract—an inevitable feature of doing philosophy even of the applied or practical variety. My hope is that the details of what follows will clarify everything contained in these introductory paragraphs. For now, the best way to answer all these complex (and never-ending) challenges will be to form new habits to replace old, harmful ones—or, more accurately in the present case, to revive and cultivate potential but endangered habits of trust and responsibility. These positive human habits have been comprehensively frayed, by technology’s disconnection-through-connection, by the polarization of public discourse, and by the reduction of everything to a kind of abstracted video game where other people are no longer seen as entirely real. Habits are powerful, but they are not inevitable. The first step is recognizing how they come to take hold of us. The second step is then to challenge them. The third is to execute this program of recovery with better habits—habits of flourishing, including trust in each other and in the institutions we all need to meet the complexities of twenty-first-century life.

 

Left: Mark Kingwell, 1984. Right: Mark Kingwell, 2024.

Authority must be questioned so that it becomes better, not in order to tear down all possible guidelines for living. We need good rules, good games governed by the rules, and better players to play the games—real people, actual citizens, not avatars or handles. Politics is, after all, a very serious game of justification, wherein participants must offer arguments, if sometimes only implicit ones, for why they have something that someone else does not. Unlike many other games, but in common with the best of them, this game allows for winners and losers but also embraces the wisdom that sometimes true achievement lies in the defeat of any need for victory. Thus do we transcend competition to create community and even glory.

Such high-toned sentiments invite immediate skepticism, I realize. Most of us are well versed in skepticism already. It is the dominant habit of the age. Indeed, the restless urge to question everything might be considered the keynote of both modern and postmodern realities: questioning things is what got us here, but it is also what now makes for confusion. Compassion is another story. Its etymology suggests an idea of fellow feeling, or empathy; but there is also a suggestion, with use, of a relevant command—that compassion entails not just recognition of another’s suffering, but a positive duty to relieve it. In this manner, compassionate skepticism may take its place alongside other, more familiar political virtues like reasonableness and civility.

Compassion is that rare thing, a strong feeling with an equally strong rational basis. Its arousal is, in part, a recognition of shared vulnerability. But that recognition also calls forth an ethical and political response, itself a conjunction of feeling and reason. I experience pain at the pain of others; their suffering causes me to suffer. Absent sociopathic deficit, this is the natural order. Kant and other rationalist philosophers remind us that our fellow-travellers on the moral plane are other rational agents—or, at least, we and they wish to be so. One of the things we have learned to accept since Kant’s time is that the class of rational agents may not all be human.

Even more important than this extension of care and regard is a point that Kant tends to discount altogether. He focuses on our rational powers, and hence our responsibilities. But reason is also a burden, and sometimes a weakness in ourselves. Reason can mask the more fragile inwardness of consciousness, that part of ourselves that includes an awareness of both weakness and wonder in the world. Once we know it, we cannot unknow the fact of suffering.

The game is better when all of us have skin in it. Good games beget good players, and good players in turn bolster and maintain the game’s health. The crisis of trust begins at home. What kind of player are you?

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In good publicity news:

  • The Notebook by Roland Allen was reviewed in the New York Times: “A revealing document of a relationship so intimate as to be sacred: that of the writer and the page.”
  • Near Distance by Hanna Stoltenberg (trans. Wendy H. Gabrielsen) received a starred review from Publishers Weekly: “Stoltenberg debuts with a stunning portrait of a strained mother-daughter relationship . . . It’s a winner.”
  • A Way to Be Happy by Caroline Adderson was reviewed by NPR book critic Kassie Rose in The Longest Chapter: “An impressive collection.”
  • May Our Joy Endure by Kev Lambert (trans. Donald Winkler) was reviewed in the Literary Review of Canada’s Bookworm: “Amanda Perry called the award-winning original, Que notre joie demeure, ‘stylistically adventurous.’ That also rings true for the seamless translation by Donald Winkler, who renders Lambert’s shifting aesthetic modes and formal experimentation with verve.”

The Bibliophile: Confessions of a Literary Schlub

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In addition to two other fine books, Mark Kingwell’s Question Authority and Graeme Macrae Burnet’s A Case of Matricide—more on both soon enough—this month we also launch our yearly installment of the Best Canadian anthologies: Essays, Poetry, Stories. This is our eighth year publishing Best Canadian Stories, which we took over from Oberon when they closed shop; and it’s our sixth publishing Best Canadian Poetry and Best Canadian Essays, which had previously been published by the now-shuttered Tightrope Books. I’ve been a long admirer of the Best American anthologies—I have the better part of two-thirds of a complete run of Best American Stories, going back now more than a century, at home—and I’d hoped that having all three anthologies under one roof might provide opportunities to market and grow the readership for these Canadian versions. As with almost everything in publishing, that’s easier said than done. Publishing is hard; publishing anthologies is, somehow, much harder. This is a shame, because every year there are unexpected riches to be found in each, work you’re unlikely to have found, especially in this age of algorithmic overload, otherwise.

Photo: Behind the scenes of Best Canadian, a glimpse at our shelves of Canadian publications from which the editors select works for each anthology.

Of the three anthologies, the one that seems to have the hardest time finding readers is Best Canadian Essays. This, too, is a shame: it’s become my favourite. There are essays from previously published installments that I still find myself thinking about: from 2020, edited by Sarmishta Subramanian, Michelle Orange’s “How it Feels to Be Free,” which has even more relevance five days out from another panic-inducing presidential election; Christina Sharpe’s “Beauty Is a Method,” which served as my introduction to this writer’s brilliance; Michael LaPointe’s “The Unbearable Smugness of Walking,” which I still think he should have agreed to expand into a Field Note. From 2021, edited by Bruce Whiteman: Mark Kingwell’s meditation on grief, “The Ashes.” From 2023, edited by Mireille Silcoff: Kathy Page’s “That Other Place,” about acquiring an unwanted passport into the land of the unwell, and Sarmishta Subramanian’s “Going the Distance,” on the way that Covid remade friendships. From 2024, edited by Marcello Di Cintio: Gabrielle Drolet’s “In Defence of Garlic in a Jar,” which has made my relationship to food prep so much easier (no small thing!). Any of these essays would have been worth the proverbial price of purchase; for free, then, you get the baker’s dozen or so that comes with them.

“In tackling the role of editor for the Best Canadian Essays series,” 2025 editor Emily Urquhart writes in her introduction, “I read work in literary and journalism magazines, in newspapers, online journals and zines, and in publications that I couldn’t begin to classify. How many essays?  Maybe hundreds . . . I tracked my progress through sticky notes and marginalia, and by the precarious piles of magazines stacked on my office floor, which shot up like skyscrapers in a fast-developing city. This vast reading was an act of divination . . . [from which] after nearly a year of reading, a cluster of singular works came forth.” This is exactly the opposite of the algorithmic processes we all publicly decry and to which we are privately addicted: the editorial process is personal, considered, considerate, and unsystematic. But the resulting gathering is as wide-ranging and finely focused as one could hope for, covering in unexpected ways the range of human, and humane, concerns.

“An essay might rant,” Emily concluded, “hold strong opinions, or be a call to action. It can be futile, or constructive, or both. It can be personal and distant all at once. It can entertain, instruct, or educate. It can resonate. It can resolve, or it can fade into the ether. It can laugh. It can weep. It can howl with indignity. Essays . . . are changeable and chameleon-like: they adapt with the times, and they reinvent themselves.” And they can help us reinvent ourselves, too.

The writing life is woven through Emily’s selection, including essays by Sadiqa de Meijer on losing her notebook, Rebecca Kempe on a poetry reading she seems incapable of escaping, and this painfully funny essay, by Tom Rachman, on the perils (there are so few pleasures) of literary promotion, “Confessions of a Literary Schlub,” which we dedicate to all of our writers currently or soon to be on the road—Caroline Adderson, Lisa Alward, Richard Kelly Kemick, Catherine Leroux, Alex Pugsley, and Jón Kalman Stefánsson, just this week alone!—in this last manic rush of the festival circuit season. Have courage! At least the stingrays always show!

Dan Wells,
Publisher

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Photo: Best Canadian Essays 2025 selected by Emily Urquhart. Cover designed by Ingrid Paulson.

“Confessions of a Literary Schlub”

by Tom Rachman

As my flight descended over the turquoise Caribbean, I asked myself, Who’d go to the Cayman Islands and attend a literary event of mine? I soon learned the answer: nobody. Just empty chairs and an awkward bookseller. “Maybe you could swim with stingrays tomorrow?” she suggested. “They always turn up.”

Promoting a book can derange you. After years of quiet toil and noisy typing, you clutch a published book, and step forth to meet the public, eight billion humans who, mystifyingly, seem not to know that your new novel just came out.

Occasionally, someone treats you like the important writer you long to be (but probably aren’t). They rave about your prose and frown attentively when you speak. It’s an adrenaline shot to your ego. Then, you’re at a signing table, the pile of hardcovers all unsold, and everyone has gone. You’re just another needy nobody, your ego mashed underfoot.

Now and then, a literary novelist is swept to fame. But most are swept by the polar wind of indifference. To avert oblivion, authors today attempt to twist themselves into hucksters, the spokesmodels for their books, sales rep of their inner lives.

I’d like to blame tech. I try to blame it for everything. When the internet bulldozed the traditional press, it squashed book coverage too. But the internet flung up alternatives, from literary websites to BookTok to public readings on Zoom.

Finally, novelists didn’t need the gatekeepers. They could shout for attention themselves. On the downside, they had to shout for attention themselves.

Publishers and agents— rarely certain why one decent book soars when a thousand more go plop—pressured authors to become more accessible, not merely slouching around festivals and bookshops, but thrusting themselves forward for inspection on Goodreads and Twitter and making themselves reachable via direct message. The writerly myth altered.

Previously, biographies and gossip imagined The Novelist as a tormented character, pungent from debauchery, infidelity, booze. Now, the writers who prevailed seemed assertively nice: the endearing quirks, the correct politics.

Being beastly never made anyone talented at writing. Nor does being kind to cats. My point is: the skill set for literature is not necessarily the skill set for promoting it.

Imagine Dostoevsky, nagged to update his Facebook page. Or Emily Dickinson at a poetry slam, posting on Instagram. Or Kafka addressing his fans on YouTube: “Hey, guys! Brutal wakeup today: I open my eyes, and I’m, like, an insect—what is up with that?! Check out my new story, #Metamorphosis. Hit ‘like,’ and subscribe below!”

Consider the case of Suzanne Young, author of a young-adult horror novel, who turned up for her reading in Phoenix, and found that she outnumbered the audience. Young tweeted a photo of the deserted store, with the caption, “If you ever want to see a career low point, this is it. Crying my entire way home.”

Photo: Suzanne Young’s viral tweet about her reading with no audience.

She didn’t sob for long. Her tweet went viral, and she ended up on NBC Nightly News, living a plot twist worthy of feel-good fiction: because nobody turned up, she had a hit.

What is the moral of her story? That the internet can save us? Or that bookstore readings are a waste, and you’re better off hyping yourself online?

For today’s author, the trail of shamelessness begins before the novel is published—perhaps before it’s written. Developing an online fanbase inhibits your writing, but your career may depend upon it. (Before her sorrowful event, Young already had more than twelve thousand Twitter followers, who helped circulate her post, ultimately seen by 7.9 million people.)

Once you’ve produced a manuscript, your self-abasement picks up, as you beg blurbs from any noted writer you’ve chanced to meet and failed to alienate. This means published ex-classmates from the creative writing MFA; or prominent authors who taught you there; or the bestselling novelist you importuned at a literary festival.

Superficially, the blurb is a recommendation to readers. But it’s also a flex, showing that a novel’s author is connected, high-status, has cool friends.

Every blurb request is inappropriate. You’re demanding twenty hours or more from a busy professional, all to serve your interests, and with questionable impact. Moreover, you’re asking an author to mislead their readers, given that most blurbs are plainly dishonest: there simply isn’t that much genuine gushing.

Next, you must badger your followers and family to preorder your novel, as advanced sales cue the publisher to take it seriously and promote yours rather than the flood of other books released at the same time. To attract coverage, you need a narrative behind the narrative—that your fiction is actually non-fiction in disguise, inspired by your messy divorce, your messy kids, your drug bust, your life in the burbs, your PTSD, your OCD, your impotence, your incontinence, your pet marmot Ernesto.

What you mustn’t say is that you just made up the story, that it came purely from imagination. Fellini, I once heard, falsified personal anecdotes to publicize his movies. I’ve been tempted to try this, to spin yarns and present myself as charismatic. But I can’t bring myself to lie. I remain a schlub making cups of tea in my kitchen.

You also must write for free. Now that the media has fragmented into many outlets of varied intent, you cannot hope that a mighty publication will crown your book. Even the cover of the New York Times Book Review has far less effect than it had. Once, it meant instant bestseller. Today, with everyone reading on phones, there is no “cover” in the same way.

So, you churn out self-publicizing content in disguise, everywhere from upstart literary blogs to old-media websites—free contributions like “The 7 Best Books on the Subject I Just Wrote About.” This bewilders me, that you’re supposed to promote your book by exhorting people to buy other books. You must pray they’ll notice your mini-bio and click the Amazon link.

Needless to say, you schlep to any event that’ll have you. The organizers are delightful; they revive your faith in contemporary literature and restore your longing for a place in it. Then, you’re looking out from a lectern at seven people, three of whom are personal friends. You wonder if any of this makes sense.

Book events expose a fundamental flaw in promoting fiction: novelists tend to be mumblers with bad haircuts who can’t bring their writing to life before a crowd and are inarticulate when answering questions about the craft. Some are performers; some are insightful; some, inspiring. More are the dinner guest nobody notices, but who has thoughts, and gathers them, composes them, types them in private, revises and revises—and only then, finds the words.

One of my first bookstore readings was at Politics & Prose in Washington, DC. Beforehand, the organizers stashed me in a sideroom alongside a staffer on break, whose calm contrasted with my terror. In minutes, I’d need to declaim about literature. I had no right. I was an imposter.

After the event, my sister rushed over, assuring me I hadn’t humiliated myself. “You didn’t seem nervous at all,” she said.

“Tranquilizers,” I confided. “I took many tranquilizers.” According to a recent survey conducted by the Bookseller magazine, the majority of debut authors say book publication damaged their mental health. At least one respondent ended up on meds.

But writing careers have always been marked more by failure than glory. And blurbs, public readings, mass indifference—all that preceded the internet era.

Is any of this truly new?

When it comes to contemporary literature, you hear debates about identity and appropriation, about awards and autofiction. But what matters is the competition: those words and pictures and videos heating the device in your pocket, which vibrates so impatiently, goading you to check its stories.

While the internet is the most powerful marketing tool that writers have ever had, the internet is also devastating to an art that requires close concentration.

Once, brainy types read contemporary novels for amusement, to ponder what it meant to be human, to shock themselves at what others did privately, to join the intelligentsia, to march into the debate. This role is rarely taken by a novel today.

A subculture of ultraliterary types does still rally around the latest darlings of fiction. A bigger constituency buys the novels selected for TV book clubs or by prize juries. Most years, a screen-adapted literary work joins the bestseller list. But beneath those few titles are stacks and stacks of disappointment.

The study of literature dwindles too, as with the rest of the humanities. According to a report in The Times of London, one university had two hundred English-literature undergrads a decade ago; now, it’s down to thirty.

When I meet bookish types with young-adult offspring, many speak of how their kids devoured fiction when little, but have since abandoned it. What those middle-aged bookish types are ashamed to add is that they themselves—with extensive culture and extensive bookshelves—scarcely read fiction anymore.

One culture critic told me that he still reviews novels because that way he is forced to read them. Authors have made similar admissions to me.

Will Lloyd, a journalist at the political and literary magazine the New Statesman, noticed that he’d read plenty of books lately—and none was a novel. So, he spent a week quizzing the literary types he knew, asking whether they were reading fiction, if they discussed it with friends, if they sought it out for social insights. Among forty people, only two said yes.

I feared that I was an imposter in writing. I’ve come to wonder if all literary novelists are imposters now, barging into the far edge of the culture, holding up reams of pages, saying, I wrote something—look at it!

How presumptuous: engaging in make-believe, asking strangers to admire it. Those strangers too have something to say, and nowadays can, commenting, filming, liking, downvoting.

What’s odd about being a novelist today is that the position retains a shimmer of prestige with only a glimmer of audience.

Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it’s just my writing that is shrivelling away. Maybe I’m projecting my eclipse onto the field.

I wouldn’t fight that charge. I’m tired of fighting for attention, imploring strangers to care about what I cared about, pleading for a hearing of my voice in an art that seems quieter and quieter, that is missing the point somehow.

A New York book editor told me that publishing had always been this way: a few megahits support all those below. Even writers at the top are rarely satisfied. Philip Roth, who had success after success, died bitter that he hadn’t won the Nobel Prize, the editor remarked, wondering just how much would be enough to quench authors.

A few weeks ago, I visited a smattering of London bookshops at the request of my British publisher. Sheepishly, I approached staff, mentioning that I was supposed to sign my new novel. They hunted down a few copies. I always feel absurd autographing books.

But it’s thrilling too, if you don’t look down: that someone was crazy enough years ago to fly me to the Cayman Islands for a reading.

I’ve been an imposter, unsure what I was doing here, frazzled by a caterwauling, distracted, outraged world, my thoughts firing, hesitating to say them—so I put them onto paper, fighting with sentences, removing commas only to replace them, judging myself a failure, hating that I minded, despairing at my irrelevance, writing to cure myself, wanting to say something that’d make others listen, trying, trying, mostly failing.

A writer.

“Confessions of a Literary Schlub” by Tom Rachman first appeared in the Globe and Mail.

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20 Stores for 20 Years: The Bookmark

It’s Biblioasis’ 20th anniversary this year, and we wanted to celebrate 20 independent bookstores who have helped us make it this far! This week we’re featuring The Bookmark, who has locations in Fredericton, Charlottetown, and Halifax. Mike Hamm from the Bookmark Halifax stepped up to tell us about his favourite Biblioasis book, How to Build a Boat by Elaine Feeney, and our publisher Dan Wells wanted to share one of the reasons why we love the Bookmark (and Mike!). Read on to learn more about Mike’s favourite book and our first “20 stores for 20 years” store.

Photo: Interior of The Bookmark, colourfully decorated with balloons.

When Dan published Biblioasis’ first book in 2004, Salvatore Ala’s Straight Razor and Other Poems, one of the first sales calls he made was to Mike Hamm at The Bookmark Halifax: “I know now how lucky I was to start with such a generous bookseller. Mike and The Bookmark were willing to support us from the get-go, at a time when most, reasonably, couldn’t be bothered; and they have continued to do so for twenty years, whether it be for local writers like Alexander MacLeod (Light Lifting), Kris Bertin (Bad Things Happen), or for the hundreds of other books we’ve published.”

And here’s why Mike chose How to Build a Boat as his favorite Biblioasis book: “The excitement surrounding Elaine Feeney’s writing intensified with the release of How to Build a Boat. When Biblioasis published this magnificent novel in the leadup to the holiday season, I had found my perfect book to recommend. Its poignancy, grace and insight into the delicate nature of human relationships captivated me and many others. Thank you, Biblioasis, for not only bringing us amazing talent from all across Canada but representing the best authors from around the globe.”

Photo: Bookmark Halifax manager Mike Hamm poses with his Biblioasis pick, How to Build a Boat by Elaine Feeney.

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In good publicity news:

The Bibliophile: The Notebook by Roland Allen

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During the 2023 London Book Fair I made what has become one of my favourite pilgrimages: to Hampstead Heath to meet the publishers of Sort of Books, Mark Ellingham and Nat Jansz. I became acquainted with Mark in 2019, when we took Canadian rights for Andri Snær Magnason’s On Time and Water, a book about global warming that Mark had acquired for Profile Books. When acquiring books, one also often acquires friends along the way: Mark and Nat rank among the best of these.

Before becoming an acquiring editor of nonfiction for Profile and starting up Sort of Books with Nat, Mark had been the creator and publisher of the Rough Guide series of travel and cultural books. Growing increasingly anxious about the environmental costs of rampant tourism and his company’s own contribution to the same, Mark sold the company and used the profits to devote himself to a different type of publishing program. That 2019 afternoon when we first met had been grey and threatening, the tall grass his dog led us through soaking the only pair of shoes I had with me, the dampness later rising up my legs as the Booker Prize ceremony that had brought me to London progressed, so that by the time the winner was announced, I was rather feverish. But the hours I spent with Mark wandering the heath, and then eating lunch at the Wells Tavern, were more than worth it, and, during the long days and weeks and months of the pandemic, took on an especially golden resonance.

The April day in 2023 when we next met was quite beautiful, and after another walk with the dog, and another lunch, we finished up with coffee in the front room of Nat’s and Mark’s house, which doubles as Sort of’s centre of operations. One of the pleasures of these fairs is talking with other people who understand the particular challenges and pitfalls of independent publishing, as well as its equally particular pleasures, which include the discovery of new books. At one point Mark put down his coffee and motioned me over to his computer: “Come take a look at this.” And he proceeded to tell me about Roland Allen’s The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper.

There is, at least for me, a covetous aspect to being a publisher: you learn of a book and feel an immediate quickening, a desire to have it for your list, or to be part of it in some fashion. This feeling overwhelmed me on first learning of The Notebook. Here, Mark told me, was the first book of its kind, a history of the notebook and the radical ways it has changed how we relate to both the world and to ourselves through a wide range of disciplines, from accounting and art to exploration, medical care, policing, and science. In the parlance of the antiquarian trade, I love BABs, or books about books, and here was a BAB quite unlike any other. Reading it transformed my own understanding of the role of this humble invention—but just as importantly, it’s changed how I use my own notebooks on a daily basis.

And judging from the response to the book since we first published it in September, I’m not alone. The Notebook has received rave reviews in the likes of KirkusWashington PostWall Street Journal, and The New Yorker; Ryan Holiday has sung its praises; and it’s been quite easily our best-selling book of the season.

There are so many wonderful stories within these pages, but one of my favourites concerns the zibaldone, an invention that changed our relationship, before the printing press, to literature, making it possible, in the world before print, for work by the likes of Dante and Boccaccio to travel far beyond the communities for which they wrote. Since reading this, I have begun to keep my own zibaldone as a notebook distinct from my others; perhaps some of you, once you finish reading this, will do the same.

Dan Wells
Publisher

Photo: The Notebook by Roland Allen, with a cover designed by Louis Gabaldoni.

Excerpt from Chapter 4: Ricordi, ricordanzi, zibaldoni

Notebooks in the home, Florence 1300–1500

No-one knows exactly when the gloriously sonorous noun zibaldone appeared, or what it originally meant. The earliest record of the word, in the mid-fourteenth century, refers to it as Florentine slang, without further definition, and we can only infer from context that it means something like ‘mess’ or ‘jumble’. The fifteenth-century merchant and art patron Giovanni Rucellai referred to his own zibaldone as ‘una insalata di più herbe’, a salad of many herbs, which gives an impression of something variegated and wholesome. But by then it had also become firmly attached to the notebook in one of its most enduring applications. For this informal culinary term came to signify a personal anthology, or miscellany.

The basic principle was simple: when you found a piece of writing that you liked, or found useful, you copied it out into your personal notebook. You could copy out as much or as little as you wanted, neatly or not, and refer to it a little, or as much, as you wanted. The collection could be poetry or prose, fictional or factual, thematic or random, religious or profane, in Latin or Tuscan, or any mixture of any of these components; you could even draw pictures in it. The notebook itself could be large or small, luxurious or utilitarian. Some better-off writers, such as the author Boccaccio (the son of a Bardi banker), had zibaldoni made of expensive parchment, and paid professional scribes to do the writing for them. Many users illustrated them, or commissioned elaborate initial capitals to open every new excerpt: surviving examples often have gaps where their owners never got round to completing that task.

Mostly they were kept by men, but not all were, and we can assume that many wives, sisters and daughters would have had access to the books kept by the men of the house. For zibaldoni, although always idiosyncratic and personal to their owner, were not necessarily private, or intimate: you would share the highlights of your own with your friends, and if you saw something that you liked in theirs, you’d copy it over. You could sell a full zibaldone, or hand it down to your heirs, and in many examples one can see where the father stopped writing and the son took over.

Some even caused family disputes. ‘This book was written by Piero di Ser Nicholo di Ser Verdiano, for his own contemplation, and that of his family, etc. in the year of Our Lord 1458’ reads an inscription at the beginning of one notebook, before writing that Piero intends the book to go to Girolamo di Piero Arighi, presumably his son. Beneath this is a crossing-out, and under that another hand writes ‘Note that you are lying through your teeth like the scoundrel you are, and you are a crazy windbag.’ Was that inserted by Girolamo’s brother, Bartolomeo, who elsewhere in the zibaldone claims ownership?

The son of a banker, Boccaccio could afford to pay scribes to compile his zibaldoni. This playful layout has extracts from the Roman poet Flacco.

What did people write in their zibaldoni? In a word: everything. Poems in Latin, poems in Tuscan, prayers, excerpts from books, songs, recipes, lists, you name it. Lisa Kaborycha, who has studied them extensively, points to one fifteenth-century example which, entirely typically, contains material as various as ‘remedies and recipes, interpretations of dreams, astrological predictions, advice on the best times for planting, Pseudo-Saint Bernard’s Epistle to Raymond, prayers, poems, ballads and a number of sonnets by Coluccio Salutati, Antonio Pucci, and Dante.’ Armando Petrucci, another expert, celebrated the zibaldone for preserving ‘gate tolls and currency exchange rates . . . alongside medical recipes, devotional tracts, lauds, and love lyrics’.

Rucellai compiled his zibaldone with his sons in mind: for their benefit, it contained moral precepts, advice on business and civic duties. In his, the sculptor Ghiberti collected translations of Vitruvius and Pliny, drawings of Roman architecture, a history of Florentine and Sienese art, and his own memoirs. Through these he interlaced his own theoretical ideas—on optics, proportion, anatomy—clearly intending the collection to form the basis of a humanist art education. His grandson Bonaccorso, who inherited them along with the family business, left his own notebooks, which quote from his grandfather’s and add numerous diagrams of bells, cannon, cranes and hoists. So no two zibaldoni are the same.

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Florentines loved their new hobby. Looking at the zibaldoni in the archives, researchers can track how the notebooks grew in popularity over time, peaking in the fifteenth century as Florence enjoyed its second heyday as the hub of Europe’s intellectual life. Books had now become everyday items, and this had profound effects on how ordinary people enjoyed the written word. Literature, previously only available in monasteries, universities, courts and a few other privileged locations, now moved into the home: the kitchen table and shop counter joined the tilted desk of the scriptorium as a place where a book could be read, or written. People read in a new way in these new locations too. They enjoyed a wave of authors writing in their local tongue—not just Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio, but a host of other writers forgotten today—and, unlike a student or a cleric in an institution’s library, they could read privately, even in bed.

We should note, too, that the labour involved in copying out a chunk of literature changes the way the copyist relates to it. Transcribing a poem or letter forces the writer to read it multiple times, paying attention to the fine details of word selection and word order, and to consequently enjoy what one scholar calls ‘a more intimate and meaningful experience than they could have with purchased texts’. You only take on the significant labour of such copying if you really enjoy the text, and you then find that you come to know it and appreciate it much better.

How did this new habit relate to the continuing work of traditional scribes? Historian Ross King has described a thriving culture of high-end manuscript production in Florence, where professional scribes and notaries—and the secretaries of some rich men—produced formal manuscript copies, nearly always on parchment, to order. Such copies could be extremely beautiful, and the booksellers who commissioned them for their wealthy clients took great care about their texts. King relates, for instance, how the great bookseller Vespasiano da Bisticci (1421–98) would compare multiple extant copies of an ancient book—for instance, Pliny’s Natural History—in order to make sure that his new version was as faithful as possible to its author’s intentions. Scribes moved their pens differently, dropping the baffling vertical strokes of traditional gothic script and adopting the beautifully lucid ‘antique’ or humanist style, recommended by Vespasiano’s contemporary Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459) in its place.

Bonaccorso Ghiberti recorded many of the machines that Brunelleschi developed for the construction of the dome of Florence cathedral.

Funded by wealthy patrons like Cosimo de’ Medici,* and scouring Europe’s monasteries for rare Dark Age survivals of classical texts, Vespasiano, Poggio and their peers kept up a steady supply of beautiful manuscripts filled with fresh translations, rediscoveries and new literary works. The presence of the papal court in Florence for several years also drew scholars to the city, and stimulated a rich intellectual life centred on the new libraries and bookshops where bookworms met to discuss their reading. This high-end literacy undoubtedly had a profound impact on European culture, giving the Renaissance its intellectual heft, and King celebrates its heroes, such as the legendary fourteenth-century scribe who produced one hundred copies of Dante’s Divine Comedy, whose sales contributed to his many daughters’ dowries.

But such painstaking efforts in expensive parchment codices could only ever find an elite audience. For Dante to become widely read, universally celebrated and the foundation of a new literature—in short, for Dante to become Dante—scribal reproduction would not alone suffice. His writings were transmitted to a much larger, more diverse, audience, by thousands of ordinary people copying favourite texts from zibaldone to zibaldone, reading and re-reading them at home, and sharing them with friends and family. And they copied not in the formal gothic or antique scripts that took years to master, but the rapid cursive scripts used by merchants and notaries; people who had to write accurately, but also quickly.

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So notebooks democratised literature by giving readers another way to read; but they also gave writers another way to write. Petrarch (1304–74), another favourite of zibaldone keepers, adopted the habits and materials of notaries, the legal professionals who formed a crucial part of the mercantile ecosystem, and today’s scholars can trace his ideas as they progress from notes on loose leaves of paper to rough copies in paper notebooks and finally to completed books in a definitive version on prestigious parchment.* The intermediate stage, in the notebook, was creatively the most important and could last a while: Petrarch worked on the verses in Il Canzoniere for forty years (this was an age before publishers’ deadlines). Such labours definitely paid for themselves: by the time of his death, the poet had been crowned poet laureate in Rome.

In the zibaldoni of Petrarch’s friend Boccaccio (1313–75), we can see how the notebook helped writers in other ways, giving them a place to collect influences for future reference and quotation. As a young man, Boccaccio endured a miserable commercial apprenticeship at the Bardi bank, where his father was a partner, before breaking away to write full-time. He left no fewer than three zibaldoni, two written by scribes on parchment, and one rough notebook, known as the Zibaldone Magliabechiano, that he kept himself. Scholars have pored over them to discern his influences and their impact on his work, including the Decameron, and they betray an impressive depth of reading: a life of Mohammed, Euripides, Pliny, letters to and from Petrarch, and so on. In turn, his own work would feature in many zibaldoni, juxtaposed with—thrown into dialogue with – classical authors like Aristotle, Cicero and Seneca.*

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Was Florence unique in all this? Yes and no. Notebook-keepers across Europe also made their own informal personal anthologies: examples survive from Scotland to Poland, and a vast majority of such books must have been lost or pulped many centuries ago. In the late 1300s, Dutch and German adherents of the devotio moderna—‘modern devotion’—movement were encouraged to keep rapiaria. The name for these notebooks derives from the Latin rapere, meaning to seize; we might call them ‘grab-bags’. In these devotional notebooks, the pious collected phrases or ideas from their scriptural reading, and added their own spiritual insights; the act of writing led to further rumination, helping the writer benefit from the wise words they copied. The Imitation of Christ—a hugely popular book—started life as the rapiarium of its author, Thomas à Kempis, a monk from Zwolle. Most rapiaria remained private, though, and were often buried with their owners, and the practice died out within a century.

But the people of Florence (and its environs) grasped the possibilities faster and more fully than anywhere else. Enriching their lives by ensuring that their favourite literature was always near at hand, they made it possible for a new writer to quickly find a wide audience. Most households had a book or two on a shelf and book-copying and production here outstripped that of every other city in Europe. One study of the period by the scholar Christian Bec shows that in the posthumous inventories of 582 deceased Renaissance Florentines, no fewer than 10,574 books were listed: an average of eighteen each.

Small wonder that Florence made a congenial home for the scholars, who would turn rediscovered classical texts into the keys of Renaissance humanism. In the city’s yeasty literary culture they could find a receptive readership, confident in their vernacular, ready for the translations, glosses and new works that humanists created, for they had already been enjoying the ancients for generations, ‘and knew the value of their wisdom’. Here too, new literary practice developed: authors could easily collect models and inspirations for their own work, could adapt the techniques of lawyers and merchants to help them hone it, and then rapidly find a wide audience in a well-read population that shared ‘content’ that we would today call viral.

Ricordi, ricordanzi and zibaldoni arrived in the thirteenth century as Florence established its commercial pre-eminence, grew in popularity over the course of the fourteenth as the city’s first great writers and painters made their impact, and peaked in the fifteenth, as the Renaissance flowered. In all three genres, and in the innumerable hybrid notebooks that refused to fit neatly into any category, Tuscans rich and poor recorded their place in society and celebrated a burgeoning culture of which they were justly proud.*

Footnotes:

  1. By 1444, when Cosimo opened the new library of San Marco, filling it with manuscripts he also donated, the tribulations that his predecessor Foligno had detailed were far behind.
  2. It is striking to note that notaries were trained to strike through phrases as they transferred them from their working draft (bastardello) to the final version, just as bookkeepers struck through transactions which had been reconciled to debit and credit. Petrarch’s father and grandfather had both been notaries.
  3. There’s more to literature than poetry, of course. Just ten years before Dante started work on the Divine Comedy, Marco Polo was coming up with Europe’s first international narrative non-fiction bestseller. Locked up in a Genoese jail with his amanuensis Rustichello da Pisa, Polo wrote his autobiographical Travels in around 1298. Sadly, we have no autograph manuscript and know nothing of how they composed the work.
  4. Literacy rates are notoriously difficult to prove, but there is strong evidence that they were higher in Florence than nearly everywhere else. Eight out of ten 1427 tax returns, for instance, were written by the taxpayer responsible, indicating a high rate of writing skill among property-holders. The historian Ronald Witt concluded that the city enjoyed rates of literacy ‘not seen again in Europe for another three or four centuries’.

Photo: Author Roland Allen signing copies of The Notebook at the Windsor book launch in Biblioasis Bookshop, September 30.

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In good publicity news:

The Bibliophile: “I’m being a smartass, but it’s true.”

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If you’re not yet acquainted with GauZ’, the Franco-Ivorian novelist and author of International Booker-shortlisted Standing Heavy, you are in for an early Halloween treat. And if you are: you’re likely anticipating a trick or two, GauZ’ being a writer in no short supply thereof.

I first encountered GauZ’s work late last fall, when Dan passed along a PDF of the debut that would in March make its way onto the shortlist. It’s a slim novel, 180ish pages, and I read it over the course of a Friday evening and Saturday morning, pausing only when I had to wrestle unbound pages back from my partner, whose eye kept catching on the titled vignettes that make up some of the sections of this kaleidoscopic story of three Ivorians working as security guards in Paris. With titles ranging from “Babies” and “The Moustache Theory” to “Right Buttocks” (followed, of course, by “Left Buttocks”), I couldn’t blame him: written from the perspectives of the guards themselves, these passages are brief observations of the curious behaviours of Western shoppers, and together comprise a shrewd, deeply funny, always unexpected ethnography, compiled by our intrepid discoverers, of the strange land in which they’ve found themselves. No surprise: GauZ’ is also editor-in-chief of News & Co, the satirical economic newspaper.

Photo: Standing Heavy (2023) and Comrade Papa (2024) by GauZ’, translated from the French by Frank Wynne. Both covers designed by Nathan Burton.

Comrade Papa is the second of GauZ’s novels to find English publication, also in brilliant translation by the inimitable Frank Wynne—truly this pair, perfectly matched as they are in intelligence and linguistic wit, should be known as one of the great duos in translated literature. In this sophomore glow-up, GauZ’ doubles down on satire and turns his canny anthropological eye in part to the past. Comrade Papa is both an unexpectedly slapstick historical novel and a charmingly comic, contemporary coming-of-age story, alternating between the perspectives of a young 19th-century Frenchman who joins a colonial expedition to the as-yet-untouched Ivory Coast and a young Black boy born to Communist parents in contemporary Amsterdam. He writes neither story as one might expect: the colonial narrative is vividly voiced and politically complex as our hero navigates between factions who disagree on everything (except their shared hatred of the British), while the child narrator of the contemporary sections, whose monologue is rife with comic malapropisms (“the yolk of capitalism” and “the lumpy proletariat” are two of my favourites), demonstrates how the long arc of the colonization finds its expression in surprising ways, and with unexpected ends. This intertwining of narrative styles and fact with folktale, writes Nadifa Mohamed for the New York Times, comprise a “gleaming mosaic,” and for the Guardian, John Self calls the narrative “funny, ebullient, often chaotic,” and even better than Standing Heavy. For TLS, Lara Pawson writes: “Only a bold writer in command of their talent could take on such a perilous and vast subject and come out, with laughter and love, on top . . . If you are foolish enough to open this book with a set of assumptions about where it will go, prepare to be wrong-footed . . . Expect to see GauZ’ back on the shortlists with this superlative work of fiction.”

We certainly agree, and we hope—now that you’re duly prepared for mischief—you’ll treat yourself to Comrade Papa’s pair of unexpected adventures. In the meantime, we thought you might enjoy our exclusive interview with the man himself.

Vanessa Stauffer
Managing Editor

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Photo: Franco-Ivorian author GauZ’

A Biblioasis Interview with GauZ’

Hey GauZ’, would you like to start by telling us a bit about yourself?

Anyway, my name is GauZ’, and I’m a Franco-Ivorian writer. Ivoiro-French. I can say both. And for almost ten years, I’ve been writing books that are a total proclamation of style. I make people think. This is what matters most in the world. What matters most in literature is style: it’s style that appeals to the reader’s intelligence, it’s style that appeals to the reader’s empathy, it’s style that reminds the reader that the cause you’re defending implicates them too. I believe that what makes me an author is this style that I have to offer: the capacity to marvel, to write dialogue that sparks, to capture the beauty of gestures, things like that.

Comrade Papa is your second novel with Biblioasis, what inspired you to write a historical novel?

I started from a very simple question, in fact. Who are the people who came to colonize us 150 years ago? And I realized that, in fact, they’re people who are a lot like us. By us, I mean Africans. In other words, they were peasants who, in the middle of France in the nineteenth century, were also under the heel of the French bourgeoisie. Colonial domination as it expanded across the globe was still a project of the European upper class. So when does the peasant who goes to Africa become “civilized,” or become a member of the bourgeoisie? And that’s how I came up with the story of this young man who leaves the backwaters of rural France to make his fortune in Africa. Just as today, Africans come to Europe to pursue their destiny, there was a time when the idea of immigration was European, in the sense that it was something lower class people could do to make something of themselves. I also wanted to weave the story of the young man Dabilly, who goes to the colony that would become Côte d’Ivoire, with the story of a child in Europe today, because childhood represents the present and also the future, going to Côte d’Ivoire more than a century later. I wanted the novel to have the geographical trajectory of the immigrant to Africa and also to follow the human trajectory from childhood to youth to adulthood, which is universal.

The great novels of colonial exploration by Joseph Conrad, among others, inspired the hyper-literary style of your novel, Comrade Papa, even if the events of the plot bring no glory to the central character (young Dabilly suffers from diarrhea, stupidity, heat, etc.). Can you tell us about your choice to write a historical novel in a style that evokes the early twentieth century, and your almost satirical way of doing it?

First off, I wanted to write something no one would expect after Standing Heavy. And two, in each of my novels the style follows from the story—the novel imposes its style on the author. Comrade Papa imposed its style right away. I wanted to give the sense that the novel was like a letter the main character Dabilly was actually writing at the time. I read a lot of correspondence, in particular the letters of former colonial administrators. They had two writing styles, when they wrote the big administrative reports, they were writing in a grandiose nineteenth century style. And when they wrote to their buddies their style was different: more touching, more direct, and without circumlocutions. There was the official speech of triumphant France. Where they would report, we secured victory over this Black chief in such and such a village, it cost so many lives to pacify people in such a region, we have brought honor to the Republic. But when they would write to their buddy, they might say, I’m heartbroken. I met an incredible girl. The others like her too. She’s a bit easy, a bit loose, and it kills me because I’m falling in love. I couldn’t believe when I was reading these letters that men had traveled on a ship to another continent and couldn’t understand the difference in sexual mores between the society they’d left and the one in this new place. In their letters, they confided to their friends about their confusion, their loneliness, their feelings. Some of them even wrote about their children, when officially, they weren’t supposed to have any. I read a heartbreaking letter from an otherwise repulsive guy. The guy’s racism was totally disgusting, but when his twelve-year-old kid died, bitten by a snake, you know I almost cried. This time spent in the archives helped me discover the novel’s style. When Dabilly is still in France, first in the country, where his parents are millers suffering from pneumonia from breathing in flour for twenty years, and then when he works in the factory in Châtellerault, the writing is reminiscent of Zola, of the way his writing makes the reader see how mechanization creates working class conditions. Then when you get on the boat it’s like Conrad: first you meet the motley crew, and then you start to understand that Dabilly’s mission is deep in the bush. The problem with Conrad, and he’s a brilliant writer, is that the Africans are stock characters. So as Dabilly begins to penetrate into the interior of Côte d’Ivoire, and the reader understands how observant the character is, the style becomes more ethnographic. Many ethnographic texts from that time are hyper-racist but it’s in these descriptions that you get the best sense of the men, both the colonizers and the peoples they were interacting with and their traditions. So that’s how the novel progresses stylistically.

To write the child narrator, all I had to do was think about what I was like as a kid. He’s got a problem. Not with knowledge, but with language. He speaks as his parents speak in rigidly Marxist terms. He’s seven, he’s missing his mother, who’s like some kind of ghost in the story. And they’re in Holland, which is the country that invented the African slave trade. Slavery and colonization are purely capitalist enterprises, and racism against Africans was invented to justify the practice of slavery. To excuse the fact of turning men into beasts of burden. So that’s why the kid leaves his home in Holland to make the journey backwards towards his own culture. A child who only hears Marxist speeches from his parents. So he speaks like that. I went through a period like that, when I couldn’t speak anything other than Marxist phrases, so it was easy for me to find the humor in that.

Books that allow their reader to feel the way history is acting on the characters and the story are rare, you know? And so I wanted to write something that I missed when I read the big books set in faraway lands: a sense of historical perspective.

The novel tells the story of a mixed-race European boy who discovers Africa in this contemporary moment, and a white European (his ancestor) who discovers Africa as part of the French conquest of the Ivory Coast—these are two characters who make journeys that will change their lives forever, and who discover the African landscape and peoples after thinking about and investing in African mythologies in their own personal ways. Can you tell us a little about the structure of your novel and these parallel journeys? 

In fact, what writers often neglect to do is to allow the reader a way to gain a kind of historical perspective on the story being told. I’ve read a lot of novels, a lot of good, good books. Take War and Peace. There’s not a lot of historical perspective in War and Peace. And in a lot of travel and adventure novels, there’s none at all, you enter the story and then stay there. In fact, because you’re so deep inside the story you can’t draw any conclusions about history and about what it all means. Books that allow their reader to feel the way history is acting on the characters and the story are rare, you know? And so I wanted to write something that I missed when I read the big books set in faraway lands: a sense of historical perspective. So that’s why I put this little kid and his story in the novel. I wove the two stories knowing full well that they were going to have to link up in the end and in that connection between the two stories the reader would feel the weight of history. Because history is alive. It lives on in us: whether European, African, or American. No matter your race. A White American lives in the shadow of their violent history as much as a Black American. But it’s rare that a writer will allow that personal history the reader carries with them to resonate with the novel. I wanted this hyper-personal thing to link these two characters who are diametrically opposed from the start. There’s nothing to make you think that this child of Marxist parents in Holland is a mixed race kid. And there’s nothing to make you think this White guy in the nineteenth century who gets on a boat to Africa is going to stay there and have a family. This book is full of surprises. The colonial history of Côte d’Ivoire, it’s not a nice story, but I wanted to give the reader a nice dramatic surprise.

The main character is one of the guys who came to Africa from France as part of the famous “mission civilisatrice” that justified the colonial project. The character of Dabilly is not a commander, he’s poor, ordinary, an economic migrant, who makes a bet like those who go to Europe or the United States at that time. Did you conceive the character of Dabilly before you started writing the novel, or after you’d started? How did you get into his point of view and sensibility?

It was super easy. It’s weird how easy it was to imagine myself in the shoes of a twenty-year-old kid who wanted to go and try his luck somewhere else. Dabilly did exactly what I did when I got my master’s degree in Abidjan. I said to myself, this place is too small for me. So there you have it. And in fact, that’s why people say that I’ve removed the colour from this character, but all I had to do was think of him as a working class guy, a young guy, who’s on the move. Who wants to build a future. It’s like all young people in Africa. All I had to do was look at myself and my friends. And to push the empathy further, I had to find a place of origin for him. I looked at the map of France and I wanted him to come from a hard knock place: there were three very hard places at that time: Brittany, Corsica, and Loire. I remembered I had a buddy who lived in a town called Abilly. So I called my character Dabilly. I went there, walked around, went to the town hall and read the registers from the nineteenth century. The peasants did not have it easy. The mill where the character’s parents work—the ruins still exist. I could imagine the suffering of the millers and their families when they died from pneumonia after twenty years of inhaling flour dust. I followed the route Dabilly would take after they died. It’s funny, in Europe, every time someone wants to change their destiny, they head west. And on the way west, there was Châtellerault where he works in a factory and first heard of Africa, then La Rochelle. And it just so happens that La Rochelle is the colonial town that founded the Ivory Coast. So the story was all lined up. He leaves from La Rochelle by ship and arrives in Grand Bassam. My hometown. The book starts with the waves, because the break posed a real problem to explorers. France colonized the Ivory Coast territories late because of the power of those waves. To write the book all I had to do was put myself in the guy’s shoes, there, in front of my house, on the beach, to see how difficult it was going to be for him to come to Grand Bassam. So I wanted to both reckon with the power of those waves that have drowned many people and at the same time I wanted to make his arrival a bit ridiculous, as the arrival of the White people in their wool uniforms must have been. They’re the ones who wrote the books, so they always have heroic arrivals, but really, it’s quite ridiculous to arrive wet in the sand, in stockings, short pants, and a feathered hat.

The Kroumens, the Agnis and other peoples of the land that became Côte d’Ivoire have different languages, economies, traditions and jokes, and in your novel they trade with the colonizers, often in very advantageous ways—so the fiction of the civilizing mission is belied a little, and in a rather funny way. It’s very well done. The fiction of colonization runs the risk of characterizing Africa as a single country. Was it important for you that the novel be panoramic in terms of places and characters to resist this narrative?

I like the term panoramic. The novel could only be panoramic because in Africa our countries are very diverse. Take Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, everyone’s the same, really. Even the forest is the same as the men who live in the forest, both are unfathomable: characterized by darkness, danger, fear, and languor. I like Conrad, but you can see that he didn’t couldn’t see the difference between people. Whereas I grew up going to school with people there were fifteen ethnic groups. The question of difference doesn’t even arise—it’s a part of life. By the age of six or seven, I’d already heard a dozen languages. So that’s why the child narrator who comes from Holland to Côte d’Ivoire, that’s why he adapts so well, because he’s learned to hear different languages, so he knows how to work with the language. Because of all these differences, naturally, we learn, we learn to converse with people who aren’t like us, to find what brings us together rather than what makes us different. And that’s why Africa is always negotiating. Negotiation is a civilizational value across the African continent because of its panoramic diversity. And so I had to write this novel in a way that would show the differences between the people of Côte d’Ivoire.

Literary writers today seem to be plagued by a kind of cynicism. They’ve understood everything. They don’t hope or believe in anything. But in fact, amidst the violent acts that one civilization has perpetrated on another it’s true that there are people who have forged bonds of love.

You did a lot of archival research in preparing to write your novel. How did this research inform your thinking on colonial history and the question of how this history is received today? Did you think about how your European, African, and now American readers would perceive this history and how you could play on these perceptions?

The plan for this book was to tell the story of colonization as the people experiencing it when the colonizer’s first arrived perceived it. This is a narrative told on a human scale. I wanted to avoid getting into grand theories, in fact, by writing about human adventures that everyone can understand. Because you quickly understand what it’s like to be lost. You quickly understand what it’s like to feel emptiness and to feel love. The French people that were sent over as part of the so-called “mission civilisatrice.” They weren’t civilized. They were poor country bumpkins. Just a group of clueless people who had incredible power in their hands and who used and abused it. All in the name of the capitalist economic model. But the leaders of these improvised colonial forces didn’t belong to any other civilization beyond the one they were inventing on the soil they claimed as their own. Well, that’s not true, they also belonged to the civilization of greed. Which followed logically (laughs). And that’s where all my research led me. I had to take on the heaviness of colonial history to be able to make light and to tell human stories in a colonial context. It was important that the colonial context be well defined in the novel: that the reader understands what’s going on, that they imagine the places, that they truly see the men for the first time. That there’s empathy for both the colonizer and the colonized: because these are merely the men. And that the reader also sees everything that is exchanged between them and that the importance of everything that was exchanged becomes clear. The story of contact is a story of exchange. Many of the Africans the colonizers were trading with believed these white men were passing through and that it was good to talk to them and to trade with them. That’s what an economy is: the ability to exchange tangible and intangible goods. And Africans had thriving economies that existed without the context of systematic domination. In fact, the Africans realized too late that the person with whom they believed they were trading with on an equal footing had come for a different reason entirely. So in a way it’s simple. The story of contact is a story of exchange but what’s more, is that in order to fully understand the subtleties of that period, it’s not enough to study African colonization, you also have to study the civilizational context of Europe in the nineteenth century, going back to the Napoleonic Wars. They should give me a doctorate in history, I’m being a smartass, but it’s true.

Love and family are the ties that bind the two narratives (one contemporary, the other historical) in this novel, so while the story is often funny, it’s tenderness that carries the reader to the conclusion. We always talk about wars as the events that determine history. What role does love play in the history of France and Côte d’Ivoire, and in your novel, Comrade Papa?

The great lesson is love. The love this young man has for a woman: his wife, his lover, who becomes a mother. I didn’t want to add violence on top of violence. I think the reader knows the horror of the colonial situation and sees the violence described in the book. To get them through the novel, I wanted to give them the tenderness of family and of love because it’s so universal. We don’t call on love enough! We don’t call on empathy enough! We don’t call on tenderness enough! Literary writers today seem to be plagued by a kind of cynicism. They’ve understood everything. They don’t hope or believe in anything. But in fact, amidst the violent acts that one civilization has perpetrated on another it’s true that there are people who have forged bonds of love. This is what can allow us to think about colonization and contact as something that happened to people like you and me. I wanted the child narrator to discover his love for his mother, and his grandmother’s love as well. He pieces together one hundred years of unsuspected family history and it’s very touching. When I finished writing the last chapter, I cried. I’m not ashamed to say that I had tears in my eyes when I finished my story. It allowed me to see how sincere I was. I believe sincerity is a form of intelligence.

Finally, what are you reading now?

Right now, I’m reading poetry and philosophy. Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract. It’s a bit hard going and yet it’s brilliant. I’m also reading the poetry of Léon-Gontran Damas, one of the founders of the Négritude movement with Léopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire. I’m committing poems to memory for the first time and it’s really worth doing. His first collection Pigments and his last collection Black Label, are just pure genius.

***

In good publicity news:

  • The Notebook by Roland Allen was reviewed in the New Yorker“Allen’s narrative moves fluidly as he recounts the evolution of the notebook’s use.”
  • A Case of Matricide by Graeme Macrae Burnet was reviewed in the Guardian“This quirky blend of psychological thriller and smalltown life is both thought-provoking and entirely convincing.”
  • May Our Joy Endure by Kev Lambert (trans. Donald Winkler) was featured in Lavender Magazine“Worth the ride.”
  • A Way to Be Happy by Caroline Adderson was featured in Scout Magazine“A collection of unique, entertaining and multi-layered stories.”

The Bibliophile: Honouring the Reading

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A writer is never really writing alone. You learn from everything you read and this is a way of honouring that reading.
—Caroline Adderson

Facebook is, as I said last week, a useful tool for a flagellant, but it’s also useful at alerting us on occasion to what we’ve forgotten. So even though I knew our twentieth anniversary or birthday or whatever you want to call it was quickly upon us, what I was no longer sure of was the exact date. I remember that the day that the boxes of Salvatore Ala’s Straight Razor and Other Poems were wheeled through the door of our first bookshop at 1519 Ouellette Ave. by the Canpar delivery man was only a day or two before Thanksgiving, 2004. I remember the moment that we carefully cut through the packing tape and pulled back the flaps, to be awed by the unvarnished beauty of all of those straight razors looking back up at us. I remember closing the shop for the rest of the day to celebrate, and heading out with Dennis Priebe, my production manager, fellow bookseller, and friend, and Sal to celebrate. And I remember carrying that book with me all Thanksgiving weekend, from family function to family function, so proud I was (and remain) of this first publication.

Photo: Straight Razor by Salvatore Ala, the first book of many to come from Biblioasis. In paperback and a limited edition hardcover.

What I didn’t remember was the date. But Facebook is indeed very good at that, and this week popped up with a memory telling me that it was October 7. So, now, it seems, we are officially twenty! Not as old as those geezers at ECW, who will be celebrating their fiftieth anniversary this fall at a party with musical performances by Dave Bidini, Rik Emmett, and others: Allied Forces! Now that makes me feel old! (There’s a great profile of ECW here, for those interested in reading more.) But old enough. Twenty years, I’ve joked perhaps once too often, is the equivalent of a life sentence; I’m not sure if or when I’ll ever get paroled, but what I am certain of is that I don’t have another thirty in me. The longer I do this, the more amazed I am by those who’ve done it far longer.

Our next books after publishing Salvatore Ala’s Straight Razor and Other Poems were a series of limited edition short fiction chapbooks, the first three of which were by Leon RookeClark Blaise, and Caroline Adderson. Caroline’s contribution, published in January, 2005, was a short story called Mr Justice, which was later gathered in her second collection, Pleased to Meet You. I’ve already written in an earlier installment of The Bibliophile about my discovery and love of Caroline’s work, but she’s also one of the writers we’ve been associated with longest. I still don’t quite understand how it is that she’s not among our most celebrated writers. But the great thing about that is that her work is still there, waiting to be discovered. So, please, on this Thanksgiving weekend, do so: trust me when I say it’s one of the easiest ways you can make yourself happy.

Photo: Mr Justice by Caroline Adderson, in a limited edition paperback and hardcover. No. 4 in the Biblioasis Short Fiction Series, readied for the press by John Metcalf.

Last week, I was able to spend a couple of days with Caroline as she toured down the 401, launching her new collection, A Way to Be Happy, alongside Richard Kelly Kemick’s Hello, Horse in Windsor and Toronto before she headed off to Ottawa and Montreal. The interview I recorded with Caroline and Richard was excellent, and, if I ever find the time to transcribe it, might make a future installment of this newsletter: the conversation ranged widely, from writing across genres, to what people get wrong about short fiction, to where their ideas come from, to the role of humour in both authors’ work, to what they each wish they’d known when they started writing. In the meantime, I thought I’d include an earlier interview we did with Caroline, in anticipation of the launch of A Way to Be Happy.

Dan Wells,
Publisher

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An Interview with Caroline Adderson

Photo: Caroline Adderson, reading from A Way to Be Happy at Biblioasis on October 2, 2024.

Can you tell me a little bit about yourself?

I’m a writer of all kinds of things, predominantly fiction for adults, both novels and short stories. I also write for children and have published one non-fiction book. But my real love is short stories.

As I read A Way to Be Happy, I was reminded of some great writers, including Alice Munro, George Saunders, and Claire Keegan, and was excited by your literary allusions to Emily Dickinson, Anton Chekhov, and more. Can you talk about some of your literary influences, and the role they play in your work, particularly in A Way to Be Happy?

I sometimes feel like I’m moving against the current. The trend today seems to be autofiction and writing from one’s lived experience. But I’ve never really done that. To me, writing is an act of empathy. I’m interested in trying to feel what it is to be someone entirely different from me. As I’ve gone along in my career, I’ve felt the need to do this even on a sentence level, to move past my own words and incorporate, or riff on, other texts. I wouldn’t say that the writers that are referenced in A Way to Be Happy have influenced my prose style per se. But since you mentioned Alice Munro, she definitely has. Whenever I’m faced with a technical problem, I turn to Munro.

When I read, I read with a pencil, underlining the sentences I admire, then transcribing these random sentences in a notebook. I often turn to this list for inspiration. I’m always encouraging students to do this too, so that they might pay more attention to the words they use and feel what style is from the inside, which is what happens when you copy something out.

Most of the stories in A Way to Be Happy contain an element of inter-textual experimentation. Sometimes it’s a little puzzle. Sometimes it’s the title, such as “All Our Auld Acquaintances Are Gone.” It’s not like Robbie Burns inspired the story, but the reference, I hope, sets up an ironic and even melodic line that runs through it. If the reader happens to recognize a reference, then the implications of that text are imported into the story. It’s really something I’m doing for myself, to keep growing in my craft, to keep learning, and to be part of “literature” in general. A writer is never really writing alone. You learn from everything you read and this is a way of honouring that reading.

The empathy for your characters is tangible, which is a unique feat given how varied your work is, and how many of your characters are ones that aren’t always visible—or focalizers—in literature. Can you tell me about the experience of inhabiting perspectives, voices, and experiences other than your own, and your approach to finding empathy for such a wide cast of characters?

I don’t find it very hard. I’m one of those people who weeps at the news and lies awake at night worrying about people I have no personal connection to. Part of being a decent human being is caring about others. And when you care about other people, you’re curious about them, curious about how they live, and how they think and feel. The pandemic was, among other things, great for practicing this. I found myself challenged by opinions I found repellant and divisive, and had to remind myself that I had these writerly skills. What if I opened my heart? What if I tried to understand why they think that way? What happened that put them in that position? That’s what I’m trying to do on the page, which is easier than in real life!

You’ve mentioned in a previous interview (with The Artisanal Writer, 2021) that for you, the most pleasurable aspect of writing is the visitation of the idea and the second is revision. When writing A Way to Be Happy, were there any stories inspired by a particularly memorable idea? Any first drafts you especially enjoyed revising?

Spoiler alert! The story “Charity” was one. It was, in a way, a gift. A friend of mine had a bone marrow transplant then, several years later, met his donor, a lawyer in New York City. Of course, he asked his donor why he’d signed up. It turned out that he didn’t even remember doing it. He went to a Jewish high school; as part of their religious education, they had to do a mitzvah. He was completely surprised when the call came so long after the fact. I thought the forgetting was pretty interesting. The idea of charity is, too, because the person who performs a charitable act definitely gets something from the transaction. Eventually I started thinking about a character whose forgotten good deed is actually the very thing that saves his life. So that was “the idea”. Then I had to figure out who this person was and what his background was like. I thought of Quoyle in Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News, the first page of which I teach in a class on beginnings. He’s this hapless guy who Proulx intricately describes without ever actually saying what he looks like. I named Robbie after him. But as I was writing, Proulx began to unconsciously morph into Prufrock. At first it was just the sound of the two names, but then I realized there were other similarities despite Prufrock being at the end of his life and Robbie at the beginning. At that point I began to use the poem more deliberately to influence the prose. In earlier drafts of the story, I wove whole lines throughout it. I thought it was really clever until I gave it to friends to read and they said it was annoying and distracting. In subsequent drafts, I excised, and excised, and excised. There’s a lot still there but it’s embedded so deeply now its effect is mainly in the rhythm of the sentences. I love working like this, moving the words around and playing with the language, trying to get it to do something beyond just tell the story.

In various stories, you make reference to distinctly Canadian stores like Winners and La Vie en Rose, which allows some readers to place the characters in Canada immediately. At the same time, a reader unfamiliar with these brands can piece why they are mentioned. When crafting a story, do you consider how your reader experiences piecing together the details? And perhaps more broadly, what bearing does the idea of an anticipated reader have on your work?

Unfortunately, not very often. I think I’d be a more successful writer if I actually considered who in the world would want to read about these people. I’m writing for the characters. I feel it’s my duty as a writer to tell, as truthfully and accurately as possible, what happened to this person who does not, in fact, exist. What a reader will make of it, I only think about it after the fact. As in: What?! You’re repelled?

Lastly, what are you reading now?

I’ve decided that I only want to write novels that are two hundred pages or less, so this year I’m only reading novels that are two hundred pages or less. I’m discovering and rediscovering all these wonderful books based on this rather arbitrary criterion. The Vegetarian, by Han Kang. Fantastic. I reread Elke Schmitter’s Mrs Sartoris. I met her at a festival years ago. Nadine Gordimer’s The Late Bourgeois World. Penelope Fitzgerald. I’ve read everything by her and am working my way through her oeuvre for the third time now. Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John. Oh, I loved Ivana Sajko’s Love Novel, which Biblioasis published. Mary Robinson’s Ha!. I’d never read her. It was just a scream, and I love punctuation in titles. Sarah Bernstein’s Study for Obedience. There’s a very interesting Spanish book by Andrés Barba, called Such Small Hands, about murderous girls in a convent orphanage. James Welch’s Winter in the Blood was wonderful. Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the Attic. It’s told in second person plural from the point of view of Japanese picture brides. Mrs Caliban was fun. William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow. A brilliant, brilliant book. I reread The Emigrants by W. G. Sebald. I could go on and on . . .

***

In good publicity news:

The Bibliophile: Goran Simić, 1952–2024

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Goran Simić: 1952–2024

Photo: Goran Simić reading at The Windsor Festival of the Book, November 2003, the day he and publisher Dan Wells first met.

This past weekend I spent the better part of forty hours digging through old boxes dating to the earliest days of Biblioasis. A couple of archivists were coming to town on Monday and Tuesday to assess a potential acquisition and I wanted to make sure that the press archives were in presentable condition. It’s been a long-running joke at the office that I don’t recycle, I archive, which also explains the shape of some of the boxes I sorted through: photographs alongside event posters alongside production files alongside edited manuscripts and other press and literary ephemera. It made me nostalgic—which is, admittedly, not very hard to do—but this state was aggravated by the fact that in less than a week it will be the twentieth anniversary of the publication of our first book, Salvatore Ala’s Straight Razor & Other Poems. At one point we intended to mark this anniversary with some celebrations, but publishing continues to be hard, so outside of a few notes and posts in places like this, we’ll be focusing our energies on more essential things, like celebrating our authors and their books.

I got lucky early in my delvings, unearthing a range of photographs, documents, and ephemera from 2004–2006, when Biblioasis began to take shape as a press. And items even older than those. In a very real way, Biblioasis Press was conceived as a result of my work running The Windsor Festival of the Book, which began in 2002. I discovered copies of festival programs, posters, and photographs from the first couple of years, including many writers who would become central to Biblioasis as it developed: Caroline Adderson, Mark Kingwell, John Metcalf, Judith McCormack, and Leon Rooke, among others. And Goran Simić.

Photo: Hardcover and paperback editions of From Sarajevo, With Sorrow (Biblioasis) and Sprinting from the Graveyard (Oxford) by Goran Simić.

In my second year running the festival, we partnered with PEN Canada, who put together a panel of Paulo da Costa, Rishma Dunlop, Goran Simić, and a couple of other writers. I was determined to read at least one book by everyone who participated in our festival: Goran Simić had two titles available in English, Immigrant Blues, recently published by Brick Books, and Sprinting from the Graveyard, a gathering, by David Harsent, of English “versions” of Goran’s poetry dealing with the Serbo–Croatian war, published by Oxford but at that point already out of print. I found copies of both and read them, but it was the latter that especially quickened my pulse. Not yet knowing enough about publishing, I urged Goran to get it again into print; he drew hard on his pipe and did something with his body that, though not a shrug, made it clear that it was out of his hands. (His inscription in my copy: November, cold day 2003 / For Daniel, who surprised me with this book.) Later that evening, at the festival afterparty, I sat down with Kitty Lewis, the long-time managing editor of Brick Books, and enthused about Sprinting and how someone needed to bring it back. Between alcohol and enthusiasm I came on too strong, an occupational hazard, and at some point, exacerbated, she threw her hands above her head to be rid of me and said that if I thought it should be back in print so badly then why didn’t I do it?

That question lingered for months. The main answer was that it seemed an ultimate hubris. I wasn’t a real publisher, and certainly not the kind Goran Simić needed or should expect. We were planning a short fiction chapbook series and our first trade book, but I’d not yet even published anything. I wanted to do more, but had no way of attracting better manuscripts: the few I’d managed to solicit were terrible. So, one afternoon in the early summer of 2004, faking courage (the title of my publishing memoir), I wrote to Goran and told him that Kitty’s challenge had been weighing on me: would he let Biblioasis publish him? The answer came in the mail with not one but two manuscripts, what would become Biblioasis’s second and third trade books: the poetry collections From Sarajevo, With Sorrow, and the story collection Yesterday’s People.

Photo: Yesterday’s People and Sunrise in the Eyes of the Snowman by Goran Simić.

It had originally been my intent to simply republish Sprinting from the Graveyard as it was, but I knew nothing of copyright then and did not know that Goran did not control these poems: they belonged to Harsent. This, in my ignorance, seemed an injustice. Further, after other conversations with Goran, I learned that he had grave misgivings about Harsent’s “versions” as a result of liberties taken with his original poems: Harsent’s were scrubbed of the raw immediacy of the war. So after discussions with his ex-wife, Amela Marin, we decided to retranslate the collection, and Amela got to work, finishing a draft later that year for a planned Spring 2005 publication. We worked on it via email through the fall, but decided to do the final editing in person.

Over this period, we published Salvatore Ala’s Straight Razor and the first volumes in the Biblioasis short fiction series, including Leon Rooke’s novella Balduchi’s Who’s Who. Goran owned a building with his new partner at 226 Carlton in Toronto’s Cabbagetown, where he had a restaurant called Octopus’ Garden (and later Fellini’s Shoe), and suggested that we launch the press there. We did so on January 29, 2005, with Sal Ala, Rishma Dunlop, Leon Rooke, and Goran. The evening was so exhilarating that I suffered an adrenaline and dopamine hit from which I’ve not yet recovered. That date might mark the moment that the press was born as more than a sideline hustle of an unpractical used book dealer. It seemed, after the struggles of attracting audiences of any size in Windsor, almost too easy. (Later experiences taught me that night was an aberration.) More than a hundred people showed up at Goran’s small bar; it was so crowded that Thomas King offered to be my bookseller for the night just to have a place to sit. The applause was loudest and longest for Goran Simić. And the next day, while Goran helped us nurse our hangovers with a bottle of cognac from behind the bar, Sal and I worked with Amela at the front table in the Octopus’ Garden to make the final edits on the book that became From Sarajevo, With Sorrow. I remember the grey January light smudging through the Victorian front window of his Carlton restaurant, the dust glinting in the dim air, like us, still a little unsettled from the previous night. By the time Sal and I packed up to head home down the 401—a trip I’ve since made hundreds of times over the last twenty years—Biblioasis’s second book was ready for the press.

LEFT: Poster for ‘Not Just Another Reading Series…’ with Goran Simić and Zach Wells, February 13th 2006, presented by Biblioasis and the Flying Monkey Cafe & Juice Bar. RIGHT: Menu for Fellini’s Shoe.

I would work with Goran on two other books: the short story collection Yesterday’s People, published later that same year and also dealing with his war experiences, and 2010’s Sunrise in the Eyes of the Snowman, Goran’s first (and perhaps only) book written in English. His place at 226 Carton, in various incarnations, became Biblioasis’s Toronto home for launches and other events for several years, his spare bedroom often the place I laid my head. A tour this week through the internet’s scattered memory reminded me that we’d planned a selected poems, taken from his untranslated Serbian books. “I have joined the ranks,” he’d written in the introduction to From Sarajevo, With Sorrow, “of those poets who have lost their own tribal language and country, and then gone on to a place where the weight of previously published books is worth almost nothing.” It had been our hope, at the time, to change that, but the manuscript never materialized. I’ve been alerted too often of late of what we forget.

What I remember: the sharp, appealing funk of pipe and garlic; his laugh—he was always laughing—and the gravelly intonation of his English; his eyes sparking, an early warning of a gentle jibe; joking and flirting with anyone with whom he came into contact. (“X reminds me of a big hamburger.” A considered pause. “And I like hamburgers.”) Drinking cognac at Carlton into the evening as a kind of medicinal remedy as he gave me publishing advice and urged me to be more serious. I envied most of all his apparent ease in all things, especially as a person for whom nothing ever seems particularly easy.

I remember him playing soccer with my at-the-time very young son with an empty water bottle in our front yard in Windsor, the sound of glee and childish laughter as they booted around this increasingly crumpled bit of plastic, and not being sure who was laughing hardest or having more fun. I loved him for this, and even after our relationship soured and failed—two supremely impractical men increasingly alienated over necessarily practical matters—I would occasionally remember that crumpled plastic, that laughter, the sparkle, and love him again.

I thought about all this on Friday and Saturday and Sunday as I sorted through some of these earliest records. Grateful all over again for Goran, how his books and the work we did on them in 2004 and 2005 helped to give the press an initial direction and identity, and again saddened at our alienation. I thought, for the first time in many years, of reaching out to him. So when Amela’s message came via Facebook this Tuesday that he’d died on September 29, perhaps at the moment that I was sorting through the posters and restaurant menus and galleys, my sadness deepened. In place of reaching out to him, I’ve now written this.

Photo: Goran Simić reading at The Windsor Festival of the Book, November 2003.

In the introduction to From Sarajevo, With Sorrow he asks “for whom were these poems written under candlelight, between 1992 and 1995?” His answer is worth reading in full, but I’ll give another small bit of it here:

The lines I wrote were written in the belief that, when compared with the cold newspaper reports which would be forgotten with the start of a new war elsewhere, only poetry can be a true and decent witness to war. I remain uncertain whether this is because the history of horror is a bad teacher or we are bad pupils. I simply wrote what I saw. Perhaps I wrote them to explain to myself the fear in my children’s eyes when they walked along streets covered in blood. Or to comfort myself with the fact that I went to so many funerals, but nobody went to mine. New wars have indeed replaced old wars, and it’s hard to believe that ten years have passed since my own war ended, ten years since I wrote these poems as a poet, a witness, and a survivor.

And it’s hard to believe that ten years have passed since I last spoke with Goran, and that in this time where new wars have replaced old wars he isn’t here, as poet, as witness.

Facebook is a useful tool for a flagellant, but it can give some relief as well: to see Goran akilter with his pipe and his dog and his smile. It’s okay: I can still hear his laugh.

Dan Wells,
Publisher

Goran Simić crosses the Mitjacka River on a water run. Frontispiece, From Sarajevo, With Sorrow. Photo Credit: Gilles Peress.

THE FACE OF SORROW

I have seen the face of sorrow. It is the face of
the Sarajevo wind leafing through newspapers
glued to the street by a puddle of blood as I
pass with a loaf of bread under my arm.

As I run across the bridge, full water canisters
in hand, it is the face of the river carrying the
corpse of a woman on whose wrist I notice
a watch.

I saw that face again in the gesture of a hand
shoving a child’s shoe into a December furnace.

It is the face I find in inscriptions on the back of
family photographs fallen from a garbage truck.

It is the face which resists the pencil, incapable of
inventing the vocabulary of sorrow, the face with
which I wake to watch my neighbor standing
by the window, night after night, staring into
the dark.

—Goran Simić, From Saravejo, With Sorrow

***

In good publicity news:

The Bibliophile: Anne Hawk on Caribbean English

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Attention Vancouver readers! The brilliant booksellers at Upstart & Crow will host the Canadian launch of The Pages of the Sea next Thursday, October 3, 2024, at 7:00 PM!

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Next week marks the US publication date of The Pages of the Sea, Anne Hawk’s debut novel. Featuring Wheeler, an unforgettable young protagonist coping with her mother’s absence while also navigating the mysteries and misadventures of growing up, it’s equally a single girl’s story and a novel of manners: as Wheeler learns to be apart from her mother, she also learns about the life of her small Caribbean community. Like the work of Jane Austen or Marilynne Robinson, The Pages of the Sea captures a distinct time and a place, richly detailed in its observations of the values and customs of one community at a moment in its history. Hawk’s elegant prose ushers the untravelled reader into its world, and—for the place and the people that inspired it—becomes an act of cultural preservation, not least by virtue of its commitment to the community’s heritage language.

I wrote last week about a few of the many reasons this remarkable debut caught my attention, and this week I’m delighted to give you Anne herself, writing on the historical origin of Caribbean English, her own mother tongue, and how her work and that of other Caribbean writers is one means by which its story is being told.

Vanessa Stauffer,
Managing Editor

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Photo: The Pages of the Sea by Anne Hawk, with a cover beautifully designed by Kate Sinclair!

What Is Caribbean English?

The term ‘Caribbean English’ refers to the diverse English-based dialects spoken in former British colonies in the Caribbean. Though commonly grouped under one heading, each language is different, having originated in isolated colonies from Jamaica to Guyana on the northern tip of South America. They reflect influences as diverse as Irish and Scots—the language of plantation overseers—as well as South Asian languages spoken by indentured workers. In some Caribbean countries, the lingering presence of French bears testament to centuries of conflict between French and British colonisers.

There is nothing ‘broken’ about the varieties of English spoken in the Caribbean, as some might suggest. These are heritage languages with a history behind them; namely, the response by enslaved Africans to the wholesale erasure by the trans-Atlantic slave trade of their languages of origin. Fearing those they had enslaved might plot against them—which they frequently did—plantation owners forced enslaved Africans to speak in English only. African languages were policed and ultimately lost in the brutal everyday of chattel slavery. The need to communicate with estate managers as well as other enslaved people gave rise to the development of various forms of English with grammatical features of West African languages, the languages of origin of most enslaved people. Far from broken, Caribbean English contains intimations of cultural preservation and cultural referencing.

Similar in origin, the various dialects spoken in the Caribbean have evolved independently of each other. Attempts to standardise them have largely been unsuccessful, due perhaps to each nation holding to its own historically adapted form of English.

Utter the Jamaican word ‘duppy’ in the Windward Islands and you’ll be met with a blank stare. Change the word to ‘jumbee’ and you’ll get a knowing look. Both are words for ‘spirit’ or ‘ghost’. From bluggoe to alligator pear, enslaved people named the world around them, at times ascribing names from their own languages to similar-looking vegetables and fruit; with the same plant, not surprisingly, being given different names in different places: taro, cocoyam, eddo.

Caribbean English as spoken in Grenada is my mother tongue. It’s a language I haven’t spoken in decades, having emigrated as a child to the UK and then to Canada. Called out on my British-Canadian pronunciation, my iffy vocab, Grenadian English is a language that I haven’t dared speak in the presence of Grenadians for many years.

Who knows how a seemingly ‘lost’ language returns?

The Pages of the Sea, my debut novel, tells the story of the children left behind by the Windrush Generation—migrants from the Caribbean to the UK in the post-war period. The novel chronicles the friendship of Wheeler and her cousin as they spend their free time knocking about, enjoying a type of autonomy that was once commonplace for young children. While thinking as my main character, the inflections and cadences, the rhythm and sounds of my first language seeped into my mouth, like water from a disused well. In service to my young protagonist, I started thinking fluently in Caribbean English, and was subsequently able to give voice to the book’s other characters as well.

The novel is a collaboration between Caribbean and standardised English: between Wheeler—who thinks and speaks in the rich cadences of Caribbean English (Wha it is y’say?)—and a Standard English narrator. From Ingrid Persaud (Love After Love) to Kei Miller (Augustown), Caribbean writers have invented their own ways of reproducing this versatile, bejewelled language on the page. I took the decision to alter the appearance of certain words, for instance ‘hav’ and ‘giv’, in capturing the spoken language of The Pages of the Sea. This is a visual reminder that the book’s narrator and characters inhabit separate language worlds, despite their attributes in common.

Separate and inherently unequal, Caribbean and British English have existed alongside each other for centuries. Educated people once eschewed their mother tongue in favour of Standard English, in case they were thought to be illiterate. Those days are thankfully gone. The history of this diverse and inventive language is now being appreciated and acknowledged. While standardised English is still preferred in formal settings and written work, the spoken language of choice for most people has become their own legacy language, to the extent that many people in the region now support the teaching of Caribbean English in schools.

© Anne Hawk, September 2024

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The Bibliophile: What A Publisher Does

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dan Wells
Publisher

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The Bibliophile: Why We Published It

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vanessa Stauffer
Managing Editor

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The Bibliophile: The Happiness Update

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dan Wells
Publisher

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