Emily Urquhart at Kingston WritersFest

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Emily Urquhart, author of Ordinary Wonder Tales, will be appearing at Kingston WritersFest for the event Folklore, Fable, and Fantastical Females! Emily will be joined by Paola Ferrante and Anuja Varghese for readings and an open discussion of the intersectionalities of being a woman, mother, artist, queer, POC, and how fairy tales, wonder, ghosts, pregnancy, chimeras, plagues, and magic help us tell our stories.

The event will take place on Saturday, September 30 at 9:30 AM ET.

More details and tickets on the Kingston WritersFest site here.

Get your copy of Ordinary Wonder Tales here!

ABOUT ORDINARY WONDER TALES

A journalist and folklorist explores the truths that underlie the stories we imagine—and reveals the magic in the everyday.

“I’ve always felt that the term fairy tale doesn’t quite capture the essence of these stories,” writes Emily Urquhart. “I prefer the term wonder tale, which is Irish in origin, for its suggestion of awe coupled with narrative. In a way, this is most of our stories.” In this startlingly original essay collection, Urquhart reveals the truths that underlie our imaginings: what we see in our heads when we read, how the sight of a ghost can heal, how the entrance to the underworld can be glimpsed in an oil painting or a winter storm—or the onset of a loved one’s dementia. In essays on death and dying, pregnancy and prenatal genetics, radioactivity, chimeras, cottagers, and plague, Ordinary Wonder Tales reveals the essential truth: if you let yourself look closely, there is magic in the everyday.

ABOUT EMILY URQUHART

Emily Urquhart is a journalist with a doctorate in folklore. Her award-winning work has appeared in Longreads, Guernica, and The Walrus and elsewhere, and her first book was shortlisted for the Kobo First Book Prize and the BC National Award for Canadian Nonfiction. Her most recent book, The Age of Creativity: Art, Memory, my Father and Me, was listed as a top book of 2020 by CBC, NOW Magazine and Quill & Quire. She is a nonfiction editor for The New Quarterly and lives in Kitchener, Ontario.

Cocktail: Fredericton Launch!

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Come on out to the Fredericton launch of Lisa Alward‘s debut short story collection, Cocktail (Sep 12, 2023)! Lisa will be reading from the collection, followed by a Q&A and signing. Books will be for sale by Westminster Books. The launch will take place at Gallery 78 on Thursday, September 21 at 7PM ADT.

More details here.

Order your copy of Cocktail here!

ABOUT COCKTAIL

“A writer to watch.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

A girl receives a bedtime visit from a drunken party guest, who will haunt her fantasies for years. A young mother discovers underneath the wallpaper a striking portrait that awakens inconvenient desires. A divorced man distracts himself from the mess he’s made by flirting with a stranger. These intimate, immersive stories explore life’s watershed moments, in which seemingly insignificant details—a pot of hyacinths, a freshly painted yellow wall—and the most chance of encounters come to exert a tidal pull. Set in the swinging sixties and each decade since, Cocktail reveals the schism between the lives we build up around us and our deepest hidden selves.

ABOUT LISA ALWARD

Lisa Alward grew up in Halifax during the 1960s and 70s. She worked in literary publishing in Toronto in the 80s and began writing fiction at 50. Her stories have won The Fiddlehead Prize and the Peter Hinchcliffe Short Fiction Award and have appeared in Best Canadian Stories and The Journey Prize Stories, as well as literary journals such as The New Quarterly, The Fiddlehead, untethered, Prairie Fire, and Exile. She lives with her husband, John, near the Wolastoq River in Fredericton.

Biblioasis 401 Tour – Hamilton

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Join us in Hamilton for our Biblioasis authors’ 401 tour! Don Gillmor (Breaking and Entering), Lisa Alward (Cocktail), Michael Hingston (Try Not to Be Strange), and Jason Guriel (The Full-Moon Whaling Chronicles) will be reading at The Casbah, followed by a Q&A and books signing! Books will be proved by The City & The City. The event will take place on Tuesday, September 12 at 7PM.

More details here.

Breaking and Entering

During the hottest summer on record, Bea’s dangerous new hobby puts everyone’s sense of security to the test.

Forty-nine and sweating through the hottest summer on record, Beatrice Billings is rudderless: her marriage is stale, her son communicates solely through cryptic text messages, her mother has dementia, and she conducts endless arguments with her older sister in her head. Toronto feels like an inadequately air-conditioned museum of its former self, and the same could be said of her life. She dreams of the past, her days as a newlywed, a new mom, a new homeowner gutting the kitchen—now the only novel experience that looms is the threat of divorce.

Everything changes when she googles “escape” and discovers the world of amateur lock-picking. Breaking into houses is thrilling: she’s subtle and discreet, never greedy, but as her curiosity about other people’s lives becomes a dangerous compulsion and the entire city feels a few degrees from boiling over, she realizes she must turn her guilty analysis on herself. A searingly insightful rendering of midlife among the anxieties of the early twenty-first century, Breaking and Entering is an exacting look at the fragility of all the things we take on faith.

Get Breaking and Entering here!

Cocktail

“A writer to watch.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

A girl receives a bedtime visit from a drunken party guest, who will haunt her fantasies for years. A young mother discovers underneath the wallpaper a striking portrait that awakens inconvenient desires. A divorced man distracts himself from the mess he’s made by flirting with a stranger. These intimate, immersive stories explore life’s watershed moments, in which seemingly insignificant details—a pot of hyacinths, a freshly painted yellow wall—and the most chance of encounters come to exert a tidal pull. Set in the swinging sixties and each decade since, Cocktail reveals the schism between the lives we build up around us and our deepest hidden selves.

Get Cocktail here!

Try Not to Be Strange

Shortlisted for the 2023 Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize

On his fifteenth birthday, in the summer of 1880, future science-fiction writer M.P. Shiel sailed with his father and the local bishop from their home in the Caribbean out to the nearby island of Redonda—where, with pomp and circumstance, he was declared the island’s king. A few years later, when Shiel set sail for a new life in London, his father gave him some advice: Try not to be strange. It was almost as if the elder Shiel knew what was coming.

Try Not to Be Strange: The Curious History of the Kingdom of Redonda tells, for the first time, the complete history of Redonda’s transformation from an uninhabited, guano-encrusted island into a fantastical and international kingdom of writers. With a cast of characters including forgotten sci-fi novelists, alcoholic poets, vegetarian publishers, Nobel Prize frontrunners, and the bartenders who kept them all lubricated while angling for the throne themselves, Michael Hingston details the friendships, feuds, and fantasies that fueled the creation of one of the oddest and most enduring micronations ever dreamt into being. Part literary history, part travelogue, part quest narrative, this cautionary tale about what happens when bibliomania escapes the shelves and stacks is as charming as it is peculiar—and blurs the line between reality and fantasy so thoroughly that it may never be entirely restored.

Get Try Not to Be Strange here!

The Full-Moon Whaling Chronicles

The follow-up to Guriel’s NYT New & Noteworthy Forgotten Work is a mashup of Moby-Dick, The Lord of the Rings, Byron, cyberpunk, Swamp Thing, Teen Wolf … and more.

It’s 2070. Newfoundland has vanished, Tokyo is a new Venice, and many people have retreated to “bonsai housing”: hives that compress matter in a world that’s losing ground to rising tides. Enter Kaye, an English literature student searching for the reclusive author of a YA classic—a beloved novel about teenage werewolves sailing to a fabled sea monster’s nest. Kaye’s quest will intersect with obsessive fan subcultures, corporate conspiracies, flying gondolas, an anthropomorphic stove, and the molecular limits of reality itself. Set in the same world as Guriel’s acclaimed Forgotten Work, which the New York Times called “unlikely, audacious, and ingenious,” and written in rhyming couplets, The Full-Moon Whaling Chronicles cuts between Kaye’s quest, chapters from the YA novel, and guerilla works of fanfic in a visionary verse novel destined to draw its own cult following.

Get The Full-Moon Whaling Chronicles here!

Biblioasis 401 Tour – Toronto

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Join us in Toronto for the final stop of our Biblioasis authors’ 401 tour! Don Gillmor (Breaking and Entering), Lisa Alward (Cocktail), Michael Hingston (Try Not to Be Strange), and Jason Guriel (The Full-Moon Whaling Chronicles) will be reading at the Supermarket Bar Toronto, followed by a Q&A and books signing! The event will take place on Wednesday, September 13 at 7PM.

More details here.

Breaking and Entering

During the hottest summer on record, Bea’s dangerous new hobby puts everyone’s sense of security to the test.

Forty-nine and sweating through the hottest summer on record, Beatrice Billings is rudderless: her marriage is stale, her son communicates solely through cryptic text messages, her mother has dementia, and she conducts endless arguments with her older sister in her head. Toronto feels like an inadequately air-conditioned museum of its former self, and the same could be said of her life. She dreams of the past, her days as a newlywed, a new mom, a new homeowner gutting the kitchen—now the only novel experience that looms is the threat of divorce.

Everything changes when she googles “escape” and discovers the world of amateur lock-picking. Breaking into houses is thrilling: she’s subtle and discreet, never greedy, but as her curiosity about other people’s lives becomes a dangerous compulsion and the entire city feels a few degrees from boiling over, she realizes she must turn her guilty analysis on herself. A searingly insightful rendering of midlife among the anxieties of the early twenty-first century, Breaking and Entering is an exacting look at the fragility of all the things we take on faith.

Get Breaking and Entering here!

Cocktail

“A writer to watch.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

A girl receives a bedtime visit from a drunken party guest, who will haunt her fantasies for years. A young mother discovers underneath the wallpaper a striking portrait that awakens inconvenient desires. A divorced man distracts himself from the mess he’s made by flirting with a stranger. These intimate, immersive stories explore life’s watershed moments, in which seemingly insignificant details—a pot of hyacinths, a freshly painted yellow wall—and the most chance of encounters come to exert a tidal pull. Set in the swinging sixties and each decade since, Cocktail reveals the schism between the lives we build up around us and our deepest hidden selves.

Get Cocktail here!

Try Not to Be Strange

Shortlisted for the 2023 Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize

On his fifteenth birthday, in the summer of 1880, future science-fiction writer M.P. Shiel sailed with his father and the local bishop from their home in the Caribbean out to the nearby island of Redonda—where, with pomp and circumstance, he was declared the island’s king. A few years later, when Shiel set sail for a new life in London, his father gave him some advice: Try not to be strange. It was almost as if the elder Shiel knew what was coming.

Try Not to Be Strange: The Curious History of the Kingdom of Redonda tells, for the first time, the complete history of Redonda’s transformation from an uninhabited, guano-encrusted island into a fantastical and international kingdom of writers. With a cast of characters including forgotten sci-fi novelists, alcoholic poets, vegetarian publishers, Nobel Prize frontrunners, and the bartenders who kept them all lubricated while angling for the throne themselves, Michael Hingston details the friendships, feuds, and fantasies that fueled the creation of one of the oddest and most enduring micronations ever dreamt into being. Part literary history, part travelogue, part quest narrative, this cautionary tale about what happens when bibliomania escapes the shelves and stacks is as charming as it is peculiar—and blurs the line between reality and fantasy so thoroughly that it may never be entirely restored.

Get Try Not to Be Strange here!

The Full-Moon Whaling Chronicles

The follow-up to Guriel’s NYT New & Noteworthy Forgotten Work is a mashup of Moby-Dick, The Lord of the Rings, Byron, cyberpunk, Swamp Thing, Teen Wolf … and more.

It’s 2070. Newfoundland has vanished, Tokyo is a new Venice, and many people have retreated to “bonsai housing”: hives that compress matter in a world that’s losing ground to rising tides. Enter Kaye, an English literature student searching for the reclusive author of a YA classic—a beloved novel about teenage werewolves sailing to a fabled sea monster’s nest. Kaye’s quest will intersect with obsessive fan subcultures, corporate conspiracies, flying gondolas, an anthropomorphic stove, and the molecular limits of reality itself. Set in the same world as Guriel’s acclaimed Forgotten Work, which the New York Times called “unlikely, audacious, and ingenious,” and written in rhyming couplets, The Full-Moon Whaling Chronicles cuts between Kaye’s quest, chapters from the YA novel, and guerilla works of fanfic in a visionary verse novel destined to draw its own cult following.

Get The Full-Moon Whaling Chronicles here!

Luise von Flotow at Perfect Books

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Come out and meet Luise von Flotow, translator of Thomas Melle‘s The World at My Back (May 2, 2023) at Perfect Books in Ottawa! The event will take place on Wednesday, June 21 at 6:30PM.

Grab your copy of The World at My Back here!

ABOUT THE WORLD AT MY BACK

A FINALIST FOR THE GERMAN BOOK PRIZE • TRANSLATED INTO EIGHTEEN LANGUAGES

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

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

ABOUT LUISE VON FLOTOW

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

Deborah Dundas at Kingston WritersFest

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Deborah Dundas, author of On Class (May 12, 2023), will be appearing at Kingston WritersFest for the event We Don’t Talk About Class. Deborah will be reading and joined in conversation by Ricardo Tranjan to talk about class: who controls the narrative, and why this must change. Rich, poor, working class, tenant class. We know these phrases, but North Americans often discount how class, and the inherent machinations of capitalism impact the lives people can live. When we ignore these realities, what, and who, are we omitting?

The event will take place on Thursday, September 28 at 3:30 PM ET.

More details and tickets on the Kingston WritersFest site here.

Get your copy of On Class here!

ABOUT ON CLASS

Deborah Dundas is a journalist who grew up poor and almost didn’t make it to university. In On Class, she talks to writers, activists, those who work with the poor and those who are poor about what happens when we don’t talk about poverty or class—and what will happen when we do.

Growing up poor, Deborah Dundas knew what it meant to want, to be hungry, and to long for social and economic dignity; she understood the crushing weight of having nothing much expected of you. But even after overcoming many of the usual barriers faced by lower- and working-class people, she still felt anxious about her place, and even in relatively safe spaces reluctant to broach the subject of class. While new social movements have generated open conversation about gender and racism, discussions of class rarely include the voices of those most deeply affected: the working class and poor.

On Class is an exploration of the ways in which we talk about class: of who tells the stories, and who doesn’t, which ones tend to be repeated most often, and why this has to change. It asks the question: What don’t we talk about when we don’t talk about class? And what might happen if, finally, we did?

ABOUT DEBORAH DUNDAS

Deborah Dundas grew up poor in the west end of Toronto. She is now a writer and journalist, has worked as a television producer and is currently an editor at the Toronto Star. Her work has appeared in numerous publications in Canada, the UK and Ireland including Maclean’s, The Globe and Mail, The National Post, Canadian Notes and Queries, The Belfast Telegraph and The Sunday Independent. She attended York University for English and Political Science and has an MFA in Creative Non-fiction from the University of King’s College. She lives in Toronto with her husband and daughter and their loving, grumpy cat Jumper.

Emily Urquhart at Eden Mills Writers Fest

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Emily Urquhart, author of Ordinary Wonder Tales (Nov 1, 2022), will be appearing at Eden Mills Writers Festival for the Modern Folklore panel! Emily will be joined by Marianne Micros, Zalika Reid-Benta, and host Farzana Doctor for readings, interviews, and a discussion of what happens when a writer stretches and plays with the boundaries of reality, marrying elements of folklore and fantasy with contemporary life. The event will take place on Sunday, September 10 at 1:30PM.

More details here.

Get your copy of Ordinary Wonder Tales here!

ABOUT ORDINARY WONDER TALES

A journalist and folklorist explores the truths that underlie the stories we imagine—and reveals the magic in the everyday.

“I’ve always felt that the term fairy tale doesn’t quite capture the essence of these stories,” writes Emily Urquhart. “I prefer the term wonder tale, which is Irish in origin, for its suggestion of awe coupled with narrative. In a way, this is most of our stories.” In this startlingly original essay collection, Urquhart reveals the truths that underlie our imaginings: what we see in our heads when we read, how the sight of a ghost can heal, how the entrance to the underworld can be glimpsed in an oil painting or a winter storm—or the onset of a loved one’s dementia. In essays on death and dying, pregnancy and prenatal genetics, radioactivity, chimeras, cottagers, and plague, Ordinary Wonder Tales reveals the essential truth: if you let yourself look closely, there is magic in the everyday.

ABOUT EMILY URQUHART

Emily Urquhart is a journalist with a doctorate in folklore. Her award-winning work has appeared in Longreads, Guernica, and The Walrus and elsewhere, and her first book was shortlisted for the Kobo First Book Prize and the BC National Award for Canadian Nonfiction. Her most recent book, The Age of Creativity: Art, Memory, my Father and Me, was listed as a top book of 2020 by CBC, NOW Magazine and Quill & Quire. She is a nonfiction editor for The New Quarterly and lives in Kitchener, Ontario.

Deborah Dundas at Eden Mills Writers Fest

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Deborah Dundas, author of On Class (May 12, 2023), will be appearing at Eden Mills Writers Festival on The Changemakers panel! Deborah will be joined by Gabriel Allahdua, Annahid Dashtgard, and host Farzana Doctor for an afternoon of readings, interviews, and discussion, as they present their startling new works of nonfiction. The event will take place on Sunday, September 10 at 4:30 PM.

More details here.

Get your copy of On Class here!

ABOUT ON CLASS

Deborah Dundas is a journalist who grew up poor and almost didn’t make it to university. In On Class, she talks to writers, activists, those who work with the poor and those who are poor about what happens when we don’t talk about poverty or class—and what will happen when we do.

Growing up poor, Deborah Dundas knew what it meant to want, to be hungry, and to long for social and economic dignity; she understood the crushing weight of having nothing much expected of you. But even after overcoming many of the usual barriers faced by lower- and working-class people, she still felt anxious about her place, and even in relatively safe spaces reluctant to broach the subject of class. While new social movements have generated open conversation about gender and racism, discussions of class rarely include the voices of those most deeply affected: the working class and poor.

On Class is an exploration of the ways in which we talk about class: of who tells the stories, and who doesn’t, which ones tend to be repeated most often, and why this has to change. It asks the question: What don’t we talk about when we don’t talk about class? And what might happen if, finally, we did?

ABOUT DEBORAH DUNDAS

Deborah Dundas grew up poor in the west end of Toronto. She is now a writer and journalist, has worked as a television producer and is currently an editor at the Toronto Star. Her work has appeared in numerous publications in Canada, the UK and Ireland including Maclean’s, The Globe and Mail, The National Post, Canadian Notes and Queries, The Belfast Telegraph and The Sunday Independent. She attended York University for English and Political Science and has an MFA in Creative Non-fiction from the University of King’s College. She lives in Toronto with her husband and daughter and their loving, grumpy cat Jumper.

Don Gillmor at Eden Mills Writers Fest

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Don Gillmor, author of Breaking and Entering (Aug 1, 2023), will be appearing at Eden Mills Writers Festival for the Lost and Found panel! Don will be joined by Charlene Carr, Larissa Lai, ad host Susan G. Cole for an afternoon of readings, interviews, and discussion. These stunning (and uniquely different) new works of fiction explore characters who are searching for truth, meaning, salvation, and hope in an uncertain world. The event will take place on Sunday, September 10 at 3PM.

More details here.

Get your copy of Breaking and Entering here!

ABOUT BREAKING AND ENTERING

During the hottest summer on record, Bea’s dangerous new hobby puts everyone’s sense of security to the test.

Forty-nine and sweating through the hottest summer on record, Beatrice Billings is rudderless: her marriage is stale, her son communicates solely through cryptic text messages, her mother has dementia, and she conducts endless arguments with her older sister in her head. Toronto feels like an inadequately air-conditioned museum of its former self, and the same could be said of her life. She dreams of the past, her days as a newlywed, a new mom, a new homeowner gutting the kitchen—now the only novel experience that looms is the threat of divorce.

Everything changes when she googles “escape” and discovers the world of amateur lock-picking. Breaking into houses is thrilling: she’s subtle and discreet, never greedy, but as her curiosity about other people’s lives becomes a dangerous compulsion and the entire city feels a few degrees from boiling over, she realizes she must turn her guilty analysis on herself. A searingly insightful rendering of midlife among the anxieties of the early twenty-first century, Breaking and Entering is an exacting look at the fragility of all the things we take on faith.

ABOUT DON GILLMOR

Don Gillmor is the author of To the River, which won the Governor General’s Award for nonfiction. He is the author of three novels, Long Change, Mount Pleasant, and Kanata, a two-volume history of Canada, Canada: A People’s History, and nine books for children, two of which were nominated for the Governor General’s Award. He was a senior editor at The Walrus, and his journalism has appeared in Rolling Stone, GQ, The Walrus, Saturday Night, Toronto Life, the Globe and Mail, and the Toronto Star. He has won twelve National Magazine Awards and numerous other honours. He lives in Toronto.

Stephen Marche at Kingston WritersFest

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Stephen Marche, author of On Writing and Failure (Feb 14, 2023), will be appearing at Kingston WritersFest for the panel The Big Idea: CanLit Unbound! Stephen will be joined by Michael Hingston (Try Not to Be Strange), Kwame Scott Fraser, and Stuart Ross,  for the discussion helmed by Carol Off. The panel will discuss current trends in CanLit—from the evolution of the written arts with the rise of hybrid and experimental works, to the growing trend of AI-generated writing. What needs to be done to keep CanLit vital and relevant in the future, as major mergers and chatbots loom on the horizon?

The event will take place on Saturday, September 30 at 7PM ET.

More details and registration on the Kingston WritersFest site here.

Get your copy of On Writing and Failure here!

ABOUT ON WRITING AND FAILURE

Writing is, and always will be, an act defined by failure. The best plan is to just get used to it. 

Failure is a topic discussed in every creative writing department in the world, but this is the book every beginning writer should have on their shelf to prepare them. Less a guide to writing and more a guide to what you need to continue existing as a writer, On Writing and Failure: Or, On the Peculiar Perseverance Required to Endure the Life of a Writer describes the defining role played by rejection in literary endeavors and contemplates failure as the essence of the writer’s life. Along with his own history of rejection, Marche offers stories from the history of writerly failure, from Ovid’s exile and Dostoevsky’s mock execution to James Baldwin’s advice just to endure, where living with the struggle and the pointlessness of writing is the point.

ABOUT STEPHEN MARCHE

Stephen Marche is a novelist, essayist and cultural commentator. He is the author of half a dozen books, and has written opinion pieces and essays for the New Yorker, the New York Times, The Atlantic, Esquire, The Walrus, and many others. He lives in Toronto with his wife and children.