Biblioasis

Mark Bourrie at Eden Mills Festival
2025-09-07 13:30 (America/Toronto) | Eden Mills Writers’ Festival, 19 Cedar Street, Eden Mills, Ontario, N0B 1P0, Canada
Join Mark Bourrie (author of Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre) as he speaks at the Eden Mills Writers Festival on the panel “The Kim Lang Set: True North Unsettled: A Conversation on Democracy.” Mark will be in conversation alongside David A. Robertson, Andrew Coyne, Ariel Sim, and Karin Wells, as well as host Jessica Johnson.
In a nation long mythologized as orderly and fair, what happens when our democratic assumptions and institutions begin to wobble? The cracks have always been there—widening now into fault lines that shape our politics, our laws, and our daily lives. In this conversation, journalists, a legal historian, an Indigenous organizer, and a civic thinker gather to ask how a democracy survives when its story no longer matches its reality. From federal failures to grassroots resistance, from the rights of rivers to the rights of women, they invite us to wrestle with the hardest questions: Whose democracy is it? And who gets to decide?
The conversation will take place at The Meadow on Sunday, September 7 at 1:30PM. More details here.
Grab Ripper here!
ABOUT RIPPER
Six weeks into the Covid pandemic, New York Times columnist David Brooks identified two types of Western politicians: rippers and weavers. Rippers, whether on the right or the left, see politics as war. They don’t care about the destruction that’s caused as they fight for power. Weavers are their opposite: people who try to fix things, who want to bring people together and try to build consensus. At the beginning of the pandemic, weavers seemed to be winning. Five years later, as Canada heads towards a pivotal election, that’s no longer the case. Across the border, a ripper is remaking the American government. And for the first time in its history, Canada has its own ripper poised to assume power.
Pierre Poilievre has enjoyed most of the advantages of the mainstream Canadian middle class. Yet he’s long been the angriest man on the political stage. In Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre, bestselling author Mark Bourrie, winner of the Charles Taylor Prize, charts Poilievre’s rise through the political system, from teenage volunteer to outspoken Opposition leader known for cutting soundbites and theatrics. Bourrie shows how we arrived at this divisive moment in our history, one in which rippers are poised to capitalize on conflict. He shows how Poilievre and this new style of politics have gained so much ground—and warns of what it will cost us if they succeed.
ABOUT MARK BOURRIE
Mark Bourrie is an Ottawa-based author, lawyer, and journalist. He holds a master’s in journalism from Carleton University and a PhD in history from the University of Ottawa. In 2017, he was awarded a Juris Doctor degree and was called to the bar in 2018. He has won numerous awards for his journalism, including a National Magazine Award, and received the RBC Charles Taylor Prize in 2020 for his book Bush Runner: The Adventures of Pierre-Esprit Radisson. His most recent books include Big Men Fear Me: The Fast Life and Quick Death of Canada’s Most Powerful Media Mogul, the national bestseller Crosses in the Sky: Jean de Brébeuf and the Destruction of Huronia, and Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre.

stephanie roberts at the LOGOS Lecture Reading Series
2025-09-08 19:00 - 21:30 (America/New_York) | Lectures LOGOS Readings, 2741 Notre-Dame West, Montreal, QC, H3J 1N9, Canada
stephanie roberts, author of the poetry collection UNMET, will be a guest at the LOGOS Lecture Reading Series! stephanie will be joined by fellow guest readers Chanel Sutherland, Kelly Nora Drukker, Marlihan Lopez, Nathalie Batraville, Laura Doyle Péan and Uchenna Dike. There will be an open-mic session as well, with spaces for eight readers.
The event, hosted by H. Nigel Thomas, will take place on Sunday, September 8 at 7PM.
More details here.
Grab a copy of UNMET here!
ABOUT UNMET
This is what comes of taking dreams / off the horizon. It is the sun / or nothing else, you would scream / if you weren’t caught up in the chorus.
Leaning deliberately on the imagined while scrutinizing reality and hoping for the as-yet-unseen, UNMET explores frustration, justice, and thwarted rescue from a perspective that is Black-Latinx, Canadian, immigrant, and female. Drawing on a wide range of poetics, from Wallace Stevens to Diane Seuss, roberts’s musically-driven narrative surrealism confronts such timely issues as police brutality, respectability politics, intimate partner violence, and ecological crisis, and considers the might-have-been alongside the what-could-be, negotiating with the past without losing hope for the future.
ABOUT STEPHANIE ROBERTS
stephanie roberts is the author of rushes from the river disappointment, a Quebec Writers’ Federation finalist for the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry, the winner of The Sixty-Four: Best Poets of 2018, a recipient of the Sage Hill Writing award for Black Excellence, and a Canada Council of the Arts grantee. Her work has been critically praised and featured in well over one hundred periodicals and anthologies, in print and online, throughout Canada, the US, and Europe. She is a citizen of Canada, Panama, and the US, and has lived most of her life in Quebec.

Colleen Coco Collins at the Antler River Poetry Series
2025-09-17 19:00 - 21:00 (America/Toronto) | Landon Branch London Public Library, 167 Wortley Road, London, ON, Canada
Colleen Coco Collins, author of the poetry collection Sorry About the Fire, will be a guest reader at the Antler River Poetry Series! Coco will be joined by fellow poets Erín Moure and Chantel Neveu.
The event takes place at the Landon Branch of the London Public Library on Wednesday, September 17 at 7PM.
Grab Sorry About the Fire here!
ABOUT SORRY ABOUT THE FIRE
A CBC Books’ Poetry Collection to Watch for in Spring 2024 • 3rd Prize Alcuin Award for Book Design in Poetry
I wanted a good bewildering, / down deep, / as the keep of a castle.
With a voice as ungovernable and determined as Prometheus—who stole fire from Zeus only to face dire consequences—Colleen Coco Collins’ debut poems are daring dispatches from beyond the margins: light-filled flares sent up from the edge of language, sentience, land, and story. Drawing on all of her multidisciplinary enamorations and rendered through the triple vision of her Irish, French, and Odawa heritage, Sorry About the Fire introduces not just a poet, but a stunningly original sensibility.
ABOUT COLLEEN COCO COLLINS
Colleen Coco Collins [she/they] is an interdisciplinary artist of Irish, French, and Odawa descent, working in songwriting, performance, poetry and visual arts. She’s worked as a gallery director, in forestry, fossil preparation, and renovation; as an autism support worker, teacher, and women’s shelter counsellor. Her writing, music, and art practice centers on temporality, presumptions of sentience, subversion, rhythm, gesture, geographies, biophonies, frequencies, the ouroboric, the peripatetic, love and the polyglottic. Hailing from Antler River/Deshkan Ziibiing/London, Ontario, Coco has studied at universities in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, New Zealand, and Ireland. She lives litorally in rural Port Greville, Mi’kma’ki/Nova Scotia amidst crows, coyotes, grackles, bees, humpback, lichen and fox.

We're Somewhere Else Now: Montreal Launch!
2025-09-18 17:00 - 19:00 (America/New_York) | Librairie Bertrand, 430 Rue St. Pierre, Montreal, QC, H2Y 2M5, Canada
Come celebrate the publication of Robyn Sarah’s new poetry collection We’re Somewhere Else Now! Robyn will be reading from her new collection at Librairie Bertrand Bookstore, where copies will also be for sale and signing.
The launch will take place on Thursday, September 18 at 5PM.
More details here.
Get a copy of We’re Somewhere Else Now here!
ABOUT WE’RE SOMEWHERE ELSE NOW
In her first collection of new poems in a decade, Robyn Sarah chronicles the pandemic years with quiet wisdom and her flair for meshing the familiar with the numinous.
We’re Somewhere Else Now moves with ease from the particular to the abstract. These are poems of grief and unexpected change, of quiet awe at the human experience. Each poem is a window for the reader to look into, “lit room to lit room,” tracking desultory days of isolation and uncertainty, while also highlighting reasons to pay attention: playing with a grandchild, the rarity of a leap year, the calls of birds.
Three poems from the collection, originally published in The New Quarterly, were nominated for a 2025 National Magazine Award in Poetry.
ABOUT ROBYN SARAH
Poet, writer, literary editor, and musician, Robyn Sarah has lived in Montreal since early childhood. Her writing began to appear in Canadian literary magazines in the 1970s while she completed studies at McGill University and the Conservatoire de musique du Québec. Her tenth poetry collection, My Shoes Are Killing Me, won the Governor General’s Award in 2015. As well, she has published two collections of short stories, a book of essays on poetry, and a memoir, Music, Late and Soon (2021), that interweaves her youth as a professional-track clarinetist with her return at fifty-nine (after a lapse of thirty-five years) to the piano teacher who was her life mentor. From 2010 until 2020 she served as poetry editor for Cormorant Books.

Self Care: Toronto Launch
2025-09-18 19:00 - 21:00 (America/Toronto) | The Society Clubhouse, 967 College Street, Toronto, ON, M6H 1A6, Canada
Join us in celebrating the Toronto launch of Russell Smith’s new novel, Self Care! Russell will be in conversation with Lydia Perovic and reading from the book, and copies will be made available for sale and signing by Another Story bookshop.
The launch will take place at the Society Clubhouse on Thursday, September 18 at 7PM.
More details here.
Order a copy of Self Care here!
ABOUT SELF CARE
An electric examination of women and men, sex and love, self-loathing and twenty-first century loneliness.
Between writing a weekly column for The Hype Report and managing her mood stabilizers, Gloria navigates a series of quasi-relationships while commiserating with her best friend about dating apps and dick pics, married men and questionable boundaries. But when she makes a glib pass at Daryn, a stranger on a subway platform crowded with young anti-immigration protesters, and finds him waiting for her outside her health club a couple of days later, a surprising curiosity leads her not to consider a restraining order, but to talk to him.
Claiming she wants to interview him for an article on the incel movement, Gloria meets Daryn for coffee and soon invites him back to her apartment—where his earnestness and painfully restrained desire inspire her to dominate him sexually. As their physical relationship intensifies, so does their emotional connection, and Gloria can’t shake the sense that she’s headed in a dangerous direction.
An electric examination of sex and love, self-loathing, and twenty-first century loneliness, Self Care is a devastating novel about women and men, what they want and what they say they want, and the violent tension between the two.
ABOUT RUSSELL SMITH
Russell Smith is the author of twelve previous books of fiction, nonfiction, and translation. His fiction has been nominated for every major Canadian award, including the Giller Prize, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and the Amazon First Novel Award. A journalist and cultural commentator, his nonfiction has appeared in the New York Review of Books, the Globe and Mail, The Walrus, and elsewhere. An acquiring editor at Dundurn Press, Smith lives in Toronto.

stephanie roberts at the Planet Earth Poetry Series: PEP in the Afternoon
2025-09-19 14:00 - 16:00 (America/Vancouver) | New Horizons Centre, 234 Menzies St., James Bay, BC
stephanie roberts, author of the poetry collection UNMET, will be reading at the Planet Earth Poetry Series! Doors at 1:30pm, with sign-up for open mic.
The event will take place on Friday, September 19 at 2PM.
More details here.
Grab a copy of UNMET here!
ABOUT UNMET
This is what comes of taking dreams / off the horizon. It is the sun / or nothing else, you would scream / if you weren’t caught up in the chorus.
Leaning deliberately on the imagined while scrutinizing reality and hoping for the as-yet-unseen, UNMET explores frustration, justice, and thwarted rescue from a perspective that is Black-Latinx, Canadian, immigrant, and female. Drawing on a wide range of poetics, from Wallace Stevens to Diane Seuss, roberts’s musically-driven narrative surrealism confronts such timely issues as police brutality, respectability politics, intimate partner violence, and ecological crisis, and considers the might-have-been alongside the what-could-be, negotiating with the past without losing hope for the future.
ABOUT STEPHANIE ROBERTS
stephanie roberts is the author of rushes from the river disappointment, a Quebec Writers’ Federation finalist for the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry, the winner of The Sixty-Four: Best Poets of 2018, a recipient of the Sage Hill Writing award for Black Excellence, and a Canada Council of the Arts grantee. Her work has been critically praised and featured in well over one hundred periodicals and anthologies, in print and online, throughout Canada, the US, and Europe. She is a citizen of Canada, Panama, and the US, and has lived most of her life in Quebec.

Ira Wells at Kingston Writers Fest: You Can't Read That!
2025-09-19 15:30 - 17:00 (America/Toronto) | Kingston Marriott, 285 King St E, Kingston, ON, K7L 3B1, Canada
Ira Wells, author of On Book Banning, will be speaking at the Kingston Writers Fest event “You Can’t Read That!” Ira will be joined by politics and culture critic David Moscrop in a robust discussion of public and private book banning. Is it wrong to embrace the books of people who do things we abhor? What is ‘equity-based weeding’? How can we know the true scope of book banning when according to a study by the American Library Association 82 to 97 percent of all library challenges go unreported? Do we have a national, communal history? If so, how can we best protect it?
The event will take place in the Limestone City Ballroom (Kingston Marriott) on Friday, September 19 at 3:30PM.
Tickets and more details here.
Grab a copy of On Book Banning here!
ABOUT ON BOOK BANNING
The freedom to read is under attack.
From the destruction of libraries in ancient Rome to today’s state-sponsored efforts to suppress LGBTQ+ literature, book bans arise from the impulse toward social control. In a survey of legal cases, literary controversies, and philosophical arguments, Ira Wells illustrates the historical opposition to the freedom to read and argues that today’s conservatives and progressives alike are warping our children’s relationship with literature and teaching them that the solution to opposing viewpoints is outright expurgation. At a moment in which our democratic institutions are buckling under the stress of polarization, On Book Banning is both rallying cry and guide to resistance for those who will always insist upon reading for themselves.
ABOUT IRA WELLS
Ira Wells is a critic, essayist, and an associate professor at Victoria College in the University of Toronto, where he teaches in the Northrop Frye stream in literature and the humanities in the Vic One program. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Globe and Mail, Guardian, The New Republic, and many other venues. His most recent book is Norman Jewison: A Director’s Life. He lives in Toronto with his wife and children.

Steven Heighton's Sacred Rage: Kingston Writers Fest
2025-09-19 19:00 - 20:30 (America/Toronto) | Kingston Marriott, 285 King St E, Kingston, ON, K7L 3B1, Canada
Steven Heighton’s second posthumous story collection, Sacred Rage, will be included in the Kingston Writers Fest event, “Bushwacked by Inspiration: Short Stories.” Excerpts from Sacred Rage will be read by Sarah Tsiang, who will also be joined for the event by Catherine Bush, Deepa Rajagopalan, and Jamal Saeed in a discussion of writing short-form fiction, and its challenges and particular satisfactions.
The event will take place in the Rideau Room (Kingston Marriott) on Friday, September 19 at 7PM.
Tickets and more details here.
Grab Sacred Rage here!
ABOUT SACRED RAGE
“A writer only feels like a writer when in the act. And the will, I said, is never enough . . . Where does inspiration, that sacred rage, originate? Maybe it’s just a matter of stubbornly starting something new and writing your way into the slot.”—Steven Heighton
In the years before his unexpected death, Steven Heighton wrote to his longtime editor John Metcalf to say that he understood that the short story marked his most important contribution to literature, and that “after the novels, rereading and writing short stories again felt like returning home.” In the fifteen stories taken from across his four collections, Sacred Rage offers us Heighton as the moral explorer of the global suburbs, as chronicler of our innermost stories of love and fear, sleeping and waking, of a rebel “unabashedly devoted to the old pursuit,” as he once called it, “of truth and beauty.” These are stories of grace and the lack of it; of elegy and requiem; of hope and care in a world where these seem increasingly alien, stories by one of our most sharp-eyed and generous writers, whether you’re discovering them for the first time, or once again.
ABOUT STEVEN HEIGHTON
Steven Heighton (1961–2022) was a writer and musician. His twenty previous books include the novels Afterlands, a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice, and the bestselling The Shadow Boxer; the Writers’ Trust Hilary Weston Prize finalist memoir Reaching Mithymna: Among the Volunteers and Refugees on Lesvos; and The Waking Comes Late, winner of the Governor General’s Award for Poetry.

Richard Kelly Kemick at the Attic Owl Reading Series
2025-09-24 17:00 - 19:00 (America/Moncton) | BC
Richard Kelly Kemick, author of Hello, Horse, will be reading at the Attic Owl Reading Series in Moncton! The event is hosted by Kayla Geitzler, and there is an Open Mic Night portion to the event as well.
The event will take place on Wednesday, September 24. Doors open at 5PM and when you arrive, ask for the sign up sheet! Then, feel free to get a tasty meal, beverage or snack from Cafe C’est La Vie. The event will get underway around 5:30PM and continue until everyone has read or 7PM, whichever comes first.
More details here.
Get Hello, Horse here!
ABOUT HELLO, HORSE
Taut, stylish stories take on big moral questions from surprising perspectives.
A teenager’s job mucking stalls at a dog track takes a strange turn when his co-worker finds a new religion at odds with winning streaks. Two brothers set out in search of fame upon the frozen waters of a subarctic lake. After her mother’s death, a high school student tries to make rent by winning the Unitarian Church’s Annual Young Writer’s Short Story Competition. An incarcerated man considers the nature of justice between shifts with his fellow inmates at Nations at War, the ultimate live-action experience for tourists eager to learn about the Canadian Civil War.
Spanning states and provinces, and featuring an apocalypse, a coterie of ghosts, nuns on ice, and an above-average number of dogs, the stories in Hello, Horse consider the mirage of authenticity and the impact of decisions we make—for better and for worse.
ABOUT RICHARD KELLY KEMICK
Richard Kelly Kemick is an award-winning poet, journalist, and fiction writer. His limited series podcast, Natural Life, is an intimate and unexpectedly honest documentary on his cousin, who is serving a life sentence without parole in Michigan. Richard is also the author of I Am Herod (also on audiobook), which takes readers undercover at one of the world’s largest religious events, and Caribou Run, a collection of poetry. He is the recipient of multiple awards including two National Magazine Awards and the Writers’ Guild of Alberta’s 2019 Award for Best Short Story. He lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Richard Kelly Kemick at Fog Lit Festival
2025-09-25 | BMO Theatre, 112 Princess Street, Saint John, NB, E2L 1K4, Canada
Join Richard Kelly Kemick, author of Hello, Horse, at the Fog Lit Festival, where he’ll be hosting the Opening Reception & Literary Trivia!
The event will take place on Thursday, September 25 at 7PM.
More details here.
Get Hello, Horse here!
ABOUT HELLO, HORSE
Taut, stylish stories take on big moral questions from surprising perspectives.
A teenager’s job mucking stalls at a dog track takes a strange turn when his co-worker finds a new religion at odds with winning streaks. Two brothers set out in search of fame upon the frozen waters of a subarctic lake. After her mother’s death, a high school student tries to make rent by winning the Unitarian Church’s Annual Young Writer’s Short Story Competition. An incarcerated man considers the nature of justice between shifts with his fellow inmates at Nations at War, the ultimate live-action experience for tourists eager to learn about the Canadian Civil War.
Spanning states and provinces, and featuring an apocalypse, a coterie of ghosts, nuns on ice, and an above-average number of dogs, the stories in Hello, Horse consider the mirage of authenticity and the impact of decisions we make—for better and for worse.
ABOUT RICHARD KELLY KEMICK
Richard Kelly Kemick is an award-winning poet, journalist, and fiction writer. His limited series podcast, Natural Life, is an intimate and unexpectedly honest documentary on his cousin, who is serving a life sentence without parole in Michigan. Richard is also the author of I Am Herod (also on audiobook), which takes readers undercover at one of the world’s largest religious events, and Caribou Run, a collection of poetry. He is the recipient of multiple awards including two National Magazine Awards and the Writers’ Guild of Alberta’s 2019 Award for Best Short Story. He lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Richard Kelly Kemick at 'The Catch-Up' Reading Series
2025-09-28 15:00 - 16:00 (America/Moncton) | Westminster Books, 88 York St, Fredericton, NB, Canada
Richard Kelly Kemick, author of Hello, Horse, will be joining ‘The Catch-Up’ Reading Series hosted by Fawn Parker. Richard will be joined in conversation by Douglas Walbourne-Gough, and will be reading from his collection of short stories.
The event will take place at Westminster Books on Sunday, September 28 at 3PM.
More details here.
Get Hello, Horse here!
ABOUT HELLO, HORSE
Taut, stylish stories take on big moral questions from surprising perspectives.
A teenager’s job mucking stalls at a dog track takes a strange turn when his co-worker finds a new religion at odds with winning streaks. Two brothers set out in search of fame upon the frozen waters of a subarctic lake. After her mother’s death, a high school student tries to make rent by winning the Unitarian Church’s Annual Young Writer’s Short Story Competition. An incarcerated man considers the nature of justice between shifts with his fellow inmates at Nations at War, the ultimate live-action experience for tourists eager to learn about the Canadian Civil War.
Spanning states and provinces, and featuring an apocalypse, a coterie of ghosts, nuns on ice, and an above-average number of dogs, the stories in Hello, Horse consider the mirage of authenticity and the impact of decisions we make—for better and for worse.
ABOUT RICHARD KELLY KEMICK
Richard Kelly Kemick is an award-winning poet, journalist, and fiction writer. His limited series podcast, Natural Life, is an intimate and unexpectedly honest documentary on his cousin, who is serving a life sentence without parole in Michigan. Richard is also the author of I Am Herod (also on audiobook), which takes readers undercover at one of the world’s largest religious events, and Caribou Run, a collection of poetry. He is the recipient of multiple awards including two National Magazine Awards and the Writers’ Guild of Alberta’s 2019 Award for Best Short Story. He lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Booktoberfest: Biblioasis Bash in Toronto!
2025-10-01 19:00 - 21:00 (America/Toronto) | The Supermarket, 268 Augusta Ave, Toronto, ON, M5T 2L9, Canada
Join us in Toronto as we celebrate with six of our authors and their 2025 releases! Mélikah Abdelmoumen (Baldwin, Styron, and Me), stephanie roberts (UNMET), Don Gillmor (On Oil), Ira Wells (On Book Banning), Elise Levine (Big of You: Stories), and Russell Smith (Self Care) will all be reading from their new books, along with an audience Q&A and discussion. Books will be available for sale and signing.
The event will take place at The Supermarket on Wednesday, October 1 at 7PM. More details here!
Get Baldwin, Styron, and Me here!
Get UNMET here!
Get On Oil here!
Get On Book Banning here!
Get Big of You here!
Get Self Care here!

Booktoberfest: Biblioasis Bash in Windsor!
2025-10-02 19:00 - 21:00 (America/Toronto) | WindsorEats, 400 Erie St E Unit 3, Windsor, ON, N9A 3X4, Canada
Join us in Windsor as we celebrate with four of our authors and their 2025 releases! Mélikah Abdelmoumen (Baldwin, Styron, and Me), stephanie roberts (UNMET), Don Gillmor (On Oil), and Russell Smith (Self Care) will all be reading from their new books, along with an audience Q&A and discussion. Books will be available for sale and signing.
The event will take place at Windsor Eats on Thursday, October 2 at 7PM. More details here.
Get Baldwin, Styron, and Me here!
Get UNMET here!
Get On Oil here!
Get Self Care here!

Colleen Coco Collins at the Fredericton Poetry Weekend
2025-10-05 | UNB Fredericton, Fredericton, NB, E3B 5A3, Canada
Catch Colleen Coco Collins, author of the poetry collection Sorry About the Fire, at the Fredericton Poetry Weekend! Book available for sale by Westminster Bookmark.
The all-day event takes place at UNB’s Memorial Hall on Sunday, October 5.
Grab Sorry About the Fire here!
ABOUT SORRY ABOUT THE FIRE
A CBC Books’ Poetry Collection to Watch for in Spring 2024 • 3rd Prize Alcuin Award for Book Design in Poetry
I wanted a good bewildering, / down deep, / as the keep of a castle.
With a voice as ungovernable and determined as Prometheus—who stole fire from Zeus only to face dire consequences—Colleen Coco Collins’ debut poems are daring dispatches from beyond the margins: light-filled flares sent up from the edge of language, sentience, land, and story. Drawing on all of her multidisciplinary enamorations and rendered through the triple vision of her Irish, French, and Odawa heritage, Sorry About the Fire introduces not just a poet, but a stunningly original sensibility.
ABOUT COLLEEN COCO COLLINS
Colleen Coco Collins [she/they] is an interdisciplinary artist of Irish, French, and Odawa descent, working in songwriting, performance, poetry and visual arts. She’s worked as a gallery director, in forestry, fossil preparation, and renovation; as an autism support worker, teacher, and women’s shelter counsellor. Her writing, music, and art practice centers on temporality, presumptions of sentience, subversion, rhythm, gesture, geographies, biophonies, frequencies, the ouroboric, the peripatetic, love and the polyglottic. Hailing from Antler River/Deshkan Ziibiing/London, Ontario, Coco has studied at universities in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, New Zealand, and Ireland. She lives litorally in rural Port Greville, Mi’kma’ki/Nova Scotia amidst crows, coyotes, grackles, bees, humpback, lichen and fox.

Precarious: Calgary Launch!
2025-10-08 18:00 - 20:00 (America/Edmonton) | Patricia A Whelan Performance Hall, Central Library 800 3 St. SE, Calgary, AB, Canada
Join us for an evening celebrating the launch of Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers by Calgary-based author Marcello Di Cintio. Hosted by Paul Haavardsrud, this event is presented by Shelf Life Books in partnership with the Calgary Public Library.
The launch will take place on Wednesday, October 8 at 6PM. The event is free, but RSVP is required on Eventbrite.
More details here.
Grab a copy of Precarious here!
ABOUT PRECARIOUS
A series of profiles of foreign workers illuminates the precarity of global systems of migrant labor and the vulnerability of their most disenfranchised agents.
In 2023, after weeks of investigation, United Nations Special Rapporteur Tomoyo Obokata came to a scathing conclusion: Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker program is “a breeding ground for contemporary forms of slavery.” Workers complained of excessive hours and unpaid overtime; of being forced to perform dangerous tasks or ones not specified in their contracts; of being physically abused, intimidated, and sexually harassed; and of overcrowded, unsanitary living conditions that deprived them of their privacy and dignity.
In Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers, Marcello Di Cintio ranges across the country speaking to those who have come from elsewhere to till our fields, bathe our elderly, and serve us our Double Doubles, uncovering stories of tremendous perseverance, resilience, and humanity, but also of precarity and vulnerability. He shows that vast swathes of our economy depend on the work of people we don’t see, while expanding our awareness of what migrant work now entails, and revealing that our mistreatment of the most vulnerable among us diminishes our own dignity.
ABOUT MARCELLO DI CINTIO
Marcello Di Cintio is the author of six books, including Walls: Travels Along the Barricades, Pay No Heed to the Rockets: Palestine in the Present Tense, and Driven: The Secret Lives of Taxi Drivers. He has also written for the Globe and Mail, The Walrus, The International New York Times, and Canadian Geographic, among others. He lives in Calgary.

Caroline Adderson at Greenwood Storyfest: Writing Worksop
2025-10-11 14:00 - 16:00 (America/New_York) | Stephen F. Shaar Community Centre, 394 rue Main, Hudson, QC, Canada
Caroline Adderson, author of A Way to Be Happy, will be leading a writing workshop at the Greenwood StoryFest! The workshop is for adults wishing to learn more about how to create believable characters in their stories. She will be sharing her insight into aspects of characters to highlight in terms of descriptions, development, and dialogue, and working with participants to create three-dimensional characters of their own.
The event will take place on Saturday, October 11 at 2PM.
Tickets and more details here.
Grab a copy of A Way to Be Happy here!
ABOUT A WAY TO BE HAPPY
Longlisted for the 2024 Giller Prize • A Globe 100 Best Book of 2024 • A CBC Best Fiction Book of the Year
Short stories about disparate characters consider what it means to find happiness.
On New Year’s Eve, a pair of addicts robs a string of high-end parties in order to fund their own recovery. A recently separated woman relocates to a small northern town, where she receives a life-changing visitation, and a Russian hitman, suffering from a mysterious lung ailment, retrieves long-buried memories of his past. In the nineteenth century, a disparate group of women coalesce in the attempt to aid a young girl in her escape from a hospital for the insane. These are but some of the remarkable characters who populate these stories, all of them grappling with conflicts ranging from mundane to extraordinary. Caroline Adderson’s A Way to Be Happy considers what it means to find happiness—and how often it comes through the grace of others.
ABOUT CAROLINE ADDERSON
Caroline Adderson is the author of five novels (A Russian Sister, Ellen in Pieces, The Sky Is Falling, Sitting Practice, and A History of Forgetting), two previous collections of short stories (Pleased to Meet You and Bad Imaginings), as well as many books for young readers. Her award nominations include the Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, two Commonwealth Writers’ Prizes, the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Rogers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and the Scotiabank Giller Prize longlist. The recipient of three BC Book Prizes, three CBC Literary Awards, and the Marian Engel Award for mid-career achievement, Caroline lives and writes in Vancouver.

Caroline Adderson at Greenwood Storyfest
2025-10-12 13:30 (America/New_York) | Stephen F. Shaar Community Centre, 394 rue Main, Hudson, QC, Canada
Caroline Adderson will be appearing at the Greenwood Storyfest to speak about her latest collection of short stories, A Way to Be Happy!
The event will take place on Sunday, October 12 at 1:30 PM.
Tickets and more details here.
Grab a copy of A Way to Be Happy here!
ABOUT A WAY TO BE HAPPY
Longlisted for the 2024 Giller Prize • A Globe 100 Best Book of 2024 • A CBC Best Fiction Book of the Year
Short stories about disparate characters consider what it means to find happiness.
On New Year’s Eve, a pair of addicts robs a string of high-end parties in order to fund their own recovery. A recently separated woman relocates to a small northern town, where she receives a life-changing visitation, and a Russian hitman, suffering from a mysterious lung ailment, retrieves long-buried memories of his past. In the nineteenth century, a disparate group of women coalesce in the attempt to aid a young girl in her escape from a hospital for the insane. These are but some of the remarkable characters who populate these stories, all of them grappling with conflicts ranging from mundane to extraordinary. Caroline Adderson’s A Way to Be Happy considers what it means to find happiness—and how often it comes through the grace of others.
ABOUT CAROLINE ADDERSON
Caroline Adderson is the author of five novels (A Russian Sister, Ellen in Pieces, The Sky Is Falling, Sitting Practice, and A History of Forgetting), two previous collections of short stories (Pleased to Meet You and Bad Imaginings), as well as many books for young readers. Her award nominations include the Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, two Commonwealth Writers’ Prizes, the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Rogers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and the Scotiabank Giller Prize longlist. The recipient of three BC Book Prizes, three CBC Literary Awards, and the Marian Engel Award for mid-career achievement, Caroline lives and writes in Vancouver.

Precarious: Marcello Di Cintio at Edmonton LitFest
2025-10-16 07:00 - 08:30 (America/Edmonton) | Muttart Theatre, Stanley A Milner Library, 7 Sir Winston Churchill Sq NW, Edmonton, AB, T5J 2V5, Canada
Marcello Di Cintio, author of Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers, will be appearing at the Edmonton LitFest! Marcello in conversation with LitFest board treasurer Danielle Paradis to talk about his latest book. Books will be available courtesy of Audrey’s Books.
The event will take place at the Muttart Theatre on Thursday, October 16 at 7PM.
Tickets and more details here.
Grab a copy of Precarious here!
ABOUT PRECARIOUS
A series of profiles of foreign workers illuminates the precarity of global systems of migrant labor and the vulnerability of their most disenfranchised agents.
In 2023, after weeks of investigation, United Nations Special Rapporteur Tomoyo Obokata came to a scathing conclusion: Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker program is “a breeding ground for contemporary forms of slavery.” Workers complained of excessive hours and unpaid overtime; of being forced to perform dangerous tasks or ones not specified in their contracts; of being physically abused, intimidated, and sexually harassed; and of overcrowded, unsanitary living conditions that deprived them of their privacy and dignity.
In Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers, Marcello Di Cintio ranges across the country speaking to those who have come from elsewhere to till our fields, bathe our elderly, and serve us our Double Doubles, uncovering stories of tremendous perseverance, resilience, and humanity, but also of precarity and vulnerability. He shows that vast swathes of our economy depend on the work of people we don’t see, while expanding our awareness of what migrant work now entails, and revealing that our mistreatment of the most vulnerable among us diminishes our own dignity.
ABOUT MARCELLO DI CINTIO
Marcello Di Cintio is the author of six books, including Walls: Travels Along the Barricades, Pay No Heed to the Rockets: Palestine in the Present Tense, and Driven: The Secret Lives of Taxi Drivers. He has also written for the Globe and Mail, The Walrus, The International New York Times, and Canadian Geographic, among others. He lives in Calgary.

Big of You: Baltimore Launch!
2025-10-16 18:00 - 20:00 (America/New_York) | Bird in Hand, 11 E 33rd St, Baltimore, MD, 21218, United States
Come out and celebrate the launch of Elise Levine’s latest short story collection, Big of You! Elise will be joined in conversation by Dora Malech at Bird in Hand, and will be reading from the collection. The event will be hosted by Nate Brown. Books will be available for sale and signing from the Ivy Bookshop.
The launch will take place on Thursday, October 16 at 6PM.
Grab a copy of Big of You here!
ABOUT BIG OF YOU
In these nine stories, Elise Levine illuminates the aspirations of women and men (and one sassy millennia-old being) as they sift through the midden of their regrets, friendships, and marriages, and seek fresher ways of inhabiting older selves.
Two young women hitchhike around Europe, a lurid secret between them. A team in space is left reeling after a colleague’s unexpected death. Ambitious brothers take to the skies in an aerostat in 19th-century Paris. Big of You contains stories of real and fantastical life, each with its own distinctive voice and wild vocabulary.
At turns playful, blistering, unabashed, these stories examine the nuanced, kaleidoscopic dimensions of character, of people driven by ambition yet contending with the hauntings of the past. Spanning various settings and time periods, Big of You captures the everyday and the extraordinary in collisions soaring and earthy, exuberant and visceral.
ABOUT ELISE LEVINE
Elise Levine is the author, most recently, of Say This: Two Novellas, the story collection This Wicked Tongue, and the novel Blue Field. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Copper Nickel, Blackbird, The Walrus, and five times in Best Canadian Stories. She lives in Baltimore, where she teaches in the MA in Writing program at Johns Hopkins University.

Precarious: Marcello Di Cintio at Calgary Wordfest
2025-10-18 19:30 - 21:00 (America/Edmonton) | Memorial Park Library, Festival Hub, 2nd Flr, 1221 2 St SW, Calgary, AB, Canada
Marcello Di Cintio, author of Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers, will be appearing at Calgary Wordfest for the panel “Othering & Empathy.” Marcello will be joined by fellow writers Linden MacIntyre and Saeed Teebi, and host Christina Frangou for a discussion on empathy. What more life-affirming way to spend your Saturday night than walking a mile in someone else’s shoes? Come grow your mind and heart with these deeply thoughtful authors. Book will be available from Owl’s Nest Books.
The event will take place at the Memorial Park Library 2nd Floor on Saturday, October 18 at 7:30PM.
More details here.
Grab a copy of Precarious here!
ABOUT PRECARIOUS
A series of profiles of foreign workers illuminates the precarity of global systems of migrant labor and the vulnerability of their most disenfranchised agents.
In 2023, after weeks of investigation, United Nations Special Rapporteur Tomoyo Obokata came to a scathing conclusion: Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker program is “a breeding ground for contemporary forms of slavery.” Workers complained of excessive hours and unpaid overtime; of being forced to perform dangerous tasks or ones not specified in their contracts; of being physically abused, intimidated, and sexually harassed; and of overcrowded, unsanitary living conditions that deprived them of their privacy and dignity.
In Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers, Marcello Di Cintio ranges across the country speaking to those who have come from elsewhere to till our fields, bathe our elderly, and serve us our Double Doubles, uncovering stories of tremendous perseverance, resilience, and humanity, but also of precarity and vulnerability. He shows that vast swathes of our economy depend on the work of people we don’t see, while expanding our awareness of what migrant work now entails, and revealing that our mistreatment of the most vulnerable among us diminishes our own dignity.
ABOUT MARCELLO DI CINTIO
Marcello Di Cintio is the author of six books, including Walls: Travels Along the Barricades, Pay No Heed to the Rockets: Palestine in the Present Tense, and Driven: The Secret Lives of Taxi Drivers. He has also written for the Globe and Mail, The Walrus, The International New York Times, and Canadian Geographic, among others. He lives in Calgary.

"Lit Up Lunch" at Indigo with Alex Pugsley and Russell Smith
2025-10-20 12:00 - 14:00 (America/Toronto) | Indigo Bay & Bloor, 55 Bloor St W, Toronto, ON, M4W 1A5, Canada
Biblioasis authors Alex Pugsley (Aubrey McKee, The Education of Aubrey McKee) and Russell Smith (Self Care) will be in conversation together at the Indigo on Bay and Bloor in Toronto! The conversation also features author Jean Marc Ah-Sen, and will be hosted by Emily Weedon.
The event will take place on Monday, October 20 at 11:30PM.
Tickets and more details here.
Get Self Care here!
Get Aubrey McKee and The Education of Aubrey McKee here!
ABOUT SELF CARE
Between writing a weekly column for The Hype Report and managing her mood stabilizers, Gloria navigates a series of quasi-relationships while commiserating with her best friend about dating apps and dick pics, married men and questionable boundaries. But when she makes a glib pass at Daryn, a stranger on a subway platform crowded with young anti-immigration protesters, and finds him waiting for her outside her health club a couple of days later, a surprising curiosity leads her not to consider a restraining order, but to talk to him.
Claiming she wants to interview him for an article on the incel movement, Gloria meets Daryn for coffee and soon invites him back to her apartment—where his earnestness and painfully restrained desire inspire her to dominate him sexually. As their physical relationship intensifies, so does their emotional connection, and Gloria can’t shake the sense that she’s headed in a dangerous direction.
An electric examination of sex and love, self-loathing, and twenty-first century loneliness, Self Care is a devastating novel about women and men, what they want and what they say they want, and the violent tension between the two.
ABOUT RUSSELL SMITH
Russell Smith is the author of twelve previous books of fiction, nonfiction, and translation. His fiction has been nominated for every major Canadian award, including the Giller Prize, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and the Amazon First Novel Award. A journalist and cultural commentator, his nonfiction has appeared in the New York Review of Books, the Globe and Mail, The Walrus, and elsewhere. An acquiring editor at Dundurn Press, Smith lives in Toronto.
ABOUT AUBREY MCKEE
From basement rec rooms to midnight railway tracks, Action Transfers to Smarties boxes crammed with joints, from Paul McCartney on the kitchen radio to their furious teenaged cover of The Ramones, Aubrey McKee and his familiars navigate late adolescence amidst the old-monied decadence of Halifax. An arcana of oddball angels, Alex Pugsley’s long-awaited debut novel follows rich-kid drug dealers and junior tennis brats, émigré heart surgeons and small-time thugs, renegade private school girls and runaway children as they try to make sense of the city into which they’ve been born. Part coming-of-age-story, part social chronicle, and part study of the myths that define our growing up, Aubrey McKee introduces a breathtakingly original new voice.
ABOUT THE EDUCATION OF AUBREY MCKEE
Longlisted for the 2024 Toronto Book Awards • A Toronto Star Most Anticipated Spring Title • A 49th Shelf Can’t Miss Title for Spring
The scene is Toronto, the early 1990s, and at a house party Aubrey McKee falls in love with a bewitching stranger who talks him into stealing a piece of cake. This woman—a poet named Gudrun Peel—rapidly becomes the person for whom he would do anything at all. Together, Aubrey and Gudrun make a life of delirious idiosyncrasy. Surrounded by friends, frenemies, lovers, and rivals in the underground arts scene, the possibilities of their destiny remain radically open. But as their relationship deepens, and their creative and professional lives stumble, stall, and then suddenly blow up, Aubrey and Gudrun struggle against their own inexperience . . . as well as each other.
The much-anticipated follow-up to Alex Pugsley’s Aubrey McKee, The Education of Aubrey McKee is a campus novel in which the city of Toronto is the institute of higher education and the setting for a glittering story about the incandescence of ﬁrst love.
ABOUT ALEX PUGSLEY
Alex Pugsley is the author of the novels Aubrey McKee and The Education of Aubrey McKee, as well as the short story collection Shimmer. Following the publication of Aubrey McKee, he was named one of CBC’s Writers to Watch. He has been nominated for Canadian Comedy Awards, Gemini Awards, Hot Doc Awards, National Magazine Awards, and is a winner of the Writers’ Trust Journey Prize. His feature film Dirty Singles is available on Apple TV and Prime Video. His next novel, Silver Lake, the third book in a series about Aubrey McKee, is forthcoming from Biblioasis.

Big of You: Washington DC Launch!
2025-10-21 19:00 - 21:00 (America/New_York) | Lost City Books, 2467 18th St NW, Washington, DC, 20009, United States
Come out and celebrate the launch of Elise Levine’s latest short story collection, Big of You! Elise will be joined in conversation by Jeannie Vanasco at Lost City Bookstore, and will be reading from the collection. The event will be hosted by Philip Dean Walker. Books will be available for sale and signing.
The launch will take place on Tuesday, October 21 at 7PM.
More details here.
Grab a copy of Big of You here!
ABOUT BIG OF YOU
In these nine stories, Elise Levine illuminates the aspirations of women and men (and one sassy millennia-old being) as they sift through the midden of their regrets, friendships, and marriages, and seek fresher ways of inhabiting older selves.
Two young women hitchhike around Europe, a lurid secret between them. A team in space is left reeling after a colleague’s unexpected death. Ambitious brothers take to the skies in an aerostat in 19th-century Paris. Big of You contains stories of real and fantastical life, each with its own distinctive voice and wild vocabulary.
At turns playful, blistering, unabashed, these stories examine the nuanced, kaleidoscopic dimensions of character, of people driven by ambition yet contending with the hauntings of the past. Spanning various settings and time periods, Big of You captures the everyday and the extraordinary in collisions soaring and earthy, exuberant and visceral.
ABOUT ELISE LEVINE
Elise Levine is the author, most recently, of Say This: Two Novellas, the story collection This Wicked Tongue, and the novel Blue Field. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Copper Nickel, Blackbird, The Walrus, and five times in Best Canadian Stories. She lives in Baltimore, where she teaches in the MA in Writing program at Johns Hopkins University.

We're Somewhere Else Now: Toronto Launch!
2025-10-22 17:00 - 19:00 (America/Toronto) | Ben McNally Books, 108 Queen St E, Toronto, ON, M5C 1S4, Canada
Come celebrate the Toronto launch of Robyn Sarah’s new poetry collection We’re Somewhere Else Now! Robyn will be reading from her new collection at Ben McNally Books, where copies will also be for sale and signing.
The launch will take place on Wednesday, October 22 at 5PM.
More details here.
Get a copy of We’re Somewhere Else Now here!
ABOUT WE’RE SOMEWHERE ELSE NOW
In her first collection of new poems in a decade, Robyn Sarah chronicles the pandemic years with quiet wisdom and her flair for meshing the familiar with the numinous.
We’re Somewhere Else Now moves with ease from the particular to the abstract. These are poems of grief and unexpected change, of quiet awe at the human experience. Each poem is a window for the reader to look into, “lit room to lit room,” tracking desultory days of isolation and uncertainty, while also highlighting reasons to pay attention: playing with a grandchild, the rarity of a leap year, the calls of birds.
Three poems from the collection, originally published in The New Quarterly, were nominated for a 2025 National Magazine Award in Poetry.
ABOUT ROBYN SARAH
Poet, writer, literary editor, and musician, Robyn Sarah has lived in Montreal since early childhood. Her writing began to appear in Canadian literary magazines in the 1970s while she completed studies at McGill University and the Conservatoire de musique du Québec. Her tenth poetry collection, My Shoes Are Killing Me, won the Governor General’s Award in 2015. As well, she has published two collections of short stories, a book of essays on poetry, and a memoir, Music, Late and Soon (2021), that interweaves her youth as a professional-track clarinetist with her return at fifty-nine (after a lapse of thirty-five years) to the piano teacher who was her life mentor. From 2010 until 2020 she served as poetry editor for Cormorant Books.

We're Somewhere Else Now: Kingston Launch!
2025-10-23 19:00 - 21:00 (America/Toronto) | Novel Idea, 156 Princess St., Kingston, ON, K7L 1B1, Canada
Come celebrate the Kingston launch of Robyn Sarah’s new poetry collection We’re Somewhere Else Now! Robyn will be reading from her new collection at Novel Idea Bookstore, where copies will also be for sale and signing.
The launch will take place on Thursday, October 23 at 7PM.
Get a copy of We’re Somewhere Else Now here!
ABOUT WE’RE SOMEWHERE ELSE NOW
In her first collection of new poems in a decade, Robyn Sarah chronicles the pandemic years with quiet wisdom and her flair for meshing the familiar with the numinous.
We’re Somewhere Else Now moves with ease from the particular to the abstract. These are poems of grief and unexpected change, of quiet awe at the human experience. Each poem is a window for the reader to look into, “lit room to lit room,” tracking desultory days of isolation and uncertainty, while also highlighting reasons to pay attention: playing with a grandchild, the rarity of a leap year, the calls of birds.
Three poems from the collection, originally published in The New Quarterly, were nominated for a 2025 National Magazine Award in Poetry.
ABOUT ROBYN SARAH
Poet, writer, literary editor, and musician, Robyn Sarah has lived in Montreal since early childhood. Her writing began to appear in Canadian literary magazines in the 1970s while she completed studies at McGill University and the Conservatoire de musique du Québec. Her tenth poetry collection, My Shoes Are Killing Me, won the Governor General’s Award in 2015. As well, she has published two collections of short stories, a book of essays on poetry, and a memoir, Music, Late and Soon (2021), that interweaves her youth as a professional-track clarinetist with her return at fifty-nine (after a lapse of thirty-five years) to the piano teacher who was her life mentor. From 2010 until 2020 she served as poetry editor for Cormorant Books.

Marcello Di Cintio and Don Gillmor at Vancouver Writers Fest
2025-10-24 10:00 - 12:00 (America/Vancouver) | Performance Works, 1218 Cartwright Street, Vancouver, BC, V6H 3R9, Canada
Marcello Di Cintio, author of Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers, and Don Gillmor, author of On Oil, will be appearing at Vancouver Writers Fest for the panel “The Costs of Exploitation and Sustainability.” Marcello and Don, joined by fellow author Vince Beisar and moderator David Beers, will be in conversation to analyze the heavy human and environmental costs of abusive resource extraction, and illuminate a better path forward.
The event will take place at Performance Works on Friday, October 24 at 10am.
More details here.
Grab a copy of Precarious here, and On Oil here!
ABOUT PRECARIOUS
A series of profiles of foreign workers illuminates the precarity of global systems of migrant labor and the vulnerability of their most disenfranchised agents.
In 2023, after weeks of investigation, United Nations Special Rapporteur Tomoyo Obokata came to a scathing conclusion: Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker program is “a breeding ground for contemporary forms of slavery.” Workers complained of excessive hours and unpaid overtime; of being forced to perform dangerous tasks or ones not specified in their contracts; of being physically abused, intimidated, and sexually harassed; and of overcrowded, unsanitary living conditions that deprived them of their privacy and dignity.
In Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers, Marcello Di Cintio ranges across the country speaking to those who have come from elsewhere to till our fields, bathe our elderly, and serve us our Double Doubles, uncovering stories of tremendous perseverance, resilience, and humanity, but also of precarity and vulnerability. He shows that vast swathes of our economy depend on the work of people we don’t see, while expanding our awareness of what migrant work now entails, and revealing that our mistreatment of the most vulnerable among us diminishes our own dignity.
ABOUT MARCELLO DI CINTIO
Marcello Di Cintio is the author of six books, including Walls: Travels Along the Barricades, Pay No Heed to the Rockets: Palestine in the Present Tense, and Driven: The Secret Lives of Taxi Drivers. He has also written for the Globe and Mail, The Walrus, The International New York Times, and Canadian Geographic, among others. He lives in Calgary.
ABOUT ON OIL
A journalist, and former roughneck, considers our long, complex, tortured relationship with oil.
Oil has dominated our lives for the last century. It has given us warmth, progress, and life-threatening pollution. It has been a gift and is now a threat. It has started wars, ended wars, and infiltrated governments—in some cases, effectively become the government. And now oil’s enduring mythology is facing a messy, complicated twilight.
In On Oil, Don Gillmor, who worked as a roughneck on oil rigs during the seventies oil boom in Alberta, looks at how the industry has changed over the decades and illustrates the ways our dependence on oil has led to regulatory capture, in Canada and elsewhere, and contributed to armed conflict and war across the world. Gillmor documents the myriad ways that oil companies have misdirected environmental action and misinformed the public about climate concerns and illuminates where we went wrong—and how we might yet change course.
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.

Ira Wells at Vancouver Writers Fest: On Book Banning and Censorship
2025-10-24 10:00 - 12:00 (America/Vancouver) | Revue Stage, 1601 Johnston St, Vancouver, BC, Canada
Ira Wells, author of On Book Banning, will be speaking at the Vancouver Writers Fest event “On Book Banning and ” Ira will be joined by politics and culture critic David Moscrop in a robust discussion of public and private book banning. Is it wrong to embrace the books of people who do things we abhor? What is ‘equity-based weeding’? How can we know the true scope of book banning when according to a study by the American Library Association 82 to 97 percent of all library challenges go unreported? Do we have a national, communal history? If so, how can we best protect it?
The event will take place at the Revue Stage on Friday, October 24 at 10AM.
Tickets and more details here.
Grab a copy of On Book Banning here!
ABOUT ON BOOK BANNING
The freedom to read is under attack.
From the destruction of libraries in ancient Rome to today’s state-sponsored efforts to suppress LGBTQ+ literature, book bans arise from the impulse toward social control. In a survey of legal cases, literary controversies, and philosophical arguments, Ira Wells illustrates the historical opposition to the freedom to read and argues that today’s conservatives and progressives alike are warping our children’s relationship with literature and teaching them that the solution to opposing viewpoints is outright expurgation. At a moment in which our democratic institutions are buckling under the stress of polarization, On Book Banning is both rallying cry and guide to resistance for those who will always insist upon reading for themselves.
ABOUT IRA WELLS
Ira Wells is a critic, essayist, and an associate professor at Victoria College in the University of Toronto, where he teaches in the Northrop Frye stream in literature and the humanities in the Vic One program. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Globe and Mail, Guardian, The New Republic, and many other venues. His most recent book is Norman Jewison: A Director’s Life. He lives in Toronto with his wife and children.

Elaine Feeney at Vancouver Writers Fest: The Conversations
2025-10-24 13:00 - 15:00 (America/Vancouver) | Performance Works, 1218 Cartwright Street, Vancouver, BC, V6H 3R9, Canada
Irish author Elaine Feeney (Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way) will be appearing at the Vancouver Writers Fest for the panel “The Conversations.” Elaine will be joined by fellow authors Ian Williams and Jack Wang, as moderator Tara McGuire conducts back-to-back interviews with these authors of some of the most anticipated novels of the season. Come for the dialogue, and you’re sure to leave with all three of these must-read books in hand.
The event will take place at Performance Works on Friday, October 24 at 1PM.
Tickets and more details here.
Order Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way here!
ABOUT LET ME GO MAD IN MY OWN WAY
An Observer, Irish Times, and Sunday Times Ireland Preview Selection
Claire O’Connor is a promising writer who left the family’s struggling farmstead in western Ireland for London, swearing never to return. But after the unexpected death of her mother, she is racked with grief, and when her father is diagnosed with cancer, she decides to return home to care for him, destroying everything she’d so carefully built up in the process. The pandemic follows, and Claire falls into a comfortable routine, one increasingly shaped by a growing obsession: the lives of the 20-something trad wives she discovers on social media. When Tom, her lost London love, unexpectedly shows up the next town over, her anxieties and obsessions collide, the resulting conflict forcing Claire and her brothers to finally deal with their family’s historic trauma—a trauma whose evidence is carved into the beams of the family home and the stone floors upon which their ancestors bled.
Ranging through recent Irish history, Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way is Elaine Feeney’s most ambitious novel to date, a work of literary and cultural exorcism and a profound exploration of family, history, violence, and hope.
ABOUT ELAINE FEENEY
Elaine Feeney is a writer from the west of Ireland. Her 2020 debut novel, As You Were, was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize and the Irish Novel of the Year Award and won the Kate O’Brien Award, the McKitterick Prize, and the Dalkey Festival Emerging Writer Award. Feeney has published three collections of poetry including The Radio Was Gospel and Rise, and her short story “Sojourn” was included in The Art of The Glimpse: 100 Irish Short Stories, edited by Sinéad Gleeson. Her work appears widely in The Moth, The Paris Review, The Stinging Fly, Poetry Review, and elsewhere. Feeney lectures at the University of Galway.

Precarious: Victoria Launch!
2025-10-25 19:00 - 21:00 (America/Vancouver) | University of Victoria, 3800 Finnerty Rd, Victoria, BC, V8P 5C2, Canada
Join us in celebrating the Victoria launch of Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers by Marcello Di Cintio. Marcello will be in conversation with host Seb Bonet. Books will be provided for sale and signing by the University of Victoria Bookstore.
The launch will take place on October 25 at 7PM.
More details TK.
Grab a copy of Precarious here!
ABOUT PRECARIOUS
A series of profiles of foreign workers illuminates the precarity of global systems of migrant labor and the vulnerability of their most disenfranchised agents.
In 2023, after weeks of investigation, United Nations Special Rapporteur Tomoyo Obokata came to a scathing conclusion: Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker program is “a breeding ground for contemporary forms of slavery.” Workers complained of excessive hours and unpaid overtime; of being forced to perform dangerous tasks or ones not specified in their contracts; of being physically abused, intimidated, and sexually harassed; and of overcrowded, unsanitary living conditions that deprived them of their privacy and dignity.
In Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers, Marcello Di Cintio ranges across the country speaking to those who have come from elsewhere to till our fields, bathe our elderly, and serve us our Double Doubles, uncovering stories of tremendous perseverance, resilience, and humanity, but also of precarity and vulnerability. He shows that vast swathes of our economy depend on the work of people we don’t see, while expanding our awareness of what migrant work now entails, and revealing that our mistreatment of the most vulnerable among us diminishes our own dignity.
ABOUT MARCELLO DI CINTIO
Marcello Di Cintio is the author of six books, including Walls: Travels Along the Barricades, Pay No Heed to the Rockets: Palestine in the Present Tense, and Driven: The Secret Lives of Taxi Drivers. He has also written for the Globe and Mail, The Walrus, The International New York Times, and Canadian Geographic, among others. He lives in Calgary.

Elaine Feeney at Ottawa Writers Fest: Now and Then
2025-10-26 16:00 - 18:00 (America/Toronto) | Library and Archives Canada, 395 Wellington Street, Ottawa, ON, K1A 0N4, Canada
Elaine Feeney (Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way) will be appearing at the Ottawa Writers Fest for the panel “Now and Then.” Elaine will be joined by fellow Irish novelist Eimear McBride in a conversation hosted by Ottawa’s Poet Laureate, David O’Meara.
The event will take place at Library and Archives Canada on Sunday, October 26 at 4PM.
Tickets and more details here.
Order Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way here!
ABOUT LET ME GO MAD IN MY OWN WAY
An Observer, Irish Times, and Sunday Times Ireland Preview Selection
Claire O’Connor is a promising writer who left the family’s struggling farmstead in western Ireland for London, swearing never to return. But after the unexpected death of her mother, she is racked with grief, and when her father is diagnosed with cancer, she decides to return home to care for him, destroying everything she’d so carefully built up in the process. The pandemic follows, and Claire falls into a comfortable routine, one increasingly shaped by a growing obsession: the lives of the 20-something trad wives she discovers on social media. When Tom, her lost London love, unexpectedly shows up the next town over, her anxieties and obsessions collide, the resulting conflict forcing Claire and her brothers to finally deal with their family’s historic trauma—a trauma whose evidence is carved into the beams of the family home and the stone floors upon which their ancestors bled.
Ranging through recent Irish history, Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way is Elaine Feeney’s most ambitious novel to date, a work of literary and cultural exorcism and a profound exploration of family, history, violence, and hope.
ABOUT ELAINE FEENEY
Elaine Feeney is a writer from the west of Ireland. Her 2020 debut novel, As You Were, was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize and the Irish Novel of the Year Award and won the Kate O’Brien Award, the McKitterick Prize, and the Dalkey Festival Emerging Writer Award. Feeney has published three collections of poetry including The Radio Was Gospel and Rise, and her short story “Sojourn” was included in The Art of The Glimpse: 100 Irish Short Stories, edited by Sinéad Gleeson. Her work appears widely in The Moth, The Paris Review, The Stinging Fly, Poetry Review, and elsewhere. Feeney lectures at the University of Galway.

Elaine Feeney at Sacred Heart University
2025-10-28 15:30 - 16:30 (America/New_York) | Sacred Heart University, 5401 Park Ave, Fairfield, CT, 06825, United States
Elaine Feeney (Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way) will be reading at Sacred Heart University in Connecticut.
The event will take place in the Martire Center Loris Forum on Tuesday, October 28 at 3:30PM.
More details here.
Order Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way here!
ABOUT LET ME GO MAD IN MY OWN WAY
An Observer, Irish Times, and Sunday Times Ireland Preview Selection
Claire O’Connor is a promising writer who left the family’s struggling farmstead in western Ireland for London, swearing never to return. But after the unexpected death of her mother, she is racked with grief, and when her father is diagnosed with cancer, she decides to return home to care for him, destroying everything she’d so carefully built up in the process. The pandemic follows, and Claire falls into a comfortable routine, one increasingly shaped by a growing obsession: the lives of the 20-something trad wives she discovers on social media. When Tom, her lost London love, unexpectedly shows up the next town over, her anxieties and obsessions collide, the resulting conflict forcing Claire and her brothers to finally deal with their family’s historic trauma—a trauma whose evidence is carved into the beams of the family home and the stone floors upon which their ancestors bled.
Ranging through recent Irish history, Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way is Elaine Feeney’s most ambitious novel to date, a work of literary and cultural exorcism and a profound exploration of family, history, violence, and hope.
ABOUT ELAINE FEENEY
Elaine Feeney is a writer from the west of Ireland. Her 2020 debut novel, As You Were, was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize and the Irish Novel of the Year Award and won the Kate O’Brien Award, the McKitterick Prize, and the Dalkey Festival Emerging Writer Award. Feeney has published three collections of poetry including The Radio Was Gospel and Rise, and her short story “Sojourn” was included in The Art of The Glimpse: 100 Irish Short Stories, edited by Sinéad Gleeson. Her work appears widely in The Moth, The Paris Review, The Stinging Fly, Poetry Review, and elsewhere. Feeney lectures at the University of Galway.
