Biblioasis

UNMET: stephanie roberts at Ottawa VerseFest
2025-03-29 17:00 - 18:00 (America/Toronto) | The Manx, 370 Elgin St, Ottawa, ON, K2P 1N1, Canada
stephanie roberts, author of the forthcoming poetry collection UNMET, will be at the Ottawa VerseFest! stephanie will be part of the Plan 99 Reading Series, and will be joined by fellow poets Bridget Huh and Sara Berkeley.
The event will take place at the Manx Pub on Saturday, March 29 at 5PM.
More details here.
Preorder 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.

On Book Banning: Windsor Launch!
2025-03-06 19:00 - 21:00 (America/Toronto) | Biblioasis Bookshop, 1520 Wyandotte St E, Windsor, ON, N9A 3L2, Canada
Join us in celebrating the Windsor launch of On Book Banning by Ira Wells! Ira will be interviewed about his new book, followed by an audience Q&A. Books will be available for sale and signing, and snacks and drinks will be provided for this evening of lively discussion.
This event will take place at Biblioasis Bookshop on Thursday, March 6 at 7PM EST.
Grab 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.

On Book Banning: Ira Wells at Words Festival
2025-03-04 19:00 - 20:30 (America/Toronto) | BC
Join Ira Wells as he speaks about his new book On Book Banning, a lively, accessible survey of the pressing question of literary censorship in our times of crisis and change, in this virtual event with the Words Festival. Ira will be speaking in conversation with host Josh Lambier.
This free virtual event will take place on Tuesday, March 4 at 7pm EST over Zoom.
More details and event link here.
Grab 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.

Freedom to Read Week with Ira Wells (On Book Banning)
2025-02-27 19:00 - 20:30 (America/Halifax) | BC
In celebration of Freedom to Read Week in Canada, join Ira Wells, author of On Book Banning: Or, How the New Censorship Consensus Trivializes Art and Undermines Democracy, for thought-provoking online conversation Dr. Shannon Murray, held by Bookmark Bookstores.
This virtual event will take place on Thursday, February 27 at 7PM ADT. Reserve your free ticket today here, and you will be emailed a Zoom link on the morning of the event to the email you include with your registration.
More details here.
Grab 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.

Mark Kingwell at the Toronto Public Library
2025-02-27 19:00 - 20:00 (America/Toronto) | Toronto Reference Library, 789 Yonge St, Toronto, ON, M4W 2G8, Canada
Mark Kingwell will be discussing his new book Question Authority at the Toronto Public Library, in conversation with host Randy Boyagoda.
The event is free, and will take place on Thursday, February 27 at 7PM in the Jack Rabinovitch Reading Room at the Toronto Reference Library.
More details here.
Grab Question Authority here!
ABOUT QUESTION AUTHORITY
Philosopher Mark Kingwell thinks about thinking for yourself in an era of radical know-it-all-ism.
“Question authority,” the popular 1960s slogan commanded. “Think for yourself.” But what started as a counter-cultural catchphrase, playful in logic but serious in intent, has become a practical paradox. Yesterday’s social critics are the tone-policing tyrants of today, while those who claim “colourblindness” see no need to engage with critical theory at all. The resulting crisis of authority, made worse by rival political factions and chaotic public discourse, has exposed cracks in every facet of shared social life. Politics, academia, journalism, medicine, religion, science—every kind of institutional claim is now routinely subject to objection, investigation, and outright disbelief. A recurring feature of this comprehensive distrust of authority is the firm, often unshakeable, belief in personal righteousness and superiority: what Mark Kingwell calls our “addiction to conviction.”
In this critical survey of the predicament of contemporary authority, Kingwell draws on philosophical argument, personal reflection, and details from the headlines in an attempt to reclaim the democratic spirit of questioning authority and thinking for oneself. Defending a program of compassionate skepticism, Question Authority is a fascinating survey of the role of individual humility in public life and illuminates how we might each do our part in the infinite project of justice.
ABOUT MARK KINGWELL
Mark Kingwell is a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto, a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine.

On Book Banning: Ira Wells at the Centre for Free Expression
2025-02-26 19:00 - 20:30 (America/Toronto) | BC
Join Ira Wells, author of On Book Banning, in a Freedom to Read Week conversation with Centre for Free Expression Director James L. Turk, at this time when censorship is becoming popular and pervasive. The event is co-sponsored by Canadian School Libraries, Edmonton Public Library, PEN Canada, Toronto Public Library, Vancouver Public Library.
This free virtual event will take place on Wednesday, February 26 at 7pm EST. Zoom link to event: torontomu.zoom.us/j/91941276567
More details here.
Grab 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.

Ira Wells at the Toronto Public Library
2025-02-25 19:00 - 20:00 (America/Toronto) | Toronto Reference Library, 789 Yonge St, Toronto, ON, M4W 2G8, Canada
As part of Freedom to Read Week, Toronto Public Library presents critic, essayist, and associate professor at the University of Toronto, Ira Wells to celebrate the publication of his new title On Book Banning: Or, How the New Censorship Consensus Trivializes Art and Undermines Democracy, in conversation with host Charles Foran.
The culture wars have found fertile ground within public schools and libraries. We’re witnessing a notable increase in book challenges and attempts to remove titles from bookshelves across North America and, as we know, this is nothing new. In On Book Banning, Ira Wells argues that conservatives and progressives alike are teaching our children that the solution to opposing viewpoints is outright censorship. How might we collectively push back and help reinforce our personal freedom to read? And how do we ensure that our democratic spaces continue to be welcoming spaces for all viewpoints?
The event is free, and will take place on Thursday, February 27 at 7PM in the Jack Rabinovitch Reading Room at the Toronto Reference Library.
More details here.
Grab 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.

Republic of Consciousness Prize (US/CAN) Virtual Longlist Party
2025-02-19 19:00 - 20:00 (America/Toronto) | BC
Celebrate the Republic of Consciousness Prize (US/CAN) longlisting of Your Absence Is Darkness by Jón Kalman Stefánsson, translated by Philip Roughton, at this virtual longlist party! The celebration is free and open to the public, and will feature the six judges as hosts, representatives from the longlisted presses as well as authors and translators reading from their works. There will also be a Q&A period.
The virtual celebration will take place over Zoom on February 19, at 6PM CT / 7PM EST. Zoom link here.
Grab Your Absence Is Darkness here.
ABOUT YOUR ABSENCE IS DARKNESS
Longlisted for the 2024 Republic of Consciousness US and Canada Prize • A World Literature Today Notable Translation of 2024 • A Shelf Awareness Best Book of 2024
A spellbinding saga about the inhabitants and inheritors of one rural community, by one of Iceland’s most beloved novelists.
A man comes to awareness in a cold church in the Icelandic countryside, not knowing who he is, why he’s there or how he arrived, with a stranger staring mockingly from a few pews back. Startled by the man’s cryptic questions, he leaves—and plunges into a history spanning centuries, a past pressed into his genes that sinks him closer to some knowledge of himself. A city girl is drawn to the fjords by the memory of a blue-eyed gaze, and a generation earlier, a farmer’s wife writes an essay about earthworms that changes the course of lives. A pastor who writes letters to dead poets falls in love with a faraway stranger, and a rock musician, plagued by cosmic loneliness, discovers that his past has been a lie. Faced with the violence of fate and the effects of choices, made and avoided, that cascade between them, each discovers the cost of following the magnetic needle of the heart.
Incandescent and elemental, hope-filled and humane, Your Absence Is Darkness is a comedy about mortality, music, and the strange salve of time, and a spellbinding saga of death, desire, and the perfect agony of star-crossed love.
ABOUT JON KALMAN STEFANSSON
Jón Kalman Stefánsson’s novels have been nominated three times for the Nordic Council Prize for Literature, and his novel Summer Light, and Then Comes the Night received the Icelandic Prize for Literature in 2005. In 2011 he was awarded the prestigious P. O. Enquist Award. He is perhaps best known for his trilogy: Heaven and Hell, The Sorrow of Angels (longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize) and The Heart of Man (winner of the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize). A subsequent novel, Fish Have No Feet, was longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2017.
ABOUT PHILIP ROUGHTON
Philip Roughton is a scholar of Old Norse and medieval literature and an award-winning translator of Icelandic literature, having translated works by numerous writers including Halldór Laxness. He was the winner of the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize for his translation of Jón Kalman Stefánsson’s The Heart of Man, and shortlisted for the same prize for About the Size of the Universe.

Mark Anthony Jarman at the Florence Writers Workshop
2025-02-08 10:30 - 13:00 (Europe/Zurich) | St. Mark’s Church, Via Maggio 16, Firenze, Italy
Mark Anthony Jarman, author of Burn Man: Selected Stories will guide this workshop on Beginnings and Endings with focus on short stories, although his lessons can be applied to other works too. Mark will lead participants through inspiring models and handy techniques from well-known short-story authors. Sponsored by Florence Literary Society, this is a free ticketed event.
The workshop will take place at St. Mark’s Church in Firenze, on Saturday, February 8 at 10:30AM. Tickets available here.
Note: due to space limitations, only ticket-holders will be admitted. Should the event be sold-out, a waitlist will be available. The first 30 minutes will be a meet and greet, with time to learn more about Florence Literary Society and/or sign up for a membership.
Grab Burn Man here!
ABOUT BURN MAN
A Globe 100 Best Book of 2024
Drawing together the best of his short fiction published over the last four decades, Burn Man: Selected Stories showcases Mark Anthony Jarman’s sharply observed characters and acrobatic, voice-driven prose in stories that walk the tightrope between the commonplace and the mystical. With an insightful introduction from John Metcalf, this revelatory selection highlights one of the most spirited and singular masters of the short story form.
ABOUT MARK ANTHONY JARMAN
Mark Anthony Jarman is the author of Touch Anywhere to Begin, Czech Techno, Knife Party at the Hotel Europa, My White Planet, 19 Knives, New Orleans Is Sinking, Dancing Nightly in the Tavern, and the travel book Ireland’s Eye. He was an acquisitions editor for Oberon Press, and introduced many new writers through the Coming Attractions series. He is also the editor of Best Canadian Stories 2023. His novel Salvage King Ya!, is on Amazon.ca’s list of 50 Essential Canadian Books and is the number one book on Amazon’s list of best hockey ﬁction. Widely published in Canada, the US, Europe, and Asia, Jarman is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a Yaddo fellow, has taught at the University of Victoria, the Banff Centre for the Arts, and the University of New Brunswick, where he has been ﬁction editor of The Fiddlehead literary journal since 1999. He is also co-editor of literary journal CAMEL.

Question Authority: Mark Kingwell at Vanier College
2025-02-05 13:30 - 15:00 (America/Toronto) | Vanier College, Vanier Auditorium A-103, 821 avenue Sainte-Croix, Montréal, QC, H4L 3X9, Canada
Mark Kingwell will be the keynote speaker at the Vanier College Humanities Symposium, with a talk on his new book Question Authority: A Polemic About Trust in Five Meditations. Mark will discuss how to reclaim the democratic spirit of questioning authority and thinking.
The talk will take place on Wednesday, February 5 at 1:30PM. Presentations will take place in the Vanier Auditorium, A-103.
More details here.
Grab Question Authority here!
ABOUT QUESTION AUTHORITY
Philosopher Mark Kingwell thinks about thinking for yourself in an era of radical know-it-all-ism.
“Question authority,” the popular 1960s slogan commanded. “Think for yourself.” But what started as a counter-cultural catchphrase, playful in logic but serious in intent, has become a practical paradox. Yesterday’s social critics are the tone-policing tyrants of today, while those who claim “colourblindness” see no need to engage with critical theory at all. The resulting crisis of authority, made worse by rival political factions and chaotic public discourse, has exposed cracks in every facet of shared social life. Politics, academia, journalism, medicine, religion, science—every kind of institutional claim is now routinely subject to objection, investigation, and outright disbelief. A recurring feature of this comprehensive distrust of authority is the firm, often unshakeable, belief in personal righteousness and superiority: what Mark Kingwell calls our “addiction to conviction.”
In this critical survey of the predicament of contemporary authority, Kingwell draws on philosophical argument, personal reflection, and details from the headlines in an attempt to reclaim the democratic spirit of questioning authority and thinking for oneself. Defending a program of compassionate skepticism, Question Authority is a fascinating survey of the role of individual humility in public life and illuminates how we might each do our part in the infinite project of justice.
ABOUT MARK KINGWELL
Mark Kingwell is a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto, a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine.

Lisa Alward at the Lorenzo Society Reading Series
2025-01-30 19:00 - 21:00 (America/St_Johns) | Oland Hall, Room 104, University of New Brunswick, NB, Canada
Lisa Alward, author of Cocktail, will be featured in the UNB Lorenzo Society’s Reading Series, hosted by Gemma Marr.
The reading will take place on Thursday, January 30 at 7PM.
More details to come here.
Grab a copy of Cocktail here!
ABOUT COCKTAIL
Winner of the 2023 Danuta Gleed Literary Award • Longlisted for the 2024 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction • Winner of the New Brunswick 2023 Mrs. Dunster’s Award for Fiction • One of the Globe and Mail’s “Sixty-Two Books to Read This Fall” • Listed in CBC Books Fiction to Read in Fall 2023 • A Miramichi Reader Best Book of 2023 • A Tyee Best Book of 2023
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’s short fiction has appeared in The Journey Prize and twice in Best Canadian Stories. She has won the Fiddlehead Prize as well as the Peter Hinchcliffe Fiction Award, has been a finalist for The Malahat Review’s Open Season Award, an honourable mention in the Peter Hinchcliffe Award, and been featured on numerous other long lists, including for the CBC Story Prize and Prism International’s Jacob Zilber Prize (three times). She was born and grew up in Halifax and completed an English degree at the University of Toronto and an MA at Queen Mary College in London, England. In the eighties and early nineties, she worked in book publishing in Toronto, before moving with her young family to Vancouver and ultimately to Fredericton, New Brunswick, where at fifty she began to write stories. Cocktail (Biblioasis), which received a starred review in Kirkus Reviews, is her debut collection.

Best Canadian 2025 Launch at Fanfare Books
2024-11-30 19:00 - 21:00 (America/Toronto) | Fanfare Books, 92 Ontario Street, Stratford, ON, N5A 3H2, Canada
Editors Steven W. Beattie (Best Canadian Stories 2025) and Emily Urquhart (Best Canadian Essays 2025) will be hosting a reading and conversation at Fanfare Books in Stratford! The two editors will be joined by contributors James Cairns (Essays) and Alexander Hollenberg (Best Canadian Poetry 2025) for an evening of fun. Books will be available for sale and signing, and refreshments will be provided.
The event will take place on Saturday, November 30 at 7PM.
More details here.
Grab all three Best Canadian 2025 anthologies here!
ABOUT BEST CANADIAN 2025
This year’s editions of Best Canadian Poetry, Stories, and Essays feature selections and introductions by editors Aislinn Hunter, Anita Lahey, Steven W. Beattie, and Emily Urquhart, and feature work by writers such as PEN/Nabokov Award winner Anne Carson, Brownwen Wallace Award finalist Henry Heavyshield, Governor General’s Award winner Sadiqa de Meijer, Mark Anthony Jarman, Marcel Goh, and more!

Behind the Scenes at Canada Reads with Catherine Leroux
2024-11-19 12:30 - 13:30 (America/Toronto) | Women’s Canadian Club of Montreal, 4626 Sherbrooke St W, Westmount, QC, H3Z 2Z8, Canada
Catherine Leroux, author of The Future, will be in conversation with CBC Canada Reads producer Lucy Mann to discuss the book’s 2024 Canada Reads win.
The discussion will take place at the Women’s Canadian Club of Montreal on Tuesday, November 19 at 12:30PM.
More details here.
Grab a copy of The Future here!
ABOUT THE FUTURE
Winner of Canada Reads 2024 • Longlisted for the 2024 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction • One of Tor.com’s Can’t Miss Speculative Fiction for Fall 2023 • Listed in CBC Books Fiction to Read in Fall 2023 • One of Kirkus Reviews’ Fall 2023 Big Books By Small Presses • A Kirkus Reviews Work of Translated Fiction To Read Now • One of CBC Books Best Books of 2023 • A CBC Books Bestselling Canadian Book of the Week
In an alternate history of Detroit, the Motor City was never surrendered to the US. Its residents deal with pollution, poverty, and the legacy of racism—and strange and magical things are happening: children rule over their own kingdom in the trees and burned houses regenerate themselves. When Gloria arrives looking for answers and her missing granddaughters, at first she finds only a hungry mouse in the derelict home where her daughter was murdered. But the neighbours take pity on her and she turns to their resilience and impressive gardens for sustenance.
When a strange intuition sends Gloria into the woods of Parc Rouge, where the city’s orphaned and abandoned children are rumored to have created their own society, she can’t imagine the strength she will find. A richly imagined story of community and a plea for persistence in the face of our uncertain future, The Future is a lyrical testament to the power we hold to protect the people and places we love—together.
ABOUT CATHERINE LEROUX
Catherine Leroux is a Quebec novelist, translator and editor born in 1979. Her novel Le mur mitoyen won the France-Quebec Prize and its English version, The Party Wall, was nominated for the 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize. The Future won CBC’s Canada Reads 2024, received the Jacques-Brossard award for speculative fiction and was nominated for the Quebec Booksellers Prize. Catherine also won the 2019 Governor General’s Literary Award for her translation of Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien. Two of her novels are currently being adapted for the screen. Her latest book, Peuple de verre, a speculative novel about the housing crisis, came out in April 2024. She lives in Montreal with her two children.

Catherine Leroux at AfterWords Festival: Fantastic Ideas
2024-11-09 19:00 - 22:00 (America/Halifax) | Bus Stop Theatre, 2203 Gottingen St, Halifax, NS, Canada
Join Catherine Leroux, author of Canada Reads-winning The Future, at the AfterWords Festival’s event, “Fantastic Ideas.” Catherine will be reuniting with her Canada Reads champion Heather O’Neill in conversation about their their respective dark fairy tales The Future and The Capital of Dreams. The event will also feature readings from Elizabeth Renzetti, Charlene Carr, and Anne Fleming.
The event will take place on Saturday, November 9 at 7PM.
More details here.
Grab a copy of The Future here!
ABOUT THE FUTURE
Winner of Canada Reads 2024 • Longlisted for the 2024 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction • One of Tor.com’s Can’t Miss Speculative Fiction for Fall 2023 • Listed in CBC Books Fiction to Read in Fall 2023 • One of Kirkus Reviews’ Fall 2023 Big Books By Small Presses • A Kirkus Reviews Work of Translated Fiction To Read Now • One of CBC Books Best Books of 2023 • A CBC Books Bestselling Canadian Book of the Week
In an alternate history of Detroit, the Motor City was never surrendered to the US. Its residents deal with pollution, poverty, and the legacy of racism—and strange and magical things are happening: children rule over their own kingdom in the trees and burned houses regenerate themselves. When Gloria arrives looking for answers and her missing granddaughters, at first she finds only a hungry mouse in the derelict home where her daughter was murdered. But the neighbours take pity on her and she turns to their resilience and impressive gardens for sustenance.
When a strange intuition sends Gloria into the woods of Parc Rouge, where the city’s orphaned and abandoned children are rumored to have created their own society, she can’t imagine the strength she will find. A richly imagined story of community and a plea for persistence in the face of our uncertain future, The Future is a lyrical testament to the power we hold to protect the people and places we love—together.
ABOUT CATHERINE LEROUX
Catherine Leroux is a Quebec novelist, translator and editor born in 1979. Her novel Le mur mitoyen won the France-Quebec Prize and its English version, The Party Wall, was nominated for the 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize. The Future won CBC’s Canada Reads 2024, received the Jacques-Brossard award for speculative fiction and was nominated for the Quebec Booksellers Prize. Catherine also won the 2019 Governor General’s Literary Award for her translation of Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien. Two of her novels are currently being adapted for the screen. Her latest book, Peuple de verre, a speculative novel about the housing crisis, came out in April 2024. She lives in Montreal with her two children.

Caroline Adderson at AfterWords Festival: Creating Believable Characters
2024-11-09 12:00 - 14:00 (America/Halifax) | Bus Stop Theatre, 2203 Gottingen St, Halifax, NS, Canada
Caroline Adderson (A Way to Be Happy) will be hosting a workshop at the AfterWords Festival: “Creating Believable Characters.” Caroline will be teaching how to people your stories and novels with characters who might walk right off the page. She will cover the meaning of names, explore techniques to deepen characterization, examine the hidden motivations of your fictional creations, trace their character arcs, and make sure that when they speak (and they will!) effective dialogue comes out of their mouths. Come prepared to write, read, and share.
The event will take place on Saturday, November 9 at 12PM.
More details here.
Get A Way to Be Happy here!
ABOUT A WAY TO BE HAPPY
Longlisted for the 2024 Giller Prize
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 AfterWords Festival: Open Secrets
2024-11-08 12:30 - 14:30 (America/Halifax) | The Carleton, 1685 Argyle St, Halifax, NS, Canada
Caroline Adderson (A Way to Be Happy) we be joining the AfterWords Festival’s event, “Open Secrets.”
When Andrea Skinner wrote in the Toronto Star about being assaulted by her stepfather when she was a child, and about how her mother chose to stay with the man instead of to stand by her daughter, many survivors saw their own experience reflected in her story and felt the reverberations. At the same time, Alice Munro’s daughters asked readers to continue engaging with their mother’s work, but through a new lens.
In this two-part conversation, Caroline Adderson, Heather O’Neill, and Deepa Rajagoplan join journalist Sarah Hampson to talk about how they’re reading Alice Munro now. Then, poet Sue Goyette presents new and recent work that dives deeply into her own experience in an unsafe house, and how trauma moves through image and language on the page.
The event will take place on Thursday, November 8 at 12:30PM.
Proceeds for this event go to Avalon Sexual Assault Centre. Content note: CSA
Registration and more details here.
Get A Way to Be Happy here!
ABOUT A WAY TO BE HAPPY
Longlisted for the 2024 Giller Prize
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 AfterWords Festival: Long Short Story
2024-11-07 19:00 - 22:00 (America/Halifax) | Bus Stop Theatre, 2203 Gottingen St, Halifax, NS, Canada
Caroline Adderson will be reading from her Giller-longlisted story collection, A Way to Be Happy, at the AfterWords Festival’s event, “Long Short Story.” Caroline will be in conversation with fellow short story writer Alexander MacLeod about her latest collection, and will also be joined in reading by Elliott Gish, Fawn Parker, and Deepa Rajagoplan.
The event will take place on Thursday, November 7 at 7PM.
More details here.
Get A Way to Be Happy here!
ABOUT A WAY TO BE HAPPY
Longlisted for the 2024 Giller Prize
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.

Lisa Alward and Alex Pugsley at AfterWords Literary Festival
2024-11-06 19:00 - 22:00 (America/Halifax) | Cafe Lara, 2347 Agricola St, Halifax, NS, Canada
Lisa Alward (Cocktail) and Alex Pugsley (The Education of Aubrey McKee) will be appearing at the AfterWords Literary Festival’s “Now We Are Six” celebration! Alex and Lisa will be reading fro, their recent books at the Wednesday night party, hosted by Sarah Mian, alongside fellow authors Amanda Peters, Deepa Rajagopalan, Cory Lavender, and Andrea Currie.
The event will take place on Wednesday, November 6 at 7PM, with doors opening at 6:30PM.
Tickets and more details here.
Get Cocktail here!
Get The Education of Aubrey McKee here!
ABOUT COCKTAIL
Winner of the 2023 Danuta Gleed Literary Award • Longlisted for the 2024 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction • Winner of the New Brunswick 2023 Mrs. Dunster’s Award for Fiction • One of the Globe and Mail’s “Sixty-Two Books to Read This Fall” • Listed in CBC Books Fiction to Read in Fall 2023 • A Miramichi Reader Best Book of 2023 • A Tyee Best Book of 2023
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’s short fiction has appeared in The Journey Prize and twice in Best Canadian Stories. She has won the Fiddlehead Prize as well as the Peter Hinchcliffe Fiction Award, has been a finalist for The Malahat Review’s Open Season Award, an honourable mention in the Peter Hinchcliffe Award, and been featured on numerous other long lists, including for the CBC Story Prize and Prism International’s Jacob Zilber Prize (three times). She was born and grew up in Halifax and completed an English degree at the University of Toronto and an MA at Queen Mary College in London, England. In the eighties and early nineties, she worked in book publishing in Toronto, before moving with her young family to Vancouver and ultimately to Fredericton, New Brunswick, where at fifty she began to write stories. Cocktail (Biblioasis), which received a starred review in Kirkus Reviews, is her debut collection.
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
A young writer finds his way in and out of love in the late twentieth century.
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.

Richard Kelly Kemick at Real Vancouver Writers Series
2024-11-05 19:00 - 21:00 (America/Vancouver) | Iron Dog Books, 2671 East Hastings St, Vancouver, BC, V5K 1Z5, Canada
Richard Kelly Kemick will be reading from his new short story collection Hello, Horse at the Real Vancouver Writers Series! Richard will be joined by fellow authors A-E Best, Matthew Walsh, Andrea Warner, Niloufar-Lily Soltan, and Jake Cardinal, along with hosts Dina Del Bucchia and Sean Cranbury.
The event will take place at Iron Dog Books on Tuesday, November 5 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 Fraser Valley Writers Fest
2024-11-02 11:00 - 12:40 (America/Vancouver) | University of the Fraser Valley, 33844 King Rd, Abbotsford, BC, V2S 7M7, Canada
Richard Kelly Kemick, author of the short story collection Hello, Horse, will be appearing at the Fraser Valley Writers Fest for the panel “Revise.” Richard will be joined by Carleigh Baker, Anita Lahey, and Loghan Paylor for discussions on new writing, chaired by award-winning writer Adrienne Gruber, followed by a Q&A.
The event will take place in the Evered Hall, Student Union Building on Saturday, November 2 at 11am.
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.

Emily Urquhart at Trident Booksellers & Cafe
2024-10-30 17:00 - 19:00 (America/Halifax) | Trident Booksellers & Cafe, 1256 Hollis Street, Halifax, NS, B3J 1T6, Canada
Emily Urquhart will be reading from her Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize-shortlisted essay collection, Ordinary Wonder Tales, at Trident Booksellers & Cafe in Halifax! The reading and conversation is hosted by the Dalhousie Creative Writing Program. There will be an array of treats, and books will be for sale and signing from King’s Co-op Bookstore.
The event will take place on Wednesday, October 30 at 5PM.
More details here.
Grab Ordinary Wonder Tales here!
ABOUT ORDINARY WONDER TALES
Shortlisted for the 2023 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction
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 the author of three books of nonfiction including the essay collection, Ordinary Wonder Tales, a finalist for the 2023 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction. She has a background in journalism and a doctorate in folklore and draws on both in her writing. She is a five-time National Magazine Award nominee for her journalistic work and has won gold and silver. She lives in Kitchener, Ontario with her husband and two children where she is a nonfiction editor for The New Quarterly and teaches creative writing and science communication at the University of Waterloo.

Jón Kalman Stefánsson at the National Nordic Museum (Seattle)
2024-10-29 18:00 - 20:00 (America/Winnipeg) | National Nordic Museum, 2655 NW Market St, Seattle, WA, 98107, United States
Award-winning Icelandic novelist Jón Kalman Stefánsson will be appearing at the National Nordic Museum for a discussion of his novel, Your Absence Is Darkness, translated from Icelandic by Philip Roughton. Stefánsson will be joined in conversation by translator Dr. Elizabeth DeNoma followed by an audience Q&A. Books will be available for sale and signing from Third Place Books.
The event will take place on Tuesday, October 29 at 6PM.
Tickets and more details here.
Grab a copy of Your Absence Is Darkness here!
ABOUT YOUR ABSENCE IS DARKNESS
A spellbinding saga about the inhabitants and inheritors of one rural community, by one of Iceland’s most beloved novelists.
A man comes to awareness in a cold church in the Icelandic countryside, not knowing who he is, why he’s there or how he arrived, with a stranger staring mockingly from a few pews back. Startled by the man’s cryptic questions, he leaves—and plunges into a history spanning centuries, a past pressed into his genes that sinks him closer to some knowledge of himself. A city girl is drawn to the fjords by the memory of a blue-eyed gaze, and a generation earlier, a farmer’s wife writes an essay about earthworms that changes the course of lives. A pastor who writes letters to dead poets falls in love with a faraway stranger, and a rock musician, plagued by cosmic loneliness, discovers that his past has been a lie. Faced with the violence of fate and the effects of choices, made and avoided, that cascade between them, each discovers the cost of following the magnetic needle of the heart.
Incandescent and elemental, hope-filled and humane, Your Absence Is Darkness is a comedy about mortality, music, and the strange salve of time, and a spellbinding saga of death, desire, and the perfect agony of star-crossed love.
ABOUT JON KALMAN STEFANSSON
Jón Kalman Stefánsson’s novels have been nominated three times for the Nordic Council Prize for Literature, and his novel Summer Light, and Then Comes the Night received the Icelandic Prize for Literature in 2005. In 2011 he was awarded the prestigious P. O. Enquist Award. He is perhaps best known for his trilogy: Heaven and Hell, The Sorrow of Angels (longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize) and The Heart of Man (winner of the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize). A subsequent novel, Fish Have No Feet, was longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2017.

Jón Kalman Stefánsson at Vancouver Writers Fest: The Literary Cabaret
2024-10-26 20:00 - 22:00 (America/Vancouver) | Performance Works, 1218 Cartwright Street, Vancouver, BC, V6H 3R9, Canada
Award-winning Icelandic novelist Jón Kalman Stefánsson, author of Your Absence Is Darkness, trans. by Philip Roughton, will be at Vancouver Writers Fest for the Literary Cabaret! Jón will be joined by fellow authors Roddy Doyle, Anne Enright, Richard Powers, Brandon Taylor, and Ayelet Tsabari. At the helm of the Vancouver Writers Fest flagship event is Musical Director Benjamin Millman, and his band, The Oxymorons.
The event will be at Performance Works on Saturday, October 26 at 8PM.
More details here.
Grab a copy of Your Absence Is Darkness here!
ABOUT YOUR ABSENCE IS DARKNESS
A spellbinding saga about the inhabitants and inheritors of one rural community, by one of Iceland’s most beloved novelists.
A man comes to awareness in a cold church in the Icelandic countryside, not knowing who he is, why he’s there or how he arrived, with a stranger staring mockingly from a few pews back. Startled by the man’s cryptic questions, he leaves—and plunges into a history spanning centuries, a past pressed into his genes that sinks him closer to some knowledge of himself. A city girl is drawn to the fjords by the memory of a blue-eyed gaze, and a generation earlier, a farmer’s wife writes an essay about earthworms that changes the course of lives. A pastor who writes letters to dead poets falls in love with a faraway stranger, and a rock musician, plagued by cosmic loneliness, discovers that his past has been a lie. Faced with the violence of fate and the effects of choices, made and avoided, that cascade between them, each discovers the cost of following the magnetic needle of the heart.
Incandescent and elemental, hope-filled and humane, Your Absence Is Darkness is a comedy about mortality, music, and the strange salve of time, and a spellbinding saga of death, desire, and the perfect agony of star-crossed love.
ABOUT JON KALMAN STEFANSSON
Jón Kalman Stefánsson’s novels have been nominated three times for the Nordic Council Prize for Literature, and his novel Summer Light, and Then Comes the Night received the Icelandic Prize for Literature in 2005. In 2011 he was awarded the prestigious P. O. Enquist Award. He is perhaps best known for his trilogy: Heaven and Hell, The Sorrow of Angels (longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize) and The Heart of Man (winner of the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize). A subsequent novel, Fish Have No Feet, was longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2017.

Jón Kalman Stefánsson at Vancouver Writers Fest: The Conversations
2024-10-25 13:00 - 15:00 (America/Vancouver) | Granville Island Stage, 1585 Johnston Street, Vancouver, BC, V6H 3R9, Canada
Award-winning Icelandic novelist Jón Kalman Stefánsson, author of Your Absence Is Darkness, trans. by Philip Roughton, will be at Vancouver Writers Fest for the panel “The Conversations.” Jón will be joined by Anne Enright and Myriam J. A. Chancy for a discussion moderated by Aislinn Hunter (Best Canadian Poetry 2025). Back-to-back conversations with the three international authors probe the writing life and bring up questions about love, intergenerational bonds, and possibility.
The event will be at the Granville Island Stage on Friday, October 25 at 1PM.
More details here.
Grab a copy of Your Absence Is Darkness here!
ABOUT YOUR ABSENCE IS DARKNESS
A spellbinding saga about the inhabitants and inheritors of one rural community, by one of Iceland’s most beloved novelists.
A man comes to awareness in a cold church in the Icelandic countryside, not knowing who he is, why he’s there or how he arrived, with a stranger staring mockingly from a few pews back. Startled by the man’s cryptic questions, he leaves—and plunges into a history spanning centuries, a past pressed into his genes that sinks him closer to some knowledge of himself. A city girl is drawn to the fjords by the memory of a blue-eyed gaze, and a generation earlier, a farmer’s wife writes an essay about earthworms that changes the course of lives. A pastor who writes letters to dead poets falls in love with a faraway stranger, and a rock musician, plagued by cosmic loneliness, discovers that his past has been a lie. Faced with the violence of fate and the effects of choices, made and avoided, that cascade between them, each discovers the cost of following the magnetic needle of the heart.
Incandescent and elemental, hope-filled and humane, Your Absence Is Darkness is a comedy about mortality, music, and the strange salve of time, and a spellbinding saga of death, desire, and the perfect agony of star-crossed love.
ABOUT JON KALMAN STEFANSSON
Jón Kalman Stefánsson’s novels have been nominated three times for the Nordic Council Prize for Literature, and his novel Summer Light, and Then Comes the Night received the Icelandic Prize for Literature in 2005. In 2011 he was awarded the prestigious P. O. Enquist Award. He is perhaps best known for his trilogy: Heaven and Hell, The Sorrow of Angels (longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize) and The Heart of Man (winner of the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize). A subsequent novel, Fish Have No Feet, was longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2017.

Best Canadian Poetry 2025: Vancouver Writers Fest
2024-10-24 20:30 - 22:00 (America/Toronto) | Performance Works, 1218 Cartwright Street, Vancouver, BC, V6H 3R9, Canada
Aislinn Hunter, editor of this year’s Best Canadian Poetry 2025 anthology, will be hosting “The Poetry Bash” event at Vancouver Writer’s Fest! Poets joining the event include Evelyn Lau, contributor to and representative of Best Canadian Poetry 2025, alongside fellow poets Stephen Collis, Jess Housty, Zehra Naqvi, Michael Turner, shō yamagushiku, and Daniel Zomparelli. Entrancing, surprising, and memorable: The Poetry Bash is a gateway to discovering new-to-you poets or hearing your favourites.
The event will take place on Thursday, October 24 at 8:30PM.
Tickets and more details here.
Grab Best Canadian Poetry 2025 here!
ABOUT BEST CANADIAN POETRY 2025
Selected by editor Aislinn Hunter, the 2025 edition of Best Canadian Poetry showcases the best Canadian poetry writing published in 2023.
Featuring:
Hollie Adams • George Amabile • Erin Bedford • Billy-Ray Belcourt • Bertrand Bickersteth • Elisabeth Blair • Ronna Bloom • Alison Braid-Fernandez • Robert Bringhurst • Emily Cann • Anne Carson • Molly Cross-Blanchard • Lorna Crozier • Kayla Czaga • Evelyna Ekoko-Kay • Kate Genevieve • Susan Gillis • Sue Goyette • Catherine Graham • Henry Heavyshield • Gerald Hill • Alexander Hollenberg • Kim June Johnson • Eve Joseph • Evelyn Lau • Y. S. Lee • D. A. Lockhart • Fareh Malik • David Martin • Domenica Martinello • Cassidy McFadzean • Carmelita McGrath • Erín Moure • Tolu Oloruntoba • Catherine Owen • Molly Peacock • Miranda Pearson • Pauline Peters • Amanda Proctor • Shannon Quinn • Armand Garnet Ruffo • Anne Simpson • Carolyn Smart • Karen Solie • Catherine St. Denis • Owen Torrey • Michael Trussler • Sara Truuvert • Rob Winger • Jaeyun Yoo
ABOUT AISLINN HUNTER
Aislinn Hunter is an award-winning poet and novelist living on the unceded and ancestral lands of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. Her most recent book of poetry is Linger, Still (Gaspereau Press), winner of the Fred Cogswell Award for Excellence in Poetry.

Colleen Coco Collins at the UNB Reading Series
2024-10-24 19:30 - 20:30 (America/Halifax) | UNB Fredericton, Fredericton, NB, E3B 5A3, Canada
Colleen Coco Collins, author of the poetry collection Sorry About the Fire (Apr 4, 2024), will be reading as part of the UNB Reading Series! Books will be available for sale and signing from Westminster Bookmark.
The reading will take place on Thursday, October 24 at 7:30PM.
Grab a copy of Sorry About the Fire here!
ABOUT SORRY ABOUT THE FIRE
A CBC Books’ Poetry Collection to Watch for in Spring 2024
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.

Jón Kalman Stefánsson at McNally Robinson (Grant Park)
2024-10-23 19:00 - 21:00 (America/Winnipeg) | McNally Robinson – Grant Park, 1120 Grant Ave, Unit 4000, Winnipeg, MB, R3M 2A6, Canada
Award-winning Icelandic novelist Jón Kalman Stefánsson, author of Your Absence Is Darkness, trans. by Philip Roughton, will be at McNally Robinson Booksellers, Grant Park. Jón will be in conversation with McNally Robinson co-owner Chris Hall, for this event co-presented by the Consulate General of Iceland in Winnipeg, the Icelandic Canadian Frón, and Lögberg-Heimskringla.
The event will be hosted live in the Atrium of McNally Robinson Booksellers, Grant Park and also available as a simultaneous YouTube stream, on Wednesday, October 23 at 7PM.
More details here.
Grab a copy of Your Absence Is Darkness here!
ABOUT YOUR ABSENCE IS DARKNESS
A spellbinding saga about the inhabitants and inheritors of one rural community, by one of Iceland’s most beloved novelists.
A man comes to awareness in a cold church in the Icelandic countryside, not knowing who he is, why he’s there or how he arrived, with a stranger staring mockingly from a few pews back. Startled by the man’s cryptic questions, he leaves—and plunges into a history spanning centuries, a past pressed into his genes that sinks him closer to some knowledge of himself. A city girl is drawn to the fjords by the memory of a blue-eyed gaze, and a generation earlier, a farmer’s wife writes an essay about earthworms that changes the course of lives. A pastor who writes letters to dead poets falls in love with a faraway stranger, and a rock musician, plagued by cosmic loneliness, discovers that his past has been a lie. Faced with the violence of fate and the effects of choices, made and avoided, that cascade between them, each discovers the cost of following the magnetic needle of the heart.
Incandescent and elemental, hope-filled and humane, Your Absence Is Darkness is a comedy about mortality, music, and the strange salve of time, and a spellbinding saga of death, desire, and the perfect agony of star-crossed love.
ABOUT JON KALMAN STEFANSSON
Jón Kalman Stefánsson’s novels have been nominated three times for the Nordic Council Prize for Literature, and his novel Summer Light, and Then Comes the Night received the Icelandic Prize for Literature in 2005. In 2011 he was awarded the prestigious P. O. Enquist Award. He is perhaps best known for his trilogy: Heaven and Hell, The Sorrow of Angels (longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize) and The Heart of Man (winner of the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize). A subsequent novel, Fish Have No Feet, was longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2017.

Luke Hathaway at the Antler River Poetry Series
2024-10-23 19:00 - 20:30 (America/Toronto) | Landon Branch London Public Library, 167 Wortley Road, London, ON, Canada
Join Luke Hathaway, author of The Affirmations, for the Antler River Poetry Series, alongside fellow poet Sarah Burgoyne. Attendees are encouraged to wear a mask to protect vulnerable members of the community.
The readings will take place at the Landon Branch of the London Public Library on Wednesday, October 23 at 7PM.
More details here.
Get The Affirmations here!
ABOUT THE AFFIRMATIONS
Shortlisted for the 2023 J.M. Abraham Atlantic Poetry Award • Winner of the 2021 Confederation Poets Prize • One of The Times’ Best Poetry Books of 2022 • A CBC Best Poetry Book of 2022 • Nominated for the 2023 ReLit Award for Poetry
The mystics who coined the phrase ‘the way of affirmation’ understood the apocalyptic nature of the word yes, the way it can lead out of one life and into another. Moving among the languages of Christian conversion, Classical metamorphosis, seasonal transformation, and gender transition, Luke Hathaway tells the story of the love that rewired his being, asking each of us to experience the transfiguration that can follow upon saying yes—with all one’s heart, with all one’s soul, with all one’s mind, with all one’s strength . . . and with all one’s body, too.
ABOUT LUKE HATHAWAY
Luke Hathaway is a trans poet who teaches English and Creative Writing at Saint Mary’s University in Kjipuktuk/Halifax. He has been before now at some time boy and girl, bush, bird, and a mute fish in the sea. His book Years, Months, and Days was named a best book of 2018 in the New York Times. He mentors new librettists as a faculty member in the Amadeus Choir’s Choral Composition Lab, and makes music with Daniel Cabena as part of the metamorphosing ensemble ANIMA.

Mark Bourrie at the Midland Public Library
2024-10-23 18:00 - 19:00 (America/Toronto) | Midland Public Library, 320 King Street, Midland, ON, L4R 3M6, Canada
Join Mark Bourrie, historian and award-winning author of Crosses in the Sky, for a discussion about his newest book at the Midland Public Library.
The event will take place on Wednesday, October 23 at 6PM.
Registration and more details here.
Grab Crosses in the Sky here!
ABOUT CROSSES IN THE SKY
From the bestselling author of Bush Runner: The Adventures of Pierre Esprit-Radisson
This is the story of the collision of two worlds. In the early 1600s, the Jesuits—the Catholic Church’s most ferocious warriors for Christ—tried to create their own nation on the Great Lakes and turn the Huron (Wendat) Confederacy into a model Jesuit state. At the centre of their campaign was missionary Jean de Brébeuf, a mystic who sought to die a martyr’s death. He lived among a proud people who valued kindness and rights for all, especially women. In the end, Huronia was destroyed. Brébeuf became a Catholic saint, and the Jesuit’s “martyrdom” became one of the founding myths of Canada.
In this first secular biography of Brébeuf, historian Mark Bourrie, bestselling author of Bush Runner: The Adventures of Pierre-Esprit Radisson, recounts the missionary’s fascinating life and tells the tragic story of the remarkable people he lived among. Drawing on the letters and documents of the time—including Brébeuf’s accounts of his bizarre spirituality—and modern studies of the Jesuits, Bourrie shows how Huron leaders tried to navigate this new world and the people struggled to cope as their nation came apart. Riveting, clearly told, and deeply researched, Crosses in the Sky is an essential addition to—and expansion of—Canadian history.
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 book, Big Men Fear Me: The Fast Life and Quick Death of Canada’s Most Powerful Media Mogul, was nominated for several book awards.

Caroline Adderson at Vancouver Writers Fest
2024-10-23 17:30 - 19:00 (America/Vancouver) | Performance Works, 1218 Cartwright Street, Vancouver, BC, V6H 3R9, Canada
Join Caroline Adderson, author of Giller-longlisted A Way to Be Happy (Sep 10, 2024) at Vancouver Writers Fest for the reading event “Short Stories, Infinite Identities.” Caroline will be in conversation with authors Shashi Bhat and Aaron Kreuter, for this event moderated by Shaena Lambert.
Good short stories can share expansive truths with the smallest details. Each of these authors offer mesmerizing insights into what it means to be human in their collections. Discover more about the intricate craft of short stories, which offers a necessary tapestry of humanity.
The event will take place on Wednesday, October 23 at 5:30 PM.
Tickets and more details here.
Grab A Way to Be Happy here!
ABOUT A WAY TO BE HAPPY
Longlisted for the 2024 Giller Prize
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.
