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Media Hits: WORK TO BE DONE, EDUCATION OF AUBREY MCKEE, CROSSES IN THE SKY, and more!

IN THE NEWS!

WORK TO BE DONE

Work to Be Done: Selected Essays and Reviews by Bruce Whiteman (Mar 12, 2024) was reviewed in The Miramichi Reader. The review was published online on May 15, and you can read it in full here.

Reviewer John Oughton writes,

“Whiteman is an erudite and very well-read lover of books in general, and literature in particular. He brings a finely honed critical perspective, a fine prose style of his own, and a sturdy sense of humour to the various essays and reviews collected here. “

Work to Be Done was also reviewed by Catherine Owen in FreeFall! The review was published online on May 13, and you can check out the full review here.

Catherine praises,

“Whiteman’s scholarship is prodigious and his style engaging as he addresses subjects that might be viewed as archaic or passé in a unique way, his tone intelligently conversational, quirky and eminently readable . . . His attention to the crucial choice of diction for translators and the essential sensitivity to sonority for the poet is relentlessly compelling. And he can be quite funny.”

Get Work to Be Done here!

CROSSES IN THE SKY

Crosses in the Sky: Jean de Brébeuf and the Destruction of Huronia by Mark Bourrie (May 21, 2024) was featured in the Toronto Star! The review was published online on May 15, and you can read it here.

Reviewer Ken McGoogan writes,

“In 2019, Mark Bourrie published Bush Runner, a biography of the adventurer Pierre-Esprit Radisson that was ‘compelling, authoritative, not a little disturbing—and a significant contribution to the history of 17th-century North America,’ as I wrote at the time. The same can be said about Bourrie’s latest, Crosses in the Sky: Jean de Brébeuf and the Destruction of Huronia . . . In reinterpreting the Jesuit’s martyrdom against the backdrop of Huronia’s destruction, Bourrie presents a revisionist history.”

Mark Bourrie was also interviewed about the book on The Andrew Carter Morning Show! The interview was posted online on May 17, and is available to listen to here.

Order Crosses in the Sky here!

THE EDUCATION OF AUBREY MCKEE

The Education of Aubrey McKee by Alex Pugsley (May 7, 2024) was reviewed in the Literary Review of Canada alongside the first book in the Aubrey McKee Novels, Aubrey McKee! The review was published online on May 17, and will be printed in their June 2024 issue. You can read the full review here.

Reviewer Liam Rockall raves,

“Bold and dynamic, Pugsley’s novels are lively and vivid, filled with individuals who are benevolent and cruel and with scenes that are captivating and terrifying. Aubrey McKee and The Education of Aubrey McKee are the first two acts of a sweeping personal drama, and any remaining volumes cannot come fast enough.”

Alex Pugsley was interviewed about The Education of Aubrey McKee, on CBC Main Street NS with Jeff Douglas! The interview was posted online on May 14, and you can give it a listen here.

Grab The Education of Aubrey McKee here!

Check out the first book, Aubrey McKee, here!

SLEEP IS NOW A FOREIGN COUNTRY

Sleep is Now a Foreign Country by Mike Barnes was featured in articles from Windsor News Today and The Windsor Star about its Trillium Award nomination! The Windsor News Today article was posted online on May 11, and can be read in full here, and The Windsor Star article was posted on May 17, and can be read here.

Get Sleep is Now a Foreign Country here!

BIBLIOASIS SPRING SEASON LAUNCH

Biblioasis’s own publisher Dan Wells was interviewed on AM 800’s The Shift with Patty Handsides on May 16, about our upcoming Spring Season Launch! The launch, which will take place in Windsor on May 23, will celebrate five of our newest titles: Crosses in the Sky by Mark BourrieThe Education of Aubrey McKee by Alex PugsleySorry About the Fire by Colleen Coco CollinsBarfly by Michael Lista, and Work to Be Done by Bruce Whiteman.

Listen to the full interview here!

More details about next week’s launch here.

Events

Biblioasis Spring Launch: Windsor!

Join us in celebrating the launches of three Biblioasis spring books: On Sports by David Macfarlane, Cherry Beach by Don Gillmor, and Silver Lake by Alex Pugsley! Hosted by our publisher Dan Wells, the launch will be held at Biblioasis Bookshop and will include readings from each author, a discussion and Q&A, and of course books will be available for sale and signing.

The launch will take place on Monday, May 4 at 7PM.

Grab On Sports here!

Grab Cherry Beach here!

Grab Silver Lake here, or check out the rest of the Aubrey McKee series here!

ABOUT ON SPORTS

What are sports, really? What do we love about them? And what, in our digital age, have they become?

On Sports reads like a conversation between friends at the ballpark in those golden days before the kiss cam and college co-eds with T-shirt cannons spoiled the fun; a book that feels like the sun on your forehead and the breeze in your hair, beer and laughter on your lips; a book that celebrates communion and friendship and the beauty of these games—whether it be baseball or football  or soccer or tennis or cricket—that we’ve designed to distract ourselves from the end of the world. It’s about what 7Up tastes like when drunk from the Grey Cup, how much work it takes for talent to shine, and the near impossibility of language to properly capture athletic excellence. It’s about the beauty of good sports copy, the ephemerality of even the biggest sports story, and how sport remains perpetually powered by the eleven-year-old in all of us. It’s a book about rediscovering the spirit of sport, before online gambling and the manufactured spectacle of today’s professional sports suffocates the last of it; and it’s about where that spirit today is best found.

ABOUT DAVID MACFARLANE

David Macfarlane‘s family memoir, The Danger Tree, was described by Christopher Hitchens as “one of the finest and most intriguing miniature elegies that I have read in many a year.” Macfarlane’s novel, Summer Gone, was shortlisted for the Giller Prize. Based on The Danger Tree, “The Door You Came In,” a two-man show (co-written and performed with Douglas Cameron) has been produced, to acclaim, from St. John’s, Newfoundland, to Stratford, Ontario. Macfarlane lives in Toronto with his wife, the designer, Janice Lindsay.

ABOUT CHERRY BEACH

A brutal murder exposes secret real estate deals, a corrupt police force, and the dark heart of a city simmering with unrest.

When two girls are found murdered in a rundown Toronto highrise, Jamieson Abel and his partner are first on the scene. Abel is a law school dropout turned police detective chronically at odds with his colleagues and perpetually on the brink of being terminated, and Davis is the department’s only female officer of colour. Both understand their being partnered as a form of banishment, but when the details of the murder go public at the start of an excruciatingly hot summer, they find themselves thrust into the centre of a front page investigation that will bring to a head the city’s long history of shady real estate deals and racist disenfranchisement.

Intricately plotted and brilliantly layered, Cherry Beach is a gripping literary crime novel that examines class, race, and corruption in the most multicultural city in the world.

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 five novels, Cherry BeachBreaking and EnteringLong ChangeMount 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, Saturday NightToronto Life, the Globe and Mail, and the Toronto Star. He has won twelve National Magazine Awards and numerous other honours. He lives in Toronto.

ABOUT SILVER LAKE

It was on a fully dark February night when I went to the Communist’s Daughter to meet a friend who never showed that my life in movies began.

So begins the third installment in a series of standalone novels about the life and travels of Aubrey McKee. Set in Toronto and Silver Lake, a creative neighbourhood in Los Angeles, the novel chronicles with infectious élan Aubrey’s journey from broken-hearted derelict to B-movie production assistant, comedy writer, and science-fiction screenwriter, all the way up to feature film director. Along the way, he encounters long-ago childhood friends, manic producers, NHL players turned talk show hosts, Victoria’s Secret models, impulsive movie stars . . . and his own rising destiny.

ABOUT ALEX PUGSLEY

Alex Pugsley has worked on over 185 produced episodes of television, writing for performers such as Lauren Ash, Scott Thompson, Dan Aykroyd, and Michael Cera. He wrote and directed the feature film Dirty Singles which won for him the Irving Avrich Emerging Filmmaker Award at TIFF. Following the publication of his first novel, Aubrey McKee, he was named one of CBC’s Writers to Watch. His first story collection, Shimmer, was nominated for the ReLit Award for Short Fiction, and his most recent novel, The Education of Aubrey McKee, was long listed for the Toronto Book Awards. His next book, The Hungarian Ballroom, an Aubrey McKee novella, is forthcoming from Biblioasis. More information can be found at www.alexpugsley.com.