Last night we celebrated the virtual launch of Mark Callanan’s new poetry collection, Romantic(October 12, 2021)! Mark Callanan had a wonderful discussion with fellow poet Luke Hathaway, who showed up dressed in shining armor for the event! The reading was followed by an audience Q&A, and a successful book giveaway!
And if you missed the live launch, you can still check it out below!
ABOUT ROMANTIC
Drawing on Arthurian myth, the Romantic poets, the ill-fated “Great War” efforts of the Newfoundland Regiment, modern parenthood, 16-bit video games, and Major League Baseball, these poems examine the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, both as individuals and as communities, in order to explain how and why we are the way we are. At its heart, Romantic interrogates our western society’s idealized, self-deluding personal and cultural perspectives.
ABOUT MARK CALLANAN
Mark Callanan is the author of two previous poetry collections. He was one of the founding editors of the St. John’s, Newfoundland-based literary journal Riddle Fence and co-edited The Breakwater Book of Contemporary Newfoundland Poetry. He lives in St. John’s with his wife, poet and critic Andreae Callanan, and their four children.
Last night we celebrated the double launch of two exciting Biblioasis books: Kate Cayley’s Householders and David Huebert’s Chemical Valley! Kate Cayley and David Huebert were joined in conversation by author Sofi Papamarko. After each author read from their work, the discussions kicked off in a fascinating range of topics, from communes to petroleum, artificiality to the placement of COVID in short stories. The conversations led into an audience Q&A, and we wrapped up the night with a giveaway of each book!
And in case you missed the live event, don’t worry! You can still watch it here:
Get your copy of Householders from Biblioasis here!
Get your copy of Chemical Valley from Biblioasis here!
ABOUT HOUSEHOLDERS
A woman impersonates a nun online, with unexpected consequences. In a rapidly changing neighborhood, tensions escalate around two events planned for the same day. The barista girlfriend of a tech billionaire survives a zombie apocalypse only to face spending her life with the paranoid super-rich. From a university campus to an underground bunker, a commune in the woods to Toronto and back again, the linked stories in Householders move effortlessly between the commonplace and the fantastic. In deft and exacting narratives about difficult children and thorny friendships, hopeful revolutionaries and self-deluded utopians, nascent queers, sincere frauds, and families of all kinds, Kate Cayley mines the moral hazards inherent in the ways we try to save each other and ourselves.
Kate Cayley has previously written a short story collection, two poetry collections, and a number of plays, both traditional and experimental, which have been produced in Canada and the US. She is a frequent writing collaborator with immersive company Zuppa Theatre. She has won the Trillium Book Award and an O. Henry Prize and been a finalist for the Governor General’s Award. She lives in Toronto with her wife and their three children.
ABOUT CHEMICAL VALLEY
Out there by the dock the ocean and the air are just layers of shadow and darkness. But the creature’s flesh hums through the dark—a seep of violet in the weeping night.
From refinery operators to long term care nurses, dishwashers to preppers to hockey enforcers, Chemical Valley’s compassionate and carefully wrought stories cultivate rich emotional worlds in and through the dankness of our bio-chemical animacy. Full-hearted, laced throughout with bruised optimism and sincere appreciation of the profound beauty of our wilted, wheezing world, Chemical Valley doesn’t shy away from urgent modern questions—the distribution of toxicity, environmental racism, the place of technoculture in this ecological spasm—but grounds these anxieties in the vivid and often humorous intricacies of its characters’ lives. Swamp-wrought and heartfelt, these stories run wild with vital energy, tilt and teeter into crazed and delirious loves.
David Huebert’s writing has won the CBC Short Story Prize, The Walrus Poetry Prize, and was a finalist for the 2020 Journey Prize. David’s fiction debut, Peninsula Sinking, won a Dartmouth Book Award, was shortlisted for the Alistair MacLeod Short Fiction Prize, and was runner-up for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award. David’s work has been published in magazines such as The Walrus, Maisonneuve, enRoute, and Canadian Notes & Queries, and anthologized in Best Canadian Stories and The Journey Prize Stories. David teaches at The University of King’s College in K’jipuktuk/Halifax, where he lives and writes.
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We had a wonderful time celebrating the virtual book launch of Lucy Ellmann’s essay collection this past Sunday, September 26. Lucy Ellmann had an engaging conversation with Todd McEwen and Diana Hope, and the event was hosted by Josh Cook. After the reading and discussions, there was an audience Q&A, and a successful book giveaway.
And if you couldn’t make the live event, don’t worry! You can still watch it below.
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Last night we celebrated the virtual launch of Elaine Dewar’s On the Origin of the Deadliest Pandemic in 100 Years! Elaine Dewar had a fascinating discussion with Wayne Grady, Canadian writer, editor, and translator. Afterward, there was an audience Q&A and giveaway of a copy of On the Origin of the Deadliest Pandemic in 100 Years!
And if you weren’t able to join last night, don’t worry! You can still watch the event here:
ABOUT ON THE ORIGIN OF THE DEADLIEST PANDEMIC IN 100 YEARS
In this compelling whodunnit, Elaine Dewar reads the science, follows the money, and connects the geopolitical interests to the spin.
When the first TV newscast described a SARS-like flu affecting a distant Chinese metropolis, investigative journalist Elaine Dewar started asking questions: Was SARS-CoV-2 something that came from nature, as leading scientists insisted, or did it come from a lab, and what role might controversial experiments have played in its development? Why was Wuhan the pandemic’s ground zero—and why, on the other side of the Atlantic, had two researchers been marched out of a lab in Winnipeg by the RCMP? Why were governments so slow to respond to the emerging pandemic, and why, now, is the government of China refusing to cooperate with the World Health Organization? And who, or what, is DRASTIC?
Locked down in Toronto with the world at a standstill, Dewar pored over newspapers and magazines, preprints and peer-reviewed journals, email chains and blacked-out responses to access to information requests; she conducted Zoom interviews and called telephone numbers until someone answered as she hunted down the truth of the virus’s origin. In this compelling whodunnit, she reads the science, follows the money, connects the geopolitical interests to the spin—and shows how leading science journals got it wrong, leaving it to interested citizens and junior scientists to pull out the truth.
ABOUT ELAINE DEWAR
Elaine Dewar—author, journalist, television story editor—has been honoured by nine National Magazine awards, including the prestigious President’s Medal, and the White Award. Her first book, Cloak of Green, delved into the dark side of environmental politics and became an underground classic. Bones: Discovering the First Americans, an investigation of the science and politics regarding the peopling of the Americas, was a national bestseller and earned a special commendation from the Canadian Archaeological Association. The Second Tree: of Clones, Chimeras, and Quests for Immortality, won Canada’s premier literary non-fiction prize from the Writers’ Trust. Called “Canada’s Rachel Carson,” Dewar aspires to be a happy warrior for the public good.
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On Thursday, May 27 we celebrated the launch of Rob Taylor’s poetry collection, Strangers! Rob Taylor was joined for a great discussion by Sadiqa de Meijer and Sue Sinclair. The night finished off with an audience Q&A and book giveaway! The event was co-hosted with Massy Books in Vancouver, BC.
And ICYMI, you can still watch the launch in the video below!
ABOUT STRANGERS
“It makes no sense. You would be strangers / if not for this.”
In Strangers, Rob Taylor makes new the epiphany poem: the short lyric ending with a moment of recognition or arrival. In his hands, the form becomes not simply a revelation in words but, in Wallace Stevens’ phrase, “a revelation in words by means of the words.” The epiphany here is not only the poet’s. It’s ours. A book about the songlines of memory and language and the ways in which they connect us to other human beings, to read Strangers is to become part of the lineages (literary, artistic, familial) that it braids together—to become, as Richard Outram puts it, an “unspoken / Stranger no longer.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rob Taylor is the author of four poetry collections, including Strangers (Biblioasis, 2021) and The News (Gaspereau Press, 2016), which was a finalist for the 2017 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. He is also the editor of What the Poets Are Doing: Canadian Poets in Conversation (Nightwood Editions, 2018) and the guest editor of Best Canadian Poetry 2019 (Biblioasis, 2019). Rob lives with his family in Port Moody, BC.
Over the weekend we celebrated the launch of Andreae Callanan’s poetry collection, The Debt! Andreae Callanan was joined in conversation by Elaine Feeney, and the event was emceed wonderfully by Mark Callanan. The launch finished off with an audience Q&A, and a successful book giveaway. The event was also co-hosted by Running the Goat Books in Tors Cove, NL.
And if you couldn’t make it, don’t worry! You can still watch here:
ABOUT THE DEBT
Set against the backdrop of a post-moratorium St. John’s, Newfoundland, The Debt explores tensions between tradition and innovation, and between past and present in a province unmoored by loss and grief. The Debt is about development and change, idleness and activism, ecological stewardship, feminism, motherhood, the personal and the political. It is also about resistance—against the encroaching forces of greed and capitalism, even against the accumulated notions of the self. The poems are an argument for community and connection in an age increasingly associated with isolation of the individual. The Debt explores the dues we all owe: to nature, to those who came before us, and to one another.
ABOUT ANDREAE CALLANAN
Andreae Callanan’s poetry, essays, and reviews have been read in The Walrus, Canadian Notes and Queries, Canadian Verse 2, Riddle Fence, CBC.ca, and The Newfoundland Quarterly. She is a recent recipient of the Cox & Palmer SPARKS Creative Writing Award at Memorial University of Newfoundland, and she holds a Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship and a Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholarship for her doctoral work in English literature. Her chapbook, Crown, was published by Anstruther Press in 2019. Andreae lives in St. John’s with her husband and their four children.
Last night we celebrated the launch of Andri Snær Magnason’s new book, On Time and Water! Andri Snær Magnason was joined virtually by Meehan Crist and Lytton Smith in a great discussion. The event then moved on to an exciting audience Q&A and book giveaway! Biblioasis was thrilled to partner with the US publisher Open Letter Books for the launch, which was co-hosted by Glass Bookshop in Edmonton, AB.
If you missed the event, don’t worry—you can still watch it below!
Or, you can pick up a copy from your local bookstore!
ABOUT ON TIME AND WATER
Asked by a leading climate scientist why he wasn’t writing about the greatest crisis mankind has faced, Andri Snær Magnason, one of Iceland’s most beloved writers and public intellectuals, protested: he wasn’t a specialist, he said. It wasn’t his field. But the scientist persisted: “If you cannot understand our scientific findings and present them in an emotional, psychological, poetic or mythological context,” he told him, “then no one will really understand the issue, and the world will end.”
Based on interviews and advice from leading glacial, ocean, climate, and geographical scientists, and interwoven with personal, historical, and mythological stories, Magnason’s resulting response is a rich and compelling work of narrative nonfiction that illustrates the reality of climate change and offers hope in the face of an uncertain future. Moving from reflections on how one writes an obituary for a glacier to exhortation for a heightened understanding of human time and our obligations to one another, throughout history and across the globe, On Time and Water is both deeply personal and globally minded: a travel story, a world history, a desperate plea to live in harmony with future generations—and is unlike anything that has yet been published on the current climate emergency.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Andri Snær Magnason is one of Iceland’s most celebrated writers. He has won the Icelandic Literary Prize for fiction, children’s fiction, and non-fiction. In 2009, Magnason co-directed the documentary Dreamland, which was based on his book Dreamland: A Self-Help Manual for a Frightened Nation. In 2010, Magnason was awarded the Kairos Prize, presented to outstanding individuals in the field of intercultural understanding. Magnason ran for president of Iceland in 2016 and came third out of nine candidates.
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We had a fantastic time celebrating the virtual launch of Catherine Fogarty’s book, Murder on the Inside: The True Story of the Deadly Riot at Kingston Penitentiary! The night kicked off with a discussion between Catherine Fogarty and guest Dean Jobb, and ended with a successful audience Q&A and book giveaway. Co-hosted by Novel Idea Bookstore in Kingston, ON.
In case you missed it, you can still watch the video here:
Order your copy from Biblioasis, or from your local bookstore!
“You have taken our civil rights—we want our human rights.”
On April 14, 1971, a handful of prisoners attacked the guards at Kingston Penitentiary and seized control, making headlines around the world. For four intense days, the prisoners held the guards hostage while their leaders negotiated with a citizens’ committee of journalists and lawyers, drawing attention to the dehumanizing realities of their incarceration, including overcrowding, harsh punishment and extreme isolation. But when another group of convicts turned their pent-up rage towards some of the weakest prisoners, tensions inside the old stone walls erupted, with tragic consequences. As heavily armed soldiers prepared to regain control of the prison through a full military assault, the inmates were finally forced to surrender.
Murder on the Inside tells the harrowing story of a prison in crisis against the backdrop of a pivotal moment in the history of human rights. Occurring just months before the uprising at Attica Prison, the Kingston riot has remained largely undocumented, and few have known the details—yet the tense drama chronicled here is more relevant today than ever. A gripping account of the standoff and the efforts for justice and reform it inspired, Murder on the Inside is essential reading for our times.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Catherine Fogarty is a storyteller. She is the founder and president of Big Coat Media and Story Hunter Podcasts. An accomplished television producer, writer and director, Catherine has produced award-winning lifestyle, reality and documentary series for both Canadian and American networks. Catherine is the executive producer of the Gemini nominated series Love It or List It and directed I Don’t Have Time for This, an intimate documentary about young women with breast cancer. Originally trained as a social worker, Catherine studied deviance and criminology. She worked with numerous at-risk populations including street youth, people with AIDS, abused women, and social services. Catherine holds an M.A. in Social Work, an MBA in Human Resource Management, and an MFA in Creative Non-Fiction from the University of Kings College. She was recently awarded the Marina Nemet Award in Creative Writing through the University of Toronto.
https://www.biblioasis.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/MOTI-blog-image.png8002000biblioasishttp://biblioasis.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/BIBLIOASIS-Logo-500x500-White-300x300.pngbiblioasis2021-04-15 10:03:262021-04-15 12:32:59MURDER ON THE INSIDE Virtual Launch Video
We had a wonderful time last night celebrating the double poetry launch of Sharon McCartney’s Villa Negativa, as well as Terence Young’s Smithereens from Harbour Publishing! The two authors each read from their books, and had a lively discussion, before finishing the event with an audience Q&A and giveaway.
And if you missed it, don’t worry! You can still watch the video here:
Order your copy of Villa Negativa by Sharon McCartney here.
Visit Harbour Publishing’s site to learn more about Smithereens by Terence Young here.
ABOUT VILLA NEGATIVA
The anticipated seventh collection of poetry from the celebrated Canadian poet.
How can we know who we are when we can never step away from ourselves? Villa Negativa posits that we can only know what we are not and explores that conundrum against the backdrop of a sibling’s illness and death, an eating disorder and a couple of really dismal dating relationships. Though it could be sombre territory, Villa Negativa looks for the laughter behind the darkness: the housebreaker who takes off her shoes first, the fabricator whose most intimate relationship is with fibreglass, the anorexic who sends the Diet Coke back because it tastes too good.
ABOUT SMITHEREENS
In Smithereens, Terence Young ranges widely among forms, subjects, tones and moods, invoking the domestic world of family and home, as well as the associated realms of work and play. He describes the simple pleasure of losing one’s bearings and seeing the world anew in “Tender is the Night,” and in “The Bear” he records the near-magical appearance at a summer cabin of a creature that hasn’t been seen in the area in over fifty years. The ironic benefits of a house fire, the late-night sounds of a downtown alley, the smells of a summer morning in the Gulf islands—all of these serve as vehicles for reminiscence, meditation and humour. Elsewhere in the collection, he summons an elegiac mood, remembering in poems like “Surcease,” “Fern Island Candle,” “The Morning Mike Dies,” and “Gary” some of the friends who have left his world. More than any of his previous books, though, Smithereens features poems that are playful, in which language is often associative, surprising and fun. It is a collection that will reward readers, whatever their temperament upon picking it up, and it will also invite them to return to its pages again and again.
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We had a fantastic night celebrating the virtual launch of Dale and Heidi LM Jacobs’ 100 Miles of Baseball: Fifty Games, One Summer! Kicking off the event was a Q&A and excerpt reading with the authors and guest Michael Elves, discussing everything from long drives to the ballpark, to the multitude of different ways people can watch the same game, and keeping the rediscovered love of baseball from going out again. A beautiful musical performance from Crissi Cochrane was given, before the night came to a close with a book giveaway.
In case you missed it, you can still watch the video here below:
ABOUT 100 MILES OF BASEBALL
By the end of the 2016 season, Dale Jacobs and Heidi LM Jacobs both finally admitted to themselves and to each other that they were losing interest in the Tigers and, consequently, in baseball itself—a thread that had not only connected the two of them, but brought them together with their families and with their own histories as well. They weren’t sure what they were missing, but they had an idea where it might be found: in their own backyard. Drawing a radius of one hundred miles around their home in Windsor, Ontario, Heidi and Dale set a goal of seeing fifty games within that circle in one summer, a schedule that took them across southwestern Ontario and into Michigan and Ohio, from bleachers behind high schools, to manicured university turf, to the steep concrete stands of major league parks. 100 MILES OF BASEBALL is the story of their rediscovery of their love of the game—and with it their relationships, and the region they call home.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Dale Jacobs is the author of Graphic Encounters: Comics and the Sponsorship of Multimodal Literacy (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013). He is the editor of Sunday with the Tigers: Eleven Ways to Watch a Game (Black Moss Press, 2015) and The Myles Horton Reader (University of Tennessee Press, 2003), and co-editor (with Laura Micciche) of A Way to Move: Rhetorics of Emotion and Composition Studies (Boynton Cook/Heinemann, 2003). His academic/creative nonfiction book, The 1976 Project: On Comics and Grief, is forthcoming from Wilfred Laurier University Press. He is the editor of The Windsor Review and teaches in the English Department at the University of Windsor.
Heidi LM Jacobs’ novel Molly of the Mall: Literary Lass and Purveyor of Fine Footwear (NeWest Press, 2019) won the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour in 2020. She is a librarian at the University of Windsor and one of the researchers behind the award-winning Breaking the Colour Barrier: Wilfred “Boomer” Harding & the Chatham Coloured All-Stars project. She is currently co-writing a book about the 1934 Chatham Coloured All-Stars, the first Black team to win the Ontario Baseball Amateur Association Championship (forthcoming from Wilfred Laurier University Press). Originally from Edmonton, she now lives in Windsor, Ontario.
Order your copy now here, or from your local bookstore!
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Join us in celebrating the Toronto launch of Russell Smith’s new novel, Self Care! Russell will be reading from the book, and copies will be available for sale and signing.
The launch will take place at the Society Clubhouse on Thursday, September 18 at 7PM.
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.
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.
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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 to come.
Join us in Windsor as we celebrate with five of our authors and their 2025 releases! Mélikah Abdelmoumen (Baldwin, Styron, and Me), stephanie roberts (UNMET), Don Gillmor (On Oil), 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 Biblioasis Bookshop on Thursday, October 2 at 7PM. More details to come.
