Vancouver Double Launch: DECADENCE and WHAT ENDURES
Join the fine folks at Upstart & Crow for the launch party of two Biblioasis books: Decadence by Richard Kelly Kemick and What Endures by Pauline Holdstock! This will be a night of joyful readings and conversation between the two authors. Books will be on hand for sale and signing.
This event is free, but capacity is limited, so please RSVP here!
Get Decadence here!
Get What Endures here!
“The genre of memoir is bullshit (as I humbly posit). No one actually lives like they are moving along some grand Freytag’s triangle. Rather, we live within isolated instances, specific struggles and victories, which, when compiled, form a narrative.”—Richard Kelly Kemick
In Decadence, Richard Kelly Kemick’s “accidental memoir of a sort,” the author ranges widely through his myriad preoccupations and obsessions—volleyball, municipal landfills, dogs, high school plays, Christmas villages, love—out of which the shape of a unique sensibility is revealed. Reminiscent of the three Davids—Rakoff, Sedaris, and Wallace—these essays accrete into a portrait of a man trying to make sense of a world in which there are no goddamn rules; and yet one in which every action has sometimes profound consequences. A book of intelligence and care and kindness and humour and yearning and the occasional epiphany, Decadence gathers up from the odds and ends of living what makes a modern life—quiet and desperate as it may at times be—worth celebrating.
Richard Kelly Kemick is an award-winning poet, journalist, and fiction writer. His debut collection of short stories, Hello, Horse, was published by Biblioasis in 2024. He is also the author of I Am Herod (available on audiobook), the poetry collection Caribou Run, and the stage play Amor De Cosmos: A Delusional Musical. Richard’s 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.
“Funny and serious, with a subtle power that accumulates like a shoplifter adding coat upon coat.”—Mark Anthony Jarman
The stories in What Endures range through and respond to a clickbait world evolving at terrifying speed, revealing the absurd and ridiculous nature of everyday life. What does it mean to endure in a world starving for truth and connection, what makes life worth living, what can be discovered and preserved from the onrush of experience—vicarious and actual—that comes at us? With bracing wit, Pauline Holdstock’s stories move back and forth through time and circumstance to unpack what it is that saves us from despair, each of them pointing in their own magical way to that one, fragile thing that has the power to endure and to live on in others.
Pauline Holdstock is an internationally published novelist, short fiction writer, and essayist. Her novels have been shortlisted for a number of awards, among them the Best First Novel Award, the Giller Prize, and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Her novel Beyond Measure was the winner of the BC Book Prizes Ethel Wilson Award for Fiction. Her novels The Hunter and the Wild Girl and Confessions With Keith have each been awarded the City of Victoria Butler Book Prize.
