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The Bibliophile: Playing God

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A brief detour for some holiday fun at the press!

This week’s anticipated holiday post has been interrupted to hand-bind copies of Richard Kelly Kemick’s madcap tale of SCD (Seasonal Compulsive Disorder), “Playing God.”

We will resume our regular programming next week.

—The Biblioasis Crew

Photo: Prepping labels for the front cover of the chapbook edition of “Playing God” by Richard Kelly Kemick.
Photo: Chapbooks waiting to be sewn together.
Photo: Jeff and Ashley hard at work sewing and cutting labels.
Photo: It’s all coming together . . .
Photo: Publisher Dan Wells even emerged from the editorial pit to trim chapbooks!

In good publicity news:

  • Passenger Seat by Vijay Khurana appeared on the New York Times list of the staff’s “Favorite Hidden Gem Books of 2025,” recommended by Greg Cowles: “This taut, terrific novel—Khurana’s debut—ratchets up the tension in a classic formula . . . I’ve been recommending it for months to anybody who likes Richard Ford and Andre Dubus III.”
  • Marcello Di Cintio, author of Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers, was interviewed for CBC Ideas in the episode “Your tomatoes have a backstory and it’s not always pretty.” Precarious also made the Hill Times’s list of “Top 100 Best Books in 2025.”
  • Baldwin, Styron, and Me by Mélikah Abdelmoumen (trans. Catherine Khordoc) was listed in BOMB Magazine’s 2025 Small Press Gift Guide: “For the person who treats literary friendships like high-stakes contact sports.” The book was also picked by critic Steven W. Beattie for Quill & Quire’s “Notable Books of 2025”: “Part memoir, part literary criticism, part admiring portrait of Baldwin, one of the author’s heroes, Abdelmoumen’s book resonates clearly with our own contentious moment.”
  • Seth’s 2025 Christmas Ghost Stories were featured in the Chicago Tribune’s holiday book guide: “An addicting revival of the Victorian-born tradition of reading scary stories at holidays.” The stories also got a shout-out from longtime fan Patton Oswalt on social media!
  • Every Time We Say Goodbye by Ivana Sajko (trans. Mima Simić) was reviewed in the Irish Times: “Sajko vividly captures the way in which travel suspends both time and place in scenes that are at once real and dreamlike . . . Every Time We Say Goodbye is a threnody to leave-taking—elegant, mournful, and profoundly human.”
  • Benbecula by Graeme Macrae Burnet was listed in the Washington Post’s list of “11 new paperbacks to add to your shelf.”
  • Dust: More Lives of the Poets (with Guitars) by Ray Robertson got a video review from Shelf Life.
  • Voices of Resistance: Diaries of Genocide by Batool Abu Akleen, et. al., was included in The Tyee’s list of “2025 Holiday Reads.”
  • Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre by Mark Bourrie was included in the Hill Times’s list of “Top 100 Best Books in 2025.”