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THE MUSIC GAME wins the 2023 FRENCH-AMERICAN TRANSLATION PRIZE for Fiction!

We’re thrilled to share that JC Sutcliffe has won the 2023 French-American Translation Prize for Fiction for her translation of The Music Game by Stéfanie Clermont! Read the official announcement here.

Since 1986, the French-American Foundation, with the longstanding support of the Florence Gould Foundation, has awarded an annual prize for exceptional translations from French to English in both fiction and nonfiction. JC is joined by the nonfiction co-winners Kieran Aarons and Cédrine Michel, for their co-translation of Self Defense: A Philosophy of Violence by Elsa Dorlin (Verso Books).

The awards ceremony is open to the public and will be held on Tuesday, May 23, 2023 at Hearst Tower in NYC. More information and a link to RSVP, may be found here.

A huge congratulations to JC from all of us at Biblioasis!

Get your copy of The Music Game here!

ABOUT THE MUSIC GAME

Winner of the 2023 French-American Translation Prize for Fiction

Friends since grade school, Céline, Julie, and Sabrina come of age at the start of a new millennium, supporting each other and drifting apart as their lives pull them in different directions. But when their friend dies by suicide in the abandoned city lot where they once gathered, they must carry on in the world that left him behind—one they once dreamed they would change for the better. From the grind of Montreal service jobs, to isolated French Ontario countryside childhoods, to the tenuous cooperation of Bay Area punk squats, the three young women navigate everyday losses and fears against the backdrop of a tumultuous twenty-first century. An ode to friendship and the ties that bind us together, Stéfanie Clermont’s award-winning The Music Game confronts the violence of the modern world and pays homage to those who work in the hope and faith that it can still be made a better place.

ABOUT JC SUTCLIFFE

JC Sutcliffe is a writer, translator and editor. She has lived in England, France and Canada. The Music Game is the ninth Québécois novel she has translated.

ABOUT STEFANIE CLERMONT

Born and raised in Ottawa, Ontario, Stéfanie Clermont travelled throughout Canada and the United States, working at a wide variety of jobs, before settling in Montreal in 2012. The Music Game, her first book, won the prestigious Ringuet Prize of the Quebec Academy of Arts and Letters, the Quebec Arts Council’s prize for a new work by a young artist, and the Adrienne Choquette Prize for short stories. It was a finalist for the Grand Prix du Livre de Montréal and was included in Le Combat des livres, the French-language counterpart of Canada Reads.

POGUEMAHONE, SAY THIS, THE MUSIC GAME, SHIMMER: Reviews & Interviews!

IN THE NEWS

POGUEMAHONE

Patrick McCabe has been interviewed in The Times in regards to his forthcoming novel Poguemahone (May 3, 2022). “Pat McCabe: A lifetime’s search for the voice” was published online on March 18, 2022. You can read the full interview here.

An excerpt from the interview:

“In the early stages of creating his new novel, though, there were times when he wondered if he was throwing it all away. Poguemahone is a free-form experiment that reads like a psychedelic ballad. Narrated by an Irishman living in England, it’s McCabe’s weirdest and wildest work to date. ‘And it’s my best,’ he insists. ‘I worked so hard on it. I’m not a great fan of indiscipline. It might look like this is wild, but everything ties up in it, and that’s not always the case with me. It won’t be for everybody, but it is for me.'”

The Globe and Mail posted their ‘Spring 2022 Books Preview’ and it includes Poguemahone (May 3, 2022) by Patrick McCabe! You can view the full list here.

Of Poguemahone, Emily Donaldson writes:

“The Irish writer, twice a Booker bridesmaid for novels including The Butcher Boy, takes an audacious stylistic turn with this 600-page novel-cum-snowballing-free-verse-monologue by an Irishman caring for his 70-year-old dementia-afflicted sister in England, which the Guardian has boldly declared this century’s Ulysses.”

Preorder Poguemahone from Biblioasis here!

SHIMMER

Also included in the Globe and Mail‘s ‘Spring 2022 Books Preview’ was Alex Pugsley’s short story collection, Shimmer (May 17, 2022)! Check it out on the list here.

Of Shimmer, Emily Donaldson writes:

“Dialogue, character study and a fair dose of profanity star in the latest collection of short stories by the Halifax writer whose previous work has elicited comparisons to Robertson Davies and John Irving.”

Preorder your copy of Shimmer here!

THE MUSIC GAME

The Music Game (February 8, 2022) by Stéfanie Clermont, trans. by JC Sutcliffe, has been reviewed in Quill & Quire! The review was posted online on March 17, 2022, and will be in their March 2022 print issue. Read the full review here.

Reviewer Cassandra Drudi writes:

“A richly created world that spans cities and years … Despite the often dark subject matter, The Music Game is hopeful and optimistic, too: it is a portrait of people who have built community on their own terms.”

Pick up your copy of The Music Game here!

SAY THIS 

Say This (March 1, 2022) by Elise Levine, was interviewed on Across the Pond podcast. It was published online on March 22, 2022. You can listen to the full episode here.

Get your copy of Say This here!

Play Along with THE MUSIC GAME

In celebration of our latest release, the staff at Biblioasis played ‘The Music Game,’ and came up with a selection of songs that we thought were good accompaniments to the reading experience.

During key moments throughout the book, the characters play their own version of the music game where someone begins to describe a scenario or a feeling, and another person answers with what they think is an appropriate song.

The Music Game seems to ask us to return to those vital conversations about the way we have been hurt and about wanting to make things better, even if the room to do that may feel so out of reach. It’s a book that allows us to escape our reality while also somehow facing it head-on. It’s a reminder of our fundamental interconnectedness, of the loss that still cuts through us every day, and, more than anything else, of the necessity of hope.” —Stacey May Fowles, Open Book

Check out our playlist below, and let us know what songs put you in a reading mood!

Get your copy of The Music Game here!

THE MUSIC GAME: Rave Reviews from the Toronto Star and more!

IN THE NEWS

THE MUSIC GAME

The Music Game (Feb. 8, 2022) by Stéfanie Clermont, trans. by JC Sutcliffe, has been reviewed in the Toronto Star! The review was published online on February 18, 2022. Read the full review here.

In his review, Steven Beattie writes:

“In her debut fiction, Montreal writer Stéfanie Clermont locates a 21st Century equivalent to the 1920s’ “lost generation” in a group of young people trying to find meaning and connection in a world of dead-end jobs, unaffordable housing, and romantic disappointments … The Music Game inhabits a liminal space between different bodies, psyches and geographies. Its characters can display the worst hipster traits — turning up their noses at Bruno Mars on a café stereo while genuflecting at the altar of Godspeed You! Black Emperor — and genuine insights into their inner selves and the nature of the world around them. If they share undeniable commonalities with lost generations before them, they are nonetheless, in Clermont’s hands, rendered specific and unique.”

Stéfanie Clermont was interviewed by Kenn at Shelf Life Books for their podcast, Book StormThe episode was published online on February 11, 2022. You can listen to the full interview here.

The Music Game was included on Boswell Book Company’s blog as a staff recommendation. Read the list of recommendations here.

Bookseller Kay Wosewick writes:

The Music Game is a delicious sneak peek into a generation (Millennials, of course) that acknowledges few boundaries, alternates between excess and emptiness, repeatedly taste-tests and spits out adulthood, and ebbs and flows within the cacophony that surrounds them. Yeah, a bit scary. But also exciting.”

The Music Game was also reviewed in the McGill Tribune and Apt613. Both reviews were published online on February 15, 2022.

In their review for the McGill Tribune, Louis Lussier-Piette writes:

The Music Game’s structure is what sets it apart. Each chapter tells a self-contained story from the point of view of someone within Sabrina’s inner circle, be it a long-lost friend or a neighbour … Clermont’s reflection on activism is skillfully nuanced, exploring both the hopefulness and cynicism that often come with political engagement.”

Read the full review here.

In their review for Apt613, Emmanuelle Gingras writes:

“[An} audacious, honest, and liberating masterpiece … The Music Game sends us on a journey through this contemporary reality. It enumerates all the ways that we love and destroy one another … The Music Game is about relationships, yet also about all the ways we desperately try to escape reality … anyone who’s ever experienced depression or anxiety will find healing through Stéfanie’s loyal and beautiful ways of describing the inexplicable. She allows for contradiction; depth and lightness meet in a disturbing but cathartic way.”

Read the full review here.

Order your copy of The Music Game from Biblioasis here!