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The Bibliophile: On the Road

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Road trip narratives are often associated with freedom, independence, a desire to find something, or perhaps change something. They are filled with people hitting the open road, carefree, escaping their everyday lives in search of something greater.

One of my favourite aspects of Vijay Khurana’s The Passenger Seat is how it turns the cliched road trip story on its head. The novel follows two teenagers who want to get away from their small town for the summer. They are free from responsibilities and obligations, but soon realize they are trapped with each other in an enclosed space for miles. We feel their claustrophobia and the tension it brings. The games they play with each other as the road stretches endlessly in front of them become much darker as all that freedom and open space allows for their dissatisfaction with the world to grow.

Photo: The Passenger Seat by Vijay Khurana. Cover designed by Zoe Norvell.

The Passenger Seat is a road novel for the atomized generation, the ones who’ve grown up in a world where, since everything can be a game, nothing needs to matter, including other’s lives.

John Warner, in his review for the Chicago Tribune last week, I think put it best when he said the novel feels “not so much written as conjured, as though the author has absorbed something from the larger ambient culture and distilled it into the characters and narrative. The result is like being put under a spell, an invitation to join some other mind in a shared dream.”

Vijay himself speaks about the paradoxes of the road trip and the novel much better than I ever could, and you can hear him do so in a recent radio interview with WPR’s BETA and on the podcasts Across the Pond and Beyond the Zero. Or if you’re like me and prefer print interviews, you can read this one from the Berliner.

But now as we head into the May long weekend, the unofficial kick-off to the summer, the time of year most of us start to think of getting back on the road, we thought we’d share with you an excerpt from The Passenger Seat.

Ahmed Abdalla,
Publicist

An Excerpt from The Passenger Seat

The road though! Endless becoming, a colour palette always and somehow never changing, grey to green to brown to blue to other, occasionally red, very occasionally yellow, whoosh, repeat, repeat, something comes the other way with headlights on, the beauty of headlights in daylight, fence, field, these lane markings like perforations maybe, as if the road or the whole world could unzip any moment now, if there were such a thing as a moment when you’re driving, which Teddy realizes there isn’t. It’s just one long stretch. The road and its contradictions: boredom and excitement, you sit still but you’re moving, there’s a good kind of silence even with the engine noise and the German metal Adam has them listening to. Teddy’s mom used to call this sitting and thinking time. But all Teddy wants to think about is how the world keeps rushing toward them then dropping harmlessly into their wake. Adam is a good driver. He speeds often, especially to pass the empty logging trucks that must be on their way back to tree farms farther north. Adam tells Teddy the German metal is political, but it’s in fucking German so how can Adam know? The singer’s definitely angry, though. Teddy can’t decide if Adam’s tastes are more adult or more childish than his own. Is what Teddy likes, let’s say Arkells, more grown-up or just more boring? Funny that people call things middle of the road. That’s where they are now, as Adam passes another rig and swings back in before the line of oncoming traffic can snag them. Somebody beeps, and Teddy lets out a hum to match. Wasn’t that a bit close, he thinks but doesn’t say. He thinks about rhythm and speed, about the fact that they don’t know where they’re going.

At a gas station they buy energy drinks and for an hour they talk eagerly over the music, looking for ways to express how free they feel. Then comes the crash, spiralling silences in which the music speaks for them and Teddy nearly falls asleep. Towns go by, billboards, fruit trees, fences. The images don’t stop when he closes his eyes, and when he opens them again he sees something amazing. Two horses are standing nose to nose in a field, perfectly still, like somebody glued them together. They look like statues or oversized toys. One of them is wearing a halter around its head, the other isn’t. Somehow this makes Teddy think of the French they had done at school, how pointless it was because no one could remember anything by the time the next class came around. The recap would take more than half the time, the teacher getting more and more frustrated. But what did she expect? To Adam he says, over the music, Do you remember when you asked that French teacher if the word for cat also meant pussy? Adam laughs, then says, Wait, are you sure that was me? I don’t remember that. It was absolutely you, Teddy says. They hadn’t been proper friends back then, but he remembers it, his green pencil case, how the boys all laughed and the girls groaned and the teacher just went on as though Adam hadn’t said anything. She was telling them about two words that sounded almost the same, and you had to be careful or you’d end up telling somebody about your horses. She was showing off, trying to make the class laugh, but Adam stole her thunder with the pussy comment. Thinking about it now, years later, Teddy decides that Adam’s comment was actually pretty smart. It was really about how pointless the whole situation was, how they were all wasting their time, the teacher included.

They’re going too fast to have the windows open and the truck’s AC is broken. You only need it two weeks of the year anyway, Adam jokes. But surely these will be those weeks. It’s late afternoon and the sun is still well above the trees. On a long, mild hill the truck seems to struggle until Adam drops a gear. Teddy feels sweat on his neck and in his little pocket of chest hair. Away to the right are miles of quiet forest, places where nobody ever goes, probably full of bugs and bears. He hates himself for not being able to drive.

Stopping is glorious, a chance to move and to fart and to breathe. They both balance on shin-high posts beside a trash can, performing a laughing parody of martial art, for no reason other than the joy of controlling their bodies, of coordinating, synchronizing. Slowly the game becomes a competition, who can jump one-legged from post to post without falling. Knowing their phones will eventually fail them, they buy a map and unfurl it on the truck’s hood, captain and first mate. They can go anywhere they want. Teddy plants a finger at the tiny pink words HOT SPRINGS, feeling the engine’s heat through the waxy paper. Adam steers them north and east, away from the coast where they spent their boyhoods. Inward, toward what comes next. As the sun finally hits the treetops, Teddy tears open a softened chocolate block and passes it to Adam by the row. It leaves sweet muck on their hands, and later, as he stares out the window into the dusk, Teddy realizes he is sucking his thumb. The more the light goes, the more it is his own face he sees in the glass, lit by the blue stereo glow, already a ghost.

Each town they pass through is smaller than the last, recognizable brands slowing to a trickle. They stop for the night on the outskirts of one place, at a bend in the river that looks deserted enough. Adam says they’re far enough from the town that no one will bother them but close enough that they can walk back to that bar they passed. They’d probably get served in a town that small. He parks beside a low track that runs into a sea of pebbles and what looks like a ford through the black water. Teddy can imagine it flooding. Even with the driving done he remains a passenger, watching as Adam unfolds the tarpaulin and ties its ends to the truck’s raised trunk. There’s only one good tree, so Adam squats by the river and lets the water fill one of his new canisters. Then he lugs it back to use as an anchor. Teddy is impressed, and determined to make his own contributions. He doesn’t want to end up with the domestic jobs while Adam does the fun stuff, but with no other options he gets the camp stove out of its mesh sack and tries to remember how the pieces slot together. The burner hisses when he finally lights it, a memory of childhood, of hunger and the happiness of being somewhere other than home. This, he thinks, will be the summer his mother finally leaves his father and goes off with Ron; maybe he will arrive back to find everything dealt with, like how he avoids the kitchen until he knows the dishes are done. He hears the click of a bourbon bottle opening for the first time. Adam has scored three from his cousin, Teddy doesn’t know on what terms. Fuck, Teddy says. We don’t have a can opener. Yeah we do, Adam says, handing him his utility knife. Teddy repeatedly pushes its hook through the metal lid, making notch after notch until he has torn a jagged mouth. Probably he did it wrong, but Adam doesn’t say anything.

They sit with scalding cans between their knees, two mouths making plenty of noise. In brief moments of quiet Teddy hears other things, birds crying in the dark and the persistent river. They pass the bourbon back and forth, and Teddy is happy. He is part of a team. You think we can make it to the Arctic? asks Adam. You mean the ocean? Yeah, Adam says. Jesus, Teddy says, how far is that? Adam’s voice is defensive. It doesn’t take that long, maybe a week. A week there and a week back, Teddy says doubtfully. He doesn’t mention how much it would cost in gas because then Adam would try to buy half the rifle off him again, which would defeat the purpose of having it. Plus he wonders what happens if they get bored, have a fight, or just get sick of each other. He leans back and looks at the stars beyond the tarp, telling himself to relax and enjoy the ride. It’s a lot of driving to do on your own, he says eventually. Maybe, Adam says, not taking the bait. Adam suggests again that they walk to the bar, but this time it sounds more hypothetical. Both of them have taken root in their camping chairs, staring like old men at the darkness that must be the river. By the time the bourbon is a quarter gone, they’re both half-asleep. They lay their mats and sleeping bags side by side in what Adam calls the camper, a rigid bubble bolted to the rear part of the truck. When Teddy closes his eyes he sees the blue flame from the camp stove, then the blue light from the car stereo, then the horses. How weird they looked, how fake, but they were definitely real.

In good publicity news:

  • Don Gillmor, author of On Oil, was interviewed in The Tyee. On Oil was also reviewed in the Miramichi Reader: “Well-researched . . . [and] warns us that should we keep worshipping at the Oil & Gas altar, our story won’t have a happy ending.”
  • Catherine Khordoc, translator of Mélikah Abdelmoumen’s Baldwin, Styron, and Me, was featured in an article on translation on the Carleton website.
  • A Way to Be Happy by Caroline Adderson was listed as one of CBC Books’ “14 Canadian short story collections to read for Short Story Month.”
  • Near Distance by Hanna Stoltenberg (trans. Wendy H. Gabrielsen) was reviewed in On the Seawall: “Stoltenberg’s dual control of and surrender to the psyche of her novel most impressed me.”
  • A Case of Matricide by Graeme Macrae Burnet was reviewed in the Winnipeg Free Press: “It’s depressing, intriguing and quite engrossing.”

The Bibliophile: Two Nice People

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It’s Short Story Month, and we’re celebrating with one of the excellent stories from the recent linked collection Old Romantics by Maggie Armstrong. For those who missed it, our managing editor Vanessa wrote an unbeatable introduction to the book in an earlier post, which accompanies an interview between Maggie and publicist Ahmed well worth checking out, so I shall simply say we hope you enjoy this slice of Old Romantics’ arresting charm.

Ashley Van Elswyk
Editorial Assistant

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Two Nice People

I was burying my little boy in sand when the policeman came right up to us. He cut out the sea and sky and I thought, what have I done now?

‘Hello there,’ he said, bending to our level. He was a shiny, compact kind of man, got up in hi-vis, shell tracksuit bottoms, sporty trainers; his summer uniform, I guessed. He didn’t wear the hat, but I knew from the badges on his arms and chest.

‘How are things here now don’t worry—because these days with everything people might see a policeman and think, Oh, I’m in trouble or something.’

‘Heh—no.’ I sat up straight and folded up my legs in such a way that he would not see any pubic hair. My swimming togs were very old and didn’t fit me properly. How many of them were here this time? I looked around but it was just this one policeman. ‘I’m Sergeant Pat Hourican,’ he was saying. Or Houlihan? O’Halloran? I didn’t really want to know his name.

‘I’m on duty up at the station on the main drag. And—hello there? This is your little fella?’

We both looked at the boy, buried to the waist. He was patting, imperiously, the sand around his body. Sand had got in everywhere, into his hair, his ears, eyebrows, nostrils. Once he noticed we were watching him he broke away and walked up to the dune to pick up stones and things. His only piece of clothing was a UV tank top with clouds and rainbows on it, and his little ass was coated in wet sand.

‘We’re obviously contented anyway, ha,’ the policeman said. He looked at me again. ‘Now, it’s a hot day, and very crowded out here.’ His eyes were bright like candle flames; his nose and cheeks were sunburned, as if all he did was patrol beaches.

‘Are ye visitors to the area, or . . . ?’

‘Yes. I come here all the time, I grew up here. We’re not just on holidays.’ I wanted to convey my separateness out here, and the policeman nodded; he understood.

‘I hear you, not exactly blow-ins.’ He edged closer on a taut calf muscle. ‘So. I just had a call there at the station, and I came to check if you were alright.’

‘Oh!’ Somebody came, I thought.

‘A call from a gentleman you may have met on the beach today.’

A gentleman. I couldn’t think of any gentleman.

‘A man who was a little bit concerned.’

‘Oh dear.’

The policeman nodded regretfully. ‘About the two of ye here, yes.’

‘Oh.’

The policeman looked inside me now, and I felt very peculiar, very bad, like I was being poisoned by my own friends. The boy was busy, collecting shells, seaweed, bits of rope and other debris. I saw the sleepy crowds, the tide, white horses, shimmering sea. Our patch of things. Mangled towels, opened suncream, sand-coated flask. Lunchbox, no lid; chocolate-smeared Wagon Wheel wrappers, one filled with a sand pie. In the game, you had to eat the sand pie and be sick. But I hadn’t played the game this time. Why had I not played the game this time? My book, a classic love story I was keen to finish and have read, was discarded, face down on its pages.

‘I’m sorry to have disturbed you, but I’m just responding to the call,’ the policeman went on. ‘So I hope it’s OK if I have a word with you here, ask a few questions. Just to find out what the story is.’

He took a pad of paper from a pocket in his jacket and he gave me a gallant little nod.

It was a half-truth, that I grew up here. We used to come here on our holidays, to a farm along an avenue where sheepdogs leapt, blackberries clustered in the briars, and bright-green cow-dotted fields, hiding flat white mushrooms, led right down to the rocky shore, and to the sea; and on hazy afternoons straw bales were tossed by the farmer onto trailers and the air was thick with pollen and wild perfumes.

The previous winter, I’d ended up very suddenly alone with my small son. Now it was time for freedom, time to be seen—maybe to be given some reward for tough endurance. Always I felt owed some happy time, some crock of gold, had no doubt but that it awaited us. The Airbnb, a bedroom and kitchenette, was clean and tasteful, and the farm just up the road looked much the same as I’d remembered it. They let us pick eggs and give a carrot to the horse. The weather was incredible, in fact it was a dangerous heatwave, with red warnings on the news. Every day we dragged ourselves into the car, and to the beach to cool off in the sea.

Today was the hottest day. In France, that week, four people died, and two in Spain. Here, people went around in a daze.

Up on the cliffs, the cars were sprawling from the car park onto the road and grass and golf links. The bins were overflowing, and long drooping queues of colourfully dressed families trailed from the Mr Whippy and chip vans. CAUTION, BEWARE OF BEING CUT OFF BY INCOMING TIDES, the sign read. We parked in a ditch and, holding hands, climbed the steep path down the cliffside to the beach. A sign said: DANGER, SUDDEN DROP BELOW.

On trips alone with my small son, to a beach or park, on planes or train journeys, I used to go up close to other families or friendly looking people. I had a beady eye for friendship on these traipses, for that gleam of openness and understanding that just might lead to company. At this beach, I pulled the boy around, checking faces under hats until we found a spot. It was a whole extended family. Mums, dads, aunts, uncles and kids, passing around crisp packets and soft drinks. The women stretched out on towels, the dads having conversations looking straight ahead of them, out to sea, the boys throwing a ball or digging a moat. They had castle moulds, pirate ships, sticky rackets, balls, snorkels—and we hadn’t thought of bringing any beach toys. I placed our bags in their periphery.

DANGER, COLLAPSING SAND DUNES. CAUTION, INCOMING TIDES. I unrolled our towels, shook the sand away. I set out the boy’s lunchbox: a peanut-butter sandwich sliced in triangles; four apple quarters turning brown; two Wagon Wheels, both already melted in their packets. And his turquoise water flask, decorated with pink octopi. The flask was stainless steel and the lunchbox bamboo, so—doing everything the right way here.

We had absolutely everything we needed. I looked around for something missing, something to stoke my anxiety, nothing came to mind. I got hold of him, coated him with Factor 50, put his cap on, stretched his limbs into his swimming trunks and rainbow top. He took his swimming trunks back off again, and sat down to play. He took his cap off, threw it away. Sun lit up his golden hair, and the shadows of his long eyelashes swept his face in lavish streaks.

I took out my paperback and looked for my page. I had forgotten water. His flask was full, but none for me. I looked up at the cliff, and the distance made my mouth feel dry. I lay back under the burning sun. You can’t have everything. I reached for his flask, but he got to it first.

Carefully, the boy unscrewed the flask, looked inside it, then tipped it upside down into the sand. He shook it hard to empty out the last few drops, then buried all the water, squatting right into his ankles. I unstuck my tongue from the roof of my mouth and pulled myself to standing.

‘Come on.’ I took his hand. The tide was so far out it took forever, pebbles pushing at our heels, before we reached the water. We waded out and farther out. The sea was shallow, murky, strewn with seaweed and dead crabs. We went a little deeper, then with his arms around my neck and his legs around my body we plunged in. The waves surged and tossed him up and down and he broke away, gasping, flapping his arms and kicking his legs until he was completely separate from me, gulping and spitting seawater, laughing, showing every tooth inside his gums. I’ve never had the strength to test it, but it seems there is no limit to the fun this boy is capable of having. He snips up cables, opens teddies with a joyfulness he shouldn’t be deprived of. Sometimes he bursts out laughing in his sleep.

There is not much to report about the day now that I’ve sat down to try. The sun shone, birds called; I worried about the sun, about sunburn, I worried that I didn’t worry half as much as someone should. I worried about all the wrong things. The group beside us, they knew how to live—their bored and diligently playing children, a woman drinking Diet Coke, reading from her phone, on her back a tattoo of a bat with its wings spread.

He was running up and down, playing in the water of a little stream that trickled from the cliffs into the sea. It occurred to me that I should put his cap back on, and his swimming trunks. The sun shone down, and I turned from right to left to let it cook me on both sides. I felt its hot rays cutting through the parting on my scalp. Fizzy drink, I thought. Iced lemonade. Cold beer. Ice cubes. Cold glass of water.

The men, arms draped around knees, had their conversations. Talked of these extremes in temperature. Of boats at sea—or county councils. Planning applications, objections to the plans. They talked about the schools, they talked about the coaching—the hoops you had to go through. Most likely all of that. One had dark hair. I moved along the towel to get a closer look. He had a beard. He had a beard and yet—the face. Easy-going—small, hooked nose, cheeks stretched now, dark impressive beard—eyes that seemed sad, or just afraid. He was heavier now, but distinguished, by the beard, kind of—time had passed, but he’d remember me as well. I’d already pulled myself to sitting and was clambering forwards on the sand.

‘Excuse me? Hi?’

They turned to look at me.

‘Hi. Did you study Arts in UCD? Ten years ago—no, fifteen.’

The bearded man leaned back. His friend or brother glanced from me to him, the bearded man pointed at himself but I knew already. His face, up close, distorted into someone else’s.

‘Sorry,’ he said, looking at his friend or brother. ‘We’re from—!’ The name of a town. I hadn’t heard of it. His friendly Northern accent forgave everything. They laughed it away. I laughed back, and they turned back to face the sea. The boy at his marsh of sand, pouring in the seawater, mixing up his elements. Running to and fro in an ecstatic hurry.

I held up the book to block the sun, checking on him with one eye. My novel was insufferably long and heavy in my hand. I’d been reading this one for about four years, even though it was a classic and a bestseller. The book jacket, its technicolour drawing of a frightened woman running from a burning house, had come apart from being

carried around. I’d seen the Netflix adaptation, so the story held no mystery anymore, I knew who murdered who and why they did it, knew there was a shipwreck coming, two shipwrecks, that in the end a human skeleton would be fished out of the bottom of the sea.

I read a paragraph from start to finish, and the effort could have killed me. Half the words were cast in shadow, and the tiny print felt harmful to my eyes. The boy was lining up some rocks along the stream now, rushing, in great hurry.

DANGER, GOLF BALLS FLYING. I thought to take a little break from looking, so that I could be right here, just sink into this time. One eye was still open; now it drooped and rested closed and everything was calm. This way I could employ my hearing at its most acute. I could appreciate the heat, and air, the sound of waves, for what they were. DANGER, OR CAUTION, BEWARE OF BEING CUT OFF BY INCOMING TIDES. You can really open all your senses, absorb the moment, take time, when you’re allowed to close your eyes. I stretched an arm, found the book, and placed the pages on my face.

‘DO YOU HAVE A SMALL BOY, THREE, BLOND??? A SMALL BOY, THREE, BLOND???’

Loud like torchlight or a speeding car. I sat up.

He was on his hunkers, talking in a phone.

‘SHE’S HERE, I’VE FOUND HER.’

Pink man, yellow thinning hair. Short, doughy build. He had a job at hand. He didn’t have a whistle round his neck but it seemed that in some other situation he would have had a whistle, and a first-aid pack, and ID.

‘HE’S WITH US, HE’S OVER BY THE WATER!’

The beach had emptied. I reached around for things, then threw myself to standing. My legs were stilts. My legs weren’t working properly. Half-words fell out—not what I’d have said if I’d had time to collect all my thoughts. But I understood the urgency, and I would not begrudge these people their distress. One foot found the sand, and then another, and I ran, with difficulty, on stilts.

My little boy was standing, seeming very little and confused, at the shore, beside a woman in a sarong. She was talking in a high-pitched voice about the water, eyes wide in mine, with her hair neatly brushed and her hand on the shoulder of my little boy. I pulled him in and picked him up.

*

The policeman wasn’t particularly enjoying any of this either, I was to understand.

‘And do ye mind me asking, are ye alone together on your holidays?’

‘Oh yes. But lots of help around. Lots of family.’

‘Oh yes surely, good to hear, it takes a village doesn’t it.’ He made some scribbles in his notepad.

‘A village.’

‘Well to rear a child, doesn’t it.’

‘Oh, sorry, yes. You’re telling me!’

‘And how did ye get down here, was it in the car today?’

‘We parked illegally, Garda.’

‘Well I think now you wouldn’t be the first, heh heh.’

‘No, heh.’

‘The car park is choc-a-bloc, alright.’ He seemed to look inside me, with a tilt, and the most inveigling compassion.

‘Are you alright?’ He looked in my pupils and gave a quick high-pitched laugh.

‘Garda,’ I said. ‘What do you want?’

‘Right. Well, this afternoon I received a phone call. What happened was you, ehm, your child, came to the attention of a gentleman on the beach here, and a lady, two nice people. They said to me that you were there with a book, that you had your face inside the book. Physically, inside the book. Not just looking at the book, but unconscious, underneath the book.’

‘I was reading, Garda.’

‘OK, listen, when you got up off the ground, you seemed disoriented. They said you weren’t making any sense, they said—look. OK—I’ll tell you. They said you looked a bit dishevelled.’

‘Dishevelled.’ We both looked down at my appearance, which was of course dishevelled, a worry almost. All our stuff. Scattered everywhere. I shut my knees together and hugged them to my chest.

‘But look sure, you seem very well. And he’s a great lad.’

‘I am very well. I’m—I’ve just been burying my kid in sand here.’

I reached out for my beach bag, and opened it, and found my sunglasses. Tears burst out behind the frames while he told me about his kids.

‘They are a handful, boys. I’ve two myself at home, I have your sympathy, I’m sure.’

‘They’d send you to an early grave,’ I wept, laughing. Tears burst from my face. He wasn’t to know.

‘Oh, you’re preaching to the converted you are.’ He shut his notepad.

Before he left, I asked him where the two nice people were. I would like to thank them one more time for coming to our rescue. He pointed at the cliffs, where the rocks were clustered in a jagged ring, where the man and woman had been watching. I shook out our towels.

On the way home, we stopped and bought the last remaining can of 7up and two Cornettos from the petrol station. The moment we arrived back in the Airbnb, it filled with sand. I stood at the shower, rinsing down the boy, who twirled and laughed under the warm spray. I scrubbed him clean, washed the sand into the plughole, dried him off, then unwrapped his ice cream while he hopped from foot to foot with his arms outstretched.

That night he watched YouTube Kids while I finished all the bottle in the fridge. Then I uncorked something special, organic and spumante I’d saved specially for the holiday. The evening darkened, the boy fell asleep. I picked up the phone.

‘No, this time I’m going to ask you some questions!’ I was on the grainy bedspread, in déshabillé, dishevelled if you like, white flesh exposed to nobody, hair tangled in saltwater, a cone of melted ice cream tipped over on the bedside table. ‘I’m going to want phone numbers,’ I said. ‘Names and phone numbers!’ The boy slept on like a little angel. I drank the wine down to its last few vinegary droplets and flopped back, laughing, and waves crashed on my skull.

In good publicity news:

  • UNMET by stephanie roberts was reviewed in the Adroit Journal: “One emerges from the agile linguistic theatrics of this book [UNMET] feeling requited, met, seen, and inspired—a sensation that moves from writer to reader.”
  • On Oil by Don Gillmor was excerpted in The Walrus.

The Bibliophile: The ghost in the machine

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Want to get new excerpts, musings, and more from The Bibliophile right away? Sign up for our weekly online newsletter here!

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It surprised me that the most riveting book I’ve read this year is on a topic I knew nothing about and didn’t think I would care to know much about anyway. But Don Gillmor hooked me. That won’t surprise anyone who has read him before. In On Oil, Gillmor, a journalist and former roughneck, takes us through the rise and fall of the oil industry. He had a front row seat to Alberta’s oil boom in the ’70s while working on the oil rigs and he uses that perspective to show how it transformed the province and the wide-ranging influence oil has had across the world. It has given some countries immense wealth and power. It has also corrupted governments, started wars, and worsened our environment.

Photo: On Oil by Don Gillmor. Designed by Ingrid Paulson.

Reading this book I learned that one of the first oil companies was started by a devout Baptist and some of the biggest oil companies were run by Christian evangelicals, which aided in building the mythology of oil as the key to a kingdom on earth. And now, as Gillmor says, “we find ourselves in a landscape that looks increasingly like the Book of Revelation. ‘A third of the earth was burnt up, and a third of the trees were burnt up, and all green grass was burnt up.’”

Please enjoy this short excerpt from On Oil, which will be released on April 22.

Ahmed Abdalla,
Publicist

***

Babylon

In boardrooms in Houston, Calgary, Kuwait, and a dozen other oil capitals, and on the floor of the New York and Chicago Mercantile Exchanges, oil was a global chess game where commodity futures were sold and bartered, oil shipped and traded. Millions of barrels lurched across the globe each day, traders hunched over streaming charts, puzzling over contracts for difference. Over the years, oil has won wars, started others, been a force for nationalism and colonization, and provided a stubborn mythology. It is the one true global religion. A glimpse of oil’s reach can be seen in America’s oil industry. Under Joe Biden, it produced 13.3 million barrels per day, enough to meet the US’s own needs. But in 2023 it imported 8.51 million barrels per day (bpd) from dozens of countries, and exported 10.15 million bpd to 173 countries. The oil network envelops the world in a complex web of shipping and refining capacity and capability, depending on cost-effectiveness and the grade of oil. Part of this is economic; it can be cheaper to import from countries with lower labour and capital costs and fewer environmental regulations. And part of it is chemistry; the heavy, sour (high sulphur content) oil that the US was importing from Venezuela and Mexico when it still needed to import oil requires a specific kind of refinery. Some of the refineries on the Gulf coast are equipped to process that oil (along with Canadian bitumen), as opposed to the light, sweet oil that Texas produces. Refineries take years to build and are expensive—between US$5 and 15 billion. With the exception of a small North Dakota refinery that came online in 2020, no US refineries have been built since 1976. Past the economics and chemistry, there are the geopolitics. Countries (Russia, Saudi Arabia, the US) sell oil at advantageous prices to other countries to gain influence and status. It is the world’s most pervasive diplomatic tool.

Photo: We’re hiring a new sales coordinator! See our website for more details.

Canada’s oil landscape is equally byzantine. Canadian pipelines tend to run south rather than east, so Ontario and Quebec get their oil from an evolving patchwork of sources that shifts depending on economics and politics. Since 1988, eastern Canada has imported more than $500 billion in foreign oil, coming from the US, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Nigeria, Norway, and others. The landscape can shift quickly. In 2012, Quebec got 92 percent of its oil from Kazakhstan, Angola, and Algeria, and just 1 percent from Alberta. Five years later, it was getting 44 percent of its oil from Alberta, the result of Enbridge’s Line 9 pipeline.

It binds us all. Oil has a pulse, it evolves and migrates, transforming cities and governments, entire countries. It fuelled economic growth and triggered recessions and gave us the romance of the open road. But at its source, in Texas and Oklahoma and Louisiana and in camps in the Arctic, and outside Medicine Hat, it was men trudging onto the drilling floor, labouring in the heat or cold amid a symphony of engine noise, wrestling with drill pipe, spinning chains, tongs and slips, the kelly hose bobbing above them as they punched another hole in the earth. Even for us, oil remained an abstraction. I never saw it; there were no dramatic gushers, black oil spewing from the earth, coating everything. It powered our cars and homes and was used in the manufacture of a thousand products, from plastics to fertilizers to Aspirin. It powered our lives: We are Hydrocarbon Man, Homo Oleum. Yet it remains unseen, the ghost in the machine.

***

After graduating from university, I worked on an oil rig for a hundred straight days, with what was probably the oldest crew in the oil patch, weathered, gnarled men in their late sixties, one in his seventies, ancient for rig work, their lives a country and western song. Pete, the wobbly seventy-two-year-old derrickman, came home to find his wife gone, along with all the furniture, appliances, and curtains. There was a note on the floor: “Your dinner’s in the oven.” There was no oven. The driller was a ropy-muscled troll who had worked on the killing floor of a meat-packing plant but quit finally, saying it took too much of you, all that death. My fellow roughneck was a farmer whose modest crop had been lost to drought. He was in his late sixties, with a deeply lined face, a face that could hold a spring rain, as my grandmother might have said. Between connections he would roll a cigarette and walk to the edge of the lease and smoke and stare at the horizon.

Photo: Check out Don Gillmor’s new feature in Maclean’s.

I went up in the derrick when Pete was drunk or too hungover to climb the thirty metres onto his perch. We were south of Calgary and I was ten storeys off the ground, a view of the Rockies to the west and limitless prairie to the east, farms and ranches laid out like a Mondrian painting, a glorious solitude.

With my first paycheque I bought a plane ticket to Europe, then counted the days like a convict. Four months later, I was sitting on a beach on the Greek island of Crete, blobs of sticky oil dotting the sand around me. A tanker carrying crude oil from Libya had run aground off the south coast of Crete and here was the residue. Only two months earlier, the Amoco Cadiz had split apart off the Brittany coast in France, spilling 230,000 tonnes of oil, at that point the largest spill in history. Twenty thousand birds were killed and millions of sea creatures. Two months after the spill, six thousand French soldiers were still cleaning up the coastline.

The 1970s was a banner decade for oil tanker spills. More happened in that decade than any decade before or since. It was peak spill, with an alarming 788 of them (by contrast, the 2010s saw 63 spills). Millions of tonnes spilled into the seas. The world was awash in oil.

***

In good publicity news:

  • Don Gillmor, author of On Oil, was interviewed on TVO’s The Agenda, and wrote the article “Why Trump Needs Canadian Oil” for Maclean’s.
  • Ripper was mentioned in The Hill Times: “A bracing reminder of some of the reputations Poilievre has ruined, the malicious fictions he has promoted, [and] the tiresome slogans he stitches into every utterance.” Mark Bourrie was also featured in Vancouver CityNews’s Bookshelf.
  • Question Authority by Mark Kingwell was reviewed in the New York Journal of Books: “A master of words . . . [Kingwell] writes with deep affection and hope for humanity and openly shares his darkest and brightest moments along life’s bumpy road.”
  • A few of our titles appear in the Literary Review of Canada’s May 2025 issue:
    • Review of On Book Banning by Ira Wells: “Persuasively explains how book banning reduces and devalues art and how it constitutes an attack on intellectual autonomy and on ‘your right to determine the future of your own mind.’”
    • Review of Baldwin, Styron, and Me by Mélikah Abdelmoumen (trans. Catherine Khordoc): “Demonstrates the good faith conversations being held within a cultural scene that is both local and transnational in its outlook.”
    • Review of UNMET by stephanie roberts: “With a resolute inward stare, Roberts reveals the cumulative nature of life.”

The Bibliophile: Romance is a season in hell

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***

I’ve recently returned from my first London Book Fair, an event I found as chaotic, and stimulating, and frustrating, and inspiring, and just plain old fun as Dan had indicated I might. Talking with editors, agents, and translators from all over the world gives me only the paradoxical sense of its smallness: no matter the size of their organization or their territory, the language of their books or the size of the advances their authors command, everyone working in publishing faces a comically similar set of problems practical and existential both. And no matter how fatigued by the whirlwind of interaction or taciturn their sales strategy, it’s easy to get a smile from someone simply by asking about the last book they really loved, or the one they’ve just encountered that they can’t wait to go home and read. Books! We love them! What could be hard about that?

Well, for one, there’s the persistent need to successfully articulate that ardor. There’s no question I find more difficult to answer than “What are you looking for?” And there’s little else anyone wants to know about an acquisitions editor. Poetry’s not, for once, the problem: After reading the hundreds and hundreds of manuscripts submitted during two open submission periods, I’ve settled on “an original and urgent relationship with language.” As anyone who’s encountered a two-year-old knows, the problem with answers is that they beget more questions, so: What do I mean by original? That I’ve never seen it before, or have encountered it only rarely and think there should be more of it. (Thus far no one’s asked what I’ve never seen before, though I would appreciate that level of faith in my clairvoyance.) By urgent: the sense that this utterance had to be made, that the poem is the only way the poet could find to stop speaking, or—and this is what I tend to prefer—the only way to start.

When it comes to fiction, my instinctual answer inclines towards breathtakingly vapid. I’m supposed to be able to specify subgenres and subjects and the sorts of authors I prefer, but the truth is that I just want it to be good, and good . . . I guess I know it when I see it. By the third day of LBF, exhausted by the frenetic pace of my schedule and slightly alarmed by an ill-fitting manuscript I’d just glanced at after feeling confident its representative and I were simpatico, I finally just said to one agent, “I want the sentences to be good.” Luckily she turned out to be a poet as well, and only laughed and nodded and turned straight to a page in her catalog, knowing what I meant.

In our age of malignant certainty, when we have perfected the practice of judging just about everything and everyone we encounter by cover or codification, maybe failures of discernment aren’t the worst sin. But they don’t make for very interesting insight into publishing, and so I’ll beg off answering via poetry once again: “No ideas but in things,” Dr Williams wrote, so let me present this thing. What I’m looking for is Maggie Armstrong and her debut story collection, Old Romantics. This is the first fiction title I acquired start to finish, from soliciting the manuscript to signing the contract. It is simultaneously a book of hideously entertaining—this being the exact descriptor that caught my eye in the catalog of the inimitable Tramp Press, Maggie’s UK publisher—literary short stories, wickedly funny in their honesty about love, sex, family, class, ambition, work, motherhood, and a linked collection with the emotional and narrative heft of a novel.

Photo: Old Romantics by Maggie Armstrong. Cover designed by Fiachra McCarthy.

The stories in Old Romantics all concern a woman named Margaret and follow her chronologically, if without strict continuity, through first love, first bad date, first job, first extremely bad date . . . Characters, as well as jokes, recur even as the narration switches between first and third-person. These are stories—and a heroine—that doggedly insist on Romantic, and romantic, ideals, yet repeatedly defer to the illusory nature thereof with cold-eyed Modernist clarity, and then leap agilely into a postmodern metafictional mode to arrive at an unvarnished and complex portrait of a single woman trying to understand, and to be, exactly who she is. It’s a Künstlerroman unlike any I’ve read before, about a female artist who must first come of age, and then to terms, with the life she’s been assigned by virtue of her gender: only after all of that can she come to her calling. It’s a trajectory little described, perhaps very well because so many women who aspire to lives in the arts are derailed along the way, and in Armstrong’s hands it is moving and funny and a triumph of invention and simple determination.

Did I mention funny? Witness fictional Margaret struggling with her prose style whilst the real Maggie demonstrates an incomparable metafictional wit (emphasis mine): “I found the sight of such bland sentences distressing—they all began with I, and ended me—and slammed the notepad shut as if its contents had offended me”. “It was a lightweight story I was working on,” Margaret continues, “to do with infantile and everyday desires, a slow descent into disappointment, with attempted anal penetration at the close.” The marshalling of syntactical expectation as the list progresses from the benign to the shocking, the soft chime of rhyme (slow / close; infantile / anal), the trochaic crescendo of “anal penetration at the close” to end the sentence, combine in an intelligence, ironic wit, and musicality I can’t ever seem to get enough of. In another story, a youthful Margaret makes some bad decisions and finds herself alone with a more experienced, intoxicated and/or unscrupulous man, a confusion of agency and passivity that Armstrong articulates through a blackly comic grammatical enactment: “This had taken place. Patch had had sex with me.” And throughout, brilliant description and metaphor abound: “A fluffy female bathrobe hulked around the door”; “She gazed back at him like a sedated hawk”; “Her chest banged like a broken toy.”

What am I saying here? The sentences are good. Really, really good. They are what I’m looking for, and I couldn’t be more proud that we can call them ours.

Vanessa Stauffer,
Managing Editor

***

Old Romantics comes out on Tuesday—just in time for April Fools’ Day! To celebrate the upcoming release, here’s publicist Ahmed with an interview with Maggie Armstrong.

Photo: Maggie Armstrong. Credit: Bríd O’Donovan.

A Biblioasis Interview with Maggie Armstrong

Can you tell me a bit about yourself and how this collection came about?

Well I have been writing short stories for about ten years, possibly fifteen. I used to perform at spoken word things around Dublin, but I was working as a journalist at the time. It wasn’t until 2020 that I actually started to publish stuff. This book came about from those short stories. A publisher came to me, had read one in a magazine called Banshee and asked if I had any more. That was Sarah from Tramp Press and that led to this collection.

I heard you had made some changes to the stories since the collection was first published in Ireland last year. Could you tell me about that?

Oh, sure. I was sort of thinking they’d be subtle changes that nobody would notice. They were so subtle.

So why did you make them anyway?

Because I’m never happy with anything. I will perennially rewrite everything. I feel terrible for editors that I’ve worked with. It feels like I’m disregarding all of their hard work and insights, but I just can’t help myself once I get my hands on something. A text seems to read differently and sound differently every time you look at it.

I knew that while I was revising it that it was sort of fruitless because I’ll never be happy with a published book. I like getting up and reading stories and I always change words here and there every time I read something live. A text remains malleable to me forever.

How would you define an old romantic?

An old romantic is a damn hapless fool who continually authors their own destruction by way of repeated mistakes and self-delusion. Or a fantasist who’s swallowed a love potion and been let loose on the town. This kind of character is not great to have in your personal life, but it’s a rich study for fiction.

I can see that in Margaret. A lot of the stories seem to test Margaret’s sense of reality with her ideals of romance. What kind of role does romance have in Margaret’s life and what does this say about her?

I think romance drives all of her actions and appetite. It dictates her decisions and it often robs her of agency. Feeling controls her rather than thought. Some of us are driven by a feeling rather than by practical considerations, which can be interesting to examine. To follow the path of a life somehow enslaved to desire and feeling and what possibly amounts simply to dopamine, the hormones, the chemicals that are sometimes leading us one way or another.

What kind of change do you see in Margaret as the stories progress?

There’s a book that I really adore by Elizabeth Bowen called The Death of the Heart. It was published in 1938 and it’s to do with a young woman called Portia whose life is on the margins and who moves to London and falls in love and is jilted and rejected by her much older lover and she has to grow up overnight and realize just how cold and hard this world is. And I think that happens to the anti-hero of my book. The heart is shattered halfway through. We see as soon as Walls comes on the scene, he’s a real menace to her belief system, and he really dismantles this fairytale of being swept off her feet. He dismantles it and leaves her high and dry and puts her life at risk in a speeding car. He is a destructive person given to extremes. That’s when we see a change happen. I think the axis turn of those stories is pivotal. Once there is a situation where there is control and cruelty in a relationship, nothing is ever going to be the same. And then of course our protagonist goes from out of that frying pan into the fire of Sergio who she has her children with.

It’s like the labyrinth, or the snake pit, where you go in and cannot find your way out. You know the Minotaur?

The myth where Theseus goes down into a labyrinth to fight the creature?

Yes, exactly. In the underworld of dates and liaisons this book tries to depict, I feel like it’s all Minotaurs and all monsters and there is a maze you’re trying to get out of. Romance is a season in hell from which you emerge a broken and changed person. Oh, that sounds so terrible.

I’m wondering if you could also speak about the form of these stories and the genre of autofiction in general. These stories obviously invite comparisons to your own life, but they also take metafictional turns with sly comments from the narrator or characters acknowledging that this is fiction. It’s a unique take on the genre.

I love a first person voice. I love the intimacy and the immediacy of slipping into someone’s consciousness like that, and indeed unconscious, and moonlighting as them. I have just adored, and maybe I shouldn’t even start mentioning names because then I can get carried away, and I have mixed relationships with all of them, and these aren’t necessarily my influences, but I’ve loved Annie Ernaux, Rachel Cusk, Deborah Levy, Ben Lerner. I’ve loved Karl Ove Knausgaard and the whole phenomenon of the life saga that he put on paper. That great project of oversharing that he went about really struck home with so many people.

I was never able to write a story until I did it in a first person voice. I had tried out the omniscient narrator thing and it went very badly. It always read like some Edna O’Brien pastiche, like I was just copying from my literature textbooks. The first person felt more like a guilty pleasure and I never believed anyone would publish it. I never thought it was something that anyone would take seriously. I felt it was somehow frowned upon in literary circles to write autofiction because maybe there’s an assumption that if you can only write your own story that you lack empathy, that you’re not able to imagine what other lives and communities are like, or maybe that you lack imagination because you simply can’t think of any other plots. Or just that you’re in love with yourself, because you find yourself so fascinating that you would genuinely be content to spend your entire day narrating your own life.

So all of these felt like obstacles to calling this real work. Then I just went for it. I thought to hell, I’m really enjoying writing this. And the finished product has no resemblance to my own life. It may be inspired or be drawn from it and the only reason for that is because I have pure unrestricted access to my own experience and consciousness. I can access it just sitting here and through my extremely unreliable memories and notebooks. It’s all there and it’s very rich material I find. I’ve always found life hard. It never came naturally to me, just being a person in the world. I have often gotten into scrapes and funny situations. I was exhausted by just my own escapades or my own sagas that I just thought: listen, at least I can get a bit of copy out of them.

I suppose writing more what you’d call autobiographical fiction is a bit of a highwire act. And it’s a dark art. I can’t vouch for the ethics of fictionalising the real, as opposed to pure invention. You have to be very careful what goes in your stories and what stays out. I’ve learned just because something terrible happened does not mean that it’s fair game for fiction.

You say you could only start writing in the first person, but some of the stories are in third person. Why the switch for some of them?

Honestly, I became disturbed by the material that I was reading. I no longer wanted to be associated with the author of these stories and did not like the tone I was taking. I felt particularly the story “Trouble” where you have extraordinary upheaval and cognitive dissonance, with a young woman, aka my fictional alter ego Margaret, who’s having an affair with a real charlatan and at the same time entering into a very serious relationship with a highly unsuitable married father of two. Reading this kind of dark testimony, it was like the room started to turn. I felt I couldn’t any longer inhabit this voice because it was all just so odd. The narrator’s level of dislocation from her actions did not feel honorable. So in order to process it in the form of a story, I needed to tell it in the third person. Does that make any sense?

Photo: First page of “Trouble” in Old Romantics.

Almost like you needed some distance to really be able to tell it?

Then even the distance of the third person didn’t feel quite right. The protagonist’s name is Margaret so clearly some of these things kind of almost happened to me, but then that’s weird to talk about yourself in the third person. Children talk about themselves in the third person, and mad Shakespearean characters. It was just an odd voice. That’s not to say I’m admitting that these are entirely myself. It’s a very distorted claustrophobic universe which happens to be very familiar to me and similar to the tiny universe of Dublin where I’ve lived my whole life.

Also there’s something about an “I” voice that’s hard to pull off, where you have to remain sort of likeable to your reader and vaguely charming to hold their attention and keep their commitment to the book. The kind of stuff Margaret was up to was not likeable nor commendable.

Margaret also spends a lot of time trying to be a writer and thinking about all these important authors. The classic Irish ones (Joyce, Beckett, O’Casey) and the Russians (Dostoevsky, Chekhov). But she seems disenchanted with them or maybe just the idea of them. What kind of influence have they had on you?

All of the big books that appear in these stories come in for a reason. I grew up with parents who read constantly and voraciously, particularly my mother. Her face was behind a very big book as she sat on the sofa most of my childhood, or she was howling laughing or reading passages aloud. Her favourite outlet from her four children was going to her book club. We grew up reading a lot and time was frittered away with literature.

Then I went to study English, and I had quite a lot of attention difficulties at school. It was a very odd choice to go do something academic because I love doing practical things and I always struggle to sit at a desk, but I read English for four years at Trinity. Nothing but books. Weighted and crushed by books. I have to a comical degree been haunted by books my whole life.

Both of my parents died in the last few years and we recently dismantled their bookshelves, which was a very sad and truly physically demanding job. Carrying boxes of books with my children buckled in the back and trying to manage everyone and all the books. I continue to not know how to keep track of books everywhere I go. This is kind of long-winded, but I’m not sure how to see that whole tradition of Western literature now and the great doorstoppers that we grew up with. They were written by men of letters, let’s say Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Dickens, who had no domestic responsibilities, who likely had servants, maids, cooks, secretaries in some cases. They didn’t have the internet, they had few distractions and the intricacies of their sentences within these formally robust paragraphs testify to that. I’m just interested that the novel form has held for so long and that we’re still expected, while our lives are so fragmented in so many ways, and our attention is so divided and splintered, we’re still expected to make sense of the world through the bastion of the novel, a form which was invented in far more fallow circumstances.

Is that why you chose to write linked short stories as opposed to a novel? I suppose people could read this as a novel, since it follows the same character, but they are distinct and also stand on their own.

Yeah, they’re great for short attention spans. A short story is perfect for the age of TikTok, a platform I have never in my life even glimpsed. I’m too distracted by other things. But I think the short story form sort of chose me. Many writers of course begin with short fiction in their apprenticeship. Same as with any craft. My nephew is studying carpentry at school—he started by making a spice rack, not a bed or a cabinet. I will one day soon make a cabinet, I’m sure of it, but I would never have got anywhere with a project more mammoth than a spice rack. Actually I was doing both short stories and novels at the same time, I’ve written two novels that I’m never going to publish, they ended up so unhinged and full of plot holes. With stories you can free yourself of the wider responsibilities of world-building. Then it was just a happy accident that Old Romantics turned out to be a linked collection. One of my fears was that all the stories were all similar and had a similar emotional thrust and that the same character was recurring. They all had the same obsessive, monomaniacal quality. And actually, that turns out to be not the worst thing about it. That’s what has really hit home with a lot of people. People enjoy tracing the adventures of short story characters as much as they do those of any series. I mean I really love John Updike’s Maples stories, Jenny Zhang’s Sour Heart, Alice Munro’s The Beggar Maid, all linked collections.

What are you hoping people take away from reading these stories?

I hope people take nothing but a pleasant memory of being lost in a book briefly.

***

In good publicity news:

The Bibliophile: Under Pressure

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***

This week we’ve invited Ottawa-based lawyer and journalist Mark Bourrie, author of Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre, to contribute today’s Bibliophile. As an election call draws near and copies of the book make their way onto shelves (and into the Globe and Mail), Mark offers a brief look at how he came to write this political biography.

Ashley Van Elswyk
Editorial Assistant

***

Photo: Finished copies of Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre by Mark Bourrie. Cover designed by Ingrid Paulson.

Writing books is a bad habit that I’ve wanted to break for a long time. I started doing it just after I quite smoking. Authors chase their own kinds of dragons. The next book always seems like such a good idea. Then it comes out into a world where your countrymen, patriots all now, camp out overnight to buy American thrillers and tell you on social media that they’re certainly not going to buy your book. The subject is too unpleasant.

You learn to live with that. After all, your idea for that next book is a “can’t miss.” And that’s in normal times. Which these aren’t.

Last May, Dan Wells and I sat down together on a lovely spring day on the patio of a coffee shop in Walkerville, the best part of Windsor. I was in town to launch Crosses in the Sky: Jean de Brébeuf and the Destruction of Huronia, a biography of a mystic missionary priest that’s really an account of how European-Indigenous relations were toxic from the start.

The geography of this story is important. We were an easy walk from Detroit. My grandparents met in that city. I’ve got cousins all over Michigan. There’s a statue of Lewis Cass, my first cousin eight times removed, downtown. (He was Michigan’s governor and the first Democratic Party nominee to fail to win a presidential election). Windsor is Detroit’s southern suburb. It’s a place that is neither fully in Canada or the States.

Photo: Mark Bourrie reading from Crosses in the Sky at Biblioasis Bookshop for the Biblioasis Spring Launch event, May 2024.

It seemed clear to me that the story arc of 2024 was the return of Donald Trump. Not only was he coming back, but the Constitution bound him to just one term. Electoral politics would not be a factor in White House decisions.

In Canada, the Prime Minister had stayed too long, as they usually do. Conventional wisdom said Pierre Poilievre, the nerd equivalent of a hockey goon, couldn’t possibly lose. It wasn’t just Poilievre’s campaign skills—admittedly, the best we’ve seen in modern memory—but also the new media environment that gave him the advantage. Toxic media in a toxic time.

And, I yammered at Dan after my eighth or ninth coffee of the day, Canada—at least at the federal level—was one of the last Western countries to resist the movement fronted by Trump, Putin, Orban, Wilders, Farage, Le Pen and the rest. In 2014, I’d written a book about Stephen Harper’s information control and manipulation. In many ways, Harper was a scout for Trump’s movement, which still does not have a decent name. Now, it seemed, we were going to endure a more extreme, vindictive regime, verging on fascism. A sort of Fascism Lite.

So let’s do a book, I said to Dan, even though I was already on the road trying to keep Crosses in the Sky on the Canadian bestseller lists and was (am) convinced that writing non-fiction books is the worst thing to do with my time. Summer was coming. I had an old sailboat in the water and a second home, a 180-year-old farmhouse in Quebec, that needed renovation. I’d just come off a brutal defamation trial, representing a former porn star who was being sued for “me too” posts about her ex. Part of the trial turned on whether he deliberately harmed the women in his life with his massive penis.

Let’s leap ahead. Sometime in August, about noon on one of those 30-degree, 90 per cent humidity days that are surprisingly common in Ottawa, I got a call from the marina. My boat, the caller said, was doing something weird. When I got to the dock, I saw how my 26-foot sailboat was very low in the water. Inside was 18 inches of Ottawa River that needed to be hand-bailed.

I hadn’t been to the boat in six weeks. The water came from a leak in the toilet water intake line, no more than mist, really. At home, I had maybe 75,000 words of my 40,000-60,000 word book drafted, and a wife adjusting to life with a newly broken ankle.

A few weeks later, I was back, scrubbing the inside of the boat, feeling guilty about stealing time from the book. At the end of the day, I hooked up a borrowed pressure washer, something I’d never used before, and swiped the side of the boat. It was a life-changing experience, the most fun I had all summer. The pressure washer that I got for Christmas sits in a box in the shed.

All of this happened when Dan and the Biblioasis folks were running on a schedule based on the idea that we’d have an election in October 2025, the “fixed” date. But, while it’s arguable that Canada is not broken, our election dates certainly are not fixed. I still had the manuscript—now pushing over 100,000 words—when Trump was re-elected. I gave it to Dan at the beginning of December.

But events . . . Trump had noticed Canada and was ruminating about annexation. Chrystia Freeland pulled a caucus coup. It was clear we’d have an election before the fall.

Everyone worked their asses off. Everyone came through on this book. The editors, the cover artist, the printers, the bookstores all did things in weeks that they usually need months for. We got Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre into stores this week. And, frankly, it’s a better book than I thought it would be.

Now, I just need to cope with two things: my car, which may or may not have a broken transmission; and the knowledge, imparted to me last night by a Cate Blanchett video on YouTube, that “ripper” has a meaning in Australia that was previously unknown to me. The Law of Sheer Perversion, which runs my life, has a very weird sense of humour.

—Mark Bourrie

***

***

In good publicity news:

  • Ripper by Mark Bourrie was covered in the Globe and Mail’s article “Inside Biblioasis and Mark Bourrie’s mad rush to get a Pierre Poilievre bio on shelves.” Mark was also interviewed about the book on David Moscrop’s Substack.
  • Ripper by Mark Bourrie and Old Romantics by Maggie Armstrong both appeared on the Globe and Mail’s spring books preview.
  • Baldwin, Styron, and Me by Mélikah Abdelmoumen (trans. Catherine Khordoc) was reviewed in The Miramichi Reader: “By knitting together this literary history with her own personal experiences, Abdelmoumen has created something new and vital.”
  • Near Distance by Hanna Stoltenberg (trans. Wendy H. Gabrielsen) was reviewed in roughghosts: “Closely observed, well composed . . . a very confident debut.”
  • Ira Wells, author of On Book Banning, was interviewed on the Quillette and Canadaland podcasts, and was featured in the Toronto Star.

The Bibliophile: There’s no box for a detail like this on a census

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Photo: Front and back covers of Baldwin, Styron, and Me by Mélikah Abdelmoumen, translated by Catherine Khordoc. Designed by Ingrid Paulson.

Introducing Mélikah Abdelmoumen’s Baldwin, Styron, and Me

As a reader, as a human, I’ve always been attracted to stories or ideas that are neither one thing nor the other, that walk, out of inclination or obligation, a fine line between taken-for-granted assumptions and identities. Perhaps, in part, this is a result of coming from the places I do, the places I’ve called home: these smaller, industrial, working-class Rust Belt towns dismissed by almost everyone else in the country, which are a very short distance from the American border. Growing up, I had no idea that we did things differently down here, that, out of some sort of alchemical mixture of geography, history, landscape, and radio and television signals, we southern Ontarians had developed as distinct an identity as had Canadians from places where theirs are more readily acknowledged, whether it be Newfoundland or Quebec or Alberta. I remember Fred Eaglesmith once telling me that there was something about how American radio waves carried across Lake Ontario when he was growing up that made it easier for him to tune into the country and bluegrass stations from Kentucky and Tennessee than it was to receive the Toronto signals from barely an hour down the road. This accident helped shape him into the man (and the musician) that he became, and bred an affinity for the fields and mountains of Appalachia over the straight, puritanical streets of Canada’s biggest city. There’s no box for a detail like this on a census. And yet it can be everything. There’s a local writer who once pitched me on a book (unfortunately never finished) whose main thesis was that the people of this part of the country were AmeriCanadians, a hybridized identity that in no way undermines our devotion or loyalty to Canada but that reflects all the factors that have shaped us and the different ways we interact and relate to the world. Despite the natural anger and patriotism we all feel as a result of the current American regime’s rhetoric and threats—and places like Windsor feel these far more keenly at the moment than most others in the country, I assure you—this still tracks. We may be choosing for now not to do our regular trips to the Detroit Institute of Arts for Friday Night Live; we may have let our subscription to the Paradise Jazz Series lapse; but it is also, for me, both morally and psychologically problematic to be expected to turn our backs on key relationships that have played such a role in making us who we are. And the expectation to do so is an unreasonable one.

I’m still trying to work this out; I hope that it makes sense.

There’s this idea that I came across in Mélikah Abdelmoumen’s just-published Baldwin, Styron, and Me (translated by Catherine Khordoc) that has become central to how I think of these matters: that of the frontier dweller. Abdelmoumen quotes the Lebanese-French writer Amin Maalouf from In the Name of Identity:

Wherever there are groups of human beings living side by side who differ from one another in religion, colour, language, ethnic origin or nationality; wherever there are tensions, more or less long standing, more or less violent, between immigrants and local populations, Blacks and Whites, Catholics and Protestants, Jews and Arabs, Hindus and Sikhs, Lithuanians and Russians, Serbs and Albanians, Greeks and Turks, English-speaking and French-speaking Canadians, Flemings and Walloons, Chinese and Malays—yes, wherever there is a divided society, there are men and women bearing within them contradictory allegiances, people who live on the frontier between opposed communities, and whose very being might be said to be traversed by ethnic or religious or other fault lines.

Who, these days, does not bear within them contradictory allegiances? Baldwin, Styron, and Me is a book about living with such, acknowledging them, and more importantly, despite the tremendous cost such effort entails, remaining true to them. It’s about not letting others, with their limited conception of who you are, define you, whether it be via a census or a checklist or otherwise. In the same way that the amalgamation of Abdelmoumen’s hometown of Chicoutimi with La Baie into Saguenay does not erase key particularities that made those places distinct, or a resident’s memory of them as such, memories that can be passed down from generation to generation, the amalgamation of certain key traits or aspects of our individual and collective histories and lives does not erase anything either. We all maintain contradictory allegiances, or if we’re honest with ourselves should: this book serves as a timely reminder of this.

Photo: Still from Mélikah’s interview below, featuring portraits of James Baldwin and William Styron.

But Baldwin, Styron, and Me is at the same time one of my favourite things, a book about books, a book about the power of books, and about the way that the discovery of a writer and their work at the right moment can transform how one relates to the world. This happened when Mélikah discovered the works of James Baldwin. Who among us has not had a similar moment reading Baldwin’s work? (And for those who haven’t, I envy you the pleasure of the discovery: your time will come, and perhaps this book will serve as both catalyst and introduction). But Baldwin, Styron, and Me is also a work of literary historical investigation and recreation, telling the story of how one particular literary friendship between the grandson of a slave and the grandson of a slaveowner transformed the lives and work of both, while at the same time serving as a reminder that many of the debates we are having about literature and who has the right to write what are part of a much longer historical conversation. It is a generous and humane work of imagination, both “a personal and courageous meditation” (Lawrence Hill) and “a balm for this time and a welcome visit with new and old relations,” (Jesse Wente) a book that anticipates and encourages discussion and disagreement.  

Mélikah’s niece put together a short video profile and interview with Mélikah about the book: rather than this week linking to an interview or excerpt we thought we’d share it with you here.

Dan Wells,
Publisher

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Narrating Identities: An interview with Mélikah Abdelmoumen

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In good publicity news:

    • Baldwin, Styron, and Me by Mélikah Abdelmoumen was featured in Lit Hub for its pub date!
    • On Book Banning by Ira Wells was featured in two Canadian School Library Journal articles, “The Language of Censorship” and “Censors Are Targeting Schools.” Ira Wells was also interviewed on the Get Lit radio show.
    • Heaven and Hell by Jón Kalman Stefánsson (trans. Philip Roughton) was reviewed in the Literary Review of Canada: “An artfully crafted and arresting novel . . . Stefánsson excels at turning small places into the absolute centre of the world.“
    • Near Distance by Hanna Stoltenberg (trans. Wendy H. Gabrielsen) was also reviewed in the Literary Review of Canada: “A thoughtfully paced debut, and Stoltenberg moves between past and present with apparent ease.“

The Bibliophile: “I Cannot Praise a Fugitive and Cloister’d Virtue”

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“I cannot praise a fugitive and cloister’d virtue, unexercis’d & unbreath’d, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race.”
—John Milton, Areopagitica

Over the past few weeks I’ve been on my phone reading the papers and various magazines and Substacks so much that my usage is up more than 177%. It’s difficult knowing how to act or be when faced with such a deluge of threats, which is probably the point of it all in the first place. In Windsor, 25% tariffs will quickly devastate both the wider community and my family, many of whom work in the auto industry; and with approximately 70% of the press’s distributed sales coming via the United States this year, the threat of tariffs leave us vulnerable. And these seem increasingly like lesser matters when compared to an American president who seems either incompetent, in the pocket of foreign or oligarchic interests, evil, or some combination of all three.

But, hey, at least we won the hockey game.

I have believed all my life in the power of books, if only because they have had so much power over me. Whether it be the work of a writer like Jón Kalman Stefánsson, who will remind me, almost as an aside, that “The ocean is cold blue and never still, a gigantic creature that breathes, most often tolerates us, but sometimes not, and then we drown; the history of humankind is not terribly complicated,” or that of a Jeannie Marshall or Mark Kingwell or Caroline Adderson, all of these and so many others (yes, including many we’ve not (yet) published) have taught me, repeatedly, to try to put aside my hubris and sense of certainty and to see the world anew. Each has, in recent years, in different ways, snapped the world for me into a slightly different focus. What more can we ask of our writers and their books? I have believed books can change the world, because they have so often changed mine. I’ve tried to keep that at the forefront in my work as a publisher, whether it be of fiction or, increasingly, of nonfiction. It was the animating impulse during the early days of the pandemic, and after the murder of George Floyd, for starting our Field Note pamphlet series. And it’s at the root of so much of the nonfiction we are publishing this year, from Mark Bourrie’s Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre through to Marcello Di Cintio’s Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers, Don Gillmor’s On Oil, and Elaine Dewar’s Growing up Oblivious in Mississippi North. It’s our hope that these books will both inform and move the needle towards justice: however vague a concept this may be, most of us can at least agree on its general direction.

Photo: On Book Banning by Ira Wells. Cover designed by Ingrid Paulson.

In recent months, I have, at least at my worst moments, started doubting the ability of books to change much of anything. I remain convinced that books still have much to impart—as I said in my note last week, Mark Kingwell’s argument about conviction addiction explains for me better than anything I’ve read in newspapers and magazines and so very many Substacks what has led us to this particular historic moment—but I am deeply concerned that their reach, their public lives, have become dangerously shortened and constrained and I am not at all certain how to combat that. The reasons for this shortening are legion: disintermediation and its aftereffects, including political polarization, the dominance of foreign multinationals within the book industry itself, which greatly affects what readers have access to, and generalized exhaustion. It is perhaps also tied to the fact that the cold blue seems less and less tolerant, that for a variety of reasons one feels on the verge of drowning. It’s not, as with most things, that complicated.

Though I’ve also been struggling with a contradiction of sorts. Why is it, at the time that books have never seemed less central to people’s lives that the efforts to ban them have become increasingly common? On the left and on the right, in Canada and the US, book banners (however they may deny such a label) have made books and libraries, school and public, a central battleground to contest a range of social and political issues: religious and parental freedom, LGBTQ rights, issues of representation and inclusion and identity, access to diverse political arguments, and much else besides. And book banners on both the left and the right use many of the very same arguments to justify their exclusion of certain kinds of literature. It is all part of what Ira Wells, in his new Field Note On Book Banning (publishing next week in Canada, and in June in the US and abroad) calls the new censorship consensus. In attempting to ban access of certain populations to certain books, both sides are trying, to paraphrase Orwell, to control both the past, present, and future through a rewriting of all three, and each are convinced that they are on the right side of history (see above: Mark Kingwell and conviction addiction), though both are contributing equally to the undermining of democracy and our ability to think for ourselves. As Ira shows, there is nothing new in this, and if we examine the history of censorship (and the historical arguments against it) we will see why we can’t let the banners and censors win. And in that, too, perhaps be reminded of the conviction that makes what we do as publishers and readers and supporters of bookish culture so important in the first place.

Below, please find an interview that Ahmed Abdalla, publicist at Biblioasis, conducted with Ira about On Book Banning: Or, How the New Censorship Consensus Trivializes Art and Undermines Democracy.

Dan Wells,
Publisher

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A Biblioasis Interview with Ira Wells

Photo: Ira Wells, courtesy of the author.

Can you tell me a little bit about yourself for readers approaching your work for the first time?

I am a professor of literature at Victoria College in the University of Toronto, a father of two school-aged kids, and a devoted, dyed-in-the-wool reader. I’m a book person.

What prompted you to write On Book Banning?

There were two moments. First, as I write in the book, my children’s elementary school undertook an equity-based “library audit,” during which our principal “joked” that she wished she could get rid of “all the old books.” Clearly, she was not alone in this thinking: the next fall, Peel District School Board, which consists of more than two hundred schools, undertook an equity-based book-weeding process in which some schools appear to have purged all books written before 2008.

Second, an episode I do not write about in the book, involves a talk on free speech that was delivered at the University of Toronto in 2023. The talk went off without a hitch—there was nothing even remotely controversial about the content or delivery—but I was struck, after the fact, to discover that our excellent students are deeply skeptical about the value of expressive freedom. Many students today believe that governments and other authorities should censor those harmful views; they do not understand why people with the “wrong” views should ever have a microphone or platform. My sense is that most young people today have never grappled with the foundational arguments (by John Milton, J.S. Mill, Frederick Douglass, and others) for free speech—arguments I wanted to outline clearly and succinctly, alongside the shocking and brutal history of censorship, which is the historical rule, not the exception. Of course, I was aware of the massive surge in censorship playing out in Florida and other jurisdictions across the United States—which may seem like a totally separate phenomenon, but which I argue is actually just another manifestation of the impulse to censor.

You start this book from the point of view of a parent whose children’s school was implementing a book-weeding process and give your first hand experience with it and the equity toolkit. How did this experience as a parent influence your thoughts on censorship and the structure of the book?

Yes, I joined a committee of parents who used the Toronto District School Board Equity Toolkit as part of this somewhat mysterious audit. (I say somewhat mysterious because the purpose of this exercise was never entirely clear to those who were involved—perhaps it was meant to educate us, the parents.) As someone who loves imaginative literature, and children’s literature, I was struck by the extent to which the toolkit manages to eliminate the imaginative and magical qualities of children’s lit. You get the sense that administrators want children’s lit to consist of little manifestos for the causes approved by the administrators. It’s basically a view of literature as propaganda. It’s alarming that those who are in charge of teaching the next generation of children how to read and think about books are doing so in these terms. I suspect that many children will turn off of reading entirely, which is of course already happening—they’re saddled with addictive technology that can make it hard to focus on anything for more than fifteen seconds. Childhood today sucks, and we’re making it worse.

What do you think the rise in book bans from both conservatives and progressives is saying about how we view literature? I know you also mention that part of the reason book banning thrives is when books and reading are devalued. Could you elaborate on that and why you think reading is being devalued?

I think that both conservatives and progressives see the library, and especially the school library, as a microcosm of society. They think—or rather believe, because all of this is playing out at the level of belief, rather than rational thought—that they can reshape society by transforming the library. They think of library books as levers they can pull to exert some kind of change in our culture. It doesn’t work that way, of course—John Milton argued more than four hundred years ago that “bad” ideas are perfectly capable of spreading without books—but this kind of library censorship does amount to a kind of symbolic violence, a way of signalling who does or doesn’t belong, a way of projecting social violence onto a scapegoat. At the same time, censorship thrives when books, and especially imaginative literature, are devalued. That is to say, when we reduce books to one putative “message,” that is a step in the direction of censorship, because it becomes easier to ban the books that convey the wrong messages. Once we accept that books and other art forms are delivery mechanisms for good or bad political content—and combine that assumption with the idea that we’re in a state of political emergency, that we’re facing existential stakes our very lives are on the line—then it can feel morally imperative to liquidate the “bad” messages, the bad books. Again, all of this is predicated on the idea that literature is reducible to messages (another mistake made by the toolkits), which they aren’t. The best novels are endlessly fascinating precisely because they are internally conflicted. They contain multiple voices and multiple messages.

What do you make of the idea that those who want to ban books never seem to refer to their actions as banning books/censorship? How does that inform their thinking?

According to the Ontario School Library Association, censorship “is the removal, suppression, or restricted circulation of literary, artistic, or educational images, ideas, and/or information because they are morally or otherwise objectionable. While the selector seeks reasons to include material in the collection, the censor seeks reasons to exclude material from the group.” That seems pretty clear to me. Whether you’re pulling Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer, or William Golding’s Lord of the Flies—if you’re removing a book because it is “morally or otherwise objectionable,” that’s censorship, according to the OSLA. If you’re using an equity toolkit to “seek reasons to exclude material,” you’re practicing censorship. It’s all clear-cut. Of course, conservative and progressive book banners believe that censorship is something practiced by the other side. The conservatives believe that they are anti-pornography or anti-LGBTQ+ indoctrination; the progressives believe that they are anti-racist and anti-colonial. Both are convinced that they are right, and that their own righteousness legitimates, or even necessitates, their censorship. As I argue in On Book Banning, both groups are convinced they are saving children from harm. Instead, they are introducing new sources of harm.

In the book, you suggest we need to find a way to distinguish between purposefully offensive language and works that contain language that could offend but it makes sense historically or artistically that it is there. How should schools approach this?

I think it’s important to approach these questions with sensitivity, nuance, and an attention to historical context. I also believe that children, especially middle and high school students, are capable of understanding that social norms and language have changed over time. We do a disservice to students by whitewashing or sanitizing history. Students should be able to read Lawrence Hill. They should be able to read Toni Morrison. Teachers should be encouraged to teach these writers, not punished for doing so. Educators use the concept of “harm” in a very blunt way. It can refer to anything that might be legitimately traumatizing to something that might induce mild discomfort, if that. We shouldn’t treat students as fragile receptacles of information; instead, we should teach them that history, social norms, and language have evolved over time. Educators should be in the business of de-mythologizing, rather than re-mythologizing.

Censorship has never really gone away—it reflects a desire for social control, and each generation has to renew the fight for expressive freedom, which is the cornerstone of artistic expression and democracy.

You give a wide history of censorship in the book and it seems that arguments around censorship have hardly changed. Some people have always wanted to censor others because of language they deem offensive (with varying reasons as to why they find it offensive). What do you make of that? And did anything surprise you in your research?

Concepts like “obscenity,” “pornography,” and so on, are highly malleable. Less than a hundred years ago, James Joyce’s great novel Ulysses was banned as obscene; it’s hard to imagine anyone objecting to that book today. “Obscenity” is a living standard, which is to say that it shifts with the times. This cuts two ways. Yes, the zone of expressive freedom expanded in the postwar years, but there’s nothing permanent about those victories: censorship may be on the verge of a major comeback, especially with the revival of Comstock laws in the US. And of course, expressive freedom has never applied equally to all people. Some readers may be surprised to learn about the brutal persecution of LGBTQ+ publishers and booksellers which continued into the 1980s and 1990s. Censorship has never really gone away—it reflects a desire for social control, and each generation has to renew the fight for expressive freedom, which is the cornerstone of artistic expression and democracy.

Where do you think censorship will go from here? Do you think attitudes about book banning and the new censorship consensus will change? Either for better or for worse?

I wish I could say I thought things will get better. I do think that people are getting fed up with being told what they or their children are allowed to read. That said, the forces of censorship are ascendent in the US. The degree to which Trump will implement Project 2025 is an open question, but that document encourages the prosecution of teachers and librarians for dissemination of “pornography” as they define it. As the fall of Roe reveals, our legal victories are always tenuous. It can all be undone. In all likelihood, Trump will appoint two more Supreme Court justices. Historically, censorship and abortion have been linked—and it’s all possible that legal censorship is now on the cusp of a generational revival. I hope that On Book Banning may provide a useful reminder of the counterarguments, as well as the stakes. We’re going to have our work cut out for us. In the meantime, let’s leave the kids alone to read what they will.

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In good publicity news:

  • May Our Joy Endure by Kev Lambert (trans. Donald Winkler) was reviewed in the TLS: “This is a novel that makes readers take mordant notice of the world around them—but it is more than a mere succession of clever scores on self- aggrandizing elite progressivism.”
  • Heaven and Hell by Jón Kalman Stefánsson (trans. Philip Roughton) was reviewed on WOSU’s The Longest Chapter: “Some novels are so extraordinary, it’s hard to do them justice in a review. This is one of them.”
  • Roland Allen, author of The Notebook, was interviewed on The Art of Manliness podcast, about the history and power of the notebook.
  • The Full-Moon Whaling Chronicles by Jason Guriel was reviewed in New Verse Review: “Guriel’s story, at its core, is not about the individual characters but about how an imagined book extends its imaginative influence into an imagined future world.”

The Bibliophile: Books for Black History Month

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In celebration of Black History Month, we’re highlighting our books by Black writers, along with some additional reads. If you’re on the lookout to expand your knowledge in nonfiction, read stories that take you around the world from the Caribbean to Angola, or discover strikingly new poetry, then have a browse through the titles below and find something to add to your reading list—for this month, and beyond.

Ashley Van Elswyk,
Editorial Assistant

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They Call Me George by Cecil Foster, cover designed by Michel Vrana, and On Property by Rinaldo Walcott, designed by Ingrid Paulson.

Nonfiction

They Call Me George: The Untold Story of Black Train Porters and the Birth of Modern Canada by Cecil Foster

Smartly dressed and smiling, Canada’s black train porters were a familiar sight to the average passenger—yet their minority status rendered them politically invisible, second-class in the social imagination that determined who was and who was not considered Canadian. Subjected to grueling shifts and unreasonable standards—a passenger missing his stop was a dismissible offense—the so-called Pullmen of the country’s rail lines were denied secure positions and prohibited from bringing their families to Canada, and it was their struggle against the racist Dominion that laid the groundwork for the multicultural nation we know today. Drawing on the experiences of these influential black Canadians, Cecil Foster’s They Call Me George demonstrates the power of individuals and minority groups in the fight for social justice and shows how a country can change for the better.

On Property by Rinaldo Walcott

That a man can lose his life for passing a fake $20 bill when we know our economies are flush with fake money says something damning about the way we’ve organized society. Yet the intensity of the calls to abolish the police after George Floyd’s death surprised almost everyone. What, exactly, does abolition mean? How did we get here? And what does property have to do with it? In On Property, Rinaldo Walcott explores the long shadow cast by slavery’s afterlife and shows how present-day abolitionists continue the work of their forebears in service of an imaginative, creative philosophy that ensures freedom and equality for all. Thoughtful, wide-ranging, compassionate, and profound, On Property makes an urgent plea for a new ethics of care.

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From left to right: Standing Heavy and Comrade Papa by GauZ’ (trans. Frank Wynne), with covers designed by Nathan Burton, and The Pages of the Sea by Anne Hawk, designed by Kate Sinclair.

Fiction

The Pages of the Sea by Anne Hawk

On a Caribbean island in the mid-1960s, a young girl copes with the heavy cost of migration.

When her mother emigrates to England to find work, Wheeler and her older sisters are left to live with their aunts and cousins. She spends most days with her cousin Donelle, knocking about their island community. They know they must address their elders properly and change their shoes after church. And during the long, quiet weeks of Lent, when the absent sound of the radio seems to follow them down the road, they look forward to kite season. But Donelle is just a child, too, and though her sisters look after her with varying levels of patience, Wheeler couldn’t feel more alone. Everyone tells her that soon her mother will send for her, but how much longer will it be? And as she does her best to navigate the tensions between her aunts, why does it feel like there’s no one looking out for her at all? A story of sisterhood, secrets, and the sacrifices of love, The Pages of the Sea is a tenderly lyrical portrait of innocence and an intensely moving evocation of what it’s like to be a child left behind.

Standing Heavy by GauZ’ (trans. Frank Wynne)

A funny, fast-paced, and poignant take on Franco-African history, as told through the eyes of three African security guards in Paris.

All over the city, they are watching: Black men paid to stand guard, invisible among the wealthy flâneurs and yet the only ones who truly see. From Les Grands Moulins to a Sephora on the Champs-Élysées, Ferdinand, Ossiri, and Kassoum find their way as undocumented workers amidst political infighting and the ever-changing landscape of immigration policy. Fast-paced and funny, poignant and sharply satirical, Standing Heavy is a searing deconstruction of colonial legacies and capitalist consumption and an unforgettable account of everything that passes under the security guards’ all-seeing eyes.

Comrade Papa by GauZ’ (trans. Frank Wynne)

Mourning the recent deaths of his parents, a young white man in nineteenth-century France joins a colonial expedition attempting to establish trading routes on the Ivory Coast and finds himself caught between factions who disagree on everything—except their shared loathing of the British. A century later, a young Black boy born in Amsterdam gives his account, complete with youthful malapropisms, of his own voyage to the Ivory Coast, and his upbringing by his father, Comrade Papa, who teaches him to always fight “the yolk of capitalism.” In exuberant, ingenious prose, GauZ’ superimposes their intertwined stories, looking across centuries and continents to reveal the long arc of African colonization.

All by by Ondjaki, trans. Stephen Henighan: Granma Nineteen and the Soviet’s Secret (designed by Kate Hargreaves), Good Morning Comrades, and Transparent City (designed by Zoe Norvell).

Good Morning Comrades by Ondjaki (trans. Stephen Henighan)

Luanda, Angola, 1990. Ndalu is a normal twelve-year old boy in an extraordinary time and place. Like his friends, he enjoys laughing at his teachers, avoiding homework and telling tall tales. But Ndalu’s teachers are Cuban, his homework assignments include writing essays on the role of the workers and peasants, and the tall tales he and his friends tell are about a criminal gang called Empty Crate which specializes in attacking schools. Ndalu is mystified by the family servant, Comrade Antonio, who thinks that Angola worked better when it was a colony of Portugal, and by his Aunt Dada, who lives in Portugal and doesn’t know what a ration card is. In a charming voice that is completely original, Good Morning Comrades tells the story of a group of friends who create a perfect childhood in a revolutionary socialist country fighting a bitter war. But the world is changing around these children, and like all childhood’s Ndalu’s cannot last. An internationally acclaimed novel, already published in half a dozen countries, Good Morning Comrades is an unforgettable work of fiction.

Granma Nineteen and the Soviet’s Secret by Ondjaki (trans. Stephen Henighan)

By the beaches of Luanda, the Soviets are building a grand mausoleum in honour of the Comrade President. Granmas are whispering: houses, they say, will be dexploded, and everyone will have to leave. With the help of his friends Charlita and Pi (whom everyone calls 3.14), and with assistance from Dr. Rafael KnockKnock, the Comrade Gas Jockey, the amorous Gudafterov, crazy Sea Foam, and a ghost, our young hero must decide exactly how much trouble he’s willing to face to keep his Granma safe in Bishop’s Beach. Energetic and colourful, impish and playful, Granma Nineteen and the Soviet’s Secret is a charming coming-of-age story.

Transparent City by Ondjaki (trans. Stephen Henighan)

In a crumbling apartment block in the Angolan city of Luanda, families work, laugh, scheme, and get by. In the middle of it all is the melancholic Odonato, nostalgic for the country of his youth and searching for his lost son. As his hope drains away and as the city outside his doors changes beyond all recognition, Odonato’s flesh becomes transparent and his body increasingly weightless. A captivating blend of magical realism, scathing political satire, tender comedy, and literary experimentation, Transparent City offers a gripping and joyful portrait of urban Africa quite unlike any before yet published in English, and places Ondjaki, indisputably, among the continent’s most accomplished writers.

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The Day-Breakers by Michael Fraser and UNMET by stephanie roberts, both designed by Ingrid Paulson.

Poetry

UNMET by stephanie roberts

Leaning deliberately on the imagined while scrutinizing reality and hoping for the as-yet-unseen, UNMET explores frustration, justice, and thwarted rescue from a perspective that is Black-Latinx, Canadian, immigrant, and female. Drawing on a wide range of poetics, from Wallace Stevens to Diane Seuss, roberts’s musically-driven narrative surrealism confronts such timely issues as police brutality, respectability politics, intimate partner violence, and ecological crisis, and considers the might-have-been alongside the what-could-be, negotiating with the past without losing hope for the future.

The Day-Breakers by Michael Fraser

“It is not wise to waste the life / Against a stubborn will. / Yet would we die as some have done. / Beating a way for the rising sun wrote Arna Bontemps. In The Day-Breakers, poet Michael Fraser imagines the selflessness of Black soldiers who fought for the Union during the American Civil War, of whom hundreds were African-Canadian, fighting for the freedom of their brethren and the dawning of a new day. Brilliantly capturing the rhythms of their voices and the era in which they lived and fought, Fraser’s The Day-Breakers is an homage to their sacrifice and an unforgettable act of reclamation: the restoration of a language, and a powerful new perspective on Black history and experience.

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1934 by Heidi LM Jacobs, designed by Michel Vrana; Baldwin, Styron, and Me by Mélikah Abdelmoumen (trans. Catherine Khordoc), designed by Ingrid Paulson; and The Utopian Generation by Pepetela (trans. David Brookshaw), designed by Zoe Norvell.

Other reads for Black History Month

1934: The Chatham Coloured All-Stars’ Barrier-Breaking Year by Heidi LM Jacobs

The pride of Chatham’s East End, the Coloured All-Stars broke the colour barrier in baseball more than a decade before Jackie Robinson did the same in the Major Leagues. Fielding a team of the best Black baseball players from across southwestern Ontario and Michigan, theirs is a story that could only have happened in this particular time and place: during the depths of the Great Depression, in a small industrial town a short distance from the American border, home to one of the most vibrant Black communities in Canada. Drawing heavily on scrapbooks, newspaper accounts, and oral histories from members of the team and their families, 1934: The Chatham Coloured All-Stars’ Barrier-Breaking Year shines a light on a largely overlooked chapter of Black baseball. But more than this, 1934 is the story of one group of men who fought for the respect that was too often denied them. Rich in detail, full of the sounds and textures of a time long past, 1934 introduces the All-Stars’ unforgettable players and captures their winning season, so that it almost feels like you’re sitting there in Stirling Park’s grandstands, cheering on the team from Chatham.

Baldwin, Styron, and Me by Mélikah Abdelmoumen (trans. Catherine Khordoc)

In 1961, James Baldwin spent several months in William Styron’s guest house. The two wrote during the day, then spent evenings confiding in each other and talking about race in America. During one of those conversations, Baldwin is said to have convinced his friend to write, in first person, the story of the 1831 slave rebellion led by Nat Turner. The Confessions of Nat Turner was published to critical acclaim, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1968, and also creating outrage in part of the African American community.

Decades later, the controversy around cultural appropriation, identity, and the rights and responsibilities of the writer still resonates. In Baldwin, Styron, and Me, Mélikah Abdelmoumen considers the writers’ surprising yet vital friendship from her standpoint as a racialized woman torn by the often unidimensional versions of her identity put forth by today’s politics and media. Considering questions of identity, race, equity, and the often contentious public debates about these topics, Abdelmoumen works to create a space where the answers are found by first learning how to listen—even in disagreement.

The Utopian Generation by Pepetela (trans. David Brookshaw)

Lisbon 1961. Aware that the secret police are watching them, four young Angolans discuss their plans for a utopian homeland free from Portuguese rule. When war breaks out, they flee to France and must decide whether they will return home to join the fight. Two remain in exile and two return to Angola to become guerilla fighters, barely escaping capture over the course of the brutal fourteen-year war. Reunited in the capital of Luanda, the old friends face independence with their confidence shaken and struggle to build a new society free of the corruption and violence of colonial rule.

Pepetela, a former revolutionary guerilla fighter and Angolan government minister, is the author of more than twenty novels that have won prizes in Africa, Europe, and South America. The Utopian Generation is widely considered in the Portuguese-speaking world an essential novel of African decolonization—and is now available in English translation for the first time.

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A Note on Question Authority by Mark Kingwell

Reader, if you’re like me, you’re probably trying to make sense, whether via the reading of entrails or essays, of the Trump and Musk train wreck and all it entails. Lest our American readers fear I’m throwing stones—and based on what we know of this substack, we have more American readers than Canadian ones—we are in the middle of something that may prove as worrisome here. (Please see last week’s Bibliophile for further insight.) Though we’ve been posting the Bibliophile on Substack for the better part of four months, I’ve only started personally using it in the last few days, devouring essays and insights by the likes of Anne Applebaum, Timothy Snyder, Paul Wells, David Moscrop, Nora Loreto, Paul Krugman, and many others: whatever else may separate these writers from one another, however they may differ on the root cause of what ails us, what they all seem to agree on is that we’re, on both sides of the 49th, in a whole mess of shit.

But despite the overwhelmingly varied offerings of Substack, not everything worth reading can be found here. When it comes to outlining the first causes for our current predicament, I still find that one of the best things I’ve read in recent memory comes via . . . a book. Mark Kingwell’s Question Authority: A Polemic About Trust in Five Meditations, which published in the US this past Tuesday, offers, for my money, one of the most intelligent analyses of what underpins our division and discord: we are, all of us, Kingwell argues, on the left and on the right, too often animated by an unshakeable belief in our personal righteousness and superiority, or what Kingwell calls doxaholism: an addiction to conviction.

Question Authority by Mark Kingwell (cover by Michel Vrana). Pictured here in Biblioasis Bookshop.

Evidence of this addiction is everywhere: around the family dinner table as much as in the partisan jibes of Trump or Trudeau or Poilievre: it makes real thought, conversation, and the trust essential to finding solutions to the real problems we face impossible. Our addiction to conviction undermines our faith in essential institutions and one another; it lubricates our descent into a range of defeating particularisms that make us even more vulnerable to manipulation. And there are those currently in power, or on the cusp of it, who’ve been very adept at this manipulation.

But this is not all that Kingwell offers: in addition to his diagnosis, he suggests an antidote, or at the very least the beginning of one, what he calls compassionate skepticism. Rather than retreating further into the particularisms of identity or grievance, Kingwell argues that we need to recentre ourselves with humility, into what he calls the ethical habit of “constructive disbelief governed by (an) awareness of our shared vulnerability.” If the past months have shown us anything, surely, it’s that we are all increasingly vulnerable, even if unequally so, to matters well outside our control: it’s in an acknowledgment of this truth that we’ll find strength.

Speaking of David Moscrop, he did an excellent interview with Mark for the Jacobin a couple of months ago about Mark’s new book: you can read it here. And find Mark’s book wherever it is you go for such things.

Dan Wells,
Publisher

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In good publicity news:

The Bibliophile: Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre

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Late one evening in 2023 I received a Facebook message from a pair of high school friends I hadn’t seen since graduation more than thirty years before. They were heading down from Chatham on a day-long cruise on their Harleys and were going to stop by the bookstore, and they were wondering if I’d be around. I made sure I was, and when they arrived, we went to the Walkerville Brewery to catch up. It was a wonderful couple of hours: both these men, despite our losing contact for decades, were fellows I had wondered about from time to time, good men who, when boys, helped bring me through very rough patches. I even lived with one for a while when my own home life was fraught. When they left that aft, we promised to keep in touch, and later that eve came an invitation to a WhatsApp group called, simply, The Boys. My two friends were connected to half a dozen others from high school, and they used the group to keep in touch, pass jokes and memes, and arrange meeting times at the local bar. Most of it was typical middle-aged silly fun. I didn’t participate much, but I got a kick out of the back and forth, sharing a bit of these guys’ lives.

But there was one thing that surprised me. With increasing regularity, various members of this group shared political posts, almost all of them focusing on Prime Minister Trudeau’s latest gaffe or supposed idiocy; others attacked Liberal policies on the pandemic response, the housing crisis, and the carbon tax. More than once, I was tipped off to some new “scandal” via these messages before some variant of the same story turned up in the pages of the Globe and Mail or the National Post. The messages were deeply partisan, and most (but not all) couldn’t have withstood much more than a quick Google, let alone a proper fact-check. But that didn’t matter, because there was no fact-checking. Several times I almost said something, then thought better of it: I did not want to get into a political debate, nor did I feel it was my place. I stopped engaging much and just watched, growing more and more fascinated and concerned.

Occasionally, someone would share a political story that wasn’t Canadian at all. After the last Russian election, a member of the Boys shared an interview between a Russian-supported online news agency and a Russian propagandist explaining that Putin had actually earned his resounding election victory as a result of the genuine love and faith entrusted to him by Russian voters, and that Russia had a stronger democracy than either Canada or the US. One of the boys responded with something akin to “When Putin defeats Ukraine I hope his next stop is Canada, where he can help finally rid us of Trudeau.”

These were not boys, or men, I would have ever expected to be overtly politically engaged. Our parents tended to think about politics dutifully and when they needed to: it wasn’t a topic of casual interaction. And we certainly weren’t political as kids, more interested in the latest hardcore sound (my ears still ring from 1988’s Anthrax concert), or scoring a mickey of something to drink in the park on Friday night. As men, they all work hard, demanding jobs; they have children and wives and mortgages; they look forward to Friday night at Chuck’s, a few pops and more laughs—who couldn’t use more of both? But here they were, passing along slickly made political memes and videos with increasing regularity, whether they were of Conservative or Russian origin, bashing the government and championing the person that everyone said would be the next prime minister of Canada: Pierre Poilievre. For the Boys, this couldn’t happen fast enough.

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Photo: Mark Bourrie reading from Crosses in the Sky at the Biblioasis Spring Launch at Biblioasis Bookshop, May 2024.

Towards the end of last May, Biblioasis hosted a book launch in Windsor. Mark Bourrie, whose Crosses in the Sky we had just published, was among the authors, and the next morning he and I met for coffee. Conversation naturally turned to his next project. Mark wanted to gather, revise, and expand some of the work he’d previously published on Great Lakes shipwrecks; he had an idea for a book on African exploration and another on a strange American assassin: they were all of interest.

Mark had also previously pitched me several times on a Field Note about the crisis facing Canadian media, and the conversation switched to this. I told him about my Boys WhatsApp group, and how I feared that the app was being used to misinform and radicalize the men and others like them, and that no one seemed to be talking about it. But Mark reminded me that he had explored exactly this in books like Kill the Messengers and The Killing Game. And then he told me how the Conservatives had developed massive alternative media networks to amplify their message, allowing them to directly reach voters outside of traditional channels: what I had come across was just one small part of it. Pierre Poilievre, Mark argued, had mastered the use of social media to reach people through YouTube, where he’d posted thousands of videos over his career, and through other social media channels: his videos and messages were full of misinformation that he was rarely called on, but that were viewed between tens and hundreds of thousands of times. Poilievre had had the benefit of almost everything Canada offered, and yet he’d long been the angriest man on the political stage, constantly flinging rage. Mark said that he was terrified about what a Poilievre government might mean for the country: he feared that it would result in the cementing of a Trump-like political culture in Canada, and that many of the most vulnerable, including a lot of people who, as has been the case with Trump, would likely vote for Poilievre would suffer enormously. Poilievre was a partisan who had not substantially altered his political views since, as a teenager, he’d been exposed to the work of Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman. He was Canada’s great divider, and we needed to show people, before the next election, what he really stood for.

It was probably around this point that I suggested that, rather than writing a Field Note on the decline of Canadian media, Mark write one on Pierre Poilievre. I imagined something short and quick and polemical. We tossed the idea around for a while before he left. A few days later I received a short email, saying that he’d do it. We set the publication date for late Spring, to give ourselves a few months before the anticipated Fall 2025 election.

Photo: Three books from our Field Notes series: On Class by Deborah Dundas, On Property by Rinaldo Walcott, and the latest addition, On Book Banning by Ira Wells.

But what started as a Field Note morphed quickly into a full-length political biography. First pages arrived in December: we were at the early stages of editorial when Chrystia Freeland resigned as finance minister and the crisis seemed ready to topple the government and trigger an early election. I consoled myself with the idea that, rather than having the first critical biography of Poilievre—Andrew Lawton’s, from last year, at times seems to border on hagiography—we’d have the first critical biography of the new prime minister of Canada. Mark worked out when he thought the election would be called and asked what we would need to do to get the book done before that became the case. I told him, and he said that he could do it.

So we worked incessantly for the better part of two months, through December and the Christmas break, January and into the first week of February, writing, editing, rewriting. It was an immense, almost impossible amount of work, with the resulting manuscript expanding to flesh out its portrait not only of Poilievre, but of the Canada that has brought him to the brink of power. The thesis of this book is that Poilievre has always been what he is: a rigid partisan and attack dog and divider, or in the parlance of David Brooks, who, in a pandemic-era New York Times column on the political forces shaping the modern world, helped to give this book its title: a ripper.

Here’s the working cover copy:

As Canada heads towards a pivotal election, bestselling author Mark Bourrie charts the rise of Opposition leader Pierre Poilievre and considers the history and potential cost of the politics of division.

Six weeks into the Covid pandemic, New York Times columnist David Brooks identified two types of Western politicians: rippers and weavers. Rippers, whether on the right or the left, see politics as war. They don’t care about the destruction that’s caused as they fight for power. Weavers are their opposite: people who try to fix things, who want to bring people together and try to build consensus. At the beginning of the pandemic, weavers seemed to be winning. Five years later, as Canada heads towards a pivotal election, that’s no longer the case. Across the border, a ripper is remaking the American government. And for the first time in its history, Canada has its own ripper poised to assume power.

Pierre Poilievre has enjoyed most of the advantages of the mainstream Canadian middle class. Yet he’s long been the angriest man on the political stage. In Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre, bestselling author Mark Bourrie, winner of the Charles Taylor Prize, charts Poilievre’s rise through the political system, from teenage volunteer to outspoken Opposition leader known for cutting soundbites and theatrics. Bourrie shows how we arrived at this divisive moment in our history, one in which rippers are poised to capitalize on conflict. He shows how Poilievre and this new style of politics have gained so much ground—and warns of what it will cost us if they succeed.

Books should start hitting shelves at the end of March.

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Photo: A hand places a card into a ballot box. Credit: Element5 Digital, Pexels.com.

As we watch what Trump and Musk are doing in the US, and the license the last few weeks have given Poilievre and his team to make similar statements about cutting government bureaucracy; gender essentialism; deporting migrants; and the problems with Canadian foreign aid, it’s become even more apparent that this is a pivotal national election. And that’s before even considering the question of who is the better leader to guide the country through Trump’s proposed economic sanctions and provide a real alternative to what we see happening in the United States. If Poilievre is a ripper, who will be our much needed weaver? Only time will tell.

I’m immensely proud of the work that Mark has put in to make this book happen, and of the intelligence, care, and compassion that is central to it. I think Ripper offers a harsh but fair portrait of a talented politician built for opposition, but one who would make, especially at this particular moment in our history, a terrible first minister. But it’s an equally harsh portrait of who we as a people have increasingly become. Working on it has been a privilege that’s given me much pause; I hope it does the same for each and every one of you.

Dan Wells,
Publisher

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20 Bookstores for 20 Years: The City & The City Books

The City & The City Books in Hamilton, Ontario, is an energetic and highly curated store that offers an impressive collection of independently published titles from across North America and beyond. Owners Tim and Janet cultivate a welcoming atmosphere where you’ll feel at home coming in out of the cold to hunt down a hidden gem and enjoy lively conversations about your latest read (Check out their book club that meets every other month at the Hearty Hooligan!) Read on for why Dan sees The City & The City Books as a home away from home, and why owner Tim loves Patrick McCabe’s Poguemahone.

Photo: The bright interior of The City & The City Books.

Dan on The City & The City Books: I first met Tim and Janet nearly two decades ago at a mutual friend’s book launch, the evening spent in ever-tightening circles talking about books and music. Almost immediately I felt a sense of kinship, so it wasn’t much of a surprise when I learned that they had left Big Smoke with the idea of opening an independent bookstore in Hamilton, Ontario. Nor is it a surprise that their shop is as good as it is, offering exactly the right mix of the anticipated and unexpected, with a particularly strong selection of the best independently published titles from across North America, and even further afield. Hamilton is a city blessed with a handful of excellent bookshops—including Epic and King W—but I have a hard time not thinking of Tim and Janet’s The City & The City as my home away from home, no matter how infrequently I get to darken its doorstep.

Photo: Owner Tim Hanna holds up his Biblioasis pick, Poguemahone.

Why Tim loved the “unhinged spirit” of Poguemahone: “A rollicking 600 pages of Patrick McCabe’s—greatest talker since Francis Brady in The Butcher Boy. A free verse epic to be sang, yelled and danced. A book that forces you up out of the reading chair; to stomp around and read to the rafters.”

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In good publicity news:

  • Heaven and Hell by Jón Kalman Stefánsson (trans. Philip Roughton) was reviewed in the New York Times: “The good news is that Heaven and Hell is the first book in a trilogy, and there is more of this beguiling life to come.”
  • The Passenger Seat by Vijay Khurana was named an March 2025 Indie Next Pick, and reviewed in the Literary Review of Canada: “The Passenger Seat will both mesmerize and refuse comforting resolution.”
  • The Pages of the Sea by Anne Hawk was included in the CBC Books list “25 Canadian books to read during Black History Month 2025 and beyond.”
  • Hello, Horse by Richard Kelly Kemick was reviewed in the Literary Review of Canada: “Kemick’s unique voice shines . . . By using dark humour to sharpen the impact of otherwise grim scenarios, he traverses the extremes of slapstick comedy and gory tragedy.”
  • Near Distance by Hanna Stoltenberg (trans. Wendy H. Gabrielsen) was reviewed in the Winnipeg Free Press (“sparse, direct and discomforting prose”) and The Complete Review (“offers a strong character- and relationship-portrait”).

The Bibliophile: The wonders we can create

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In anticipation of Heaven and Hell’s pub date this Tuesday, we’re following up last week’s excerpt with an interview with Icelandic author Jón Kalman Stefánsson, conducted by publicist and all-star interviewer Dominique.

On another note, if you have any thoughts on what you might like to see in a future Bibliophile—the behind-the-scenes of book publishing, features on backlist or frontlist books, whatever you’re curious about—feel free to reach out and let us know! We want to know what you most want to read about.

Ashley Van Elswyk
Editorial Assistant

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Jón Kalman Stefánsson. Photo Credit: Einar Falur Ingólfsson.

A Biblioasis Interview with Jón Kalman Stefánsson

Heaven and Hell is a testament to the power of literature: tragedy strikes because of poetry, but the boy is also able to find a reason to carry on because of books—in returning the Milton to its original owner and in the company of readers he finds once he arrives. Can you tell us a bit about how books, as well as the friendships and communities that form around books, have changed your life or given you hope?

I was, as a child and a teenager, an eager reader, and for me libraries were places of wonder, adventure, and shelter. I think I was what we could call a born reader: it’s in my blood, the love for literature, this hunger, need, for the worlds and the wonders we can create and find in words. Books were for me both, at perhaps the same time, some kind of get-away transport, and something that enlarged my life and my thoughts. And I believe that one of the main purposes of literature is namely to do all that: enlarge our life, help us to forget our self, make us see the world and our own lives in a new, often unexpected light, help us to travel around the world, get to know other times, different cultures, ideas. Those who read a lot of books, both fiction and non-fiction, and of course poetry, from all over the world, are the only ones who truly can be called cosmopolitans. And those who read little, and perhaps never foreign literature, can be easy prey for populist politicians who get their power from prejudice, discrimination, hatred and fear for those who are slightly different from them; politicians who want us to fear variety, instead of embracing it as we should do.

It’s been a while since Heaven and Hell was originally published in Iceland. Has your relationship to this work changed since the beginning? What does it mean to you now, considering the scope of your work?

Yes, I wrote Heaven and Hell almost twenty years ago, so many things have changed since then: both in my own life and in the world. The book is the first one in a trilogy, and the next two came out in 2009 and 2011, so these worlds travelled inside me for around six years. Since then, I’ve written six novels, and I think that one changes—hopefully—a bit with every book one writes. I have to admit that I seldom think of my older books: they just are there, living their own lives, and have no need for me anymore. They are part of me, but they are at the same time totally independent every time they meet a new reader. I’m fond of them, glad if they are doing well, and hope that they’ll change or affect the lives and thoughts of the readers.

A stack of Heaven and Hell by Jón Kalman Stefansson, translated by Philip Roughton. Photo courtesy of our Biblioasis Bookshop staff.

A lot about this book reminded me of epic poetry—the movement of the language (the plentiful, rhythmic use of commas, the repetition of “I am nothing, without thee”), the “hero’s journey” at the center of the book. How important is poetry to your prose writing? Are there any particular poets whose influence you see in your writing?

Poetry is very important to me; I started my writing career as a poet, published three books of poetry before I turned over to prose. In a way, I think that I use, though subconsciously, the technique and the inner thinking of poetry while writing prose; therefore, poetry lies in the veins of my prose. I think as a poet while writing as a novelist. I also see my novels partly as a piece of music, a symphony, a requiem, a rock or hip-hop song. There lies so much music, both in the language and the novel itself: its structure, style, breath. And the structure is for me just as important as the stories; one can sometimes call it one of the characters.

A lot of poets have influenced me throughout time. I read poetry constantly, and never travel without having some books of poetry with me. They can be Icelandic, European, South or North American, Asian . . . and from all time periods. I guess that poets like Vallejo, Szymborska, Borges, Tranströmer, Zagajewski and many more have influenced or inspired me; the same goes for lyrical novelists, like, for example, José Saramago and Knut Hamsun.

I like the coexistence, in the lives of your characters, of the physically rigorous and the intellectual. These characters are in a constant struggle against the elements, but many of them are simultaneously leading these rich, bookish lives. And the books they read (Paradise Lost, for example) seem far less escapist than immersive—like an extra set of eyes over the world. How important is the natural world to the intellectual world of books, and vice versa, in your work?

Books have in my view always been part of life, the world; not something sidelong, but flowing through life, affecting it. We sometimes forget that some of the most famous persons in world history are characters in books, novels: Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment; Don Quixote; Achilles; Oliver Twist; Anne Karenina . . . People who read novels are constantly meeting new people, new characters, who affect them, influence them, move them with their thoughts, words, destiny, in short: become part of their life, their inner world. I sometimes say that what we call reality and then fiction/literature are like a couple dancing together; and occasionally the dance becomes so intense, that they seem to almost melt together and then it’s impossible to see which is which. Therefore: literature reflects life, and life reflects literature.

I think I was what we could call a born reader: it’s in my blood, the love for literature, this hunger, need, for the worlds and the wonders we can create and find in words.

I was in a class once in university where the professor would have us make a playlist for every book we read. I liked that idea, and still find myself doing it. I know that music is very important to you—you created Death’s Playlist for Your Absence Is Darkness, and you’ve written a book about The Beatles. I’m not asking you to create an entire playlist for Heaven and Hell, but does this book (or the trilogy as a whole) evoke any particular songs for you?

Seems to me that this professor did a good job; a wonderful idea! Yes, music is very important for me. I love making playlists, for myself, for my wife and I, my friends, my kids, who influence me all the time by playing for me the music they are listening to. I’m always eager to get to know new artists, both those who are contemporaneous to us, in hip-hop, rock, jazz, classical, and then also getting to know artists and composers from the past. And my novels are often filled with music, references to music, songs that characters are listening to, or it simply comes to my mind while writing, forcing itself into the story, becoming part of it. I’m not sure that there were any particular songs linked to Heaven and Hell, but I think that my running songs from that time—I’m a runner and I always have a special song list for my runs—and while running, my thoughts about the novel I’m working on at that time flow around in me, mixing with the songs, which sometimes affect or create new ideas. And my running songs from that period were for example songs like Jesus of the Moon by Nick Cave; Where is My Mind by Pixies, Back to Black by Amy Winehouse; but while working on the novel songs like Falla by Nana, Aria from Pastorale in F Major by Bach, both played by the great Pablo Casals, and Gnossiennes by Satie; and I guess that the atmosphere of that music coloured, in one way or another, what I was writing, and how.

And we ask this every time, but I always love hearing the answer—what are you reading and enjoying right now?

I’m usually reading many books at the same time, and right now I could name: Human Acts by Han Kang; The Gospel According to Jesus Christ by José Saramago, one of those authors who has followed me for a long time; I’m reading this book for the second time because I read it in Danish some fifteen years ago, and was very taken by it then. It’s great to read it again, but I’m afraid that I’m a bit more critical towards this fine novel now; Urd by a Norwegian poet, Ruth Lillegraven, a strong, fascinating book of poetry telling a story of two women across different periods of time; The Confessions of Augustine of Hippo, written about 400 AD, a book that has influenced our way of thinking, if not feeling, regrettably in some ways; and then always some books of poetry: Szymborska, Werner Aspenström, a great Swedish poet, and the poems of Enheduanna, the earliest known name in world history, from around 2280 BC, who wrote her poems almost 1500 years before the first letter was drawn in the Old Testament.

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20 Stores for 20 Years: Source Booksellers

After a brief hiatus, we’re starting up our 20 bookstores to celebrate 20 years of publishing posts again! Today, we’d like to celebrate our neighbours in Detroit: Source Booksellers. Owner Janet Webster-Jones spent 40 years as an educator in Detroit public schools before she set up Source’s brick and mortar location in 2002. Janet now runs the store alongside her daughter Alyson, and they are a midtown institution! Read on for why our publisher Dan loves Source, and why Alyson chose The Utopian Generation by Pepetela (trans. David Brookshaw) as her favorite Biblioasis book.

Biblioasis publisher Dan Wells poses with Source Booksellers’ Alyson Turner and Janet Webster-Jones.

Dan on Source Books: I’m not sure there’s a bookseller I admire more than Janet Jones at Source. Whenever I’m feeling exhausted by the state of the world, or the state of the industry, I take inspiration from her example. Now well into her ninth decade, she remains a veritable fount of inspiration, joy, enthusiasm and love, for books, literature, and for her Cass Corridor community. Alongside her daughter, Alyson, a very fine and energetic bookseller in her own right, Source is set to remain an inspiration for years to come.

Alyson poses with her Biblioasis pick, The Utopian Generation.

And here’s why Alyson chose The Utopian Generation: “My heart landed on celebrating the creative and brave translated novels we get from Biblioasis. Yes the Canada Reads ’24 winner in French, The Future, which rethinks Detroit, MI, is a delight to read and sell. Yet another recent release that is hard to put down, The Utopian Generation gives us a peek into an African struggle for decolonization. Bravo to Biblioasis for Twenty Years of indie publishing just across the river!!!!”

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In good publicity news:

  • The Notebook by Roland Allen was reviewed in the New Criterion: “Fascinating . . . [a] wide-ranging and well-researched book.”
  • Your Absence is Darkness by Jón Kalman Stefánsson (trans. Philip Roughton) was reviewed in The Scandinavia Review: “[An] epic story of love, legacy and grief.”