Freedom to Read Windsor: Tomorrow

Available at Biblioasis. Come check out our
new Freedom to Read Window display.

As you know it's Freedom to Read Week here in Windsor, and we at Biblioasis are delighted to be hosting Windsor's 2013 Freedom To Read Week celebration, which is happening this Thursday at Milk Coffee Bar. You're encouraged to come out, read a passage from your favourite banned or challenged book, listen, and join a discussion on the impact of censorship in Canada and abroad. (& for an excellent introduction to censorship and its relationship to writing, I highly recommend you check out the new interview that was just posted by the LPG with Liliana Heker.)

Even in what is a free country by world standards, and as the Canadian Book & Periodical Council observes, books and magazines are still banned at the border. Schools and libraries are regularly asked to remove books and magazines from their shelves. Free expression on the Internet is under attack. Few of these stories make headlines, but they affect the right of Canadians to decide for themselves what they choose to read.

Freedom to Read Week is an annual event organized by the BPC (and in the US by the American Library Association), which encourages Canadians to think about and reaffirm their commitment to intellectual freedom as guaranteed under the Charter. We hope you'll join us. Thursday Feb. 28, 7:30 p.m., Milk. Open mic is first-come, first served.

Liliana Heker, who has just spoken about her
experience with censorship under the Argentine State
to Taryn Boyd of the LPG.

For a list of banned & challenged classics you can visit the BPC's Freedom to Read page here, or the ALA's banned books page here.

The End of the Story (but not the Free Books)

Julio Cortázar

Liliana Heker

Day 8 of February Freebies brings you another title from our International Translation Series: Liliana Heker's The End of the Story. The most controversial novel of the Argentine Dirty War, The End of the Story sparked a media frenzy upon its publication in Spanish in 1996, and was castigated by the left for its warts-and-all portrayal of the revolutionary psyche.

Heker, who became known for her public correspondence with Cortázar throughout the war (1976-83), was vocal about her belief that writers have a responsibility to witness and report on state atrocity. With The End of the Story she leaves very few sights unseen: it's an uncomfortable but extraordinary book. If you're looking for an excellent freedom-to-read read, let this be it.

You know the drill. Visit www.facebook.com/biblioasis, like our Freebie status, share, enter, win. For more information on Heker click the link below.

http://biblioasistranslation.com/end-of-the-story.html

Our Woman's Bay Area Vacation

Morning, all, and happy Monday. It was a good long weekend of good short reviews for Malarky, with Northern California showing the love: click on to read what the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Book Review had to say. Or you can even--what the heck--keep reading RIGHT HERE. Quoth the Chronicle:

Malarky becomes truly compelling when Our Woman embodies an existential strangeness. In certain moments, we are not so far from Beckett's Molloy - Our Woman comes close to enlivening not only the political and the personal but also the human. Schofield has true promise for this kind of writing, and it is there that I hope she next turns her sizable gifts, in the book that will surely follow this resoundingly successful first novel.

Hear that, Phil? It's not every character that holds her own against the Irish greats. Move over, Molly; make way, Molloy; mind yerself, Maud Gonne? Thanks to Mr. Esposito of Quarterly Conversation for that piece (and thanks, too, to Pax Plena for his sizable blog post this weekend).  

In other news, those of you waiting to read Three Percent's review of Liliana Heker, it's up and available now. Long and lovely treatment of the text. More on that soon from our translation series blog.

Good Grief, GoodReads!

Hey folks! As you can see, we're doing a few more GoodReads Giveaways over the next two weeks. Sign up to win free copies of our spring Bibliobooks! Giveaways should go live within the next 48 hours, so if it isn't working immediately, please check back soon.

Biblioasis at the Bookshelf, TONIGHT

Morning, all, and happy Monday! We hope anyone within spitting distance of granola-town--by which I of course mean Guelph, that recycler's paradise, that urban spa, that city on the hill for composting cosmopolitans--will stop by The Bookshelf tonight for a bang-up Bibliomnibus Night. We're bringing you five authors, all at once, all for free! Come support the bibliocrew and the stupendous Dan Evans: indefatigable bookseller, charming radio host, and (it would seem) impromptu tour guide. AK's in Guelph as we speak and the rest will descend shortly! 

WHAT: Biblioasis at the Bookshelf: An Evening of Poetry & Fiction

WHERE: The Bookshelf, 41 Quebec St., Guelph

WHEN: Monday May 14th, 7 p.m.

Admission is free. Please contact tmurphy@biblioasis.com if you have any questions.   

THE LINE-UP:

Mike Barnes: The Reasonable Ogre

The author of seven books including poetry, short fiction, novels and a memoir, Mike Barnes has received many honours for his writing.  Calm Jazz Sea was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for poetry and Aquarium won the Danuta Gleed Award for best first book of short stories in Canada.  His short fiction has won a National Magazine Awards Silver Medal and appeared in the prestigious Best Canadian Stories (twice)and Journey Prize Anthology (three times).  Since the early 1970s Mike Barnes has also lived with mental illness, a story he told for the first time in his memoir The Lily Pond. His most recent book, The Reasonable Ogre, is a collection of adult fairy tales, and has been called by Fairy Tale Review founder Kate Bernheimer "a marvel, and a tribute to the power of story." For more information please visit www.reasonableogre.com. 

Alex Boyd: The Least Important Man

Alex Boyd writes poems, fiction, reviews and essays, and has published work in magazines and newspapers such as The Globe and Mail, Quill & Quire, and on websites such as Nthposition. His first book of poems Making Bones Walk (Luna Publications, 2007) won the Gerald Lampert Award. He edits the online poetry journal Northern Poetry Review, and recently helped establish Best Canadian Essays. His second collection of poetry, The Least Important Man, was released from Biblioasis in spring of 2012.

Liliana Heker: The End of the Story

Liliana Heker is a Jewish-Argentinian author and intellectual, known for her outspoken protests against state violence during Argentina's Dirty War (1976-1983). At a time when many writers and journalists fled the country to escape persecution, Heker remained, and argued the necessity of bearing witness to state atrocities. 

   Made famous at first by the public polemic she had with the great Argentine writer Julio Cortázar (then living in Paris), Heker’s short fiction has since been anthologized in over a dozen countries. Her collected stories was released by Alfaguara in 2004. The End of the Story, which provoked enormous public controversy over how best to remember the years of the Argentine dictatorship, is her second work to appear in English.

Amanda Jernigan: Groundwork

Amanda Jernigan is a poet, playwright, essayist, and editor. Her works have been published in Canada, the United States and Germany, and are represented in the online archive of the Poetry Foundation. Groundwork, which was selected as a Top-Five Book of Poetry for 2011 on NPR.org, was commended this January by David Orr: "Jernigan," he says, "possesses daunting formal skill ... her lines have an emotional intensity that is no less memorable for being understated. And she has a light, perfecting touch."

Anakana Schofield: Malarky

"Malarky spins and glitters like a coin flipped in the air—now searingly tragic, now blackly funny. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant."—Annabel Lyon, author of The Golden Mean

"This is the story of the teapot-wielding 'Our Woman': fretful mother, disgruntled farmwife, and—surprisingly late in life—sexual outlaw/anthropologist. Everything about this primly raunchy, uproarious novel is unexpected—each draught poured from the teapot marks another moment of pure literary audacity."—Lynn Coady, author of The Antagonist

Anakana Schofield is an Irish-Canadian writer of fiction, essays, and literary criticism. She has contributed to the London Review of Books, The Recorder: The Journal of the American Irish Historical Society, the Globe and Mail, and the Vancouver Sun. She has lived in London and Dublin, and now resides in Vancouver. Malarky, which was selected as a Summer 2012 Barnes & Noble Discover Pick, is her first novel.