Eucalyptus reviewed in Publishers Weekly, The Rover

Afternoon, all, and TGIF. A quick word before we all scatter for the weekend, to say that the reviews for Eucalyptus keep tumbling in: this week we've got one up at Publishers Weekly and another at The Rover. The PW one is actually one of the best we've seen from our trade mag cronies. Congratulations to Mauricio and Donald (who, by the by, got some much-deserved praise for the seamlessness of his translation) and a very merry Friday to you all. Be danged to you, Polar Vortex II! We're feeling GOOD.

From Publishers Weekly

"Segura writes with a poetic economy of language, using very few words to create meaningful images ... Winkler's masterful translation is so seamless, readers will think that the novel was written in English ... Segura's novel and his original voice are important additions to the Canadian canon." 

From The Rover
"Ably translated, well-paced, teeming with interesting characters that often speak for whole chapters, and written in a prose that is both lucid and hallucinatory, Eucalyptus is a remarkable, thought-provoking novel with the accessibility of a page-turner."

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Last Week Was Actually Pretty Great.

You wouldn't know it from the Thirsty blog (ahemcoughsorry), but last week was actually a pretty great one over here at the Bibliomanse. So a happy Monday to you all! See below for the movings, shakings, news, reviews, and gossipy tidbits that got our follicles tingling ca. Nov. 11 to Nov. 15th, 2013. On the 16th we at the Bibliomanse celebrated ONE FULL YEAR in our wonderful new bookshop and office, and admittedly got a little distracted preparing for that, but you know what? We had a heckuva good time. Paul Vasey, Bob Duff, and Rino Bortolin joined us for author signings, and—as an extra-special geek treat—we had bookbinder extraordinaire Dan Mezza come in from London to do on-the-spot book appraisals and make repairs suggestions on old volumes. Thanks to the book doctor for making the trip south, and thanks to all of our wonderful customers who came in to support us here at the shop. We couldn't do it without you.

On to the media!

1. We had a lovely endorsement of Ray Robertson's David from the Historical Novel Society, as well as a half-hour interview with Ray with Bill Kenower, editor in chief of Author Magazine, on Author2Author;

2. Mauricio Segura's Eucalyptus was reviewed in the Montreal Review of Books and was named an Editor's Pick/Amazon.ca Top 100 Books of the Year for 2013;

3. Lucie Wilk, whose Strength of Bone was also an Editor's Pick/Amazon Top 100 book, was reviewed in this month's Quill & Quire. Quoth Kamal Al-Solaylee: “If you suppose [The Strength of Bone] is a love story across racial and political lines, you’re underestimating the inventiveness and grace of Lucie Wilk’s meditative debut. Wilk instead works with what is unspoken, hinted at, and left to the imagination … anything but typical.”

4. A "Book News" piece by Annalisa Quinn is circulating on NPR.org and NPR affiliates for Mia Couto's Neustadt win:
Book News: Mozambican Writer Wins Neustadt Prize, 'America's Nobel’: on NPR.org’s “The Two-Way,” Nov. 5
Repeated on WWNO.org, Nov. 13

5. In the wake of the furor surrounding Garth Hallberg’s massive Knopf advance, I thought I’d mention that yep, that is in fact the same Garth who blurbed Traymore so handsomely for The Millions. Traymore was also singled out for its first line over the weekend by the San Francisco Chronicle. 

6. Friday was a lovely wonderful rare day for us here at Biblioasis, with our first full-length poetry review in Michael Lista’s “On Poetry” column. For the poetry enthusiasts out there—heck, for everybody—the whole thing’s worth reading in full. Congratulations to Alexandra Oliver.

“An incredible feat of vision and voice … technically, nothing is out of Oliver’s grasp. Her go-to iambic pentameter can swallow anything in its path. Meeting the Tormentors in Safeway should go a long way toward establishing Oliver as one of the country’s best stanza makers, with a fluidity and ambition aspiring to Dylan Thomas or Yeats … When she succeeds, she succeeds entirely.”

7. Last but not least, the following from KD Miller, whose new collection All Saints will be forthcoming with Biblioasis in Spring 2014:

Recently I was interviewed by CNIB volunteer Ann Saunders for Accessible Media Inc. about my experience of recording some of my own books for The Canadian National Institute for the Blind. Included in the interview are excerpts of me narrating Holy Writ (The Porcupine's Quill, 2001); actor Deborah Kipp narrating Brown Dwarf (Biblioasis, 2010); and Ann Saunders herself narrating The Other Voice (Stonebunny Press, 2011.)
If you'd like to listen in, just click on the word "online" at the end of this sentence: "The November 2013 episode of Choice Words, featuring an interview with K.D. Miller, is available for listening online."

Biblioasis in Toronto at the Garrison Tonight!

The readings continue tonight in Toronto as Biblioasis brings you more of the authors you love.

Cynthia Flood, Norm Sibum, Andrew Steinmetz, Lucie Wilk,  Richard Norman, Alexandra Oliver and Mauricio Segura are appearing on the next stop in their tour to bring you readings from their newest books.

Music will be provided by Massey Harris, and our wildly popular t-shirts will be available for purchase.

To make the evening more exciting the purchase of a book will give you the chance to win a limited edition leather-bound copy of David Manson's The Pope's Bookbinder. The drawing for which will take place in November.

So come down to The Garrison at 1197 Dundas St W, and let the words fly and the drinks flow.

Doors open at 7 pm, admission is free.
For more information call Biblioasis at 519-968-2206 or email info@biblioasis.com.

Biblioasis Book Launch Tonight at Casa del Popolo, Montreal

We're back from a tryptophan-tastic Thankgsiving and ready for the Montreal launch of our Fall titles tonight at Casa del Popolo.

Join Biblioasis, Mauricio Segura and Donald Winkler, author and translator of Eucalyptus, as we celebrate their hometown launch with a joint reading.

We've also got Andrew Steinmetz with his latest book of non-fiction, This Great Escape, which was recently shortlisted for the Writers' Trust Hilary Weston Prize.

Journey Prize winner Cynthia Flood will be in town, all the way from Vancouver, to read from her latest short fiction collection Red Girl Rat Boy, and Lucie Wilk, who practices medicine in London, UK, also travels from afar to launch her debut novel The Strength of Bone. 

Check out Cult Montreal's launch preview,  in which they call This Great Escape, "fascinating," The Strength of Bone, "a lyrical debut," and Red Girl Rat Boy, "compulsively readable."


If anything is going to wake you from your post-turkey day lethargy, this is the reading to do it.
Doors are at 7pm, and as always, admission is free.

For more info call Biblioasis at 519-968-2206 or email info@biblioasis.com.

Living Colours

Over at the Rover, Neil MacRae reviews Mauricio Segura's Black Alley. Interestingly, this is the first review by a Montreal english language journal/newspaper of this novel, which is about racial tensions and the immigrant experience in Montreal. What is it with that? The book certainly gained plenty attention among francophones when it was published in 1998. Does the anglophone media just not give a shit? Anyone have an answer out there?

MacRae writes, in part:

Mauricio Segura is an established journalist specializing in issues of multiculturalism. Black Alley is his first novel, originally published in French in 1998, and it is primarily an examination of those same issues. But while its thematic concentration and narrative focus are sharp and specific, its scope is much broader. It is certainly a valuable glimpse into the life and nature of conglomerate immigrant neighbourhoods, racial animosities and street violence. It is also a universal coming-of-age story. Marcelo becomes Flaco, leader of the Latino Power gang, and Cléo grows into CB, head of the Haitian gang The Bad Boys, and the tragedy of violent racial conflict between two childhood friends is what the novel is about. But it is as much a story of the need to belong, and the choice that every maturing human is given and must make: will we define ourselves by what is inside us, or who stands beside us? By what we are not, or by what we are?

For the rest of the review, please go here.

For the Real Reader (Not the E-Reader)

This Fall the Literary Press Group is launching its Handmade Campaign, focusing on well-designed physical books in this age of e-reading hysteria. This, to my mind, is one of the more intelligent and creative back-to-the-book promos I've seen in a few years. There's some great titles there, by some of the best indie presses in the land: Coach House, Anvil, Pedlar, Invisible. And Biblioasis, of course.

Zach Wells's Track & Trace, K.D. Miller's Brown Dwarf and Mauricio Segura's Black Alley make up the Biblioasis contribution to this campaign. But if you're looking for some other great Biblioasis titles with that handmade appeal, why not also check out Mike Barnes's Thaw Foretold, Salvatore Ala's Straight Razor, Glenn & Kingwell's Idler's Glossary, Goran Simic's From Sarajevo With Sorrow.

Check in with you local indie bookseller to see if they'll be carrying these titles. For more information please go here.

Biblioasis Translation Series Launch Photos

It's been a bit of a busy time around these parts of late, and I've been meaning to post these photos for some time now. At Blue Met last month two of Biblioasis's Translation Series Authors were in attendance. From all received accounts Horacio Castellanos Moya, pictured above, was one of the hits of the festival, with three scheduled festival events in English and Spanish. Rumour has it that one of these sessions was recorded by CBC for playback at a later date. We'll try and find out when it will run and post a link when we do.
We also launched the latest title in our translation series, Mauricio Segura's Black Alley. A novel about Haitian and Latino gang violence in the Cotes-des-Neiges region of Montreal, it was quite a controversial novel when first published in French more than a decade ago, and it has lost none of its edge in Dawn Cornelio's translation. We're planning to do other events in support of this one. Stay tuned for further details ...

Pictured above, Translation Series Editor Stephen Henighan with Mauricio Segura.

First Review of Black Alley

Mauricio Segura's Black Alley is this season's first installment in the Biblioasis International Translation Series, and the first translation we've published that deals with Canadian experience: in this case, that of Chilean and Haitian immigrants in the Cote-des-Neiges area of Montreal. Stacey May Fowles reviews it in the current Quill & Quire, and says in part:

It’s a shame that so few books explore Canadian urban themes (especially those unique to Quebec) as well as Black Alley does. This long-anticipated translation of Mauricio Segura’s acclaimed and controversial 1998 novel, Côte-des-Nègres, is a unique window into the immigrant experience, city life, and gang violence. ... As the novel progresses we become deeply invested in the poignant confrontation between childhood friends who have become divided by race and gang allegiances. ... What results is a crystal clear and unadorned look at the many intersections of class, race, gender, and generational divide in modern urban Quebec. Black Alley is a distinctly refreshing reading experience.