Happy 10th! Tom Dilworth on Light Lifting

Light Lifting, for which Biblioasis acted as midwife as well as publisher is a great book, important for me for lifting the west end of Windsor into literature of a high, international calibre and, in doing so, establishing its publisher as an important one. 

The Bibliomanse is Back in Business!

A Happy New Year to all our devoted Thirsty followers. We've hit the ground running here at Biblioasis after a delightful holiday hiatus: some of us were in Texas, some of us were in New Brunswick, one of us (*cough*ChrisAndrechek*cough*) may have caused a scene at the Gare Central by banging on a train window and hollering "HEY ZACH!", and a couple of us (*cough*Dan*cough*Jesse) saw the bookshop through its long snowy hours. A certain resident press shih tzu may have tried to take on a herd of urban deer. Altogether I'd say it was a smashing holiday (did I develop a cough?), but all in all we're glad to be back.

In the interim a few nice media hits came in for our titles, and some lovely blurbs for Cynthia Flood and KD Miller especially. Congratulations to all.  I also wanted to share a beautiful poem that seems appropriate as we sit here between Christmas and Epiphany, which is by our own Marsha Pomerantz and ran recently in Raritan. It's there if you scroll down.

Onward, upward, 2014 ho!—
T.

1. Strength of Bone review from The National Post syndicated by PostMedia News
Which means you may have seen it in Vancouver, Calgary, Montreal, Regina, Windsor, Ottawa, Canada.com, & more.

2. Red Girl Rat Boy makes National Post’s Best of 2013 Short Fiction List (Steven Beattie)
"These stories shine like glass, but glass that is coloured and curved and prismatic. Flood’s brief, technically adventurous tales sparkle and glitter in dazzling, yet frequently unexpected ways.”

3. Red Girl Rat Boy makes Globe & Mail’s Books of 2013 Short Fiction List (Caroline Adderson)
"In Red Girl Rat Boy Cynthia Flood has pared her style down to a clipped staccato that is at first jarring, then mesmerizing. How does she scrape the narrative so close to the bone, yet still manage to emotionally engage the reader? Because she’s a master, carefully maximizing the potential of each word."

4. Red Girl Rat Boy reviewed on The Coastal Spectator
"These stories are told in a voice that navigates like an underground stream through the deepest channels of the psyche. These stories are felt in the marrow."

5. KD Miller’s Brown Dwarf reviewed in FreeFall Magazine

"Brown Dwarf ... creeps up on you with its increasing complexity and deft handling of an adolescent mindset. More than a mystery, it explores not only the limits of memory—how our perception of events shifts as we age and change into adults—but also the sometimes irrational dynamics of relationships between friends, and between child and parent … deeply affecting.”

6. Light Lifting reviewed in FreeFall Magazine

“MacLeod so beautifully articulates everyday events that even the most normal (even mundane) occurrence becomes breathtaking. He takes his reader to a reality in which everything is nuanced. Every object, interaction and event has a beautiful poignancy to it, and it is in illuminating this beauty to his reader that MacLeod succeeds in breaking his reader’s hearts … a collection that should be consumed carefully."

7. Marsha Pomerantz has 5 Poems in Raritan (published by Rutgers)

Of which this is the first.

Saint Luke Paints the Virgin

As soon as his brush lifted,
the elixir of her withdrew,

leaving her mud in small
shaped phrases. He was

painting his desire to hold
her always and want her

never. I’d trade always for
an apple, said the assistant,

stroking the arc of a cheek as
his teeth marked minutes along

his lips. Holiness is separation,
pooling just beyond depiction

in a single swimming thought.
That Luke could ever get her

down was either blasphemy
or fantasy, and both options

beckoned. Know me, he heard her say.
Take my likeness, make me likely.

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Black Moss Night at Biblioasis

Happy Monday, folks! Here are a few bits and bytes to tide you through this (extremely blustery) February afternoon.

1. We're happy to announce that this Sunday we're having an informal celebration in honour of Black Moss Press here at the bookshop. 6 p.m. Join us as we raise our glasses to this legendary local institution and the authors that make it special. RSVP on Facebook today!

2. Ray and I made it back safely from the WDET studios this morning. As a little memento? The attached. Craig Fahle remains as awesome and impressive as ever (and in this picture Ray may or may not be reading an article about Girls.) You can listen to the episode, called "Stories of the Underground Railroad," online here.

3. We've had a new interview with Alexander MacLeod go up on the Numéro Cinq blog. Check out Benjamin Woodard's questions on physicality, layering, research, construction, and more.  Plus there's that funny picture of Alex knee-deep in what I'm fairly certain is a septic tank.

4. Today's February Freebie, in celebration of the Black Moss event on Sunday night, is Marty Gervais' Ghost Road and Other Forgotten Stories of Windsor. Visit our FB page, like that status update, share it, enter, and win!

K. That's it. That's plenty! Till tomorrow.

UK Keeps Up the Love for A. MacLeod

What not to keep on your night-
stand, according to Britain?

Afternoon, Ls&Gs, and happy Friday! We just got word from across the pond that Alex MacLeod has a short review in today's Independent. Here's what they had to say:

"Short stories aren't usually known for boosting adrenalin levels, but Canadian author Alexander MacLeod's debut collection isn't one for the bedside table … Firmly rooted in work and family, Macleod's relaxed story-telling will make you feel anything but."

Short, sweet, cold sweats. Who could ask for more? Till soon, folks. Murphy out. 

Cinco de Mayo Malarky

Well, folks, it continued to be a good weekend for Malarky. The book didn't, like the rest of Windsor, file into Detroit and get drunk in Mexicantown, nor did it stumble home in the wee hours clutching a bag of tostadas and reeking of margarita salt ... but it did get a little drunk on love. FIVE reviews this weekend: count them. FIVE. Not only did we see some tenderness from The Vancouver Sun and The National Post, but Kassie Rose of The Longest Chapter raved about it, as did The Winnipeg Free Press and Sheryl MacKay on North by Northwest. 

So. You can listen to Sheryl MacKay's interview with AK (approx. 22 min) here, and you can see how the rest of the salt shook out below.  

In other news, Alex Boyd was yesterday's Sunday Poet on the vehicule press blog, tonight is Alice Petersen's Montreal launch and Alexander MacLeod is reading at the Rowers Pub Reading Series AND Claire Tacon goes viral at Grey Borders; then tomorrow Claire is reading at Palisades Garden in Cobourg and Rebecca Rosenblum continues to spread the Bibliobug at Virus in St Catharine's. 

Lord. What a week! And to think it's only--well, a happy, yes happy--it's only Monday. More soon!

Malarky In Review 

"Schofield’s brilliant storytelling in Malarky is among the most engaging I’ve ever encountered." - Kassie Rose, The Longest Chapter

"The love of a mother for her son is the central theme of this novel. But the book has much to ask and much to say about many other topics as well, among them empowerment through sex, loneliness in marriage, the futility of war, the strains of immigration and the margins of mental health. Schofield's ability to tie all these together in such an original, quirky, tender and eloquent way is to be commended ... Malarky is an alternately beautiful, brilliant, profound, poignant and comedic work of literary fiction." - The Winnipeg Free Press  

"I loved this book Malarky ... I was gobsmacked." - Sheryl MacKay, CBC Radio, North by Northwest

"A challenging but rewarding look at what happens to a mother when the bottom drops out."—The Vancouver Sun

"Delightfully offbeat ... Schofield shows a deft - and altogether welcome - comic touch."—The National Post

"Malarky is an exemplary read ... I look forward to the next of Anakana Schofield’s novels."—Scott Esposito, Conversational Reading

"Irish-Canadian literary critic Anakana Schofield's first novel is a tumultuous ride. Malarky asks questions without providing answers, chronicling the emotional, mental, and occasionally menial anxieties of Our Woman as she struggles with her own agency and desire. Set in contemporary Ireland, the book overflows with subtle and sometimes subversive allusions to James Joyce's Ulysses, Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles, site-specific contemporary Irish art, and Catholic history. Yet Schofield's strong prose style and inventive approach to structure will likely reward readers unfamiliar with these cultural references."—Quill & Quire

"Malarky is like nothing else, and what everything should be … This is a book that will leave you demanding more of everything else you read."—Pickle Me This 

"Malarky is a wacky, dead serious book, and what stands out more than anything is its freshness in a sea of same-old, same-old novels.“—The Telegraph Journal

From West to East

Last but not least, ladies and gentlemen, and from the other side of the world: Rebecca Rosenblum and Amy Jones were on a Maritime Tour last week, where they read at St. Mary's, UNB, and Acadia. Thanks go out to our own Alexander MacLeod and Brian Bartlett at the St. Mary's Reading Series, as well as the many others who helped make this tour possible.

Biblioauthors Dine in Style: Alexander MacLeod, Amy Jones, Zach Wells, & Rebecca Rosenblum. Take that, Halifax!

The guardian Reviews Light Lifting

A rave review of Alexander MacLeod's Light Lifting appeared in The Guardian this weekend.  chris Powers writes, in part:

Canadian author Alexander MacLeod's debut collection opens with a story titled"Miracle Mile", a nod to the 1954 Vancouver meeting between Roger Bannister and John Landy, when for the first time two competitors in the same race managed to run a mile in under four minutes. The race was unprecedented, not merely in athletics, but in popular culture as well: it was the first international sporting event to be broadcast live across North America. Monuments were commissioned and headlines were made, most of which featured phrases such as "the eyes of the world" and "a date with destiny". MacLeod's story isn't about those two runners, but about a couple of contemporary professional sportsmen who've been training with and competing against each other since grade school, and who run four-minute miles every day. That is, when they're not flopped out in motel rooms drifting along with daytime TV, or clinic-hopping for steroid shots, or packed into a courtesy bus with other oddly shaped athletes ("Each of us had one of those strange bodies designed to do only one thing"). Their achievements and sacrifices are now commonplace. The world may not be watching at all.

The question implicit here – how or why even a little thing might matter, and to whom – runs through every story in this book like ore through rock. (For runners, "the smallest numbers meant more than the bigger ones" and quirky pre-race rituals are critical; for bricklayers, "it's the light lifting that does the damage", wrecking knees and ageing workers prematurely.) So too does an intense interest in the body, its exploits and its depredations. When MacLeod's characters aren't out-running freight trains, or night-swimming in the Detroit river, they're kids sporting sunburns that seep through clothing "like grease coming through waxed paper", or autoworkers "so twisted up with tendonitis they couldn't tie their own shoes", or – perhaps most memorably – a father wrestling with his sick child's nappy in a service station ("Liquid shit blasts out of her diaper, runs all the way up her back to the neck … Lines of men waiting for the urinals, watching me").

This last incident is from "Wonder of Parents", both the most abstract and accomplished piece here, where MacLeod allows his interest in minutiae to dictate the form of the story. A fragmentary, non-chronological account of regular parenting tasks (combing for nits, collecting Happy Meals at the drive-thru, queuing for flu shots) co-exists alongside the narrator's nightly reading of Hans Zinsser's Rats, Lice and History (itself a tribute to Laurence Sterne, that great theorist of contingent association), and overtly stakes a claim for the abiding influence of small, concrete matters over grand narratives and premeditated outcomes. What random assortment of circumstances (a girl in a Clash T-shirt, a college fumble) leads people to embark on a lifetime of exhaustive – and exhausting – commitment? MacLeod's point here is that there are no epiphanies as such, merely a series of events that swiftly becomes everyday discipline, and significance – if it exists at all – is always imposed retroactively. "Who are we to these people?" the tired parent asks himself of his children. "Genetics. A story they make up about themselves."

For the rest of the review, please go here.  

RainTaxi Reviews Light Lifting

Benjamin Woodard reviews Light Lifting in the latest edition of RainTaxi:

The Canada found in Alexander MacLeod’s impressive debut story collection, Light Lifting, is full of anxiety and obsession: a land where man masters the ins and outs of minivan combustion engines, parents fixate on the origin of lice, and the powerless struggle to overcome childhood fears. Across seven wide-ranging tales, lives are saved, others are lost, and redemption, both physical and spiritual, is occasionally found. Nevertheless, the world harnessed by MacLeod is also one that bursts with wonder and nostalgia, and the author lets his subjects shine with both raw power and supple beauty throughout. Each story in Light Lifting is a true marvel—there are no fillers here—and with every passing page MacLeod firmly establishes himself as a bright new talent in literary fiction.

For the full review please go here.

Light Lifting Makes O'Connor Prize Shortlist

The Irish Times announced this morning the shortlist for The Frank O'Connor International short Story Award, and Alexander MacLeod's Light Lifting has made the shortlist of six. He's among pretty heady company: Yiyun Li, the first winner of the 35,000 pound prize, nominated a second time for Gold Boy, Emerald Girl; Saints and Sinners, by Edna O'Brien; Death is Not an Option, by Suzanne Rivecca; The Empty Family, by Colm Toibin; and Marry or Burn, by Valerie Trueblood.

Alex will be flying to Ireland to participate in the festival, where the winner will be announced September 18th.

Congrats!

Light Lifting Wins Atlantic Book Award

Last Night Alex MacLeod's Light Lifting won The Margaret and John Savage First Book Award at the Atlantic Book Award gala. Light Lifting was also nominated for the Thomas Raddall Award, won by Biblioasis-alumni Kathleen Winter for Annabel. Congratulations to both Alex and Kathleen.

31 Days of Short Stories: Steven Beattie on MacLeod's The Loop

Over at That Shakespearean Rag, Steven Beattie continues his 31 Days of short stories by focusing on one of Alexander MacLeod's, from his Giller nominated (Danuta Gleed-nominated; Commonwealth-nominated; doubly Atlantic Book Award nominated) Light Lifting:

Alexander MacLeod’s story The Loop is about borders: between young and old, between safety and danger. It is narrated by Allan, a 12-year-old boy who makes bicycle deliveries for a local pharmacy. The title of the story refers to the boy’s delivery route, which usually begins with Barney, a shut-in who “had everything wrong with him. Diabetes, high blood pressure, kidney problems, a liver thing and some kind of circulation issue that made his feet swell up so badly that he couldn’t wear shoes and could barely walk.” Rumours swirl around town that Barney “had a thing for kids and couldn’t keep his hands off little boys.” MacLeod’s descriptions of Barney are grotesque in their detail: he is “horrible, fat, nearly naked,” usually clad only in “a pair of nylon track shorts that almost disappeared when they got sucked between the folds of his rolling gut and his wide, hairy thighs,” and in the humid summers his “whole body would get this greasy sheen.” But Barney is renowned for one thing in particular:

He was famous mostly for his hernia. It was this red pulsating growth about the size of a misshapen grapefruit and it bulged way out of the lower left side of his stomach. It seemed like something impossible, like one of those gross, special effects from an alien movie that was supposed to make you think there was a smaller creature in there. Just the shape of it, and the way it stuck out of him, and how it seemed to come right at you, could make a person squirm if they weren’t used to it. But he refused to get it fixed and he was always making a big deal about how tough he was and how it didn’t bother him at all. He thought it was funny to pull back his shirt and scare the little kids as they walked by.

It is perhaps natural that a 12-year-old boy should fixate upon the hideous physical deformities of an older man: this is, after all, exactly the kind of thing that captures a pre-adolescent male’s attention and imagination. Still less comfortable is the boy’s admission that he is charged with taking new issues of various skin magazines with him on his rounds, magazines that Barney has no compunction about sharing with his young visitor: “‘Look at that one,’ he’d say and he’d hold up some crazed picture of an orgy that was supposed to be taking place in a working garage with five or six people, men and women, all tangled up around each other and bent over the hoods of cars.” The fact that Barney devours heterosexual porn tends to suggest that the rumours about him are exaggerated; nevertheless, there is something creepily disconcerting about his willingness to engage the 12-year-old delivery boy in discussions of sexual subject matter (one of many borders that get crossed in MacLeod’s story).

For his full analysis please go here.

Light Lifting on Danuta Gleed Shortlist

We received word this morning that Alexander MacLeod's Light Lifting has been shortlisted for the 2010 Danuta Gleed Award for the best first book of short stories. The judges (Douglas Glover, J. Jill Robinson and Claire Holden Rothman) said of the collection:

The stories in Alexander MacLeod's Light Lifting are dense with the tragic poetry of the everyday. His narrators speak in a deceptively relaxed vernacular that reflects a fierce emotional intensity just beneath the surface of the words, the stoic heroism of the common man and woman, and MacLeod's commitment to realistic story-telling.

The other Danuta Gleed nominees are:

Darcie Friesen Hossack, Mennonites Don't Dance (Thistledown Press)
R.W. Gray, Crisp (NeWest Press)
Billie Livingston, Greedy Little Eyes (Vintage)
Teri Vlassopoulos, Bats or Swallows (Invisible Publishing)

The winners will be announced in Toronto on Saturday May 28th, 2011, at a banquet during the OnWords Conference and AGM of the Writer's Union of Canada.

Congratulations to Alex and all of the other nominees!

Largehearted Boy and the Light Lifting Playlist

Over at Largehearted Boy Alexander MacLeod offers up his Light Lifting inspired musical playlist, which has already sent me scrambling for If I Should Fall From Grace and Mule Variations, two of my favourite albums. A good way to end a Friday.

From Alex's post:

I wrote Light Lifting with a lot of different music running through my head. Most of the stories in the book revolve around decisions or moments of change where one set of circumstances gives way to another. There are a lot of transformations in here, some more intense than others, so the songs vary quite a bit between the fast and the slow and the new and the old.


"Miracle Mile"

This is a story about two nearly world class distance runners who have to sign over their lives in order to achieve something that almost nobody else really cares about. The intensity of their training isolates them from other people and forces them into places where the normal rules don't apply. When they were kids in high school, for example, they used to race the freight trains through the dark in the rail tunnel from Detroit, under the river, and up to Windsor. I'm going with "If I Should Fall from Grace with God" on this one because one of boys wears a lucky Pogues T-Shirt as part of his superstitious warm-up ritual. I'll follow that with "Lose Yourself" by Eminem because nobody works a rhyme better than he does and because he knows all about the things that get ‘Imported from Detroit.'


"Wonder About Parents"

I guess this is a story about the tough accommodations that come along with any relationship so "Hotel Yorba" by The White Stripes gets the call. More Detroit truth here. Anybody who's seen the real Hotel Yorba knows the shelter it provides isn't deluxe, but it will do until the next day arrives. This is earlier White Stripes, back when Jack and Meg were still together or kind of married and that fits in with the story, too. I'll back it up with "There's an Arc" by Newfoundland's Hey Rosetta!, mostly for the line - "This could be our reward. This could be it." Check out the one-take video for this song: a victory in low-tech film making.

Read the rest of his playlist here.

Light Lifting: Two Atlantic Book Award Nominations // L.A. Times Review

We're a bit behind here, but on March 22nd it was announced that Alexander Macleod's Light Lifting was short-listed for two Atlantic Book Awards: the Margaret & John Savage First Book Award; and the Thomas Head Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award. Winners will be announced May 19th.

Light Lifting was also reviewed yesterday in the L.A. Times, it's first major U.S. review:

Every so often a new writer comes along with a true gift for language — not necessarily heavy with metaphor or profound imagery but has an elegant, conversational simplicity. It takes a certain clarity of mind not to burden sentences, and Alexander MacLeod has it in the story collection "Light Lifting." For example: "I ate my lunch with Tom every day and every day it was the same thing." "The sun just kept streaming down on us, all bright and summery. It wasn't right and I kept wishing for it to be darker so I didn't have to see it all so clearly." The stories veer toward darkness — he explores two world-class runners and the insidious nature of competition; the trauma of peer pressure; the terrors of young parents, the proud sorrow of single mothers and the embarrassment of their children. MacLeod's graceful writing lends these and other scenarios a humanity, a community of hardship and survival. In this way they move forward; the characters move forward; life goes on.

Biblioasis Hand-bound

When I first started Biblioasis six years, four months and five days ago (yes: at this point and time I am aware of the passing of every bloody second) I started it with the idea of it being a boutique-style press. The idea to start publishing actually came, at least in part, because I had taken a few bookbinding courses and was tired of making blank notebooks. When I started out, I intended that every trade book and every chapbook would have a hand-bound component. And, for a while, at least, I kept it up. Our first four trade books and nine chapbooks had hand-bound editions. And I have text blocks ready for binding for quite a few of the next dozen or so titles that followed. I even have a small binding room built in the garage, which proves that as little as three years ago I thought there was a chance I'd catch up. But I never did. Something I've become used to, as a publisher: my ambition being beat down by the tripartite realities of (1) not enough hours in a day; (2) not enough gas in the tank; and (3) not enough cash in the till. I was a Fool (Destined to be the working title of a future autobiography.) to believe it would be otherwise.


But I've always regretted abandoning this part of our publishing program, and I've always intended to get back to it. As a bookseller, book collector, bibliophile (or, when manic, mane), luddite, it's important to me. And in a digital age, when the twitter-verse is alive with chatter (ceaseless, ceaseless chatter) about the end of the physical book, perhaps it's even more important to get back to it. So, in fact, I have.

I'd hoped to have these ready well before the new year, to take advantage of the Christmas conasumerist frenzy, but it wasn't to be. We've produced two hand-bound editions of Fall 10 titles, a run of 50 copies of the first printing of Alexander MacLeod's Light Lifting, numbered and bound into hand-marbled papers; and a further run of 30 copies of A.J. Somerset's excellent Combat Camera. Both produced for the press by the wonderful Kate Murdoch (I seem to have even less hours in a day, and far less gas in the tank; but thanks to a better than average Fall 11, a few more dollars in the till.) Priced at 60.00 each, they can be purchased through the website -- just click on the hand-bound/hardcover link on the right side of the given book's page (For MacLeod, here; here for Somerset) -- or email me direct. If I can blow off the dust and put on my bookseller hat for a second, these are cheap at the price, and won't (or at least shouldn't) last long. Both will go for far more in as little as a few year's time. Especially if the Twitterverse is indeed correct, and the physical book is dead.

We'll be producing one or two such limited hand-bounds a season going forward, for as long as we can afford to do so. Clark Blaise's The Meagre Tarmac will follow this Spring. If any out there are interested in placing a standing order for these titles, let me know and we will get you off all new hand-bound titles as soon they are ready.