Diane Schoemperlen in Quill & Quire, The Bull Calf

In the December issue of Quill & Quire, Diane Schoemperlen offers up a introduction to found text and collage, and the genesis of her latest book, By the Book: 

The stories in By the Book are in the tradition of the objet trouvé – taking the form of a found narrative or conversation or meditation – each being an expanded, exploded, and embroidered rearrangement of the original material. The selection and ordering of the sequences in each story was a very labour-intensive and time-consuming process, but one that I found immensely enjoyable and satisfying.

Reading and rereading each old book with a pencil in hand, I searched for its hidden treasures and marked each sentence that resonated for me. Then I moved them around like puzzle pieces, working out of instinct and my love of language and its unpredictable largesse, until the whole thing began to gel. More often than not, I was happily surprised by the power of the juxtapositions and how far I could take them. It was a matter of simultaneously trying to control the material while remaining open to accident, chance, and serendipity.

For the full review go to: http://www.quillandquire.com/people/2015/02/04/last-word-diane-schoemperlen-on-found-text/ 

In The Bull Calf, Sarah Bezan offered up a positive take on By the Book:

Perhaps the most successful section of the book, entitled “By the Book or: Alessandro in the New World,” reads between the lines of the Nuovissima Grammatica Accelerata: Italian-Inglese Enciclopedia Popolare (1900), a book intended to be read by new Italian immigrants to the United States. The original text, which includes advice, notes on grammar and nomenclature, and a background on the American Constitution, also traces correspondence that can be used by its readers to navigate “everyday situations such as discussing the weather, looking for work, getting a hair cut, buying groceries, and visiting the doctor,” as Schoemperlen writes in the section’s introduction (2). Interspersed with extracts from the Nuovissima (indicated by Schoemperlen with the use of boldface), this section imagines a real world of love and loss in the character of Alessandro, who longs for his home country, and for the beautiful young women of the New World, in equal measure...Redeeming personal accounts and stories left untold between the lines of remaining documents, By The Book toys with the notion of completeness. Pieced together “the old-fashioned way by the traditional cut-and-paste method with real paper, real scissors, and real glue” (xi), her most recent book explores the enigmatic possibilities of juxtaposing unfamiliar elements in a bold creative practice of scission and adhesion.

For the full review go to: http://www.thebullcalfreview.ca/dianeschoemperlen.htm

Kirkus Loves Alphabet

Giving Kathy Page's Alphabet a coveted starred review, Kirkus Reviews had the following to say:

A moving novel about knowledge, self-awareness and the power of words, set in the purgatory of prison. This young man's life demands our attention and refuses to let go.

Simon Austen is serving life imprisonment for the murder of his girlfriend in a fit of uncontrollable rage. It's Margaret Thatcher's 1980s England, but he is lost in time, attending sessions with institutional psychiatrists who might be able to help him gain parole. He learns to read with the aid of a prison volunteer and writes letters for his fellow inmates to lawyers, mothers and lovers, considering it his job. He also writes his version of his life story, tattooing his body with the words others have called him in spite and hate: “ARROGANT,” “WEIRDO,” “BASTARD,” “COLD,” “MURDERER.” Then “COURAGEOUS,” inspired by Bernadette "Bernie" Nightingale, a counselor he fantasizes about and works with to enter an experimental program that may move his parole forward. Page writes fiercely, drawing a fine portrait of a man who lives daily, routinely, fragilely in an environment that can erupt in violence at any time. It does, in a powerful scene where Simon is gang-beaten, has bleach poured down his throat, and is sent to a hospital, where all we've learned about him is dramatically, but tenderly, unsettled. Vic is his roommate in the prison hospital and an unforgettable character as he transforms into Charlotte, disrupting Simon’s view of life's predictability and moving him to a greater understanding. Charlotte is freed, figuratively and literally, but writes letters and visits Simon, giving him strength and a vision of life outside the cement and steel of incarceration and the confinement of his own history. The words that are inked over Simon’s body are simply prologue to the next chapter of his life.

Page doesn't sentimentalize the cruelty of life in a prison system but manages to transcend it through Simon, who writes his own story in tattoo ink and letters. This powerful novel is simply an epiphany.

Publishers Weekly Praises Kathy Page's Alphabet

Kathy Page's Alphabet, one of our new reprint titles (though a first publication south of the 49th) comes in for some praise -  and our second starred review for the book in the US -- from Publisher's Weekly: 

Page’s gritty and illuminating sixth novel, originally published in 2004, and shortlisted for Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Awards in 2005, follows Simon Austen, a convicted murderer, through a series of inner triumphs and small victories as he makes his way through the British penal system. Fascinating from the first page, readers watch Austen as he learns how to read, becomes a letter writer for his fellow inmates, and “gets into education, big time,” eventually earning all his high school credits. He decides to address the issue of his inability to relate to women, on his own at first, by corresponding with various women. His description, in one of those letters, of the events that lead him to strangle his girlfriend sends him into a tailspin as he begins to face the underlying reasons behind the impulsive violent act that has defined his life. He is sent to an intensive therapeutic program that forces him to face many of his most serious issues. The journey Austen makes is primarily an inner one, a slow peeling back of the layers of protection he uses to shut everyone out, including himself. As he starts to let people in, in a series of increasingly authentic interactions, we bear witness to his slow and inspiring transformation.

A Season of Serious Reading

In the Toronto Star's list of the most anticipated Fall books of the season, Emily Donaldson gave a shout-out to our very own Freedom in American Songs, by Kathleen Winter, saying:

I’m also excited about Kathleen Winter’s new story collection The Freedom in American Songs, whose tales her publisher Biblioasis describes as being about “modern loneliness, small-town gay teens, catastrophic love, and the holiness of ordinary life”; in other words, everything.

For the full list of the Star's anticipated Fall titles, which also included a Kathleen's other book this season, Boundless (Anansi), please go here.

Words Without Borders praises Ondjaki's Granma Nineteen

Over at the online world literature magazine Words Without Borders Amanda Calderon has fallen in love with Ondjaki's charming and graceful Granma Nineteen and the Soviet's Secret:

It is no surprise that this energetic and endearing novel is the work of a writer of such stunning accomplishment as Ondjaki. He is incredibly prolific—the author of twenty books, and winner of over a dozen Portuguese-language literary prizes, including the prestigious José Saramago Prize for Literature in 2013. He is only thirty-six.

Just as the dust whipped up by the Luanda Bay breeze drifts across the neighborhood in a wave, settling on front steps and in chicken coops, getting into everything through windows and eyes, the world of Granma Nineteen is in constant motion. We have only to read the first lines to know this: “The explosion woke up even the birds asleep in the trees and the dozy fish in the sea. Colours came out that had never been seen before: yellow mixed with red pretending to be orange in a bluish green, flares that mimicked the strength of the stars reclining in the sky and a warlike rumbling of the kind made by MiG planes.” Ondjaki is at his best when he is writing the frenetic wonderment of children, even as they contend with the deadly realities of war and political power. The result is ebullient, cinematic, and downright magical.

Read more: http://wordswithoutborders.org/book-review/ondjakis-granma-nineteen-and-the-soviets-secret#ixzz3CXlB04s9

Praise for Kathy Page and K.D. Miller

Morning All! 

I hope you had a wonderful Canada Day, we certainly did here at Biblioasis! 

Kathy Page's Paradise and Elsewhere has been racking up the praise this week.  The Minneapolis Star-Tribune review called it "A mind-bending collection of stories about transformation and adaptation, full of startling ideas, capricious characters and uncanny goings-on ... Paradise & Elsewhere is composed of elastic language and distorted reflections, each story boldly illuminating as it playfully confounds."

In their Canada Day blog That Shakespearean Rag made a list of their top 5 books so far this year and we are so proud that two of our authors were included.  About Paradise and Elsewhere they said “Kathy Page’s new collection is cast in the fabulist mode of Angela Carter, with stories about a society that has outlawed kissing due to an orally transmitted virus, a sea creature who takes the place of a lighthouse-keeper’s missing wife, and a journalism student who takes the notion of communing with nature to a bizarre and unsettling extreme.”

Also featured in That Shakespearean Rag's top 5 books was K.D. Miller’s All Saints. “All Saints is infused with humour, a surprising degree of eroticism, and an uncompromising eye for human fallibility and frailty."

Cheers,

Deirdre

Ray Robertson in the News

Biblioasis is pleased to announce several reviews of the highly acclaimed I Was There the Night He Died by Ray Robertson:

"I Was There the Night He Died, [Ray Robertson's] seventh novel, is an absorbing and hilarious read, despite the most tragic of narratives ... the narrative is filled with sly wit and keen observation ... an exceptional novel by one of the country's finest literary voices."—The National Post

"Penned in the stark-yet-warm rock'n'roll prose that has become his signature ... Robertson creates characters who dance and sing even as they suffer the malaise of life ... [and] has a great deal of fun with his chosen profession, poking sly jabs at the stereotypical image of the writer while at the same time paying tribute to it."—The Winnipeg Review

Ray was also interviewed by Chatham Daily News' Ellwood Shreve, who claimed that “I have read and enjoyed some of Robertson's books, including What Happened Later, David and Why Not? What makes his books even more interesting to me is the fact they are set in Chatham. The way he describes neighbourhoods and places, I can see it in my mind's eye.”—Chatham Daily News

On April 9th, Chatham This Week heralded I Was There the Night He Died as a "portrait of a self-medicating man’s midlife crisis, a testimony to love’s persistence despite death and decline, and ultimately a passionate defence of the power of popular music to change our lives.”—Chatham This Week

49th Shelf posted it in the "On Our Radar" blog series and quoted Cord Community "I Was There The Night He Died doesn’t read like a lot of Canadian fiction. It’s urban, has a lot of alt-country and obscure rock and roll in it, and it’s not trying to turn anyone into a better human being. It’s just a great story populated by some very real, very flawed characters. Granted, no one who works for the Chatham Chamber of Commerce will be too thrilled, but I think many of the rest of us will remember fondly a life not too far removed from our own, and have a laugh on the way.”—49th Shelf

And last but not least, Open Book Ontario posted a segment with Ray Robertson on the role of money in fiction.

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.  

The Pangborn Defence

There are times, as a publisher (as I am sure is also the case with writers and their books) when I begin to worry that the books we are publishing have little life beyond the short window of buzz (& some, despite our best efforts, don't even manage buzz, but are effectively (or at least seemingly) stillborn) we're able to build around them at publication.

So I always find it gratifying when there's a google alert for an older book and it's not merely another eBay bookseller listing a review copy of the title for pennies on the dollar.  Such was the case this weekend, when what might be the most intelligent review we've received for Norm Sibum's 2008 The Pangborn Defence was brought to our attention.  It leaves reason to hope many of our older books are still finding their way in the world, one reader at a time.

Here a taste of the review, from www.gordsellar.com:

...what I find different in this book is its worldliness — not in the sense of that boring old divide between the sacred and the secular, so much as in its responsivity to the world. Sibum seems to have provided his own answer to the question, “What does it take to get poets to shake their fists at power?” His answer seems to be: The Bush Administration.

Well, not that alone. Reality TV; the rise of capitalist globalization; but also, one senses, the creeping on of the years, the visible collapse one witness less in one’s own life than in the lives of one’s friends and enemies, as their hair grays and their marriages collapse and their bad habits continue on into the shadow years.

....

There is disgust and rage in these pages, but a salutary one: The influence of Pound on Sibum’s work was apparent to me in The November Propertius mainly for his juxtaposition of the ancient and mythical with the quotidian world of waitresses and drunk pals, as well as in his treatment of language; here, though, he has gone further, he has made his work overtly, unapologetically political.

With The Cantos, that move was in many ways disastrous, but I dare to think it is less so with The Pangborn Defence. Happily, though Sibum has brought his poet’s tatty shoes to the streetcorner and mounted a soapbox, we find to our relief that he has come out not in praise of the Mussolinis of our day, but rather to condemn them; and the weary, unhopeful tendency here gives way, just often enough, to rage that that feels pent up, that one gets at least this much: one is not alone, in one’s own horror and disgust at how the century began.

Worldliness, a salutary disgust and rage (along with various beauties): Gord gets it absolutely right.

Read the full review here.  

A Black Rose of Regret....

blooms in Alex MacLeod's Light Lifting. Or so says the Globe & Mail.

Saints, of course, have a tough time staying fresh. They gather scholarly dust and, too easily, an ossified adulation that can do disservice both to the subtleties of their gifts and to the acolytes (or progeny) who write in their footsteps. I’m happy to say that Alexander MacLeod’s debut fiction collection, just long-listed for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, fully dodges the behemoth of homage and expectation. This writer swims entirely in his own waters.

Miracle Mile opens in a generic hotel room with best buds Mikey and Burner flat out on their beds watching the sports news. They’re career runners on yet another cross-country track tour, their world narrowed daily to the prep and the race. TV surfing is one way of clearing their minds. “This was the day after Mike Tyson bit off Evander Holyfield’s ear.” As a video loop of the carnage plays over and over, Mikey acknowledges, almost celebrates, the bestial sensuality: “Mike moving in for the kill, the way his cheek brushes up almost intimately against Evander’s face just before he breaks all the way through and gives in to his rawest impulse ... and his teeth come grinding down.”

A chummy-rivalrous erotic current underlays the story, from Burner’s open speculations on his hotel bed about wearing underwear, or not, that day, to the light touch of a hand on a back just before a race. MacLeod’s detours into scarier specifics of the track-addict demimonde are fascinating, plunging us into minds and bodies tortured in months of abuse to shave off crucial 10ths of a second. The story veils its deeper structure, building toward bursts of understanding. These guys love each other. They will never say so. And, like Tyson, they fight their rawest impulses and sometimes don’t win.

Wonder About Parents pivots on the prospects of a babe in arms whose fever is judged a little too casually by her parents as they undertake a gruelling Montreal-to-Windsor highway trip on Christmas Eve. The more diversionary pivot is an episodic historical biology (both personal and global) of head lice, with surprise cameos from Aristotle, Henry IV and Vladimir Lenin, among others. Weighty with research, the tale nonetheless rattles along on arresting factoids and sharp set pieces, including a comically horrific diaper change in a crowded rest-stop men’s room (“Got your hands full there, buddy”). Brisk and loose, it cuts the predictable sick-child suspense with a sustained ironic tone and an incisive take on the learning curve of parenting.

For the full review, please go here.

A Stone Motherfucker of a Book

When we move into a second printing for Light Lifting, we know what we're going to put on the front cover. Forget Robert Wiersma's Pure Literary Transcendence. I prefer his unedited enthusiasm over at Beattie's Shakespherian Rag. "It really is a stone motherfucker of a book. It blew me away."

Over at That Shakespherian Rag Steven offers his own take on Light Lifting:

Sometimes a debut collection appears that’s so assured, so confident, so poised that it’s hard to believe it’s the author’s first time out of the gate. This was true of Rebecca Rosenblum’s 2008 debut, Once, and it also applies to Alexander MacLeod’s newly Giller-longlisted collection Light Lifting. (Like Rosenblum’s book, Light Lifting is published by Biblioasis, a press which seems to have some kind of alchemical formula for discovering talent in the short fiction arena.)
Not that MacLeod’s book appeared fully formed as if out of Zeus’s head. The author published his first story when he was 21 years old. He’s now on the cusp of 40, so the seven stories in his collection have clearly been percolating for quite some time. Such patience and dedication is apparent on every page of MacLeod’s staggering debut, which collects a group of tough-minded urban tales about people at defining moments in their lives – moments that often involve a recourse to violence or harm.
Each story is a small stylistic marvel. “Adult Beginner I” features a potent, vertiginous scene – one of the most visceral in recent memory – of a swimmer attempting a daredevil dive off a hotel roof into the Detroit River. “Wonder About Parents” employs staccato, declarative sentences to trace the trajectory of a relationship through the prism of a head lice infestation at an elementary school. The title story, about the macho dynamics of a bricklaying crew, opens with a scalding description of a sunburn: “You could see it right through his shirt. Like grease coming through waxed paper. Wet and thick like that, sticking to him. Purple.”

Full review here.

And MacLeod bunkmate A.J. Somerset has this to offer over at his Banjaxed.

Alexander MacLeod’s debut collection of short fiction, drawn from 15 years of writing for literary magazines in Canada, tempts you to indulge in the kind of superlatives that might be counterproductive in the age of hype; just how brilliant can it really be? Well, pretty damn brilliant, actually. Among the seven longish stories that make up this collection, there is not a single misstep. This book is that good.
These stories lead in one direction, dart down a side alley, and then return to themselves, without any bad welds or weak seams to give away their construction. “Number Three” erects the Chrysler minivan as a mythic object, while exploring the consequences of a devastating accident; “Adult Beginner I” finds teenaged lifeguards diving into the Detroit River from the roof of the Holiday Inn, as a swimmer goes out of her depth; and “Wonder About Parents” encapsulates, in staccato prose, the strange intimacies of parenthood. “Good Boys,” an apparently simple story about four brothers and the kid across the street, manages to be both funny and moving while avoiding any form of predictability.
Read it. Oh, yes. Read it.

That, pretty much, is his full review. So just visit AJ's blog by chicking over the right. And pick up his Combat Camera as well. It also is a Stone Mutherfucker.

I just like saying that.

Pause in the Globe

Robyn Sarah, the veteran among this group of poets, has produced another fine example of lyric craftsmanship in her ninth collection, Pause For Breath. The pause Sarah meditates on is nothing less than the brief time of breathing between one's entry into the world and one's exit from it. Her poems demonstrate the mindfulness of one attending to the quality of each inspiration and exhalation onto the page.

for the rest of this review, please go here.