We often rely on analogy to speak of things. It’s been common, for instance, to talk about literature as a conversation, and many have used the same term to talk about writing and reading in Canada. This approach views our country’s literature as an extended, sometimes more, sometimes less inclusive conversation about our common lives.

Discussions of literature also often use a different analogy — the marketplace, as in, a marketplace of ideas — which is suggested by the actual, tangible market in physical books and intellectual properties. This framing has dominated discussions of the book trade since the 1980s, as more social-democratic post-WW II visions of society have been replaced by the individualism of liberal-capitalist economic relations based on private property ownership and rights.

Both of these analogies serve to illuminate aspects of Canadian literature as it has evolved since the 1960s. But neither helps us understand the collapse of that market, the muffling of that conversation, over the past quarter century or so.

For that, we might borrow yet another analogy, this time from the natural sciences, and consider the world of writing, publishing, bookselling, and reading as belonging to a single ecosystem, one in which the viability of any part depends on the condition of the entire system.

Once upon a time, Canadian literature was a wetlands teeming with life — startling creatures breaking from the underbrush with thrilling cries and bright colours, laying down layers of writing which provided a nutrient base for future growth. Canadian writers and publishers were issuing books at an unprecedented rate — but people were reading them at an unprecedented rate, too. And not just Canadians: our writers were being read outside the country’s own borders like never before.

Today, that once pristine wetlands is showing distinct signs of “development”. Over here, the Digital Pivot has resulted in the clearing of vast acreages for the construction of the server farms and the factories stamping out the circuit boards, plastic casings, and batteries that are envisioned as powering the literature of the future. Over there, the destination Publishers Outlet Mall, with its pallets of below-cost celebrity biographies, cookbooks, &c., surrounded by plenty of free shipping parking for your EV. Compared to those amenities, the loss of the little grove that’s been flattened to make room for the new Party headquarters is hardly noticeable. Surrounding it all is a colourful exotic introduced to provide an eye-pleasing screen for the ordnance plant across the channel. This is our arts councils.

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Throughout most of history, bookstores and libraries have been the most visible parts of this ecosystem of reading and writing — the physical place where these activities come together, where reader meets writer — or author (it’s complicated). Libraries, schools and post-secondary institutions also play a critical role in this ecosystem.

But our wetland has many other parts, most of them less visible, though generally discernible by its denizens: beyond the toiling writers are the editors, indexers, designers, typesetters, proofreaders, printers and binders, freight forwarders and truckers, cataloguers and bibliodata wranglers, hawkers and warehouse workers who together are indispensible to the books; but also the clerks and administrators whose role is to see that the various parts articulate with one another: the many unseen hands that produce the work. Not least in importance is the vital activity of review, criticism, informal discussion.

Most of history, because in the last two or three decades of the twentieth century this understanding was challenged, as part of a general questioning — disruption — of received understanding about how commerce works best in a liberal-capitalist economy. More simply, bookstores, and extant practices of disseminating books (and knowledge) came to be seen not so much as a feature of the landscape, but as an obstacle to its proper development. The historical / “traditional” bookstore was a chokepoint that was holding us back. Inefficient, slow-moving, underprofitable: dinosaurs, really, whose existence was limiting the benefits of reading to a minority, and whose creative destruction, or, at a minimum, dis-intermediation, was a necessary precondition for society to achieve the full benefits of general literacy, which (not coincidentally) peaked globally somewhere around the same time.

We have seen, with the advent of the mall chain store, followed by the big-box retail model, a diminution of the so-called brick-and-mortar bookstore — even as a few of them got a lot bigger, their numbers and diversity have declined. And with that, the opportunities to place books before potential readers has been greatly diminished. To what extent is a good question. And one of the first questions any serious examination of the book business in Canada would have to look at is the change in the number, and type, of booksellers in the country and how that has changed since liberal economics have come to dominate. But even without knowing the numbers, every participant in publishing understands this has changed and resulted in a more concentrated bookselling marketplace, despite the advent of the internet and the Buy Now button.

Anyone concerned about the malaise that has infected our literature — both at the reading and the writing end — would do well to consider whether the more or less deliberate, ground-clearing destruction of a network of smaller, independently owned and run bookstores across the country has actually harmed our literary culture, and did not, as was believed, clear the way for a democratizing spread of book-reading. It is worth noting that none of the claims made by proponents of the new-model book trade — expanded readerships, new audiences, more efficient bookslinging, all leading to greater profitability and more incentive to produce more, more, more great literature — have been borne out, except for the part about more books.

The premise / promise of the post-Thatcher reforms of the chronically underprofitable book industry was that insertion of modern, more capital-friendly business practices which opened the way for greater access to financing, was that the new practices would burst the constraints that were holding us back, and turn the sector into a more dynamic, profitable, and growth-oriented industry. But none of this has happened. What has happened is that the sector is now paying more in rent, interest, and banking fees, without however there having been any concommitant gain for the industry, let alone more, better, and cheaper books for readers.

What do Barnes & Noble, Borders, Chapters/Indigo, and Waterstones all have in common besides being big-box retailers? They’ve all had near-death, if not actual-death, experiences within not too many years of their establishment. This is strange, and ought not to be even possible. Not only are they run by the smartest, boldest, disruptive-thinking minds on the planet; they have had the singular advantage of being able to more or less dictate terms to their suppliers, even the biggest of the Big Five. And with all that, they still can’t make a go of it? These retail models are not just crappy stores; they may be crappy businesses.

There is room in the book trade for some giant bookstores. Anyone remember The World’s Biggest Bookstore, operated by Coles in the latter decades of the 20th century? There has never been a Chapters or Indigo outlet that comes anywhere close to being the reader’s paradise that World’s Biggest was. It, too, was part of the book ecosystem. Every city should have one of those. Instead, we have the identical branded mid-size (in actual fact) box in every downtown & suburb. Biologists call this “monoculture.”

And Amazon. Well, Amazon. How many people know that Amazon never recorded so much as a single profitable quarter from its founding in 1994 until the Trump presidency? That it only became profitable since then by renting out web storage to governments and large corporations, and taking a cut of sales transactions where they play little or no role in making, storing, picking, packing, & shipping the doodad? It is almost certainly the case that Amazon has never made money by buying and re-selling anything itself — which is, after all, what “retail” used to mean.

You know who does make money buying and selling books? Those nostalgic relics of the 20th century, independent brick-and-mortar bookstores, that’s who. Sure, not ever enough to cause a hedge fund manager to become aroused. But enough to keep a few people gainfully employed while doing something that makes the world a better place.

And here’s another weird thing about those forgotten relics of publishing of yore. According to BookNet Canada’s 2023 Canadian Book Market report, that’s who is selling Canadian literature: 10 percent of independent bookstores’ turnover last year was in Canadian titles, according to BookNet. This is almost double the overall industry figure of 5.3 percent. What must that figure be for the big-box retailers, with their market dominance, to pull the average down to just 5.3 percent?

Why, then, for the past twenty years, have our publishers prioritized relations with Indigo-Chapters and Costco? It seems against their interests to be doing so.

From my perspective in my role at the People’s Co-op Bookstore, it’s been plain that the Big Five are not making the same mistake. To some degree, they have all responded to the changes in the environment by improving their terms to independent bookstores — Penguin Random House and Hachette Book Group most prominently. Their behaviour tells you that they don’t consider sales through independents as some sort of sideline to their actual business.

Independent booksellers continue to grow wherever there is no looming dark shadow of a big box retailer. In East Vancouver, for example – not exactly Indigo country – there’s a cluster of at least seven independent bookstores, representing a diverse range of interests, inventories, and business approaches, where, ten years ago, there were three. None of them carry even a fraction of the inventory that an average Big Box can accommodate. But between them, they offer selection and diversity unmatched by the chain stores.

From the publisher’s standpoint, this is also far more desirable. Instead of having to roll the dice on that one sales appointment in Toronto that will make or break your title, you have numerous chances to get your books onto a bookstore’s shelves. This provides feedback which in turn you might be able to use to go back and persuade that bookstore that initially declined to take your book to reconsider.

This is important enough for the publisher of Isn’t Capitalism Great!, and even more so if your book is Boy, Capitalism Sucks. A retail model that is mostly focussed on top-line growth is necessarily focussed on the possible tastes and interests of the chimerical “middle Canadian”, and — regardless of the personal feelings of the individual occupying that buyer’s position — that’s going to be reflected in the big-box’s curation habits (a good moment to reflect on the evangelical roots of that term). It’s a more hostile environment to anything that strays too far from the middle of Main Street; good luck if your book is coming from the margins. Monoculture.

And this matters because one of the main lessons of 20th century bookselling is that a book’s presence in a bookstore is not merely the most important element in its “discoverability”, it may be more important than all other factors of a book’s existence combined. Numerous studies of consumer habits throughout the 20th century, in fact into the 21st century, suggested that as many as three book purchases out of four — and never fewer than half — were impulse purchases that depended on the book’s physical presence to trigger the transaction.

Publishers and others willing to accept the disappearance of their books from bookstore shelves were either gambling on replacement sales coming from some other source, like the Internet (which hasn’t happened to any measurable degree); or they were expecting to be able to thrive on half or less of their previous sales.

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Of course, none of the dramatic changes to this ecosystem have been lost on its denizens. Indeed, a plethora of new imaginative behaviours have arisen in response to the new conditions. The range of responses includes a growth in writers’ festivals, multiple-city author tours and events, internet-centred campaigns centred on the author’s persona and employing the latest knowledge of social media, targeted advertising, &c.. Much of it as clever and creative as the books themselves, and there is much to say about this. It deserves its own post.

Hannah Calder’s forthcoming novel, Hester in Sunlight, is less a re-telling or transposition of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic and more a re-purposing of the materials to tell a different version. In “glittering language” and through Hawthorne’s Hester, Calder illuminates the life of her own protagonist, a woman of a certain age with parents, a husband, and a child also at a certain age.

Hester in Sunlight will be available on November 14, click here to find a local independent bookstore near you where you can preorder the book. Read below for a preview from the prologue:

Prologue

I carry the superstition that to start a novel, I must be elsewhere.

The Scarlet Letter is a sort of elsewhere.

So here I am. In my body. Typing on a laptop. The ticker-ticker of the letters, mic’d wings, bats in the dark. This is where I’m at.

I’m here to tell you about Hester. Yes, that Hester. After Hawthorne lifted her from a document in a barrel in the upper rooms of the Custom House in Salem, she found herself on a ride she couldn’t get off.

She’s persisted into the 21st century and will persist long past your death-day and your children’s children’s death-days, etc.

For some reason, people like her.

They root for her.

I get it. She is an impossibly decent person. Without wincing or even complaining, she carries a secret that is scalding hot.

The woman who played Hester Prynne for Hawthorne was a fragment of a whole. When Hawthorne published his book, he thought his character, a mere sliver of his psyche, would remain inside the book’s covers. Obedient. Silent. Still. But she escaped — it can be messy — out into the sunlit imaginations of readers and moviegoers. Each year, she entered a few more heads. Each year, she changed, ever so slightly, to fit the times she belonged to, to reflect the tone of each adaptation of her tale. 1920s Hester was one thing, as Lillian Gish made clear. Millennial Hester was yet another, and we have Emma Stone to thank for that. My niece read The Scarlet Letter at school, and she said that Hester was an “idiot.” Ouch. And the waves of feminism have allowed her to both crest and drown. She never got to be herself, which is the curse of all characters, you may be surprised to know.

Hawthorne polished Hester up like a silver button, but she was flawed, like me, like you, like all of us. She had plans — ones Hawthorne wouldn’t permit her to enact for fear she would break from character and destroy his novel. He was right. She would have ruined the whole thing. But that didn’t happen. Hawthorne died before Hollywood set upon Hester with its pinking shears.

Arthur Dimmesdale, her lover, had a similar problem. Trapped until death parted him from her, he writhed in the agonizing wires of stasis.

As did Pearl, their daughter. Forever skipping about maniacally or ripping up the grassy margins of the lanes and throwing the clods at bullies, she barely knew her own diagnosis.

And Roger Chillingworth, Hester’s ugly old husband, spent most of his time feeling clownish with a pillow stuffed up the back of his shirt to create a hunched back.

Hawthorne, a big believer in the slipperiness of a veneer, won’t tell me what’s on the memory card. I must be content with the spreading bruise of my own imagination. It contains the trail that we don’t stick to, the dewy morning-after cold fright, the sunlight of shame, the devil’s staff turned snake.

As hard as I try, I can barely make out Hawthorne’s characters meeting in their gloom-framed forest clearing.

This is where it gets tricky. Sorry.

Stan Persky (1941 – 2024)

Play the game of word association with “New Star Books”, and the first name that comes to mind for many is that of Stan Persky. Stan was a guiding spirit and a writer of books for the press from its inception as the Georgia Straight Writing Supplement / Series, which morphed into Vancouver Community Press, which in turn became New Star Books in 1974.

He may be best known for writing one of New Star’s early bestsellers, Son of Socred (1977), followed by a couple of similar interventions in temporal politics, The House That Jack Built (1980; about city politics and then-mayor Jack Volrich, though the title nods to one of Stan’s own fathers, Jack Spicer); and Bennett II (1983). At the Lenin Shipyard (1981) provided what we are now calling The West with one of the early accounts of the Solidarnosc trade union uprising in the Gdansk shipyards in Poland, one of the first major cracks in the edifice of the post-WWII Soviet-dominated Eastern Bloc.

Stan wrote or edited fourteen other titles that appeared under the New Star imprint between 1980 and 2007. Perhaps the one that was most significant for him was Buddy’s (1989), where he returned to his literary origins to create a lasting work that is both an exemplar of the then-”new narrative” writing that has since become one of the standard forms for contemporary literary writing, as well as a portrait of gay life in late 20th century North America that still fascinates and illuminates a third of a century after its publication.

A popular teacher for many years at Capilano College / University, Stan fell in love with the city of Berlin in the 1990s, and moved there permanently early in the present century. He remains however an indelible thread in the fabric of this city and province.

Roy Miki (1942 – 2024)

New Star published two books of poetry by Roy Miki: There (2006), the follow-up to his Governor-General’s Award-winning 2002 book, Surrender; and Mannequin Rising (2011), both now out of print. The press is honoured to have part of Roy’s project, and to have contributed to his extensive publication record; but Roy’s influence extended far beyond those books, or his poetry.

Roy’s organizing and advocacy work for the Redress campaign, to recognize and compensate for Canada’s historical discrimination against Japanese Canadians, had an impact that went far beyond the war-time internments which gave rise to it. The Redress campaign, and the space that Roy through his own work, opened Canadian literature to a broad range of voices representing alterity to the Anglo-European colonial project called Canada.

“He’ll be missed,” is what people say. Yes; but he won’t be. The work that Roy Miki did to make this a better place will continue to reverberate and influence long after his own leaving of it.

As we headed into the Covid pandemic in what seems like a different lifetime, the Canadian literary world was roiled by a controversy branded as the “Canlit dumpster fire”. The debate was triggered by a series of revelations (the questionable identity claims of Joseph Boyden; allegations of abusive behaviour by UBC Creative Writing chair Steven Galloway) and has generated job dismissals and disciplinary action, formal investigations, numerous lawsuits and court proceedings, and at least two books so far.

This is an important debate to have. But for all the attention given to the blazing dumpster, we’re missing that this is not just about the dumpster. In fact, the entire edifice of Canlit that our dumpster sits behind is in flames, and threatens to collapse into a pile of debris at any moment. A change of government in Ottawa might be all it takes.

Our preoccupation with the dumpster fire has distracted us from what has been happening to the reading of Canadian literature since the turn of the present century. In the past generation, by all indications, Canadian-authored books appear to have lost somewhere between 40 and 50 percent of their market share, and the readership for Canadian-published books — i.e., not just written by a Canadian author but also published by a Canadian-owned press — may have eroded by two thirds or more.

This is hard to square with the image of vibrant health that Canlit has been able to project. Universities and colleges from coast to coast have been building out their creative writing departments, while contests, prizes, and festivals have sprung up in every part of Canada to recognize and honour our finest authors. A new generation seems poised to assume leadership of our literature(s). Throughout what has been a period of disruptive change, what with Amazon, social media, e-books, and now AI, the unique Canadian literary identity has only grown stronger.

Some doubt about this picture was sown at the end of 2017 with the publication of the More Canada Report, spearheaded by Canlit publishing veteran James Lorimer and a group of concerned publishers and scholars. The More Canada Report was interested in the portion of Canadian book reading devoted to Canadian books, which are defined as those authored by Canadians but published by non-Canadian publishing companies (i.e., the “branch plants”, the five or so big multinationals whose Canadian operations publish the most prominent Canadian writers including Naomi Klein, Margaret Atwood, and John Vaillant), together with books written by Canadians and published by Canadian-owned presses, almost all of them small and dependent for their survival on government grants. More Canada reported that the combined Canlit share of the domestic book market, which was measured at about 25 percent at the turn of the century, had fallen to around 17 percent, more than two-thirds of which was accounted for by the foreign branch plants.

More Canada and its troubling news should have received lots of attention, and prompted an overdue discussion about writing, reading, and publishing in this country. As it turned out, however, More Canada was dismissed by much of the domestic publishing industry. The report was incomplete, many argued; the picture it painted was distorted, and it overlooked the real success story that Canlit has been. After all, who could deny the steady outpouring of new and original works of creative imagination from the more than 120 independent presses in the Anglosphere? Many Canadian publishers were in fact growing and profitable. Besides, Jim Lorimer, bless his soul, while always provocative and entertaining, also tends to come with an agenda of his own. Indeed, much of More Canada was preoccupied with the declining use of Canadian materials in post-secondary learning institutions, which represents a big part of Lorimer’s publishing business.

In brief, More Canada wasn’t taken very seriously by the Canadian publishing establishment. Whatever attention it briefly stirred up, died down quickly enough and not long after was overshadowed by the UBC Creative Writing / Steven Galloway conflict: the social media’s “dumpster fire”.

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But the story is back. Earlier this year, BookNet Canada’s annual Canadian Marketplace Survey contained the information that Canadian authors’ share of domestic book sales was just 5.3 percent. And in an April 5 post in his widely read e-newsletter SHush titled “Our book market today,” Sutherland House publisher Ken Whyte drew further attention to the dismaying news.

BNC’s figures are actually pretty consistent with what More Canada had reported, and underscore the sense that the market for Canlit seems to have eroded significantly over the past generation. Like More Canada, Whyte uses the turn of the century as a reference point.

The scenario suggested by the numbers is this one. The year before the towers came down, Canadian writers and publishers had established a market share of around 25 percent of books purchased. Somewhat more than half of that, around 15 percent, consisted of books written and published by Canadians; the remaining 10 percent represented the multinationals’ share. If More Canada and BNC are onto anything here, it would appear that, since 2000, the multinationals’ share of the marketplace has stayed the same, but the Canadian-published sector has fallen by two thirds, from 15 percent to about 5 percent.

This should be truly alarming. Despite all the end-of-the-book doomsaying, when inflation, retail channels (Amazon, warehouse club, and big-box vs. smaller dedicated bookstores), and format shifts (e-books, audiobooks) are taken into account, the trade market for books in Canada hasn’t changed that much since the turn of the century. (Amazon’s opacity makes it hard to know for certain.) Canadian-owned publishers just have a much, much smaller share of it.

This almost certainly understates the magnitude of the loss. By the year 2000, the Canadian industry had already spent five years being rocked by the twin towers of Chapters / Indigo and Amazon. The high water mark was likely reached around 1995, the year the first Chapters stores opened and one year after Amazon.com’s launch. It’s hard to believe now, but many in the industry at the time viewed Amazon as a leveller, allowing smaller indie / literary presses to compete on something closer to the same basis as the bigger publishers.

Going back a generation, in 1982, the Applebaum-Hebert Federal Cultural Review Committee reported that the Canadian-authored sector of the industry at that time had a 27 percent share of the domestic market. Using a slightly earlier baseline, we discover an even more troubling fact. According to Canadian Publishers & Canadian Publishing, the 1972 Report of the Province of Ontario’s Royal Commission on Book Publishing (the “Rohmer report”), Canada’s share of its own domestic book market, before governments got involved, was … 15 percent, dominated by a handful of multinationals publishing our biggest stars (Mordecai Richler, Robertson Davies, Margaret Laurence; the young Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood, just starting out), with a circa 5 percent stub comprising for the most part highly local “stage coach and steamboat” local-interest publishing.

Fifteen percent: about what it is today.

In other words, having as a country spent around $10m a year from the early 1970s to the mid-1990s building up a domestic Canadian writing and publishing industry commanding around 30 percent of the market, we have passed the next quarter century spending about twice as much to buck the industry back down to its late 1960s level, where it was before Expo, before Trudeaumania, before LIP and OFY, before the Canada Council and the Department of Canadian Heritage’s dedicated literary arts and publishing infrastructure programs.

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Can this be true? That the modern Canadian literary infrastructure, with upwards of 120 presses supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, and keeping six to eight thousand cultural workers (writers, editors, designers, marketers, administrators) occupied producing about the same number of new titles a year from every part of the country, has about the same market presence as when the domestic publishing trade consisted of a few dozen men and women working out of a handful of offices in Toronto in the Sixties?

As an industry and a literary culture, we need to do what that earlier wave of Canadian writers and publishers did: some basic research. At the moment, nobody seems to know what’s going on. And that, in my 40+ years of experience in the Canadian trade, is unprecedented. The Canadian book trade, which sees itself as a “knowledge industry”, is flying blind.

Over the decades various bodies, including the Association of Canadian Publishers, have initiated numerous deep dive studies as the industry sought to better understand the dynamics of reading, writing and publishing in our country. Sometimes these studies have been on the industry’s own dime, but more often willing funding partners have been found at various levels of government. Governments, after all, have a real interest in knowing what’s going on when they are being lobbied for this or that new program or regulatory change.

I’ve mentioned a couple of these closer examinations of the book business already: Applebaum-Hebert, Rohmer. There have been many others, including the same Jim Lorimer’s 1981 report, Book Reading in Canada; Karl Siegler’s 1989 paper, “Culturally Valuable Canadian Trade Publishing, Profitability, and Grants,” as well as numerous studies commissioned by the Department of Canadian Heritage itself and carried out by Paul Audley, EKOS Research, Arthur Donner Consultants, and numerous others. Here in BC, another 1989 report, by SFU Communications prof Rowland Lorimer (brother of Jim of the previously mentioned More Canada Report), who went on to found the SFU Centre for Publishing Studies, was instrumental in the establishment of the province’s publishing support programs in the waning days of the final Social Credit administration. In 2001, inspired by the proposed Indigo-Chapters merger, the Association of Canadian Publishers commissioned a detailed study of the Canadian book marketplace by retail consultants Evans and Co.

And not much since. There has not, to my knowledge, been any thorough investigation of the changes wrought on our industry by Amazon and Indigo. It is a curious lack of curiosity, and a result seems to be a lack of any clear understanding of what is going on in the Canadian game on the part of its participants.

In light of the fact that our various levels of government have poured a sum that must be around half a billion dollars by now into the Canadian industry, I would expect our federal government to be keenly interested in any proposal for a check-in coming from the industry.

Indeed, the country’s richest repository of detailed statistical information about Canadian publishing and how it’s been doing for the past generation is kept in the virtual filing cabinets of the Canada Council for the Arts. All 120+ of us CCA-supported publishers have devoted countless hours to meeting the Council’s detailed financial reporting requirements. Surely there is no better source of detailed and reliable information on the transformation of the industry since the advent of Amazon and big-box retail.

The CCA itself would have every reason to share this trove of data with those who care most deeply about the industry: its participating writers, publishers, and its ultimate funders, the Canadian taxpayers who support the industry whether or not they are among the 3 or 4 percent who actually read any contemporary Canadian literature.

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The other thing we can undertake is a nationwide commission of enquiry into the creation of art in Canada. We wouldn’t even be having this conversation today if a post-World War II government hadn’t asked the Massey-Levesque Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences to take the country’s pulse. Massey-Levesque’s 1951 Report lay the foundation stones for the establishment, six years and a federal election later, of the Canada Council.

The Applebaum-Hebert Report, previously mentioned, was a generation-on check-in on the work done by Massey-Levesque. In addition to affirming that Massey-Levesque, and the country, were on the right track, Applebaum-Hebert was one of a number of studies that laid the groundwork for the subsequent range of programs delivered by the Department of Canadian Heritage and designed to strengthen the industry’s technological and logistical infrastructure — a source of funding that for most publishers now dwarfs the direct arts council funding they receive.

But there has been nothing like Applebaum-Hebert since. Which is odd, given the changes that have swept over the industry, and the country, since the early 1980s. It’s almost amusing to consider the forces driving that generation’s fears — including, most prominently, the spectre of the disruptive potential of then-new technologies for photocopying and home taping.

But nothing similar has taken place to examine the effects of what are arguably a much more profound set of changes on our national and other identities and opportunities for cultural expression.

We have seen, fairly recently, the positive and generative potential of a national conversation around a specific set of concerns: the Commission on Truth and Reconciliation. Never mind the debates around the slow implementation of the Commission’s recommendations, or about the recommendations themselves. What is abundantly clear is that by its very work, the Commission enabled an unprecedentedly frank discussion around Reconciliation, and thereby re-set the country’s agenda.

It is time for a renewed National Commission into the Arts, Culture, and Media of Canada. The current cultural regime is unsustainable — indeed, it is failing to provide cultural and intellectual sustenance that defines a country.

It is time to acknowledge and to reflect on the foundations of a vibrant cultural life that were laid by previous generations of publishers, writers, and readers, and that appear to be in danger of being swept away.

Tantor Media has acquired audio book rights to Misguided: My Jesus Freak Life in a Doomsday Cult, by Port Alberni author Perry Bulwer, published in September 2023 by New Star Books.

Tantor Media is a division of RBMedia, one of the largest audio book publishers in North America. Misguided is set to release in late August, check out their website for more details.

The acquisition was facilitated by The Rights Factory‘s Trisha Telep.

Today we welcome two new poetry collections to the New Star shelves!

Join us for launch celebrations at the People’s Co-op Bookstore (1391 Commercial Drive, Vancouver) on Friday April 12 at 7PM!

The Goldberg Variations by Clint Burnham

The Goldberg Variations takes as its organizing principle the idea of contingency – the world thrown into Being that the poet encounters – and variation, or Bach’s looping, recombinant system, as a way to turn into verse what shows up in the Notes app. And varied these poems are: appearing on the page as sonnets and columns, big and small, wide at the bottom and skinny on top (like Vancouver condos). Made of jargon, of slang or invective, pop culture or politics, sampling the overheard, the raw material of language organized anew and composed for a different kind of keyboard.

CLINT BURNHAM is a poet and academic from Comox, British Columbia. His recent books include Pound @ Guantanamo, and White Lie. Burnham’s writing has appeared in The Capilano Review, Artforum, The Globe and Mail, and The Vancouver Sun.

Tomorrow is a Holiday by Hamish Ballantyne

These poems sit as much on the mountainside as they do on city streets. Resisting the urge of revelation in favour of idiomatic observation, Tomorrow is a Holiday brims with restless curiosity, trees felled or still standing, electricity in the streets, mossy chainlink fences, sea dwellers and city figures in lowercase, and Hamish Ballantyne serves as a witness at the margins of it all.

HAMISH BALLANTYNE is a poet and translator based on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples (Vancouver, Canada). He works in the Downtown Eastside and as a commercial mushroom picker. Ballantyne has published two chapbooks, Imitation Crab and Blue Knight. Tomorrow is a Holiday is his first full length collection.

Lokator Media of Krakow will be publishing a Polish language translation of The Weather, by Lisa Robertson, originally published in 1999 by New Star Books.

Pogoda, its Polish title, is translated by Małgorzata Myk, and will be published in May. Lisa Robertson will visit Poland later in May for events in Krakow and Warsaw.

The Weather has previously been translated into French (Editions Nous, 2017) and Swedish (Ramus Vorlag, 2016).

LISA ROBERTSON is the author of many books of poetry and essays, including, most recently, Boat and The Baudelaire Fractal. She lived in Vancouver for many years, where she was a member of the Kootenay Writing Collective, and now lives in France.

MAŁGORZATA MYK is a Polish literary scholar and translator. She teaches at the University of Łódź in the Department of North American Literature and Culture. Author of the monograph Upping the Ante of the Real: Speculative Poetics of Leslie Scalapino (Peter Lang, 2019). The Kościuszko Foundation Fellow in 2017/18 (UCSD) and the Fulbright Senior Award recipient in 2024/25 (University of Utah). She lives in Warsaw.

Attentive New Star readers may have noticed a certain duck circling overhead in our forthcoming section this year. We are thrilled to be releasing Steve Weiner’s much anticipated novel, Duck Island, just in time for the holidays!

Duck Island updates the story of the prodigal son, returning, in the aftermath of the Vietnam war, to the midwestern American town where he grew up. In Steve Weiner’s retelling, the father is no longer alive, and his ghost is unforgiving.
Unable to rekindle a high school flame, Cal Bedrick, who is Jewish, soon meets a very nice Catholic girl, Frannie Sinkiewicz, who falls hard for the troubled young man. Their courtship leads quickly to a marriage that fills their acquaintances with doubts.

Like a David Lynch film, Duck Island vividly contrasts a society whose liberal surface conceals a troubled soul, which is revealed as the novel’s events unfold.

You can find Duck Island in all the usual places, but we recommend checking out your local independent bookstore for a copy (or ask them to order in for you!)
Ebooks available from Kindle and Kobo.

STEVE WEINER draws on his own mid-western roots in telling this tale of a deeply fractured, confused society. The author of Sweet England (2010), The Yellow Sailor (2001), and The Museum of Love (1993; finalist for the Giller Prize), Steve Weiner lives in London, UK.

Male Pregnancy in Reverse by TOM PRIME is available now!

Tom Prime is, as described by Daniel Harris, author of The Posthuman Series, “at the forefront of a new generation of avant-gardists.” His latest work is a long poem “in 5 Acts” that transmutes a disturbing and sometimes horrifying experience—albeit one which is only ever obliquely and allegorically described—into a dazzling and heady literary puzzle.

You can visit the ShopLocal website below to find Male Pregnancy in Reverse at an independent bookstore near you.

Come join us for the launch for Male Pregnancy in Reverse in Vancouver!

WHERE: Cross and Crows Books
2836 Commercial Dr,  Vancouver
WHEN: Wednesday October 18th, 7 PM

Alongside Tom we are excited to announce guest readings from Mark Laba and Warren Dean Fulton.

Preorder your copy with our friends at Cross & Crows and receive 20% off!

TOM PRIME is a PhD candidate at Western University (specializing in 17th century female prophesy). His solo debut collection of poetry Mouthfuls of Space (Anvil) was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial prize. He has published 2 collaboratively written collections of poetry with Gary Barwin (Bird Arsonist with New Star and A Cemetery for Holes with Gordon Hill Press). He lives in London, ON.