The latest collection of short fiction from Writers’ Trust Prize-winning author Tamas Dobozy hits the shelves today!

Ghost Geographies contains 13 short fictions and novellas, including “Krasnogorsk-2” (National Magazine Awards 2014 Gold Medal for Fiction), and “Crosswords” (Previously titled “No. 10” Best Canadian Short Stories 2017), all of which delight and intrigue with a complexity inviting comparison to the worlds of Bolaño. Read an excerpt from the collection right here, and check below for a list of booksellers and online retaillers to pick up your copy of Ghost Geographies today.

Your local bookstores:
:: Munro’s Books – Victoria, BC
:: Iron Dog Books – Vancouver, BC
:: Hager Books – Vancouver, BC
:: Black Bond Books – Surrey, BC
:: Huckleberry Books – Cranbrook, BC
:: Sea & Summit Bookshop – Parksville, BC
:: Laughing Oyster Bookshop – Courtenay, BC
:: Book City – Toronto, ON (Queen St E, Danforth Ave, Bloor St W, & Yonge St)
:: Type Books – Toronto, ON
:: Queen Books – Toronto, ON
:: Another Story – Toronto, ON
:: Words Worth Books – Waterloo, ON
:: Novel Idea – Kingston, ON
:: Perfect Books – Ottawa, ON
:: Singing Pebble Books – Ottawa, ON
:: Sleuth of Baker Street – East York, ON
:: Someday Books – St. Catharines, ON
:: The Bookshelf – Guelph, ON
:: Manticore Books – Orillia, ON
:: McNally Robinson – Winnipeg, MB, Saskatoon, SK
:: The Next Page – Calgary, AB

Or order online:
:: New Star Books
:: Amazon.com
:: Amazon.ca
:: Chapters
:: UTP Distribution
:: Small Press Distribution

eBooks are available at:
:: Amazon Kindle
:: Kobo

While I was working on her

I ripped a hole in the foundation

Two holes in her

 

I couldn’t find her this time

It took me twice as long, my confidence wasn’t there

Something in my universe wasn’t right

 

It took all the pins, it didn’t fit

I had to put it all back on and do it right

This time I wasn’t going to get that fresh new piece

We are continuing our periodic reviewing of reivews with another roundup, this time shining the spotlight on The Wig Maker.

“Janet Gallant and Sharon Thesen create a disturbing yet ultimately inspiring collaboration which is part biography, part memoir, part poetry, and part lament.” Says Carol Matthews in the latest issue of the Malahat Review going on to call the poetic collaboration of Gallat and Thesen an “unforgettable duet.”

In her omnibus review of poetry across the pandemic over on the Ormsby Review, Linda Rogers says Thesen “does not embellish the flat narrative with coloratura ornaments, the gifts of a lyric poet. Both the telling and listening require absolute integrity.” And in BCBookworld, Caroline Woodward similarly described Thesen’s poetic listening/retelling as that of a “master poet with an acutely sensitive ear for language”.

The Wig-Maker, for Richard Osler, is “so much more than a collection of poems”, his review teasing out the ways in which Gallant and Thesen’s truth-telling becomes an important act of healing in itself. And for rob mclennan these poems “offer a memoir propelled by Thesen’s lyric clarity.”

You can also catch two great interviews by Paul Nelson with both Janet and Sharon.

Sharon and Janet will be virtually participating in the Winnipeg THIN AIR Festival launching later this month. Running from September 30 through to October 18th, THIN AIR will be hosted on a brand new festival website, registration is now open so click here to find out the details and sign up for your free reader profile – and if you happen to be a Winnipeg local, you can catch a handful of in-person events hosted at McNally Robinson. Keep an eye on the festival website for updates!

ICYMI – you can check out a recording of the launch event for The Wig-Maker right here on YouTube.

Bringing you another New Star review of reviews – this time shining the spotlight on George Bowering and his two most recent books.

Karl Siegler has recently reviewed Bowering’s Could Be over at the Ormsby Review. “[W]e find in his “It Would Never Have Been a Sonnet” a perfect illustration of the dictum ‘form is never more than an extension of content.’” writes Siegler, “Of course not: the poem’s octave is missing a line. George notices such things, even though “poets have no business / looking for order.””

Of this same collection rob mclennan writes “there is an elegance to these poems, even through working a number of his familiar touchstones…These are poems of attention, looking simultaneously, it would seem, in every direction”

And on Soft Zipper, Bowering’s earlier 2021 offering, mclennan says the “structural echo from Gertrude Stein” Bowering has employed in writing the book is “a curious way to produce a memoir, and an intriguing way to prompt memory, allowing that narrative leap from a word or a phrase to spark where that section might go.”

Over at the Literary Review of Canada, Rose Hendrie writes that “like the best memoirs, Soft Zipper offers a slice of a mind. And like the best, Bowering does not fall under the spell of his own mythology.”

“[T]hese essays put me in mind of E.B. White, with their whimsical insights and tales of growing old.” says Sheldon Goldfarb, back at the Ormsby Review, “these essays aren’t obscure at all. They are playful, wistful, nostalgic, and profound.”

Both of George’s latest books are available online and in your local bookstore – check out this post to find out where to find Could Be and this one for Soft Zipper! You can also catch readings from George by watching the recording of our online book launch.

Listeners out east in Ontario’s Golden Horseshoe may have caught a familiar voice on the radio earlier this month.

Sean McCammon joined Chris Houston from The Idea Shop along with Mike Richards and David Bastl, hosts of Sauga 960AM’s Raw Mike Richards Show to talk about Outside.

Both hosts have been battling friends and family to hold on to their constantly loaned and re-loaned copies of Outside since the book was featured by Houston the week prior, when Richards said “the reaction to this book is unlike anything that I have ever seen, except when an enormous author has 400 books under his resume.”

Impressed with the response to Outside and stunned that this is a debut novel, Richards and Bastl asked Sean a bit more about the writing process, his similar experiences to our protagonist David, and what it’s like to sit down to write your first ever novel.

I started with the end in mind, I pictured how the book would end, and really the process for me was building in all that backstory, how we get to this climactic scene, for me that’s the way to go.

You can watch the whole interview below or listen to the recording right here on SoundCloud.

Want more of Sean? You can rewatch the launch event for Outside here, or check out Sean’s YouTube channel.

George Bowering’s latest collection of poetry hits the shelves today. Could Be assembles a new offering of poems from one of Canada’s indisputable literary greats, wiser, though not any mellower, for his years. These pages are suffused with the warmth and curiosity of any young poet.

Join us on Zoom Sunday June 27 at 2pm PST for a double feature launch event to celebrate both Could Be and Bowering’s earlier 2021 release, Soft Zipper.

Missed the launch event? You can watch the recording right here on YouTube.

Cover design by Oliver McPartlin

Every day now
in my ninth
decade I am newly

educated by small things I
was educated by
when I was little

when my arm
was half as long
as it is now

when I knew
for the first time
the big earth was

turning over
with me
able to stand on it.

Find Could Be in store at your local bookseller:

:: Galiano Island Books – Galiano Island, BC
:: Laughing Oyster Bookshop – Courtenay, BC
:: Bookingham Palace Bookstore – Salmon Arm, BC
:: Tanner’s Books – Sidney, BC
:: 32 Books – North Vancouver, BC
:: Queen Books – Toronto, ON
:: Someday Books – St. Catherines, ON
:: Hunter St Books – Peterborough, ON
:: Book City – Toronto, ON (Queen St & Danforth Ave)
:: Chapters

Robson St – Vancouver, BC
Granville St – Vancouver, BC
Yonge St – Toronto, ON
Bloor St W – Toronto, ON
Rideau St – Ottawa, ON
Place Montreal Trust – Montreal, QC

Or order online:
:: New Star Books
:: Amazon.com
:: Amazon.ca
:: Chapters
:: UTP Distribution

A wry, propulsive, visceral collection of stories about the afterlives of utopia – imagined and real – from the author of the Writers’ Trust Prize-Winning Siege 13.

In his first book since the award-winning Siege 13, Tamas Dobozy joins New Star with Ghost Geographies, a collection of stories, each of which vividly imagines a number of unsettled utopias populated by decadent and absurd personalities.

Fleeing communist Budapest by air balloon, a wrestler tries to reinvent himself in Canada. On a formal invitation from the Party’s General Secretary, a Belgian bureaucrat “defects” to communist Hungary, chasing the dream of a better world. Meanwhile, a provocateur filmmaker drinks and blasts his way to a final, celluloid confrontation with fascism, while an enfant terrible philosopher works on his prophetic, posthumously panned masterpiece, Dyschrony.

Ghost Geographies contains 13 short fictions and novellas, including “Krasnogorsk-2” (National Magazine Awards 2014 Gold Medal for Fiction), and “Crosswords” (Previously “No. 10” Best Canadian Short Stories 2017), all of which delight and intrigue with a complexity inviting comparison to the worlds of Bolaño.

Cover design by Oliver McPartlin

Tamas Dobozy is the author of three previous collections of short fiction and novellas: When X Equals Marylou (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2003), Last Notes and Other Stories (HarperCollins Canada / Arcade [US] 2005), and the Governor General’s Award finalist and Writers’ Trust Award winner, Siege 13 (Thomas Allen / Milkweed [US] 2012).

Available September 16, 2021
320 pages :: 5.5 x 8.25
$24 CAD :: $20 USD
ISBN 9781554201792

This summer we’re celebrating the two most recent titles from George Bowering: Could Be: New Poems and Soft Zipper: Objects, Food, Rooms.

Join us for a double feature launch over on Zoom on Sunday June 27, 2PM PDT. Register here!

COULD BE: NEW POEMS

“Still producing at the height of his powers” is a cliche that rarely applies as well as it does to George Bowering’s recent output. In ‘Could Be: New Poems,’ gathering work since his close call five years ago, Bowering shows off a wiser, though not necessarily mellower, aspect alongside the wit and unerring ear readers have come to expect from one of our greats.
Glad to be alive, these are poems that look out into the world with fresh eyes, curious as any young poet’s. Only now the shadow of mortality finally takes its proper place alongside life’s many other sources of magic and wonder. Sunlight and warmth suffuse these poems, formally spanning short lyric verse, “found” stuff, and a long poem (“Sitting in Jalisco”). Rewarding attention as always, with ‘Could Be’ George Bowering adds to a substantial body of work.

SOFT ZIPPER: OBJECTS, FOOD, ROOMS

“The supple scale of space, from dresser drawer to American road trip, here folds and regroups the poet’s craft — for George’s prose is poet’s prose, with its joyous attention to the detail of syntax, the humour and mystery of juxtaposition, and the music of tone.”
– Lisa Robertson, from the Introduction.
This engaging memoir relates stories about George Bowering’s small-town BC upbringing and his parents — his father long dead and his mother more recently passed on at the age of 100 — while at the same time honouring the author’s other “parents”: Gertrude Stein, Charles Olson, and Roland Barthes.
Read a review of Soft Zipper from Rose Hendrie in the LRC

Pre-order your copy of Could Be right now on:
:: Amazon.ca
:: Amazon.com
Or ask your local bookstore to get it in stock!

And click here to check out where to find Soft Zipper both online and in store.

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A spirited, far-sighted guide to politics, Star Wars, the Avengers, David Lynch, and the lost highways between them, for today’s capitalist-realist age.

“We’ve met before, haven’t we?” The grand illusion of our era is that we’re at the end of history and movies are now no more than tranquilizing entertainment. What we’ve lost sight of is the political undercurrent running through cinema and its potentially redemptive power, whether through Hollywood mega blockbusters like Star Wars or off-kilter indies and art films like Blue Velvet.

This is the premise and challenge of Screen Captures. Critic Stephen Lee Naish guides us through the recent cinematic phenomena that reflect/refract our contemporary political existence in this collection of essays, observations, and love letters to the films that have shaped not only his own cinematic literacy, but also the larger phenomena of Hollywood and beyond. Screen Captures adds a sharpening filter to the film-goer’s experience on the big and little screen.

Cover design by Oliver McPartlin

Naish’s previous books include U.ESS.AY: Politics and Humanity in American Film (Zero Books, 2014), Create or Die: Essays on the Artistry of Dennis Hopper (Amsterdam University Press, 2016), Deconstructing Dirty Dancing (Zero Books, 2017), Riffs and Meaning (Headpress, 2018).

Available September 30, 2021
208 pages :: 5.5 x 8.5
$20 CAD :: $18 USD
ISBN: 9781554201754

In a hillside

above my dry town

I dug a hole out

of which I lifted

a knife, a baseball

and finally

this poem.

The indefatigable George Bowering graces our lineup yet again this year. In Could Be, Bowering has assembled a collection of poems that are suffused with the warmth and curiosity of any young poet and which span short lyric verse, “found” stuff, and a long poem (“Sitting in Jalisco”). Following the early 2021 release of his engagingly playful Stein-inspired memoir, Soft Zipper, Bowering continues to produce at the height of his powers, and with all the usual wit and craft that readers have come to expect from one of Canada’s literary greats.

Cover design by Oliver McPartlin

George Bowering is a poet, novelist, memorist, essayist, critic, and legend of Canadian letters. He is Canada’s first Parliamentary Poet Laureate and a two-time G-G winner. Of his 100-plus books, his most recent include: Soft Zipper (non-fiction, 2021), Writing and Reading (essays, 2019), No One (fiction, 2018), Ten Women (stories, 2015), and The World, I Guess (poetry, 2015).

Available June 24, 2021
120 pages :: 5.5 x 8.5
$18 CAD :: $16 USD
ISBN: 9781554201785

We’re as happy as a pair of mutually inverted clams to behold the Polish edition of Andrew Struthers’s joint The Sacred Herb / The Devil’s Weed, published this spring by Vis-A-Vis Etiuda of Warszawa, one of Poland’s leading publishing houses.

Święte zioło / Diabelski Chwast joins an impressive list at Vis-A-Vis, including books by William S. Burroughs, Doris Lessing, Paul Tillich, Noam Chomsky, Bret Easton Ellis, Carl Jung, George Orwell, Ann Rice, J.G. Ballard, Montaigne, Kierkegaard, Pascal, T.S. Elliot, and quite a few other household names; Sruthers is listed between Bram Stoker and Sun Tzu on Vis-A-Vis’s website.

Get your copy of Święte zioło / Diabelski Chwast here or here or here or even here.