One of the most rewarding parts of my job at Kirkus is encountering great books from new (or new to me) small presses. Soon after starting here in 2014, I received a photocopied manuscript, held together by a rubber band, from a publisher I’d never heard of. I sent it out for review and got back a rave. That book was Alphabet by Kathy Page, and the publisher was Biblioasis; I’ve been looking forward to their books ever since.
Like a number of independent presses, Biblioasis began as a bookstore; it was founded by Dan Wells in Windsor, Ontario, in 1998, and when I asked Dan how he started publishing books six years later, he said it was almost accidental: “I’d been taking some bookbinding classes and got tired of making blank notebooks, thought I’d do some chapbooks instead, and fell in love with publishing, both the making of the books themselves and making them public.”
Biblioasis has been having a standout season. Of the five books we’ve considered most recently, four have gotten starred reviews.
Breaking and Entering by Don Gillmor (Aug 15.): During the hottest summer anyone can remember, Beatrice Billings turns 50 and somehow veers sharply out of her regular life as a Toronto art dealer and, after learning to pick locks, starts breaking into empty houses, investigating the lives of the people who live there. “A smart, funny, and sneakily terrifying version of the way we live now,” according to our review.
The Future by Catherine Leroux (Sept. 5): One of many books by Quebecois writers that Biblioasis has published, this novel takes place in an alternate Detroit that was never ceded by its original French settlers. When a woman is murdered and her daughters go missing, their grandmother begins searching for the girls in the local park, which has been taken over by feral children. Our review says, “The story…encompasses speculative alternative history as well as a dystopian future—albeit with utopian aspects—and is recounted in sometimes-feverish prose that pushes its boundaries into poetry.”
Cocktail by Lisa Alward (Sept. 12): Alward turns a sharp eye on domestic life in her debut collection of stories, setting the tone from the opening title story, in which a woman recollects her parents’ 1970s cocktail parties—the ones they threw before their divorce—and the mysterious man who almost (but not entirely threateningly) found his way to her preteen bedroom. “Refreshingly tart reflections on family fragmentation and its aftershocks,” according to our review.
Burn Man by Mark Anthony Jarman (Oct. 10): Our review says that “if there were any justice,” 68-year-old Jarman would be much more widely known in the U.S. This selection of his best stories, in which “marginalized men are on the run, failing to figure out how to stay in one place, how to stay sane, how to pin life down and make sense of it,” aims to make that happen. “Amid a welter of sensory impressions and a decided lack of the steadying machinations of traditional plot, narrators imagine alternate outcomes to their meager existences, their common language a heady, often surreal stream-of-consciousness.…Literature at the highest level: heartrending, disquieting, fascinating.”
Laurie Muchnick is the fiction editor.
