Vibrant, exciting, and playfully challenging: Meet Our Terrific Spring 2015 season
We’re so excited to share our absolutely fabulous spring 2015 lineup. We’re launching 9 new titles that represent a cross-range of poetry, fiction, and entre-genre categories, on subject matter as distinctive as the writers themselves. Each of these works joins in our already existing family of diverse books so well, we think you’ll agree that they represent a unique contribution to the diversity that defines our publishing program.
First up are two fantastic titles chosen by our fiction editor Malcolm Sutton. Carellin Brooks’ astonishingly beautiful One Hundred Days of Rain will mesmerize readers with its sharp and unforgettable prose. Even if you don’t live in Vancouver, rain and the weather will never be the same after you read Brooks’ book.
Mike Steeves’ daring novel Giving Up takes us into the maelstrom of a couple’s relationship during one evening in their lives. Meet James and Mary, and live inside their thoughts and minds, where many things converge: the great work of one’s life, family, con artists and ATMs, disfigured cats and apartment living. And hovering over it all is the frightening possibility of giving up (or not) on everything.
Steve McCaffery is singlehandedly attempting to rewrite classic books of canonical literature. And while Lewis Carroll’s Alice has already been Disneyified, wait ’til you get a load of Alice McCafferyified: Alice in Plunderland is equal parts entertaining and infuriating, but for all the right reasons. And the illustrations by Clelia Scala set the perfect tone for McCaffery’s text. It’s also perfect timing because 2015 marks the 150th anniversary of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Oh, how the times have changed!
Joining our growing collection of translations is Suzanne Leblanc’s The Thought House of Philippa, a poetic and philosophical novel that takes place, literally, in a house designed by Ludwig Wittgenstein. Oana Avasilichioaei and Ingrid Pam Dick’s translation of this stunning book will take you into a mind structured by its habitation, and readers will enjoy living in this complex and thoughtful space.
Pearl Pirie and Lesley Battler, both new to BookThug and whose manuscripts were selected by our poetry editor Phil Hall, provide exciting new collections to sink into. Pirie’s the pet radish, shrunken will envelop readers with its quirky lyricism and wit, while Battler’s Endangered Hydrocarbons explores the inescapable world we live in as controlled by big oil – even poets and poetry are not safe from that tar pool.
The Clown Princes of Canadian Poetry (Interior BC Chapter) known as Jake Kennedy and kevin mcpherson eckhoff offer readers two very different books: Kennedy’s lyrical collection Merz Structure No. 2 Burnt by Children at Play treats destruction as creation and the destroyed with a sense of beauty and creativity, and reframes how we think about loss; Eckhoff’s Their Biography: a organism of relationships was written by anyone but kevin, and yet he has claimed everything between the covers – including a crossword puzzle and a screenshot of a Google Mail account– as his very own biography.
And finally, political hack Jimmy McInnes presents a timely volume of poetry that inverts the balance of power in ‘power politics.’ For centuries, poets and politicians alike have been getting up on soap boxes and preaching to their converted brethren – in A More Perfect [, McInnes dismantles the political speech into a radical poem that grants readers access into the genre that speech itself uses to convert others.
