As we approach the ides of August, thoughts turn to the Fall 2015 literary season. BookThug is proud to present a stellar lineup of adventurous new books, with fiction from Jess Taylor, Josh Massey, and Jean Marc Ah-Sen, poetry from Liz Worth, Brian Dedora, Steven Ross Smith, Samuel Andreyev, and Shannon Maguire, as well as a […]
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From Canadian poet and academic Jay Gamble comes this special release from BookThug’s Boondoggle imprint: Book of Knots, a highly playful and deceptively musical book-length meditation on the poetics of nothingness. Taking W.H. Auden’s famous remark that “poetry does nothing” to its radical-but-logical conclusion, Book of Knots resorts to what Gamble calls “extreme forms of not-writing.” By confronting supposedly negative […]
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Clocking in at ten (count-’em, ten!) adventurous, innovative titles, Spring 2015 was BookThug’s biggest season ever. Authors came from far and wide for the Spring Launch Party in Toronto, and BookThug supporters came out in droves to ring in the new season. Happily, our indispensable media guru John Schmidt was there to document the event. ❧ Opening […]
Continue readingBook*hug’s crack team of publishing professionals share their summer reading recommendations. ❧ Jay MillAr Co-publisher My Body Is Yours by Michael V. Smith (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2015) From Arsenal Pulp Press: Michael V. Smith is a multihyphenate force of nature: a novelist, poet, improv comic, filmmaker, drag queen, performance artist, and occasional clown. In this, […]
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In honour of the inaugural Authors For Indies Day on May 2, 2015, BookThug teamed up with Toronto bookstore Type Books to produce a limited edition publication of two stories and an essay by Jacob Wren entitled If our wealth is criminal then let’s live with the criminal joy of pirates. Canadian Authors for Indies Day is a celebration […]
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Summer reading is a distinctly marked species in the great genus Reading: a temperate zone in the mind, between luxurious indolence and exacting work. Surly study has its dignities and claims: stiff-backed, hard-seated study, that makes no luxury of books, but quarries them, and digs or blasts material for solid uses. But there must also be […]
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BookThug is very pleased to announce that Aisha Sasha John’s acclaimed 2014 collection THOU is a Finalist for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry, Ontario’s leading award for literature! Established in 1987 to recognize the excellence of Ontario writers and writing, the Trillium Book Award is open to books in any genre: fiction, non-fiction, drama, children’s […]
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Lesley Battler‘s debut collection Endangered Hydrocarbons channels the poet’s personal experience as an employee of Shell Oil into an ingenious suite of poems confronting the extent and the implications of oil production in Canada. As a veteran of Big Oil, Battler is able to write from the unique perspective of the poet-insider. Appropriating the corporate and scientific language of oil extraction […]
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Mike Steeves’ new novel Giving Up is an uproarious, unrelenting look inside a contemporary middle-class relationship. Taking place over the course of two or three hours on a deceptively inauspicious evening in a non-descript, unnamed city, the novel, Steeves’ first, has the rare immediacy of a play—only turned inside out. Much of the action here is internal, […]
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The lyrics populating Ottawa poet Pearl Pirie‘s new collection, the pet radish, shrunken, buzz with oblique wisdom and surgically sharp wit. Cicadas chirp from beneath the troposphere; secret agent squirrels conspire among the peonies at sunset; revelatory reversals and unfamiliar aphorisms grow like wild flowers. Playing on themes of love and relationships, future-politics of the English language and the current […]
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