Book*hug Turns 20: Thirty Books for Twenty Years, Part Three of Three
In case you missed the news, this year marks our twentieth anniversary. We’ve been celebrating this special milestone anniversary in various ways throughout the year. To help keep the celebrations going, our team has assembled a list of thirty of our favourite titles from the last twenty years. Today, we’re pleased to bring you part three of a three-part series that features our last ten picks.
Take a dive into the past with us to witness the combined efforts of the fantastic writers, editors, translators, and designers who have helped make Book*hug Press what it is today! This is not an exhaustive list, but a starting point for discovering just some of the daring and bold works that we have proudly championed. Here’s to twenty more years of literary excellence!
In an unnamed town in the summer of 1998, Judy is an isolated and inexperienced teenager on the cusp of adulthood struggling to craft an identity for herself—especially as the artist she wants to be. An affecting novel of psychological nuance and dark humour, Big Shadow explores the costs of self-deceit, fandom, and tenuous ambitions, exposing the lies we’ll tell ourselves and the promises we’ll make to edge closer to what we want…or what we think we want.
Suture shares three interweaving stories of artists tearing themselves open to make art. The result is a hyper-real exploration of the cruelties we commit and forgive in ourselves and others. This exciting debut novel from Nic Brewer is a highly original meditation on the fractures within us, and the importance of empathy as medicine and glue.
Remnants by Céline Huyghebaert, translated from French by Aleshia Jensen
Remnants is an exploration of our relationships with family and perception, told through a profound investigation of a father’s life and sudden death. With various voices and hybrid forms—including dialogues, questionnaires, photographs, and dream documentation—Huyghebaert builds a fragmented picture of a father-daughter relationship that has been shaped by silences and missed opportunities. This stunning work won the Governor General’s Literary Award for French-language Fiction when it was first published in 2019 under the title Le drap blanc; Aleshia Jensen was then nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation for Remnants in 2022. Remnants also won the Betsy Warland Between Genres Award in 2022.
In Jess Taylor’s sophomore story collection, contemporary views of female sexuality are subverted, and women are given agency over their desires and bodies. Through these characters, sex is revealed to be many things at once: gross, shameful, exhilarating, hidden or open—and always complicated. Reminiscent of the works of Maggie Nelson, Mary Gaitskill and Chris Kraus, the stories in Just Pervs explore the strange oppression and illumination created by desire, the bewilderment of adolescence, and the barriers to intimacy both discovered within and imposed upon ourselves.
Attuned to a body in motion, Marianne Apostolides’s Swim pulls the reader beneath the logic of prose, into the eroticism of language itself. The arcing rhythm of a body breathing—a woman marking her birth as she swims in a pool—sustains the unique and hypnotic language that becomes the medium through which this story moves. In a review on his blog, rob mclennan writes, “This is a passionate, longing prose of elemental heartbreak, a physical and pounding prose of the body and heart, with echoes sweeping through of the late Elizabeth Smart’s groundbreaking By Grand Central Station I Lay Down and Wept, with an ending that glows.”
My Conversations With Canadians by Lee Maracle
In personal essays that are both conversational and direct, the late Lee Maracle thinks through subjects such as citizenship, segregation, labour, law, prejudice, and reconciliation, to name a few. Drawing on a multitude of experiences as a First Nations leader, a woman, a mother, and a grandmother, Maracle’s My Conversations With Canadians presents a tour de force exploration into the writer’s own history and a reimagining of the future of our nation
Notes from a Feminist Killjoy by Erin Wunker
Neither totemic nor complete, the essays that make up Notes from a Feminist Killjoy: Essays on Everyday Life attempt to think publicly about why we need feminism, and especially why we need the figure of the feminist killjoy, now. From the complicated practices of being a mother and a feminist, to building friendship amongst women as a community-building and community-sustaining project, to writing that addresses rape culture from the Canadian context and beyond, Wunker’s multiple award-winning collection invites readers into a conversation about gender, feminism, and living in our inequitable world
In this multiple award-winning collection of deeply personal essays, twenty-six writers explore their connection with language, accents, and vocabularies, and contend with the ways these can be used as both bridge and weapon. Tongues: On Longing and Belonging through Language is a vital anthology that opens a compelling dialogue about language diversity and probes the importance of language in our identity and the ways in which it shapes us.
Blank: Essays and Interviews by M. NourbeSe Philip
Bla_K is a collection of previously out-of-print essays and new works by one of Canada’s most important contemporary writers and thinkers. In heretical writings that work to make the disappeared perceptible, Bla_K explores questions of race, the body politic, timeliness, recurrence, ongoingness, art, and the so-called multicultural nation. Through these considerations, Philip creates a linguistic form that registers the presence of what has seemingly dissolved, a form that also imprints the loss and the silence surrounding those disappearances in its very presence.
Small, Broke, and Kind of Dirty: Affirmations for the Real World by Hana Shafi
Small, Broke, and Kind of Dirty—built around art from Hana Shafi’s popular online affirmation series—focuses on our common and never-ending journey of self-discovery. It explores the ways in which the world can all too often wear us down, and reminds us to remember our worth, even when it’s hard to do so. Drawing on her experience as a millennial woman of colour, and writing with humour and a healthy dose of irreverence, Shafi delves into body politics and pop culture, racism and feminism, friendship, and allyship.
