Spring 2023 Season Reveal! | Book*hug Press

Spring 2023 Season Reveal!

Happy New Year! Today, we are revealing our Spring 2023 lineup, featuring seven remarkable fiction, nonfiction, and poetry titles! Read on for all the details, including on sale dates and pre-order information, plus an announcement about FREE SHIPPING on website orders!


 

Spring 2023 Fiction

 

Places Like These
by Lauren Carter
Literary Fiction | Short Stories
$23.00 | On Sale April 18, 2023

A widow visits a spiritualist community to attempt to contact her late husband. A grieving teenager confronts the unfairness of his small-town world and the oncoming ecological disaster. A sexual assault survivor navigates her boyfriend’s tricky family and her own confusing desires. A mother examines unresolved guilt while seeking her missing daughter in a city slum. A lover exploits his girlfriend’s secrets for his own purposes.

“The stories in Lauren Carter’s Places Like These explore the landscape of grief and anxiety that disrupt the quietude of so-called ordinary lives and places. Carter turns her penetrating writer’s gaze toward that which makes us human, the ways in which we must carry on, for better and for worse,” writes Nancy Jo Cullen, author of The Western Alienation Merit Badge. Read more.  

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Big Shadow
by Marta Balcewicz
Literary Fiction | Coming of Age Fiction
$23.00 | On Sale May 16, 2023

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. Her only friends are increasingly obsessed with a cultish belief in a coming “Big Shadow.” Her mother is afraid of life and finds solace in TV shows. At her lowest point, Judy meets Maurice Blunt, a visiting summer poetry class professor who is a “has-been” fixture of the 1970s NYC punk music scene. Judy believes Maurice—a man more than twice her age desperately seeking lost adoration—is the ticket out of her current life.

“Preternatural, radiating warmth and coldness and colour and light, Big Shadow brims with intelligence and wit. While one world flickers in the background, our narrator enters another, but by the end, we see that the flickering is, amazingly, reality too. I never quite knew where this novel was taking me, which is exactly where I wanted to be going,” writes Amina Cain, author of Indelicacy. Read more.

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The Loneliness in Lydia Erneman’s Life
by Rune Christiansen, translated from Norwegian by Kari Dickson
Literature in Translation Series | Literary Fiction
$23.00 | On Sale June 6, 2023

Winner of the Brage Prize, the most prestigious award in Norwegian Literature, The Loneliness in Lydia Erneman’s Life is a quiet, beautiful exploration of solitude and how we relate to other beings.

Having grown up as an only child in Northern Sweden, Lydia is used to isolation and being on her own. In a series of poetic sketches, Lydia tends to the animals in her community, spends time with her aging parents, and falls in love. Despite an increasing need for closer human contact that begins to encroach on her contented solitude, ultimately it is Lydia’s satisfaction with her inner life that speaks of an elegance and hope often lost in these clamouring times.

“Light in tone, soft and delicate, [Rune Christiansen’s sentences] awaken your vigilance to what lies almost imperceptibly beneath the great details of everyday life. This is a book to cherish for a long time.” —Mappalibri, Belgium. Read more.

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Spring 2023 Nonfiction

Crying Wolf
by Eden Boudreau
Memoir | Narrative Nonfiction
$25.00 | On Sale March 22, 2023

It’s a tale as old as time. Girl meets boy. Boy wants girl. Girl says no. Boy takes what he wants anyway.

After a violent sexual assault, Eden Boudreau was faced with a choice: call the police and explain that a man who wasn’t her husband, who she had agreed to go on a date with, had just raped her. Or go home and pray that, in the morning, it would be only a nightmare. Crying Wolf is a gripping memoir that shares the raw path to recovery after violence and spotlights the ways survivors are too often demonized or ignored when they belong to marginalized communities.

“Readers will close Crying Wolf with a sense of having been changed by the story of healing and returning to oneself, but most of all, will find themselves hopeful for the future,” writes Kelly S. Thompson, bestselling author of Girls Need Not Apply and Still, I Cannot Save You. Read more.

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Spring 2023 Poetry

Heating the Outdoors
by Marie-Andrée Gill, translated from French by Kristen Renee Miller
Literature in Translation Series | Indigenous Poetry
$20.00 | On Sale March 7, 2023

Irreverent and transcendent, lyrical and slang, Heating the Outdoors is an endlessly surprising new work from award-winning poet Marie-Andrée Gill. In these micropoems, writing and love are acts of decolonial resilience. Rooted in Nitassinan, the territory and ancestral home of the Ilnu Nation, they echo the Ilnu oral tradition in her interrogation and reclamation of the language, land, and interpersonal intimacies distorted by imperialism. They navigate Gill’s interior landscape—of heartbreak, humour, and, ultimately, unrelenting light—amidst the boreal geography.

“Defiantly fragmentary, these are stunning shards of tongues, embodied vernaculars slowly, steadily unsettling grammars. Kristen Renee Miller’s translations retain the elegance and shimmer of the originals while wondrously conveying their knottedness, their syntax of skin,” writes Urayoán Noel, author of Transversal. Read more.

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Lent
by Kate Cayley
Poetry
$20.00 | On Sale April 4, 2023

Lent, from award-winning writer Kate Cayley, explores domestic and artistic life amidst the environmental crisis, and the surprising ways that every philosophical quandary—large and small—converges in the home, in small objects, conversations, and moments.

“Gorgeous and startling, the poems in Kate Cayley’s Lent emerge as a testament to poetry itself: the desire to grapple with an imperfect world, and yet respond with praise… These are poems filled with hope, searingly intelligent, by one of our country’s finest poets. Lent is a wonder,” writes Steven Price, Scotiabank Giller Prize shortlisted author of Lampedusa. Read more. 

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archipelago
by Laila Malik
Poetry
$20.00 | On Sale April 6, 2023

archipelago, the debut poetry collection from Laila Malik, traces fragments of family, becoming and unbecoming against the shifting shorelines of loss, multigenerational migration, and (un)belonging. Beginning with a coming of age in the 80s and 90s between Canada, the Arabian Gulf, East Africa and Kashmir, they subvert conventions of lineage, instead drawing on the truths of inter-ethnic histories amidst sparse landscapes of deserts, oceans, and mountains. They question why the only certainties of “home” are urgency and impossibility.

“This is a carefully chosen title—what is an archipelago, if not the geographical expression of multiplicity?” writes writes Nasser Hussain, author of SKY WRI TEI NGS. “archipelago by Laila Malik is the poetic expression of the geographic, then—a host of voices, overlapping, harmonious, discordant, dark, and humorous in turns. Grief can make an island of anyone: these poems can bring you to new shores.” Read more.

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Free Shipping on All Web Orders in Canada!

We are currently offering FREE SHIPPING on all online orders in Canada.
Don’t miss this chance to stock up on new releases and backlist favourites!

 

 

 

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