Winter/Spring 2024 Reveal
Today, we are thrilled to reveal our Winter/Spring 2024 lineup, which features twelve exciting new works of literary fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and translated literature. Read on for all the details, including pre-order information!
But first, 2024 marks an important milestone for Book*hug Press as we celebrate our twentieth anniversary of adventures in literary publishing, which is no small feat for an indie publisher. We’ll be celebrating our anniversary all throughout the year. Stay tuned for more announcements!
Winter/Spring 2024 Fiction
The Singularity
by Balsam Karam, translated from Swedish by Saskia Vogel
Literature in Translation Series
Literary Fiction
Paperback $23.00 | eBook $14.99
On Sale January 24, 2024
FINALIST FOR THE AUGUST PRIZE
FINALIST FOR THE EUROPEAN UNION PRIZE FOR LITERATURE
“I don’t know anyone who writes like Balsam Karam. Truly one of the most original and extraordinary voices to come out of Scandinavia in…forever.”
—Fredrik Backman, author of A Man Called Ove
Lyrical and devastating, The Singularity is a breathtaking study of grief, migration, and motherhood from one of Sweden’s most exciting contemporary novelists. Balsam Karam weaves between two narratives in this formally ambitious novel and offers a fresh approach to language and aesthetic as she decenters a white European gaze. Her English-language debut, The Singularity is a powerful exploration of loss, history, and memory. Read more.
Blue Notes
by Anne Cathrine Bomann, translated from Danish by Caroline Waight
Literature in Translation Series
Literary Fiction | Medical Thriller
Paperback $23.00 | eBook $14.99
On Sale February 22, 2024
“A touching meditation on love and loss and what it means to be truly human.”
—Elyse Friedman, author of The Opportunist
From the author of the international bestselling novel Agatha comes a literary medical thriller about loss, empathy, science, Big Pharma, and societal norms. A Danish university research group is finishing its study of a new medicine, Callocain: the world’s first pill for grief. But psychology professor Thorsten Gjeldsted suspects that someone has manipulated the test results to hide a disturbing side effect. When no one believes him, he teams up with two students to investigate. Read more.
How You Were Born
by Kate Cayley
Literary Fiction | Short Stories
Paperback $23.00 | eBook $14.99
On Sale March 12, 2024
WINNER OF THE TRILLIUM BOOK AWARD
SHORTLISTED FOR THE GOVERNOR GENERAL’S LITERARY AWARD FOR FICTION
“A stunning collection.”
—Alissa York, author of Far Cry
The stories in How You Were Born, each more incisive and devastating than the last, examine the difficult business of love, loyalty, and memory. Sharing the bizarre and tragi-comic of life, Cayley champions the importance of connections, even when missed or mislaid, and the possibility of redemption. This tenth-anniversary edition of Cayley’s award-winning collection includes three new stories, an introduction by Alayna Munce, and a preface by the author. Read More.
Play
by Jess Taylor
Psychological Fiction
Paperback $23.00 | eBook $14.99
On Sale April 23, 2024
“Taylor has created a uniquely gentle sort of dread, weaving a story that is compelling and compassionate, and burning with profoundly moving insight about trauma, the power of art, and our deep need for connection.”
—Jessica Westhead, author of Avalanche
From the acclaimed author of and Pauls and Just Pervs comes a haunting and riveting novel that reminds us of both the beauty and danger of imagination. Inseparable from a young age, Paul (Paulina) and her cousin Adrian play the Lighted City, an imaginary world where they can escape a childhood that seems both too sad and too grown-up. Years later, Paul, struggling with PTSD, is dragged back into the fate that Adrian seems to have scripted for them. And so she finds herself journeying across the country and back to the Lighted City, where so much of her childhood played out. Read More.
These Songs I Know By Heart
by Erin Brubacher
Literary fiction | Autofiction
Paperback $23.00 | eBook $14.99
On Sale May 7, 2024
“A deeply humane and compassionate compendium of encounter and observation meditating on friendship, motherhood, art making, and home.”
—Jordan Tannahill, Scotiabank Giller Prize-shortlisted author of The Listeners
Through a three-day canoe trip, chance encounters, fierce female friendship, step-parenting, IVF, pandemic isolation, and quiet moments between humans, These Songs I Know By Heart, the highly anticipated debut novel from multi-disciplinary artist and writer Erin Brubacher, weaves vignettes of everyday mythology into an absorbing and honest meditation on the connections in our lives. Read More.
Disobedience
by Daniel Sarah Karasik
Dystopian Fiction | Speculative Fiction
Paperback $23.00 | eBook $14.99
On Sale May 21, 2024
From the author of Plenitude comes a remarkable work of queer and trans speculative fiction that imagines how alternative forms of connection and power can refuse the violent institutions that engulf us. Shael lives in a vast prison camp, a monstrosity developed after centuries of warfare and environmental catastrophe. As a young transfeminine person, they risk abject violence if their identity and love affair with Coe, an insurrectionary activist, are discovered. But desire and rebellion flare, and soon Shael escapes to Riverwish, a settlement attempting to forge a new way of living that counters the camp’s repression. Read More.
Nauetakuan: a Silence for a Noise
by Natasha Kanapé Fontaine, translated from French by Howard Scott
Literature in Translation Series
Literary Fiction | Indigenous Fiction
Paperback $23.00 | eBook $14.99
On Sale June 11, 2024
“Poet, singer, actress, and Innu activist, the talented Natasha Kanapé Fontaine has written her first hard-hitting novel, which cuts through us like a lightning bolt.”
—Le Journal de Montréal
Monica, a young woman studying art history in Montreal, has lost touch with her Innu roots. When an exhibition unexpectedly articulates a deep, intergenerational wound, she begins to search for a stronger connection to her Indigeneity. A quickly found friendship with Katherine, an Indigenous woman whose life is filled with culture and community, underscores for Monica the possibilities of turning from assimilation and toxic masculinity to something much deeper—and more universal than she expects. Read More.
Elevator in Saigon
by Thuận, translated from Vietnamese by Nguyễn An Lý
Literature in Translation Series
Literary Fiction | Detective Fiction
Paperback $23.00 | eBook $14.99
On Sale July 9, 2024
From the author of Chinatown comes a personal and political, tragic and bitingly satirical, ethereal journey through Hanoi, Saigon, Paris, Pyongyang, and Seoul. A Vietnamese woman living in Paris travels back to Saigon for her estranged mother’s funeral. Her brother had recently built a new house in Saigon, and staged a grotesquely lavish ceremony for their mother to inaugurate what was rumoured to be the first elevator in a private home in the country. But shortly after the ceremony, in the middle of the night, their mother dies after mysteriously falling down the elevator shaft. Read More.
Winter/Spring 2024 Nonfiction
Monsters, Martyrs, and Marionettes: Essays on Motherhood
by Adrienne Gruber
Essais Series No. 16
Nonfiction | Personal Essays
Paperback $23.00 | eBook $14.99
On Sale May 1, 2024
“Gruber explores modern motherhood in all its beautiful, terrifying, confusing, grotesque, joyful, sometimes mundane, sometimes ridiculous glory, in a way that is both intimate and yet wholly universal.”
—Amy Jones, author of Pebble & Dove
Monsters, Martyrs, and Marionettes is a revelatory hybrid collection from the author of Buoyancy Control and Q & A that subverts the stereotypes and transcends the platitudes of family life to examine motherhood with blistering insight. Each essay peers into the seemingly mundane to show us the mortal and emotional consequences of maternal bonds, placing experiences of “being a mom” within broader contexts—historical, literary, biological, and psychological—to speak to the ugly realities of parenthood often omitted from mainstream conversations. Read More.
Winter/Spring 2024 Poetry
Medium
by Johanna Skibsrud
Poetry
Paperback $20.00 | eBook $14.99
On Sale March 5, 2024
“The accumulation of voices in Skibsrud’s Medium serves to reclassify individuality, offering a choral refuge and a devotion to a larger field of inquiry. Readers will delight and be haunted by the invocation of the ‘divine feminine.’”
—Annie Guthrie, author of The Good Dark
The poems in Medium explore the lives and perspectives of women who—in their roles as biological, physical, or spiritual mediums—have helped to shape the course of history. Reckoning with the dominant historical narratives of each woman’s era, Skibsrud underscores the power of poetry to bring about new formulations for understanding the relationship between past and present, self and other. Read More
you
by Chantal Neveu, translated from French by Erín Moure
Literature in Translation Series
Poetry
Paperback $20.00 | eBook $14.99
On Sale March 19, 2024
“you is among the texts that quietly renew the relationship between poetry and intimacy.”
—Adrien Meignan, Un dernier livre avant la fin du monde
From the author and translator duo of the award-winning collection This Radiant Life, comes a book-length poem that plunges us more deeply into the notion of the idyll and into the polyhedric structure of love. you demonstrates with exceptional beauty how in the interval between words or verses, language can glimmer, absorb, and refract the changing realities and attractions of an all too human relationship. Read More.
Oh Witness Dey!
by Shani Mootoo
Poetry
Paperback $23.00 | eBook $14.99
On Sale March 26, 2024
“The story of how Europe’s rapacity accelerated in the wake of ’discovery’ is timely and inexhaustible, and these poems bear impassioned witness to a world that has raced past its precipice.”
—Kaie Kellough, Griffin Poetry Prize–winning author of Magnetic Equator
Oh Witness Dey!, from the celebrated author of Polar Vortex and Cane | Fire, expands the question of origins, from ancestry percentages and journey narratives, through memory, story, and lyric fragments. These vibrant poems transcend the tropes of colonial violence to reimagine tensions and solidarities among various diasporas and to find new routes toward understanding. They invite the reader to witness history, displacements, and the legacies of our inheritance. Read More
