Hello, Bibliophile readers! It’s a pleasure to introduce myself as the new Sales Coordinator here at Biblioasis. This is the last day of my first week of full-time work, most of which I got to spend in the office in Windsor. Toronto is my beloved home base, but I’ve had a great time exploring the city and its environs—including one of the best Turkish bakeries I’ve yet come across in Ontario.
It’s hard to put into words just how exciting it is to have joined the (brilliant) Biblioasis team. Before starting at the press, I was working as a bookseller at the beautiful Flying Books on Queen Street in Toronto, which connected me to a vibrant literary community. I had spent the years between 2019 and 2024 teaching full time at The University of King’s College in Halifax, an experience I found incredibly meaningful, but publishing was my first love. Since as long as I can remember, I’ve had more books than space to accommodate them. Books have accompanied me throughout my life. They have given me a sense of place and rootedness in the midst of many types of transitions.
Sitting in the Biblioasis office with shelves of wonderful titles behind me has been a genuine thrill. There is a lot to learn, but after teaching for so many years, I’m enjoying feeling like a student again, making one discovery after another. Everyone I’ve met so far has been patient, supportive, and welcoming. I’m passionate about our books and I’m looking forward to championing them.
As a bonus, here are some of my favourite Biblioasis titles. Incidentally, they are all works of fiction written from the perspective of mothers: Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport (if you haven’t tackled the tome yet, take this as your sign—it’s more relevant than ever), Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat(one of the most lyrical genre-bending works I’ve come across), and Hanna Stoltenberg’s Near Distance(an unflinching modern take on the mother-daughter relationship that I think Simone de Beauvoir would have loved).
Hilary Ilkay Sales Coordinator
In other news, Lazer Lederhendler is the fiction winner of the French-American Foundation Prize for his translation of The Hollow Beast! The foundation conducted a short interview with Lazer about his experiences working with Christophe Bernard’s “beast of a novel.” We’re delighted to present it here, ahead of the awards ceremony in New York next week.
Q: What did you enjoy most about translating The Hollow Beast by Christophe Bernard?
Lazer: Problem solving is one of the things I love most about translating good fiction, and I was well served in that department by Christophe’s fabulous beast of a novel. I did a good amount of research on English dialects of Eastern Canada that are comparable to the French spoken on the Gaspé Peninsula, where most of the action is located. This proved to be not the most fruitful avenue, as the linguistic idiosyncrasies of the book are mainly due to Christophe’s unique and highly evocative visual style. In fact, it occurred to me that The Hollow Beast has all the makings of a wonderful graphic novel. So rather than focusing primarily on language equivalencies or approximations, I would picture the characters and scenes in detail and render those images into English (and afterwards, of course, make sure I hadn’t strayed from the original). On the other hand, however, there was the challenge of depicting the evolving speech patterns of the story’s hero, Monty, who starts out quasi-illiterate but through self-education (he carries around a copy of Homer’s Odyssey) progressively acquires a more sophisticated level of French.
Q: You specialize in translating contemporary Quebecois literature. What are some differences you’ve noticed between contemporary French literature in Canada and French literature in France?
Lazer: That’s a huge question, perhaps best left to academics. But one clear difference that does immediately come to mind is this: today, more than ever before, Québécois literature and Québécois culture and language in general are very much creatures of North America, whose references and influences point increasingly south and west rather than to Europe. This is true, at any rate, for most of the writers I’ve translated since the early 2000s — Nicolas Dickner, Catherine Leroux, Perrine Leblanc, et al — who are assuredly representative of contemporary Québécois fiction. Another basic difference worth mentioning is that the literature of France by and large takes the language for granted — ça va de soi. The same can’t be said of Quebec, where the French language has always been a battle field that, as a friend of mine put it, is foregrounded as a constituent part of the landscape.
Q: The French-American Foundation Translation Prize seeks to honor translators and their craft, and recognize the important work they do bringing works of French literature to Anglophone audiences. What does being named a winner for this prize mean to you, and, in your own words, why does a Prize like this matter?
Lazer: Translators are among the unsung artisans of literature endeavouring to carry the words and artistry of writers across the barriers of language and culture. We for the most part labour in the shadows in order to extend the reach and longevity of an author’s works. So it’s always encouraging and gratifying to have one’s efforts as a translator acknowledged and celebrated. What’s more, awards like the FrenchAmerican Foundation’s Translation Prize, spotlight books and writers that otherwise might not get the attention and readership they deserve.
In good publicity news:
The Passenger Seat by Vijay Khurana was reviewed (again!) in The New York Times: “Structurally ingenious, rendered in unusual and fine colors, buffed to a shine. A perfect debut novel, explicit in its excellence!”
Vijay Khurana was also interviewed on the podcast Final Draft.
Alice Chadwick interviewed Alice Chadwick for Debutiful.
https://www.biblioasis.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/unnamed-scaled.jpg6172560biblioasishttp://biblioasis.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/BIBLIOASIS-Logo-500x500-White-300x300.pngbiblioasis2025-06-23 12:49:262025-06-23 12:49:28The Bibliophile: An introduction from our new Sales Coordinator
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Alice Chadwick’s Dark Like Under follows a large cast of characters—made up of students and teachers at an English secondary school in the 1980s—in the aftermath of a beloved teacher’s sudden death. The premise reminded me of Phillippe Falardeau’s devastating film Monsieur Lazhar, yet Dark Like Under, despite the grief and uncertainty that propel the narrative, feels radically life-giving.
This 336 page novel takes place over the course of a single day, which allows for a heightened attentiveness to the nuances of setting and character. Chadwick really does justice to her characters. I think Pamela Hensley (The Miramichi Reader) gets it right in her recent review:
“Every character is so richly depicted, so expertly drawn with emotional depth and intelligence that we understand not only the individual, but the way each person influences the others and how the town—and the country—has evolved.”
Dark Like Under is the kind of deep, soul-defining book that counters the train chug of reels and the trashiness of beach reads. It allows for immersion in a way that reminds me of summers reading Hardy as a young teenager (before I was expected to work).
Chadwick’s craft is care. This is a beautiful debut novel. It’s also a lovely physical object, with a cover designed by Kate Sinclair, and pages that smell of glue and early summer mornings.
I had the privilege of asking Alice Chadwick a few questions over email, and I’m delighted to share her thoughtful responses here.
Dominique Béchard Publicist
Photo: Dark Like Under by Alice Chadwick. Cover designed by Kate Sinclair.
A Biblioasis Interview with Alice Chadwick
DB: Dark Like Under takes place over the course of a single day. What inspired this decision? Did you encounter any pitfalls (or surprising benefits) to the circadian form? Are there any other circadian books that inspired you?
AC: My novel is set in a school, and I’m fascinated by the ritualistic nature of the school day. The routines are familiar to us all but, from the distance of adulthood, can appear quite strange. Despite their repetitive quality, there are some school days that stand alone, that remain with us throughout life. I wanted to write about one of those days.
The idea of writing a novel based on a school day slotted into the circadian form in a way that felt entirely natural, even irresistible. The single day as a metaphor for the span of a human life has a rich history (I’m thinking of Shakespeare’s sonnet 73—“In me thou see’st the twilight of such day, As after sunset fadeth in the west . . .”). In my novel, the teenage characters are still in the morning of their lives, moving towards the high, bright point; their teachers and parents feel the light dimming as the decades accumulate. I wanted to explore those distinct stages of life and, as we move through the day of the book, the structure itself carries some of that meaning.
Working with the circadian form was tremendously helpful in structuring the novel—I had a beginning and an end, as well as a natural high point. The one-day structure keeps the narrative fresh, the characters in the present moment and the whole thing moving forwards. There is, quite literally, a ticking clock at the heart of the book. Having those things in place allowed me to write very freely. In that sense, I found it unexpectedly liberating and didn’t feel any disadvantages—perhaps those are for readers to point out!
Before I started working on Dark Like Under, I hadn’t realised that a lot of the literature I love best takes a circadian form. Despite the constraints, it’s hugely flexible and seems to inspire innovation. At one end of the scale there is Katherine Mansfield’s short story sequence Prelude, a masterclass in brevity and restraint; at the other, there’s Joyce’s exuberant and encyclopedic Ulysses. My own favourite is Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway; a hundred years after it was written, it still has urgent things to say about female experience in middle age, motherhood and marriage, and about trauma. The spectre of death haunts all these works. Reading them, our appreciation of what it means to live through a single day and through a single life is heightened. They return us to our own daily existence with a sharpened perception of life’s beauty, strangeness and fragile value.
Photo: Alice Chadwick, author of Dark Like Under. Credit: Beth Boswell-Knight.
Even though the novel is focused on a single day, this day is perceived polyphonically—through multiple characters. I’m curious to know if this was always going to be the case. Do you have a favourite character, or has that favourite changed over the course of writing the novel?
When I began to write the book, I experimented with the first-person plural perspective—the collective “we.” The whole town has suffered a loss, and I was looking for a way to voice that shared grief. Gradually I realised that individual experiences were equally important, and I shifted to a more polyphonic approach, with each chapter drawing close to one character to observe their particular response (a close third-person perspective). Nevertheless, I wanted to retain something of that initial choral feeling. There is considerable social division in the town of the novel, as in 1980s society more broadly, and it felt important to have a plurality of voices, as far as that was feasible within the school.
Initially, I was writing only from the perspectives of the teenage girls and women. At a certain point, I saw that I needed to open it out further and include those of the boys and men. When I had this thought, I stood up from my desk and walked out of the house—I felt extremely ill-equipped to enter the minds of teenage boys! But it was one of the turning points of the book. A character like Kelly, who had initially functioned as a sort of irritant in the classroom, became quite different when given his own chapters. That took me by surprise—he is now one of my favourite people in the book.
I feel a great deal of tenderness for all my characters, but some were easier to write than others. Nicolas, for example—who is at sea in all the teenage drama and would just like to get on with his homework—flowed out of my pen. He could have taken over the novel! I also love Robin. Her life is far from easy but there is not a speck of self-pity in her. The art teacher, Sue Sharpe, is another character close to my heart. She is not conventionally heroic, or even particularly sympathetic, but she has endured. She attempts to communicate something of genuine value to the kids in her classroom and, despite the disappointments and compromises of her career, still carries the flame of her artistic life.
The 1980s serve as a backdrop for the novel. How much do you think the time period factors into the story? Do you think it would have made for a very different novel if it had been set, say, in the 2000s, or today?
I do think it would be different. The premise—that a teacher could die, and no real explanation be given, no support for staff or children be put in place—is, I hope, unthinkable today. The silence around “difficult” subjects such as death and mental health, gender and sexuality, felt almost total in the 1980s; there was a lack of vocabulary and openness about many things that we discuss more freely and fluently now. That said, some events are inexplicable. People, even those closest to us, can remain mysterious and unknowable. The book, in one sense, is an exploration of that.
The novel is underpinned by the tension between communal experience and social division in a small town. For that reason, the 1980s under Margaret Thatcher, a period of growing inequality and social destabilisation, felt like the right backdrop for the book, even the necessary one. However, the debates of the 1980s remain pressing: how do we look after the most vulnerable in our communities? How do we share the resources of land, money and education?
I also really wanted to capture an “analog” way of being alive that has almost entirely disappeared now. The texture of life was so different in the 80s—the way we passed little handwritten notes around and did all our learning from books; how, if we wanted to phone someone, we had to stand in the hall and use the landline, where the whole family could hear. Photographs were rare; we didn’t walk around with cameras and films were expensive to process. It was a different way of being an individual and of experiencing time; as a teenager you might be alone or bored, isolated or idle, to an extent that is almost impossible now. That said, teenagers are teenagers. The excitement, defiance and uncertainty of those years belong to us all, whichever decade we grew up in.
Dark Like Under is so richly detailed and elaborate. It seems to go against the distracted, content-driven culture we live in. The level of your attentiveness is impressive. What are your writing habits like?
Thank you! One of the things I love in books—and not just books, in painting, photography, cinema too—is the noticing, the observation of small details that are everyday but at the same time surprising and telling. There are many ways of paying attention, but I love an immersive book, one that takes you wholeheartedly into a place, into the lives of its characters, and lets you have a long look around. It’s a slowing down, yes, and in that respect requires a level of close attention, but that, to me, feels generous and nourishing.
But to answer your question: my writing habits are very regular, very workaday. Every morning I get up, make coffee and go outside, often before London has fully woken up. I like to write in the garden, surrounded by my neighbour’s houses, by trees and birds. It’s a small patch of urban Eden! I work in cheap exercise books, which are often covered in soil and smudged by rain, but the work I can do by hand, early in the morning, seems freer and more unexpected than anything I can do on a screen. Later, I do go inside and work at my desk—I like to type things up and edit on my computer. In the late afternoon, I might go for a walk to clear my head, and sometimes I do other (paid) work. Evenings are for reading, and reading is very much part of writing, a crucial part.
I write every day and most days I struggle, but I’ve learnt that these dull, difficult days are necessary. They often herald a breakthrough, a dreamlike period when words finally flow and stray ideas come together.
I’m interested in the title, Dark Like Under. I love the cryptic imagery it inspires. Could you tell us about how you came to it?
The title came to me slowly, I had to wait for it. I’ve had this experience with poetry; it can take a long time for the right words to surface and find an order. I always knew that there would be “dark” in the title, however. In the western tradition, in the Bible or Dante, say, knowledge and goodness are often associated with light and illumination, but some of the most important lessons we need to learn, not to mention things of great mystery, nuance and beauty, come from places of darkness. It’s where ghosts, and Time itself, accumulate—sometimes in a literal sense, in the buried, archeological layers under our feet. The art teacher in the school tries to teach something of this to the kids: to draw a pebble, to describe a human face, requires a sensitivity to the shadows as well as the highlights. There is only so much that light can teach us. But it is, of course, a question of balance, of not being pulled under by the dark.
Have you read anything lately that you’d like to recommend?
I am halfway through Rose Tremain’s 1992 novel, Sacred Country. Told in multiple voices, it’s a portrait of a sleepy, slightly eccentric village and the story of a young girl who discovers, aged six, that she is Martin, not Mary. It’s funny and deeply touching, and I feel as though I’ve left behind friends every time I put it down.
I’ve also just finished James Agee’s A Death in the Family, a novel (as mine is) about a sudden death and how people live through those first hours and days. I now know that it’s a classic of American literature, but I hadn’t heard of it until a bookseller pressed a copy into my hands. I’m grateful that he did.
Named an RTE Book of the Week: “A masterclass in Irish storytelling.”
Listed as one of the Economist’s 40 best books published so far this year: “A powerful, poignant book.”
Reviewed in The Guardian: “Hugely satisfying . . . the novel’s baggy, complex, unfolding structure offers rich rewards.”
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Photo: A stack of freshly-packaged envelopes awaits mailing to booksellers. Next to it, a stack of recent and forthcoming Biblioasis books.
A quick Google search tells me that approximately 2.2 million books are published every year. I don’t know how accurate that number actually is, but it’s something I find myself thinking about a lot more these days. How can anyone ever keep up? How do you decide what book is worth your time and attention?
I started working at Biblioasis last November. It’s my first job in publishing. I’ve never really known what I wanted to do career-wise, but I’ve always liked being surrounded by books and hoped that whatever job I had would include large stacks of books on either side of me. I found the idea comforting as someone whose primary thoughts are about what books I’m currently reading and, more often, have yet to read. When I saw the job posting online, I sent in my application with a feeling that I probably wasn’t going to get it. But, to my surprise, they took a chance and hired me anyway. What I’ve come to admire most about independent presses is their willingness to take chances.
It’s been funny to see how it all works after having been just a reader for so long, who never thought about what goes into publishing a book. It involves a lot of hard work to lay the foundation so that a book has the best shot of finding its readers—and then a startling amount of, what seems to me, just luck that it eventually does. You can’t really predict the success of a book. I can’t yet anyway.
Now as a publicist my goal is to make you aware of our books. It’s a process that involves a lot of reading and rereading our upcoming titles to try and come up with the most interesting way to talk about them. That is the fun part. After that it’s a lot of emailing and sending copies out to reviewers, interviewers, booksellers, influencers, and hoping something resonates with them enough that they take a chance to—out of the millions of books being put out into the world and sent to them—read and recommend this one. This can be less fun because a lot of the time I don’t hear back, and that’s alright, no one can read them all. But it’s surprisingly exhilarating when I do get a response. I felt a genuine rush of excitement the first time seeing our efforts result in a prominent review, or from hearing booksellers enthusiastically champion one of our books. I’m generally not a very expressive person, so this did not show on my face or in my voice at all, but in my head I was doing cartwheels and fireworks were going off.
It can feel endless: the new manuscripts coming in, the reading, the pitching, the following up, the waiting. And it hasn’t even been a full year for me yet. What I’ve really learned these last few months is that every book published is its own miracle and that getting the right books to the right readers, by talking about what our books have meant to me in a way that might convince you to give them a chance, is a high that I’d like to keep chasing.
Irish Farmers Journal: “Rich in history and drama, Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way reveals the legacies of violence and redemption as the secrets of the past unfold.”
Irish Mail on Sunday: “Feeney’s astute lyricism makes for a marvellously engaging story of a woman on the verge.”
Irish Independent: “In presenting both a political and personal history, Feeney delivers a moving meditation on enforced female roles in Irish society both past and present, the heavy pall of grief and the unceasing encroachment of the past into the present.”
On Book Banning by Ira Wells received a starred review in Publishers Weekly: “Wells delivers a potent behind-the-scenes look at book banning in this standout account . . . a decisive and fascinating take on a hot-button issue.”
Near Distance by Hanna Stoltenberg (translated by Wendy H. Gabrielsen) was reviewed in Scout Magazine: “Nuanced, as well as touching, tense, and cringe-y at different turns, [Near Distance] contains all the stuff of a fraught mother-daughter relationship, impressively depicting its subtle, complicated dynamic.”
Since 1986, the French-American Foundation has awarded the Translation Prize for the best translation from French to English in both fiction and nonfiction, guiding these important works of French literature to the American market. The prize is awarded to translators to recognize and celebrate their work.
Publisher Dan Wells says of the win:
“Lazer Lederhendler has long been one of the best translators of Quebecois literature in the world. His translations of Nicholas Dickner, Alain Farah, Catherine Leroux, Pascale Quiviger, and others rank among the best published in this country, and we’ve long marvelled at his range and dexterity. With his translation of Christophe Bernard’s Le Bête Creuse, Lazer set himself one of the largest challenges of his career, a quixotically gargantuan beast bred on joual, wordplay, and slapstick. But Lazer has delivered a brilliant rendition of the Quebecois original, and we’re so very grateful that the French American Foundation judges have honoured Lazer’s work as this year’s fiction winner.”
This will be the second Biblioasis title to win the award within the last three years.
Lazer, along with Nonfiction winner John Lambert, will be awarded at an Awards Ceremony on June 25 in New York City. The event is free with RSVP, and seating is limited and first-come, first-served. The Translation Prize, funded by the generous support of the Florence Gould Foundation, is one of the flagship programs of the French American Foundation.
Winner of the 2025 French-American Translation Prize • Finalist for the 2024 Governor General’s Literary Award in Translation • A Globe and Mail Most Anticipated Spring Title
Don Quixote meets Who Framed Roger Rabbit in this slapstick epic about destiny, family demons, and revenge.
1911. A hockey game in Quebec’s Gaspé Peninsula. With the score tied two-two in overtime, local tough guy Billy Joe Pictou fires the puck directly into Monti Bouge’s mouth. When Pictou’s momentum carries them both across the goal line in a spray of shattered teeth, Victor Bradley, erstwhile referee and local mailman, rules that the goal counts—and Monti’s ensuing revenge for this injustice sprawls across three generations, one hundred years, and dozens of dastardly deeds. Fuelled by a bottomless supply of Yukon, the high-proof hooch that may or may not cause the hallucinatory sightings of a technicolor beast that haunts not just Monti but his descendants, it’s up to Monti’s grandson François—and his floundering doctoral dissertation—to make sense of the vendetta that’s shaped the destiny of their town and everyone in it. Brilliantly translated into slapstick English by Lazer Lederhendler, The Hollow Beast introduces Christophe Bernard as a master of epic comedy.
Lazer Lederhendler is a veteran literary translator based in Montreal and specializing in contemporary Québécois fiction and nonfiction. He is a three-time winner of both the Governor General’s Literary Award and the Cole Foundation Translation Prize of the Quebec Writers Federation. His rendering of Nicolas Dickner’s novel Nikolski (Random House Canada) won the 2010 Canada Reads competition. His translations have twice been finalists for the Scotiabank-Giller Prize.
https://www.biblioasis.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/FRENCH-AM-LAZER-win.jpg8002000biblioasishttp://biblioasis.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/BIBLIOASIS-Logo-500x500-White-300x300.pngbiblioasis2025-06-05 14:43:442025-06-05 14:45:43THE HOLLOW BEAST wins the French-American Translation Prize!
