Bibliobash Toronto: C.P. Boyko, Nadine McInnis, Alice Petersen, Norm Sibum
When
Where
The Dora Keogh
Join Biblioasis and crew for our annual fall fiction bash-up. On Monday September 25th, you are formally invited to get Bibliobashed with C.P. Boyko, the Journey Prize nominee and Globe Top Five First Fiction author of Blackouts, who’ll read from his new collection Psychology and Other Stories. Let your head get light with Blood Secrets, a sophomore work by Nadine McInnis, whom Ann-Marie MacDonald has praised as “exquisite.” Go stark raving mad for Alice Petersen’s All the Voices Cry, the stories of which sent Kathleen Winter and David Bezmozgis over the moon. Get the shakes with special guest poet Norm Sibum, whose Sub Divo sets the heart pounding for days. And why? Because it’s better than benzos, folks. This s*!t will knock you out.
Psychology and Other Stories by C.P. BoykoBiblioasis  Psychologists are people we love to hate. At best, they’re compassionate detectives of the human soul, healers and diagnosticians, assessing the internal machinations that structure our lives and behavior. At worst, however, they’re smug, hyper-educated, bombastic, yappy, socially deaf, thrice-divorced and twice-separated spouse-swapping cat-torturing perverts. Plus, they’re all in this book. And so are their patients. C.P. Boyko’s Psychology and Other Stories is a brilliant study of mental illness, mental health, and the people who try to tell them apart. |
Blood Secrets by Nadine McInnisBiblioasis  Nadine McInnis’s sophomore collection is about endings and their revelations: the affair that ends a marriage, the disease that ends a life, the effect of a long-ago suicide. As her characters struggle to administer to each other in their final moments, each story becomes an autopsy, dissecting bodies for their secrets and bloodlines for the things they hide. |
All the Voices Cry by Alice PetersenBiblioasis  An academic’s wife, struggling to keep up with her husband’s quest to find a long-dead author’s Tahitian love-garden, realizes that her own idea of paradise no longer includes her husband. An architect dreams of slender redheads, Champlain’s astrolabe, and a brush with mortality—and finds at least the latter at Danseuses 7 Jours. An elderly man boards a trans-Pacific flight in an attempt to elude the prediction of a psychic, only to understand too late how the prophecy has shaped his actions. In All the Voices Cry, modern life collides with all the old pushes and pulls: city and country, the global and the local, the ideal and the real. Petersen’s characters chase the mirage of escape, and are brought up hard by reality. This is a book rooted in landscape, tangled in the brambles of personal history, and it introduces in Alice Petersen a wondrous new voice that is yours to discover. |
Sub Divo by Norm Sibum Sub Divo is a screed against the cultural impotence of modernity, and the decline of American empire. Personal, epistolary, corrosive, vented with Sibum’s classical spleen and explosive prosody, this collection teems with emperors, historians, presidents, politicians, musicians, composers, trollops, poets, gods. Few poets could pair such a flirtatious and colloquial style with such allusive breadth. |