For the final installment of our “Poetic Inspiration” series, we’re interviewing Laila Malik, author of archipelago! B*: Please share up to three poetry books or poets that are important to you, and helped influence the writing of archipelago. Please also share how they influenced your book. LM: Audre Lorde’s “A Litany for Survival.” Before the era of smartphones, a faintly feral friend in Montreal who didn’t own a computer or a printer found a way to type this poem out and print it. He folded it four times so it was a small square and unceremoniously handed it to me. This poem ..read more

Today, we’re celebrating the release of Play by Jess Taylor. Happy Book Birthday to Play by Jess Taylor! This marks our third book with Taylor; she is also the author of the highly acclaimed short story collections Pauls and Just Pervs, a finalist for the 2020 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Fiction. Unsurprisingly, her first novel has generated much pre-publication buzz, already being named a “Most Anticipated” spring 2024 fiction title by CBC Books, Toronto Star, 49th Shelf, and Hamilton Review of Books. In Play, Taylor continues the ..read more

Next up in our “Poetic Inspiration” series is Hana Shafi, author of People You Know, Places You’ve Been! B*: Please share up to three poetry books or poets that are important to you, and helped influence the writing of People You Know, Places You’ve Been. Please also share how they influenced your book. HS: The books Sex Magick by Ian Young, even this page is white by Vivek Shraya, and City Poems by Joe Fiorito, have been hugely influential to my journey and growth as a poet. For me, they changed my perceptions about what poetry had to look like, or what subject matter could be broac ..read more

Today, we’re sharing another Author Spotlight Q&A. Our featured author is Jess Taylor, author of Pauls, Just Pervs, and Play. B*: What does being part of the Book*hug author family mean to you? JT: When I first signed with Book*hug for Pauls, I remember thinking: This press wants to grow. I could tell in our initial conversation on their back porch, that they saw the same thing in me: they understood that I was just beginning all that I wanted to do as a writer, and that I would want to grow. As a new writer, it was important to find others who were interested in growing, learnin ..read more

Today, we’re sharing Jess Taylor’s playlist for her debut novel Play! Paul (Paulina) Hayes loves her cousin Adrian. Inseparable from a young age, they play The Lighted City, an imaginary world where they pretend to live together and can escape a childhood that seems both too sad and too grown-up. But The Lighted City isn’t without danger. Jess shares her playlist below and walks us through the presence of music in her novel, as well as in her writing process. We hope you enjoy! Play comes out on April 23, and is available from our online shop or your favourite independent bookstore. When ..read more

Today, Kate Cayley is taking us behind “The Summer the Neighbours Were Nazis,” a story from How You Were Born! I’m fond of the background of this story because I think it illustrates how most stories are cobbled together, a weird mixture of overheard conversations, small scraps, memories and of course pure imagination. But I’m not sure it’s possible to create a story that’s truly from your own brain. We just aren’t that inventive. Yet we do invent. I think I like best the line in Seamus Heaney poem “You are neither here nor there/A hurry through which known and strange things pass.” It describ ..read more

The final title in our Winter/Spring 2024 Fiction Preview is Elevator in Saigon by Thuận, translated by Nguyễn An Lý! 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 a ..read more

Next up in our “Poetic Inspiration” series is Kate Hargreaves, author of tend!  B*: Please share up to three poetry books or poets that are important to you, and helped influence the writing of tend. Please also share how they influenced your book. KH: Brute by Emily Skaja – I picked this collection up on a whim while in New Orleans just before the pandemic lockdowns in 2020, and when I was in the early stages of writing tend. I remember reading it on the plane home and being struck by the timeless quality of Skaja’s poems, in which people and settings seemed unanchored by spec ..read more

We’re back with another “Poetic Inspiration” feature! Joining us today is Sandra Ridley, author of Vixen! B*: Please share up to three poetry books or poets that are important to you, and helped influence the writing of Vixen. Please also share how they influenced your book. SR: Christine McNair’s Charm (Book*hug Press). I always go to McNair’s books for her fearlessness and unyielding intensity. If Vixen has some of this, I’d like to think it comes from McNair. Phil Hall’s The Ash Bell (Beautiful Outlaw Press). Hall’s writing has shaped mine for years. From him I keep learning ..read more

Next up in our “Poetic Inspiration” series is Johanna Skibsrud, author of Medium!  B*: Please share up to three poetry books or poets that are important to you, and helped influence the writing of Medium. Please also share how they influenced your book. JS: It occurs to me—in thinking about what poets and works of poetry influenced the writing of Medium—that as much as a work of poetry the book is a kind of love song to the genre of poetry and all its possibilities. In the book’s preface, I cite cultural historian Johan Huizinga’s observation that, of all modes of linguistic ex ..read more