Hot News This Week
February 6, 2025
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| Badiucao, a Chinese-Australian dissident artist and co-author of You Must Take Part in Revolution (Street Noise Books), is quoted in an Artnet story on censorship and artificial intelligence after sharing on social media that DeepSeek, a Chinese AI chatbot, failed to return any information on his forthcoming graphic novel. “I do not miss the irony that our book is about a techno-authoritarian dystopia,” he tells Artnet.
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| Pádraig Ó Tuama on NPR’s All Things Considered
“I suppose we’re often looking for a small secular liturgy for our lives, and poetry can provide that sometimes.” Irish poet Pádraig Ó Tuama was interviewed on NPR yesterday, appearing on All Things Considered to discuss poetry, the concept of a “ghost mass,” and his new collection, Kitchen Hymns. Ó Tuama is the host of On Being’s popular Poetry Unbound podcast, and Kitchen Hymns has received nice coverage in Write or Die Magazine, Literary Hub, Library Journal, Booklist, and Publishers Weekly.
Kitchen Hymns
by Pádraig Ó Tuama
Copper Canyon Press • January 2025 • 9781556597107
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| Two Fiction Picks from Biblioasis
Jón Kalman Stefánsson’s novel Heaven and Hell, translated by Philip Roughton, received a full review in the New York Times Book Review on February 4. “This swinging style is seductive” and “irrisistable,” writes critic John Self in the piece, and it “has something in common with the ‘slow prose’ of Jon Fosse.” The story follows an Icelandic fisherman welcomed into a group of outcasts after a tragedy at sea, and “the good news is that Heaven and Hell is the first book in a trilogy, and there is more of this beguiling life to come.”
In other news for Biblioasis fiction, the American Booksellers Association announced this week that Vijay Khurana’s The Passenger Seat is an Indie Next pick for March. “Join two teen boys in a joyride to nowhere as they light out for the territories with Chekhov’s gun behind the front seat,” says Austin Carter of Pocket Books Shop (Lancaster, PA), one of the nominating booksellers. “Khurana’s debut novel rumbles like a ‘67 Impala; readers will long for their seatbelts as it peels off toward its inevitable conclusion.”
Heaven and Hell
by Jón Kalman Stefánsson, trans. Philip Roughton
Biblioasis • February 2025 • 9781771966511
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| A “Juicy New Book” about Friendship with an Andy Warhol Superstar
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“Immediate, honest and affecting—Pathemata, Or, The Story of My Mouth is everything I look to Maggie Nelson for.” — Laurel Kane, White Whale Bookstore (Pittsburgh, PA)
“[Nelson] reflects on breaking banality and aloneness with other people, feeling seen and loved in friendships, in everyday interactions with the world and allowing for coincidence, defamiliarization, chance.” — Julie Jarema, Hub City Bookshop (Spartanburg, SC)
“Maggie’s words find me when I need them most.” — Sofia Brekkan, Third Place Books (Lake Forest Park, WA)
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★ “Siddiqui chronicles his eventful life story in a fast-paced graphic memoir that jumps from the author’s early years in Jeddah to his journey of becoming a prominent journalist in Pakistan who is critical of the Islamic republic’s oppressive military rule.” — Kirkus Reviews
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★ “David Gessner explores the life and death of an owl on the lam in his animated, endearing The Book of Flaco.” — BookPage
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★ “Readers will be captivated by a tale that weaves mythology, conservation, magic, and friendship into one engaging story that they will immediately read cover to cover. . . . Highly recommended for all libraries.” — School Library Journal
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| | New Digital Review Copies
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Eve Hill-Agnus’s translation of Ultramarine by Mariette Navarro (Deep Vellum Publishing) is the fiction winner of the 2024 Albertine Translation Prize, which honors English translations of contemporary French works.
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Moshtari Hilal’s Ugliness, translated by Elisabeth Lauffer (New Vessel Press), was mentioned this week in Jessica DeFino’s advice column for The Guardian as well as her Review of Beauty newsletter.
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