For all the book nerds and champions of Canadian independent publishing out there - this ‘People of Picton’ is for you. 📚🇨🇦
At a time when independent publishing continues to face big challenges, it’s always exciting to meet the people keeping print culture alive, thoughtful, and fiercely local. That’s exactly what we found when we sat down with @pressassembly , who are located right in the heart of our lovely town. We were excited to chat with the team about publishing, creativity, life in the County, and what it means to build something independent in today’s landscape.
Thanks for chatting with us, Leigh & Andrew! Here’s a shout out on behalf of us as well 📣 - Let’s keep reading and sharing what we love to read with everyone!
Slide through for the full interview 👉🏻
It’s been one year since we published The Road Between Us by @bindu_suresh ! ✨
“Compulsively readable… There are loads of tough and subtle lesson in Suresh’s book, but most of all, The Road Between Us is a complicated tangle of people and the ways that they cross paths through time, some more damaging than others.”—@themiramichireader
Add this one to your stack if you like ensemble novels that are easy to binge 📚📚📚
💚 A reading recommendation for Mental Health Awareness Month 💚
As an empathetic, character-driven novel, The Orange Notebooks by @susannacrossman_ offers an honest portrayal of a mother’s experience of loss and recovery.
Following the death of her son, Anna is institutionalized, and she chooses to stay there for a time to undergo therapy and to attempt to work her way through her grief by writing in a series of orange notebooks.
No spoilers, but the book’s resolution has been described by reviewers as “satisfying” along with the caveat “This is not a book about ‘getting better’ in any conventional sense, but about finding ways to live with permanent alteration.”
Pick up a copy of The Orange Notebooks from your local bookseller or library, and if you like it, please recommend it to someone else who might like it too.
#MentalHealthWeek #MentalHealthAwareness #MentalHealthAwarenessMonth
📣 Mom Camp is here! 📣
Happy pub day to @veroniquedarwin_ and the effervescent ride that is Mom Camp!
“Deeply strange, well observed, and often laugh-out-loud funny.”—Gabrielle Drolet, author of Look Ma, No Hands
“A charming, inventive, and funny collection that explores the infinite complexities of motherhood, sisterhood, and female identity.”—Alix Ohlin, author of We Want What We Want
“With clear-eyed precision and a taste for the absurd dressed up in plain clothes, Mom Camp’s dynamic cast of female leads bubbles over with funny, earnest questions about what it means to live each day in search of one’s truest self.”—Jacquelyn Zong-Li Ross, author of The Longest Way to Eat a Melon
“Attentive to the writing life as both vocation and burden... a debut of patience and emotional precision.”—Sheung-King, author of Batshit Seven
“These are fictions of containment and eruption, where labels miss the mark, narratives grow holes, and forms are made to be broken.”—Marisa Grizenko, author of the Plain Pleasures newsletter
Now available for your reading pleasure from your local bookstore or library branch 📚
It’s short story month 📏📖
So we’re sharing one of the shortest short stories from @garybarwin ’s Scandal at the Alphorn Factory: New and Selected Short Fiction, 2024-1984:
💸 OVER 2.7 MILLION DOLLARS 💸
One son is smearing yogurt and blueberries all over his thighs, the other is driving a Lego car through a plate of Parmesan cheese. The dog is barking by the door, not itself sure whether it wants food or to be let outside into the cold. Some music—or was it talking?—on the radio, barely audible over the sound of the dishwasher taking in water for the pots/pans cycle. I was standing in my pyjamas drinking a half cup of reheated coffee, washing down some raisin toast, reading, against my better judgment, the list of the week’s top-grossing Hollywood films, when I looked up and there you were downstairs after sleeping in, beautiful in your bright floral dress as if someone had just turned on the wall switch for summer, along with a few of the other switches nearby.
✨from Big Red Baby, originally published by The Mercury Press in 1998
“This is work of virtuoso beauty made by a master spinner of signs: crystalline, multi-faceted kaleidoscopic letterforms, mazes, roadmaps, blueprints, mandalas, I-think-knots, sometimes playful, sometimes numinous, alien, human, tactile with craquelure, synaptic as neural networks, lyrical, jazzy, magical, elegant. Stebner’s eyemusic made with dry transfer typefaces shows that letters are the ultimate building set as he sings infinite signifiers, sigils, and symmetrical signals. The endless sighs and size of the designs insightfully show that language is the most fun one can have looking at thinking and thinking about looking.”
— @garybarwin , author of For It Is a Pleasure and a Surprise to Breathe: New and Selected Poems
📣 GIVEAWAY TIME 📣
Because the only thing better than a new book is a new book with a matching accessory, we’re giving away one copy of MOM CAMP by Veronique Darwin and a complimentary/complementary MOM CAMP hat. 📖+🧢=🎉
How to enter:
1️⃣ Sign up for our mailing list starting Monday April 27 and ending on Sunday May 3 at 11:59 PT using the link in our bio.
2️⃣ That’s it!
🎲 The winner will be announced on Monday May 4 around 9am ET; join us here for a live draw over morning coffee.
💌 The winner will also be notified by email, so make sure the email address you use is legit, please!
🔎 Fine print: this is only open to Canadians who are over the age of majority, you get one entry per email subscribed to our list, and there’s no purchase necessary. This promotion is in no way sponsored, endorsed or administered by, or associated with, Instagram.
💸 If you don’t want to leave getting one of these sweet, very limited in number hats to chance, they’re available for purchase right now in the Merch section on our website.
We’ve got a fancy new display shelf thanks to @bookscompany_picton 📚
It’s stocked and ready to go for Canadian Independent Bookstore Day on April 25. Stop by and check it out!
#cibd26 #canadianindepenedentbookstoreday #shoplocal
Thursday Apr 30, 2026
7:00 PM - 8:30 PM Iron Dog Books
Join authors Phoebe Wang and Joanne Leow for a joint reading and discussion at Iron Dog Books! Joanne Leow is an SFU professor and author who will be discussing her recently published nonfiction title Exhumations: Inside the Body of a Petrostate. Phoebe Wang is an author and poet whose collection of essays, Relative To Wind: On Sailing, Craft and Community, was published in Fall 2024. Both books examine the colonial relationship of bodies with the natural environment — authors will discuss these themes and more through conversation and readings.
Learn more, RSVP, and buy the books at Iron Dog’s website!
One year ago today we published Field Work: On Baseball and Making a Living by @utilityofboredom !
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If you haven’t read it yet, now’s the perfect time to scoop up a copy from your local bookstore or library - it pairs well with a snack and a live game 📖 🥨🏟️
Grateful to Jérôme Melançon and @thetemzreview for so carefully reviewing Melanie Dennis Unrau’s Goose. Here’s an excerpt of the much longer piece, which you should definitely seek out:
“Unrau draws on practices of visual poetry and erasure poetry, but the physical practice she developed for this book has more to do with the choice of what is to be kept than what is to be removed. She hand-traced the words and drawings from the original publications, adding new pages over previous ones, sometimes superposing them, presenting the text on the page in different arrangements. Consequently, each page contains many pages at once and becomes a reconfiguration of threads that already ran through the original work. The superposition of words and drawings, which is always limited to a few sites of disturbance of whatever order and balance was left for them in Ells’ text, gives them the status of signs—signs that are either undecipherable or that gain an indeterminate meaning. Separating them from what Ells meant to have them signify, Unrau lets us see these words and drawings without allowing us to force patterns or meanings upon them. Some pages present a cloud of punctuation, swarming insect-like; some show the equally senseless repetition of the words Ells favoured to share his perspectives on the land and his ideas for what could be done with it, words Unrau also saves from his prose. Ells becomes external to his own writing, his self intact but his actions and ideas dismantled. We are left with countless geese, pages full of words and metaphors and drawings, and the Métis and First Nations men who pulled scows full of tar sand up the Athabasca river, bound to them through ropes and harnesses.“
