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Michael Heald launches

Goodbye to the Nervous Apprehension with Jacob Wren

May 22nd @ 7PM

Tomorrow, we’ll be hosting the final stop in the Portland publicist/author Michael Heald’s debut book tour. Goodbye to the Nervous Apprehension (Perfect Day Publishing) is Heald’s debut essay collection, receiving praise from numerous sources, including The Oregonian (“Sneaky deep”), The Baltimore City Paper (“Truly brilliant”) and an ex-girlfriend (“Embarrassing”). “Across eleven essays, Michael Heald compulsively measure himself against men like Eli Manning, Ryan Gosling, and Stephen Malkmus, and always comes up short. After a decade of failed relationships, estranged siblings, and abandoned hopes, he may or may not have learned his lesson. Goodbye to the Nervous Apprehension is not nearly as depressing as any of this sounds” (from Perfect Day Publishing).

If you want to get a sense of the book before coming out to the reading, check out an interview with Michael Heald on Oregon Public Broadcasting here. Details for the reading are available on Facebook, if you’re into that sort of thing.

“The very first — and the very last — pages of Michael Heald’s new book of essays have the same four words: “My twenties are ending.” They’re fitting bookends for what’s inside.

Goodbye to the Nervous Apprehension is made up of eleven autobiographical essays. Together, they’re a kind of field guide to Heald’s 20s. In his telling, this is a decade of self-definition and self-discovery — a time that’s both painful and thrilling. He writes about a strained relationship with his older brother and about doomed romantic entanglements. He captures the special place that music holds in those years, and what it means to be five foot four… (courtesy of Dave Miller, OPB)”

 

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Lectures at the Argo:

Richard Swift launches The Great Revenue Robbery: How to Stop the Tax Cut Scam and Save Canada

May 23rd @ 7PM

“For decades, the right has flooded the airwaves and taken over the political podiums with its anti-tax hysteria. But Canadians are waking up to the simple truth that taxes are the price we pay for civilization, and that scrimping on taxes means scrimping on civilization.” – Linda McQuaig, author and journalist

Edited by Richard Swift for Canadians for Tax Fairness, The Great Revnue Robbery is a collection of essays surrounding “the misinformation spewing out of right-wing think tanks and media outlets” over tax cuts (McQuaig). “This is a welcome critique of conventional economic wisdom,” says Toronto Star political columnist Thomas Walkom. “If you thought tax cuts would solve all of your problems, read The Great Revenue Robbery and think again.”

Join us as Richard Swift and other contributors launch this new book from Between the Lines Books!

Sorry for any inconveniences!

 

& the Semiotext(e) Intervention Series:

• The Agony of Power by Jean Baudrillard

• The Coming Insurrection by The Invisible Committee

• Where Art Belongs by Chris Kraus

 

• The Art of Fermentation by Sandor Ellix Katz

 

 

Poetry

 

 

• Teeth by George Bowering

• Mother Died Last Summer by David W. McFadden

• (The Original) Notebook of a Return to the Native Land by Aimé Césaire

• The Small Nouns Crying Faith by Phil Hall (includes the limited edition poetry pamphlet Faith)

& New Directions Poetry Chapbooks:

• Pneumatic Antiphonal by Sylvia Legris

• The Helens of Troy, NY by Bernadette Mayer

 

 

Children’s Lit

• And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street! by Dr. Seuss (his first book!)

Our copies for the launch of Phil Hall‘s The Small Nouns Crying Faith (BookThug) have arrived, just in time for tomorrow’s launch!

From 7:30PM to 9:30PM at the Atwater Library Auditorium, Phil Hall will be giving the first Montreal reading for his new book of poetry. The wonderful poet/translator Angela Carr will be hosting the event, and will be interviewing Phil about his work once the reading is over. There will be refreshments, beautiful books for sale and good company. Check this out:

Each copy of The Small Nouns Crying Faith  contains these poem leaflets by Phil Hall, entitled Faith. A considerable acquisition for any and all (CanLit) bibliophiles out there; each leaflet belongs to an 1,000-copy print run. Both the book and its included leaflet are beautifully designed with an all-Canadian design and typeface.

Who knows if we’ll have copies left over after tomorrow? And Phil Hall will be there to sign them!

Hope you can come out and enjoy the evening.

Literature

(Fiction, Social Sciences, Philosophy…)

• Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan (new paperback edition)

• Drone Warfare: Killing By Remote Control by Medea Benjamin

• The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune by Kristin Ross

• Hegel Contra Sociology by Gillian Rose

• Man’s Search For Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl

• Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire by Iain Sinclair

• A Delicate Truth by John Le Carre

• Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler

• Levels of Life by Julian Barnes

Young Adult Literature

 

 

• Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green & David Levithan

• An Abundance of Katherines by John Green

 

Poetry

 

 

• Metaphysical Dog by Frank Bidart

• Walking to Martha’s Vineyard by Franz Wright

Poetry

• All The Daylight Hours by Amanda Jernigan

• A Rhythm to Stand Beside by Jack Hannan

• Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations by David Ferry

• A Reliquary and Other Poems by Daryl Hine

Literature

• Lives of the Poets by Michael Schmidt

• Speech Begins After Death: Michael Foucault in Conversation with Claude Bonnefoy

• At the Borders of Sleep: On Liminal Literature by Peter Schwenger

• Harlem by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

• Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal

• The Devil and the Detective by John Goldbach

• The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin (Volume One: Where on Earth)

• The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin (Volume Two: Outer Space, Inner Lands)

Sunday, May 5^th @ 7PM

The Sparrow, 5322 St. Laurent Blvd.

As a denouement to National Poetry Month, six poets from three indie presses—Montreal’s Vehicule Press, Toronto’s Coach House Books and Fredericton’s Goose Lane Editions—will be reading together in one fell swoop at The Sparrow, a beautiful bar on St. Laurent on May 5^th. The six-fold launch will include debut books and long-awaited collections from Adrienne Barrett, Andrew Faulkner, Carmelita McGrath, Robert Moore, Deena Kara Shaffer and David Seymour. Furthermore, guests are encouraged to wear black and white in honor of the Harper government’s love for the bamboo-chewing bear. Hope you can make it, as we’ll be handling the book table.

Here’s the Poetry Panda-monium line-up:

Adrienne Barrett: The first book from Adrienne Barrett, The house is still standing (Goose Lane Editions), peopled with charlatans, gingerbread men, children and savants. (The) poems deke and swerve, from the wry to the theatrical to the intimate.

Andrew Faulkner: Debut poet Andrew Faulkner will unleash Need Machine (Coach House Books), a collection of poems about hangovers, house parties, cities, syndicated television, and even baseball pitcher Roy Halladay!

Carmelita McGrath: The long awaited follow-up to McGrath’s Atlantic Poetry Prize-winning collection To the New World, Escape Velocity (Goose Land Editions) culls overlooked fragments from our domestic lives and ferries them on unpredictable journeys. A conversation with a telemarketer becomes a monologue on overcoming loss, stray animals provoke cautionary tales shared between generations of women, and junk mail fosters a meditation on necessity, debt and the inevitability of death.

Robert Moore: The fourth collection from Moore asks the question, if cows could talk, what would they say? The Golden Book of Bovinities (Vehicule Press) represents the collective wisdom of centuries of bovine self-awareness and contains some of the freshest, funniest, most startling poetry you will (have) ever read.

Deena Kara Shaffer: The debut poet’s book, The Grey Tote (Vehicule Press), is a collection of elegies on the death, in quick succession, of her father and mother. Scorning easy consolations, Shaffer’s poems are witty, epigrammatic, rhythmic, spiked with grief but ultimately dry-eyed ‘lessons in goodbye.’

David Seymour: Acclaimed poet and film industry worker David Seymour will launch For Display Purposes Only (Coach House Books), poems that pause for the spectacle: cloning technologies, super-slo-mo photography, narcotic cab rides. These poems are paeans to our facility for duplicity and self-deception, in which the act of living becomes more and more like a movie we’re not in.

Oh, and before we forget to mention it: Consider popping on over to the Cult #MTL (formerly Montreal Mirror) Best of Montreal 2013 voting website and vote for the Argo Bookshop as Best New Bookstore. It should only take you 5 to 10 minutes to fill out their minimum of 25 categories (Best Mexican or Best-Dressed Montrealer, for example). You can access the voting site here. Thanks for your consideration!

New & Latest Arrivals

• Snowflake & Different Streets by Eileen Myles

• A Time to Keep Silence by Patrick Leigh Fermor

• How I Wrote Certain of My Books by Raymond Roussel

• Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

• Being Numerous: Poetry and the Ground of Social Life by Oren Izenberg

• Justice for Hedgehogs by Ronald Dworkin

• 9 Algorithms That Changed the Future by John MacCormick

• Algerian Chronicles by Albert Camus

Book of the Month: 20% off Kate Zambreno’s Heroines

“I am beginning to realize that taking the self out of our essays is a form of repression. Taking the self out feels like obeying a gag order–pretending an objectivity where there is nothing objective about the experience of confronting and engaging with and swooning over literature.” – Heroines

“On the last day of December, 2009 Kate Zambreno began a blog called Frances Farmer Is My Sister… Widely reposted, Zambreno’s blog became an outlet for her highly informed and passionate rants about the fates of the modernist “wives and mistresses.” (In it,) Zambreno reclaimed the traditionally pathologized biographies of Vivienne Eliot, Jane Bowles, Jean Rhys, and Zelda Fitzgerald: writers and artists themselves who served as male writers’ muses only to end their lives silenced, erased, and institutionalized…

In Heroines, Zambreno extends the polemic begun on her blog into a (work of literary scholarship). Combing theories that have dictated what literature should be and who is allowed to write it–from T. S. Eliot’s New Criticism to the writings of such mid-century intellectuals as Elizabeth Hardwick and Mary McCarthy to the occasional “girl-on-girl crime” of the Second Wave of feminism–she traces the genesis of a cultural template that consistently exiles female experience to the realm of the “minor” and diagnoses women for transgressing social bounds.” (MIT Press)

Book Club Update

Another book club choice of ours, Victor Serge’s Conquered City, has come and gone. On to the next one!

Our next read will be The True Deceiver, by the Swedish novelist and children’s author Tove Jansson:

“ Snow has been falling on the village all winter long. It covers windows and piles up in front of doors. The sun rises late and sets early, and even during the day there is little to do but trade tales. This year everybody’s talking about Katri Kling and Anna Aemelin. Katri is a yellow-eyed outcast who lives with her simpleminded brother and a dog she refuses to name. She has no use for the white lies that smooth social intercourse, and she can see straight to the core of any problem. Anna, an elderly children’s book illustrator, appears to be Katri’s opposite: a respected member of the village, if an aloof one. Anna lives in a large empty house, venturing out in the spring to paint exquisitely detailed forest scenes. But Anna has something Katri wants, and to get it Katri will take control of Anna’s life and livelihood. By the time spring arrives, the two women are caught in a conflict of ideals that threatens to strip them of their most cherished illusions. ” (NYRB)

On June 26^th, we’ll get together to discuss the book over some drinks. Everyone’s welcome, and anyone partaking receives a 15% discount off the book.

If you would like to join in for our monthly discussions, send an email to argobookshop@gmail.com in order to receive regular updates.

News for upcoming events coming soon!

Why?

“Something dry is filleted / Out of the air that hangs dead / Over me and my fashions” (from ‘I Do Pilates on the L Train’)

& remember:

From April 1st to the 30th, all poetry in the shop is 20% off!