Bonne fête! Buon compleanno! ¡Feliz cumpleaños! Happy Birthday...to us! That’s right — in this, our third season, Freehand Books is celebrating its first birthday.
And what a year it’s been! Marina Endicott and her novel, Good to a Fault, continued to take the Canadian literary scene by storm. Good to a Fault won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best Book Award (Canada and the Caribbean), and was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the WGA Georges Bugnet Award for Fiction and the BPAA Trade Fiction Book of the Year. (The winners of the latter two categories were not announced before our press deadline). The Globe and Mail named Good to a Fault a Top 100 Book of 2008, and, to date, we’ve sold over 12,000 copies!
Our spring season continued to build on Freehand’s initial success — the launches were packed, the books are still flying off the shelves, and the critics have noticed! We particularly love Patricia Robertson’s take on Stuart Ross’s Buying Cigarettes for the Dog in The Toronto Star: “It’s as if Jane Austen and Franz Kafka collaborated on a short story collection while Albert Einstein acted as editor.”
To top it all off, Freehand Books has been shortlisted for the CBA Libris Small Press Publisher of the Year Award and the BPAA’s Publisher of the Year Award! We’re keeping our fingers crossed...
This fall, we’re extraordinarily excited to present three titles that are sure to keep Freehand’s name on everyone’s lips for a long time to come:
Anik See’s brilliant collection of short fiction, postcard and other stories, is an exquisitely crafted, very cool, and exceptionally lucid exploration of the intricacies, emotions, and confusion that constitute adult life. She is one talented lady, and she has all of us here in Calgary’s Grain Exchange Building immensely excited about the future of short fiction in Canada.
Jesse Patrick Ferguson is a rising star in Canadian poetry, and his debut collection, Harmonics, is sure to propel his stellar career. Jesse’s uniquely-structured and musical poetry touches intelligently on everything from climate change to love, and is infused with an East Coast energy that ensures this collection is a readable, rollicking good time.
And, one year after its initial publication, we are so proud to release a new paperback version of Good to a Fault. It’s small enough to fit in any carry-on, and it’s now recession proof. For under twenty dollars, you can get an award-winning novel from “a sweet-natured but sharp-eyed and quick-tongued social observer in the Jane Austen-Barbara Pym-Anne Tyler tradition, who can wring love, revulsion and hilarity from readers in a single page.” We think that’s a pretty good deal.
Happy reading!
Robyn Read and Sarah Ivany
Editors, Freehand Books
About Freehand
Freehand Books is a publisher of literary fiction, literary non-fiction, and poetry. We look for books that pay an equal—and extraordinary—attention to writing style and to the interests and needs of readers. Great books; great reads.
Editorial decisions are made by an Editorial Advisory Board in conjunction with Freehand editor Robyn Read.
Our offices are located in the historic Grain Exchange Building in downtown Calgary, Alberta, Canada.
Freehand, in operation since June, 2007, is a wholly owned imprint of Broadview Press. For more information about Broadview, please visit www.broadviewpress.com.
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) for our publishing activities.
