Blaurock Press and Coach House Books Present

Blaurock Press authors Michelle Alfano (Made Up of Arias), Michael Linhares (Autumn Hollow) and Sylvia Markle-Craine (Swimming to Fatima) share the stage with Coach House poets Kyle Buckley (The Laundromat Essay), Margaret Christakos (What Stirs) and Jeramy Dodds (Crabwise to the Hounds) in Waterloo on December 1. Take shelter from the cold of late autumn at Starlight for Waterloo's greatest Monday night literary review ever.



December 1, 2008
Starlight, 47 King Street North
Waterloo, ON



Doors at 7:00 p.m.

Made Up of Arias

Lilla, Joey and Clara Pentangeli, their father Salvatore and their mercurial mother Seraphina live on Paradise Street behind a giant billboard, in a charmed world filled with operatic heroines. Seraphina idolizes Maria Callas. Between bouts of housework, she re-enacts Violetta’s death scene from La Traviata, dresses in a kimono like CioCioSan in Madama Butterfly, and concocts outrageous tales for her three enchanted children. She also reveals one or two secrets from her past. At last real-life tragedy overtakes the house on Paradise.

Michelle Alfano is a Toronto writer. Her short story “Opera” on which this novella is based, was a finalist for a Journey Prize anthology. Her fiction and non-fiction work has been widely published in Canada and in the U.S.

Edition Numbers

If you look at the inside front cover of any Blaurock Press book you will find a number. That number is the edition number, unique to every book. So if you have, for example, number 120 on the inside cover, that book was the 120th book off of our press. Not earth shattering I know, but one more way that we set ourselves apart from the mass market.

Swimming to Fatima Book Launch

It was a marvelous night at the eBar in Guelph for the launch of Swimming to Fatima. The place was packed, Sylvia was brilliant, sales were brisk and Dan and the staff at the eBar were wonderfully accommodating.

Blaurock Press would like to thank everyone who came out and everyone who worked behind the scene to make it happen.

Sylvia Markle-Craine and her son Nick Craine.

S. K. Johannesen and Penny Winspur

Christian Snyder and Penny

Dan, Sylvia, Christian, Penny and Stan

Swimming to Fatima Book Launch

Blaurock Press and the eBar launch Sylvia Markle-Craine's "Swimming to Fatima" on Monday the 22nd of September @ 7:30. Admittance is free.

Autumn Hollow

A first collection in the tradition of the strange, the weird, the uncanny tale. Set in a ghost- and ghoul-haunted woodland, located somewhere between horror and fantasy, in which past and present intertwine, these stories throb with recurring motifs or symbols—a horse, a dog, a weathervane, a wheelbarrow, a length of wire fence, snow, ice, a river, a coffin—with the eerie insistence of dreams, in a mad loop of no beginning, no ending and no escape.

Written by Michael Linhares