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Invisible Publishing

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Canada
Montreal, QC
Invisible Publishing

Making books like you don't even know.

09/14/2026

Come celebrate the publication of Joyce Mansour’s Floating Islands, translated from the French by Emilie Moorhouse.

Emilie Moorhouse in conversation with Literary Review of Canada editor Emily Mernin
Friday September 25
7PM to 8:30PM
DE STIIL Booksellers
351 Av. Duluth E
Montréal, QC

ABOUT THE BOOK

“Floating Islands” is Joyce Mansour’s most personal and unsettling work of prose. Set almost entirely within a hospital in Geneva, this work chronicles the slow collapse of boundaries between visitor and patient, authority and submission, imagination and extinction. What begins as an act of filial duty becomes an existential entrapment, as the narrator is absorbed into the institution’s rhythms and hierarchies.

Doctors and nurses embody a cruel vitality, their health weaponized against the dying. Patients drift through states of dependency, hallucination, and rage. Bodies leak, fail, and betray their owners, while language splinters under the pressure of describing what polite discourse refuses to name. The hospital is a place for arrivals and departures, and it is where Mansour stages her own farewell: “Floating Islands,” her final work of narrative prose, marks an important shift in her creative life in which she begins to look outward, rather than inward, for inspiration.

Rooted in Surrealism yet strikingly contemporary, “Floating Islands” (1973) is collected here alongside Mansour’s earliest prose works, “Julius Caesar” (1955) and “The Parrot” (1956).

Joyce Mansour (1928–1986) was born in England to a Jewish family of Syrian descent who moved to Egypt shortly after her birth, where she grew up among the English-speaking elite. She authored sixteen books of poetry, as well as prose works and plays that confront desire, death, violence, and the female body with startling directness.

Emilie Moorhouse is a multidisciplinary writer, translator, and lecturer based in Montréal. Her previous translations include Emerald Wounds: Selected Poems of Joyce Mansour (City Lights Books, 2023) which was longlisted for the 2024 Griffin Poetry Prize. She holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia.

08/26/2026

Let us introduce you to two very different yet complementary books of Canadian history from the margins that we published this year.

Sallie Fullerton’s Baby Face/Face de bébé, with photographs by Suzanne Girard, is a portrait of Denise “Baby Face” Cassidy, the first woman to own a le***an bar in Montréal. It’s a book constructed with the tools of poetic and documentary convention—fragmentation, oral history, rhythmic and imagistic leaps—that Eileen Myles calls “a helluva aesthetic toast to human le***an magic and ancestor worship, daggers, womyn, and q***rs.”

Michael Rancic’s A Nation of Tinkerers, an instant Globe & Mail and Toronto Star national bestseller, is a history of electronic music in Canada from 1945 to 1985. By illuminating the work of overlooked engineers, composers, and scene-builders, Rancic shows how their innovations paved the way for contemporary electronic and pop artists and for the digital production environments that shape the music of Drake, The Weeknd, and Justin Bieber. In doing so, A Nation of Tinkerers reframes electronic music as a key site for understanding Canada’s cultural identity, technological imagination, and artistic legacy.

08/26/2026

Two invisibillionaires reading outside on a late August evening in Toronto. Thanks to our dear friends at Coach House Books for hosting.

08/10/2026

For Women in Translation Month ( ) find a review of two upcoming books written and translated by women in this month’s Bookmarks, the new book section of The Walrus. This issue also features a thought-provoking essay on the way we describe and compare books by an alumni of our very first year of publishing, the great Thea Lim.

Full review text:

The Furrow by Valérie Manteau, translated by Claire Foster (Oct 6, 2026)
Floating Islands by Joyce Mansour, translated by Emilie Moorhouse (Sept 22, 2026)

Invisible Books is taking a flyer on international literature. They buy English-language rights to works unknown in North America, hire their own translators, and do all the editing in-house. It’s a bold enterprise in keeping with the press’s self-described “scrappy” mandate. Invisible was established nearly twenty years ago and is based in Picton, Ontario, with staff in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. Also scrappy are the translations themselves: time-slippery graphic novels set in Beirut, ancient Chinese poetry, “bizarro” short fiction from Argentina. This fall, a pair from France. The Furrow won Valerie Manteau the 2018 Prix Renaudot and follows a young French woman traipsing around Istanbul, obsessed with an Armenian journalist named Hrant Dink who was murdered in 2007. Floating Islands, both weirder and worthier, is a collection of fiction by the postwar Surrealist poet Joyce Mansour and quite literally a book of nightmares (I had one after my first read-ing): a decapitated head “bleeding meaty bubbles”; the “gelatinous hand” of a floating co**se. Translator Emilie Moorhouse renders Mansour’s grotesquerie indelible, along with her unexpected shots of beauty: “a swollen soul swung on the end of its stem”; children growing up “in the sun-shine, full of sap and grand plans.”

07/20/2026

Next week, we’re going back-to-back at Osler Records!

Join us Tuesday July 28 at 7:30PM for the launch of Michael Rancic’s A Nation of Tinkerers: A History of Electronic Music in Canada from 1945 to 1985. Michael will be in conversation with the incomparable , followed by a DJ set from Automaticamore Diana Chan McNally.

Then march right back on Wednesday July 29 at 7:00PM as we celebrate the new editions of m. nourbeSe philip’s Looking for Livingstone and She Tries Her Tongue; Her Silence Softly Breaks, featuring m. nourbeSe philip, Katherine McKittrick, Michael Nardone, and more.

06/30/2026

The Canadian Indie Booksellers’ Association released their Booksellers’ List for the best books of summer, one of which is Michael Rancic’s A Nation of Tinkerers: A History of Electronic Music in Canada from 1945 to 1985. Thanks to Jo of TYPE Books for the wonderful blurb! The book publishes August 11, so there’s plenty of time to preorder your copy from an indie bookstore, because INDIE 4EVER!

06/05/2026

“Well of course they do.”

A raucous and lovely launch for Sallie Fullerton’s Baby Face/Face de bébé last night at . Thank you to the audience for filling the room and buying ALL the books, for Sallie for their wonderful reading, to the DOCUMENTS team, and to Suzanne Girard, the luminous photographer whose work fills the book.

05/19/2026

Booksellers, esteemed members of the media (social or otherwise), particularly eager readers: galleys/advanced review copies of our fall/late summer books are ready to make their way into the world. Drop a comment/DM or fill out the form linked in our bio to get your hands on one.

AUGUST: A Nation of Tinkerers: A History of Electronic Music in Canada from 1945 to 1985 by Michael Rancic

SEPTEMBER: Floating Islands by Joyce Mansour, translated by Emilie Moorhouse

OCTOBER: The Furrow by Valérie Manteau, translated by Claire Foster

NOVEMBER: Fair by Jen Calleja

05/13/2026

We’re launching BABY FACE/FACE DE BÉBÉ by Sallie Fullerton, with photographs by Suzanne Girard, at 7PM on June 4 at . Come celebrate the first book in the newly rehomed DOCUMENTS series.

About the book:

“A helluva aesthetic toast to human le***an magic and ancestor worship, daggers, womyn and q***rs.”—Eileen Myles

Constructed with the tools of poetic and documentary convention—fragmentation, oral history, rhythmic and imagistic leaps—Baby Face / Face de bébé weaves a portrait of Denise Cassidy, known as Baby Face, the first woman to own a le***an bar in Montréal.

Iconoclastic and authoritative, revered and feared, Baby Face’s story remains nevertheless largely undocumented. Yet for those in the know, the Montréal q***r scene is nearly impossible to recount without her. The story of Baby Face is, too, the story of a formative time and place in North American le***an culture and a testament to those who have worked to preserve her history.

Blending photographs by Baby Face’s personal photographer Suzanne Girard with archival clippings, spliced interviews, audio from independent films, and other marginalia, the book offers a window into a particular moment in q***r life—and a nod to the DIY methods often used to preserve histories relegated to the margins.

05/12/2026

Today we’re celebrating the publication of Susannah M. Smith’s third book: The Alchemy of Paradise.

“A luminous novel told in snippets, The Alchemy of Paradise considers how best to live in the face of loss.”—Carolyn Wilson-Scott, Foreword Reviews

In this novel, a curator confronts grief, loss, and mortality by arranging the fragments of her life—objects, memories, impressions—into a fragile order.

Set in contemporary England, with Venice shimmering at its core, The Alchemy of Paradise follows her attempt to preserve what might otherwise vanish, shaping a collection that makes survival possible. When order fails to yield meaning, she turns to the alchemical, where matter shifts into metaphor and loss becomes transformation.

A novel of ideas told through poetic essays and reflections, The Alchemy of Paradise explores the tension between collecting and transmuting, order and disorder. In the spirit of Walter Benjamin’s collections, and in dialogue with writers like W.G. Sebald, Patti Smith, and Leanne Shapton, it meditates on the ways that art and imagination allow us to chart personal maps through the universal yet individual territories of loss. Refusing collapse into despair, The Alchemy of Paradise offers curation itself as a restless, ongoing practice of creation and renewal.

Susannah M. Smith is the author of The Fairy Tale Museum (Invisible Publishing) and How the Blessed Live (Coach House Books). Her short fiction, poetry, and visual art have appeared in various publications. She lives in Vancouver.

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