Against the backdrop of 2020’s unrelenting news cycle, Biblioasis is launching the Field Notes series. The works of topical non-fiction will launch with four titles, each under 200 pages, to be published this fall and winter.

All of the titles respond to 2020’s turbulent spring and summer. University of Toronto philosophy professor Mark Kingwell’s On Risk (Oct. 13) considers how we conceive of risk-taking in the era of COVID. McGill writing professor Andrew Potter’s On Decline (Nov. 10) suggests that COVID has illuminated the possibility of a declining West.

Maclean’s columnist Andray Domise’s On Killing a Revolution (Dec. 1) will outline how the grassroots protest movement against anti-Black racism reached corporate boardrooms with Blackout Tuesday. And the University of Toronto’s Rinaldo Walcott, director of the Women and Gender Studies Institute, will publish On Property (Jan. 19), which will illustrate how calls to defund the police must recognize that prioritizing things over people is at the core of the criminal code.

Future volumes will cover disciplines such as philosophy, public policy, history, economics, and cultural criticism, with writers encouraged to debate arguments raised in other books from across the series. The series will also take on a variety of non-fiction forms including longform journalism, philosophical treatise, and personal essay.

Biblioasis publisher Dan Wells is open to receiving submissions for the series. The covers will be designed by Ingrid Paulson.