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Our August Author of the Month: ZOE WHITTALL

Friday, Jul 30, 2021 at 11:55am

Zoe Whittall’s first novel, Bottle Rocket Hearts, was named a Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year and one of the top ten essential Canadian novels of the decade by CBC’s Canada Reads. Holding Still For As Long As Possible, Whittall’s second novel, has been optioned for film, and was shortlisted for the 2010 ReLit Award, as well as winning a Lambda Literary Award. Her third novel, The Best Kind of People was shortlisted for The Scotiabank Giller Prize, and a best book of the year by Walrus Magazine, The Globe & Mail, Toronto Life, and The National Post and is currently being adapted for limited series by director Sarah Polley. Her poetry books include The Best Ten Minutes of Your Life, The Emily Valentine Poems, and Precordial Thump. Whittall has worked as a TV writer on the Emmy-Award winning comedy show Schitt’s Creek, and The Baroness Von Sketch Show, for which she won a 2018 Canadian Screen Award for Best Writing, Variety or Sketch Comedy, and was nominated again in 2019. She was born on a sheep farm in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, and has called Toronto home since 1997.

It’s taboo to regret motherhood. But what would happen if you did? Shifting perspectives and time periods, Whittall’s new novel The Spectacular is a multi-generational story exploring sexuality, gender and the weight of reproductive freedoms. By turns sharp and provocative, she captures three generations of very different women who struggle to build an authentic life in the absence of traditional familial and marital structures. Definitions of family, romance, gender and love will radically change as they seek out lives that are nothing less than spectacular.

Zoe Whittall IndieBookFest Virtual Event. Tuesday, September 14, 2021. 6 PM CT (SASK) / 7 PM CDT (MB).

Categories: Authors, Saskatoon, Winnipeg, Author of the Month

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June's Author of the Month: IVAN COYOTE

Friday, May 28, 2021 at 11:56am

Ivan Coyote is the award-winning author of thirteen books, the creator of four short films, and they have released three albums that combine storytelling with music. They have spent decades on the road, telling stories around the world. For years, Ivan has kept a file of the most special communications received from readers and audience members — letters, Facebook messages, emails, soggy handwritten notes tucked under the windshield wiper of their truck after a gig. Then came Spring, 2020, and, like artists everywhere, Coyote was grounded by the pandemic, all their planned events cancelled. The energy of a live audience, a performer’s lifeblood, was suddenly gone. But with this loss came an opportunity for a different kind of connection. Those letters that had long piled up could finally begin to be answered.

Care Of combines the most powerful of these letters with Ivan’s responses, creating a body of correspondence of startling intimacy, breathtaking beauty, and heartbreaking honesty and openness. Taken together, they become an affirming and joyous reflection on many of the themes central to Coyote’s celebrated work — compassion and empathy, family fragility, non-binary and Trans identity, and the unending beauty of simply being alive, a giant love letter to the idea of human connection, and the power of truly listening to each other.

Categories: Authors, Saskatoon, Winnipeg, Author of the Month

Our May Author of the Month: RACHEL CUSK

Friday, Apr 23, 2021 at 4:07pm

Rachel Cusk was born in Canada in 1967 and spent much of her childhood in Los Angeles before finishing her education at a convent school in England. Her first novel, Saving Agnes (1993), won the Whitbread First Novel Award. A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother (2001), is a personal exploration of motherhood. In The Lucky Ones (2003), she uses a series of five narratives, loosely linked by the experience of parenthood, to write of life’s transformations; of what separates us from those we love and what binds us to those we no longer understand. Her novel, Arlington Park (2006), was shortlisted for the 2007 Orange Prize for Fiction. She has also published a memoir of a 3-month family stay in Italy, The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy (2009); and a novel entitled The Bradshaw Variations (2009). In 2014 her novel Outline was published by Vintage. It was inspired by Cusk’s experience of teaching a creative writing course in Athens supported by the British Council. Shortlisted for several major awards, it was the first in a trilogy, followed by Transit (2016) and Kudos (2018).

Second Place, Rachel Cusk’s electrifying new novel, is a study of female fate and male privilege, the geometries of human relationships, and the moral questions that animate our lives. It reminds us of art’s capacity to uplift — and to destroy. A woman invites a famous artist to use her guesthouse in the remote coastal landscape where she lives with her family. Powerfully drawn to his paintings, she believes his vision might penetrate the mystery at the center of her life. But as a long, dry summer sets in, his provocative presence itself becomes an enigma — and disrupts the calm of her secluded household.

Categories: Authors, Saskatoon, Winnipeg, Author of the Month

Our April Author of the Month: HELEN OYEYEMI

Tuesday, Mar 30, 2021 at 2:54pm

Helen Oyeyemi is the author of several story collections and novels, including Mr. Fox and Gingerbread, as well as Boy, Snow, Birdwhich was a finalist for the 2014 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She received a 2010 Somerset Maugham Award and a 2012 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and in 2013 she was named one of Granta's Best Young British Novelists. Born in Nigeria and raised in London, England, Oyeyemi now lives in Prague.

> Watch the lovely video greeting Helen Oyeyemi sent us!

Peaces, her newest book, is a vivid and inventive story about a couple forever changed by an unusual train voyage. When Otto and Xavier Shin declare their love, an aunt gifts them a trip on a sleeper train to mark their new commitment — and to get them out of her house. Setting off with their pet mongoose, Otto and Xavier arrive at their sleepy local train station, but quickly deduce that The Lucky Day is no ordinary locomotive. Their trip on this former tea-smuggling train has been curated beyond their wildest imaginations, complete with mysterious and welcoming touches, like ingredients for their favourite breakfast. They seem to be the only people onboard, until Otto discovers a secretive woman who issues a surprising message. As further clues and questions pile up, and the trip upends everything they thought they knew, Otto and Xavier begin to see connections to their own pasts, connections that now bind them together.

Categories: Authors, Saskatoon, Winnipeg, Author of the Month

Our March Author of the Month: EDEN ROBINSON

Friday, Feb 26, 2021 at 5:26pm

Eden Robinson is the internationally-acclaimed and award-winning author of such books as Traplines and Blood Sports. Her second book, Monkey Beach, was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Governor General's Literary Award, and received the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize in 2001. In 2016 she received the Writers' Trust Engel/Findley Award for her body of work, followed by being named as a recipient of the Writers' Trust Fellowship in 2017, and in 2018 she received an honorary doctoral degree from UBC for her literary works. A member of the Haisla and Heiltsuk First Nations, Robinson lives in Kitamaat Village, BC.

> Watch the lovely video greeting Eden Robinson sent to us from her home in Kitamaat Village!

Return of the Trickster is Robinson's newest book, which brings her highly acclaimed Trickster trilogy, including the books Son of a Trickster and Trickster Drift, to a close. In this third book we catch up with Jared Martin as he wakes up naked, dangerously dehydrated and confused in the basement of his mom's old house in Kitimat. Some of the people he loves, the ones who don't see the magic he attracts, just think he fell off the wagon after a tough year of sobriety, but the truth for Jared is so much worse. He finally knows for sure that he is the only one of his dad's 535 children who is a Trickster, a shapeshifter with a free pass to other dimensions, and everyone he loves is in mortal danger from the dark forces he's accidentally unleashed — the scariest of which is his Aunt Georgina, a maniacal ogress hungry for his power, who has sent her posse of flesh-eating coy-wolves to track him down.

On Friday March 12, 2021, we hope you'll join us for an online discussion between Eden Robinson and Cherie Dimaline. See this page for details.

Categories: Authors, Saskatoon, Winnipeg, Author of the Month
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