Helen Chau Bradley Virtual Book Event with guests Jenny Heijun Wills & Anna Leventhal
Wednesday Feb 09 2022 7:00 pm, Virtual, Online via Zoom & YouTube
Please join Helen Chau Bradley, in conversation with Jenny Heijun Wills and Anna Leventhal, to celebrate the launch of their debut collection, Personal Attention Roleplay. This event presented by McNally Robinson Booksellers in association with Metonymy Press and The Winnipeg Public Library.
Registration is required to directly participate in the Zoom webinar. It will be simultaneously streamed on YouTube and available for viewing thereafter. Live captioning will be provided.
Praised as “A perfect album of stories” by Casey Plett, this collection is propelled by queer loneliness, mixed-race confusion, late capitalist despondency, and the pitfalls of intimacy. The stories feature young Asian misfits struggling with the desire to see themselves reflected in the world around them.
Helen Chau Bradley is a writer and musician living in Tiohtià:ke (Montreal). They are the Fiction Editor for This Magazine, and the host of Strange Futures, a speculative fiction book club. Personal Attention Roleplay is their first book.
Anna Leventhal is the author of the short story collection Sweet Affliction (Invisible Publishing). She's an MFA candidate at the UBC School of Creative Writing and teaches English at the University of Winnipeg. Leventhal is the 2021-22 Writer-in-Residence at the Winnipeg Public Library, having returned to Treaty 1 territory after 20-odd years in Tio’tia:ke/Montréal.
Jenny Heijun Wills (she/her) is the author of Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related (McClelland & Stewart). She is Professor of English at the University of Winnipeg, where she is also the 2020-2023 Chancellor’s Research Chair and Director of the Critical Race Network. She is currently writing two novels.
See:
Personal Attention Roleplay
- H Felix Chau Bradley 
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A young gymnast crushes on an older, more talented teammate while contending with her overworked mother. A newly queer twenty-something juggles two intimate relationships--with a slippery anarchist lover and an idiosyncratic meals-on-wheels recipient. A queer metal band's summer tour unravels amid the sticky heat of the Northeastern US. A codependent listicle writer becomes obsessed with a Japanese ASMR channel.
The stories in Personal Attention Roleplay are propelled by queer loneliness, mixed-race confusion, late capitalist despondency, and the pitfalls of intimacy. Taking place in Montreal, Toronto, and elsewhere, they feature young Asian misfits struggling with the desire to see themselves reflected--in their surroundings, in others, online. Chau Bradley's precise language and investigation of our more troubling motivations stand out in this wryly funny debut, through stories that hint at the uncanny while remaining grounded in the everyday.
