Sabrina Reed Hybrid Book Launch
Friday Nov 25 2022 7:00 pm, Winnipeg, Grant Park in the Atrium, Streaming via YouTube
Join Sabrina Reed for the launch of Lives Lived, Lives Imagined: Landscapes of Resilience in the Works of Miriam Toews (University of Manitoba Press). This event features a conversation with Alison Calder (English, Theatre, Film & Media, University of Manitoba).
The event will be hosted live in the Atrium of McNally Robinson Booksellers, Grant Park and also available as a simultaneous YouTube stream with live chat. Before arriving, please review details of how to attend physical events here at the store.
In this first monograph to cover Miriam Toews’s entire oeuvre, Lives Lived, Lives Imagined: Landscapes of Resilience in the Works of Miriam Toews by Sabrina Reed demonstrates how Toews exposes and resists oppressive systems in her writing. A celebration of autofiction as a reparative gesture in the face of trauma, this close examination of Toews’s books will appeal to both scholars and other interested readers of Canadian literature.
A professor in the Department of English, Languages and Cultures at Mount Royal University since 1993, Sabrina Reed’s research centres on disability narratives within the context of Canadian Literature. She is drawn to Miriam Toews’s strong female characters, her focus on resilience in spite of great hardship, her humour, and her ongoing examination of the personal and familial effects of mental illness.
Poet Alison Calder teaches Canadian literature and creative writing at the University of Manitoba. She has published widely on Canadian prairie literature and culture.
See:
Lives Lived, Lives Imagined
- Sabrina Reed 
Trade paperback
$27.95
Reader Reward Price: $25.16
Perceptive, controversial, topical, and achingly funny, Miriam Toews's books have earned her a place at the forefront of Canadian literature. In this first monograph on Toews's work, Sabrina Reed examines the interplay of trauma and resilience in the author's fiction.
Reed skillfully demonstrates how Toews situates resilience across key themes, including: the home as both a source of trauma and an inspiration for resilient action; the road trip as a search for resolution and redemption; and the reframing of the Mennonite diaspora as an escape from patriarchal oppression. The deaths by suicide of Toews's father and sister stand out as the most shocking and tragic of the author's biographical details, and Reed explores Toews's use of autofiction as a reparative gesture in the face of this trauma.
Written in an accessible style that will appeal to both scholars and devotees of Toews's work, Lives Lived, Lives Imagined is a timely examination of Toews's oeuvre and a celebration of fiction's ability to simultaneously embody compassion and anger, joy and sadness, and to brave the personal and communal oppressions of politics, religion, family, society, and mental illness.
