An Evening with Jón Kalman Stefánsson
Wednesday Oct 23 2024 7:00 pm, Winnipeg, Grant Park in the Atrium, Streaming on YouTube
Join us for an evening with acclaimed author Jón Kalman Stefánsson as he visits Winnipeg to discuss his novel Your Absence Is Darkness (Biblioasis), a spellbinding saga about the inhabitants and inheritors of one rural community, by one of Iceland’s most beloved novelists. Featuring a conversation hosted by McNally Robinson co-owner, Chris Hall. Co-presented by the Consulate General of Iceland in Winnipeg, the Icelandic Canadian Frón, and Lögberg-Heimskringla.
The event will be hosted live in the Atrium of McNally Robinson Booksellers, Grant Park and also available as a simultaneous YouTube stream.
Incandescent and elemental, hope-filled and humane, Your Absence Is Darkness is a comedy about mortality, music, and the strange salve of time, and a spellbinding saga of death, desire, and the perfect agony of star-crossed love. All "...rendered here in a tumblingly beautiful translation by Philip Roughton” (Daniel Mason, New York Times).
Jón Kalman Stefánsson’s novels have been nominated three times for the Nordic Council Prize for Literature, and his novel Summer Light, and Then Comes the Night received the Icelandic Prize for Literature in 2005. In 2011 he was awarded the prestigious P. O. Enquist Award. He is perhaps best known for his trilogy: Heaven and Hell, The Sorrow of Angels (longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize) and The Heart of Man (winner of the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize). A subsequent novel, Fish Have No Feet, was longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2017.
Host Chris Hall has been with McNally Robinson Booksellers for more than twenty-five years, more than ten of which as owner. When he isn't reading or walking he loves to travel and cook. He lives in Winnipeg and is currently training his daughters to be booksellers.
See:
Your Absence Is Darkness
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Trade paperback
$26.95
Reader Reward Price: $24.26
Longlisted for the 2024 Republic of Consciousness US and Canada Prize o A World Literature Today Notable Translation of 2024 o A Shelf Awareness Best Book of 2024
A spellbinding saga about the inhabitants and inheritors of one rural community, by one of Iceland's most beloved novelists.
A man comes to awareness in a cold church in the Icelandic countryside, not knowing who he is, why he's there or how he arrived, with a stranger staring mockingly from a few pews back. Startled by the man's cryptic questions, he leaves--and plunges into a history spanning centuries, a past pressed into his genes that sinks him closer to some knowledge of himself. A city girl is drawn to the fjords by the memory of a blue-eyed gaze, and a generation earlier, a farmer's wife writes an essay about earthworms that changes the course of lives. A pastor who writes letters to dead poets falls in love with a faraway stranger, and a rock musician, plagued by cosmic loneliness, discovers that his past has been a lie. Faced with the violence of fate and the effects of choices, made and avoided, that cascade between them, each discovers the cost of following the magnetic needle of the heart.
Incandescent and elemental, hope-filled and humane, Your Absence Is Darkness is a comedy about mortality, music, and the strange salve of time, and a spellbinding saga of death, desire, and the perfect agony of star-crossed love.
