Posts Tagged ‘Canadian Author’
Raised in rural Saskatchewan and now living in Toronto, Holly Luhning holds a PhD in eighteenth-century literature, madness and theories of the body. She has received a Saskatchewan Lieutenant Governor’s Arts Award, and her collection of poetry, Sway, was nominated for a Saskatchewan Book Award. Her first novel, Quiver, is forthcoming in January 2011.
Time: Thursday, January 19th @ 7p
Location: Sobey Building- Saint Mary’s University, Rm 165, 903 Robie St
Admission: Free
In Holly Luhning’s debut novel Quiver, Danica, a young Canadian forensic psychologist working in England, is ensnared in a terrifying web spun from the legend of a 16th-century Hungarian countess: Elizabeth Báthory, a female Dracula who tortured and killed over six hundred servant girls to bathe in their blood, believing this would preserve her youth and beauty. Danica finds herself in a dangerous zone where scholarly research and forensic psychology encounter the shifting borders between appealing and harmless fantasy, prurient reality, and treacherous sexuality and violence.
Luhning, also an accomplished poet who was raised on a Saskatchewan farm and earned an M.A. in Creative Writing and English from the University of New Brunswick, will read from her fiction and poetry with a reception and book signing to follow. Her poetry draws on her Prairie roots, east coast experience, and world travels, while Quiver benefits from her research in Gothic literature, madness, and theories of the body. She now lives in Toronto.
- From BUZZon.com
Time: Tuesday, January 17th @ 7:30p
Location: UPEI Faculty Lounge
Admission: Free
The two sections in Jacob McArthur Mooney’s virtuoso collection – one rural in orientation, one urban – open an intricate conversation. Taking as its inciting incident the 1998 crash of Swissair Flight 111 off the coast of Nova Scotia, before moving to the neighbourhoods around Toronto’s Pearson International Airport, Folk is an elaborately composed inquiry into the human need for frames, edges, borders, and a passionate probe of contemporary challenges to identity, whether of individual, neighbourhood, city, or nation. Mooney examines the fraught desire to align where we live with who we are, and asks how we can be at home on the compromised earth. This is poetry that poses crucial questions and refuses easy answers, as it builds a shimmering verbal structure that ventures “beyond ownership or thought.” Mooney’s distinctive voice is seriously unsettling, deeply appealing, and answerable to our difficult times.
Join us for an intimate and interactive look at some of Atlantic Canada’s Best authors. This month we have Wayne Johnston and Ami McKay with us to take a look at their newest releases.
Wayne Johnston is one of the greatest storytellers of his generation. The Newfoundland native, is the author of numerous bestselling and multi-award winning novels, including The Divine Ryans, The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, The Custodian of Paradise and his latest narrative, A World Elsewhere.
Ami McKay hit the mark with her first full-length novel The Birth House; the touching tale of a Nova Scotia Midwife resonated with readers and critics alike, earning the Scots Bay resident numerous awards, nominations and a lengthy stay atop the bestseller lists. Her long awaited follow-up is The Virgin Cure.
The Literary Luncheon is hosted by Halifax-based author, journalist and broadcaster Stephen Patrick Clare.
Time: Monday, November 28th @ 12p
Location: The Halifax Club
Admission: 24.95 for Members, 37.49 for non member guests
Dress Code: Smart Casual
Set against the backdrop of Cold War Toronto, The Lightning Field follows the lives of Peter and Lucy Jacobs from their post-war courtship through marriage and child-rearing in the suburbs. Though spanning four decades, the book pivots on the events of a single day: October 4, 1957. On this day, the Russians launch Sputnik into orbit, the Avro Arrow — the most advanced jet plane of its time, whose wings Peter Jacobs has engineered — rolls out onto the tarmac to great ceremony, and, in a nearby field, Lucy Jacobs is struck by lightning on her way to the event. In the aftermath of that day, Peter struggles with his wife’s hospitalization and recovery, the care of their children, and, eventually, the loss of his job when the Arrow project is suddenly terminated. Their children — Kier, Andy and Rose — grow up in the sheltered cul-de-sacs of their Toronto suburb, troubled by the disappointments of their parents’ world, yet drawn to the infinite possibilities inspired by Laika the space dog and the mysteries of the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. If so much of what their parents hoped for in life seemed ultimately out of reach, how will this next generation of dreamers find their way?The Lightning Field is about loss and unexpected offerings, personal dismantling and reassembly.
Following in the footsteps of The Birth House, her powerful debut novel, The Virgin Cure secures Ami McKay’s place as one of our most beguiling storytellers. (Not that it has to . . . that is pretty much taken care of!)“I am Moth, a girl from the lowest part of Chrystie Street, born to a slum-house mystic and the man who broke her heart.” So begins The Virgin Cure, a novel set in the tenements of lower Manhattan in the year 1871. As a young child, Moth’s father smiled, tipped his hat and walked away from his wife and daughter forever, and Moth has never stopped imagining that one day they may be reunited – despite knowing in her heart what he chose over them. Her hard mother is barely making a living with her fortune-telling, sometimes for well-heeled clients, yet Moth is all too aware of how she really pays the rent.Life would be so much better, Moth knows, if fortune had gone the other way – if only she’d had the luxury of a good family and some station in life. The young Moth spends her days wandering the streets of her own and better neighbourhoods, imagining what days are like for the wealthy women whose grand yet forbidding gardens she slips through when no one’s looking. Yet every night Moth must return to the disease- and grief-ridden tenements she calls home.The summer Moth turns twelve, her mother puts a halt to her explorations by selling her boots to a local vendor, convinced that Moth was planning to run away. Wanting to make the most of her every asset, she also sells Moth to a wealthy woman as a servant, with no intention of ever seeing her again.These betrayals lead Moth to the wild, murky world of the Bowery, filled with house-thieves, pickpockets, beggars, sideshow freaks and prostitutes, but also a locale frequented by New York’s social elite. Their patronage supports the shadowy undersphere, where businesses can flourish if they truly understand the importance of wealth and social standing – and of keeping secrets. In that world Moth meets Miss Everett, the owner of a brothel simply known as an “infant school.” There Moth finds the orderly solace she has always wanted, and begins to imagine herself embarking upon a new path.Yet salvation does not come without its price: Miss Everett caters to gentlemen who pay dearly for companions who are “willing and clean,” and the most desirable of them all are young virgins like Moth. That’s not the worst of the situation, though. In a time and place where mysterious illnesses ravage those who haven’t been cautious, no matter their social station, diseased men yearn for a “virgin cure” – thinking that deflowering a “fresh maid” can heal the incurable and tainted. Through the friendship of Dr. Sadie, a female physician who works to help young women like her, Moth learns to question and observe the world around her. Moth’s new friends are falling prey to fates both expected and forced upon them, yet she knows the law will not protect her, and that polite society ignores her. Still she dreams of answering to no one but herself. There’s a high price for such independence, though, and no one knows that better than a girl from Chrystie Street. Ami McKay was born and raised in rural Indiana. After an undergraduate degree in music education and graduate studies in musicology at Indiana State University, she moved to Chicago to teach music at an inner city high school for the arts. In her off hours she would write, filling notebooks and journals with short stories and ideas for novels.
Here is the eagerly anticipated new novel from a brilliant writer whose last book, Good to a Fault, was shortlisted for the prestigious Giller Prize and won the Commonwealth Prize for Canada and the Caribbean.
The Little Shadows revolves around three sisters in the world of vaudeville before and during the First World War. We follow the lives of all three in turn: Aurora, the eldest and most beautiful, who is sixteen when the book opens; thoughtful Clover, a year younger; and the youngest sister, joyous headstrong sprite Bella, who is thirteen. The girls, overseen by their fond but barely coping Mama, are forced to make their living as a singing act after the untimely death of their father. They begin with little besides youth and hope, but Marina Endicott’s genius is to show how the three girls slowly and steadily evolve into true artists even as they navigate their way to adulthood among a cast of extraordinary characters – some of them charming charlatans, some of them unpredictable eccentrics, and some of them just ordinary-seeming humans with magical gifts.
Using her gorgeous prose and extraordinary insight, Endicott lures us onto the brightly lit stage and then into the little shadows that lurk behind the curtain, and reveals how the art of vaudeville — in all its variety, madness, melodrama, hilarity and sorrow — echoes the art of life itself.
-From the Publisher