Search results for ""Author Alex Leslie""

Finalist for the 2020 Western Canada Jewish Book Awards, The Nancy Richler Memorial Prize for FictionFinalist for the 2020 Kobzar Book AwardFinalist for the 2019 Ethel Wilson Fiction AwardWe All Need to Eat is a new collection of linked stories from award-winning author Alex Leslie that revolve around Soma, a young Queer woman in Vancouver, chronicling her attempts to come to grips with herself, her family and her sexuality.Set in different moments falling between Soma's childhood and her late thirties, each story--bold and varying in its approach to narrative--presents a sea change in Soma's life, from Soma becoming addicted to weightlifting while going through a break-up in her thirties; to her complex relationship with her younger brother after she leaves home revealed over the course of a long family chicken dinner; to Soma's struggles to cope with her mother's increasing instability by becoming fixated on buying her a lamp for seasonal affective disorder; and the far-reaching impact and lasting reverberations of Soma's family's experience of the Holocaust as it scrapes up against the rise of Alt Right media. Lyrical, gritty and atmospheric, Soma's stories refuse to shy away from the contradictions inherent to human experience, exploring one young person's journey through mourning, escapism, and the search for nourishment.

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Winner of the 2020 Western Canada Jewish Book Awards, The Lohn Foundation Prize for PoetryIn Vancouver for Beginners, the nostalgia of place is dissected through the mapping of a city where readers are led past surrealist development proposals, post-apocalyptic postcards, childhood landmarks long gone and a developer who paces at the city's edge, shoring it up with aquariums.In these poems you will traverse a city lined with rivers, not streets. Memory traps and tourist traps reveal themselves, and the ocean glints, elusive, in the background. Here there are many Vancouvers and no Vancouver, a city meant for elsewhere after the flood has swept through. This place of the living and the dead has been rewritten: forests are subsumed by parks, buildings sink and morph, and the climate has changed.Vancouver for Beginners is a ghost story, an elegy, a love song for a city that is both indecipherable and a microcosm of a world on fire.Praise for Alex Leslie:"Alex Leslie is a tremendously gifted and compassionate writer. This bold and searing collection is a wonder." —Madeleine Thien, Scotiabank Giller Prize winning author of Do Not Say We Have Nothing"A magnetic collection that must be read over and over." —Kirkus Reviews

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