Search results for ""Author Pablo Strauss""

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” meets Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao in Daniel Grenier’s epic novel, which tells the story of a boy who ages only one out of every four years.There’s something extraordinary about Thomas Langlois.Thomas is a young boy growing up in Chattanooga, Tennessee, with a French-Canadian father, Albert, and an American mother, Laura. But beyond the fact that he lives between two cultures and languages, there’s something else about Thomas that sets him apart: he was born on February 29.Before Albert goes on a strange quest to find out more about their mysterious relative, Aimé Bolduc, he explains to Thomas that he will only age one year out of every four and he will outlive all of his loved ones.Thomas’s loneliness grows and the years pass until a terrible accident involving a young girl sets in motion a series of events that link the young girl and Thomas to Aimé Bolduc — a Civil War–era soldier and perhaps their contemporary.Spanning three centuries and set against the backdrop of the Appalachians from Quebec to Tennessee, The Longest Year is a magical and poignant story about family history, fateful dates, fragile destinies, and lives brutally ended and mysteriously extended.

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Simon and Marie can't seem to have a baby. They decide to flee the city for an idyllic village, where things, they tell themselves, must be better. But their new home is gloomy, threatening, tinged with tragedy - things have not been the same since the factory closed down and the broadcast antenna was erected. In the trees, no birds are singing, and people have started disappearing... The Country Will Bring Us No Peace is celebrated Quebecois author Matthieu Simard's first work to be translated into English and published in the UK; a strange and poignant novella exploring grief and its aftermath.

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Squatters at a rural gas station try to find freedom and build something new on the ashes of our petrocivilization in this sensual novel. A community of outsiders takes over an abandoned gas station. They spend their days ripping up asphalt, drinking beer and eating hot dogs, and wandering through woods and towns in search of new ways of living. People come and go: a charismatic landscaper, Italian anarchists, a policewoman, travellers. A teenager drifts into homelessness. And The Girl With No Name keeps a journal of her attempts to meet new people and sleep with them, sex that is “not a sideline” but the motivating force in a story she is struggling to understand. Neighbors grow hostile. An investigation threatens the community. Tension builds between the surface violence of “normal life” and the attempt of these outsiders to experience freedom and build something new on the ashes of our oil-addicted society. With a character borrowed from Agnès Varda’s Vagabond and inspiration taken from Anne Boyer’s writings, Anne Lardeux’s highly original debut assembles elements of poetry, film, and visual arts into an exuberant choral novel, an ode to the daughters of fire and to the poetry of the body. Often funny, sometimes raunchy, consistently surprising, never flinching, The Second Substance heralds an important new voice in Quebec literature."A revolutionary diary that parses the lines of sex and power, in language that pushes itself around on the page like paint. With echoes of Emma Goldman's if I can't dance, Lardeux's revolution has fucking at its core. The Second Substance is fleshy, cinematic, intuitive." -Tamara Faith Berger, author of Queen Solomon“A nomadic miscellany of gruff scavengers and would-be pioneers has commandeered the derelict filling station at 69 Rue Principale—an anonymous sensualist and moonlighting authoritarian among them—all jockeying for position at the nexus of self-determination and fate. In Anne Lardeux’s enigmatic debut, presented here in a translation by Pablo Strauss, the constant friction between societal strictures and communal revision spark a series of disorderly experiments, abstract epiphanies blasting off in every direction. The Second Substance is a novel about overriding our programming, rewriting our code in order to initiate an even more radical set of protocols for eroticism, destruction, and rebirth.” —Justin Walls, Bookshop.org

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"Atavisms" is an original and unsettling portrait of Quebec, from the hinterland to the metropolis, from colonial times to the present, and beyond. These thirteen stories, though not linked in the traditional sense, abound in common threads. Like family traits passed down through the generations, the attitudes and actions of a rich cast of characters reverberate, quietly but deeply, over generations. Here is a group portrait of the individual lives that together shape a collective history. "Atavisms" has been shortlisted for the 2014 Jan Michalski Prize for Literature.

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In a near-future world ravaged by climate change, who will win in the struggle between humanity and nature? A thick fog rolls in over Shivering Heights. The river overflows, the sky is streaked with toxic green, parasites proliferate in torrential rains and once safely classified species – humans included – are evolving and behaving in unprecedented ways. Against this poetically hostile backdrop, a biologist, Laura, fights to understand the nature and scope of the changes transforming her own body and the world around her. Ten lush and bracing linked climate fictions depict a world gorgeous and terrifying in its likeness to our own. Fauna, Christiane Vadnais’s first work of fiction, won the Horizons Imaginaires speculative fiction award, the City of Quebec book award, and was named one of 2018’s best books by Radio-Canada.

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