Search results for ""Author Pablo Strauss""

WINNER OF THE AMAZON CANADA FIRST NOVEL AWARD • NOMINATED FOR CANADA READS • A NEW YORK TIMES NEW & NOTEWORTHY BOOK • A NOW MAGAZINE BEST BOOK TO READ FOR SUMMER 2019 • As heard on CBC's The Sunday Edition with Michael Enright It’s October in Montreal, 2002, and winter is coming on fast. Past due on his first freelance gig and ensnared in lies to his family and friends, a graphic design student with a gambling addiction goes after the first job that promises a paycheck: dishwasher at the sophisticated La Trattoria. Though he feels out of place in the posh dining room, warned by the manager not to enter through the front and coolly assessed by the waitstaff in their tailored shirts, nothing could have prepared him for the tension and noise of the kitchen, or the dishpit’s clamor and steam. Thrust on his first night into a roiling cast of characters all moving with the whirlwind speed of the evening rush, it’s not long before he finds himself in over his head once again. A vivid, magnificent debut, with a soundtrack by Iron Maiden, The Dishwasher plunges us into a world in which everyone depends on each other—for better and for worse.

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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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In 1907, the fifteen-year-old French-Canadian Ernest Dufault left his home in Quebec for Montana, where he was promptly arrested as a cattle thief. As a prisoner of the state of Nevada, he passed himself off as an American cowboy named Will James. Over the next few decades, Dufault, a.k.a. James, would flourish as a cowboy and horsebreaker and go on to become an artist, a soldier, a Hollywood stuntman, and a bestselling author of award-winning westerns — and his own false memoir. The Quebecer was so successful a pretender that he was later inducted into the Hall of Great Westerners, and his estranged wife, Alice Conradt, would only learn his true identity when, at the age of fifty, Will James died and left his estate to a man she had never heard of: one Ernest Dufault.In Benediction, Olivier Dufault recreates the true story of his distant relative Ernest’s incarceration in a Nevada prison and his subsequent reinvention as “Will James.” Relying on authentic historical materials, including letters, telegrams, and court documents, as much as his own imagination, Olivier Dufault’s magnificent novel is a posthumous benediction of an exceptional American life in which truth and lies walk side by side.

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“Let's be honest: Who hasn't fantasized about shooting someone in the face with a hunting rifle?”One day, a thirteen-year-old girl decides to startle a classmate. Instead, she accidentally kills him.And she likes it.Over the years, she begins experimenting with murder. Her victims are, of course, people that deserve it: a careless driver, a CEO of an energy corporation that is destroying the planet, a rapist. Every crime scene is flawless — untraceable and made to look like an accident or suicide. But, as she sleepwalks through her day job and lives in a crummy apartment, one thing becomes increasingly clear: she needs more.Because nothing compares to the thrill of violent retribution.

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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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An intimate yet wide-sweeping story of a marine biologist working to save ocean ecosystems from climate change.With the world’s oceans ravaged by climate change, Émeraude, a young marine biologist, works to preserve aquatic ecosystems by recreating them for zoos. When her work earns her a spot aboard a research vessel with an extended mission in the Arctic, it is the inescapable draw of the ocean that will save her when the world she leaves behind is irrevocably changed.Stories of Émeraude’s ancestors — a young sailor abandoned at birth, a conjuror who mixes potions for her neighbours, a violent young man who hides in the woods to escape an even more violent war, and a talented young singer born to a mother who cannot speak — weave their way through her intimate reflections on a modest life, unknowingly shaped by those who came before.A RARE MACHINES BOOK

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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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"Bock's language crackles with the energy of a Québécois folk song, impassioned and celebratory but also melancholy and cheekily ironic." —The New Yorker, on AtavismsA young, floundering author meets Robert "Baloney" Lacerte, an older, marginal poet who seems to own nothing beyond his unwavering certainty. Over the course of one summer evening, Lacerte recounts his unrelenting quest for poetry, which has taken him from Quebec's Boreal forests to South America to East Montreal, where he seems poised to disappear without a trace. But as the blocked writer discovers, Lacerte might just be full of it.Maxime Raymond Bock lives in Montreal, Quebec. Atavisms, his first book, won the Prix Adrienne-Choquette.Pablo Strauss, who translated Atavisms, lives in Quebec City, Quebec.

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ONE OF BOOK RIOT'S "20 MUST-READ HORROR BOOKS YOU'VE NEVER HEARD OF"Simon and Marie can’t seem to have a baby. And so they flee the city for an idyllic village, where things will certainly be better. But the town is gloomy, even hostile -- things haven’t been the same since the factory closed down and a broadcast antenna was erected. Now there are no birds singing, and people have started disappearing.

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