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January 23, 2019
Librairie Drawn & Quarterly Books of the Week - January 23rd, 2019
In the weekly Librairie Drawn & Quarterly Books of the Week, the Montreal bookstore recommends several new works of fiction, art books, periodicals, and comics.
Librairie Drawn & Quarterly is one of Montreal's premiere independent bookstores.
Bookends: Collected Intros and Outro by Michael Chabon
Here’s a format we’ve never seen before: an anthology of introductions (and postscripts, plus some liner notes) written for other books. It’s an appropriately “meta” concept for the ever-playful Chabon, and surveying the range of intros here (for the Wes Anderson Collection, a book on superhero fashion, Ben Katchor’s graphic novel Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer, M.R. James’ ghost stories, and D’Aulaire’s Norse Myths, among other things) gives you a sense of Chabon’s kaleidoscopically varied sensibility and genre-busting enthusiasms.
Tentacle by Rita Indiana
Rita Indiana is something of a superstar in the Domican Republic, where she is beloved not only for her novels, but also as the bandleader of neo-merengue group Rita Indiana & Los Misterios and an outspoken advocate for queer issues. Her latest novel, Tentacle (which won the Grand Prize of the Association of Caribbean Writers in 2017), follows a young maid in post-apocalyptic Santa Domingo who finds herself in the middle of a Santeria prophecy that demands she travel back in time, save the oceans and humanity, and change her sex with the help of a sacred Anemone. It’s The Tempest as a telenovela!
Last Night in Nuuk by Niviaq Korneliussen
Niviaq Korneliussen is a groundbreaking young writer from Greenland whose debut novel follows the lives of five young people in the capital city of Nuuk (population: 17,000). Queer, urbane, studded with stream-of-consciousnness textspeak, and delirious from nightlife, Last Night in Nuuk is a brave book that’s earned comparisons to Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting and promises to put Greenlandic literature on the map.
The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1900 to the Present by David Treuer
Responding to and refuting the mythology of the “vanishing Indian” that has dominated the settler imagination and the writing of American history, David Treuer’s The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee aims at nothing less than a comprehensive retelling of Indigenous history. Blending history, memoir, and reportage, Treuer (an Ojibwe of Leech Lake, MN) documents how colonial violence has spawned new forms of survival and resistance in each era. A major work.
Reproduction by Ian Williams
Reproduction is the debut novel from award-winning Canadian poet (and UBC Creative Writing prof) Ian Williams. It’s a restless, unsentimental, formally inventive story about the often bizarre ways in which people become bonded. A teen girl from an island nation and the lazy heir of a wealthy German family come together over shared grief and simple proximity. Years later, their son forms an unconventional unit with the neighbours: a divorced father, his odd son, and nubile daughter. As the group is reshuffled by death, disease, violence, and desire, Williams illuminates how families are not always born out of blood or even love, at least not on the surface.
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other Librairie Drawn & Quarterly Books of the Week
Antiheroines (interviews with up and coming female comics artists)
Atomic Books Comics Preview (weekly new comics and graphic novel highlights)
Book Notes (authors create music playlists for their book)
guest book reviews
musician/author interviews
Note Books (musicians discuss literature)
Short Cuts (writers pair a song with their short story or essay)
WORD Bookstores Books of the Week (weekly new book highlights)
