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Upcoming Virtual Events!

Harlem Shuffle: A Novel

By Colson Whitehead

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Harlem Shuffle is driven by an ingeniously intricate plot that plays out in a beautifully recreated Harlem of the early 1960s. September 29 at 8 pm. Check out indieevents.ca!

The Strangers

By Katherena Vermette

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Katherena Vermette's The Strangers is a deeply moving story of how colonial institutions continue to bear down on and disrupt the lives of Indigenous women and girls. October 7@ 8 p.m. Check indieevents.ca!

Unreconciled: Family, Truth, and Indigenous Resistance

By Jesse Wente

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Part memoir and part manifesto, Unreconciled is a stirring call to arms to put truth over the flawed concept of reconciliation, and to build a new, respectful relationship between the nation of Canada and Indigenous peoples. October 14 @ 8 p.m. Check indieevents.ca!

Bewilderment: A novel

By Richard Powers

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What can a father do, when the only solution offered to his rare and troubled boy is to put him on psychoactive drugs? October 4 @ 7p.m. Check out indieevents.ca!

The Apollo Murders

By Chris Hadfield

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The far side of the Moon, 1973. Three astronauts are trapped in a tiny Apollo module, and one of them has murder on the mind . . .
 October 26 @ 8 p.m. Check out indieevents.ca! Great New York Times review Oct 15!

Crossroads: A Novel

By Jonathan Franzen

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It's December 23, 1971, and the Hildebrandt family is at a crossroads. The patriarch, Russ, the associate pastor of a suburban Chicago church, is poised to break free of a marriage he finds. October 19 @ 7 p.m. Check indieevents.ca!

The Great Bear: The Misewa Saga, Book Two

By David A. Robertson

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Back at home after their first adventure in the Barren Grounds, Eli and Morgan each struggle with personal issues: Eli is being bullied at school, and tries to hide it from Morgan, while Morgan has to make an important decision about her birth mother. October 28 @ 8 p.m. Check out Indieevents.ca!

down the rabbit hole!

The New York Trilogy

By Paul Auster

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Mindbending and wonderful, Paul Auster plays with our notions of identity and place. So strange, so delightful!

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel

By Haruki Murakami

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If you've been wondering how to get into Murakami's fantastical world, here is the place to start! A riveting read!

Perchance to Dream: Selected Stories

By Charles Beaumont, Ray Bradbury, William Shatner

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In his short life, Charles Beaumont succeeded in creating some genuinely inspired short fiction (as well as 22 episodes of the Twilight Zone). A rare talent not to be missed!

Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe

By Thomas Ligotti, Jeff VanderMeer

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The worlds of fringe horror author Thomas Ligotti can be brutal and strange and misanthropic, but he's never not a compelling read!

The Island of Dr Moreau

By Margaret Atwood, Steve Maclean, Patrick Parrinder, H.G. Wells

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The truly terrifying tale of a mad scientist and his island of ghastly hybrid creatures!

Literary

REVIEW: A GHOST IN THE THROAT

Article By Barb Minett

Date: 11 Jul 2021

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A Ghost in the Throat

 

How strange that, while reading this highly intimate and sensual depiction of messy life with small children, there are three of me present. One of course is me, the present reader. Another is me, the distraught and ashamed new mother of long ago. Lastly and more vaguely, there is the naive person I was before children.

 

Doireann Ní Ghríofa, a sorceress who employs strong visceral language, has called them all forth. She understands her craft because she knows that “The past is always trembling inside the present, whether or not we sense it.” Each of us is a palimpsest.

 

 

The text of bearing four children all under the age of 10 has screwed her to the sticking post of motherhood. Her joy lies in ticking off the mass of seemingly endless daily tasks. They are her prayer beads and deep pleasure arises from wiping, wiping, wiping, carrying, taking here, dropping off there, hoisting in and out of car seats, hoovering, hoovering, hoovering, nursing, always nursing, everything gooey. Deep pleasure but also cavernous fatigue.

 

This ceaseless multi-tasking rebirths an old obsession. She becomes as devoted to unearthing the history of an 18th century Irish woman by the name of Eibhlin Dubh as she is in keeping her little ones afloat. And she really has to dig because history has left almost no trace of this charismatic woman, who wrote an epic poem about the murder of her husband in which she mourns by drinking his blood. Misogyny and primogeniture infect the era. This resurrection gives her purpose.

 

Ní Ghríofa explains her life as decanted between milk and text and she sips her own dark sustenance from ink.

 

She gives us her naked psyche throughout. Even though she tells her husband sex is fine post-birth, in reality sex hurts. She wonders why she cannot be honest. From the pen of a lesser writer, her revelations would be embarrassing, but Ní Ghríofa's firm grasp of concrete details combined with a very big intellect raise the horizon. Her teenage disaffection, her car accident, her almost still birth, her breast cancer scare, and again her bottomless fatigue – these are Everywoman.

 

The night that I finished the book I had an unsettling dream. I was in a very dark cinema with my two-year-old toddler, Hannah. Suddenly I couldn’t find her, and I frantically felt under all the seats in the dark with no luck. I was desperate. Then I went outside into the light and she was there, with her little blue snowsuit on alive and well. The past lives on in us and does tremble just below the surface.

 

On Sunday July 18, 2:00 p.m. EST (online) The Eden Mills Writers Festival welcomes Emma Donoghue and Doireann Ní Ghríofa for a conversation about writing, research, unearthing the past, self-discovery, motherhood, art, memory, and the importance of amplifying women’s voices on and off the page. Register HERE

 

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