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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!

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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: SOMETHING NEW UNDER

Article By Andrew Hood

Date: 12 Sep 2021

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Something New Under the Sun: A Novel
When his first novel is optioned for a film, east coast novelist Patrick Hamlin leaves his wife and daughter behind to go west. Hoping to exert some manner of influence on the adaptation of his only successful book, he finds he signed away all his rights in exchange for a job as a PA on the production. Instead of driving the film, he ends up driving the film's lead: the grown child star Cassidy Carter who, if you believe all the tabloids and viral videos, has gone totally doolally. LA traffic has always been a bear, but the constant and encroaching fires makes it an unbearable, inevitable force of nature in Alexandra Kleeman's Something New Under the Sun.
 
A fish out of water (or, since there is no longer any natural water in California, the nation being slaked instead by a synthetic marvel, a fish out of WAT-R), at first Patrick finds the constant fires odd. But, overtime, he becomes used to them. Waylaid by one such conflagration, finding his mind wandering to Cassidy's nose--a nose so perfect that droves of fans have gotten rhinoplasty in order to have it for themselves--he thinks to himself, "It's not really an emergency... if you can drive around it." 
 
"An emergency," he thinks, "would be everywhere, inescapable; some long-submerged animal intelligence would recognize it with fierce instinct. In an emergency, the mind would not drift aimlessly from daydream to distraction... in search of something to grasp."
 
I can't think of a better expression of western impotence--and Kleeman's book is chockablock with such succient observatiosn. In over a year of dogpiled disaster, we still see devastation as an obstacle to drive around rather than stop for. As Patrick, with the help of Cassidy (who once played a detective on TV) strives to get to the bottom of why no one seems concerned whether or not the film is getting made, and how that might be connected to the insidious  ubiquity WAT-R, his struggle becomes not so much about getting to the bottom anything, but to continue seeing the depth of the natural world and not its simulation.
 
In her second novel, Kleeman has presented the dissociation and simulation of our current moment in time with the mordant acuity of DeLillo and Pynchon. She at once captures the daily strangeness and natural depravity to which we've become so inured and elevates and twists it enough to help us re-see the devastating absurdity around us. Not only does Something New Under the Sun hit the nail so deftly and swiftly on the head, but it delivers such a sure blow that it leaves a perfect pucker of its hammerhead in the soft wood of our reality. 
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