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Upcoming Virtual Events!

Harlem Shuffle: A Novel

By Colson Whitehead

In the store

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

Sleep and Philosophical Rigour

Review By Barb Minett

Date: 3 Sep 2015

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It’s Faulkner’s line: “In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep.” I’m not absolutely sure what it means. Perhaps that’s because I, like most of you, fill my life with activity, people, places, and things, instead of getting down to hard philosophical thinking. But Galgut has emptied his room so that what is present are luminously sad insights and stirring existential questions.

Galgut, a South African, comes by the wisdom of solitude honestly. He became very sick with cancer when he was six and spent much of his childhood in hospitals where books and stories were his only companions. And like another famous South African, J. M. Coetzee, he uses himself as a character in his novels. He is so crafty; like Virginia Woolf, he changes point of view on a whim. Sometimes he is he, sometimes I, sometimes me. The Hindus call it tat tsvam asi (“you are that”). But it all works.

Galgut carries his character “Galgut” through three separate journeys. In the first story he becomes entranced by a handsome philosophical nomad. Tension and eroticism build with every page before he falls into the abyss of his own fear and detachment. The second story follows much of the same emotional terrain as he tags along with three strangers travelling in Zimbabwe and develops an intense fascination with one of them. He is left so alone and vulnerable at the end of this tale that all I wanted to do was pull him out of the story and invite him to dinner. But of course he would have declined. The last section is so wild and interesting that you will not be able to put it down until you have finished it. His detachment is blown when he allows a good friend to accompany him to India, knowing that she is at the height of a full blown manic episode.

There are so many reasons to thank Galgut. It has been a long time since I did so much underlining in a text. I keep going back and re-reading passages. And I haven’t even mentioned his reverence for the natural world, so I’ll leave you with just a few lines from this astonishing work:

He passes a horse in a field under a full moon. No other image from this journey is so rare and brilliant for him, the green of the grass like glossy plumage, the animal dreaming quietly in profile, the white circle up above like God. Surely they must be there.
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