An Evening of Exiles
at McNally Robinson Booksellers
Saskatoon, Saskatchewan - 3130 8th Street
Friday evening, 7:00pm
Begging Questions was honed to perfection over 15 years, and is the highly anticipated new book of stories by Seán Virgo, winner of the CBC, BBC, and National Magazine awards for short fiction.
In these stories, Virgo engages questions left hanging by public and private lives in a world whose foundations have shifted beyond prediction: questions of identity and belief; the emigré phantoms of memory; the frail oppositions of beauty to experience.
"Virgo is fearless: he wills his curiosity about people to draw him into situations where lesser writers fear to tread." Toronto Star
"A writer at the peak of his form!" Books in Canada
"Implicit in his fiction is a reverence before both the miracle of consciousness and the miracle of nature." Times Literary Supplement
This astonishing novel braids the stories of people on both sides of World War Two. At a house party beside Georgian Bay, on the eve of war, Victoria Treloar of London is attracted to poet Grant Giovanelli from Toronto. The next day, at a castle in Germany, Clara Dunsmuir of New Brunswick marries her fiancé Peter von Metternich, thus barely escaping internment as an enemy alien. Throughout the war, Clara and her best friend Tatiana Miloslavsky secretly help Tati¹’s husband Klaus to save refugees, then carry out the bomb attack on Hitler in 1944. Grant Giovanelli fights U-boats in the North Atlantic, his brother Jack parachutes on a commando mission into occupied France. Vivid battle scenes interlock with the love stories, while Hitler, Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt plot their separate wars that ruin the world.
James Bacque of Canada is the best-selling author of Other Losses and Crimes and Mercies – both histories of the aftermath of World War Two in Europe. He has also written two novels, a book of short stories, two anthologies and a biography. He has been published in nine languages in eleven countries around the world.
Readers interested in the author and his books may consult www.jamesbacque.com. They will find material about the creation of the novel, along with source notes, maps, and suggestions for further reading.
In Ontological Necessities Priscila Uppal investigates the emotional and philosophical struggle fundamental to notions of being in the 21st century. From poems that explore questions of identity (who is anyone, anyway?) to those that attempt to examine human relationships with the onslaught of horrors depicted daily in the news, this collection uses surrealist and absurdist language in subversive and startling ways to grapple with the increasingly absurd world we all occupy. Written with the verve of the uninhibited artist but with a clarity of thought and expression more akin to the scientist or scholar, these poems are utterly contemporary and utterly aware of the past; a necessary tonic for our times. Ontological Necessities also includes a radical, post-9/11 translation of the Anglo-Saxon elegy "The Wanderer," dragging our political and artistic past into the present and future, and back again.
"Priscila Uppal is certainly one of the most engaging young poets writing in English in Canada today." World Literature in Review
"Unquestionably a writer of strong vision and bold strokes." The Toronto Star
"Outstandingly successful ... Uppal writes with a spare and sure effectiveness that is totally convincing." Books in Canada
* Images from the Evening *
will be available mid-November
These books, and books previously published by the authors through Exile Editions, are for sale direct from the publisher at: www.ExileEditions.com.