Canoes by Maylis de Kerangal

About the book:

“When did I start placing myself in the fable?” A young Parisian wonders as she tells her son the legend of Buffalo Bill, a spectral presence atop the mountain in their small Colorado town. She has just moved to the United States and everything disorients her – suburbs stretching along reptilian highways, a new house rigged like a studio set, but most of all, the sound of her husband’s voice. Sam speaks with a different tone in English, not the soft and swift timbre of his native French. From a voice made new, Maylis de Kerangal opens up a torrent of curiosities, hauntings, and questions about place and language.

Seven stories ricochet off of this exhilarating central novella, and in them we hear female voices by turns indelibly witty, insightful, intimate, bracing, and profoundly interconnected. The women of these stories are mad about: stones, molds of human jaws, voicemail recordings, sonic waves, UFOs, and always how the texture of human voice entwines with their obsessions. With cosmic harmonics, vivid imagery, and a revelatory composition, Canoes will leave its reader forever altered.

About the author:

Maylis de Kerangal is a critically acclaimed author of several books, including Birth of a Bridge, winner of the 2010 Prix Franz Hessel and Prix Médicis; The Heart, one of the Wall Street Journal’s Ten Best Fiction Works of 2016 and longlisted for the Booker International Prize; The Cook, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice; and Eastbound, one of the New York Times Book Review's Ten Best Books of 2023.

About the translator:

Jessica Moore is an author and literary translator. Her first book, Everything, Now is a love letter to the dead and a conversation with her translation of Turkana Boy by Jean-François Beauchemin, for which she won a PEN America Translation award. She is the translator of five books by Maylis de Kerangal, including Mend the Living, nominated for the 2016 International Man Booker and winner of the UK's Wellcome Book Prize in 2017. Jessica’s most recent book, a true story in long-poem form called The Whole Singing Ocean, was published in 2020. Her work has appeared in BOMB, Brick Magazine, and Canadian Art, among others. She lives in Tkaronto/Toronto.

Maylis de Kerangal will be in conversation with Becca Rothfeld.

Becca Rothfeld is the non-fiction book critic at The Washington Post, an editor at The Point, a contributing editor at The Boston Review, and the author of the essay collection All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess.

Accessibility note: This event is up two flights of stairs and Lost City Books does not have an elevator. Please contact [email protected] with questions.

Dato de accesibilidad: Este evento toma lugar en el segundo piso y Lost City Books no tiene ascensor. Favor de contactar [email protected] con cualquiera duda.

Host or Publisher Lost City Books