In-Store: Dionne Brand presents Salvage: Readings from the Wreck

Event guidelines:

• All attendees are strongly encouraged to wear a face mask at all times.
• Tickets are limited to restrict capacity at our store, and each ticket will include either a copy of the featured book or a $10 Books Are Magic gift card.
• Additional copies of the book will be available for purchase at the event.
• A signing will follow the talk.
• Home address is collected for contact tracing purposes; it will not be used otherwise.
• The event will also be livestreamed for free here: https://youtube.com/live/uZqRd1beZGE
• As a reminder: If you are not feeling well, please do not come to the event, even if you have a ticket; email us and we'll work it out.

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Dionne Brand explores English and American literature, and the colonial aesthetic that shaped her sense of self and the world, of what was possible and what was not.

In Salvage, the internationally acclaimed poet and novelist Dionne Brand offers a bracing account of reading, life, and what remains in the wreck of empire. Uniquely and powerfully blending criticism and autobiography as artifact, Brand explores her encounters with colonial, imperialist, and racist tropes in famous and familiar books, looking particularly at the extraordinary implications and modern-day reverberations of stories such as Robinson Crusoe and Mansfield Park; the ways that practices of reading and writing are shaped by those narrative structures; and the challenges of writing a narrative of Black life that attends to its own expression and consciousness. Making and remaking the self in relation to these dominant cultural narratives, Brand learned to read the literature of two empires, the British and the American, in an anti-colonial light—in order to survive, in order to live.
The scene is the act of reading. The book, another kind of forensics. A forensics of the literary substance of which the author is made and must recover from, and if not recover, then piece together as artifact. Much more than autobiography or a work of literary criticism, Salvage is gripping, witty, revelatory, and essential reading by one of our most powerful and brilliant writers.

Dionne Brand is the author of numerous volumes of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. Her latest poetry collection, Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems, won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry. Her other collections have won the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Governor General’s Literary Award, and the Trillium Book Award. Her works of nonfiction include Bread Out of Stone and A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging. From 2009 to 2012 she served as Toronto’s poet laureate, and in 2021 she was awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction. She lives in Toronto.

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