June Literature in Translation Bookclub!

Name: June Literature in Translation Bookclub!
Start: 2024-06-27T19:00:00-04:00
Location: 1841-A rue Sainte. Catherine Ouest, Montreal, QC, Canada, Quebec H3H 1M2

Schedule

Thu Jun 27 2024 at 07:00 pm

UTC-04:00

Location

1841-A rue Sainte. Catherine Ouest, Montreal, QC, Canada, Quebec H3H 1M2 | Montreal, QC

Would you like to explore literature from around the world? This bookclub will select and discuss titles that have been translated from a variety of languages into English. After each meeting, we will collectively decide on the next book.
This June, we will be reading Qiu Miaojin's Notes of a Crocodile, which is translated by Bonnie Huie. Set in the post-martial-law era of late-1980s Taipei, this novel is a coming-of-age story of queer misfits discovering love, friendship, and artistic affinity while hardly studying at Taiwan’s most prestigious university. Told through the eyes of an anonymous lesbian narrator nicknamed Lazi, this cult classic is a postmodern pastiche of diaries, vignettes, mash notes, aphorisms, exegesis, and satire by an incisive prose stylist and major countercultural figure. Afflicted by her fatalistic attraction to Shui Ling, an older woman, Lazi turns for support to a circle of friends that includes a rich kid turned criminal and his troubled, self-destructive gay lover, as well as a bored, mischievous overachiever and her alluring slacker artist girlfriend. Illustrating a process of liberation from the strictures of gender through radical self-inquiry, Notes of a Crocodile is a poignant masterpiece of social defiance by a singular voice in contemporary Chinese literature.
Please join us in store on June 27th, where we will host a meeting for open discourse about translation and world literature! Copies of the book are now available in store for purchase, so come get one ASAP! This event is open to all; masks are required (they will be provided for free at the door).