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Double Book Launch: Social Fiction and Like Every Form of Love
22 August at 19:00
Tuesday, August 22, 7 pm
La Petite Librairie Drawn & Quarterly (176 Bernard Ouest, Montreal)
Free Admission
Join Padma Viswanathan and Geoffrey Brock at La Petite Librairie Drawn & Quarterly at 176 rue Bernard O at 7 pm on Tuesday, August 22nd for the launch of Social Fiction and Like Every Form of Love! The evening will feature a reading, a conversation, a Q&A and a signing.
The event is free and open to all. Books will be available for purchase at the event and the authors will sign copies of their books.
Please note that all guests are encouraged to wear masks at this event. Masks will be available free of charge upon entry.
About Like Every Form of Love
From the Scotiabank Giller Prize finalist, a gripping exploration of class, race, friendship, sexuality, what an author owes her subject and what it means to be a good person—all wrapped up in a riveting Canadian true crime story.
Padma Viswanathan was staying on a houseboat on Vancouver Island when she struck up a friendship with a warm-hearted, working-class queer man named Phillip, who told her a story that kept them connected for more than twenty years. Phillip was the son of a severe, abusive man named Harvey, a miner, farmer and communist; his stepmother, Del, was a convicted bank robber who had violated her parole and was suspected in her ex-husband’s murder. Phillip had long since lost track of Del, but when Padma said she’d like to write about her and about his own young life, he eagerly agreed. Quickly, though, Padma’s research uncovered hidden truths about these larger-than-real-life characters. Watching the effects on Phillip as these secrets, evasions and traumas came to light, she increasingly feared that when it came to the book or the friendship, only one of them would get out of this process alive.
Padma Viswanathan is the author of two novels: The Toss of a Lemon (2008), published in eight countries and shortlisted for the Pen Center USA Fiction Prize, the Amazon.ca First Novel Prize, and others, traced sixty years in the lives of a young Indian widow and her gay manservant. In her second novel, The Ever After of Ashwin Rao (2014), a cranky Indian psychologist comes to Canada to do what he calls a ‘study of comparative grief,’ tracing the effects of a real-life 1985 jet bombing. It was also published internationally and a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Her stories, essays and short translations have appeared in Granta, The Boston Review, BRICK, and elsewhere. Her translation of the novel São Bernardo, by the Brazilian novelist Graciliano Ramos, was published in 2020 by New York Review Books on their Classics series. Born in BC and raised in Edmonton, she now divides her time between Montreal, Quebec, and Fayetteville, Arkansas, where she is Professor of Fiction at the University of Arkansas and founder of the Arkansas International Writer-at-Risk Residency Program.
About Social Fiction
Appearing together in English for the first time, three politically charged sci-fi graphic novellas by a pioneering comics artist, translated from the French by Geoffrey Brock.
An anonymous official chides a man under surveillance for stepping out of view of a security camera; visitors to an underground mall are forced to form a new society after an apparent nuclear strike; newlyweds living in an authoritarian city attempt to navigate the insidious hurdles of being permitted to have a child; and a Puerto Rican boxer discovers that segregation continues in America long after death.
These are the visions of Chantal Montellier, a contributor to the legendary Métal Hurlant and the creator of some of the most striking and stirring science fiction comics of the 1970s and 1980s.
Geoffrey Brock is an American poet and translator. He is the author of three books of poems, the editor of The FSG Book of 20th-Century Italian Poetry, and the translator of various books of poetry, prose, and comics, mostly from Italian. His poems have appeared in journals including Poetry magazine, Paris Review, Copper Nickel, Yale Review, and Best American Poetry. His awards include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets. His translations have received ALTA’s National Translation Award for Poetry, the Raiziss/de Palchi Book Prize, the MLA’s Lois Roth Award, the PEN Center USA Translation Prize, the ATA’s Lewis Galantière Translation Award, and Poetry magazine’s John Frederick Nims Prize. Since 2006 he has taught in the University of Arkansas’s Program in Creative Writing & Translation, where he is the founding editor of The Arkansas International magazine.
Chantal Montellier is a French novelist, painter, and comics creator. Montellier began working as an editorial cartoonist in 1972, with work appearing in newspapers and magazines such as Politis, L’Humanité, and Marianne. A contributor to the renowned comics magazine Métal Hurlant and one of the most active female comics creators in France, Montellier is known for her realist drawing style and her engagement with political and feminist themes in her work.
La Petite Drawn and Quarterly Accessibility information:
- Attendees are encouraged to wear masks
- Event space uses StopGap.ca ramps in an effort to encourage accessibility. Both the step at the entrance, followed by a half step and a door have StopGap ramps. The door opens inward and is not automated. Once inside, there are no additional steps.
- It is not a sober space; events sometimes offer alcohol.
- Please email events@drawnandquarterly.com if you have any questions!