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Nicole Brossard News!!

Quebec lesbian author Nicole Brossard celebrates her 40th publishing anniversary. This month, Coach House Books will publish Yesterday, at the Hotel Clarendon the English translation of Brossard's 2001 novel, Hier. It's her first English novel in 8 years, and will be launched at the Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival on March 31.

I know, we're in Edmonton, she's in Montreal. Still, it's good news and worth mentioning in case you are planning to be in Montreal later this month! The event will feature readings of Brossard’s work in English and French by Martine Audet, Denise Desautels, Louise Forsyth, Alberto Manguel and Elise Turcotte, and a collaborative reading from Yesterday, at the Hotel Clarendon by Brossard and the novel's translator, Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood.

Yesterday, at the Hotel Clarendon is hailed by critics in Quebec as the synthesis of almost four decades of writing. According to Coach House, it is a meditation on time, death, desire and history, a novel whose backbone is formed by the relationship that develops between Carla Carlson and an unnamed narrator as they talk about childhood and parents and landscapes, about time and art, about Descartes and Francis Bacon and writing. Set against the grand backdrop of Quebec City, Yesterday, at the Hotel Clarendo interweaves the lives and conversations of four women into a kind of romantic art installation, a lively read in which life and death and the vertigo of ruins tangle themselves together to say something about history and desire.

Perhaps we should add it to our reading list.

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