Author Reading at Queen Books with Gary Barwin
info@queenbooks.ca
Join authors Gary Barwin and Steven Mayoff in Toronto for an afternoon of playful and provocative readings.
✷ The event will begin at 2pm and wrap up around 4pm.
✷ Queen Books is located at 914 Queen Street East in Toronto, Ontario. For more information about the venue, please visit their website: http://queenbooks.ca/
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
✷ Gary Barwin is a writer, composer and multidisciplinary artist and the author of twenty-six books including Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy, which won the Canadian Jewish Literary Award. His national bestselling novel Yiddish for Pirates won the Leacock Medal for Humour and the Canadian Jewish Literary Award, was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction and the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and was long-listed for Canada Reads. Though born in Northern Ireland to South African parents of Ashkenazi descent, Barwin lives in Hamilton, Ontario, and at garybarwin.com.
✷ Steven Mayoff (he/him) was born and raised in Montreal. His fiction and poetry have appeared in literary journals across Canada, the U.S. and abroad. He is the author of the story collection Fatted Calf Blues, winner of the 2010 PEI Book Award for Fiction; the novel Our Lady of Steerage; and two books of poetry Leonard’s Flat and Swinging Between Water and Stone. Steven lives in Foxley River, PEI. Learn more about Steven at stevenmayoff.ca.
ABOUT THE BOOKS
✷ IMAGINING IMAGINING: ESSAYS ON LANGUAGE, IDENTITY AND INFINITY BY GARY BARWIN (Non-fiction, 2023): Award-winning author Gary Barwin has written poems, novels and books for children. He’s composed music, created multimedia art and performed around the world. Now he has turned his talented pen to essays. In Imagining Imagining: Essays on Language, Identity and Infinity Barwin thinks deeply about big ideas: story and identity; art and death; how we communicate and why we dream. From his childhood home in Ireland to his long-time home in Hamilton, Barwin shares the thoughts that keep him up at night (literally) and the ideas that keep him creating. Filled with witty asides, wise stories and a generosity of spirit that is unmistakable, these are essays that readers will turn to again and again.
✷ THE ISLAND GOSPEL ACCORDING TO SAMSON GRIEF BY STEVEN MAYOFF (Fiction, 2023): Samson Grief, a reclusive painter in PEI struggling with a creative block, is confronted by three red-haired figments of his imagination in the form of Judas Iscariot, Fagin and Shylock. They claim to be messengers of “The Supreme One”, a genderless deity who has decreed PEI to be the new Promised Land and also wants Samson to build the Island’s first synagogue. Scared, confused, and seriously doubting his sanity, Samson eventually, though grudgingly, accepts the challenge amidst increasingly bizarre obstacles.
