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Liem, McDonald, & Hernández-Ramdwar: 3 WOTS Guest Authors on What They're Reading at the Festival & Why

Liem, McDonald, & Hernández-Ramdwar: 3 WOTS Guest Authors on What They're Reading at the Festival & Why

This weekend, The Word on the Street will take over Queen's Park in Toronto to bring together over 100 writers and creators for two full days of literary celebrations. There will be panel discussions, ...

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Writer in Residence

Geoffrey Morrison’s latest book

Falling Hour

Falling Hour

All talk, no action: The Mezzanine meets Ducks, Newburyport in this meandering and captivating debut

It’s a hot summer night, and Hugh Dalgarno, a 31-year-old clerical worker, thinks his brain is broken. Over the course of a day and night in an uncannily depopulated public park, he will sift through the pieces and traverse the baroque landscape of his own thoughts: the theology of nosiness, the beauty of the arbutus tree, the pathos of Gene Hackman, the theory of quantum immortality, Louis Riel’s letter to an Irish newspaper, the baleful influence of Calvinism on the Scottish working class, the sea, the CIA, and, ultimately, thinking itself and how it may be represented in writing. The result is a strange, meandering sojourn, as if the history-haunted landscapes of W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn were shrunk down to a mere 85 acres.

These digressions are anchored by remarks from the letters of Keats, by snatches of lyrics from Irish rebel songs and Scottish folk ballads, and, above all else, by the world-shattering call of the red-winged blackbird.

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Vikki VanSickle
Vikki VanSickle

More Funny Books, Please!