If you love meeting talented writers and hearing them read from their published work, or just want to soak up a unique cultural experience, don’t miss the Canadian Writers in Person Lecture Series, which continues Oct. 26 with a reading from Emily St. John Mandel’s fifth novel, The Glass Hotel (Penguin Random House, 2021).
The series gives attendees an opportunity to get up close and personal with 11 authors who will present their work and answer questions. Canadian Writers in Person is a for-credit course for students and a free-admission event for members of the public. All readings take place at 7 p.m. on select Tuesday evenings via Zoom. Links for each reading can be found here.
St. John Mandel lives in New York City with her husband and daughter. Her four previous novels include Last Night In Montreal, The Singer’s Gun, The Lola Quartet and Station Eleven, which was a finalist for a National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and has been translated into 32 languages. Her latest novel, Sea of Tranquility, will be released in April 2022.
The Glass Hotel is set at the glittering intersection of two seemingly disparate events – the exposure of a massive criminal enterprise and the mysterious disappearance of a woman from a ship at sea. In this captivating story of crisis and survival, St. John Mandel takes readers through often hidden landscapes: campgrounds for the near-homeless, underground electronica clubs, service in luxury hotels and life in a federal prison. Rife with unexpected beauty, The Glass Hotel is a captivating portrait of greed and guilt, love and delusion, ghosts and unintended consequences, and the infinite ways we search for meaning in our lives.
This year’s Canadian Writers in Person Lecture Series lineup consists of a unique selection of emerging and established Canadian writers whose writing explores a broad range of topics and geographical and cultural landscapes. Featuring seasoned and emerging poets and fiction writers, the series highlights Canada’s ever-growing pool of literary talent.
Other readings scheduled in this series are:
- Nov. 9: Chantal Gibson, How She Read (Caitlin Press)
- Nov. 23: Ava Homa, Daughters of Smoke and Fire (HarperCollins Canada)
- Dec. 7: Katłįà (Catherine) Lafferty, Land-Water-Sky /Ndè–Tı–Yat’a (Fernwood Publishing)
2022
- Jan. 18: Thomas King, Suffrance (HarperCollins Canada)
- Feb. 1: Zsuzsi Gartner, The Beguiling (Penguin Random House Canada)
- Feb. 22: Rebecca Salazar, sulphurtongue (Penguin Random House Canada)
- March 8: Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Mexican Gothic (Penguin Random House)
- March 22: Louise B. Halfe/Sky Dancer, Burning in This Midnight Dream (Brick Books)
Canadian Writers in Person is a course offered in the Culture & Expression program in the Department of Humanities in York University’s Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies. For more information on the series, visit yorku.ca/laps/canwrite, or email Professor Gail Vanstone at gailv@yorku.ca or Professor Leslie Sanders at leslie@yorku.ca.