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Jul 13th, 2014, 9:06 pm
Three novels in the Soifs series by Marie-Claire Blais, Nigel Spencer (Trans.) (#03-5)
Requirements: ePUB reader | 973KB
Overview: MARIE-CLAIRE BLAIS is the world-renowned author of more than twenty-five books. She is a four-time winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction and has also been awarded the Athanase-David Prize, the Gilles-Corbeil Prize, the Blue Metropolis Achievement Award, the Molson Prize, and several Guggenheim Fellowships. She is also the patroness of a recently initiated prize for young authors as part of a Québec-France exchange. She resides principally in Florida and travels extensively.

With the novels featured here, Blais delivers her third through fifth volumes in her prize-winning series the Soifs - acclaimed as one of the greatest undertakings in modern Quebec fiction. The series began with Soifs (These Festive Nights) and was followed by Thunder and Light. Neither of these titles have been published in digital form.
Genre: Contemporary Literature

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3. Augustino and the Choir of Destruction
This third novel in Blais' series is set on an island in the Gulf of Mexico that is home to the full spectrum of humanity: the rich, the poor, the powerful, the humble, artists, criminals.

With her unique, signature use of punctuation, Marie-Claire Blais manages to brilliantly show in one flashing stroke men and women; victims and tormentors; child kamikaze pilots and petty thieves from Bahama Street; Charles, a great poet cut down by AIDS; Cinderella, a transvestite prostituting himself to a customer at the Porte du Baiser saloon; Caroline, an artist and photographer who has seen all the hidden treasures of the world; and Augustino, a clairvoyant child-writer. These individual destinies combine in Blais' vision to form a single harmonic texture.

4. Rebecca, Born in the Maelstrom
With this astounding fourth novel in her ongoing series of contemporary masterpieces, Marie-Claire Blais invites us again to enter a complex circle of unforgettable characters. But this time, the tone is different: Blais’ writing has acquired a new, buoyant, electrifying rhythm, one described as "the heartbeat of the world."

As we follow a central character named Rebecca, the voice in the novel becomes the voice of the world inventing itself, and the future playing itself out. Here Nigel Spencer, Marie-Claire Blais’ longtime translator, gives us Blais’ singular vision in supple English prose that is as transcendent and nuanced as the original French.

5. Mai at the Predators' Ball
A mesmerizing and unforgettable portrait of imaginary beings who seem to embrace the whole of humanity.

Every night in the Saloon, after darkness falls, a group of boys are transformed into creatures we see only in dreams. They adorn themselves in colourful dresses and wigs and they take to the stage to sing and dance. They open their arms to those who are excluded — both men and women, triumphant and threatened, both free and bound — and every evening is a carnival of freedom and transgression.

With this masterful novel, Blais invites us to share the drama of perfect joy, the tragedy of happiness, and she gives us her best work yet.

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Jul 13th, 2014, 9:06 pm

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