Ordinary commitmentsMélikah Abdelmoumen
“It’s about refusing, together, this supposedly reasonable and pragmatic idea according to which improving our world is absolutely impossible. To refuse to believe that which is is immutable,” writes Mélikah Abdelmoumen in Ordinary commitments. As those who have read his moving story know Twelve years in France (2008), in which it was notably a question of the help that she has long offered to Roma families in Lyon, the author of Baldwin, Styron and me is not the type to let himself be stopped by the supposed pragmatism of the Aquoibonists. In this brief but rich essay she pays homage to the women of her lineage, these anonymous people whose commitment is generally described as ordinary, even if there is never anything ordinary in this desire to make life sweeter. life of his neighbor.
October 5
Ordinary commitments
Workshop 10
89 pages
Godin, Jonathan Livernois
Despite “all the reasons in the world that he would have/to stop/to give up”, as he wrote in his “Tango de Montréal”, Gérald Godin never stopped fighting for a world to come freed from the weight of injustice. A ubiquitous character in the cultural and political worlds of Quebec, the deputy-poet finally finds in Jonathan Livernois a biographer courageous enough to take on the gigantic task that the telling of a life which, even if it was interrupted, undoubtedly represented too early (55 years), seems to have contained several. To accomplish this colossal task, the professor from Laval University spoke with the man’s relatives, in addition to having been able to draw on his family archives and other unpublished documents.
October 5
Godin
Lux
544 pages
Liberate the citiesMaxime Pedneaud-Jobin
“Municipalities could become drivers for in-depth changes in areas as important as the climate crisis, access to culture, the integration of immigrants and the well-being of families,” Maxime Pedneaud-Jobin firmly believes. The problem, according to the former mayor of Gatineau and collaborator at The Press ? Quebec cities are subject to a legal and fiscal framework worthy of a straitjacket, imposing too many constraints on their field of jurisdiction. A “hard-hitting” essay, we warn, driven by the hope of a reform that would allow municipal governments to speak on an equal footing with their provincial and federal counterparts.
October 11
Liberate the cities
X Y Z
136 pages
Off-sideFlorence-Agathe Dubé-Moreau
In 2014, Florence-Agathe Dubé-Moreau’s life partner, a certain Laurent Duvernay-Tardif, was drafted by the Kansas City Chiefs. What the independent curator of contemporary art will discover, by going behind the scenes of this singular microsome, will profoundly change her “view of the impact of sport in the fight for gender equality”. In this “cultural and feminist chronicle on the professional sports industry”, the committed intellectual undermines the myths that stick to women evolving in an environment where, although they are less and less reduced to the strict role of spectators swooning or cheerleading, many stereotypes still die hard.
October 24
Off-side
Editions du agitation
244 pages
The notch and durationNicole Brossard
Sprawling, insightful, irreducible; The work of Nicole Brossard is among the most important in Quebec literature, prefiguring a formal hybridity which is flourishing more than ever among authors of Generation Y and Z. Although her books rarely correspond to a single literary genre – the essay being always a bit of a poem, the novel a bit of an essay, and so on – it is Nicole Brossard the essayist who celebrates this “sum which is both scholarly and delightful”, bringing together texts published by different brands over the years. Last 50 years. Translation, lesbianism, feminism, visual arts and cinema; this anthology developed by Chloé Savoie-Bernard and Karim Larose comes at the right time to highlight the 80e birthday (November 27) of an architect of contemporary intellectual life.
October 31
The notch and duration
Boreal
360 pages
Donato: blue on the spotStanley Péan
What is the difference between a good musician and a very good musician? we asked jazzman Michel Donato in July 2022, as he prepared to celebrate his 80th birthday. “It’s like sport,” he replied. “There are hockey players and there is Maurice Richard. A very good musician, everything he does looks easy. When Lemieux outwits three guys, you feel like you could do it too. » The Maurice Richard of the double bass, who shared the stage with Bill Evans, Dizzy Gillespie and Oscar Peterson, in addition to accompanying Ginette Reno and Félix Leclerc in the studio, spoke for several years to the writer, host and jazzophile Stanley Péan, who signed this biography which is said to be worthy of a real novel.
November 15
Donato: blue on the spot
Hands free
402 pages