Literary return to school | Ten Quebec titles to add to your pile

Have you already gone through all the books you brought back from the bookstore on August 12? We don’t believe you. Either way, there’s never a bad reason to add one (or two, or four) to the pile that’s threatening to topple over on your nightstand. Overview of the start of the school year in novels, short stories and stories from here.

The uncanny valleyJD Kurtness

Aquariums, his previous book published in 2019, was described as anticipatory fiction, because it represented humanity grappling with an epidemic of unprecedented virulence. This therefore shows the extent to which we must be wary of the literary prophecies of JD Kurtness, who, in this third novel, imagines in the proverbially near future a Quebec company marketing small robots that look like children. Following a popular protest movement which saw these toys banned, one of these artificial kids, named Sim, had to take refuge in the countryside, with a farmer. “A modern-day Pinocchio,” they say.

September 19

A stormy nightYves Beauchemin

At 82 years old, and with a dark sense of humor clearly intact, Yves Beauchemin warns thatA stormy night will most likely constitute the end point of his generous work begun 50 years ago, because “writing senile is pathetic. Writing dead, extremely difficult.” Difficult to contradict him. The author of Cat and of Juliette Pomerleaumaster of the popular novel in its noblest expression, recounts in this potential last work the meeting between a man who had a nasty fall on an icy sidewalk and a dazed emergency doctor, who believes he recognizes in this patient his brother for a long time gone.

September 26

Havre-Saint-PierreAbla Farhoud

Quebec literature lost one of its most endearing women in December 2021. Both in the city and between the pages of his books, Abla Farhoud will have embodied empathy, humor and curiosity towards his neighbor. Her final work returns to the form of the choral novel, which she masterfully embraced in 2005 in Crazy Omar and in 2017 in In the bright sun hide your daughters. Havre-Saint-Pierre thus encounters the voices of two aging brothers, who go on a pilgrimage in the footsteps of their sister, who died five decades previously. The writer’s daughter and eternal first reader, Alecka, supervised the editing work.

September 27

A lake in the morningLouis Hamelin

After John James Aubudon naturalized him, to whom he gave flesh in Twilight of the Yellowstone (2021), Louis Hamelin goes back again to the 19th^e century, the time of a novel dedicated to Henry David Thoreau. Allergic to idealized versions of history with a capital H, the author of The rage highlights the contradictions of one of the American thinkers still having the most influence on the contemporary life of ideas. His story Walden or life in the woodschronicle of the two years, two months and two days that he lived in a cabin in the woods, obviously remains a bible for the environmental movement, as well as for the proponents of voluntary simplicity.

October 3

Of hells and childrenLarry Tremblay

It goes without saying that children should be able to grow up free from all violence, but the world being what it is, kids are torn away from the blanket of their innocence every day by tragedy, war and injustice. It is partly around this idea that Larry Tremblay constructed his unforgettable novel in 2016 The orange grove. A breeding ground from which he draws again between the pages of this collection of five short stories (or to use the chic term used by his publishing house, five “paintings”), guided by a dizzying question: “Why does it happen? Do childhood and hell share the same season? »

October 4

Destiny is othersClaudine Bourbonnais

Almost ten years later Métis Beach, first novel acclaimed by critics and the public, Claudine Bourbonnais strips herself of the screen of fiction and embraces her own self in this story constructed from three personal memories. Between London, where she studied political science, Egypt, where she stayed for a summer to learn Arabic, and Montreal, where she discovered the true identity of a former classmate arrested during their transition to university, the head of the antenna Weekend newscast explores the fertile intersection between truth and memory. Intriguing.

October 17

QimmikMichel Jean

In Tiohtiá:ke (2022), Michel Jean walked the distress-studded sidewalks of Montreal. He is now flying to Nunavik with Qimmik. The Innu writer recounts both the love between Saullu and Ulaajuk, who travel miles of ice and snow in the company of their dogs, and a few decades later, the thirst for justice of a non-indigenous lawyer called to defend an Inuk accused of murdering former police officers. But as is the case with several of his novels, including Kukumit is implicitly the story of a vast territory – a place of freedom and dispossession – that the journalist recounts here.

October 18

File a complaintLéa Clermont-Dion

Four long years, that’s all the time – anxiety-inducing, nagging, interminable – that the legal process in which Léa Clermont-Dion engaged in in October 2017 will last, by filing a complaint against her former boss for sexual assault. File a complaintit is also the title of the book that the documentarian (I salute you bitch, Janette and daughters) drew from this experience which was beginning as the #metoo movement liberated words hitherto swallowed in shame throughout the West. An autobiographical investigation, somewhere between essay and story, which is promised “radical honesty” and a “fierce desire to do useful work”.

October 24

Bitumen and windVincent Vallières

We knew he was gifted at making characters appear using a handful of finely chosen words and a few guitar chords. But it is another kind of storyteller that Vincent Vallières revealed during his last solo tour, by publishing short road stories on social networks, all crossed by the conviction that as the title of his most recent album hopes , All beauty is not lost. These snapshots written at the level of a man and a woman, so many antidotes to the ambient mess, are finally put together under the same cover which, it is specified, will also contain many previously unpublished pieces.

October 23

KanatuutNatasha Kanapé Fontaine

Indigenous literatures have been shining for several years now, not only for their excitement, but also for the diversity of the texts they bring to the world. After a detour through the world of music with his incandescent minialbum Nui Pimuten, the essential Natasha Kanapé Fontaine returns to writing in this first collection of short stories subtitled “The Huntress”. The Innu novelist and poet announces a book pulsing to the rhythm of a “merciless territory”, a work made of “surrealism, magical realism, dreamlike, fantastic or real creatures from oral tradition and spirits of the ‘ancestral animism’.

1^er november