Friday, May 6, 2011 at 7:00 p.m.
Admission by $5 donation to Give For Greatness
Talking Leaves…Books & Hallwalls present
Book Signing & Reading
Award-winning young Canadian writer Alexander MacLeod will read with seasoned US writer Clark Blaise, whom the New York Times has called a "born storyteller." While MacLeod's characters channel the divide between Canada and the United States, Blaise's suite of linked stories grapple with the realities of globalization and the changing nature of race relations in a post-9/11 world.
Light Lifting: Stories by Alexander MacLeod
"To read each story in this gorgeous collection is to live a series of rich and dangerous lives along the Canadian-Michigan border…MacLeod is a literary rock star, and his prose is wise and rowdy music. I will recommend this book to everyone" (Bonnie Jo Campbell, author of American Salvage & Once Upon a River).
"These stories offer a real pleasure…they contain a rare kind of truthfulness" (Colm Tóibín, author of The Empty Family).
The Meagre Tarmac: Stories by Clark Blaise
"Top work from a master storyteller and border-crosser" (Margaret Atwood).
"Clark Blaise's brilliantly imagined The Meagre Tarmac is a novel in short-story form, warmly intimate, startling in its quick jumps and revelations, a portrait of individuals for whom we come to care deeply—and a portrait of an Indo-American way of life that shimmers before our eyes with the rich and compelling detail for which Clark Blaise's fiction is renowned.…a remarkable accomplishment" (Joyce Carol Oates).
About Light Lifting and Alexander MacLeod
:
"A brilliant collection without a weak link" (Quill & Quire).
"MacLeod's straight-up themes of endurance and frailty, boyish transgression or gnawing mid-life regret, unfold without a trace of cliché or sentiment. Muscular and uniquely voiced, these stories swim entirely in their own waters" (Globe and Mail "Best Books of the Year" citation).
"Few authors…have delved so deeply into the workplaces of [the] working-class as MacLeod, and the characters he finds there are as rich and complex as any of the cerebral exotics that populate the work of Ondaatje, Urquhart, and Atwood" (Toronto Star).
Shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Commonwealth Prize, the Atlantic Book Awards, and named a best book of the year by the Globe and Mail, Quill & Quire, and Amazon (Canada), Light Lifting marks the debut of an exceptional writer. Here two young, long-distance runners race a cargo train through the darkness of a rat-infested tunnel beneath the Detroit River. A drug store bicycle courier crosses a forbidden threshhold in an attempt to save a life, a young swimmer conquers her fear of water only to discover she's caught in far more dangerous currents, and an autoworker tries to separate his life from the internal combustion engine forever after losing his family in a car accident.
The son of novelist Alistair MacLeod, Alexander MacLeod is a writer whose stories "swim entirely in their own waters" (Globe and Mail) Light Lifting, his celebrated first collection, offers us a suite of darkly urban and unflinching elegies that explore the depths of the psyche and channel the divide between Canada and the United States.
Alexander MacLeod was born in Inverness, Cape Breton and raised in Windsor, Ontario, just across the river from Detroit, Michigan. He holds degrees from the University of Windsor, the University of Notre Dame, and McGill. MacLeod now lives in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia and teaches at Saint Mary's University in Halifax.
Photo credit: Heather Crosby
First U.S. publication: April 2011 / ISBN: 978-1-897231-94-4/ Trade Paperback Original / $16.95 / 224 pages
READ MORE: Alexander MacLeod on growing up on the Detroit border, being an athlete, and the power of the short story (from the Toronto Star)
WATCH: Alexander MacLeod on lonliness and the publishing process (from Studio 4 with Fanny Kiefer)