Character Studies with Jowita Bydlowska, Mary Morrissy and David Szalay
Hosted by Rhonda Douglas
In Person Fiction
Admission
Free
Saturday
Oct , 2016
22
6:30pm
Eastern
Christ Church Cathedral
414 Sparks Street • Ottawa
Profound, sometimes moving and often blackly comic, All That Man Is delights even as it unsettles. It’s another bravura performance from Szalay.
Three gifted storytellers delve into the nature of self, and the gulf between our inner lives and our place in the world. Join us for a taste of three remarkable novels and a conversation on the difference between who we are and what we do.
Guy, by Jowita Bydlowska, author of the bestselling memoir Drunk Mom, exposes the twisted thoughts of the misogynist bro next door. Guy is a successful talent agent who dates models, pop stars and women he meets on the beach. He’s a narcissistic, judgmental snob who is completely oblivious to his own lack of empathy, and his greatest talent is hiding it all…until he meets someone who challenges him in a way he’s never been challenged before.
All the characters in Prosperity Drive by Hennessy Award winner Mary Morrissy begin their journeys on a single suburban Dublin street, and everything eventually returns to it. It is an Ireland in miniature. The novel is laid out in stories, linked by characters who appear and disappear, bump into each other in chance encounters, and join up again through love, marriage or memory.
Tracing a dramatic arc from the spring of youth to the winter of old age, the ostensibly separate narratives of David Szalay’s All That Man Is–longlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize and winner of the 2016 Paris Review Plimpton Prize for Fiction–aggregate into a picture of a single shared existence, a picture that interrogates the state of modern manhood while bringing to life, unforgettably, the physical and emotional terrain of an increasingly globalized Europe. And so these nine lives form an ingenious and new kind of novel, in which David Szalay expertly plots a dark predicament for the twenty-first-century man.
Books available for purchase at every event: Proceeds support our free children’s literacy programs.
Guy, by Jowita Bydlowska, author of the bestselling memoir Drunk Mom, exposes the twisted thoughts of the misogynist bro next door. Guy is a successful talent agent who dates models, pop stars and women he meets on the beach. He’s a narcissistic, judgmental snob who is completely oblivious to his own lack of empathy, and his greatest talent is hiding it all…until he meets someone who challenges him in a way he’s never been challenged before.
All the characters in Prosperity Drive by Hennessy Award winner Mary Morrissy begin their journeys on a single suburban Dublin street, and everything eventually returns to it. It is an Ireland in miniature. The novel is laid out in stories, linked by characters who appear and disappear, bump into each other in chance encounters, and join up again through love, marriage or memory.
Tracing a dramatic arc from the spring of youth to the winter of old age, the ostensibly separate narratives of David Szalay’s All That Man Is–longlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize and winner of the 2016 Paris Review Plimpton Prize for Fiction–aggregate into a picture of a single shared existence, a picture that interrogates the state of modern manhood while bringing to life, unforgettably, the physical and emotional terrain of an increasingly globalized Europe. And so these nine lives form an ingenious and new kind of novel, in which David Szalay expertly plots a dark predicament for the twenty-first-century man.
Books available for purchase at every event: Proceeds support our free children’s literacy programs.
