“I know one thing I wanted was to write about an intelligent person who doesn’t have money; usually, the kinds of characters who get to have existential worries are middle-class types, while working-class people deal with external challenges, say, oppression by social and natural phenomena.”

We get into class and representation towards the end of the interview — a subject that there’s so much more to say about.

You can hear my interview with Demers below (or subscribe to “Books Rational” through Itunes, and also get older interviews with Hiromi Goto, Aaron Peck, & others).

Here is the advanced praise:

“Charles Demers writes wittily, unguardedly, and often downright scandalously, until he arrives, in The Prescription Errors, with a novel that is as much about an individual’s uneasy condition as it is about a society’s deeper illness. Read this book if you’re prepared for fiction’s equivalent to a raucous stand-up performance, if you’re prepared for a merciless send-up of social pieties, and most of all, if you’re prepared to confront and enjoy the strangest of symptoms.”— David Chariandy

“The Prescription Errors is a thoughtful, hilarious and deeply engaged novel. Charles Demers’ many obsessions make for compulsive reading.” — John K. Samson

“An impressive debut in fiction.” — George Fetherling

“With this book, Charles Demers has written a complicated love letter to Vancouver. The Prescription Errors is as filled with debilitating insecurities, troubled relationship histories and affirmation of the power of community as the city itself. I read it on a trip and it made me homesick for the city I so love/hate.”— Morgan Brayton

Demers will also be launching a book of non-fiction, Vancouver Special (Arsenal), which is highly anticipated. Oh, and there’ll be refreshments, short readings from each book and, of course, books for sale!

Cafe Rhizome,
317 East Broadway (just east of Kingsway),
Thursday November 26th, 7:30 p.m.

]]> http://annestone.net/2009/11/05/charles-demers-double-book-launch/feed/ 0 http://annestone.net/2009/03/22/book-talk-with-sampirisi-and-peck/ http://annestone.net/2009/03/22/book-talk-with-sampirisi-and-peck/#comments Sun, 22 Mar 2009 00:41:46 +0000 admin http://annestone.net/lately/2009/03/22/book-talk-with-sampirisi-and-peck/ It looks like I may be doing a semi-regular feature on books at Co-op Radio’s Arts Rational: Thursdays, 9-10 p.m. on CFRO 102.7. (Who better to talk books with visiting writers than a sleep-deprived new mom?) Once a month or so, if all goes accordingly, I’ll drop in to the show and review a book or interview an author.

This past Thursday, host Megan Turnbull and I interviewed Jenny Sampirisi and Aaron Peck about their debut novels. (I got fancy and, after downloading and parsing the archive, pasted together some freeware sound effects, creating a little sound-scape introduction for such episodes — ahh, the things one can accomplish when baby sleeps).

Sampirisi is the second writer I’ve edited for the Wayside/Serotonin imprint (shared with JP Fiorentino). This is a tight, dense, and complex work, lovely in its use of language, and frightening in its implications. Read this book. The launch will feature Sampirisi reading from her novel, as well as an interview conducted by Jude MacDonald (the author of Grey: Stories and Jane — another highly recommended book).

ABOUT THE BOOK:

Set in the media-saturated 1980s, when images of missing children first occupied the public imagination, is/was explores one town’s complex emotional reaction to the brutal rape and murder of a child within its bounds.

It is October 1983 and eight-year-old Abigail Wren has gone missing from a tiny Ontario town. In the crosscuts and fragments of each day’s news, word of the abduction filters into the troubled Fitch family household. Roland Fitch becomes unhinged by long kept secrets, while his wife Eva, turns inwards, tracing the aftermath of her own surgically precise loss. In the days and weeks following Abigail Wren’s death, the Fitch children, Andrew and Isabel, are increasingly left to parent themselves. As the already tenuous boundaries between family members are slowly effaced, once solid definitions – of the child, the adult, and the body – come unmoored.

At its core, is/was is an unflinching meditation set at the very edge of human limits. Boundaries of language, media, and the body itself transform to hold the complex currents of lust and absence. This investigative first novel is never reductive, but with subtlety and nuance, unfolds the terrible trajectory of loss.

PRAISE FOR IS/WAS

is/was is a shattering portrait of the psychological effects on one family of sudden and inexplicable violence. Jenny Sampirisi evokes dissociated states of mind and blocked communication with impressive precision. Tuned in to the body and its almost alternate life, this narrative pulls the reader into the gradually unfolding suspense of suspended knowing.
— Daphne Marlatt, author of Taken and Ana Historic

is/was explores loss in its immensity, but it rivets us, always, to its world of details. To the micro-rituals of conduct during periods of duress. To the concreteness of words on the page and the capillary routes of the sentence. Jenny Sampirisi is at once a marvelously fearless and disciplined writer.
– David Chariandy, author of Soucouyant

In the Canadian experimental lineage of Atom Egoyan’s film Exotica, Lynn Crosbie’s poetry Missing Children and Gail Scott’s novel Main Brides, this searing story of a bereft family at its core searches to reunite pain’s palimpsest with its fleshed healing. Sampirisi keenly makes us ache for a renewed stab at what was and can be.
– Margaret Christakos, author of Excessive Love Prosthesis and What Stirs

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jenny Sampirisi is a poet, prose writer and editor. She is the managing editor for BookThug and facilitates the online vispo journal, Other Cl/utter. She teaches English at Ryerson University where she runs the Ryerson Reading Series. She is also an executive member of the Scream Literary Festival. Her first novel, is/was (Insomniac Press 2008) explores the flexible boundaries of language, media, and the body.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
Jude MacDonald is the author of Jane (1999) and Grey: Stories for Grown-Ups (2001) and the editor of section15.ca.

My plan with Wayside Editions is to focus on exciting first books. Louis was the first of these, and I’m very happy to see this long over-due book come into existence. When I approached him last spring, I had his shorts in mind, those lovely little “true stories” books he’d put out over the 90s, like “Fly vs. Kitten.” Louis, though, had something more ambitious in mind and from the stories I loved and some I hadn’t yet seen, wove together a wonderful novel. If you’re in or around Montreal, don’t miss this launch.

October 23rd.
6 to 10 p.m. (followed by special guest DJs)
Casa del Popolo
4873 St. Laurent

The Montreal Review of Books has a big profile of Louis and his book. Check it out.

If you’re in Vancouver, though, you might want to drop by Spartacus at 7 p.m. and hear Reg Johanson, Larissa Lai, Lora McElhinney, Sachiko Murakami, and Renee Rodin. They’ll be reading as part of the launch of West Coast Line 53: Representations of Murdered and Missing Women.

As for the imprint, next fall will see the publication of a brilliant and experimental novel by Jenny Sampirisi. Can’t wait.