Writers fest website launches Sunday

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 19/09/2020 (2185 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When the Winnipeg International Writers Festival website goes live tomorrow it will allow audiences to take in more presentations than ever before in a variety of forms and genres.

With travel not an issue, plenty of out-of-town authors are taking part.

Fiction works on the agenda include A Russian Sister, a tragicomedy set in 19th-century Russia, by award-winning Vancouver author Caroline Adderson; Seven, a novel about a woman who travels to India and is caught between customs and traditions, by Toronto psychotherapist-novelist Farzana Doctor; Hurry Home, a suspense thriller about two estranged sisters and their dark secrets, by British Columbia writer Roz Nay (for a review of Hurry Home see page D5); Butter, Honey, Pig, Bread, a debut novel of food, family, trauma and forgiveness, by Nigerian-born Francesca Ekwuyasi; and Indians on Vacation, a satirical novel in which a couple’s holiday in Europe illustrates the collisions of European and Indigenous history, by Thomas King.

Non-fiction and autobiographical fiction on the agenda includes Five Little Indians, which chronicles the quest for healing and justice by residential school survivors, by lawyer and author Michelle Good; How to Lose Everything, a memoir of grief, loss and compassion, by performing and recording artist Christa Couture; On Pandemics, a user-friendly guide to pandemic diseases from the bubonic plague to today, by veterinarian epidemiologist David Waltner-Toews; and A Grain of Rice, a novel based on the author’s childhood experiences as a refugee from the Vietnam War, by physician-author Nhung N. Tran-Davies.

The festival’s dedicated website, thinairfestival.ca, goes live tomorrow.

● ● ●

Readers of the Daily Bonnet know they can rely on the online news source for comedic takes on Mennonite life, but not for factually accurate reporting of events.

Andrew Unger, the creator of the site, broke precedent recently by reporting news on the Bonnet that was literally, and not just figuratively, true — that his novel, Once Removed, will be published this month by Winnipeg’s Turnstone Press. The comic novel is the story of a ghostwriter torn between divided loyalties and threatened by bankruptcy when he takes on the task of updating a small Mennonite town’s local history book.

Unger cautions readers of the Daily Bonnet that “Once Removed won’t be available for fifty cents at your neighbourhood MCC Thrift Shop for a very long, long time yet, so you might as well purchase it at your local independent bookstore instead.”

● ● ●

The new work by American poet and novelist Ocean Vuong (On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous) is literally to die for.

He’s joining Margaret Atwood, David Mitchell, Karl Ove Knausgard and others in a project called the Future Library, in which 1,000 trees being planted near Oslo, Norway, will be harvested in 2114 to make paper so that the author’s specially commissioned work can be printed and read. Until then, not even the project’s co-ordinator will read them.

“So much of publishing is about seeing your name in the world, but this is the opposite, putting the future ghost of you forward,” Vuong told the Guardian. “You and I will have to die in order for us to get these texts.”

● ● ●

If using Latin signifies that you’re smart, what does using Latin incoherently signify?

That question was raised by the discovery that Fox News anchor Sean Hannity placed a Latin subtitle on his recent book that one reader described as “complete and utter gobbledygook.”

The book, Live Free or Die: America (and the World) on the Brink, originally had a Latin tagline reading “vivamus vel libero perit Americae,” which Hannity said means “live free or America dies,” but which doesn’t follow any of the complicated rules of Latin grammar.

After the “unintelligible word salad” was pointed out by classics students and professors, the latest printing of the book bears the grammatically correct Latin phrase “vivamus liberi ne America pereat.”

Presumably, “caveat emptor” was not considered.

booknewsbob@gmail.com