The Sound and the Fury with Russell Smith, Neil Smith and Sean Michaels, featuring new music by Mike Dubue
Hosted by Michael Blouin
From the glittery brightness of New York in the 1920s to the leaden cold of the Soviet Union under Stalin, the grace of Michaels’s style makes these times and places seem entirely new. He succeeds at one of the hardest things a writer can do: he makes music seem to sing from the pages of a novel.
Join us for a celebration of creativity—a taste of three exceptional books, a conversation with three talented authors and three specially commissioned songs based on their work by HILTOTRONS front-man Mike Dubue.
In Russell Smith’s darkly brilliant new collection of short stories Confidence, the reader will be introduced to ecstasy-taking PhD students; financial traders desperate for husbands; owners of failing sex stores; violent and unremovable tenants; aggressive raccoons; seedy massage parlours; experimental filmmakers who record every second of their day; wives who blog insults directed at their husbands.
In Neil Smith’s Boo, a young boy has a tragic accident, and wakes up to find himself in a very strange sort of heaven: a town populated only by 13-year-old Americans. While he desperately wants to apply the scientific method to find out how this heaven works (broken glass grows back; flashlights glow without batteries; garbage chutes plummet to nowhere), he’s confronted by the greatest mystery of all—his peers.
Giller Prize winner Sean Michaels may now live in Montreal, but he grew up right here in Ottawa, so we’re thrilled to welcome home the author of Us Conductors. Inspired by the true life and loves of the famed Russian scientist, inventor and spy, Lev Termen –creator of the Theremin. Like Termen’s own life, it is steeped in beauty, wonder and looping heartbreak. For what else is love, but the greatest invention of all?