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Date With Destiny
Hélène Rioux and Jonathan Kaplansky (Translator)
Guernica Editions, Fall 2016
128 pages
Trade Paperback
ISBN13: 9781771831024
ISBN10: 1771831022
English
Translated from the French
$6.95 Canada, $6.95 US
Read more from the Essential Translations Series
In this collection of ten short stories, the main characters -- women between the ages of 13 to 88 -- see death appear suddenly in their daily lives: in the pages of a novel written by a former lover, in a farewell letter abandoned on a living room coffee table, in the memory of a first love. Although disturbing in their truth, these stories are written in luminous prose that reconciles us -- almost -- with that ultimate rendezvous, our own Date With Destiny.
The teenager scans the landscape. Outside, the sun calls to her: her salmon-coloured bathing suit lies on the bed. She got it for her birthday. Salmon, what a colour! Her mother wanted to make her happy and her mother understands nothing -- From Anne ... Who Sees Nothing Coming
The author knows how to describe places and characters, making them live in an everyday-ness filled with music and reverie, as if to better lead her reader to the inevitable.
Jacques Allard, Le Devoir
Ms. Rioux knows how to effectively capture people, things, cities. She has a powerful sense of precision, of the details that give these stories a cinematic flavour.
Léon-Gérald Ferland, L’Express d’Outremont
Reviews
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Collection of short stories examines the way death changes our lives
This - February 22, 2017
Books by Hélène Rioux
Books by Jonathan Kaplansky