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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
$15.00 Canada, $15.00 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
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
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
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