About this Event
Please join us in person on Tuesday, May 14th at 7:00pm central to help celebrate Diego Gerard Morrison's new novel,Pages of Mourning. Diego will be in conversation with Exile MVP Maryse Meijer!
About Pages of Mourning:
Pages of Mourning is a stunning achievement, a pioneering and inventive novel that confronts family history, creativity, Magical Realism, and the impact of violence from Mexico's drug war, by a magnificent new talent in Diego Gerard Morrison.
It's 2017 and the crisis of forced disappearances has reached a tipping point after 43 docent students disappeared and are feared dead. Aureliano Más the Second is a fledgling writer at a lucrative fellowship in Mexico City chaired by his aunt, Rose. When Aureliano was very young, his mother left without reason or trace. Aureliano is attempting to write a novel that mirrors his mother's unexplained disappearance while shattering Magical Realism as a genre in the process. It doesn't help though, that he's named after the protagonist of a touchstone of the Magical Realist canon, and raised in the mythical town of Comala.
Aureliano searches for insight and closure from his father and from Rose, who grappled with his mother's disappearance through a failed novel of her own. Their stories lead back to the 1980's and the burgeoning drug trade, as Rose and Aureliano's mother journey as young runaways throughout the Mexican countryside. Meanwhile, Aureliano's addictions and the overwhelming burden of the past threaten his tenuous position at the fellowship, just as a deadly earthquake strikes Mexico City on the exact same date as a legendary earthquake struck in 1985.
Pages of Mourning is a daring, captivating, darkly funny novel that grapples with uncertainty and loss in a land of violence and superstition, while questioning whether Magical Realism as a genre is capable of confronting the brutal dissonance of a country that awaits the return of the missing while not wholly acknowledging their death. Monumental, lyrical, and engrossing, Pages of Mourning is a towering accomplishment by one of the most exciting new writers at work today.
About the authors:
Diego Gerard Morrison (Mexico City, 1984) is a writer, editor and translator whose recent work explores themes of Magical Realism and appropriation in the context of the Mexican drug war. He is the author of The Wait, an appropriation of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in a setting of Mexican cartel violence and its resulting crisis of forced disappearances. His debut novel, Myth of Pterygium was the winner of the Rising Prize in Fiction. He is the cofounder and fiction editor of diSONARE, an editorial project based in Mexico City. He lives in Mexico City.
Maryse Meijer is the author of Heartbreaker, Rag, Northwood, and her most recent, The Seventh Mansion. She lives in Chicago.
About this event:
This is a free, in person event and registration is required. Please click on the link below to register for free. Diego and Maryse will be happy to sign/personalize copies of their books after the event! Can't make it to the event? Signed copies will be available in store and online after the event.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Exile in Bookville, 410 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, United States
USD 0.00
