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Join us for the launch of critically acclaimed author Pamela Mordecai’s new short story collection, Two Days in Mayaro! Featuring an introduction by Nalo Hopkinson and an in-conversation with Neil Armstrong, this event is proudly presented by A Different Booklist and Goose Lane Editions.This unforgettable collection of stories of the Jamaican diaspora combines old time stories with the contemporary and showcases the struggles, triumphs, and humour of diaspora life, creating a world powered by unforgettable characters in language that sings.
This event is free and open to the public.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Pamela Mordecai is a Jamaican Canadian author whose first short story collection, Pink Icing, received rave reviews and whose debut novel, Red Jacket, was shortlisted for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Her work has been described as “brilliant” by Kamau Brathwaite and as “immaculately crafted” by Kwame Dawes and has been shortlisted for the James Tiptree Jr. Memorial Award (now the Otherwise Award) for writing in the speculative fiction or fantasy genre. She has written nine collections of poetry, including a trilogy about the life of Jesus in Jamaican Patwa (de book of Joseph, de book of Mary, and de Man) and a collection of new and selected poems, A Fierce Green Place. With her late husband, Martin, she also wrote a reference work called Culture and Customs of Jamaica. A recipient of the Institute of Jamaica’s Centenary and Bronze Medals for her contributions to Jamaican literature, she blogs at pamelamordecai.ca and writes the occasional critical essay. Two Days in Mayaro is her second collection of stories.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
A new collection of stories of the Jamaican diaspora by acclaimed poet and storyteller Pamela Mordecai. Mordecai combines old time stories with the contemporary and showcases the struggles, triumphs, and humour of diaspora life, creating a world powered by unforgettable characters in language that sings.
The characters in Two Days in Mayaro cope with the universal experiences of birth and death, home and belonging, reckoning with both their present and past. Only two months in Toronto, a young man gets in trouble at school for being restless and disruptive. A stone-throwing duppy smashes an elderly couple’s car window as they drive past a graveyard. A man in a nursing home looks back on two days on a beach with his then-wife and children and the lost chance of happiness.
In this multidimensional universe, Mordecai mixes Jamaican Patwa with standard English and profanity with reverence, making her characters all the more real by introducing uncanny detail at just the right moment or by turning confusion on its head to make us laugh. This is a world alive with sound, infused by lore, ancestry, and history.
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Event venue
A Different Booklist, 779 Bathurst St, Toronto, ON M5S 0B7, Canada
Tickets
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