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**UPDATE: NEW VENUE FOR MEETING**Join us for the next meeting of the Violet Hour Book Club, a reading group devoted to classic and contemporary works of 2S/LGBTQ+ literature. This month, we’re collaborating with Galerie SKOL and hosting our meeting in their space, alongside their current collective exhibition, Réveiller l'Androgyne. Reviving the Bookstore.
We’ll be meeting on Saturday, March 21, from 3 PM to 4:30 PM to discuss The Tiger and the Cosmonaut (2025) by Eddy Boudel Tan. Galerie SKOL is located in Montreal’s Belgo Building, 372 Ste-Catherine West St., #444 (an accessible venue). People are invited to come earlier or stay later to check out the artwork (SKOL Gallery is open from 12 to 5:30 PM on Saturdays).
Please note that the gallery will be open to the public during our meeting, so we might have a few people watching us from the sidelines as we spin our magic. In many ways I’d like to think of us as also being a part of the exhibit — “performing” our queer book club in a Montreal art gallery.
A reminder: All VHBC titles are available at Librairie Paragraphe Bookstore (2220, McGill College Ave) at 15% off and at Librairie Pulp Books & Cafe (3952 Wellington St.) at 10% off.
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION ///
This group exhibition brings together nine queer artists who each revisit L’Androgyne, Québec’s first gay, lesbian, and feminist bookstore, active from 1973 to 2002. Serving simultaneously as a site for the circulation of ideas, a space for encounters, and a hub of political engagement, the bookstore played a central role in shaping queer communities at a time when visible spaces of sociability were rare and often precarious.
Drawing on this legacy, the artists –who never experienced L’Androgyne as an active space– set in motion intergenerational transmission, offering traces in which erased narratives resurface. The exhibition thus examines the persistence of queer memory and considers how a place that no longer exists continues to generate meaning, connection, and collective forms of gathering. Participating artists include fernando belote, naakita f.k., Lou Fozin, Em Laferrière, Lucas LaRochelle, kimura byol lemoine, Flora Nwakobi, Joshua Schwebel, and Lou Sheppard.
ABOUT THE BOOK ///
A noirish page-turner about a mysterious disappearance and a moving portrait of a Chinese Canadian family navigating insecurities, expectations, and simmering anger in their small BC town.
Casper Han grew up the dutiful son of immigrants who never felt entirely welcome in their remote corner of British Columbia. Now an adult, living in Vancouver with a boyfriend whose privilege he quietly resents, Casper rarely returns to his hometown, the site of a grief his family doesn’t discuss: the loss of his twin brother, Sam.
Over twenty years have passed since Sam went missing, and a crisis brings Casper and his siblings back. Their father has vanished, only to be found wandering the vast woods beyond the family home, confused and clutching a pair of scissors, seemingly trapped in the memory of that tragic night. In order to move forward, the Han family must finally confront the past and untangle the mystery of what really happened to Sam.
Combining the atmosphere and intrigue of a cracking good suspense novel with the depth of a rich character study, The Tiger and the Cosmonaut tells the story of a family whose members have long made themselves small and quiet and obedient—and what happens when the cycle is finally broken.
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Event Venue
Centre Skol, 352 Rue Ste-Catherine O, Montréal, QC H3B 1A1, Canada, Montreal
Tickets
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