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We All Need to Eat by Alex Leslie Launch
November 8, 2018 @ 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Join Massy Books November 8th as we celebrate the launch of Alex Leslie’s We All Need to Eat. Come find out why Kirkus Reviews calls this new Bookhug release “a magnetic collection that must be read over and over.”
About We All Need to Eat:
We All Need to Eat is a collection of linked stories from award-winning author Alex Leslie that revolves around Soma, a young Queer woman in Vancouver. Through thoughtful and probing narratives, each story chronicles a sea change in Soma’s life. Lyrical, gritty, and atmospheric, Soma’s stories refuse to shy away from the contradictions inherent to human experience, exploring one young person’s journey through mourning, escapism, and the search for nourishment. The stories slipstream through Soma’s first three decades, surfacing at moments of knowing and intensity. The far-reaching impact and lasting reverberations of Soma’s family’s experience of the Holocaust scrapes up against the rise of Alt Right media. While going through a break-up in her thirties, Soma becomes addicted to weightlifting and navigates public mourning on Facebook. As a child, Soma struggles to cope with her mother’s
sorrow by becoming fixated on buying her a lamp for seasonal affective disorder. A friend’s suicide prompts a drinking game that takes mortality as its premise. But alongside the loss in Soma’s life is a pursuit of intimacy, resounding in the final story’s closing words: “Look me in the eye.”
“We All Need to Eat is a stunning inquiry into the sharpness of the world as it collides with the fragility – the ambiguities and possibilities – of the self. Alex Leslie is a tremendously gifted and compassionate writer. This bold and searing collection is a wonder.” —Madeleine Thien, Scotiabank Giller Prize winning
author of Do Not Say We Have Nothing.
About Alex Leslie:
Alex Leslie was born and lives in Vancouver. She is the author of the short story collection People Who Disappear (2012) which was nominated for the 2013 Lambda Literary Award for Debut Fiction
and a 2013 ReLit Award, as well as a collection of prose poems, The things I heard about you (2014), which was shortlisted for the 2014 Robert Kroestch Award for Innovative Poetry. Winner of
the 2015 Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ Emerging Writers, Alex’s short fiction has been included in the Journey Prize Anthology, The Best of Canadian Poetry in English, and in a special issue of Granta
spotlighting Canadian writing, co-edited by Madeleine Thien and Catherine Leroux.