small life: A Novel
Apr 2027 · Sold by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Ebook
160
Pages
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Eligible
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infoThis book will become available on April 27, 2027. You will not be charged until it is released.
About this ebook
A globe-spanning jigsaw puzzle of a novel about what it is to be human during this nervous, catastrophic moment in time.
Dionne Brand’s brief, powerful small life has the dazzling, hypnotic rhythm of a series of waves, tossing together multiple narrators and stories in time and space. The novel works through affective momentum, through gathering velocity, through multiplying and quickening voices and stories. None of these vividly alive characters know one another, but all exist inside this nervous moment in time.
Throughout the novel, characters’ voices recur in random ways, each around their own “small life.” Each person is in the middle of an action or a demand or a situation or a misunderstanding, and each is attempting to find a life, to know a life, to navigate the precarity of life. These lives are unfolding anywhere in the world: leaving the outskirts of Cartagena, working the streets of Madrid, caught in a toxic flood, hanging on to the edge of a boat in the Mediterranean, cleaning a stall in a North American airport, setting off to work on an oil platform, refusing eviction from an apartment. Their stories build and braid through inference, familiarity, and emotion—shock, realization, small joy—offering glimpses of the innermost workings of human beings in our contemporary, catastrophic zeitgeist.
Dionne Brand’s brief, powerful small life has the dazzling, hypnotic rhythm of a series of waves, tossing together multiple narrators and stories in time and space. The novel works through affective momentum, through gathering velocity, through multiplying and quickening voices and stories. None of these vividly alive characters know one another, but all exist inside this nervous moment in time.
Throughout the novel, characters’ voices recur in random ways, each around their own “small life.” Each person is in the middle of an action or a demand or a situation or a misunderstanding, and each is attempting to find a life, to know a life, to navigate the precarity of life. These lives are unfolding anywhere in the world: leaving the outskirts of Cartagena, working the streets of Madrid, caught in a toxic flood, hanging on to the edge of a boat in the Mediterranean, cleaning a stall in a North American airport, setting off to work on an oil platform, refusing eviction from an apartment. Their stories build and braid through inference, familiarity, and emotion—shock, realization, small joy—offering glimpses of the innermost workings of human beings in our contemporary, catastrophic zeitgeist.
A globe-spanning jigsaw puzzle of a novel about what it is to be human during this nervous, catastrophic moment in time.
Dionne Brand’s brief, powerful small life has the dazzling, hypnotic rhythm of a series of waves, tossing together multiple narrators and stories in time and space. The novel ...
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About the author
Dionne Brand is a renowned poet, novelist, and essayist known for formal experimentation and the beauty and urgency of her work. Her volumes of poetry include Land to Light On, thirsty, Inventory, Ossuaries (winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize), and The Blue Clerk (winner of the Trillium Book Award). Theory, her 2018 novel, received the Toronto Book Award, and Brand received the 2021 Windham– Campbell Prize in Fiction. She served as Toronto's third poet laureate from 2009 to 2012 and was named to the Order of Canada in 2017. Until recently a professor in the School of English and Theater Studies at the University of Guelph, Brand will serve as the editorial director of Alchemy, a new imprint at Knopf Canada.
Dionne Brand is a renowned poet, novelist, and essayist known for formal experimentation and the beauty and urgency of her work. Her volumes of poetry include Land to Light On, thirsty, Inventory, Ossuaries (winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize), and The Blue Clerk (winner of the Trillium Book Awar...
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