Join us tonight, Saturday, November 15 at 7 p.m. to celebrate the fall issue of the Montreal Review of Books!
Expect readings by Bill Brownstein, who helped finish John Dunning's You're Not Dead Until You're Forgotten (MQUP); Daniel Levitin, author of The Organized Mind (Allen Lane); and Kim Thùy, author of Mãn, which was recently translated into English from the original French. Books will be available for sale and signing! Refreshments, too!
Much to his chagrin, John Dunning was born into the movie business. But
once he came to accept his career fate, he developed a great passion for
making movies, and ultimately became Canada's pre-eminent B-movie
producer, with a knack for developing young talent.
In You’re Not
Dead until You’re Forgotten, Dunning, in forthright and charming
fashion, recounts his rough-and-tumble upbringing in the Montreal suburb
of Verdun in the 1930s, his modest start in the film industry behind
the candy counter of his family's movie theatre, and later, his ventures
into film distribution and production. In the 1960s Dunning, along with
financial wizard André Link, founded Cinepix, which eventually merged
into the Lionsgate Entertainment film colossus. Specializing in such
exploitation genres as raucous comedy, groundbreaking Québécois "maple
syrup porn" and horror films, Cinepix churned out cult classics like
Valérie, Shivers, Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS, and Meatballs. Dunning's
detailed recollections of making these movies provide a rare, candid,
and witty take on how the film industry really works. Driven to succeed
in the face of arbitrary censors, parochial Canadian critics, and
controlling government funding agencies, Dunning and Link developed a
formula for producing controversial, moneymaking movies, and helped
launch the careers of such luminaries-to-be as David Cronenberg, Ivan
Reitman, and Don Carmody.
The information age is drowning us in an unprecedented deluge of
data. At the same time, we’re expected to make more—and faster—decisions
about our lives than ever before. No wonder, then, that the average
person reports frequently losing car keys or reading glasses, missing
appointments, and feeling worn out by the effort required just to keep
up.
But somehow some people become quite accomplished at managing information flow. In The Organized Mind,
Daniel J. Levitin, Ph.D., uses the latest brain science to demonstrate
how those people excel—and how readers can use these methods to regain a
sense of mastery over the way they organize their homes,
workplaces, and lives.
With lively, entertaining chapters on
everything from the kitchen junk drawer to health care to gambling in
Las Vegas, Levitin reveals how new research into the cognitive
neuroscience of attention and memory can be applied to daily life.
His practical suggestions call for relatively minor changes that require
little effort but will have remarkable long-term benefits for mental
and physical health, productivity, and creativity.
Mãn has three mothers: the one who gives birth to her in wartime, the
nun who plucks her from a vegetable garden, and her beloved Maman, who
becomes a spy to survive. Seeking security for her grown daughter, Maman
finds Mãn a husband--a lonely Vietnamese restaurateur who lives in
Montreal.
Thrown into a new world, Mãn discovers her
natural talent as a chef. Gracefully she practices her art, with food as
her medium. She creates dishes that are much more than sustenance for
the body: they evoke memory and emotion, time and place, and even bring
her customers to tears. Mãn is a mystery--her name
means "perfect fulfillment," yet she and her husband seem to drift
along, respectfully and dutifully. But when she encounters a married
chef in Paris, everything changes in the instant of a fleeting touch,
and Mãn discovers the all-encompassing obsession and ever-present
dangers of a love affair.
Full of indelible images of beauty, delicacy and quiet power, Mãn is a novel that begs to be savoured for its language, its sensuousness and its love of life.