LA PEUPLADE Rights catalogue 2013

RIGHTS CATALOGUE
Rights catalogue 2013
LA PEUPLADE
LE SOLEIL DU LAC
QUI SE COUCHE
FLEUR AU FUSIL
Marjolaine Deschênes
J.R. Léveillé
Le soleil du lac qui se couche, J.R. Léveillé’s first
novel set in his native Manitoba, describes the
unforgettable encounter of Angèle, an aspiring
young Métis architect, with Ueno Takami, an older
Japanese poet. The story begins when they meet at
an art gallery in Winnipeg, a city surprisingly rich
both physically, in its architecture, and culturally,
with its mix of heritage and customs brought by
people who have emigrated there from all over
the world. From Winnipeg Angèle and Ueno head
north through the wilds to Thompson.
Narrated by Angèle, who is remembering her
feelings of excitement, surprise and wonder at
the discoveries inspired by the Japanese artist,
Le soleil du lc qui se couche is as much a love
story as a spiritual journey, a celebration of life
in all its incompleteness, imperfection, and
impermanence.
(Source : Signature Editions)
•
“ Some would say that The Setting Lake Sun is a love
story, and some would say that it’s a love affair between
two cultures. Some would say that it’s a sexual explo­
ration, and some that it’s a religious journey into the
unknown. The Setting Lake Sun is all those things, and
no one who reads it will be able to forget its characters,
or their voyage of self­discovery into the wilds of
northern Manitoba.”
Guy Gauthier – Prairie Fire Review of Books
“ This quiet, elegantly suspended story generates an
aura that is softly enfolding, stirring respect for elusive
connections and a gentle engagement with mysteries.”
The Globe & Mail
Novel
October 2013 (for this edition)
2001 (1st edition)
140 pages
978-2-923530-62-8
Born in Winnipeg in 1945,
J.R. Léveillé divides his
time between the city and
Lake Manitoba country. He
is now retired from RadioCanada national television,
where he was a journalist for
many years and for whom he
produced over thirty author
and artist profiles, Léveillé
is also the author of a more
than a dozen works of poetry,
fiction and essays. His
work has been published in
Manitoba, Quebec and France.
AWARDS
Winner — On The Same Page
Winner — Prix Champlain
Winner — Prix Littéraire
Rue-Deschambault
Viviane Videloup grew up “in the rubble of Romanticism”,
among the beasts that her father stuffed. Writer, she believes
that her style “is romantic to give the appearance of the
living to the dead and to perpetuate an endless mourning.”
Take a vacation - of everything - and not write, this is the
starting point of this passage in Belgium where Viviane’s
disordered memory intertwines with that of her friends.
Louis Leloup is no more, but Laurent Louve awaits her in
Brussels. As for Fleure, the childhood friend, she will appear
to her on the Grand-Place, beautiful and vivid as a “magno­
lia standing on top of the harshest winters.” Fleurs au fusil
explores the desire of creation, renewal and persistence,
combines elegance and cruelty, lyrical and philosophical
delusions, violence and beauty.
Novel
September 2013
176 pages
978-2-923530-61-1
•
Marjolaine Deschênes was born in 1975, became a writer, teacher
and researcher. After four books of poetry published by Editions d’art
Le Sabord, by David and by Noroît, Fleurs au fusil is her first novel.
LE FIL DES KILOMÈTRES
Christian Guay-Poliquin
Le fil des kilomètres tells the story of a mechanic who, after
drowning heartbreak at the bottom of several months of
work, decides to drop everything to visit his ailing father,
at the other end of the continent. But the road is long and
a strange power failure has plunged the country into dark­
ness. Along this straight-line labyrinth, loneliness weighs,
thirst torments and memories have raised ambushes. There
is only accumulated tiredness to enliven the kilometers.
•
Christian Guay-Poliquin grew up at the end of Des Érables Road,
in St-Armand., Canada He is preparing a thesis and works in the
construction industry. The pencil on his ear he used to mark measurements as it does to jot down his ideas. Le fil des kilomètres is his
first novel.
Novel
November 2013
230 pages
978-2-923530-63-2
LA GARÇONNIÈRE
ALLERS SIMPLES
Mylène Bouchard
Frédérick Lavoie
The story of this novel involves an unconventional,
atmospheric and intellectual relationship between
a woman and a man, Mara and Hubert, protago­
nists of a doomed love. They are best friends,
symbolic sister and brother, lovers, each other’s
counterpart, immoderate. Hopeless loves bear at
the same time an overwhelming love and a tragic
fatality. We might need more than one life to un­
derstand all this.
La garçonnière travels from Beirut to Prague and
from Noranda to Péribonka; we come across rails,
wilderness, ice skating rinks, letters and travels.
And some imaginary trains and a bachelor.
•
“An incredible atmosphere emerge from this book, and
that’s what we call grace. The style is magnificent.
A must read.”
Monique Roy – Châtelaine
“Mystery remains in this rich and dense story that
ends up grabbing the reader. This doomed love is
left unexplained, since unexplainable. Tragic. As we
progress in the book, the writer’s pen refines and more
moments of grace appear, until the final scene, very
close to a magnificent state. It is indeed a writer we
promise to follow.”
Danielle Laurin – Le Devoir
“Mylène Bouchard explores twists and turns of love with
lots of fineness and style. She wakes up in all of us this
great love story forever etched in our memory.”
Julie Laferrière - TV5/Club Social
Novel
Nov. 2009 (1st ed.) and March
2012 (2nd ed.)
208 pages
978-2-923530-40-6
Mylène Bouchard is born in
1978 in Saguenay-Lac-St-Jean
and lives there since 2005.
She is the co-founder and
literary editor of publisher
Éditions La Peuplade. Her
first novel Ma guerre sera
avec toi (La Peuplade) was
published in 2006. In addition
to her numerous implications
in the literary field, she
pursues doctoral studies at
the Université du Québec à
Chicoutimi.
From one single journey to another, Canadian
journalist Frédérick Lavoie travels the world,
wondering. Curious and insatiable traveler, he
brings the reader with him on the road of “PostSovietia”, a geopolitical entity between Europe
and Asia which shares history along with the same
uncertain future. Among revolutionary hopes of
young Belarusians in a Minsk jail, hate speeches
from neo-nazis in Vladivostok, the tragedy of a
poor Uzbek babushka living under dictatorship in
Turkmenistan and great dreams cherished by a
Chechen village chief, Lavoie tells the tale of some
former Soviets he met along the way, while on a
reporting assignment across the fallen empire.
Allers simples captures realities of life usually out
of our reach.
•
“A most fascinating book.”
Michel Desautels – Radio-Canada
“Frédérick Lavoie is a keen observer, as
well as an outstanding storyteller.”
Daniel Dubrûle – La Presse
“It’s the kind of journalism we need.”
Catherine Perrin – Radio-Canada
“A book that reads like a tale of incredible
adventures.”
Travel literature / Journalism
August 2012
384 pages
978-2-923530-46-8
Frédérick Lavoie is a
freelance journalist born in
1983, in Chicoutimi, Québec.
He was living in Moscow from
2008 to 2012, but he now lives
and works in Mumbai. He is
a regular collaborator of La
Presse, Radio-Canada and
works with French, Belgian
and Swiss media.
Allers simples is his first
book.
Claude Bernatchez – Radio-Canada
“This sensitive, skilled and human collection of
stories takes the reader all over the places on the other
side of the world. And the experience is exquisite...”
Dominique Lemieux – Le Libraire
“With restraint and taking all the way a great witness role
more than a tourist role, Lavoie gives a second life to his
notebooks and previous news stories in Allers simples for us to
see and understand.”
Christian Desmeules – Le Devoir
AWARDS
Double winner — Prix
Littéraires du Salon du livre
du Saguenay—Lac-St-Jean
ROSE BROUILLARD, LE FILM
POINT D’ÉQUILIBRE
Jean-François Caron
Mélissa Verreault
A young film-maker, the daughter Haitian
immigrants, has been hired to make a
documentary film about the village of SainteMarée de l’Incantation. It is intended to stir the
interest of potential tourists to the village.
Believing we can keep balance is a delusion. We
are always searching for it without really ever
reaching it. When we achieve it, it doesn’t last.
“Dying is easy” compared to this.
Interlocked like Russian dolls, the eleven fictions
of Point d’équilibre put the emphasis on destabi­
lizing everyday realities and protagonists that are
about to lose ground. We go deep into the boxes,
from the biggest to the smallest one, where we
meet those humans hanging between Montreal
and Quebec, Afghanistan and Italy: a ballerina
injured, a confused immigrant, a child betrayed, a
soldier with trauma and a clothesline installer who
thinks he is a tightrope walker. In a direct style,
Mélissa Verreault tells us their stories marked by
jealousy, anxiety, embarrassment, anger, nervous
shock, surprises, simple beauties, passions and
returns to the land.
•
“In this collection of short stories, some of which
inspired by her own life, the writer enjoys putting her
characters in destabilizing situations. The result are
deep and compelling stories.”
Lisanne Rheault-Leblanc – 7 jours
“With Point d’équilibre, an highly mastered collection of
short stories, Mélissa Verreault proves she can easily slip
into the skin of a little boy or of an immigrant, each time
pointing out what turn their world upside down, with
empathy and intelligence.”
Josée Lapointe – La Presse
“Verreault has a precise writing that compels admiration
without ever rushing the reader, leading him into the
private universe of the characters. In less than 200
pages, she explores many subjects and themes with an
enviable talent; therefore her collection is a vast and
complete picture of society.”
Gabriel Gaudette-Tremblay – Salon Double
This is a novel about memory, the recovery of a lost
past that can only be restored through language. It
is also about truth, lies, and fiction — at the end the
author himself even gets a mention.
Short stories / Fiction
October 2012
176 pages
978-2-923530-48-2
Mélissa Verreault is the
full-time mother of triplet
and writer when she has
a few hours off. Her first
novel, Voyage Léger, was
a great success. She holds
a master in creative writing
from UQAM and now lives
somewhere between Lévis
and Italy.
The writing of Rose Brouillard, le film is poetic in
the best sense, in the rhythm of the prose and in
the very beautiful and evocative descriptions of
the Saint Lawrence landscape as well as of the
characters and their intimate experiences. The
different narrative voices are finely delineated, and
their variety, as well as the multiple perspectives,
add greatly to the interest of the story.
•
“With Rose Brouillard, le film, Jean-François Caron
has given us one of the most accomplished novels of the
season… The writing is certainly poetic, but it is also
funny and surprising, precise and fluid, brilliant and
arresting.”
Josée Lapointe – La Presse
Novel
March 2012
244 pages
978-2-923530-42-0
Jean-François Caron is the
author of a very well-received
first novel, Nos Échoueries
(La Peuplade, 2010) and of
two volumes of poetry, Des
champs de mandragores (La
Peuplade, 2006) and Vershurlements et barreaux de
lit, (Éditions Trois-Pistoles,
2010).
“Sheer joy to read.”
Monique Roy – Châtelaine
“It is magnificent. Here is a book borne by a very special
imagination and use of language, full of nuance. It
is bathed in light and gentle warmth. It is tender and
affecting. And powerful.”
Danielle Laurin – Le Devoir
“Jean-François Caron juxtaposes various voices,
concerns, and epochs in a second novel imbued with
great narrative power.”
Éric Paquin – Voir
AWARDS
Winner —
Prix Jovette-Bernier
RIGHTS SOLD
World English
WIGRUM
QUAI 31
Daniel Canty
Marisol Drouin
It’s October 1944. During a brief respite from the
aerial bombardment of London, Sebastian Wigrum
absconds from his small flat and disappears into
the fog for a walk in the Unreal City. This is our
first and only encounter with the enigmatic man we
come to discover decades later through more than
one hundred everyday objects he has left behind.
Wigrum’s bequest is a meticulously catalogued
collection of the profoundly ordinary: a camera,
some loose teeth, candies and keys, soap, bits of
string, hazelnuts, and a handkerchief. Moving
through the inventory artifact to artifact, story
to story, we become immersed in a dreamlike
narrative bricolage determined as much by the
objects’ museological presentation as by the tender
and idiosyncratic mania of Wigrum’s impulse to
collect them.
With its traces of Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino,
and Georges Perec, Daniel Canty’s graphically
arresting Wigrum explores the limits of the
postmodern novel. Having absorbed the logic of
lists and the principles of classification systems,
the Wigrumian narrative teeters on the boundary
between fact and fiction, on the uncertain edge of
the real and the unreal.
Readers venturing into Sebastian Wigrum’s cabinet
of curiosities must abide only the following maxim:
If I can believe all the stories I am told, so can you.
•
“This is a new novel genre. An inventory! … The inventory
is a list of more or less fantastic objects – sometimes
computer-based, electronic, historical, or purely useless –
but each finds its place in this collection for one reason or
another. In the last part of the book, Daniel Canty mixes
fact and fiction, deconstructing our vain attempts to
discover the truth. Unique and very exciting!”
Shannon Desbiens – Les Bouquinistes
Fiction
October 2011
208 pages
978-2-923530-33-8
Daniel Canty is a Montrealbased writer and film director
who works in literature, film,
theatre and design, and new
media. Canty collaborated
with the pioneering
multimedia studio DNA Media,
in Vancouver, and directed the
inaugural issues of Horizon
Zero, the Banff New Media
Institute’s web space on the
digital arts in Canada.
AWARDS
Grafika Grand Prize Winner
(Typography), 2012
RIGHTS SOLD
World English
Forced to leave their island submerged with water,
hundreds of refugees climb aboard a cargo ship
that’ll take them across the ocean, to the Dock 31.
Échine and his mother are among the refugees.
Taken care of by the authorities, they are cramed
into a neighborhood near the port. Échine then
starts a new life with no point of reference. He will
meet an ambitious young man who will take care
of him and a two-faced woman. Immune to a virus
that twists spines, he will be both actor and witness
of the end of the world announced a thousand
times, and lived a thousand times.
This pure fiction is a book you can’t put down.
•
“Flipping through Quai 31, you enter more deeply into
a universe that does not exist, but that we know it is not
too far from us. Even if some sentences let us see the
humanity in the characters, this book leaves the reader
disturbed by the gloomy prospects it contains.”
Josée Lapointe – La Presse
“It is a good novel. I was struck by her writing: clear,
concise, effective, where images arise. The story is dark,
supported by a brilliant style. It is a novel with ambiance,
very poetic, very beautiful.”
Annie Landreville – Radio-Canada/Info-réveil
“Quai 31 is a post-apocalyptic novel. It is very dark, but
all the while a very good book. Two hours of sheer joy.”
Éric Blackburn – Radio-Canada/La Librairie Francophone
Novel
March 2011
128 pages
978-2-923530-29-1
Marisol Drouin is a young
author born in Charlevoix in 1976
and now living in Montreal. Quai
31 is her first novel. She also
sings and write for Macha fjord,
a musical project shared with
musician Olaf Gundel.
BÉANTE
Marie-Andrée Gill
Béante allows us to see in the night. Midnight is time for medita­
tion and it is full moon. In some offhand manner – “imagine the
end” – this poetic text immerses the reader deep into the recollec­
tion of humanity and of the tangible reality of life. In touch with
tides and stars, mirages and ancestors, the human being, ilnu,
here represented, travels from the outside to the inside. Between
moments of confusion and lucidity, there is a will to resolve the
maybes, to manage the declines, to find a light.
In Béante, times are overlaping. Until the end of the night.
•
“In Béante, her first collection published by La Peuplade, Marie-Andrée Gill
invites the reader in a world where there is a quivering transition between
the frailty of human and the expression of a suffocating world. The poet
escapes and roams the crevices of her desire to go through the bitter end of
the deconstructions where is hanging anything that you otherwise want,
as well as to transplant rabbit’s feet on black cats. Born in Mashteuiatsh,
Marie-Andrée Gill successfully gives her writing a deep intimacy with an
identity aspect, not scared of the words reminding issues of reality. ”
Christian Girard – Le libraire
DISTRIBUTION
Poetry
September 2012
92 pages
978-2-923530-47-5
AWARDS
Winner - Prix littéraires du Salon
du livre du Saguenay—
Lac-St-Jean
Finalist - Governor general
literary award
RIGHTS SOLD
World English
CE QUI EST LÀ DERRIÈRE
Geneviève Gravel-Renaud
Ce qui est là derrière are words of departure. The loved one is gone,
and he leaves behind a woman recalling her scars, putting them
back in context every time she gazes at an item in the house. The
apartment, the books, the piano, the purple chair, the dishes,
the rocks, the bookmarks all come along with us in this long trip.
Doors open and close while the woman knits and asks herself if it
is not just a figment of her own imagination. The space around her
withstands, overrunned by absence. Dust falls down and builds
up, but the slightest thing brings back memories. Luckily, there
are other presences: portraits, Marie-H. and her baby. Luckily,
other stories can happen.
A crucial text to learn how to leave and how to clean dust away
from hearts.
•
“Without doubt, Geneviève Gravel-Renaud is already an author to follow,
since the language in this first collection has the appropriate tone, shiver­
ing on styles, memories and material pregnancy. ”
Hugues Corriveau – Le Devoir
In Canada
Diffusion Dimedia
In France
Librairie du Québec à Paris (DNM)
In Belgium
Espace Livres & Création
CONTACT
201-415, rue Racine Est,
Chicoutimi (Québec), G7H 1S8
418.602.0522
www.lapeuplade.com
Publisher Simon Philippe Turcot
lapeuplade@gmail.com
Editorial director Mylène Bouchard
mb.lapeuplade@gmail.com
Poetry in prose
February 2012
92 pages
978-2-923530-40-6
Born in Montreal in 1984,
Geneviève Gravel-Renaud
graduated from UQAM with a
master degree of literature. Ce
qui est là derrière is her first
book.
Managing editor Sophie Gagnon-Bergeron
sgb.lapeuplade@gmail.com
LA PEUPLADE
Established in Canada, La Peuplade publishes innovative French fiction, poetry and selective non-fiction since 2006. Without limits, the
publishing house moves, evolves, engages in dialogue, helps build its
time, formulates ideas, speaks.