Book Reading: Polar Vortex by Shani Mootoo

Acclaimed writer and visual artist Shani Mootoo reads an excerpt from her new novel, Polar Vortex.

The past isn't even past – and the present is tense with conflicting desires and untold stories. What brings clarity to this setting is Shani Mootoo's limpid prose, clean and bracing. Polar Vortex is an honest, but also moving, exploration of true intimacy. – author Amitava Kumar

In Giller Prize-nominated writer and visual artist Shani Mootoo’s highly-anticipated new novel, couple Priya and Alexandra move to a picturesque countryside town, only to have their quiet lives upended by the reappearance of a figure from one of the woman’s pasts. Seductive and tension-filled, Polar Vortex is a story of secrets, deceptions, and revenge.

In light of having to postpone the Toronto launch of Polar Vortex and conversation between Shani Mootoo and author Catherine Bush, the Koffler’s Mary Anderson, Manager of Literary & Public Programs, asked Shani to record herself reading the opening pages of her new book from her home in Prince Edward County, Ontario.

Book*hug Press kindly provided the excerpt from which Shani read, and can be downloaded here (PDF).

In order to support its authors and provide readers with some affordable books during this time of isolation and social distancing, Book*hug Press is currently offering a 25% off sale on their entire website.

Writing the Real: Representing the climate crisis in fiction
by author Catherine Bush, March 31, 2020

I spent the spring of 2019 at an Institute for Advanced Study in Germany. One evening, in the midst of a conversation about the climate crisis, I asked another Fello—a methane expert, methane being an even more potent greenhouse gas than carbon—what he feared most about the future. Crispr, he said, and a global pandemic. His words haunt me now. Some months ago, I wrote the essay below, about the challenges of representing our current reality in fiction, a reality that includes the climate crisis, our habits of denial, and our comforting belief in a future that resembles the past. Now the world has swerved. Swerves make good fiction, but they can be shocking to live through. The COVID-19 pandemic changes the lens through which we view the climate crisis and the breakdown of the planet’s ecosystems but it doesn’t make these phenomena go away. Mere weeks ago millions of hectares of Australia were burning. We add the pandemic—its viral deaths, our shutdown and disrupted lives, and its proof of the possibility of rapid social change in response to a crisis—to the seams of our world as we speculate about what is to come.