Literature and Language
Robson Reading Series Presents Al Hunter (Beautiful Razor: Love Poems and Other Lies)
Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre as part of the Robson Reading Series. “In this fluid collection we enter a galactic expanse where absence, distance and fire repel and attract love-bodies in a winged-whirl of magnetic mad flight. Loss, emptiness, space, desire, blood, memory; all devour themselves in the combustions of love [...]
Robson Reading Series Presents Andrew Kaufman, Camille Martin and Barry Webster
Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre as part of the Robson Reading Series. Andrew Kaufman’s Born Weird tells the tale of the Weird family who have always been a little off, but not one of them ever suspected that they’d been cursed by their grandmother, Annie Weird. Now Annie is dying and [...]
Jillian Lerner Taylor – Peerless Prodigies of P.T. Barnum
A work of historical fiction, this graphic novel explores the technological imagination of the 19th century from the vantage of two extraordinary entrepreneurs. Readers encounter an alternate world that once existed: a bygone world of gaslight, sideshows and horse-drawn cabs to be sure, but also a forward-looking world shot through with experimental media, profit-oriented entertainments [...]
Brandon Konoval – Fatal Enlightenment: Discourse on the Origin of Inequality by Rousseau
Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and hosted by UBC Arts One. Philosopher, novelist, playwright and composer, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 — 1778) became a leading figure of the Enlightenment as one of its sharpest critics. His Discourse on the Origin and the Foundations of Inequality Among Men (1755)—a trenchant analysis of the [...]
Robert Crawford – Upstart Crew: Mutinous Winds in Shakespeare’s Tempest
Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and hosted by UBC Arts One. Shakespeare’s final, richly allegorical play has been subjected to widely differing interpretation. Shakespeare disguises these dangerous interests in a subtle allegory hinging on an established linkage between seamanship and rulership, and in the seemingly minor characters of boatswain, master, and [...]
Weyman Chan – Chinese Blue
Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre as part of the Robson Reading Series. Drawing on more than two thousand years of ancient Chinese tradition that present diverse philosophical modes of being, whether it be the spiritual teachings of Kong Zi or Lao Tzu, the military dicta of Sun Tzu or the complex [...]
Raminder Sidhu – Tears of Mehndi
A courageous and timely novel, Tears of Mehndi explores the rich, complex and often heartbreaking lives of a tight-knit community in Vancouver’s Little India. Through the perspectives of several women whose lives intertwine over a generation, Raminder Sidhu deftly exposes the shrouded violence within the Indo-Canadian community, a difficult and often dissembled subject. Sidhu’s characters [...]
Ray Hsu & Evelyn Lau – Poetry
Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and hosted by the Robson Reading Series. Ray Hsu is a poet, activist and scholar who teaches creative writing at UBC. His book Anthropy won the 2005 League of Canadian Poets’ Gerald Lampert Award and was shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry. He has [...]
C.E. Gatchalian – Robson Reading Series at IKBLC Presents “Falling in Time”
Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre. C.E. Gatachalian will be reading from his new book, “Falling In Time.” Gatchalian is a playwright, fiction writer, poet, editor, and teacher. He is an alumnus of the University of British Columbia’s Creative Writing program, and the author of three books: Motifs & Repetitions & Other [...]
NoViolet Bulawayo – Open a Book, Read Africa
Webcast sponsored by Irving K. Barber Learning Centre. Zimbabwean author, NoViolet Bulawayo, has won the annual £10 000 Caine Prize for African Writing, as announced at the Bodleian Library in Oxford this evening. Bulawayo wins the 2011 prize for her short story, “Hitting Budapest”, which Chair of Judges, Hisham Matar, described as being “reminiscent of [...]
