Features in Montreal Review of Books Advertising in Canadian Literature, BC Bookworld Montreal Review of Books.Publisher's Weekly Social media presence (Twitter, Facebook) Promotion on the author's website Publicity and promotion in conjunction with the author's speaking engagements $2,500 marketing and publicity budget Advance Review Copies will be available
Dominique Scali is an author and journalist who
is nostalgic for bygone eras she can experience only in her
imagination. Her novel, À la recherche de New Babylon (La Peuplade,
2015; to be published as In Search of New Babylon in English by
Talonbooks), won the First Novel Award at the twenty-ninth Festival
du Premier Roman, held in Chambéry, France (2016). It was also a
finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Awards (2015), the
Grand Prix du livre de Montréal (2015), and the Prix des libraires
du Québec (2016).
W. Donald Wilson holds a degree in modern
languages from Trinity College, Dublin, where he also completed a
Ph.D. in French literature. He has taught at universities in the
West Indies, the United Kingdom, and at the University of Waterloo.
In 2011 and 2013, two of Wilson’s translations were long-listed for
the Best Translated Book Award in the United States, and in 2013 he
was a finalist for the French-American Foundation translation
prize.
“Beautifully and compellingly written, these characters frequently
transcend their fictional nineteenth-century context with pertinent
insights about humanity’s seemingly insatiable desire for
spectacle.” —Canadian Literature“Scali’s In Search of New Babylon
gives us a vast swath of America during the mid-nineteenth century
– ‘right in the middle of hell.’ … The novel succeeds as a Western.
It has a vast number of the cues, reshuffled perhaps, but with
enough rugged individualism, or maybe just anti-collectivism of any
and all sorts, and a gruffness to clearly operate within the genre.
… On the terrain the novel builds for itself, it comes off
masterfully, in sharp, terse prose and compelling movement. For a
work so concerned with repetition, it remains marvelously paced
…”
—Full Stop
“Like Guy Vanderhaeghe’s The Englishman’s Boy, Patrick DeWitt’s The
Sisters Brothers, or Sean Johnston’s Listen All You Bullets, Scali
continues the trend of contemporary Canadian Westerns with [her]
own foray into the Wild West of the American frontier after the
Civil War. … descriptions are accompanied by sparse, wry dialogue
and jumps in time that slowly reveal the ultimate fates of the
characters … Scali has written a new type of Western that … keeps
you enthralled with characters whose true selves always seem just
out of reach to the reader. In Search of New Babylon is an
entertaining and well-crafted read for Western and CanLit fans
alike.”—Prairie Fire
On the terrain the novel builds for itself, it comes off
masterfully, in sharp, terse prose and compelling movement. For a
work so concerned with repetition, it remains marvelously paced
…”—Full Stop
“Unlike classic western writers such as Louis L’Amour or the
contemporary Cormac McCarthy, Scali departs from the traditional
style of depicting humanity bringing order to a lawless land.
Instead, she positions the people who flocked to the frontier as
speculators out to exploit any natural resources or vulnerable
people they could find. However, while her characters are morally
flawed, they are mostly sympathetic, sometimes even likeable.”
—Winnipeg Free Press
“The story is tightly woven and executed with masterful shifts in
chronology and narrative focus. The characters are quirky and
compelling. The language of W. Donald Wilson’s translation sings
with rich detail. Short, staccato-like chapters propel the story
forward with the pacing of good television. This is in no way meant
as an insult – seamless storytelling is difficult to achieve, and
Scali accomplishes that with virtuosity in this novel.”
—Montreal Review of Books
“[An] exceptional piece of historical fiction … In Search of New
Babylon could easily have been written originally in English; the
wry humour, stark prose, and rolling cadence are superbly captured.
… In Search of New Babylon is incredibly fun and impossible to put
down. Scali has successfully taken a piece of American history and
woven it into a wholly unique Quebec Western, one that truly
reflects Scali’s own relationship with and interpretation of the
genre. From this perspective, Wilson’s translation can be seen as
an act of retranslation; by rendering the novel in English, he has
relocated the story and, in a sense, returned it to its
origins.”
—Québec Reads
“This book will knock all the goddamn polish off your teeth.”
—Ross Ufberg (on Twitter)
"[An] exceptional piece of historical fiction … In Search of New
Babylon could easily have been written originally in English."
—Québec Reads
“Readers who have enjoyed Patrick deWitt’s The Sisters Brothers or
Guy Vanderhaeghe’s Frontier Trilogy will enjoy Scali’s haunting,
McCarthyesque foray into the West and her creative engagement with
memorable tropes.”
—Canadian Literature
“Beautifully and compellingly written, these characters frequently
transcend their fictional nineteenth-century context with pertinent
insights about humanity’s seemingly insatiable desire for
spectacle.”
—Canadian Literature
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