Robert McGill in Conversation with Ian Williams and Maria Cichosz
When and Where
Speakers
Description
Toronto Lit Up Presents: Robert McGill in conversation with Ian Williams and Maria Cichosz
About this Event
A Suitable Companion for the End of Your Life by Robert McGill Launch with Ian Williams and Maria Cichosz.
Sponsored by the Jackman Humanities Institute and the Department of English at the University of Toronto.
When: September 20, 2022 from 5:00-7:00pm ET
Where: Jackman Humanities Building, Room 100A. 262 Bloor St W, Toronto, ON M5S 1V8
Robert McGill's writing has appeared in magazines including The Atlantic, The Dublin Review, Hazlitt, and The Walrus. He teaches at the University of Toronto. His previous books include two novels, The Mysteries and Once We Had a Country, and two nonfiction books, The Treacherous Imagination and War Is Here. Visit him at robert-mcgill.com.
Maria Cichosz is the author of a novel, Cam & Beau. Her writing has appeared in publications including Critique, Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Puritan and on the CBC Literary Awards shortlist. She teaches writing at Victoria College and is working on a new book with support from the Canada Council for the Arts.
Ian Williams is the author of six books, including the essay collection Disorientation, the poetry collection Word Problems, and the novel Reproduction, which won the Scotiabank Giller Prize. He teaches Creative Writing at the University of Toronto.
Distraught and hopeless, an eighteen-year-old distance runner, Regan, decides to end her life. And she’ll do it through an unusual new method available only on the dark web. Enter Ülle, a woman with amnesia, who will, inadvertently, make Regan’s wish come true.
Soon Ülle begins to remember her past and the outrageous steps her government took to combat a deadly pandemic of parasitic infections, which have brought her to this new country and to Regan’s house. Meanwhile, Regan might be changing her mind, and she finds herself more and more concerned about keeping both Ülle and herself alive. But the shadowy organization that brought them together wants to keep them both quiet – permanently.
A Suitable Companion for the End of Your Life is a darkly comic dystopian tale that probes our anxieties around boundaries, whether territorial or bodily, and our fraught desire not to die alone.
