Larry Tremblay – författare

In “The Axe” a literature professor arrives at the door of one of his students in the middle of the night. On his way he has stumbled (with a flask of whiskey) through the pouring rain, stopping in a city park to vandalize the statue of an angel, tormented by the image of his life’s work, ninety-seven poems he has left behind in flames in his apartment. The student has turned in an assignment (which the professor has brought along in his briefcase): a carefully wrapped hatchet.In “Piercing” a teenage runaway, Marie-Hélène, seeks to escape the mediocrity of her small-town family life, only to end up in a very different kind of urban “family,” a cult of dominance and body piercing presided over by Kevin, the maimed and orphaned son of a millionaire. They live in a church converted into luxury condos, with a strange ageless and toothless woman who plays guardian to him and his test-tube son Raphael: a 20 year old computer nerd working on an MA thesis on securitization.In “Anna on the Letter C” a lonely, virginal typist transcribing the “c” words for a dictionary project lives just blocks away from the church where Rasputin-like Kevin holds court. But her world is not inhabited by the angels and demons of “Piercing.”Taking pity on a middle-aged stalker (a seedy, sweating chain-smoker, retired from his job as a projectionist in soft-core porn cinemas), she invites him to her apartment for tea. As they sit, awkwardly making conversation, she confesses that she is a virgin. Her feelings for him waver between repulsion and compassion. His desire for her is palpable as heat lightning flashes in the summer night.

John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C. Inside that theatre today, Ranger Powell of the U.S. Parks Service takes crowds of tourists, the curious and the ghoulish through a step-by-step description of the assassination. Underneath the box where Lincoln was shot, he describes the plot of the comedy Lincoln watched that night, Our American Cousin, as being “kind of like the Beverly Hillbillies.”Scratch the surface of any story and underneath you will find layer upon layer of fiction masquerading as fact. The play’s main character, Mark Killman—a feared but much admired director—draws inspiration from Abraham Lincoln’s assassination to stage the schizophrenia of America. He hires two actors to play Laurel and Hardy. Both are to re-enact the assassination, while he himself plays the iconic role of Abraham Lincoln as a wax figure.The script is frequently self-referential, building on each of these “retakes” with further allusions to itself, telling the same story many times over in different voices from different points of view. Tremblay quite explicitly stages elements of literary theory with this play, including references to Jean Baudrillard’s concept of the simulacra and the “desert of the real,” concepts first popularized by the movie The Matrix—the idea that in our post-modern world, the imitator has become more relevant than the imitated, and that the virtual worlds we construct are becoming more “real” to us than the real world.Absurd, hilarious and haunting, Abraham Lincoln Goes to the Theatre is an unforgettable mystery that asks the question: How can we ever know who we are and what is true when the world we know is shifting beneath us? Its answer is simple: John Wilkes Booth was the first American star—the actor who kidnapped reality to transform it into theatre.Cast of 3 men.

Edgar, a timid, asocial thirty-something, witnesses the brutal rape of a young woman and subsequently bears the unconscious victim home. Haunted by the death of his overbearing mother, he pledges to act as the mysterious woman’s saviour. Gothic and darkly humorous, The Obese Christ explores the nebulous divide between Good and Evil, while demonstrating a powerful mastery of suspense.

War Cantata translated by Keith Turnbull How far will humanity go in its quest for power? Why do we desire to eliminate each other through war? War Cantata looks at ways the impulse for violence is transmitted from one generation to the next; for example, when a father teaches his son hatred to transform him into a soldier impervious to pity. Without focusing on a particular battle or soldier, this harsh, intense, choral text builds the rhythmic power of words to expose war’s spiral toward hatred. In 2012, SACD (Société des auteurs et compositeurs dramatiques), in partnership with France Culture, awarded War Cantata the Prix SADC for best world play written in French, and CEAD (Centre des auteurs dramatiques) awarded it the Prix Michel-Tremblay for the best play written in Quebec in 2012. Cast of 2 men and a chorus. Child Object translated by Chantal Bilodeau With child as a blank page, a man sets about constructing his ideal companion manipulating personality, gender, and body. The child becomes the ultimate consumer good. Cast of 1 woman and 2 men.

Ce livre porte sur ce que l''on peut faire pour soulager de façon naturelle les symptomes associéss aux troubles digestifs fonctionnels (TDF). Parmi ceux-ci on retrouve la dyspepsie qui consiste en une digestion difficile accompagnee parfois de reflux, de ballonnements et de nausees. Elle accompagne souvent le syndrome de l''intestin irritable (SII) qui est une douleur diffuse dans le gros intestin et qui comporte des episodes de crampes, de flatulences, de diarrhee et/ou de constipation. A cela peut s''ajouter des symptomes tels la migraine, l''insomnie, l''angoisse et l''anxiete, des maux de dos, etc. Le livre montre qu''il est possible de reduire sensiblement ces malaises et de favoriser un bon fonctionnement du systeme digestif naturellement. Selon l''auteur, il est possible mener une vie normale et sans douleur malgre un TDF. Ce livre est sans doute le plus complet que l''on puisse trouver sur le sujet, ainsi que celui qui permet le plus de developper l''autonomie du patient dans la gestion et le traitement de ses symptomes d''où le titre « Autotraitement...».

Apres une description de ses symptomes, l''auteur precise les exercices qu''il a developpe; afin de gerer la majorite des symptomes associes aux TDF. Le livre comporte une revue de litterature qui compte six sections : les critres de Rome, qui se veulent une reconnaissance internationale du diagnostic, de la terminologie et des traitements associes aux TDF; la description et les traitements proposes, medicaux ou non, pour les maux les plus frequents (flatulence, reflux, constipation, diarrhee, migraine, anxiete, etc.). Il traite aussi des causes connues de maux de ventre (alimentation, allergies, maladies, etc.), ainsi que de certaines hypotheses recentes visant a; comprendre les TDF (systeme nerveux central, traumatismes, psychosomatique, depression). Il presente aussi des exercices proposes par d''autres auteurs; et ce que l''on peut prendre pour soulager certains symptomes (medicaments, phytotherapie, alimentation, supplements alimentaires).

“A finely sculpted gem . . . Possibly the best novel to come from Quebec in 2013.”—Elle

“A fluid and disturbing fable . . . Subtle and extraordinary.”—La Presse

“An essential book.”—Chatelaine

In an unnamed and war-torn country, twin brothers Amed and Aziz live in the sanctuary of the family’s orange grove. But when a bomb comes from “the other side of the mountain” and kills their grandparents, their father must choose how best to avenge his parents’ death, with tragic and unforeseen consequences.

Morally complex and completely unforgettable, Larry Tremblay’s bestselling The Orange Grove offers up a tragic fable about the absurd logic of terrorism, the power of brotherly love, and the hope for peace in a broken world.

Bestselling author Alice Livingstone is dead. She leaves her philosopher husband, Antoine, to deal with her legacy, towards which he feels increasingly estranged. Confronted with his wife’s much-reported disappearance, Antoine revisits their past relationship: open and liberal on the outside, but constrained and deviant on the inside. The news of the day (the death of JFK Jr., the self-immolation of a Buddhist monk), which plays on the television running in the novel’s background, gradually becomes significant in the lives of the protagonists – as revealed in Alice’s mysterious, posthumous last novel, A Pure Heart. Bit by bit, as we move closer to the novel’s centre, its narrators lose reliability; their discourses and pretenses become more and more confused, fragmentary, and misleading. Good intentions become corrupted and appearances prove to be deceiving. Impurity’s conclusion is as gripping as it is asphyxiating. After his masterpieces The Orange Grove and The Obese Christ, Larry Tremblay, one of Québec’s most accomplished novelists and playwrights of the last two decades, offers his readers a riveting mystery, a self-reflective enigma whose decoding places on trial the literary form itself.

A playful and macabre narrative tour de force, Impurity weaves a fascinating web of interlocking narratives in an epistolary puzzle connecting forms with voices, and voices with revelations.

I ett land någonstans i Mellanöstern lever tvillingbröderna Amed and Aziz ett fridfullt liv i skuggan av träden i familjens apelsinlund. Plötsligt en dag faller en bomb och deras föräldrar blir dödade. De båda pojkarna kastas rätt in i krigets fasor. Några män kommer för att hämnas blodet som spillts. En av pojkarna tvingas bära ett bombbälte över bergen och till ett flyktingläger. Vem av dem kommer att bli utvald?

Många år senare är den överlevande tvillingpojken skådespelarelev i ett vintrigt Montreal. En dag tilldelas han en roll som tvingar honom att konfrontera sitt förflutna.

Apelsinlunden har alla förutsättningar att bli en klassiker, med styrkan hos de stora tragedierna, nutida frågeställningar och de eviga ökenlegendernas trolskhet sammanvävda till en prosa som griper hårt om läsaren. Den ställer oss inför den svåra uppgiften att skilja de rena från de svekfulla, fanatikerna från frihetshjältarna.

Larry Tremblay, f. 1954, räknas som en av Kanadas största författare med över 30 böcker publicerade. Han är också dramatiker, skådespelare och poet. Hans kritikerrosade teaterstycken har spelats över hela världen. Apelsinlunden har sålt i omkring 30 000 exemplar i Kanada, har vunnit Quebec’s Bookseller Prize, Prix littéraire des collégiens och många andra priser, och är utgiven i 15 länder. Men Apelsinlunden introduceras Larry Tremblay på svenska.