This Hour Has Three Wise Men!

Thierry Hentsch, Truth or Death: The Quest for Immortality in the Western Narrative Tradition (Talon Books)

Pier Giorgio Di Cicco, Dead Men of the Fifties (The Mansfield Press)

Carmine Starnino, With English Subtitles (Gaspereau Press) & A Lover’s Quarrel (The Porcupine’s Quill)

Three of the wisest minds in Canadian letters come together for one hour to discuss the themes and ideas treated in Thierry Hentsch’s Governor General Award-winning Truth or Death: The Quest for Immortality in Western Literature. Led by Hentsch the three will discuss the fascinating dialectic drawn out in Truth or Death, which has its origins in the very first written story from “the cradle of civilization”, The Epic of Gilgamesh-a tension between heroic narrative, in which death alone provides the horizon of a life against which all acts are measured, and the challenging narratives of “truth”: either the “revealed” truth of the Christian tradition; or the “demonstrable” truth of reason and science.

Thierry Hentsch has carried out various diplomatic missions for the International Red Cross in Syria, Palestine and Pakistan. An expert in inter-cultural relations, he has written extensively on the Western perception of the Middle East and on the construction of Western literary, cultural, philosophical and political identities. In 2003 Truth or Death won the French Governor General’s Non-fiction Award. Swiss-born, Hentsch lives and teaches in Montreal.

Pier Giorgio Di Cicco was born in Arezzo, Italy and was raised in Baltimore, Montreal, and Toronto. He is the author of over thirteen books of poems including The Tough Romance, Dancing in the House Of Cards, Flying Deeper into the Century, and Virgin Science: Hunting Holistic Paradigms. He withdrew from the world of letters to join a monastery in 1986 and re-emerged in 2001 to publish Living in Paradise: New and Selected Poems with Mansfield Press. An ordained Catholic priest, he currently resides in the countryside north of Toronto.

Carmine Starnino is a poet, essayist, critic and the editor of Signal Editions. He is associate editor of Books in Canada, and the poetry editor of Canadian Notes and Queries. He has published two other books of poetry, The New World and Credo. His reviews and essays have appeared in The Globe and Mail, the Montreal Gazette, Matrix, Arc and Quill and Quire. He lives in Montreal.