Perfecting

What constitutes evidence? Is it something we can touch? Or is it a matter of how we act? Do personal beliefs count as proof? At the launch of her much awaited new novel Perfecting (Goose Lane Editions), Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer will untangle such ontological knots during a conversation with acclaimed author Andrew Pyper. Marc Glassman, Executive Director of This is Not A Reading Series and Proprietor of Pages Books & Magazines will host the evening.

Two women pick their way toward each other along the parched riverbed of the Pecos in New Mexico. Both are searching for proof. Evidence. Truth. The underbelly of the fictions they’ve bought and paid for with how they live their lives.

Hattie is old and makes this walk daily, collecting lures, remnants of a time when the river was full, a life force. Of her three sons, one is lost.

Martha is in her forties. Beautiful but barren, she carries a gun that sits like a question mark in her purse. Behind her in Ontario is the Family, a religious community founded by her lover — who happens to be the half brother of Hattie’s lost boy.

Powerful and unsentimental, Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer’s style throughout Perfecting is muscular and unrelenting — full of dark humour and razor-sharp insight. Her writing catches human fallibility head-on, demanding examination, confrontation, assessment, and a reckoning of pain with beauty.

Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer is an award-winning author, editor and educator. She the former fiction editor of The Literary Review of Canada and has also worked as a tree-planter, a lumberjack, and a baker. Her reviews have appeared in The Globe and Mail, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Toronto Star, and The National Post. Kuitenbrouwer’s first book of fiction, Way Up received a Danuta Gleed Award and was a finalist for the Relit Award. The Nettle Spinner, her first novel, was short-listed for the Amazon.ca/Books in Canada First Novel award. Kuitenbrouwer teaches creative writing at the University of Toronto and is the Magazine Editor for Bookninja.com.

Andrew Pyper is the author of four bestselling novels, Lost Girls (a New York Times Notable Book), The Trade Mission, and The Wildfire Season, and most recently The Killing Circle as well as Kiss Me, a collection of short stories. Lost Girls and The Killing Circle are currently in development as feature films. Pyper lives in Stratford, Ontario.