Celebrate Our Diversity: An Evening of Readings

Join massy Books and Mawenzi House Publishers Ltd. as we celebrate new works by Sanjay Talreja (Downward This Dog), C Fong Hsiung (New Land Same Sky), Kagiso Lesego Molope (Such a Lonely, Lovely Road), and Julia Lin (Shadows of the Crimson Sun) with an evening of readings.

Come hear from three exciting new releases from the publishing house that Canadian literature says is “changing our understanding of the Canadian literary landscape through its innovative publications.”

About Downward This Dog:
These sardonic, wry, and sometimes playful stories, set in Toronto and the Indian subcontinent, describe the lives of people caught in diverse situations characterized by their recent unsettled, alien status. A disgruntled yoga teacher; an ardent epistolarian; a school custodian who has lost a winning lottery ticket; a young woman whose dentist may be touching her inappropriately; a disillusioned retiree obsessed by food; a chef dreaming of a chain of restaurants; a man who has turned away from religious fundamentalism–these and others find sustenance and exploitation, love and disillusion, and sheer luck as they attempt to locate meaning and weave historical order within their larger universe.

“Downward this Dog is a beautifully written, insightful testament to the bravery of ordinary life, exploring themes of religion, family, love, marriage, money, success and failure.”
—Lisa de Nikolits, author of No Fury Like That

About New Land Same Sky:
The Sino-Indian war has ended. The Chinese community in Calcutta (Kolkata), feeling threatened and facing discrimination, begins to look for ways to emigrate. By the seventies they are flocking to Canada legally or otherwise. Wen-Lung, a young man in his twenties, goes away on a tourist visa to Toronto where he marries Megan, a white Canadian woman, in order to obtain his legal papers. He leaves behind his pregnant wife, Maylei and a two-year old son. When Maylei arrives in Toronto a few years later, the union is far from ideal because Wen-Lung is still attached to Megan. To complicate matters further, Maylei meets her former lover Keith, an Anglo-Indian. When Maylei returns to India to see her aging parents, she finds herself caught in the midst of a race riot.

A touching story of modern exile and immigration, of the pain of leaving and the joy of freedom, set in Tangra, the leather district of Calcutta, and in Toronto’s neighbourhoods.

About Such a Lonely, Lovely Road:
Coming out in South Africa … At what cost?

All his life Kabelo Mosala has been the perfect child to his doting absent parents, who show him off every chance they get. Both his parents and his small community look forward to him coming back after medical school and joining his father’s practice. They also plan to give him the perfect township wedding. But Kabelo’s one wish has always been to get as far away from the township as he possibly can and never come back. A few weeks before he leaves for university, however, he forms a close bond with Sediba, one of his childhood friends, confirming his long-held suspicion that he is gay. Their relationship is thrown into turmoil by social pressures and conflicting desires, and it starts to look as if they can’t be together. But against all odds the two young men make their way back to each other, risking scorn from the community that raised them.

In her characteristic, beautifully modulated voice, with razor-sharp clarity, Kagiso Lesego Molope tackles an urgent issue in her country of birth.

“Such a Lonely, Lovely Road is at once fascinating and unforgettable. Set in the new South Africa slowly recovering from decades of apartheid, it tells the complex story of Kabelo and Sediba, two men finding love and navigating the difficult terrain of race, homophobia in the black community and family ties. Molope writes a riveting tale of finding self and finding love in this gripping story of men in love in post-independence South Africa.”

—Jude Dibia, author of Blackbird.

About Shadows of the Crimson Sun:

After the Russian invasion of the Japanese puppet state of Manchuria (Manchukuo) in 1945, fourteen-year-old Akihisa Takayama escapes with his family to their ancestral Taiwan. Here they find themselves under the brutal Chinese dictatorship of the Kuomintang. In the 1960s, now a physician calling himself Charles Yang, he escapes with his young family to the United States, from where they finally go on to Canada to become among the first Taiwanese Canadians in Vancouver. Charles Yang’s experiences illuminate the “White Terror” of Taiwan, and the geopolitical dispute between Communist China and Taiwan over the meaning of “One China.” This is a rare, humane, and personal account of the little known histories of Manchukuo and Taiwanese immigration to North America.

“. . . seamlessly interweaves history and memory in this fascinating narrative . . . compelling.”
–CD Alison Bailey, Dept of Asian Studies, University of British Columbia