Stories for Survival

with Maria Reva, Madeleine Thien, and PP Wong

Is time an illusion? Are any of us every really safe or free? This year’s fiction panel brings together three novelists’ insightful takes on these questions against a backdrop of war and displacement. In Maria Reva’s second book, Endling, the procreation of rare snails is combined with “romance tours” and the outbreak of war on a harrowing journey through present-day Ukraine. In Madeleine Thien’s latest novel, The Book of Records, we are transported to a strange resting place for migrants called the Sea in which time, as we know it, does not exist and conversations with great thinkers of the past are commonplace. In PP Wong’s satirical second novel, Slice the Water, a freedom fighter leaves his homeland, run by a book-burning king, only to find that the peaceful nation he immigrates to is under a more dubious, technology-based threat. The conversation that arises from these three thought-provoking novels is sure to inspire.

Moderated by Susan Sanford Blades

• Livestream available
• Captioning for in-person and livestream
• Contact VFA by September 30 for ASL interpretation

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