From Montreal to Jerusalem

15 May 2024

Sivan Slapak converses with Lisa Newman about her debut book Here is Still Here on The Yiddish Book Center's podcast, The Shmooze. Listen here

Here is Still Here

Sivan Slapak

May 2024

$22.95 | ISBN: 9781773901466

Sivan Slapak lived in Jerusalem for twenty years before returning to Canada in 2013. Since then, her short fiction and essays have been published by The New Quarterly, Montreal Serai, and carte blanche and in collections published by Véhicule Press and Guernica Editions. She was selected as a finalist for the CBC Quebec Writing Competition, won the Peter Hinchcliffe Fiction Award once and was shortlisted twice. She lives in Montreal, where she works in the arts and culture sector. Here Is Still Here is her first book.

Letters appear, quickly metamorphose into other letters, creating new words, new meanings, and new stories. A story that might have been set in Brooklyn is transformed on screen into a story about Odessa, and then into another about Berlin.

I catch a line about being “hand in hand on uncertain ground.” It all reminds me of that line of Leonard Cohen’s about a woman “who’s gone and changed her name again.”

blue as an orange

The Quebec “Nobel” goes to novelist Victor-Lévy Beaulieu

Now 67, VLB is in the process of reissuing his complete works. His plan is to publish 666 copies of each work, seeing that as the number of real readers he can count on in Quebec.

From Montreal to Jerusalem

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