Nights Too Short to Dance

by Marie-Claire Blais

Translated by Katia Grubisic

Published by: Second Story Press

Imprint: Second Story Press

Sales Date: 2023-10-17

Paperback

CA$22.95

Published: October 2023

Product Details

Imprint: Second Story Press

Page Count: 216 Pages

Dimensions: 5.50 x 8.50

216 Pages, 5.50 x 8.50 x 0.40 in

Paperback

CA$22.95

ISBN: 9781772603507

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René suddenly feels like an old man. Recovering at home after an illness, his mind will not leave the past. He is both comforted and annoyed by the officious care provided by his Russian nurse, who keeps referring to him as a woman. It is a lifetime struggle. Right now, René just wants to get out of his pajamas and dress elegantly, as in the old days of playing piano in cabarets. A friend—or lover—will surely visit? And they do. René is soon surrounded. By the writer Johnie, the musician Doudouline, the theologian Polydor, the painter l’Abeille, and Gérard, who was lost but never forgotten.
They support each other, offering shelter from the snowy world outside. They reminisce about past loves, tragedies, fights. The Stonewall riots. The AIDS epidemic where they lost so much. The Women’s March on Washington. They steel themselves to take on the monster of bigotry and intolerance whenever it rears its ugly head, as it always does, again and again.
Most of all, they find comfort and hope in each other’s presence and in the continuing struggle to assert our own identities, to love how we wish, and to not be defined by what society expects.
An icon of queer literature, Marie-Claire Blais’s characters bring to life pivotal moments in the fight for queer rights.

Marie-Claire Blais was a giant of the French literary scene and a queer icon. She authored over thirty books which won her the Médicis Prize, the W.O. Mitchell Literary Prize, four Governor General’s Literary Awards, and two Guggenheim Fellowships. Born in Québec City, she spent much of her life in Key West, Florida, where she died in 2021.

Katia Grubisic is a writer, editor, and translator. Her work has appeared in Canadian and international publications. She has been a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for translation and the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry, and her collection of poems What if red ran out won the Gerald Lampert award for best first book.

"Though Blais is gone, her legacy remains, and now readers can enjoy a new, posthumously published novel in her distinctive voice."
Open Book

"Nights Too Short to Dance is an impassioned call for love, justice and collective action that, in Katia Grubisic’s vibrant translation, thrums with poignancy and urgency—a work of vast empathy amid menacing times."
Pasha Malla, author of Kill the Mall and The Withdrawal Method

"[Blais] left behind a remarkable literary edifice that, in the words of her almost exact contemporary Margaret Atwood, 'spoke from that seething, fermenting, francophone-Canadian sensibility – formed by decades of repression by the Duplessis mini-dictatorship and also by the Church.' Repression, in fact, might be considered the bête noire of the author’s entire oeuvre, a force she battled against with every fibre of her writerly being. Nowhere is this more apparent than in her last novel."
Quill and Quire

"The novel weaves in and out and back and forth over more than 50 years…. It all comes out in a beautiful cacophony: love, fidelity, marriage, resistance, sex, aging, death…. Grubisic does an amazing job with the translation, capturing the youthfulness of the chorus of characters and René’s passionate digressions.”
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