Readopolis

From award-winning writer Bertrand Laverdure comes Readopolis, a novel translated by Oana Avasilichioaei.

It's 2006 and down-and-out protagonist Ghislain works as a reader for a publishing house in Montreal. He's bored with all the wannabe writers who are determined to leave a trace of their passage on earth with their feeble attempts at literary arts. Obsessed by literature and its future (or lack thereof), he reads everything he can in order to translate reality into the literary delirium that is Readopolis--a world imagined out of Chicago and Montreal, with few inhabitants, a convenience store, a parrot, and all kinds of dialogues running amok: cinematic, epistolary, theatrical, and Socratic.

In the pages of Readopolis, Laverdure playfully examines the idea that human beings are more connected by their reading abilities than by anything else. Funny and sardonic, whimsical and tragic, this postmodern novel with touches of David Foster Wallace and Raymond Queneau portrays the global village of readers that the Internet created, even before the 2.0 revolution.

BERTRAND LAVERDURE is the author of six novels, including Universal Bureau of Copyrights and Readopolis (winner of the Governor General's Literary Award for Translation), both translated by Oana Avasilichioaei. His many poetry publications include Cascadeuse and Sept et demi. He was awarded the Joseph S. Stauffer Prize from the Canada Council for the Arts (1999) and the Rina Lasnier Prize for Poetry (2003) for Les forêts. He was a literary chronicler on MAtv and CIBL Radio, and Poet Laureate of Montreal from 2015 to 2017.

OANA AVASILICHIOAEI is a Montreal-based poet, translator, and artist. She is the author of many books, including Expeditions of a Chimaera (with Erín Moure; 2009), We, Beasts (2012; winner of the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry) and Limbinal (2015). Previous translations include Suzanne Leblanc's The Thought House of Philippa (co-translated with Ingrid Pam Dick; 2015), Catherine Lalonde’s The Faerie Devouring (winner of the 2018 Cole Foundation Prize for Translation), three books by Bertrand Laverdure, including Universal Bureau of Copyrights (finalist for the 2015 ReLit Award, Readopolis (winner of the 2017 Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation), and The Neptune Room (finalist for the 2020 Governor General's Literary Award for Translation).