Nicolas Weinberg, Vivre ou presque, Éditions L'Interligne

Good stories are often an invitation to escape, to embark on an inner journey, but they don’t always turn out as expected and even more rarely end as planned. The same is true of existence, which surprises, amazes, disappoints and sometimes terrifies us but always goes beyond us. For Nicolas Weinberg, “to write is to experience reality intensely,” and his stories show that this intensity can be passed on to others. They show that to read is to live (or very nearly to live).

Vivre ou presque is a collection of seven stand-alone short stories with a common theme: the difficulty of existing.

Born first in Paris in 1967 and again in Marseille in 1998, Nicolas Weinberg came of age in Canada, where he has lived since 2006 and works as a translator.

Link to publisher’s website [French only]: https://interligne.ca/auteurs-auteures/nicolas-weinberg/vivre-ou-presque/

A. Light Zachary, More Sure, Arsenal Pulp Press

A book of poems and interruptions, recording instances of love, self-realization, and recovery in non-binary, queer, and autistic lives.

In their stunning debut collection, A. Light Zachary draws power from a vision of life - especially queer and neurodivergent life - as a journey of continuous self-realization. These poems record the experience of locating oneself over and over again, within gender, language, family, labour, sexuality, fear, and love.

Reaching back to claim queer space in the oldest Western canon, Zachary interrupts famous quotations from ancient Greek and Roman thinkers, asking: what advice might Juvenal or Seneca have handed down to non-binary citizens? Elsewhere, in concise and fluid verses that draw from punk rock and quantum physics, they ground the work firmly in the present. Come: invade with the alien. Evade with the coyote. These poems propose a certain supremacy: in these unending journeys of discovery and alienation, "we become more sure of who we are than you."