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Sebastian Ritscher
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REPRODUCTION

Ian Williams

A hilarious and poignant love story about what happens when strangers become family.
Told with the savvy of Zadie Smith and the energy of Junot Diaz, Reproduction is a tale of love among inherited and invented families. Ian Williams' rambunctious novel sweeps through a world of racial and religious mash-ups, cultural collisions, and cross-pollinations galore. Consider only three of them: Felicia, Army, and Riot.

Felicia Shaw never planned on getting pregnant. But here she is, a young woman from a little-known Caribbean island who can't be pregnant with Edgar Gross's baby. Because he's a married man. Because he's a married German man who is more than twice her age and who doesn't want any children. Also because he had a vasectomy.

Then there is Army, her son. Turns out that Army has big plans for his life and a huge capacity for denial. He wants to earn 100K with his garage barbershop by the time he's sixteen, and by twenty-one he plans to have a cool million. That is, if he can manage the upstairs landlord, Oliver, a needy, volatile, recently divorced man whose teenage daughter is now pregnant. Baby? What baby?

And Riot - Oliver's grandson, child of a child - all he wants to do is make art films. Who cares if he's about to be kicked out of school for making porn?

Beginning in a palliative care ward and ending in a cancer ward, Reproduction is the twenty-first-century proof of John Lennon's famous claim that "life is what happens while you are busy making other plans." It is the story of strangers from strange places who accidently become forever tangled.

Ian Williams is the author of Personals, shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Robert Kroetsch Poetry Book Award; Not Anyone's Anything, winner of the Danuta Gleed Literary Award for the best first collection of short fiction in Canada; and You Know Who You Are, a finalist for the ReLit Prize for poetry. He was named one of ten Canadian writers to watch by CBC. Williams is currently assistant professor of poetry in the Creative Writing program at the University of British Columbia. He completed his doctorate in English at the University of Toronto under George Elliott Clarke. In 2014-2015, he was the Canadian Writer-in-Residence for the University of Calgary's Distinguished Writers Program. He has held fellowships or residencies from Vermont Studio Center, the Banff Center, Cave Canem, and the National Humanities Center. Born in Trinidad, Williams grew up in Brampton, Ontario, and worked in Massachusetts and Toronto before moving to Vancouver.
Available products
Book

Published 2020-04-01 by Europa

Book

Published 2020-04-01 by Europa

Comments

Ian Williams Wins 2019 Giller Prize... The jury citation called the book, a "masterful unfolding of unexpected connections and collisions between and across lives otherwise separated by race, class, gender and geography." Read more...

This gorgeous novel vibrates with life. Williams' compassion for his characters transforms them from ordinary beings into uncommon souls. We know these people: their flaws, their foibles and their fuck-ups. We recognise them because we share the same vagaries of living, wherever we are born. Stylistically inventive and narratively compelling, Reproduction is a stunning achievement.

USA: Europa Editions ; Italian: Keller Editore, UK: Dialogue Books/ Little, Brown

Giller Prize - And if you want to watch THE ENTIRE ONE-HOUR GALA, here it is! Ian talks about his book beginning 16 minutes in. Read more...

The best video of his win and acceptance speech of the Giller Prize Read more...

Ian Williams is the Winner of the 2019 Scotiabank Giller Prize. Read more...

The startling brilliance of Ian Williams stems from his restlessness with form. His ceaseless creativity in sussing out the right patterning of story, the right vernacular nuance, the right diagram and deftly dropped reference all in service of vividly illuminating the intermingled comedy and trauma of family.

REPRODUCTION has now been shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize.

Video Interview Read more...

Reproduction's genius is its weaponized empathy, the precision-etched intensity of Williams' gritty, witty, wholly unsentimental exploration of the collision of human hearts and the messy aftermath. Love, and its lack, form a spectrum that the characters bounce between, searching for connections, redemption and meaning.

shortlisted for the Toronto Book Award

Williams's imaginative, intricate tapestries are dazzling... In his rich probes of language and intimacy, legacy and inheritance, he slyly shows that reproduction is consequential, but so is everything else.

book trailer for REPRODUCTION that Penguin Random House has produced Read more...