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Vendor
Liepman Literary Agency
Marc Koralnik
Original language
English
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http://tanyatagaq.com/

SPLIT TOOTH

Tanya Tagaq

Trailer: https://twitter.com/PenguinCanada/status/1044625173532561410
From the internationally acclaimed Inuit throat singer who has dazzled and enthralled the world with music it had never heard before, a fierce, tender, heartbreaking story unlike anything you've ever read.

Fact can be as strange as fiction. It can also be as dark, as violent, as rapturous. In the end, there may be no difference between them.

A girl grows up in Nunavut in the 1970s. She knows joy, and friendship, and parents' love. She knows boredom, and listlessness, and bullying. She knows the tedium of the everyday world, and the raw, amoral power of the ice and sky, the seductive energy of the animal world. She knows the ravages of alcohol, and violence at the hands of those she should be able to trust. She sees the spirits that surround her, and the immense power that dwarfs all of us.

When she becomes pregnant, she must navigate all this.

Veering back and forth between the grittiest features of a small arctic town, the electrifying proximity of the world of animals, and ravishing world of myth, Tanya Tagaq explores a world where the distinctions between good and evil, animal and human, victim and transgressor, real and imagined lose their meaning, but the guiding power of love remains.

Haunting, brooding, exhilarating, and tender all at once, Tagaq moves effortlessly between fiction and memoir, myth and reality, poetry and prose, and conjures a world and a heroine readers will never forget.


TANYA TAGAQ is an improvisational performer, avant-garde composer, and experimental recording artist who won the 2014 Polaris Music Prize for her album Animism, a work that disrupted the music world in Canada and beyond with its powerfully original vision. Tagaq contorts elements of punk, metal, and electronica into a complex and contemporary sound that begins in breath, a communal and fundamental phenomenon. While the Polaris Prize signaled an awakening to Tanya Tagaq's art and messages, she has been touring and collaborating with an elite international circle of artists for over a decade. Tagaq's improvisational approach lends itself to collaboration across genres, and recent projects have pulled her in vastly different directions, from contributing guest vocals to a F**ked Up song (a hardcore punk band from Toronto) to premiering a composition made for Kronos Quartet's Fifty for the Future collection, and composing a piece for the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. Tanya's most recent album Retribution was released in fall 2016.
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Book

Published 2018-09-01 by Penguin Canada

Comments

Editions Alto

“What Tagaq offers with Split Tooth is a still too rare glimpse of the inner lives of young people, particularly girls and women, living in northern and rural communities . . . blood is in the air and on the ground, bringing both fear and comfort. Creatures and natural phenomena are anthropomorphized and figure alongside the archetypes of bildungsroman: beleaguered parents, loyal sidekicks, mean girls, local drunks, the crush. Time passes in cycles of 24-hour sunlight and 24-hour night. Tagaq's poetry and prose are sometimes punctuated by guileless humour and, more often, the violence perpetrated by people and nature.” Read more...

“Split Tooth reflects its journal origins, grounded by chronological vignettes drawn from Tagaq's life, spliced with poems and dreamscapes. There are tales that charm, such as how a young Tagaq loved to encourage lemmings to burrow into her hair, in what she calls the best massage she's ever received. Others devastate and anger, like one perfunctory verse in which she shares how she was sexually assaulted by a teacher.” Read more...

“[Split Tooth] has the 43-year-old Inuit throat singer weaving through pages of fiction and memory, producing an unprecedented literary work that—much like her musical career—bounces through genre.” Read more...

“If you're familiar with how [Tanya Tagaq] crafts her voice on record in such unexpected ways, you may not be surprised that for her audiobook, she's employed a cadence that soothes and enraptures.” Read more...

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/may/23/seal-hunting-throat-singing-and-fighting-fair-the-power-and-purpose-of-tanya-tagaq