Mainstage: Making Do, Getting By

How do you cope? Tonight’s writers look at ways people try to deal with life.

Christy Ann Conlin’s Watermark is a collection of “North Atlantic Gothic” stories, a gallery of gritty and lyrical portraits, each unmasking the myth and mystery of the everyday. Adnan Khan’s There Has to Be a Knife explores the expectations—both intimate and political—folded into the representations of brown men. Fawn Parker’s brutally honest and devastatingly funny novel Set-Point explores intellectual parody, mental and physical illness, and the relationship between technology and sex in a group of Montreal millennials.

In Steven Price’s Lampedusa, the last Prince of Lampedusa, haunted by memories of Fascism and the war in 1950s Sicily, struggles to complete his novel Il Gattopardo (The Leopard), one of the greatest works in Italian literature. In The Country Will Bring Us No Peace, the English translation of a novel by Quebec writer Matthieu Simard, a couple flees the city for an idyllic village, only to discover that people there have started to disappear.