Book Launch – Personal Attention Roleplay by Helen Chau Bradley

Please join us for the hometown soft launch of Helen Chau Bradley’s debut fiction: Personal Attention Roleplay
 
Coop Le Cagibi, 6596 St-Laurent
Free event
7-9 pm
October 21, 2021
with special guests David Bradford, River Halen Guri, and Sruti Islam

 
Gods and Heroes mocktails, Hekate cocktails, and more. Come learn what all the fuss is about.
 
Limited capacity, limited edition first printing books for sale! If you pre-ordered, you can pick up your copy here or wait for the first full printing.
 
Vaccine passports will be required; food and drink will be available for purchase, but we strongly encourage you to keep your masks on during the readings!
 
This will be our first indoor pandemic launch, and space is limited. Arrive on time or early, and check insta live if you can’t be there. Also, we’ll share outdoor post-launch party details closer to the time, weather dependent. Please know that Helen will be doing online events as well.
 
The stories in PERSONAL ATTENTION ROLEPLAY are propelled by queer loneliness, mixed-race confusion, late capitalist despondency, and the pitfalls of intimacy. Taking place in Montreal, Toronto, and elsewhere, they feature young Asian misfits struggling with the desire to see themselves reflected—in their surroundings, in others, online. Chau Bradley’s precise language and investigation of our more troubling motivations stand out in this wryly funny debut, through stories that hint at the uncanny while remaining grounded in the everyday. Casey Plett calls the collection “A perfect album of stories.”
 
HELEN CHAU BRADLEY is a writer and musician living in Tiohtià:ke (Montreal). Their writing has appeared in carte blanche, Cosmonauts Avenue, Maisonneuve Magazine, the Montreal Review of Books, and elsewhere. They are the author of Automatic Object Lessons, a poetry chapbook. They are the Fiction Editor for This Magazine and the host of Strange Futures, a speculative fiction book club. Personal Attention Roleplay is their first book.
 
RIVER HALEN GURI is queer trans writer of Catalan and Danish descent living on unceded Indigenous land in Tio’tia:ke. Their poems and essays dealing with relation, ecology, transformation, and sexuality have been published widely in Canada, as well as in the U.S., Australia, and in translation in Japan. They are the author of Match (Coach House, 2011), which was shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry, and the forthcoming collection Dream Rooms (Bookhug, 2022). Chapbooks include Microphone Lessons for Poets (Bookhug, 2015), Some Animals and Their Housing Situations (The Elephants, 2018), and I looked for the exit, found a sleeve (Skyebound Press, 2019).
 
DAVID BRADFORD is the author of Dream of No One but Myself (Brick Books, 2021) and several chapbooks, including Nell Zink is Damn Free (Blank Cheque Press, 2017) and The Plot (House House Press, 2018). His work has appeared in The Capilano Review, The Tiny, filling Station, The Fiddlehead, Carte Blanche, and elsewhere. Bradford lives in Tiohtià:ke (Montréal), on the unceded territory of the Kanien:keha’ka Nation.
 
SRUTI ISLAM is a reader, and sometimes writer. She has over five years of experience working in publishing—formerly a book publicist for Drawn and Quarterly, Anteism, and Metatron Press. She founded Weird Era, a literary space, in 2019. Since partnering with Librairie Saint-Henri Books, Weird Era has developed into LSHB’s Weird Era, a literary podcast, as well as a literary arts journal: Weird Era, exclusively available for sale via Librairie Saint-Henri Books. She is a libra.
 
**Accessibility info** Beyond COVID protocols in place for restaurants and the masking request above, there are two steps to get inside Le Co-op Cagibi, but a portable ramp will be installed the night of this event. The venue is on the 55 St-Laurent bus route. The front door is three feet wide. There are two gender-neutral washrooms, one of which is built to accessibility code. Part of the restaurant’s serving counter is three feet high. The main part of the venue is all one level.
 
Please contact the Co-op Cagibi or Metonymy with specific accessibility queries or requests.
 
À noter que l’événement se déroulera en anglais.