Join Lauren Carter for the hybrid launch of her short story collection, Places Like These (Book*hug Press) featuring a reading, a conversation hosted by Erna Buffie, and a book signing.
The launch will be hosted live in the Atrium of McNally Robinson Booksellers, Grant Park and also available as a simultaneous YouTube stream featuring live chat. Before arriving, please review details of how to attend physical events here at the store.
A widow visits a spiritualist community to attempt to contact her late husband. A grieving teenager confronts the unfairness of his small-town world and the oncoming ecological disaster. A sexual assault survivor navigates her boyfriend’s tricky family and her own confusing desires. Whether in Ecuador or San Francisco, small-town Ontario or northern Manitoba, the landscape in each of Carter’s poignant short stories reflects each character’s journey.
Psychologically complex and astute, Places Like These plumbs the vast range of human reactions to those things which make us human—love, grief, friendship, betrayal, and the intertwined yet contrasting longing for connection and independence.
Lauren Carter is the author of four previous books of fiction and poetry, including This Has Nothing to Do with You, winner of the 2020 Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction. She has also received the John Hirsch Award for Most Promising Manitoba Writer. Her debut novel, Swarm, was longlisted for CBC’s Canada Reads. Carter’s stories and poems have been published widely in journals and longlisted multiple times for the CBC Literary Prizes. Her short story “Rhubarb” won the Prairie Fire Fiction Award and was subsequently included in Best Canadian Stories in 2015. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. An Ontarian transplanted to Manitoba, Carter lives just outside of Winnipeg, where she writes, teaches writing, and mentors other writers. She writes regularly about her creative process online.
An award-winning documentary filmmaker and author, host Erna Buffie’s debut novel, Let Us Be True, was nominated for the Margaret Laurence Fiction Prize and chosen by CBC Books as one of the 12 "must read" historical fiction novels for 2015/16. Her short stories have appeared in Room, Prairie Fire and The Vagrant Review of New Fiction, among other publications. She was awarded a Canadian Screen Award for Best Direction in a Documentary for her most recent film, Smarty Plants.