Double Book Launch - May 7, 2023

Deux Voiliers Publishing is pleased to announce that DVP author Lewis Evans will be joining Ottawa translator Luise von Flotow to launch his novel, A Whale Watcher's Guide to the Apocalypse (DVP) and her latest translation, The World at My Back by Thomas Melle (Biblioasis). Everyone is welcome to join them at the book launch on May 7, 2023 from 6 pm to 8 pm at 144 Hawthorne Avenue in Ottawa. Both books will be available for purchase, and light refreshments will be served. For more information, please contact us at deuxvoiliers@gmail.com.

Here's a little about Lewis and Luise.

Lewis Evans has lived and worked in Germany, the US, Ecuador, Chile, Spain, the Netherlands, France, Italy and Canada. Before contributing to the canon of timeless world literature, he was variously employed as an English teacher, landscape gardener, actor, morgue attendant, grunt labourer, and tour guide. He currently lives in Ottawa.

A Whale Watcher’s Guide to the Apocalypse recounts one man’s endeavour to regain control of his dreary life by setting out for a new “frontier.” What starts as an innocent, lager-fuelled quest for change quickly spirals out of control, and our “frontiersman” finds himself doggedly pursued by a ruthless bounty hunter. With only nature, raccoons and whales as his allies, our hero’s escape from his pursuer recklessly brings on the advent of a new apocalypse. This slapstick collection of maxims on life’s thrills and dismal shortcomings is a classic Bildungsroman, couched in contemporary parody and satire.

Luise von Flotow has taught Translation Studies at the University of Ottawa since 1995. Her main research interests lie in the areas of feminist and gender issues in translation, translation as cultural diplomacy, and audio-visual translation. Most recent academic books include: The Routledge Handbook on Translation, Feminism and Gender, eds. Luise von Flotow and Hala Kamal, 2020; Translating Women, Different Voices and New Horizons, eds. Luise von Flotow and Farzaneh Farhazad, Routledge 2017; Translation Effects: The Making of Contemporary Canadian Culture and Translation, ed. with Kathy Mezei and Sherry Simon, McGill Queens UP 2014. She is also a literary translator, working from German and French to English.

The World at My Back by German Book Prize finalist Thomas Melle is a story dedicated to the impossibility of reclaiming what has been lost, its lines both a prayer and reminder that, on the other side of madness, other possibilities await. It has been translated into eighteen languages. Addicted to culture, author Thomas Melle has built up an impressive personal library. His heart is in these books, and he loves to feel them at his back, their promise and challenge, as he writes. But in the middle of a violent dissociative episode, when they become ballast to his increasingly manic self, he disperses almost overnight what had taken decades to gather. Nor is this all he loses: descending further into an incomprehensible madness, he loses friendships and his career as a novelist and celebrated playwright, but the most savage cruelty is that he no longer either knows or understands himself.