His first novel De Niro’s Game won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and was nominated for the Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Award. This is the second time – after Cockroach – that Hage is nominated for all three prestigious Canadian literary awards. In the first segment of the evening, the renowned Lebanese-Canadian author Rawi Hage reads from his latest novel Beirut Hellfire Society followed by an on-stage interview by the acclaimed filmmaker Atom Egoyan.īeirut Hellfire Society is the fourth book by the Montreal based author Rawi Hage who is nominated for the Giller Prize, the Governor General's Award, and the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize.

The 18th edition of Diaspora Film Festival opens with Literary and Poetic Imagery Evening. The narrator is ambiguous, untrustworthy, sly, and filled with a despair both nasty and noisy but he is also deeply wounded, oddly lovable, his voice both moving and manipulative.OPENING NIGHT of the Diaspora Film Festival - Literary And Poetic Imagery Evening RAWI HAGE BOOK READING Theres a slight jolting sensation as the narrative shifts gear from poetic to cinematic, with guns and knives and elaborately contrived set-ups replacing the earlier evocations of drains and flesh and wintry streets, but its all managed with great brio and expertise.-James Lasdun, The Guardian Review Quotes There is something exhilarating about relentlessness. offers a version of an emigre underground which is original, raw and brave.-Colm ToibinA dark Dostoevskian fable, which lowers the reader into the sewers of immigrant Montreal to confront an underground world teeming with sex, crime and greedy insectoid life.-Hari KunzruSearing, affecting, misanthropic.-Mohsin HamidMost fiction writers are primarily either stylists or plotters, but Hage is clearly both.

From the Back Cover Praise for Cockroach: dark and uncompromising vision. Cockroach is a carnivalesque, philosophical novel that weaves dark humor with an accusatory, satirical voice, spawning from the subsurface to challenge humanity and its downfall. Forced to visit a therapist after a suicide attempt, he brings us back to his childhood in a war-torn country, forward into his current life in the smoky migr cafs where everyone has a tale, and out into the frozen nighttime streets of Montreal, where he imagines himself to be a cockroach invading the lives of the privileged, but willfully blind, citizens who surround him.

Book Synopsis In Montreals restless immigrant community, our unnamed narrator is living in despair. Cockroachs finely wrought scenes build in tension toward a conclusion thats fitting and yet unpredictable.-Kevin Chong. About the Book Hages look at the underbelly of organized religion and immigrant life in Canada is unflinching and grim.

Beirut hellfire society review