Paul Quarrington & Pork Belly Futures at TINARS

At a joint launch, Canada Reads 2008 winner Paul Quarrington will celebrate the release of his eagerly anticipated new novel, The Ravine, by singing the blues with Pork Belly Futures, who will debut their self-titled CD. A This Is Not A Reading Series event presented by Pages Books & Magazines, Random House Canada and EYE WEEKLY. At the Gladstone Hotel Ballroom, 1214 Queen Street West. On Wednesday, March 19 at 7:30 p.m. (doors 7:00 p.m.) Admission free.

The Ravine testifies to celebrated novelist Paul Quarrington’s gift for providing hilarious portraits of human despair. When everything in your begins to collapse, there is a self-preserving impulse to isolate the root of the problem. If you do, perhaps you can prop things back up again. At least that is what the pop psychologists tell us.

As failed television producer Phil McQuigge’s world falls down around his ears, he believes that his bad luck can be traced to a traumatic event from his formative years. He sets out to make amends with a childhood acquaintance, Norman Kitchen, who tagged along with McQuigge and his younger brother Jay down a ravine when something – and McQuigge is fuzzy on the details – bad happened to them. The Ravine underscores the somewhat absurd, complex nature of finding redemption. What McQuigge ends up having to atone for is not the sin that he thinks he committed.

Paul Quarrington is an acclaimed, award-winning novelist, screenwriter, non-fiction writer and a musician, most recently in the band Porkbelly Futures. His last novel, Galveston, was nominated for the Giller; Whale Music won the Governor General’s Award for Fiction in 1989. Quarrington has also won the Stephen Leacock Medal and Canada Reads 2008 for King Leary.

Join the This Is Not A Reading Series Facebook Group: www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2265446255