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Book Cover for: Passing Ceremony, Helen Weinzweig

Passing Ceremony

Helen Weinzweig

The brilliant debut novel by Helen Weinzweig, one of the first feminist writers in Canada and the award-winning author of Basic Black With Pearls.

In Helen Weinzweig's brilliant debut novel, a wedding reception becomes a gothic dream. The bride is not all she seems and there is something ambiguous about the groom -- and just about everyone else at the surreal and strangely moving wedding.

Like a piece of music, Passing Ceremony is composed of brief, suggestive fragments that grow into a tightly integrated whole. There are bits of real and imagined conversation; polite dialogues that slide into mad comic banality; and scenes that could be quiet nightmares out of Borges. A satire and a rueful meditation on the ways people hurt one another, Weinzweig gives us a world suspended in time, an uneasy territory of the soul, which we all inhabit.

This edition features a new introduction by Jim Polk.

Book Details

  • Publisher: A List
  • Publish Date: Sep 5th, 2017
  • Pages: 128
  • Language: English
  • Edition: A List - undefined
  • Dimensions: 8.30in - 5.40in - 0.40in - 0.40lb
  • EAN: 9781487002602
  • Categories: JewishLiterary

About the Author

Weinzweig, Helen: -

HELEN WEINZWEIG is the author of the novels Passing Ceremony and Basic Black with Pearls, winner of the Toronto Book Award. Her short story collection, A View from the Roof, was shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction. Helen Weinzweig died in Toronto in 2010.

Praise for this book

A remarkable piece of writing.-- "Toronto Star"
Polished, forceful, and poetic.-- "Ottawa Citizen"
Handled with skill.-- "Chatelaine"
A brilliant first work of fiction.-- "Edmonton Journal"
[Passing Ceremony] crackles with the energy of chance. Its form seems built from mysterious, unconscious forces . . . As a whole, the powerful novel resembles a shattered reflection in a mirror, each page a different-sized shard of a splintered psyche . . . There's a reason people are returning to [Helen Weinzweig's] work now. Her art was committed to unshackling us from the illusion of any form of certainty -- to keeping the unknown, unknown.-- "Literary Review of Canada"