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2022 Longlist

The Imago Stage

Translated from the French by Rhonda Mullins

ABOUT
THE BOOK

Growing up with a menacing drunk for a father and a grief-stricken mother, a girl spends her 1980s childhood staring at the television to escape the tension, depression, and looming violence that fill her suburban home. After winning a modelling competition, she dedicates herself to becoming a placid image onto which anything can be projected, a blank slate with a blank stare. Earning enough in Paris to retire in her twenties, she buys a studio in Montreal and retreats from the world and its perceived threats, cultivating her existence as an image through her virtual reality avatar. But when her mother develops cancer and nears the end of her life, she is forced to leave her cocoon – surrounded by her posse of augmented reality superheroes – and interact with the world and her parents without the mask of her perfect, virtual self.

Georges offers up an alienated childhood with shifting pop culture obsessions, a woman’s awakening to the role of the image in culture, and her eventual isolation in her apartment and the world online. It is a catalogue of the anxieties of an age, from nuclear war to terrorism, climate change to biological warfare. Karoline currently lives in Montreal.

 

 

ABOUT
THE AUTHOR Karoline
Georges

Karoline Georges  is the author of seven books, including Under the Stone (finalist for the 2012 Quebec Booksellers’ Prize). In 2012, she received the Artistic Creation Award from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec. The Imago Stage, has won several honours in French, including the Governor General’s Literary Award in 2018.

Karoline Georges  is the author of seven books, including Under the Stone (finalist for the 2012 Quebec Booksellers’ Prize). In 2012, she received the Artistic Creation Award from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec. The Imago Stage, has won several honours in French, including the Governor General’s Literary Award in 2018.

NOMINATING LIBRARY COMMENTS

The Imago Stage by Karoline Georges brilliantly explores the issues of body image, obsession with beauty and self-staging on social networks alongside with complex family relationships. Well written and thought-provoking, the author takes a disturbing look at our fascination for screens to escape our flesh and bones reality. Bibliothèque de Québec, Canada

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Country
CA
Publisher
Coach House Books
Translator
Rhonda Mullins
Translation
Translated from the French by Rhonda Mullins

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