READING: Banks, Enright, Morgenstern, Senior

Russell Banks has received numerous prizes and awards for his work, including the O. Henry and Best American Short Story Awards and, most recently, the 2011 Common Wealth Award for Literature. His previous novels include Continental Drift, The Sweet Hereafter and Rule of the Bone. He lives in upstate New York. A contemporary tale of guilt and redemption, Banks’ Lost Memory of Skin is a riveting mystery about a young outcast who must create a life for himself in the wake of incarceration.

Anne Enright’s previous novel, The Gathering, won the 2007 Man Booker Prize and is a Canadian and international bestseller. She is also the author of the novels The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch, What Are You Like? and The Wig My Father Wore, and the short story collection The Portable Virgin. Enright presents The Forgotten Waltz, a story about the bewildering speed of attraction and the irreparable slip into longing that reads with breathtaking immediacy.

Rachel Giese is a senior editor at The Walrus. Formerly, she was a columnist for the Toronto Star, a writer and editor at CBC.ca’s Arts Online, a senior editor at Chatelaine and a journalism instructor at Ryerson University.

Erin Morgenstern is a writer and a multimedia artist who describes all of her work as “fairy tales in one way or another.” She lives in Massachusetts. Morgenstern presents her debut novel, The Night Circus, in which a competition between two magicians becomes a star-crossed love story.

Olive Senior (Canada/Jamaica) is the prize-winning author of a dozen books of fiction, poetry and non-fiction. Her short story collection Summer Lightning won the inaugural Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book and her poetry collection Over the Roofs of the World was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry. Senior presents Dancing Lessons, which tells the story of Gertrude Samphire who, after moving into a group home, begins to chronicle her life in a notebook.