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Asian Heritage in Canada
Authors
Lai, Larissa
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Larissa Lai was born in 1967 in
California, grew up in St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador,
and has lived in Ottawa, Vancouver and Calgary. She graduated
from the University of British Columbia with a B.A. (hon.) in
sociology in 1990. In 2001 she completed an M.A. in creative
writing from the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England.
Her poems and short fiction have appeared in many literary journals.
She is also an accomplished editor and curator. Lai completed a Ph.D. in English at the University of Calgary in 2006. Her dissertation is entitled: The "I" of the Storm: Practice, Subjectivity and Time Zones in Asian Canadian Writing. Lai is now an assistant professor of Canadian literature at the University of British Columbia. |
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Fiction
Salt Fish Girl
Toronto: Thomas Allen, 2002.
9th floor PS8573
.A373 S24 2002
Publisher's Synopsis
Set alternately in nineteenth-century China and in a futuristic
Pacific Northwest, Salt Fish Girl
is the mesmerizing tale of an ageless female character who
shifts shape and form through time and place.
Awards and Honours
2003 City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book Prize (Shortlisted)
2003 Sunburst Award
for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic (Nominated)
2002 Alcuin Society Award for Excellence in Book Design in Canada--Prose Fiction (Honourable Mention); Designer: Gordon Robertson
2002 James Tiptree Jr. Award (Nominated) |
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Anthology (Short stories)
"Rachel." In So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction & Fantasy, ed. Nalo Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehan, 53-60. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2004.
9th floor PN6071 .S33 S6 2004 |
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Poetry
Automaton Biographies
Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2009.
9th floor PS8573 .A373 A87 2009
Publisher's Synopsis (from its website)
The books consists of four long poems: "Rachel," a meditation in the voice of the cyborg figure Rachel from Ridley Scott's film Blade Runner and its source material, Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?; "nascent fashion," which addresses contemporary war and its excesses; "Ham," which circulates around the chimpanzee named Ham sent up into space as part of the Mercury Redstone missions by NASA in the 1960s and later donated to the Coulston Foundation for biomedical research; and "auto matter," a kind of unfolding autobiography told in poems.
Awards and Honours
2010 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize (BC Book Prizes)(Nominated) |
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Poetry
Sybil Unrest
Co-author: Rita Wong.
Burnaby, B.C.: LINEbooks, 2008.
9th floor PS8595 .O5975 S92 2008
Synopsis (from Acknowledgements)
This poem began in a renga spirit during the 2003 Hong Kong International Literary Festival. ... The conversational format and the intensive questioning produce an unstable, flickering sort of subjectivity that throws an enlightenment individual "i" into question, and hopefully explores its ideological underpinnings. It is into this unstable subjectivity that we attempt to reinject questions of gender, race and class, as well as geography, movement, power and hope. |
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Anthology (Poetry)
Fist of the Spider Woman: Tales of Fear & Queer Desire
9th floor PS8323 .L47 F57 2009
Lai, Larissa. "Nascent fashion." In Fist of the Spider Woman, edited by Amber Dawn. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2009, 98-102. |
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Selected Criticism and Interpretation
Fu, Bennett Yu-Hsiang. "Differing Bodies, Defying Subjects, Deferring Texts: Gender, Sexuality, and Transgression in Chinese Canadian Women's Writing." Ph.D. diss., Université de Montréal, 2004.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
Harry, Leanne Marie. "(Re)membering the Subject: The Politics of History, Memory, and Identity in Maria Campbell, Joy Kogawa, and Larissa Lai." M.A. diss., Simon Fraser University, 2000.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
Luo, Shao-Pin, "Translation and Transformation in Chorus of Mushrooms and When Fox is a Thousand." In Asian Women: Interconnections, ed. Tineke Hellwig and Sunera Thobani, 115-138. Toronto: Women's Press, 2006.
7th floor HQ1726.A834 2006
Ty, Eleanor, "Shape-shifters and Disciplined Bodies: Feminist Tactics, Science Fiction, and Fantasy," chap. in Unfastened: Globality and Asian North American Narratives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010, 89-107.
9th floor PS153 .A84 T9 2010 (also available as an e-book) |
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