Listening for Jupiter

Overview

March soon, and it’s already 28°C in Montreal. Hollywood is living a dead-end life working at the local graveyard. Meanwhile, it’s snowing non-stop all over Europe and in Toronto, where Xavier works for a pharmaceutical company he couldn’t care less about. The two meet somewhere in between... only ever in their dreams. This fresh, international novel weaves the fates of two unlikely friends whose days and nights are filled with movies and music, sleeping pills and shooting stars. A beautiful piece of magical realism with a modern, existential twist.Madeleine Stratford translates the voice of Hollywood, while Arielle Aaronson translates Xavier’s sections.

Reviews

"From London to Toronto, via Bilbao, Montauk, and San Francisco, Pierre-Luc Landry plunges readers into a waking dream." —Samuel Larochelle, Fugues

"It's an intriguing novel about the biggest of topics – the nature of truth and existence, the conditions for real human connection – which Landry orchestrates with ingenuity and dry wit into an offbeat kind of cosmic road-movie." —Simon Lavery, tredynasdays.co.uk

"Inventive . . . This adventurous, improbable novel, which leaves readers wondering whether the two characters are, in fact, two different destinies of the same person, is an intelligent take on a hybrid of literary and genre writing." —Publishers Weekly

"I loved the book despite the occasional confusion . . . Listening for Jupiter is an intrguing light read, a novel blurring the lines between dreams and reality . . . . I'd chalk it up as another success for a young publisher building a brand." —Tony Malone, tonysreadinglist.wordpress.com

"Arielle Aaronson (who translates Xavier's sections), and Madeleine Stratford (who translates Hollywood's), make sure that each character's textual timbre rings true . . . . They have done a superb job making Landry's multi-voiced novel authentically multi-voiced in English." —Alex Andriesse, readingintranslation.com

"A deceptively light story about two men sorting out the conundrums of themselves, it leaves much to consider – on perception, reality, synchronicity and meaning – after the final page." —Jade Colbert, Globe & Mail

"If you've been looking for a novel that explores the underpinnings of reality, the material of dreams, and the almost-mystical revelations we sometimes have while just living our lives, then you need to get yourself a copy of Listening For Jupiter." —Rachel Cordasco, sfintranslation.com

Author Biography

Pierre-Luc Landry is an author, editor, and publisher and has a PhD in creative writing. He is a faculty member at the Royal Military College of Canada's French Studies department. Listening for Jupiter is Landry's second novel and his first to appear in translation. Arielle Aaronson has a diploma in Translation Studies from Concordia University and an M.A. in Second Language Education from McGill University. Her first translation, 21 Days in October, was published by Baraka Books in 2013. Madeleine Stratford is a literary translator and professor of Translation at the Université du Québec en Outaouais. In 2013, she was awarded the John Glassco Prize by the Literary Translators' Association of Canada. She translated Marianne Apostolides at the Banff International Literary Translation Centre in 2014.