SPICY VALENTINE: LGBTQ+ AUTHORS – OF LOVE AND ISRAEL

SPICY VALENTINE: LGBTQ+ AUTHORS – OF LOVE AND ISRAEL 

Wed Feb 14,  8:00pm           $18
Moderator: Anakana Schofield

TAMARA FAITH BERGER / Yara: A Novel
Set in the sex-tape-panicked early 2000s, Yara is a reverse cautionary tale about what the body can teach us. Distraught that her teenage daughter is in love with a woman a decade older, Yara’s mother sends her away from their home in Brazil to Israel, on a Birthright trip for Jewish youth. Freed from her increasingly controlling and jealous girlfriend, Yara is determined to forge her own path and follow her desires. After Birthright takes a debaucherous turn, Yara flees Israel for Toronto, and then California. As she wanders, Yara is forced to reframe her relationship and her ideas around consent.
TAMARA FAITH BERGER writes fiction, non-fiction and screenplays. She is the author of Lie With Me and The Way of the Whore, Kuntalini, and Maidenhead which won the 2012 Believer Book Award. Her fifth book, Queen Solomon, was nominated for a Trillium Book Award.

REBECCA “BEE” SACKS / The Lover
Unfolding during a previous invasion of Gaza, The Lover tells the passionate love story between a young Israeli soldier and a Canadian woman. The emotional realities of ideology and war begin to change the lovers, who undergo a gradual and parallel radicalization and deradicalization.
Set mostly in Tel Aviv where Allie, an introspective academic seeking her place in the world, falls deeply and unexpectedly in love with Eyal who is doing his military service, the story is passionate and sensual and Allie is happily embraced by Eyal’s family. But when he returns home from an invasion of Gaza, to which he has an intense emotional response, Allie has changed so radically that her betrayal of her lover feels both shocking and tragic.
The Lover is a provocative, immersive, gorgeously written love story that raises unsettling questions about identity, conflict, intensity, war, and danger.
REBECCA “BEE” SACKS (they/any) is a queer writer. Their debut novel, City of a Thousand Gates, was awarded the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for fiction in 2023. A former journalist, they previously worked at Vanity Fair before moving to Israel to study sacred Jewish texts. Bee lives in Los Angeles.

–

ANAKANA SCHOFIELD is the Irish-Canadian author of Bina: A Novel in Warnings and the critically acclaimed, Giller Prize-shortlisted novel Martin John. She contributes criticism and essays to the London Review of Books blog, The Guardian, The Irish Times, and The Globe and Mail.