WICI Virtual Book Club: The Little Animals
Tuesday March 8th at 1 p.m. ( via Zoom)
Hosted by Dawn Parker, with a reading by the author
Call for Graduate Student Participants
We are looking for complexity-minded or complexity-curious graduate students from a variety of disciplines to participate in this book club discussion. Students will be provided a copy of the book in advance and will be asked to prepare a short reading with commentary on its relevance to complexity science, complex systems themes and/or the students own research.ÌýPlease contact Brenda Panasiak, WICI Administrative Coordinator, if you are interested, and please share!
WICI affiliate member Sarah Tolmie’sÌý²Ô´Ç±¹±ð±ôÌýThe Little Animals tells the story of Antoni Van Leeuwenhoek, natural philosopher and pioneer of microscopy in 17th-century Delft, and the Goose Girl, drawn from the Brothers Grimm, who can hear the voices of the microbes he is discovering. Magic realism meets early science in Holland’s Golden Age, at the confluence of art and science, religion and commerce.
WICI graduate student respondents across a range of disciplines will be invited to give brief five-minute talks, reading aspects of the novel from the diverse perspectives of their research.Ìý
The event will conclude with an open Q & A session with the author and graduate student readers.
via Zoom
Sarah Tolmie, a Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of À¶Ý®ÊÓƵ, is a traditionally-trained, philologically-oriented medievalist with a master's degree from the University of Toronto and a PhD from the University of Cambridge. Her research interests are in historiography, visionary poetry and embodiment. She has published articles on Middle English and Scots literature, as well as on Langland's Piers Plowman.Ìý
A poet and speculative fiction , Sarah has authored multiple works including The Art of Dying (2018); the 120-sonnet sequence °Õ°ù¾±´ÇÌý(2015); novels The Little Animals (2019)²¹²Ô»åÌýThe Stone Boatmen (2014); and short fiction collectionsÌý¶Ù¾±²õ±ð²¹²õ±ðÌý(2020),ÌýTwo Travelers (2016), and NoFood (2014). In 2020 she published three books, The New Weird short fiction collection Disease, the poetry collection Check, and the novella The Fourth Island.ÌýHer newest work All the Horses of Iceland is anticipated in 2022.
The Little Animals earned the Special Citation at the 2020 Philip K Dick Awards and The Art of Dying was a finalist for the 2018 Griffin Prize.