Split Tooth
Tanya Tagaq
(Author)
Description
Longlisted for the 2018 Scotiabank Giller PrizeShortlisted for the 2019 Amazon First Novel Award
Shortlisted for the 2019 Kobo Emerging Writer Prize
Winner of the 2019 Indigenous Voices Award for Published Prose in English
Winner of the 2018 Alcuin Society Awards for Excellence in Book Design - Prose Fiction
Longlisted for the 2019 Sunburst Award From the internationally acclaimed Inuit throat singer who has dazzled and enthralled the world with music it had never heard before, a fierce, tender, heartbreaking story unlike anything you've ever read. Fact can be as strange as fiction. It can also be as dark, as violent, as rapturous. In the end, there may be no difference between them. A girl grows up in Nunavut in the 1970s. She knows joy, and friendship, and parents' love. She knows boredom, and listlessness, and bullying. She knows the tedium of the everyday world, and the raw, amoral power of the ice and sky, the seductive energy of the animal world. She knows the ravages of alcohol, and violence at the hands of those she should be able to trust. She sees the spirits that surround her, and the immense power that dwarfs all of us. When she becomes pregnant, she must navigate all this. Veering back and forth between the grittiest features of a small arctic town, the electrifying proximity of the world of animals, and ravishing world of myth, Tanya Tagaq explores a world where the distinctions between good and evil, animal and human, victim and transgressor, real and imagined lose their meaning, but the guiding power of love remains. Haunting, brooding, exhilarating, and tender all at once, Tagaq moves effortlessly between fiction and memoir, myth and reality, poetry and prose, and conjures a world and a heroine readers will never forget.
Product Details
Price
$16.99
$15.80
Publisher
Penguin Books Canada
Publish Date
September 24, 2019
Pages
208
Dimensions
5.2 X 7.9 X 0.7 inches | 0.44 pounds
Language
English
Type
Paperback
EAN/UPC
9780143198055
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About the Author
TANYA TAGAQ is an improvisational performer, avant-garde composer, and experimental recording artist who won the 2014 Polaris Music Prize for her album Animism, a work that disrupted the music world in Canada and beyond with its powerfully original vision. Tagaq contorts elements of punk, metal, and electronica into a complex and contemporary sound that begins in breath, a communal and fundamental phenomenon. While the Polaris Prize signaled an awakening to Tanya Tagaq's art and messages, she has been touring and collaborating with an elite international circle of artists for over a decade. Tagaq's improvisational approach lends itself to collaboration across genres, and recent projects have pulled her in vastly different directions, from contributing guest vocals to a F**ked Up song (a hardcore punk band from Toronto) to premiering a composition made for Kronos Quartet's Fifty for the Future collection, and composing a piece for the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. Tanya's most recent album Retribution was released in fall 2016.
Reviews
Audiobook finalist for the 2019 Audie Awards (Literary Fiction & Classics category)
WINNER of the 2018 Alcuin Society Awards for Excellence in Book Design - Prose Fiction
SHORTLISTED for the 2019 Amazon First Novel Award
SHORTLISTED for the 2019 Kobo Emerging Writer Prize "Tagaq's surreal meld of poetry and prose transmutes the Arctic's boundless beauty, intensity, and desolation into a wrenching contemporary mythology."
--The New Yorker
"Though the protagonist's coming-of-age story, generously and lovingly documented by Tagaq, is the anchor, Split Tooth is not a book that can be fully absorbed in one sitting. It's possible to sink deeper and deeper into the narrative with each successive reading. Like a smirking teenager, Split Tooth blithely gives typical literary expectations the finger, daring us to see and experience narrative as chaotic, emotional, and deeply instinctive. And it succeeds."
--Quill and Quire "A raw, powerful voice breathes fresh air into traditional Inuit folklore to create a modern tale of mythological proportions."
--Kirkus
"Tanya's book is one of the most incredible things I've ever read. It's deeply profound, emotional and personal, and furthers her artistic experimentation and genius into a new realm. I love her even more after reading it, and I'm once again awed by her talent."
--Jesse Wente, CBC Broadcaster "[Split Tooth] straddles the line between memoir and fiction, prose and poetry, magic and harsh reality. . . [and] is infused with Tagaq's intimate knowledge of life in the Arctic."
--Oprah Magazine "[A] forceful coming-of-age tale."
--Toronto Life magazine "[Split Tooth is] one of the best things I've ever read. Amazing. Amazing. Amazing. Amazing. The last two pages of her book are just this whole beautiful piece about: I don't want to forgive. But I forgive myself. I'll pick it up every once in a while just to read that."
--Elliot Page
"In [Tanya Tagaq]'s forthcoming novel, Split Tooth, there's a chapter called "Ritual" that is such a distillation of childhood magic and refuge that it made me feel like I was reading Tove Jansson or Roald Dahl for the first time."
--Sean Michaels, Scotiabank Giller Prize-winning author of Us Conductors "An ambitious and acrobatic blend of memoir, fiction, poetry, and dream journals."
--Refinery29
"Tanya Tagaq has written a book that should re-arrange the reader's mind and very being in her astounding Split Tooth. She uses the narrative arc of a coming of age story to tell of coming of age in a northern, indigenous community that includes close experience of abuse, village violence, colonial exploitation, and also close kin ties, birth, death, a knowing of how we are really fed, an awareness of how small life can be, and how large ... I look forward to putting this book in people's hands."
--Rick Simonson, owner of Elliott Bay Book Company "[Split Tooth] boldly and cohesively mixes memoir, traditional folk tales, poetry and fiction to depict the humiliations and hilarities of coming-of-age, the formidable power of Nunavut's landscape, the resilience of women ... The book is like nothing I've ever read before, exhilarating in its carnality, experimentation, vulnerability and wisdom."
--Now Magazine
"Neither fully autobiography nor fiction, Split Tooth is brutal, beautiful literary magic."
--Exclaim Magazine
"Tagaq's genre-defying work establishes her as a careful, gifted wordsmith" --Publishers Weekly
"Split Tooth is both fractured and direct, horrible and beautiful, so surreal in its reality, so real in its surreality...Tagaq's writing is both weighted down in the troubled, material world while also being free to explore the ageless, phantasmagorical world that exists behind it. There are realities that exist beyond our own, and they are all gathered and explored here."
--Bookshelf.ca "In simplest terms, Split Tooth is a punch to the throat...a stellar first novel; an incredible work of Canadian, indigenous, and world literatures."
--PopMatters
"Tagaq has broken a new trail for all future Inuit writers to tread upon, describing the lived world of an Inuk child with writing that is breathtaking and singular...With this work Tagaq has reshaped what Inuit literature is... it is impossible to stop reading. It is delicious. And offers a new way forward for Inuit authors."
--Inuit Art Quarterly
WINNER of the 2018 Alcuin Society Awards for Excellence in Book Design - Prose Fiction
SHORTLISTED for the 2019 Amazon First Novel Award
SHORTLISTED for the 2019 Kobo Emerging Writer Prize "Tagaq's surreal meld of poetry and prose transmutes the Arctic's boundless beauty, intensity, and desolation into a wrenching contemporary mythology."
--The New Yorker
"Though the protagonist's coming-of-age story, generously and lovingly documented by Tagaq, is the anchor, Split Tooth is not a book that can be fully absorbed in one sitting. It's possible to sink deeper and deeper into the narrative with each successive reading. Like a smirking teenager, Split Tooth blithely gives typical literary expectations the finger, daring us to see and experience narrative as chaotic, emotional, and deeply instinctive. And it succeeds."
--Quill and Quire "A raw, powerful voice breathes fresh air into traditional Inuit folklore to create a modern tale of mythological proportions."
--Kirkus
"Tanya's book is one of the most incredible things I've ever read. It's deeply profound, emotional and personal, and furthers her artistic experimentation and genius into a new realm. I love her even more after reading it, and I'm once again awed by her talent."
--Jesse Wente, CBC Broadcaster "[Split Tooth] straddles the line between memoir and fiction, prose and poetry, magic and harsh reality. . . [and] is infused with Tagaq's intimate knowledge of life in the Arctic."
--Oprah Magazine "[A] forceful coming-of-age tale."
--Toronto Life magazine "[Split Tooth is] one of the best things I've ever read. Amazing. Amazing. Amazing. Amazing. The last two pages of her book are just this whole beautiful piece about: I don't want to forgive. But I forgive myself. I'll pick it up every once in a while just to read that."
--Elliot Page
"In [Tanya Tagaq]'s forthcoming novel, Split Tooth, there's a chapter called "Ritual" that is such a distillation of childhood magic and refuge that it made me feel like I was reading Tove Jansson or Roald Dahl for the first time."
--Sean Michaels, Scotiabank Giller Prize-winning author of Us Conductors "An ambitious and acrobatic blend of memoir, fiction, poetry, and dream journals."
--Refinery29
"Tanya Tagaq has written a book that should re-arrange the reader's mind and very being in her astounding Split Tooth. She uses the narrative arc of a coming of age story to tell of coming of age in a northern, indigenous community that includes close experience of abuse, village violence, colonial exploitation, and also close kin ties, birth, death, a knowing of how we are really fed, an awareness of how small life can be, and how large ... I look forward to putting this book in people's hands."
--Rick Simonson, owner of Elliott Bay Book Company "[Split Tooth] boldly and cohesively mixes memoir, traditional folk tales, poetry and fiction to depict the humiliations and hilarities of coming-of-age, the formidable power of Nunavut's landscape, the resilience of women ... The book is like nothing I've ever read before, exhilarating in its carnality, experimentation, vulnerability and wisdom."
--Now Magazine
"Neither fully autobiography nor fiction, Split Tooth is brutal, beautiful literary magic."
--Exclaim Magazine
"Tagaq's genre-defying work establishes her as a careful, gifted wordsmith" --Publishers Weekly
"Split Tooth is both fractured and direct, horrible and beautiful, so surreal in its reality, so real in its surreality...Tagaq's writing is both weighted down in the troubled, material world while also being free to explore the ageless, phantasmagorical world that exists behind it. There are realities that exist beyond our own, and they are all gathered and explored here."
--Bookshelf.ca "In simplest terms, Split Tooth is a punch to the throat...a stellar first novel; an incredible work of Canadian, indigenous, and world literatures."
--PopMatters
"Tagaq has broken a new trail for all future Inuit writers to tread upon, describing the lived world of an Inuk child with writing that is breathtaking and singular...With this work Tagaq has reshaped what Inuit literature is... it is impossible to stop reading. It is delicious. And offers a new way forward for Inuit authors."
--Inuit Art Quarterly
