The Listeners: Jordan Tannahill

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On April 4, 2019, Tannahill and three collaborators staged a protest action during high tea at The Dorchester Hotel. [42] The action was in response to Brunei's proposed introduction of laws that make homosexual sex and adultery punishable by stoning to death. [43] The Dorchester Collection is a luxury hotel operator owned by the Brunei Investment Agency. Video documentation of the protest action, and Tannahill's forceful removal from the hotel, went viral soon after it was posted online. [44] Bibliography [ edit ] Fiction [ edit ] Powerfully, the novel sets itself up as a memoir of a woman who is retrospectively trying to arrange the moments of her life that turned into a rampant cascade that swept her away from what was her “normal”. There are remarks situated outside of her narrative that reference fictional events. Disclaimers or context that work to give the reader an added sense of suspense and unease simply because it implies with its framing that this is reality. I was hoping that was the end of it, but I could tell it was still working on Paul as he lay there, staring up at the ceiling. For such a giant man, he could be like a little boy when he stewed on something. He received Canada's Governor General's Award for English-language drama in 2014 for Age of Minority: Three Solo Plays, [18] in 2018 for his plays Botticelli in the Fire & Sunday in Sodom, [19] and was a finalist for the award in 2016 for his play Concord Floral, and in 2023 for Is My Microphone On?. He has been nominated for five Dora Mavor Moore Awards for Toronto theatre, winning in 2013 for his live-streamed monologue rihannaboi95, and in 2015 for Concord Floral. A masterful speculative novel exploring the fine lines between faith, conspiracy, and mania in contemporary America.

I really loved the premise of this and the blurbs made it sound like it would live up to its premise, but unfortunately it wasn't for me. Mr. Tannahill (who is an award winning playwright and author) has written a compelling and intense novel questioning the nature of spirituality, mental health, and the quest of fringe groups to offer support and care. The novel has a trajectory that increases in volume and disintegration posing interesting questions and dilemmas to the reader along the way. Why did you want to explore the idea of how people respond when their ideas of themselves, their personal narratives are suddenly falling apart? I studied Paul's face, wondering if this was all a set-up for one of his laboured jokes. He then told me that ever since his father died in the fall, he had found himself thinking about faith. In the face of this story, one might ask themselves what the appealing feature of such a dementedly irritating plot might be & I should like to highlight that I came across this book while looking to read stories written by Canadian authors. I have a great appreciation for the bizarre, especially in literature, & therefore felt that this book would be right up my alley. When Claire begins to hear a hum she goes insane, in the literal medical meaning of the word. I was intrigued by the topic & admit to having high hopes for this book.Until that evening and my conversation with Ashley on the staircase, I don’t think I fully grasped the extent to which hysteria was a psychic wound that we as women still bore; a wound inflicted from centuries of our symptoms, our instincts about our own bodies, our pleasures and afflictions, always being the first to be discounted and discredited, even by other women. Even by our own daughters, as the case may be. It was a wound that we still carried, because we could, at any moment, have an entire history called upon to silence us in a word, in an instant. Novelist Jordan Tannahill tells ue about his new novel exploring the fine lines between faith, conspiracy and mania in contemporary America, The Listeners. While lying in bed next to her husband one night, Claire Devon hears a low hum that he cannot. And, it seems, no one else can either. This innocuous noise begins causing Claire headaches, nosebleeds and insomnia, gradually upsetting the balance of her life.

One of the book’s most striking but bewildering motifs is the coyotes that dart in and out of the narrative. The most poignant chapter involves a coyote walking through a park in the wake of a tragic event. Are they reminders of the feral nature that lurks in all of us?Tannahill's work in contemporary dance includes choreographing and performing with Christopher House in Marienbad for the Toronto Dance Theatre in 2016; and writing the text for Xenos in 2018, and Outwitting the Devil in 2019, two shows by choreographer Akram Khan, which have toured internationally to venues including Sadler's Wells Theatre, Festival d'Avignon, and the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. Now (newspaper) listed both Marienbad and Xenos as Top 10 dance shows of the 2010s decade. [26]

She’s a relatable 21st-century everywoman who loves her daughter, fears organized religion, and hates the patriarchy. Her cleverness should have probably taken her further in life, but she’s happy with the way things are until The Hum so rudely invades her life. In the same way that burnt toast takes away from the desire & hopes held in the pallet of the consumer so too did this book strip me of the ability to regard it with any level of seriousness. The impossibility that this book was anything other than satire leads me to feel a level of comedic humour otherwise unachievable by a story that is brimmed with sensitive & morose subject matters. The truth is that I am a mother, and a wife, and a former high school English teacher who now teaches ESL night classes at the library near my house. I love my family fiercely. My daughter, Ashley, is the most important person in my life. You read about parents disowning their transgender sons, or refusing to speak to their daughters for marrying a Jew, or not marrying a Jew, and I think— well that's just barbarism. Faith is basically a mental illness if it makes you do something so divorced from your natural instincts as a parent. I remember holding Ashley when she was about forty-five seconds old, before she had even opened her eyes, when she was just this slimy little mole-thing, nearly a month premature, and I remember thinking I would literally commit murder for this creature. As I held her I imagined all of the joy and pleasure she would feel, all of the pain that I would not and could not protect her from, and it completely overwhelmed me. I imagined the men who would hurt her one day, and I imagined castrating them one by one with my bare hands. All of this before she was a minute old! So no, I have never understood how anyone could ever put any creed or ideology before their love of their child—and yet, this is precisely what Ashley accused me of doing in the year leading up to the events on Sequoia Crescent.The suspense that underlies these really beautiful moments between people who share something no one else understands underscores the unique quality this book evokes. I liked that the author kept the novel about the group of 'Hummers' and how they fit (or don't) within their community; I liked that finding the source of the noise was not the purpose of the book. Some members of the book wanted to find it, some wanted to eliminate it, some wanted to live with it. Everyone had a different explanation for it and tried to make sense of it. The fall into conspiracy theories was well described and well executed.