Chemical Valley: Virtual Hong Kong Reading
Join David Huebert for a reading of his award-winning short fiction collection, Chemical Valley (October 19, 2021)! David will also have a discussion with film and community worker Pearl Chan on hope, reading and writing in a world of depleting resources. This virtual event is hosted by Islanders Space in Hong Kong, and will take place on Saturday, September 24 at 8AM EST / 8PM HKT.
More details here.
Order a copy of Chemical Valley from Islanders Space here!
Get your copy of Chemical Valley from Biblioasis here!
Winner of the Alistair MacLeod Prize for Short Fiction • A Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award Finalist • A 2022 ReLit Award Finalist • A Siskiyou Prize Semi-Finalist • A Miramichi Reader Best Fiction Title of 2021
Out there by the dock the ocean and the air are just layers of shadow and darkness. But the creature’s flesh hums through the dark—a seep of violet in the weeping night.
From refinery operators to long term care nurses, dishwashers to preppers to hockey enforcers, Chemical Valley’s compassionate and carefully wrought stories cultivate rich emotional worlds in and through the dankness of our bio-chemical animacy. Full-hearted, laced throughout with bruised optimism and sincere appreciation of the profound beauty of our wilted, wheezing world, Chemical Valley doesn’t shy away from urgent modern questions—the distribution of toxicity, environmental racism, the place of technoculture in this ecological spasm—but grounds these anxieties in the vivid and often humorous intricacies of its characters’ lives. Swamp-wrought and heartfelt, these stories run wild with vital energy, tilt and teeter into crazed and delirious loves.
David Huebert’s writing has won the CBC Short Story Prize, The Walrus Poetry Prize, and was a finalist for the 2020 Journey Prize. David’s fiction debut, Peninsula Sinking, won a Dartmouth Book Award, was shortlisted for the Alistair MacLeod Short Fiction Prize, and was runner-up for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award. David’s work has been published in magazines such as The Walrus, Maisonneuve, enRoute, and Canadian Notes & Queries, and anthologized in Best Canadian Stories and The Journey Prize Stories. David teaches literature and creative writing at The University of New Brunswick.
