St. Lawrence Blues, Marie-Claire Blais. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1974. First edition.
Marie-Claire Blais is a French-Canadian writer of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and plays. She has earned many of Francophone literature’s highest international honours, and was nominated as a candidate for the Nobel prize. Her work is often studied from a critical queer theory lens, and she often centres marginalized and culturally oppressed communities in her work.
"...she writes with great power, and the prose is exhilarating... an exceptional book. Mlle Blais is sustained by her sense of life, her native humanity, her eloquence, her feelings for the possibilities; we may say, paraphrasing Yeats, that she sets her chisel to the hardest stone". - The New York Review of Books, on Marie-Claire Blais' earlier work