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Fiction. Translated from the French by Oana Avasilichioaei. From multidisciplinary artist Bertrand Laverdure comes UNIVERSAL BUREAU OF COPYRIGHTS, a bold, strange, and addictive story that envisions a world where free will doesn't exist, and an unnameable global corporation buys and sells the copyrights for all things that exist on the earth, including real and fictional characters. Part narrative-poetry, part sci-fi-dystopian fantasy, readers become acquainted with the main character, a man who deconstructs himself as he navigates the mystifying passages of the story. Having no control over his environment, time continuum, or body, he is a puppet on strings, an icon in a video game and, as he eventually discovers with the bowels of the UNIVERSAL BUREAU OF COPYRIGHTS, the object of countless copyrights. With touches of Vonnegut's
Breakfast of Champions and Sterne's
Tristram Shandy, Universal Bureau of Copyrights packs a multitude of modern cultural references into an audacious exploration of identity and one's place in the world.
About the author
Bertrand Laverdure is a poet, novelist, and the current Poet Laureate for Montreal (2015-17). A prolific writer, Laverdure is the author of three books of poetry and four novels, including
Lectodôme (2008),
Bureau universel des copyrights (2011; published in English by BookThug as UNIVERSAL BUREAU OF COPYRIGHTS in 2014), and
La chambre Neptune (2016). He has won many awards for his work, including the 2003 Grand Prix du Festival International Poésie de Trois-Rivières, and the 2009 Grand Prix littéraire Archambault for
Lectodôme.
