About BC Books Online
BC Books Online was created for anyone interested in BC-published books, and with librarians especially in mind. We'd like to make it easy for library staff to learn about books from BC publishers - both new releases and backlist titles - so you can inform your patrons and keep your collections up to date.
Our site features print books and ebooks - both new releases and backlist titles - all of which are available to order through regular trade channels. Browse our subject categories to find books of interest or create and export lists by category to cross-reference with your library's current collection.
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Description
CANADA READS RUNNER-UP, 2024
Winner, Trillium Book Award and Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction; Finalist, Rogers Writers' Trust of Canada Fiction Prize; a Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year
In Tea Mutonji's disarming debut story collection, a woman contemplates her Congolese traditions during a family wedding, a teenage girl looks for happiness inside a pack of cigarettes, a mother reconnects with her daughter through their shared interest in fish, and a young woman decides to shave her head in the waiting room of an abortion clinic. These punchy, sharply observed stories blur the lines between longing and choosing, exploring the narrator's experience as an involuntary one. Tinged with pathos and humour, they interrogate the moments in which femininity, womanness, and identity are not only questioned but also imposed.
Shut Up You're Pretty is the first book to be published under the imprint VS. Books, a series of books curated and edited by writer-musician Vivek Shraya featuring work by new and emerging Indigenous or Black writers, or writers of colour.
About the Author
Tea Mutonji is an award-winning poet and writer. Born in Congo-Kinshasa, she now lives and writes in Scarborough, Ontario where she was named emerging writer of the year (2017) by the Ontario Book Publishers Organization. Shut Up You're Pretty is her first book.
Awards
- Short-listed, Canada Reads
- Winner, Trillium Book Award
- Winner, Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction (Publishing Triangle)
- Short-listed, Rogers Writers' Trust of Canada Fiction Prize
Editorial Reviews
The stories are honest and vulnerable, propulsive, complex, and unafraid to show life and sexuality and family in all its messiness ... I marvelled at Mutonji's beautiful phrasing throughout, and "Sober Party" and "Theresa Is Getting Married" brought me to tears. -49th Shelf
A sense of assuredness permeates Mutonji's writing in Shut Up You're Pretty. Through a series of 18 strikingly raw vignettes, Loli's identity flows like the Congolese river she is named after. -Toronto Star
Each story is a separate, richly described glimpse into an aspect of the protagonist's life, and together they form a whole picture of a young woman who is struggling to understand herself and her world. -Book Riot
The stories are vivid and unsettling in their detail ... Mutonji writes with grit and quick-witted humour. The ease with which these stories unfold is a facet of the author's craft: the prose holds its emotion in the same way the characters hold their pain. -Quill and Quire (STARRED REVIEW)
Shut Up You're Pretty is an unforgettable collection of stories, signalling the arrival of a brave and distinctive new voice in Canadian literature. -Zoe Whittall, author of The Fake
Shut Up You're Pretty is a chronicle of millennial malaise, gendered and seaming with a discontent that does not sleep on the status quo of any page. Tea Mutonji is a writer who is assured and measured with a style all her own, holding a hand up to greats like Hurston and Kincaid. She takes back the 21st century in this delicious feast of stories as vivid and taut as they are understated. -Canisia Lubrin, author of Voodoo Hypothesis and augur
This book asks us to witness the journey of a girl into womanhood, holding in her arms the fragile understandings of femininity as a commodity, femininity as a caretaker, femininity as a storyteller. Dulled by the residue of trauma and sharpened by the expectations of the streets, Tea's characters are painfully and beautifully rendered in these gritty, must-read stories. -Catherine Hernandez, author of Scarborough
Tea Mutonji's timely, original, and absorbing stories compose a shattered and shattering bildungsroman. Her lyric, dramatically charged fragments are linked by rich and vital prose, captivating and urgent storytelling, and an eye for the strange and striking detail. Probing the mundane, the traumatic, and all the struggles in between with authenticity, intelligence, and art, Shut Up You're Pretty is a stunning debut. -Daniel Scott Tysdal, author of Predicting the Next Big Advertising Breakthrough Using a Potentially Dangerous Method
