Kerouac & Presley takes you on the road, guitar slung over your shoulder. Beginning in the Montreal neighbourhood where a teenage girl was brutally murdered in 1975, the International Year of the Woman, to an Abbey in Connecticut where a former starlet and Elvis co-star fled Hollywood to become a nun. This is the story of a wanderer who sets out to rewrite “the blank and flawless page” that is America. Inspired by the history of Quebec and America, Kerouac & Presley is an American prayer in prose and paragraphs.

Originally from Laval, Quebec, André Pronovost has a Master's degree in Animal Psychology. In 1978 he hiked the Appalachian Trail from one end to the other. His seventh book, Kerouac & Presley won the 2018 Quebec Arts Council (CALQ) literary prize. He lives in Montreal.

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International journalist and award-winning literary translator Fred A. Reed is also a respected specialist on politics and religion in the Middle East. Anatolia Junction, his acclaimed work on the unacknowledged wars of the Ottoman succession, has been translated in Turkey, where it enjoys a wide following. Shattered Images, which explores the origins of contemporary fundamentalist movements in Islam, has also been translated into Turkish, and into French as Images brisées (VLB éditeur, Montréal).

After several years as a librarian and trade union activist at the Montreal Gazette, Reed began reporting from Islamic Iran in 1984, visiting the Islamic Republic thirty times since then. He has also reported extensively on Middle Eastern affairs for La Presse, CBC Radio-Canada and Le Devoir.

A three-time winner of the Governor General’s Award for translation, plus a nomination in 2009 for his translation of Thierry Hentsch’s Le temps aboli, Empire of Desire. Reed has translated works by many of Québec’s leading authors, several in collaboration with novelist David Homel, as well as by Nikos Kazantzakis and other modern Greek writers.

Reed worked with documentarist Jean-Daniel Lafond on two documentary films: Salam Iran, a Persian Letter and American Fugitive. The two later collaborated on Conversations in Tehran (Talonbooks, 2006). He is currently working on a memoir. Fred A. Reed resides in Montréal.

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