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"Where is everybody?" That's the question physicist Enrico Fermi posed to his Manhattan Project colleagues now 70 years ago. They knew what he meant. Decades of reaching out to intelligent beings elsewhere in the universe, and no response. Zero. Nothing. A fact which remains true today. Mont Babel sling-shots off the Fermi paradox using the opposing forces of father and son. Jim Benedict's a humanist, a man of the word, his son an engineer who's bored by Shakespeare and likes the NFL. "In the beginning was the word. In the beginning was the Big Bang: two party bumper stickers of our current malaise," writes Jim Benedict. Father and son rarely communicate. If they do, it is by email. What brings them together is the lovely Iris Doubt, Tom Benedict's south African geologist girlfriend, one of the Ariel School children who claimed to have been visited by aliens. Now working in Canada, she spends her free time as invitee to UFO conferences and as investigator of impact craters, one of which is l'oeil du Québec, Mont Babel. Macrocosm meets microcosm in Mont Babel, quantum mechanics and astrophysics, neutrinos and black holes, raising questions about perception and consciousness, heaven and family peace. Mont Babelfeatures an Introduction by Don C. Donderi, author of UFOs, ETs, and Alien Abductions: A Scientist Looks at the Evidence

"In his third DC Books title, Ghost Face, Greg Santos explores what it means to have been a Cambodian infant adopted at birth by a Canadian family. Through a uniquely playful and self-reflective series of poems that pay moving homage to his adoptive parents, and explore the fantasies of a lost family and life in Cambodia, Santos leads the reader through his visceral process of unlearning and relearning who he is and who he might become."--

The protagonist of this novel, Stephen, twice exiled, first from his birthplace, Hungary, and then from the United States as a Vietnam draft resistor who settles in Montreal, Quebec, becomes obsessed with W.H. Auden's poem, 'Musée des Beaux Arts' and Bruegel's painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, an obsession about the nature of suffering and art that leads to his attempted suicide and to the subsequent chaos of his life. Upon his discharge from a mental institute, he attends several sessions with his psychiatrist with whom he has a comically adversarial relationship wherein they explore his false reliance on literature as the only way to define and relate to the world. Told through the first- person narrator, the novel explores the nature of suffering, of authenticity, and of the value of the written word as Stephen reflects on his past life, the dissolution of his marriage, and his abiding yet potentially destructive passion for books. After his discharge from the mental institute and while undergoing therapy and merciless self-evaluation, Stephen receives a mysterious phone call that leads him to an exploration of his failed relationships with women and a final surprise resolution to his search for meaning and redemption. Set primarily in Montreal, the novel also travels to the places of Stephen's past: the Hungary of his childhood, Europe, the United States, and the Montreal of his youth through his memories and reflections. Despite its comic undertone, the novel explores the illusions we construct to provide value to our lives, the nature of love and the erotic, and the path towards compassion and meaning..

Its 2008. Blue Hills is a haunted place. Katie fights to reclaim her life from the grip of a profound psychological crisis, tracing back a maternal thread through a stumbled-upon and uncertain family history at the nearby, now-abandoned prairie mental asylum. As Katie seeks to rehabilitate the present by understanding the past, her fate becomes imaginatively intertwined with that of her great-grandmother Kate Wake, an enigmatic independent-minded artist with a remarkable story of her own. In returning to a scene of loss, this elegant variation on the Eurydice -- Orpheus myth reconsiders, with a fresh, unsentimental vision, the roles of trauma, madness, creativity and memory in relation to art and literary form. Sharply realized and fortified by a fierce, poetic grace, Kate Wake testifies to the timeless, urgent power of art and music with a delicately experimental, multi-genre story that unfolds its narrative mystery to reveal a shocking core.

Gavin McHenry is a lonely, restless man. Even among the beautiful and bountiful yuletide merriment of his cousin Arthur LeMagnes Christmas feast, the RCMP constable stands apart, brooding and regretful. Then a strange Sasquatch on a sled crashes the party and challenges him to a cruel game. A kind of duel, it will lead to other tests along the way as a year hence Gavin goes in search of the beast the Dene Nation call Nuk-luk. Is the young constable just an old-fashioned Canadian adventurer or a retro Millennial adrenalin junkie? Gavins struggle for virtuous action and nobility of soul in a self-serving world of violent deceit and sexual treachery may be that of every man and woman alive today. In Sasquatch and the Green Sash, Keith Hendersons narrator presents a scarily enchanting and thrilling tale of two determined, duty-bound adversaries. Gavins struggle is ours, and something to savour for sure -- but maybe not too sweetly? One thing clear through all the snow and ice and race to win is what some will risk to gain or lose, be it love or fame through sin and dishonour in the perilous Arctic mountains of Canadas mystical north Sasquatch and the Green Sash is a modernised retelling of the medieval poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight...

A woman wins a fabulous lottery; a frustrated middle-age man waits for his wealthy father to die; an unemployed father and widower struggles to earn a living wage; an older man of means has an affair with a much younger woman; a privileged but harassed suburban woman and a homeless man meet in a subway station: each story, built upon familiar motifs, leads into the core of the characters sense of who they are. The narrative drama arises from what they face and how they live during their present circumstances. For the readers, the stories transform the ordinary, which many have felt themselves, into a new dimension of experience. As a writer of short fiction whose very first collection The Cost of Living was nominated for the Governor Generals Award, Radu evinces a sure voice and deft hand. Of his previous book Earthbound, also published by DC Books, a reviewer in The Fiddlehead states ''the variety is dazzling and somewhat daunting because Radu writes convincingly in all of these voices.'' Anatanas Sileika confirms in The Toronto Star that Radus earlier book of stories, A Private Performance, is a ''collection of sparkling gems.'' Years of crafting the art of the short story has led to Radus mastery of effect and style, not to mention an undercurrent of humour and wit, which enables him to handle emotionally charged and complex dramas. In the words of Prairie Fire reviewing Radus collection Sex in Russia, displays the necessary empathy to reveal his protagonists natures, while his morally centered prose provides perspective. Net Worth continues Radus tradition of well-crafted and necessary stories.

Excitement Tax uses a series of tonally various prose sonnets to trace the deeply uneasy relationship of a grown-up person and his imaginary friend, Walter Weaselbird. The pair crash through thickets of erudition in search of candy. Often they find candy.

"Edited by Kenneth Radu"--Title page verso.

In metaphor there is an implicit comparison, a higher form by which presence in this world is made manifest through language. Pierre DesRuisseaux . . . practises that ellipse of metaphor in which I like to see the primal symbol, polished by the poet to a glittering point of excellence . . . Pierre DesRuisseaux's work abounds in such triumphs. No one now dares to talk seriously of the universe . . . It is by trusting to language -- not childish language, but the language of childhood -- and to the original state of the word that the poet intends to lay the foundation of his peaceable kingdom and restore the universe, giving it the appropriate form and rhythm for the truths he has to say, and, with convincing discipline, first capturing the reader's attention, then inspiring fervour.

When Canadian reality TV producer Jonathan Farb finds out that he may be dying of a brain tumor on the same day that he catches his wife having an affair with her obstetrician, he makes a pledge: to raise his five month-old son Elliot to manhood before his time is up. Farbs list of parenting goals range from instilling a religious identification (can a baby be Bar Mitzvahed?), to the importance of Education (The Birds & The Bees), and onto more pressing pursuits like amassing capital for his son's inheritance. Can Farb succeed in getting his reality TV pitch Canada's Next Great Apologist greenlit despite the opposition of his antagonistic boss, a pathological fear of public speaking, and his declining mental and physical health? An energetic and ultimately poignant literary debut, Failure To Thrive digs deep into the compromises of marriage, the intensity of parenthood and the love that propels a father in the face of his own mortality to raise his son.

With wit and sensitivity, these tales portray moments of suffering, confusion, and discovery and introduce the reader to worlds as widely various as Japanese kite-making, bees, daycare, alcohol, and motorcycle maintenance. Abrays stories push full-on into the world of obsessions. A new vacuum cleaner becomes a pawn in a just-ended relationship. Riding-a-motorbike becomes the way brothers bond over their troubled relationship with their father. A wise naturalist takes the reader on a comic tour of an animal-filled mall, and a bee infestation in a kitchen forces three urban apartment-sharing youths to suddenly confront nature and their own changing relationship.