Books published by DC Books,Canada

"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.

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.

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.

Robert Edison Sandiford moved from Canada to his parents' native Barbados in 1996. He went for 'wife and work' -- his new bride was a Bajan, and he had landed an editor's position at the leading daily newspaper. Yet his journey 'Back Home' also led to a series of insightful and often poignant meditations on relationships, island life, and the decline of his father, diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease twelve years earlier.

Beautifully shaped and with language full of sensuous intimations, here is the latest volume of poems by Steve Luxton. From the tensile short lyrics of "Hermit Crab Song" to the loosely sashaying rhythms of "Morning After: At the Dacha". Luxton's sustained vision compels and fascinates. As G V Downes comments in Canadian Literature, Luxton is both original and aware, a poet "who sees with precision" the Canadian landscape. Like the being in the title poem "Iridium", the reader is urged for a moment to relinquish the grotesque world of appearances to find shapes that sound, touch, and endure.