This novella is a fictional account of one man's immigration to Quebec. It relates, in the first person, how Samuel Gaska, a failed composer of Polish origin, comes to give up music after doing time in prison in the Canadian West. Torn between the Old World and the New, he feels compelled to explore the origins of American immigration―Acadia, the Amerindians and the West. And delving into this mythology, he discovers that the birds were the first to come here and are the true guides for anyone wanting to settle in America.

A writer, professor and publisher, Étienne Beaulieu runs Éditions Nota bene and teaches literature at the Cégep de Drummondville. His preferred literary genres are the literary essay, which he finds much more personal in tone than the academic study, and the prose narrative, which he considers very different from the novel given his prose philosophy. In 2014, he published a novella, Trop de lumière pour Samuel Gaska (Too Much Light for Samuel Gaska), which garnered the City of Montreal's Prix Jacques-Cartier, the Grand Prix du livre de la Ville de Sherbrooke, the Prix Alfred-Desrochers and was a finalist for the Prix Chambéry (France). His historical narrative, Thomas Aubert : La Pensée et la mer, will be appearing in 2017.

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JONATHAN KAPLANSKY won a French Voices Award to translate Nobel Prize winning author Annie Ernaux’s La vie extérieure (Things Seen). His translation of Frank Borzage: The Life and Films of a Hollywood Romantic by Hervé Dumont was a finalist for the Wall Award from the Theatre Library Association. Recent translations include Jonathan Bécotte’s Like a Hurricane, Hélène Rioux’s The End of the World is Elsewhere, and the libretto of an opera by Hélène Dorion and Marie-Claire Blais entitled Yourcenar: An Island of Passions. He has also translated Dorion’s Days of Sand. Born in Saint John, New Brunswick, Kaplansky now lives in Montreal.

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