Fiction. Beset with environmental disaster, animal-like children, and the failure of traditional roles, the twenty-six fathers of CATACLYSM BABY raise their desperate voices to reveal the strange stations of frustrated parenthood, to proclaim familial thrashings against the fading light of our exhausted planet, its glory grown wild again. As the known world disappears, these beleaguered and all-too-breakable men cling ever tighter to the duties of an unrecoverable past, even as their children rush ahead, evolve away. Unflinching in the face of apocalypse and unblinking before the complicated gaze of parental love, Matt Bell's CATACLYSM BABY is a powerful chronicle of our last days, and of the tentative graces that might fill the hours of our dusk.

Here we have Matt Bell at his most inventive and uncanny: parents and children, murderers and monsters, wild renditions of the past, and stunning visions of the present, all of which build to a virtuoso reimagining of our world. A 19th-century minister builds an elaborate motor that will bring about the Second Coming. A man with rough hands locks a boy in a room with an albino ape. An apocalyptic army falls under a veil of forgetfulness. The story of Red Riding Hood is run through a potentially endless series of iterations. A father invents an elaborate, consuming game for his hospitalized son. Indexes, maps, a checkered shirt buried beneath a blanket of snow: they are scattered through these pages as clues to mysteries that may never be solved, lingering evidence of the violence and unknowability of the world. A Tree or a Person or a Wall brings together Bell’s previously published shorter fiction—the story collection How They Were Found and the acclaimed novella Cataclysm Baby—along with seven dark and disturbing new stories, to create a collection of singular power.

Although the infant has been a consistent figure in literature (and, for many people, a significant figure in personal life), there’s been little attention focused on infants, or on their place in Canadian fiction, until now. In this book, Sandra Sabatini examines Canadian fiction to trace the ideological charge behind the represented infant. Examining writers from L.M. Montgomery and Frederick Philip Grove to Thomas King and Terry Griggs, Sabatini compares women’s writing about babies with the way infants appear in texts by men over the course of a century. She discovers a range of changing attitudes toward babies. After being seen as a source of financial burden, social shame, or sentimental fantasy, infants have increasingly become a source of value and meaning. The book challenges the perception of babies as passive objects of care and argues for a reading of the infant as a subject in itself. It also reflects upon how the representations of infancy in Canadian literature offer an intriguing portrait of how we imagine ourselves.

Before you succeed at parenting, you need to succeed as a couple! Baby Bomb is the resource you need when a new baby turns your life—and your romantic relationship—upside down. A baby is a blessing—and also a completely life-altering event. If you’re like many new parents, nothing could have fully prepared you for the exhaustion of late-night feedings, the explosive diapers, the evaporation of your free time, the pure joy, and the moments of pure terror. In the midst of these hazy, early months, it’s normal to feel overwhelmed. And when you’re overwhelmed, it’s easy to put your romantic relationship on the back burner. But, more and more, research shows that in order to be the best parents you can be, you and your partner need to make sure that your needs—as a couple—are also met. Written by a psychologist and relationship expert, Baby Bomb offers powerful tools based in psychology and neurobiology to help you and your partner co-parent and co-partner as a solid and supportive team—while also cultivating mad love for each other! You’ll find more than just “tips” for better parenting and partnering; you’ll discover how a secure-functioning relationship is essential for raising happy, healthy kids. This isn’t a book with advice about how to have a romantic candlelit dinner while your baby is screaming in the other room. It’s a road map for getting on the same page about your expectations as parents, about your needs as humans, and about how to maintain a strong and lasting relationship in the face of, well, a baby bomb.