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Chemical valley : stories / David Huebert.

by Huebert, David.

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Biblioasis, 2021.

Climatic changes -- Social aspects -- Fiction.

Social justice -- Fiction.

Alienation (Social psychology) -- Fiction.

Alistair MacLeod Prize for Short Fiction.

9781771964470 (trade pbk.)

"A John Metcalf book."

From city-dwelling preppers to long term care nurses, dishwashers to professional hockey enforcers to refinery workers, Chemical Valley's caring and carefully-wrought stories cultivate rich human emotional worlds in all the dankness of our bio-chemical animacy. Full-hearted, laced throughout with bruised optimism and a sincere appreciation of the profound beauty of our wilted, wheezing world, Chemical Valley does not shy away from urgent modern questions--the distribution of toxicity, environmental racism, the future of technology, the climate, and the human body--but it grounds these anxieties in vivid and often humorous intricacies of its characters' lives. These are stories about big questions, but they are not scared of sentiment. Swamp-wrought, they run wild with vital energy, tilt and teeter into crazed and delirious loves. Contemporary issues: climate crisis, social justice, 21st century alienation. The characters in these stories are struggling with feelings of dislocation and exile from their natural and social worlds: a man struggling to care for the environment and his dying girlfriend while still working at a power plant that's polluting his city. Genre: Huebert's stories engage with the ecological world in surprising ways, expressing wonder at the world around us, dismay at its destruction, and using that world as a metaphor for humanity's own floundering, a new genre of ecological/climate fiction he conceives of as 'dirty nature writing.'

Winner of the Alistair MacLeod Prize for Short Fiction, 2022.

Canadian fiction.

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