Formally inventive, Simon Brousseau’s Synapses orchestrates a series of beautifully crafted literary snapshots, each involving a different character, eloquently presented using a sole, twisting and turning, stylistically accomplished sentence written in the second-person singular. Brousseau depicts a vast society of differing psyches and souls, all unique and idiosyncratic, yet interconnected, quasi neurologically, in a dialogic network of humanity. With Synapses, his first novel, Brousseau realizes the surprising feat of a pointillist literary masterpiece.

Simon Brousseau was born in Québec City in 1985. He lives in Montréal and teaches literature at Collège Jean-de-Brébeuf. Synapses was a finalist for the 2016 Grand Prix de la ville de Montréal. His dissertation on the work of David Foster Wallace and the question of literary influence will be published by Éditions Nota bene in 2019. He is also the author of a collection of short stories, Les fins heureuses (Le Cheval d’août, 2018).

Simon Brousseau's profile page

Pablo Strauss is the translator of twelve works of fiction, several graphic novels, and the screenplay of one feature film, White Dog (2022). He is a three-time finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for translation for The Country Will Bring Us No Peace (Coach House Books, 2020), Synapses (Talonbooks, 2019), and The Longest Year (House of Anansi, 2017). The Dishwasher, his translation of Stéphane Larue’s Le plongeur, won the 2020 Amazon Canada First Novel Award. He has published essays, reviews, and translations in Granta, Geist, The Literary Review of Canada, The Globe and Mail and The Montreal Review of Books. Pablo grew up in Victoria, BC, and has made his home in Quebec City for fifteen years.

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• Short-listed, Governor General's Literary Award for Translation

"By situating the reader in a multitude of perspectives, [Brousseau] pushes the limits of human empathy in ways that a traditional novel cannot"
—Montréal Review of Books

"The mind searches for and finds pleasing dialogic connections between the snapshots."
—Ian MacLean, The Malahat Review