Ray Smith: A native of Mabou, Cape Breton, to which he has returned, Ray Smith lived in Montreal for forty years, where he taught English literature at Dawson College. He is the author of, among others, A Night at the Opera (winner of the 1992 Qspell Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction), Cape Breton is the Thought-Control Centre of Canada, and Century, all published by Biblioasis.

"An entertaining and shamelessly obstreperous romp that holds nothing sacred."&#8212Good Reports "For all the surface sheen to the picaresque, a dark, Swiftian distaste for the human animal runs beneath. The difficulty of assigning obvious targets to the book's deeper impulses keeps the reader off-balance, never quite sure where to laugh and where to wince."&#8212Globe and Mail "The only thing that can ever be safely stated about Smith is that he is among the country's best yet under-appreciated writers -- a novelist and satirist of the first order whose witty and irreverent prose have surfaced once again in a brand new novel, The Flush of Victory"&#8212Westmount Examiner