BC Books Online was created for anyone interested in BC-published books, and with librarians especially in mind. We'd like to make it easy for library staff to learn about books from BC publishers - both new releases and backlist titles - so you can inform your patrons and keep your collections up to date.
Our site features print books and ebooks - both new releases and backlist titles - all of which are available to order through regular trade channels. Browse our subject categories to find books of interest or create and export lists by category to cross-reference with your library's current collection.
A quick tip: When reviewing the "Browse by Category" listings, please note that these are based on standardized BISAC Subject Codes supplied by the books' publishers. You will find additional selections, grouped by theme or region, in our "BC Reading Lists."
From the author of Stupid Crimes, Krekshuns and Stand in Hell come more fictional wanderings. Gas Tank & Other Stories casts disparate characters into tumultuous scenes of moral terror, testing their courage, energy, and capacity to endure.
Praise for Gas Tank & Other Stories:
"Gas Tank & Other Stories isn't just another work of gritty realism or a chronicle of beautiful losers. Bolen tempers the moral dissolution and despair of these stories with a unifying vision of survival and transcendence, of self-affirmation achieved through rage and struggle ... These stories are testaments to individualism, chronicles of regular people raging against the social and economic machines they are caught within." (Quill & Quire)
"Brutality, death and moral vacuums are the stuff of Dennis Bolen's new collection of short stories and novellas. Bolen's reputation to date rests largely on his ability to represent the underside of contemporary society with gritty, unflinching accuracy. Gas Tank & Other Stories will confirm this distinctive Bolen territory with its blend of understated grotesquerie and a social realist's concern for human lives blighted by neglect, indifference and exploitation. Each piece in the collection focuses on the individual's capacity to absorb threat and damage - physical, psychological, emotional - and still endure. But Bolen also shows how human capacity for resilience and survival is much darker and more ambivalent than our cultural myths of heroic suffering suggest." (British Journal of Canadian Studies)
"A riveting read from start to finish." (Dead Rats Press)
Since his first highly-acclaimed 1991 novel, 'Stupid Crimes' (Anvil Press), Dennis E. Bolen has written three other novels: 'Stand In Hell', 'Krekshuns', and 'Toy Gun' (Anvil Press). He is also the author of the short story collection 'Gas Tank & Other Stories' (Anvil Press). He has worked as a parole officer in Vancouver and has taught creative writing at the University of British Columbia. For many years Mr. Bolen held the post of fiction editor for the literary journal 'subTerrain', contributing editor to the 'Vancouver Review', and has acted as a columnist and part-time editorial board member at the 'Vancouver Sun'.