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.
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Finalist for the City of Hamilton literary awards
At times comic, tender, dark, and arrestingly bizarre, Gary Barwin's latest fiction collection marvels at the strangeness, charm, and beauty that is contemporary life in the quantum world.Ranging from short story to postcard fiction, Barwin's stories are luminous, hilarious, and surprising. A billionaire falls in love with a kitchen appliance, a couple share a pair of legs, a pipeline-size hair is given the Nobel Prize only so that it can be taken away, a father remembers with tenderness the radiant happiness of his teenage child, trapped inside his body. As the Utne Reader said of his last collection, "what makes them so compelling is Barwin's balance of melancholy with wide-eyed wonder."
Praise for I, Dr. Greenblatt, Orthodontist, 251-1457:
"Barwin and publisher Anvil Press have taken a risk here, and the result is a book that is unabashedly and delightfully odd ... though your brain is sure to be confounded by the weirdness on display, the tone is playful; the weird is meant to allow your logic centre to relax and be receptive to these ideas, and in this way you are left open to experience something profound, moving, and often pretty funny." (The Winnipeg Free Press)
"There's so much to love in I, Dr. Greenblatt, Orthodontist, 251-1457. Each story is a portal into a wondrous and mysterious parallel world. Like the great U.S. poet, Russell Edson, Gary Barwin's work inhabits a transcendent country, one in which surprise, delight, discovery, and, above all, gleeful imagination rule the day." (M.A.C. Farrant, author of The World Afloat and Darwin Alone in the Universe)
"These stories are as unexpected as they are beautiful. Each one will have you seeing the world in a slightly different way." (Andrew Kaufman, author of All My Best Friends are Superheroes and Born Weird)
Gary Barwin is a writer, composer, multimedia artist, and educator and the author of 17 books of poetry and fiction as well as books for both teens and children. His most recent poetry collection is Moon Baboon Canoe (Mansfield Press, 2014.) A novel, Yiddish for Pirates will appear with Random House Canada in 2016. Sonosyntactics: Selected and New Poetry of Paul Dutton, introduced and edited by Barwin, will appear from Wilfrid Laurier University Press in spring 2015.
Barwin is the winner of the 2013 City of Hamilton Arts Award (Writing), the Hamilton Poetry Book of the Year 2011, and co-winner of 2011 Harbourfront Poetry NOW competition.