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."
Debut talent Raoul Fernandes's first offering is Transmitter and Receiver, a masterful and carefully depicted exploration of one's relationships with oneself, friends, memories, strangers and technology.
The three parts of this collection are variations building on a theme--at times lonely, sometimes adoring, but always honest. Wider areas of contemplation--the difficulty of communication, the ever-changing symbolism of language and the nature of human interaction in the age of machines--are explored through colloquial scenes of the everyday: someone eats a burger in a car parked by the river ("Grand Theft Auto: Dead Pixels"), a song plays on the radio as a man contemplates suicide ("Car Game"), and a janitor works silently once everyone else has gone ("After Hours at the Centre For Dialogue").
Forthright and effortlessly lyrical, Fernandes builds each poem out of candor and insight, an addictive mix that reads like a favourite story and glitters with concealed meaning. Rather than drawing lines between isolation and connection, past and present, metaphor and reality, Transmitter and Receiver offers loneliness and longing hand-in-hand with affection and understanding: "The last assembly instruction is always you reading this. A machine / that rarely functions, but could never without you."