The City of Vancouver has been through a lot in its first 125 years. It’s a city that has played host to the likes of Mark Twain, Alice Cooper, Elvis Presley, Winston Churchill, The Beatles, Louis Armstrong, Howard Hughes, Expo ‘86, and the 2010 Olympic Winter Games. It’s the birthplace of Canada’s first female MLA, the country’s first (and la …

Nate’s nervous mother chews gum at warp speed and has a bob that resembles Darth Vader’s helmet. His icy father dabbles part-time in the death trade at a funeral home after working for a decade in the insurance racket. His older sister Holly is always lurking in the shadows or away at school. Nate, a creative, messy, and anxious teen, has chosen …

Atomic Storybook is a novel about a young painter named Owen who is regularly abducted by beings he calls "the space pricks." These otherworldly visitors perform experiments on him, befuddle him with an absurd riddle about the moon, and show him scenes from his previous lives - one as a 12th century English monk; in another he shares the ward with …

Finalist, Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize (BC Book Prizes)

Wood is a pop-culture meditation on parenthood and all its complexities and complications. In her third collection, Harper deftly inhabits the lives of sons and daughters, fathers and mothers - the real, the mythical, the dreamed-up, and the surrogate. Pinocchio tries to make his father proud i …

Jack Minyard is a private dick down on his luck. He’s badly overweight and on the wrong side of sixty. He’s lost his marriage, and maybe a little of his mind, too. After narrowly escaping charges in a statewide fraud and money laundering scandal, Jack has been working private contracts and counting on the kindness of strangers (not to mention a p …

Finalist, Giller Prize

Winner of 2 Saskatchewan Book Awards (Best First Book; City of Saskatoon Book Award)

Finalist, Saskatchewan Book Award (Book of the Year)

Winner, Canadian Authors’ Association-BookTV Emerging Writer Award

Finalist, Amazon/ Books in Canada First Novel Award

Rowan Friesen has made a career of drug-dealing and small-time thievery …

A capricious comedy of errors, Small Apartments resonates with tremulous energy and quirky characters. Franklin Franklin is a fully realized and sympathetic protagonist in the vein of Ignatius Reilly (A Confederacy of Dunces), a simple man who yearns for “a land of pastoral serenity” devoid of the irritations of contemporary urban life. An offbea …

In prose that’s as sharp as broken glass and shot through with poetry, Teresa McWhirter unlocks the extraordinary subculture of urban adults in their twenties and early thirties. Most startling of all are the portraits of young women—tough, independent party girls who are strong enough to say “no” to love and smart enough to know why.

Praise …

Finalist, Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize (BC Book Prizes)

Winner, CNFC Readers' Choice Award for "Threshold"

In this debut collection of personal essays, Silcott looks at the tangle of midlife, the long look back, the shorter look forward, and the moments right now that shimmer and rustle around her. Here is love, grief, uncertainty, longing, joy, de …

Author Statement: Five years ago I began working on a collection of poems titled Unus Mundus, derived from Marie Louise Von Frantz’s description of human union with “the one cosmos.” In her book, Creation Myths, she writes: “This unus mundus is not the cosmos as it exists now, but an idea in God’s psyche.” When I began this manuscript, I was …

This Drawn & Quartered Moon takes pre-millenial San Francisco as its epicenter, and from there ranges out in time and space. Characters abound. The reader will meet a plagiarist, a Vietnam vet named Othello, a Mafia don, a drug mule en route to jail, Elvis Presley (the poet’s father was his doctor), a “Sculptor of the Lower Fillmore Head Shot,” …

Glossolalia is an unflinching exploration of sisterhood, motherhood, and sexuality as told in a series of poetic monologues spoken by the thirty-four polygamous wives of Joseph Smith, founder of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In Marita Dachsel’s second full-length collection, the self-avowed agnostic feminist uses mid-nineteenth …

The follow-up to Eve Lazarus's successful 'At Home with History: The Untold Secrets of Greater Vancouver's Heritage Homes', 'Sensational Victoria' gives us a glimpse into aspects of Victoria rarely talked about in the tourist brochures or flowery garden guidebooks. 'Sensational Victoria' covers legendary women, including Emily Carr, Nellie McClung, …

As with many writers, Jim Christy keeps a "source file," notes, scrawled snippets of conversation, observations made on the run, photographs of people known and unknown, scraps of paper with puzzling notes written on them, receipts, matchpacks, and other assorted parapher-nalia that might come in handy for a future story, article, or essay. For Mr. …

'Mutant Sex Party' is Ed Macdonald's first collection of plays. As well as the title piece, this collection includes 'The Escape Artist, Erratica, Gemini, Smoke & Blood, Hot Meat,' and 'Titus Lucretius Carus'.

"There's an interesting and very complicated relationship to explore here; I was immediately curious about the power dynamic...and also about …

'Whitetail Shooting Gallery', a new novel from award-winning author and Giller Prize nominee, Annette Lapointe, is set in the outer urban, often desolate, landscape of the Saskatchewan prairie. Cousins Jennifer and Jason live close together as small kids, exploring their rural home. They live in adjacent, sometimes overlapping, households. But one …

From the author of 'Dead Man In the Orchestra Pit' and 'Foozlers', comes another tale of madcap human folly. Louella Debra Poule is doing an eighteen-month stint on a weapons charge at a minimum security institution up BC's Fraser Valley. Her drug dealing, sort-of-boyfriend Jimmy Flood, and his sidekick, Blacky Harbottle, should have taken the rap, …

Twenty-first century metalheads; twelfth century troubadours and their female counterparts, the trobairitz- what could they possibly have in common? The creation of an often misunderstood and at times reviled genre for one; for another, a kin preoccupation with the questioning of structures set up by class, gender, and religion.

"Describing metal fa …

Winner, City of Victoria Butler Book Prize

Finalist, Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction

Nominated for the BC National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction

Afflictions & Departures is a collection of first-person experiential essays. However, this is not the realm of traditional memoir—in addition to incidents and feelings recaptured from memory …

Kaspoit! puts speculative illustration to the most profuse series of crimes ever to take place on Canadian soil. Set in the lower mainland of Vancouver, the time is now—criminals are brazen, cops are cynical—and no one is trying to solve the disappearance of dozens of women. Throughout, the novel conveys a savage, dystopian depiction of a nethe …

Winner of the W.O. Mitchell/City of Calgary Award

A debut collection, these stories are set in the corporeal world of adult endeavour: the mall, the office, the subdivision. It’s these settings that W. Mark Giles exploits—locking his sights on eerily familiar characters, excavating their fears, intimacies, and the dark machinery behind their act …

The Skeleton Dance takes place on the mean, formerly clean streets of Toronto before the century ticked over into the new millennium. This graphic novel artfully depicts the human casualties and debris piled up around the downtown bank towers. Wiped out in the rush of the thousand-eyed crowd hurrying to beehive office cubicles, and unhinged by the …

The Devil You Know is the follow-up volume to Farrell’s critically acclaimed debut collection, Sugar Bush & Other Stories. These stories deal with sex, love, work, birth, and death in alternately moving, shocking, funny, and at times devastating ways. Whether these characters are facing the death of a parent, bad love choices, the possibility of …

Finalist, City of Vancouver Book Award

Monday Night Man is a back alley view of East Vancouver netherworlds. Horst Nunn, Ray Bunce, and Boyle Rupp are a trio of middle-aged, underemployed, intelligent “plungers” striving for redemption through humour and long shots at the track.

Praise for Monday Night Man:

"These stories . . . combine the flavour …

Tacones is a hangout for a subculture of outlaws and rejects-crackhead murderers, transvestite prostitutes, biastogerontophiles, hustler boys, and addicts-all painfully beyond denial, searching for connection, solace, humour, thrills, sex, and the perfect high. A rollicking and caustic romp through the violent and ambivalent world of the Toronto af …

Toy Gun continues the exploration of character and fate on the streets of Vancouver that began with the novel Stupid Crimes (1992) and continued in Krekshuns (1995). Written in the style of the “hard-boiled” detective thriller, Toy Gun is very much a literary treatment of contemporary life in one of the world’s most densely populated urban ce …

Valery the Great is a crackling, electric collection of dark humour that follows the bizarre and beautiful lives of its protagonists. Sometimes sweet and gentle, sometimes sharply sarcastic, the unique narrative voices in this collection are always powerfully touching.

Praise for Valery the Great:

"15 Finest Book Covers in Spring Fiction This Year" s …

Five Little Bitches chronicles the rise and fall of the all-woman band, Wet Leather. Each of the women is plagued by her own unique demons, but their devotion to music and the punk lifestyle keeps them pushing on. As the band progresses, they tour Canadian, American and European towns and cities—and all the alleys, gutters, back stages, vans, hot …

'A Dark Boat', a new collection of poetry by Patrick Friesen, is heavily influenced by 'cante jondo' (Spanish "deep song", or flamenco) and 'fado' (Portuguese songs of longing). Friesen approaches music as a method of weaving his poems with both Spanish and Portuguese aspects of longing, imagistic leaps, and darkness.

The poems in 'A Dark Boat' try …

Each new volume by Stuart Ross is a more confounding grab bag than the last. In 'You Exist. Details Follow.', his seventh full-length collection of poetry, Stuart Ross veers in opposite directions: narrative confessional poems, and works that might be considered abstract expressionist, and a lot both in between and beyond those boundaries. Still, e …

Baudelaire's prose poems were written over many years and published in magazines between 1855 and his death in 1867. Francis Scarfe's translations reflect a lifetime's passion for Baudelaire's work and a deep understanding of it. The appeal of this beautiful book', he says in his introduction, lies in its wide range of subjects, its variations of t …

'Vancouver Noir' looks at the period from the 1930s to the 1960s, an era in which there was intensified concern with order, conformity, structure, and restrictions. These are visions of the city, both of what it was and what some of its citizens hoped it would either become, or, conversely, cease to be. The photographs-most of which look like still …

'Shag Carpet Action' is Matthew Firth's boldest and brashest collection of stories yet. Centred on the novella "Dog Fucker Blues" this collection examines what it's like to be down but not quite out in the 21st century. The book examines people clinging to the edge of physical, mental, sexual, psychological, and financial survival, bordering on the …

When the Mayan Calendar runs out on December 21st, 2012, all manner of possible disasters will befall the earth, from collision with a rogue planet to biblical flooding, to attacks by swarms of gnats. But just because life as we know it will come to an end, it doesn't mean you can’t survive and even prosper financially in the post-apocalyptic worl …

New Edition as part City of Vancouver’s Legacy Book Project, with foreword by historian Daniel Francis

Who Killed Janet Smith? examines one of the most infamous and still unsolved murder cases in Canadian history: the 1924 murder of twenty-two-year-old Scottish nursemaid Janet Smith. Originally published in 1984, and out of print for over a decade …

'Who Killed Janet Smith?' examines one of the most infamous and still unsolved murder cases in Canadian History: the 1924 murder of twenty-two-year-old Scottish nursemaid Janet Smith. Originally published in 1984, and out of print for over a decade, this tale of intrigue, racism, privilege, and corruption in high places as a true-crime recreation t …

A longtime resident of Surrey, Truman Green wrote 'A Credit to Your Race' (1973), in which a fifteen-year-old black porter's son falls in love with, and impregnates, the white girl next door. Set in Surrey, circa 1960, 'A Credit to Your Race' is a disturbing and convincing portrayal of how the full weight of Canadian racism could come to bear on a …

Somewhere in Montreal, in the not too distant future, an obscure company offers custom-designed suicides for its clients with one condition: their desire to die must be pure and absolute. Antoinette Beauchamp is a successful candidate but her suicide is not. Now a bedridden paraplegic, hooked up to machines that monitor all her bodily functions, sh …

'Hard Hed' is a contemporary retelling of the Johnny Appleseed story. Hoosier Chapman, local historian and apple orchardist, has just been released from a Northwestern Ohio jail after serving two years for planting wild apple trees in a city park. Dropped at the State Line by a deputy sheriff, Hoosier treks west, overland and barefoot into Indiana …

'The Song Collides' takes the reader on a highly personal and internal metaphysical investigation into the state of the natural world-and then back again via more lyrical and local enquiries that speak to each and every one of us. Life is an exchange: each of us takes in the world and then expresses it for ourselves and for others. This is a simult …

Winner, SFU Writer's Studio's First Book Competition (2010)

Winner, Canadian Authors Association Exporting Alberta Award (2011)

Unmarried and pregnant in 1968 Winnipeg, teenager Myrl Coulter found herself at a loss. Unable (and perhaps unwilling) to support her child, Myrl’s parents forced her to give the baby up for adoption. After being sent to a …

Nondescript Rambunctious is a genre-busting thriller with a beating, human heart. More than a simple story of a killer and his victims, the novel takes the reader into the life of a family, the days of a community, and the very real possibility that evil is everywhere—maybe even inside us. Woven through this dark tapestry are the glittering threa …