The poems in A Dark Boat shake hands with darkness; the kind of darkness that is rich and necessary for a full human life, the darkness of soil into which seeds drop and grow, the darkness of the grave into which the body is lowered.

Heavily inspired by cante jondo (Spanish "deep song") and Portuguese fado, these poems explore the kind of yearning t …

Winner, Exist Through the Giftshop Award (2013)

Best Poetry of 2012, Winnipeg Free Press

You Exist. Details Follow. is Stuart Ross's seventh full-length collection of poetry. In these poems, Ross veers in opposite directions: narrative confessional poems, and works that might be considered abstract expressionist, and a lot both in between and beyond …

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 Sun books list: "30 best reads from B.C. and beyond"

It was an era of gambling, smuggling rings, grifters, police corruption, bootleggers, brothels, murders, and more. It was also a time of intensified concern with order, conformity, structure, and restrictions.Vancouver Noir provides a fascinating insight into life in the Terminal City, n …

Finalist, ReLit Award (2012)

Shag Carpet Action is Matthew Firth's boldest and brashest collection of stories to date. These are absurd, raunchy, funny stories whose sharp, salty characters are boldly credible and wonderfully rendered by one of Canada's most adventurous and courageous fiction writers.

Firth's gimlet-eyed, deep mining of the bowels of …

On December 21st, 2012 the eerily accurate Mayan Calendar, which goes back over 5,000 years, suddenly comes to a stop. Obviously this means only one thing: the world will end. What no one knows is how the world will end and that's where this book will be an invaluable companion as the conflagration begins. Will it be a massive earthquake, a biblica …

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 …

Part of the City of Vancouver's Legacy Book Project

Set in Surrey, BC circa 1960, A Credit to Your Race is a story about innocent love awakening between a fifteen-year-old black porter's son and the white girl next door. The novel is a disturbing and convincing portrayal of how the full weight of racism and bigotry came to bear on a youthful, inter …

New Edition as part City of Vancouver's Legacy Book Project, with a 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 …

Governor General's Award Finalist

The Globe 100: The very best of 2011

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 parapl …

Longlisted for the ReLit Award (2012)

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, o …

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 …

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

Winner, SFU Writer's Studio's First Book Competition

Galaxy is about a wounded family (Anger brimming until it overflows / into rage in the dark living room, / his undershirt soaked through / up the back to his collar), a prairie place (Ochre River girls / have a one-room school, / walk through fields of wheat, / play in silos, storing grain dust / …

Winner, Writer's Studio at Simon Fraser University's First Book Competition

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 - mayb …

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 …

The Mountie at Niagara Falls is an astonishingly absurd and humorous collection of brief stories from Toronto author Salvatore Difalco. Ranging in length from fifty to seven hundred words, these vital and sudden fictional forays transport the reader to worlds both big and small: a land where green goats roam, voodoo dolls inflict crushing migraine …

Winner, 2011 ReLit Award

From the author of Pontypool Changes Everything, Ravenna Gets is a new collection of "wheeled" stories that continue the author's exploration of "apocalypse fiction."

In a single convulsion of homicide, the population of Ravenna tries to erase the population of Collingwood. The innocent, standing in their living rooms, cookin …

Best of 2010, Uptown Magazine

Meet Walter Finch, an ungainly kid who survives his cloying suburban childhood to make it only as far as the local mall, where he rises through the ranks to become manager of a shoe store. Unlike his other childhood friends who either flee suburbia or remain as resigned fixtures, Walter is content with his lot and finds …

Spat Ryan has demons. They haunt him by day and share his drink at night. Raised in Montreal by a bagman for the Irish mob, Spat has fictionalized or ignored chunks of his life too painful to recall. A chance meeting with an old friend of his father's in a bar on the Main exposes the dark secret they've both been harbouring, the secret that has sha …

Finalist, Acorn-Plantos Award

Vs. is a collection of poems chronicling a foray into the world of amateur boxing by a shy, bookish woman you'd never expect could hit someone in the face. Throughout these poems the author reflects on what it means to be a woman and a boxer, as well as a poet and a boxer. Part instruction manual, part rationalization V …

Providing new insights into how vividly local - but never far removed from cosmopolitan developments - the region's literary production has been, the collection features archival references to a constellation of the area's essential literary figures. The fifteen essays by established and newer voices examine creation myths among West Coast literary …

Some waterbirds can live away from land for months at a time, taking all of their food and rest from the ocean. However, these birds are not true creatures of the sea, and their relationship to the water is a superficial one. It is only when the bird dives down to catch its prey that it breaks the surface, and even then, it penetrates only a fracti …

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 unw …

Wombat is a cartoon strip from Vancouver artist Rod Filbrandt and the precursor to his long-lived and much loved strip, Dry Shave. In Wombat: The Collected Comic Strip the reader witnesses the development of a cartoon strip and the characters that fill its frames, from its nascent, raw stages, when it first ran in the Discorder (a UBC campus paper) …

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 d …

Pacific Cinémathèque Monograph Series #2 features Nettie Wild, one of the leading documentarians working in Canadian cinema today. Her work and her interests span the globe and also encompass issues of regional interest to the broader Western Canadian/British Columbia community.

She is best known for her feature length documentary films, A Place C …

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 nether …

Private Grief, Public Mourning is an historical investigation of mourning sites and practices within the context of the province of British Columbia. The authors are concerned, primarily, with the rise of the roadside death memorial in the late twentieth century. They argue that RDMs are not a marginal, quirky phenomenon but part of a longer and co …

Winner of the Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry (Alberta Book Awards)

In Greek mythology the Muses preside over the arts and inspire writers and artists to produce works of genius. In Frenzy, Catherine Owen pays homage to the muse in a six-part compilation of muse-quests, some the author's, some those of others. These muses can be a person, a …

The Pacific Cinémathèque Monograph Series was initiated to explore the spectrum of contributions and innovations of Western Canadian filmmakers, videomakers, and fringe media artists. Monograph Number One focuses, fittingly, on David Rimmer, one of Canada's foremost experimental filmmakers.

Praise for Loop, Print, Fade + Flicker:

"There is no bette …

Finalist, Gerald Lampert Memorial Award (2010)

Inventory is a collection of 58 object poems. Taking as a starting point the reciprocal relation between subjects and objects, the book explores the unique way that objects appear in an individual consciousness. Each object in this Inventory exists on its own and also reflects the author's experience, f …

Finalist, Trillium Book Award

The stories in Animal depict people on the brink of major life change. Often at a crossroads they are oblivious to, Leggat's characters seem to be captured in a cinematic slo-mo, teetering on the edge of something unknown, heroically resisting the ever-present pull of Fate. It matters little whether the characters take …

Four disparate people confront each other - their memory and their responsibility - at the emergency room of a hospital when brought together by the crisis of a teenager suffering a psychiatric episode.

Tortoise Boy is a "chamber play," four monologues, or mon-dialogues, if you will. Through these four voices, four instruments - a quartet - these ch …

Dodging down back-alleys in bomb-torn Beirut. Wheeling past God and traffic in Mombassa, Kenya. Slipping around the edges of Alzheimer's disease, the Gulf War, and the eternity of CNN.

Set somewhere between here and the heat-death of the universe, Jim Oaten's debut collection serves up random samples of literal and literary truth scooped up at top s …

Best Nonfiction Books of the Year Pick, CBC Radio Toronto (2008)

In these pages you will encounter gamblers and adventurers, conmen and conwomen, rodomontades and ragamuffins, outright fools and outrageous liars. Scalawags, the lot of them.

But you can be an adventurer, a conman or conwoman, a fool, liar, gambler, rodomontade or ragamuffin and not be …

Finalist, Saskatchewan Book Award: Poetry Award honouring Anne Szumigalski

Suicide Psalms is both hymn and visceral scream - of loss, despair, hope and ultimately redemption. These poems are drawn out with quick precision, as if they were indeed written in haste, or delirium, before tightening the noose or firing the pistol or jumping off the ledge. …

What It Feels Like for a Girl is a book-length series of poems that tell the story of two teenage girls as they delve into the big, strange world of sex.

What It Feels Like for a Girl is about many things: the friendships girls have at the most intense times in their lives. Pornography and its “lessons” for the young woman who has never experien …

DAMP: Contemporary Vancouver Media Arts, is a singular effort, a visually exuberant work that is also on the vanguard of theoretical engagement, a symbiosis of form and content, in full-colour throughout, inclusive of extensive imagery, graphic intrigues and typographical accent - a rare and desirable art-infused statement of the city's media art s …

The twenty contemporary writers featured in this anthology have one thing in common: a connection to British Columbia, to a specific time, landscape, or community in BC. Their essays and memoirs have been inspired by, or are in some way affected by, the particular "sense of place" that sets that left-hand corner of the country apart from other prov …

Pamela Stewart is a self-described "literary proctologist," and her writing often looks into places that people generally don't want to look. The stories in Elysium are about the difficulties of life we all encounter as human beings, the fragility of life - the physical, mental, and spiritual challenges we must try to overcome. They are about ordin …

Longlisted for the ReLit Award

Editor's Pick, Vancouver Sun

Dirtbags is a novel about reckoning—with one's past, one's choices, and one's expectations for the future. Spider is a scrappy kid growing up in rural B.C., and when a tragic event causes her world to implode she heads to Vancouver for solace, distraction, and experience.

We witness a shift …

Body Breakdowns is a collection of true tales about brushes with mortality and the medical establishment. Some are serious, some are funny; all are about illnesses, both minor and major.

The pieces are all related to aging and are told in strong, engaging, and authentic voices. They are about people suddenly discovering they're vulnerable and the di …

Winner, 3-Day Novel Contest

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 amb …

The year is 1964 and first-time film director Alan Schneider is about to embark on a project combining the talents of Buster Keaton and Samuel Beckett. When Alan visits the home of Keaton to discuss the project, titled simply Film, he discovers the former star engaged in an imaginary card game with the long-deceased Irving G. Thalberg.

It doesn't ta …

Homelessness is not new to Vancouver. There have been homeless people in Vancouver since it was founded in 1886. As in other major North American cities, until the late “70s and early “80s homelessness in Vancouver followed the economic logic of boom and bust capitalism.

However, since the run-up to the World Exposition of 1986, that logic has n …

Finalist, ReLit Awards (shortlist)

Black Rabbit & Other Stories is a debut collection of great intensity and versatility. The stories range from the fantastic to the gritty, from urban dystopias to worlds of dreamlike possibility. Even in their frequent explorations of brutality, the author remains honest and true to the motivations of his character …

Longlisted, ReLit Award

Burnham's poetry works at the edges of meaning, propriety, and the commodification of language. Combining elements of found text - the overheard, the over-read - he recasts his findings in various combinations that are unique to their presentation on the page. The essentials of language, how people use it - and how it uses th …

Shortlisted for the ReLit Award (2008)

I Cut My Finger is Stuart Ross's first full-length poetry collection since his acclaimed Hey, Crumbling Balcony! Poems New & Selected (2003). The poems here show Ross's ever-expanding breadth, from his trademark humour and surrealism, to pointedly experimental works and poems of human anguish. Here, a poet incl …