Winner, 25th Annual 3-Day Novel Contest

"Recommended Reading," Sunburst Award Jury

Best SF and Fantasy Books of 2003, Locus Magazine

Meet Finnigan Heller, drifter: reclusive, abrasive, and clairvoyant. He's also been struck by lightning more times than you've had hot dinners. It happens in every town he passes through. But is he following the weather …

With a thousand members throughout the province, the Federation of BC Writers is one of the most active and vigorous writers' organizations in the country. The Fed Anthology, edited by Susan Musgrave on the occasion of the group's 25th anniversary, is a colourful bazaar of previously unpublished fiction and poetry by nearly 50 of those members. Lik …

engineering, in it's entire diverse ramifications, was just beginning to be realized as the 1800s unfolded. Men who could grasp its principals and shape its potential to their needs were to become the new giants of commerce. Captain William A. Hagelund is uniquely positioned to write a history of HBC's SS Beaver, the ship that did more than any oth …

This engaging collection of verse captures the history and experience of the Mounties from the 1800s to the present day. Ranging from humorous to poignant, these poems reflect the moods and adventures of Arctic survivors, plains horsemen, vulnerable trainees and witty veterans. Collectively, they will entertain anyone who has ever been or known a M …

Heather Haley's poetry is tough, irreverent, and in-your-face. She asks all the questions that a nice girl's not supposed to ask. Down back roads and highways, her characters long to possess the past and harness the future. Cowboys, car accidents, broken hearts, dead lovers - and potential violence - hover like heat on the horizon. Whether they're …

In Bordertown Café, seventeen-year-old Jimmy faces the archetypal Canadian dilemma: stay home in Canada, with all its obvious flaws, or go south (young man) to the Land of Opportunity. Jimmy’s dad is the powerfully encoded Western hero of American popular myth – the cowboy as trucker, living his freedom and riding the roads of Wyoming. He offe …

These new, off-side stories continue M.A.C. Farrant’s exploration of the relation of fiction to the evolving corporate construction of reality in the media and information age. Objective reality (what’s out there) in our culture has become a performance of make-believe (fiction), and the disassociation and confusion this causes in our private …

They came west looking for new opportunities and they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. Entrepreneurs such as James Lougheed, Max Bell, Eric Harvie and A.E. Cross all had a few characteristics in common: they were exceptionally ambitious and took enormous risks. And they went from rags to riches.

Curt seems to have it all--a girlfriend, friends, a good summer job and a guaranteed position on the baseball team with the promise of a professional career. Then, one misstep causes his world to unravel and his life to plummet into the depths of depression and addiction. A bleak yet ultimately hopeful story about one teen's struggle with the press …

Author Kathleen Hamilton combines world references with clues reflecting a distinct Canadian cultural identity. Spellings are Canadian too, and the words are derived from our history, geography and pop culture. Books 2 through 5 have giant weekend-size puzzles for even more crossword fun.

The genus Lasiopogon is a widespread group of robber flies (Diptera: Asilidae) inhabiting the north temperate parts of the Earth. This study is the first to examine the genus as a complete entity and clearly define intrageneric relationships. It is also the first to pay special attention to the male and female genitalia, important structures in the …

The three plays collected in this volume were the first of Max Frisch's dramatic works to reach the public. Now for the first time they appear in English, thanks to the translation skills of Michael Bullock. These three plays are of special interest both to students of modern drama and admirers of Frisch.

Santa Cruz (1944), Frisch's first dramatic e …

Cruise Control knows no borders, hurtling down BC's Coquihalla Highway, sightseeing in Regina, tearing through Windsor, "plunging beneath the Earth" in Chicago, visiting some eccentric characters in Germany and even exploring the "non-presence (i.e. lostness)" of Atlantis.

Ken Howe's reckless intellect and insatiable curiosity for everything -- Cana …

This print-on-demand title is available by request from most booksellers.

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A Quaker thwarted by the government in her attempts to prevent her tax dollars from being used for military purposes. A man wrongly convicted as an habitual criminal. A girl rendered brain damaged and quadriplegic by a botched hospital procedure.

Tom Berger may be best known …

From translator Lenny Hu, who brought the acclaimed erotic Chinese novel The Embroidered Couch back into print, is this collection of five erotic stories, also from Ming dynasty China.
Ling Mengchu (1580-1644) was a prolific writer, producing more than thirty works in various genres during his lifetime. A Confucian scholar, described as having be …

Birding and butterfly watching have been popular outdoor activities for decades. Now, dragonfly watching is catching on as a fascinating and enjoyable pursuit. Dragonflies are large, colourful insects with amazing and easily observed behaviour. Noted entomologist Dr. Robert Cannings introduces students, naturalists and outdoor enthusiasts to the wo …

The Order of British Columbia was established in 1989 to recognize and honour ordinary citizens who have made a difference in the lives of others.

Goody Niosi offers the stories of 17 of these recipients, from well-known people like Rick Hansen and Robert Bateman to lesser-known heroes, including Dr. Michael O'Shaughnessy, who has dedicated his lif …

A witty, enthusiastic and knowledgeable guide, Zee draws us into the heady pleasures of Chinese food and presents a banquet of family anecdotes, folklore and alluring tidbits about Chinese culinary history and culture.

The narrator of this Governor General’s Award-winning novel does not have a name. She is simply a grotesque “fat woman,” getting larger every day—a clown, a monster, in her own words, with no self, no identity save her enormous mound of flesh, its blubber, its perceived deformity. She is used by men who find her a convenience—for their ca …

The Uncanny: Experiments in Cyborg Culture is a dazzling and provocative examination of the cyborg--the concept of man-as-machine--in popular culture. The book collects essays and images, in colour and black-and-white, presenting the image of the cyborg in all its imaginative guises. The title is from a 1919 essay by Sigmund Freud (and included in …

Anvil's first-ever title!

A Toilet Paper is a humorous examination, from a historical linguistic viewpoint, of four commonly used words relating to our posterior orifice and that which comes out of it.

Praise for A Toilet Paper:

"The humour of the pamphlet is overwhelming" (Rene Hering, Prairie Fire)

As seen in Time Magazine, Esquire, and The New Yorker!

Every man has the capacity to grow facial hair, but the decision to do so has always come with layers of meaning. Facial hair has traditionally marked a passage into manhood, but its various manifestations have been determined by class, religious belief, historical precedent, and occupational …

In Salmon Boy: A Legend of the Sechelt People, a young boy is captured by a Chum salmon and brought to the country of the salmon people-a dry land beneath water where "the salmon people walked about the same as people do above the sea." The boy lived with them for one year, and his captivity becomes a source of learning that will ensure the surviva …

For rob mclennan, poetry is a way of seeing, and what is seen in harvest: a book of signifiers is always a landscape as it inhabits the poet and his various personae. In the absence of capital letters, with only minimalist punctuation, and with a denial of the possessive case, (all formal signifiers of precedence and ownership), these poems do not …

Lifted from an ancient Chinese astronomical text, the title Dream Pool Essays hints at Gil McElroy’s interest in cosmology: always a construct made visible between the elements of chaos.
These poems constitute an active multiple streaming of sources usually considered quite disparate: the physical sciences, particularly astronomy, theoretical co …

Since 1975, Ken Norris has produced some of Canada’s most intriguing poetry. Whether detailing the amorous lives of produce (Vegetables), documenting travels to the South Seas (The Better Part of Heaven and Islands), engaging contentious social and political issues (In the Spirit of the Times and In the House of No), or taking the measure of the …

Archaeologists James Keyser and Michael Klassen show us the origins, diversity, and beauty of Plains rock art. The seemingly endless variety of images include humans, animals, weapons, masks, mazes, handprints, finger lines, geometric and abstract forms, tally marks, hoofprints, and the wavy lines and starbursts that humans universally associate wi …

Outdoor adventurers from all over the world come to the Sunshine Coast to enjoy the very best in bicycling, beachcombing, scuba diving, birdwatching, canoeing, kayaking and hiking in rain forests and mountain passes.

This new, expanded edition covers the 160 picturesque kilometres of winding coastline from Port Mellon, Gibsons, Sechelt and Pender Ha …

Whose initials are displayed in Morse code on the hand-operated scoreboard at Boston's Fenway Park? Which baseball personality inspired the name of Gillian Anderson's character in The X-Files? The weird, the wonderful, the well-known, and the who-ever-knew-thats: from fun facts out of baseball movies to real-life oddities from the diamond, these mu …

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

Finalist, City of Vancouver Book Prize

Long listed for CBC Canada Reads 2015

The Door Is Open is a compassionate, reflective, and informative memoir about three-and-a-half years spent volunteering at a skid row drop-in centre in Vancouver's downtown eastside. In an area most renowned for its sh …

"P class=""book_description"">A delightful and informative trek across the globe by a witty, intelligent, and courageous Victorian artist and adventurer.

In 1871, at age 41, Marianne North, an artist with a keen interest in botany, decided to travel the world on a quest to paint as many plants and flowers as she could find in their natural habitat. …

Captain Ed Shields tells the comprehensive history of the North Pacific codfish industry, shedding light on the lives of the men who sailed to the Bering Sea in search of cod from the 1860s until 1950. He describes the work that went into preparing the fishing fleet for five months on the high seas and ensuring that the ships came back safely with …

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

Finalist, City of Vancouver Book Prize

Long listed for CBC Canada Reads 2015

The Door Is Open is a compassionate, reflective, and informative memoir about three-and-a-half years spent volunteering at a skid row drop-in centre in Vancouver’s downtown eastside. In an area most renowned for its …

"One of Canada's best poets ... Robertson's language is sparkling and sharp, and builds momentum through its rhythmic motion motion to produce a dense and difficult, but enjoyable and readable book ... The Weather rewrites the pastoral with confidence and cunning."
— Prairie Fire
"Hip, cerebral, streamlined, and dense, The Weather is about many …

This exquisite cookbook instructs the epicure-boater on how to make magnificent gourmet meals using only a limited galley pantry and plenty of fresh food from the ocean: from spicy Haw Mog Hoy (mouthwatering spicy steamed mussels with a touch of Thailand) and Coquilles St. Jacques (a delectable creamy scallop dish), to a Sesame Seed Crusted Halibut …

About 10 years ago, George Bowering and Linda Hutcheon came up with the idea for a short fiction collection called Likely Stories: A Postmodern Sampler. It was a great idea at a time when a lot of people were still trying to figure out what “postmodern” actually meant.
That fine collection of stories has now gone out of print, and George Bower …

The long poem, nowadays, is the talk of various discourses with each other: “A poem is a small painting, a long poem is a mural.”

The second edition of The New Long Poem Anthology is an irreplaceable roadmap of a vital and powerful poetic form, a record of the most seductive and sustained “singing talk” in postmodern Canadian writing. Edited …

In 1895, the arctic explorer Captain Ian Ryder has let his house in Blackpool on the Nova Scotia coast to the recently married Clara Weiss, who is about to become the compass of a social circle far too intimate for its own good. Lost in a maze of obsessive Victorian pseudo-science and its ignorant fascinations with violence, spiritualism, the rean …

Doyle has a very funny problem: he hears too much. He can hear the most intimate details of the lives of everyone living in his apartment building. He can tell the temperature of a young neighbour’s bath water by the resonance of her pipes; he knows where the old lady’s lost teeth are by the way they rattle in their glass when her appliances t …

Women played a vital role in the shaping of the West in Canada between the 1880s and 1940s. Yet surprisingly little is known about their contributions or the differences sex and gender made to the opportunities and obstacles women encountered. Telling Tales contributes to the rewriting of western Canada’s past by integrating women into the shifti …

Daphne Marlatt’s latest book of poems is a memory book—an album of love poems spanning twenty-five years, from her first writing of what was to become the opening section, “A Lost Book,” to later, most recent sequences.

These are love poems in the sense that in the meeting of our minds and bodies, we are actually tied to the earth, and how, …

Author Kathleen Hamilton combines world references with clues reflecting a distinct Canadian cultural identity. Spellings are Canadian too, and the words are derived from our history, geography and pop culture. Books 2 through 5 have giant weekend-size puzzles for even more crossword fun.

Billie Livingston's poems drive straight for the sharp edges--from the rough, self-assured and brash voice of a woman who poses nude at seventeen while considering the 40-year-old photographer as her guinea pig, to the confidante of relatives and friends grappling with the torturing frustration of love, sexuality, adultery and death.

These jagged re …

In January 1887 a delegation of chiefs from the Nisga'a and Tsimshian peoples of northern British Columbia, seeking restitution from a government that had stolen their lands without a treaty or compensation, arrived by steamship in Victoria's Inner Harbour. They were met by Premier William Smithe, who refused them entry to the provincial legislatur …

The books are filled with lively illustrations by Anne DeGrace, as well as facts and quirky trivia about Canadian actors and athletes, history, geography, books and authors, music, movies, animals and place names. Ages 8 and up.

The federal Department of Justice was established by John A. Macdonald as part of the Conservative party's program for reform of the parliamentary system following Confederation. Among other things, it was charged with establishing national institutions such as the Supreme Court and the North West Mounted Police and with centralizing the penitentia …

Each year the League of Canadian Poets sponsors the prestigious National Poetry Contest. From the thousands of entries received, the judges choose three prize winners and a list of honourable mentions. These poems, the finest of the year, are then published in Vintage, the annual anthology.

For the year 2000, First-Prize Winner ($1,000) is Russell T …

A century ago, the steel ships working coastal waters were built elsewhere. Gradually marine engineers began migrating to the coast with their families, and the BC industry got underway.

Ships of Steel chronicles that industry from the early development of steel construction facilities, equipment and qualified personnel; to the World War II boom whe …