We've all had good, bad, and sometimes ugly experiences on public transit. Exact Fare Only is an anthology of real life stories about heading out, heading back, and everything that happened in between, whether the trip was across the country or just across town.

Praise for Exact Fare Only:

"This book should be sold in bus terminals and train stations …

The suburbs house two-thirds of North America’s population and are the subject of much debate and criticism. Planning the New Suburbia explores this phenomenon and proposes ways to respond to the challenge of creating affordable, adaptable, and environmentally sustainable neighbourhoods. Avi Friedman surveys the evolution of urban planning and th …

Before the birth of Trans Canada Airlines (TCA) in 1937, Canada was one of the very few countries of the world that had no organized air service connecting its principal cities. In 1936, many of the one million people who travelled on scheduled flights in the United States were Canadian citizens who needed to travel south of the border to reach des …

In his third collection of essays, veteran journalist Stephen Hume demonstrates yet again that his understanding of British Columbia - and beyond - runs as deep as Hecate Strait and as far-reaching as the Rocky Mountains. In Off the Map, Hume takes his readers on a wondrous journey through western Canada, stopping at little-known places along the w …

It is unlikely Hal Hammond ever dreamed his stories would achieve fame and immortality. But in the retelling of his father's stories, Dick Hammond has brought his father a wide audience twenty-six years after his death in 1975.

Hal Hammond worked as a logger, a tracker and a beachcomber during his time on the BC coast. Most of that was spent on the …

Throughout its modern history, China has suffered from immense destruction and loss of life from warfare. During its worst period of warfare, the eight years of the Anti-Japanese War (1937-45), millions of civilians lost their lives. For China, the story of modern war-related death and suffering has remained hidden. Hundreds of massacres are still …

Planning Canadian Regions is the first book to consolidate the history, evolution, current practice, and future prospects for regional planning in Canada. As planners grapple with challenges wrought by globalization, the evolution of massive new city-regions, and the pressures for sustainable and community economic development, a deeper understandi …

The Adventures of Grey-Dawn is the first in a series of books that brings the knowledge and wisdom of ancient native legends into a new era with renewed life. Metis legends come alive in this tale of courage and perseverance. Grey-Dawn--an outcast from his people because of his eye colour--and his friends Eagle, Moose and Owl make the journey to th …

Sarah Carson is a mother of two and grandmother of two more, living quietly on the BC coast and minding her own business and generally being quite ordinary - or so it seems until one fine day when she goes out to work in her garden and she has a stroke.

From that moment, the lives of everyone around Sarah begin to change. Her daughter Lorraine puts …

'The Beautiful Dead End' is a visceral crime thriller that takes the reader on an existential journey to the "other side" and almost back again. In a bizarre, shadowy interzone populated by disturbing characters, our anti-hero confronts the dark secrets of his past, and comes face to face with the consequences of having lived an unexamined life.

Fin …

During the nine years that the Conservatives under Brian Mulroney held power in Ottawa, Canadian foreign policy underwent a series of important departures from established policy. Some of these changes mirrored the major transformations in global politics that occurred during this period as the Berlin Wall was breached, the Cold War came to an end, …

Ancient People of the Arctic traces the lives of the Palaeo-Eskimos, the bold first explorers of the Arctic. Four thousand years ago, these people entered the far northern extremes of the North American continent, carving a living out of their bleak new homeland. From the hints they left behind, accessible only through the fragmented archaeological …

This exhilarating journey through British Columbia's historic cattle country takes the reader from the high Chilcotin meadows to the rich irrigated fields of the southern Okanagan, from cattle drives to modern marketing, from urban ranches to those tucked away in splendid isolation - all with spectacular full-colour photographs. Ranchland is a gorg …

In 1891, Alice Barrett moved from Port Dover, Ontario, to the Okanagan Valley to keep house for her brother and uncle. She soon married Harold Parke, a former NWMP officer, and spent the next decade recording her experiences in a series of notebooks sent to her Ontario family. Few women’s diaries have survived from that time, and Barrett Parke re …

The story of Burrard Inlet is also the story of Greater Vancouver, the third largest port in North America and one of the most beautiful cities in the world. This engaging history traces the development of the area from the First Nations settlements dating back thousands of years, to the early European explorers and developers (and tree-huggers!), …

With Blue Himalayan Poppies, Jay Ruzesky collects his best poetry of the past seven years. Acclaimed as one of Canada's most interesting and innovative contemporary poets for his first two books, Am I Glad to See You (Thistledown, 1992) and the highly praised and influential Painting the Yellow House Blue (Anansi, 1994), Ruzesky has produced his be …

With its juxtaposition of Canadian prairie with the downs of southern England, with its movement between reality and dream, night and day, Norm Sacuta's brilliant debut poetry collection, Garments of the Known, uses both traditional verse forms and linguistic fracture to create a most passionate landscape.

That landscape is always half one world, ha …

As more and more skiers, snowshoers and hikers venture into the backcountry, it is becoming increasingly important that they know how to read the snow. Using photographs of various types of snow and snow conditions, snow expert Edward R. LaChapelle examines in detail the shapes, forms and textures found on the surface of the snow and describes how …

Witches have always been figures electric with possibility, feared as menacing hags but also standing as towering images of female rebellion. Trace their wild ride across the centuries, flying on brooms, turning into animals, making spirit journeys, visiting the dead, casting spells, and causing or healing illnesses. Every age has fashioned this le …

In the wonderous city of Baghdad lives a young girl called Jehan. One morning, Jehan wakes and sees that her smile is lost. She looks everywhere. Jugglers and fire-eaters come to help her find it. Artists paint murals on the walls of her room. They all try their hardest to entertain Jehan, but still, she cannot find her smile. Derived from a collec …

The 1950s were the golden years of haute couture, captured by iconic images of glamorous models wearing dramatic clothes. Yet the real women who wore these clothes adapted them to suit their own tastes, altered them to extend their life, and often could not bear to part with them long after the dresses had outlived their use. This gorgeously illust …

A magnificent anthology of blues poems/songs by some of Canada's best poets; on the accompanying CD, the poems are masterfully interpreted by Canadian west coast blues artists.
Writing contributors include Ken Babstock, bill bissett, George Elliott Clarke, Lynn Coady, Lorna Crozier, Barry Dempster, Patrick Friesen, Mark Jarman, Ryan Knighton, Rob …

In Paris's Pere-Lachaise cemetery lie the bones of many renowned departed. It is also home to a large number of stray cats. Now, what if by some strange twist of fate, the souls of the famous were reborn in the cats with their personalities intact? There's Maria Callas, a wilful and imperious diva, wailing late into the night. Earthy, bawdy chanteu …

Ashok Mathur's debut novel, Once Upon an Elephant, was a hilarious murder mystery steeped in Hindu mythology and starring elephant-headed Hindu deity Ganesh.
The Short, Happy Life of Harry Kumar continues Mathur's playful jaunt through mythology, this time blending the Hindu epic, the Ramayana, with the geography of Canada and Australia. Harry Ku …

From Judy MacDonald--author of the novel Jane--is a startling collection of stories called Grey.
Grey is a baby. Grey is a bad date. Grey battles a tornado, flies past giant monkeys, and pauses to watch an old woman with her lists.
These stories toy with fact and fiction, autobiography and invention, memory and make believe. Grey proves that a m …

"X" is one of the most provocative representations in contemporary culture: a symbol of capital, power, waste, and illicit desire. Based on the connection between language and the lack thereof, Sign after the x investigates the letter "X" that is used in our culture as part of a complex sign system that encompasses the evolution of language back t …

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 terms of rights and freedoms for queers, Canada holds an international reputation as among the most liberal of nations. Yet this picture of harmonious gay and lesbian assimilation is nothing if not fractured and fraught with the contradictions of place, privilege, race, and gender. In a Queer Country is a groundbreaking collection of fourteen e …

Since the release of our first, bestselling Calgary cityguide, many things in the city have changed: it's gotten bigger, faster, and richer. Still filled with strange secrets, this revised and expanded edition of the earlier Calgary: Secrets of the City reveals the whole truth.
With stories of notorious figures like the jazz impresario who has ha …

How does working at home change people's activity patterns, social networks, and their living and working spaces? How will it change the way we plan houses and communities in the future? Will telecommuting solve many of society's ills, or create new ghettos?

Gurstein combines a background in planning, sociology of work, and feminist theory with qual …

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 …

In this darkly comic monologue by one of the masters of contemporary German theatre, a German tourist visiting Banff is forced to wait out a thunderstorm in the cabin of an old shaman. By the time the night is over he has been humiliated, mocked, and enlightened, has undergone a nightmare voyage through the worlds of the living and the dead, and ha …

What does Jacques Casanova, demonstrably the world's greatest lover, have to say to heterosexual men of the 21st century? Do his celebrated memoirs provide a message for the muddled swains of our time, whose sex drive is often stuck in neutral because liberated women can be a scary climb? The answer, one that Casanova was accustomed to hearing: si …

The Tenth Pupil, for readers eight to fourteen, is set in a small logging camp on Vancouver Island in 1934. Eleven-year-old Trudy Paige enjoys her life in Mellor's Camp. She has a loving family, a shaggy dog, friends, a swimming hole, a fishing stream, books to read, wild animals to lend a touch of danger, and a friend in Vancouver to visit. She es …

'Bogman's Music' is a debut collection of poetry that is both elegiac and sensitive in its exploration of family dynamics, the enduring power of childhood experience, and the healing ability of faith and love.

"It's gritty and quirky, and at times almost spins out of but for a formality that always tends to rein in thing." - The Georgia Straight

Gove …

Connie Fife is one of Canada's warrior poets. Poems for a New World, her third book of poems, refuses to take prisoners. She writes of Oka and Gustafson Lake, of the police shooting of a Native mother and child, as well as the NATO genocide in Yugoslavia. Reflecting on her own life, she carves out a space for new forms of loving that will act as a …

Ann Walsh has selected fourteen captivating stories written by accomplished authors from across Canada for this historical anthology. Each of the stories focuses on a "first-time" historical experience, such as the meeting between natives and Europeans at Fort St. James; the ship carrying filles du roi as brides for the settlers of New France; the …

This volume is a collection of thirty-eight pieces unified by a combination of the playful, primitive aesthetic of literary modernism with the anti-authoritarian, anarchist praxis of radical democratic politics. This bipolar sensibility permeates the work of Jerry Zaslove, to whom the book is dedicated.
Yet even if this sensibility pervades the bo …

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 …

In this powerful dramatic monologue, Lorena Gale remembers, by reconstructing for the audience, her childhood and coming of age as an African-Canadian in Montreal.
Her autobiographical protagonist is unabashedly one of those spoil-sport “ethniques” who, for political factions led by the likes of Parizeau, undermined and destroyed the separatis …

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 …

"The stories and images in this book are both challenging and tragic. They tell how eight land-mines in my own country, Mozambique, prevented more than 20,000 people from returning to their villages in the Mahniça valley for seven years. They tell of the exploitation of girls as soldiers and sexual slaves ... The book charts the rise of HIV/AIDS …

August 12, 2002 would have marked the 100th birthday of one of Western Canada's most beloved, exemplary, idiosyncratic and admired citizens, the Hon. J.W. Grant MacEwan. A Century of Grant MacEwan: Selected Writings is published to mark the centenary of the author's birth, and showcases the writing achievements of this remarkable man. From his firs …

World-renowned nature photographer Jonathan Chester combines a magnificent portfolio of penguin photographs with a highly readable and scientifically up-to-date text. Throughout the book, Chester's astonishing photographs capture these amazing birds in their natural habitats as they feed their young, porpoise out of the water to catch their breath …