Now updated with a chapter-length afterword by the editors on the end of the Deng era and its aftermath, China in the 1990s provides a comprehensive survey of a nation in transition. An understanding of this complex process requires a multidisciplinary and multidimensional approach, which the editors have achieved by bringing together experts from …

The Recovery of the Public World is a collection of texts and talks which address the work of poet Robin Blaser and the field inhabited by his work. It is a field in which the private and the public are grounded in a poetic thinking that operates within the problematics of companionship and community. The companions are “you, dear reader,” the …

Bryden MacDonald’s most extreme venture into the world of the theatre to date, Divinity Bash, creates a play informed by Ionesco’s arid visions, Dali’s baroque excesses and Jim Morrison’s amateur nihilisms. As the main character, Albert’s secure and straight world begins to unravel, so does the structure of the language, leaving words and …

ABC of Reading TRG examines the writings of Steve McCaffery and bpNichol, with a special focus on their collaborative work as the Toronto Research Group (TRG). The book expands what little criticism there is on the Group’s collaborations by exploring their engagements with literary theory, by differentiating between each writer’s personal conc …

This book stands at the point where actuality and legend converge in a land as old as time. From it extends an arid landscape upon which are inscribed the stories of peoples, civilizations, ideas that enslave and beliefs that liberate. Anatolia Junction weaves together three narratives: that of Fred A. Reed’s early winter journey through high An …

scars on th seehors is bill bissett’s latest report from and to the image nation, in which his metric performs a kind of absence of narrative intent that lets everyone and everything speak for itself:

eye dont have 2 invent th world ium / alredee in it

There is much evidence of wounding here, of things gone completely raging:

whats th mattr / why yu …

In this book, the Gitksan and Gitanyow present their response to the use of the treaty process by the Nisga’a to expand into Gitksan and Gitanyow territory on the upper Nass River and demonstrate the ownership of their territory according to their own legal system. They call upon the ancient oral history (“adaawk”) and their intimate knowledg …

Whales, although among our most important and interesting animals, have been little studied until recently. Almost a third of about seventy living cetacean species have been recorded in North American Pacific coast waters.

Our word whale describes glimpses of surfacing cetaceans; its Old English root hvael means "a wheel." A large whale's rolling ba …

Content to juggle the demands of her career and family life, Betty's charm comes from being what her co-creator Gerry Rasmussen calls "a working class hero whose spirit cannot be broken by the endless series of outrages that make up modern life."

The creative world of a northern Native community is revealed in this innovative book. Once semi-nomadic hunters and gatherers, the Dene Tha of northern Canada today live in government-built homes in the settlement of Chateh. Their lives are a distinct blend of old and new, in which more traditional forms of social control, healing, and praying ent …

Betty Goodwin is one of Canada's most accomplished and influential artists, and her powerful works about death, loss and the traces of life have influenced a generation of Canadian artists. "Her work is not a catalogue of distress," Anne Michaels writes, but "a record of hope in its most distilled form, potent and fiercely earned." To celebrate a c …

Above all
a poem records speech:
the way it was said
between people animals birds
a poem is an archive for our times
-Dorothy Livesay, "Anything Goes"
Dorothy Livesay, who died in 1996, is considered a pioneer of Canadian poetry; her work is infused with an extraordinary grace and power, and shaped by a prescient feminist sensibility which le …

Once Upon an Elephant is a contemporary tale of Hindu deity Ganesh and what happens when worlds, cultures, and stories collide.

A whimsical, contemporary retelling of the creation story of Ganesh--the elephant-headed Hindu deity--Once Upon an Elephant is rife with humour and political satire.

When the police find unusual boy parts--a young man's hea …

Quickies, together with Hot & Bothered, are hot his-and-her follow-ups to the highly successful Queer View Mirror 1 and 2 books of queer "short short" fiction. Quickies includes work by 69 writers (67 men and 2 women) from the US, Canada, Great Britain, Australia, Germany, South Africa, and Ireland, on aspects of gay male desire, from first kisses …

Small Worlds is a fascinating compendium: photographs of aspects of everyday objects-coins, keys, cutlery-that, in photographer Matthew Wheeler's hands, are not readily recognizable.
How well do you know the world around you-the things right under your nose and at your fingertips?
The 100 photographs, extreme close-ups of objects that surround u …

Hot & Bothered, together with Quickies, are hot his-and-her follow-ups to the highly successful Queer View Mirror 1 and 2 books of queer "short short" fiction. Hot & Bothered includes work by 69 women from the US, Canada and elsewhere-stories about danger, romance, humor, and of course, hot sex. From a woman in love with Marge Simpson (asking the …

From the author of Stupid Crimes, Krekshuns and Stand in Hell come more fictional wanderings. Gas Tank & Other Stories casts disparate characters into tumultuous scenes of moral terror, testing their courage, energy, and capacity to endure.

Praise for Gas Tank & Other Stories:

"Gas Tank & Other Stories isn't just another work of gritty realism or a c …

WASPs is one of those plays where the whole is quite literally much greater than the sum of its parts—so much so that it becomes, in retrospect, the subject of the play, “what the play is about,” and that doesn’t hit you until you are half-way home after a fun evening of bizarre, exotic, and hilarious entertainment. Although signified only …

Lost Souls and Missing Persons premiered at Theatre Passe Muraille in 1984. It is a comic, biting, surreal investigation of the question of self and identity in the North American middle-class—a trope of insulating banalities which trades the body’s physical and spiritual content for the artifice of a formalized security and predictability. Ha …

Guillermo Verdecchia is primarily known for his award-winning plays; Citizen Suárez is his first book of short stories, and it is a remarkable debut.
These stories take on the quintessential issues forced upon a generation betrayed by their citizenship—a betrayal the more profound because it subsists primarily in the global death of the nation-s …

This book is an up-to-date checklist of the current valid taxonomy for all vascular plants, bryophytes, and lichens in British Columbia, including synonyms, species codes, and other information. A convenient, geographically restricted, comprehensive checklist like this one will aid greatly in avoiding the present confusion concerning the names of m …

Elephant Crossing. Houdini Needles. Miniskirt, Tickletoeteaser Tower, and Why Not Mountain. These are just some of the many names of places, rivers, mountains, and lakes that you will come across in the newest edition of British Columbia Place Names. This classic which, in its various editions, has sold over 29,000 copies, covers about 2,500 geogra …

The modern tales in Stories to Hide From Your Mother provide directions for conduct in a difficult world, filled with hysterical wedding parties, abusive lovers, and judgmental mothers. In Stories to Hide From Your Mother, the body plays a central role--a site of lurid spectacle and misplaced lust; and the various characters--a woman who obsesses …

As Canadians, we remember the stories told to us in high-school history class as condensed images of the past--the glorious Mountie, the fearsome Native, the Last Spike. National Dreams is an incisive study of the most persistent icons and stories in Canadian history, and how they inform our sense of national identity: the fundamental beliefs that …

Scrambled Brains is a decidedly offbeat cookbook for those living and eating on the edge-urban warriors and young hipsters low on funds but high on attitude. Robin, a visual artist, and Pierre, a chef, are roommates who joined forces to create a spirited yet highly usable book of recipes, comics, and anecdotes based on their solemn belief that it …

"Wuzz is a place not far from here. It's like here. Almost." Thus begins Willobe of Wuzz, the coming-of-age story of a dragon like no other-a dragon who uses his fire power to bake rather than burn, and who'd rather paint pictures than fight with knights. When Willobe wins the friendship of Princess Emily the Resourceful, a major flare-up with his …

Silence Descends: The End of the Information Age, 2000-2500 is not as much a novel as it is an imaginary book of non-fiction: a history of the future, written in the year 2500--a look back at where we have yet to go. Silence Descends is a cautionary tale; it is a critique of "the Microsoft mentality"--the belief in the power of technology to save …

A publishing oddity, Death Writes: A Curious Notebook is both what you might expect--a handwritten notebook with doodles in the margins and clippings in the back; and what you might not expect--the perspective of Death him/herself, ruminating about the land of the living.
This unusual, stylish book is Death's personal notebook, which has been une …

A truly remarkable person, Caroline Macdonald (1874-1931) was a Canadian woman who spent almost her entire working life in Japan and who played a significant role there in both the establishment of the YWCA and in prison reform. A native of Wingham, Ontario, she was one of the first women to attend the University of Toronto, where in 1901 she gradu …

The first book-length study of whether cannibalism existed on the Pacific Northwest coast. McDowell shows how a "cannibal complex" among Westerners coloured many early accounts of "man-eating," and how this perception obscured the importance of ritual cannibalism in the secret Hamatsa ceremony—a crucial feature of Native spirituality.

Queer View Mirror 2 is a second volume of lesbian and gay short short fiction: snapshots of queer life that articulate, in one thousand words or less, different ways of the world. One hundred and one stories from writers in eight different countries make up Queer View Mirror 2. Their subject matter ranges the wide spectrum of gay experience, from …

Finalist, Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize (BC Book Prizes)

Ivanhoe Station is a début collection that rivets with poetic imagery as sharp as movie graphics. These poems address, in turn, social and political questions, while focussing - centrally - on a theme of transcendence.

Praise for Ivanhoe Station:

"These poems pack a wallop. They 'steam and churn …

According to Joan MacLeod, her play 2000 grew out of a story she read about a cougar that had wandered into a sports arena in Vancouver, BC: “I was intrigued by the notion of the wild invading the city and the city invading the wild, by the idea of things being not quite right in nature and the approach of the millennium.”
In the play, the cou …

A college student’s life is given meaning when he chooses to sponsor Elias, a Salvadoran refugee, as a class project. When Elias arrives, his hosts Sander and his family learn what it means and feels to be a refugee and how to relate to someone who has endured such intense personal grief. The warmth and humour of the characters invite us to embr …

Poems that tell stories on many different levels: through sound, visual images, political insights, non-narrative fusion and linguistic music.

accepting th radiant dances uv being

4 kleerances uv ko dependenseez n help

th selvs being plural storeez sound

vizual politikul non narrativ fuseyn

linguisteek mewsik letting go uv th

rashyunalizasyuns irrashyuna …

At the dawn of the twentieth century, Vancouver was a mill town rapidly becoming a bustling cosmopolitan seaport. New technology proliferated, Klondike miners brawled their way through town, political turbulence and dramatic boom-and-bust cycles were the norm, Then as now, Vancouver was young, thriving, magnificently beautiful, and troubled by seri …

Mrs. Amor de Cosmos has been entertaining British Columbia's commercial fishermen for over 15 years with her popular "A Letter From Home" columns. In 1981, her letters became a feature of the national tabloid newspaper Canadian Fishing Report, and in 1992, her columns began appearing each month in British Columbia's leading commercial fishing magaz …

Whose overtime scoring exploits earned him the nickname "Sudden Death"? Who is the only goalie to post three consecutive shutouts in one playoff series? See if you can answer these and many other amusing trivia tidbits of the NHL. Relive the glorious history of hockey's most coveted prize. Answers: Mel Hill, Franck McCool. 144 pages, 35 b/w illus., …

Making Vancouver explores social relationships in Vancouver from 1863 to 1913. It considers how urbanization structured social boundaries among Burrard Inlet's increasingly large population and is premised on the belief that, in studying social boundaries, historians must abandon single category forms of analysis and build into their research strat …

The second volume of Gordon Davies' collection of stories features the rivers of British Columbia and the Yukon. Travelling from the turbulent Yukon in the far north to the streams flowing into Washington State, Davies acts as a guide to fisher and non-fisher alike.

The avid fisherman will find information about the types of fish in each river as we …

An elegant reissue of a timeless collection of Haida myths, with a new preface by Claude Levi-Strauss.

Ten masterful, complex drawings by Bill Reid are accompanied by ten episodes from Haida mythology told by Bill Reid and Robert Bringhurst. The result brings Haida art and mythology alive as never before in an English-speaking world. The collection …

"The Sound of Whales is a lyric-comedy about language, our obsessive reliance upon it, and how linear thought can inhibit understanding. David MacLean's play has its roots in his personal experience in dealing with governmental, educational, and medical bureaucracies. The frustration the playwright expresses toward these institutions is balanced by …

A vivid, contemporary travelogue, Salonica Terminus explores a current landscape thronged with figures bent beneath the weight of history. It peers beneath the rotting logs of ideology, and prods the decomposing hulks of historical corpses that litter this region of dark mountains and misty valleys. Through its pages lurch extremists, confidence me …

Founder/Editor Howard White predicts that Raincoast Chronicles 17 will come to be known as the "bad medicine" issue. From the queasy feeling that pioneer medicine inspires in Margaret McKirdy's "The Doctor Book" to Robin Ward's profile of Francis Rattenbury - British Columbia's favourite architect - whose chequered career ended in a classic "Agatha …

Before multimillion-dollar deals, rinkboard advertising, and union lockouts, hockey produced many of the game's greatest legends, bloodiest rivalries, and most enduring memories. From 1942 to 1967, six NHL teams set standards and records by which today's superstars still measure all-star performance. Test your knowledge of the players, teams, seaso …

Consider yourself an expert hockey fan? Challenge your NHL knowledge with hundreds of who's, what's, when's, and where's about the greatest game on ice. Score mental goals with multiple-choice and true-false questions, quizzes, and puzzles. 128 pages, 5 1/2 x 8 1/2.

Chiwid was a Tsilhqot'in woman, said to have shamanistic powers, who spent most of her adult life "living out" in the hills and forests around Williams Lake, BC. Chiwid is the story of this remarkable woman told in the vibrant voices of Chilcotin oldtimers, both native and non-native. Chiwid is number 2 in the Transmontanus series.

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

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