Finalist, City of Vancouver Book Awards, 2008

At Home with History is a collection of real life stories that bring to life the glamorous and not-so-glamorous social histories of selected heritage homes in Greater Vancouver - stories of brothels and bootleggers, secret rooms, and Shakespearean-style murders. An Italian family survives the depression …

Fiction Pick, Broken Pencil Magazine

Suburban Pornography is contemporary literature, which documents Canadian urban life in a raw and naked manner. The prose is stripped - minimalist, direct, urgent, unflinching. The stories revolve around ordinary characters and problems - people stuck in bad relationships or jobs. Some yearn for something just be …

Longlisted for a ReLit Award (2007)

Alcuin Society Citation for Excellence in Design

The stories in Sugar Bush & Other Stories deal with gender relations, love, and sex in a frank way. Most of the pieces feature female protagonists who navigate their young adult years in some questionable ways. They make some ill-advised choices, which are driven by …

Finalist for the George Ryga Award for Social Awareness

Rooted in the back alleys, squats and psychiatric wards of contemporary Vancouver and Montreal, these unyielding poems enter the intersecting tensions and intensities in characters such as Mike, a panhandler on Vancouver's Commercial Drive, Matthew, a runaway punk, and Dara, a single mother. Cu …

Alcuin Society Citation for Excellence in Design

Signs of the Times reunites the poetry of Bud Osborn and the woodprints of Vancouver printmaker and painter Richard Tetrault. As with their first collaboration, Oppenheimer Park, Signs of the Times is both an unflinching look at Vancouver's Downtown Eastside and a beautiful object in its own right.

Pra …

Longlisted for a ReLit Award (2006)

Best Fiction of the Year, OttawaXpress

A Small Dog Barking is a startling array of stories, diverse in theme and far-reaching in their breadth of subject matter. Ranging in setting from teenage drinking parties to the apocalyptic landscape of a near-future Western civilization, this collection is both intensely per …

“Reading the Riot Act” is a phrase that has entered the popular lexicon, meaning the action taken by authority figures when they perceive that their “charges” are getting out of hand. The act itself is a seldom-used piece of legislation actually designed to prevent a riot from taking place. Supposedly, the mere mention of the Riot Act is en …

Bizarre Winery Tragedy is a book of lyric poems about country folk, city folk, alcohol and urbanism. These poems continue Neff's quest to explore the modern-day juxtaposition of urban and rural landscapes, and the lines of power between the countryside and the metropolis-firewood, dams and the WiFi-enabled grid. Deeper insights emerge in this, the …

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 centres. …

Best Books of 2005, Ottawa Xpress

Writer's Trust of Canada's "Warm Weather Reads Recommended by Writers" list (recommended by Robert Hough)

Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer is equal parts literary memoir, advice for the emerging writer, and reckless tirade. Ross has been active in the Canadian literary underground for a quarter of a century: he …

Painted Lives & Shifting Landscapes showcases the artwork of Vancouver painter, printmaker and muralist Richard Tetrault. Tetrault's work explores universal themes of the figure and the urban landscape. From Berlin to Bangkok to Vancouver, his artwork revisits these themes over thirty years. His imagery is at its most direct in street drawings and …

Singer, An Elegy is a long poem memorializing the author's father and, equally, the now-obsolete industrial culture that shaped him. Singer, An Elegy has rhetorical lightning flashes but aspires to much greater straightforwardness than Fetherling's previous poetry.

Praise for Singer, An Elegy:

"Singer is a brilliant poem. Fetherling takes John Thomps …

Viral Suite explores our relationship with self, other, environment, space, and time. The sensual and the cerebral. How the we/here/now is evolving and mutating with each downloaded packet.

Praise for Viral Suite:

"The poems in Viral Suite are exuberant in their exploration of the body as 'a vast zone of sensation,' including a palpable face-to-face …

Finalist, ReLit Award

Unravel addresses our universal experiences of time and place, and how those places shape who and what we are. Unravel challenges our sometimes-complacent perceptions and justifies what we all hold dear: an address and an identity.

Praise for Unravel:

"Armstrong pushes the potential of the lyric into darker places, inside the sea …

Longlisted for the ReLit Award (2005)

Honeymoon in Berlin examines the extremes of human desire, and investigates the human fascination with limits, the line between courage and fear, life and death.

Praise for Honeymoon in Berlin:

"A book of bold contrasts, Honeymoon in Berlin is simultaneously beautiful and ugly, alluring and repulsive. It's an achi …

Longlisted for the ReLit Award (2006)

Going to New Orleans is the story of Lewis King, a jazz trumpet player who lands a gig in the Big Easy. King is a genius on cornet, but his private life is emotionally, morally, and financially bankrupt. He's a heavy drinker and compulsive sexual manipulator, prone to paranoid fits of violent rage. His girlfrien …

The Dreamlife of Bridges is the debut novel from Vancouver writer Robert Strandquist. Leo is a middle-aged, divorced handyman capable of mending almost anything outside of himself. The denial of his son's death, and his inability to deal with his own pain, has rendered his life fractured and untenable. June is a single mom struggling in the bottlen …

With an afterword by David Suzuki

Back with more, Exact Fare Only 2 is the follow-up collection of the weird, the wild and the wonderful of commuter literature. Whether by land, sea or air, public transit around the world says more about the human condition than many want to admit. These real-life tales, reflections, poems, and rants are required re …

Finalist, ReLit Award

Amazon.ca's 50 Essential Canadian Books selection

First published in 1997 to much critical acclaim, Salvage King, Ya! is a novel firmly rooted in Canada's favourite national pastime - hockey. Critics have called Salvage King, Ya! "the great Canadian novel," and a "postmodern Canadian classic." Drinkwater, Jarman's narrator, is t …

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 …

When jazz musicians of the “30s and “40s were gettin” down, when things were really cookin” they—d say, Yeah, make it tight like that. It meant things were good, as good as they could get. It's a good thing in fiction, too. The stories in Jim Christy's latest collection span time and space, taking us from the depression-era Deep South to …

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 …

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 actio …

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 …

From the notorious Alan Twigg, publisher and editor of BC BookWorld, Canada's largest-circulating publication about books

One night in April, after a Sunday soccer game, Alan Twigg couldn't remember the names of his two sons or his wife - and he couldn't hold a pen. An emergency CAT scan revealed a large brain tumour squeezed against his motor corte …

Winner of the City of Vancouver Book Award

The Heroines Series is an epic photographic documentary of the addicted women of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. In 1997, fashion and portrait photographer Lincoln Clarkes turned his lens away from the world of glamour and began documenting the dire circumstances being endured by the marginalized women livin …

Whether considering the simplicity of a butterfly in flight or the terror of a cancer diagnosis, Heidi Greco confronts the world head-on, yet always with the fresh eyes of the stranger in our midst. The issues she addresses belong to the world; the settings she employs are international.

At times funny and irreverent, these are pieces that dissect r …

'Socket' tells the gripping tale of Ronald Percy, an international aid worker who travels to Ethiopia to assist with an irrigation project for the African Development Organization. Upon arrival, he is unable to locate his agents or company representatives, and soon finds himself enmeshed in a web of bureaucracy and state corruption. 'Socket' was se …

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)

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 …

Finalist, Books in Canada/Amazon.ca First Novel Award

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 …

Nominee, Governor General's Award (youngest person to be nominated for a GG)

Winner, Alfred G Bailey Award for Poetry (New Brunswick)

Section from Bogman's Music shortlisted for the Acorn Rukeyser Chapbook Contest

Bogman's Music is a debut collection of poetry that is both elegiac and sensitive in its exploration of family dynamics, the enduring power …

Second Prize Winner, Canada's National One-Act Playwriting Competition (1994)

Shylock is an award-winning play about a Jewish actor who finds himself condemned by his own community for his portrayal of Shakespeare's notorious Jew. Shylock has provided much fuel for the fiery debates surrounding censorship, historical revisionism, political correctne …

Swing In the Hollow is a debut collection that struggles with the service and spoil of lyrical attention. In quirky and precise turns, Knighton's language teases a sense of phenomena from the rubbish and rubble of atrophied urban experience.

Praise for Swing in the Hollow:

"... meditative and immediate ... hewn deftly out of pop culture ... imploded …

Articles of Faith is a play designed to promote understanding of the controversial subject of the blessing of same-sex unions. The play is based on a series of interviews conducted by the author in a Pacific Northwest community where the issue of formal condoning and blessing of same-sex unions divided and eventually split an Anglican parish.

Praise …

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 …

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 …

The Inanimate World is an affecting suite of stories, with a novella-length piece at its core. The stories within The Inanimate World traverse both rural and urban landscapes, exploring the terrain of the personal as much as the geographic. They span the time period of 1980 to the present, providing relevant insights into the private lives of peopl …

Full Magpie Dodge is about the shiny brightness of modern urban life, its pressures and joys. More-or-less artful dodgers populate its pages, along with office workers, crows, exhausted junkies and jubilant lovers. Intertwined with all their lives is the unforgotten rural past and the still turbulent North; in short, it's a book that takes Canadian …

Snatch is a hilarious and creepy collection of poems that may not even be poetry at all. Like a comic novel from an alternate universe, or a fragmented hoax of an autobiography, Snatch picks at the vacuous horror of suburbia and exposes a world of small beauty and perfect moments amid TV-induced nostalgia and impending violence. In her mysterious a …

Winner, 3-Day Novel-Writing Contest (1998)

Meet Jack Minyard, a nice, liberal, milk-drinking, hockey-playing white-bread Canuck from Saskatoon who's stuck down in Memphis, Tennessee workin' for a security company and moonlighting as a private dick.

Ruby Ruby is a soft-boiled murder mystery that follows the trail of our expatriate Canuck as he tries t …

Touched renders the emotional and intellectual implosion experienced by Jade King, a young university student. This debut novel challenges the social stigma attached to such altered states and traces the effects of physical violation and psychic trauma. Lundgren encourages a critical examination of current psychiatric labels and treatments through …

Selected for the BC 2000 Book Awards Program

Under the Abdominal Wall is a moving collection of poetry, an elegy for ones loved and lost. The pieces in this volume focus largely on the subjects of childbirth, illness and loss - of a sibling and a parent. While the subjects of death and illness are forefront, they are countered by a theme of rejuvena …

Drinkin' rye and water with Grandma. Guns in False Creek. Frat boy homies from the North Delta ghetto. Samuel L. Jackson. Phantom Lord & Metallica. A kid who's got the hots for his mom...

Hunh?

That's right. It's all here in this collection of immediate, lean and visceral short fiction from Clint Burnham.

Praise for Airborne Photo:

"A stack of hot Man …

Finalist, City of Vancouver Book Prize

A blackly comic new novel from Vancouver author Grant Buday, based on his eight glorious years working in a mass production bakery. Dickensian in magnitude, White Lung is a sardonic portrait of B.C.'s racial conflicts and chaotic economy.

Praise for White Lung:

"a rollicking black comedy of errors with a host of …

Winner, 20th annual 3-Day Novel-Writing Contest

The Underwood is a poignant tale of a parentless twenty-one-year-old pianist who lands the job of lounge entertainer in a once glorious and elegant establishment. Enter the young Foster Lutz, and the hotel - including the lives of its inhabitants - is set for a spell of splendour and rejuvenation.

A los …

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 …

If you like your comic strip characters cute and cuddly, you?ll hate Dry Shave. Dry Shave cracks open a hardboiled world of laconic lowlifes, pugnacious palookas, shiftless grifters and demented dames?with a tip of the pork-pie hat to Robert Mitchum. As featured in Vancouver's The Georgia Straight and Toronto's eye weekly magazine, Rod Filbrandt's …

Where Words Like Monarchs Fly brings Mexican poetry to the fullness of its senses in English with all the music of the meaning, richness of metaphor and humour. It introduces Jose Emilio Pacheco, Gabriel Zaid, Homero Aridjis and Elsa Cross - born in the thirties and the forties - along with the fifties generation they have inspired. Covering twenty …