From "surviving ground zero in the nuclear family," to "feeling fear at the Fall Fair," to "quelling a taste for champagne on a tap-water budget," Gordon Kirkland writes about survival - survival in the '90s, that is.

Looking back, Kirkland acknowledges his life has always been filled with laughter. He comes from a family who was like "Monty Python …

Islands have always had a special place in our minds, hearts and souls. So too have cottages. Add the two together and what do you get? Eric Nicol's wryly funny, sharply observed new book on the joys and terrors of cottage life on Saturna Island, in BC's Strait of Georgia.

Part loopy guidebook, part madcap how-to manual, part fractured history, When …

Bad Jobs is an anthology of tales--both humorous and tragic--about the worst jobs people have ever held.
This collection of stories, comics, and photographs depict, in gory true-life detail, examples of bad jobs. We all shudder at the thought of our own worst jobs-waiter, cashier, parking lot attendant-but these take the cake, demonstrating just …

You're Not As Good As You Think You Are is an important addition to the field of self-help literature.
You think you're swell, don't you? That you're God's gift to the Universe, the cream in everyone else's coffee. Well, you're wrong, and it's getting on everyone's nerves. The problem is you're too good, too pumped, too motivated. You need to com …

He's baaaaack! Get ready for another batch of smart, funny, bang-on stories of the ups and downs of country living.

Ever wondered how to discipline an unruly chicken? How to kill a mouse with a hardcover book? How to survive the pettifogging bureaucrats at your daughter's school? How to save your own butt when a tough guy outside the convenience sto …

Honest, offbeat, and very funny, Tom Henry's stories about living in the country have been broadcast weekly on CBC Radio in British Columbia and have become favourites among listeners in the city, the country, and everywhere in between. This cassette collects some of the best of Henry's anecdotes from Metchosin, a rural area on southern Vancouver I …

During the years Al Purdy was becoming one of Canada's best-loved poets, he also wrote and published many pages of distinctive prose. This selection of almost forty years of essays and anecdotes is vintage Purdy. Part I, No Other Country, consists of essays on seeing the world as a Canadian. It begins as a fascinating travel diary as Purdy takes th …

Short, funny anecdotes from a natural born recycler, do-it-yourselfer, tinkerer and pack rat all rolled into one. They start during the Depression, when young Caplette learned how to make a perfect slingshot and go after gophers in South Battleford, Saskatchewan. They follow him down the road when he gets the bright idea to ride his bicycle to the …

In his introduction to this provocative collection of essays, George Woodcock describes his response to a recent question about national unity. "I remarked impatiently that what interested me was not the achievement of 'national unity, but the accomplishment of creative anti-national disunity."

Woodcock argues that if Canadians are angry about their …

Edith Iglauer has been a journalist for four decades, working for The New Yorker, Harper's, The Atlantic Monthly and other publications. This book is a lively retrospective of her writings, from the 1940s when she covered Eleanor Roosevelt's press conferences, through the 1960s when she was present at the founding of Canada's first Inuit co-operati …

The Athabasca Ryga presents essays, short stories, plays, and selections from a novel that George Ryga wrote in Athabasca and in Edmonton before his move to British Columbia in the early 1960s. Very little of this work has ever been published before. Almost all these early writings evoke and portray the sights, sounds and people of Deep Creek, Atha …

Anecdotes, interviews and extensive research. Fuse magazine called it ". . . one of the most provocative and playful feminist texts to have emerged in recent years."

One powerful taboo that still remains in our literature today is the taboo against discussing our most central daily experience: working for a living.

Poet and editor Tom Wayman believes that with the recent appearance of a new kind of work writing we have begun at last to see the end of this limitation. In his essays gathered in Inside Job Wayman c …