This hard-hitting novel explores the gritty underbelly of contemporary urban life revealing the shocking chasm between demonized media images and the everyday life of the uneducated poor. At the centre is thirty-seven-year-old Maggie MacKinnan, a star reporter at the Montreal Tribune who is wrenched from her life of respectability when she meets Ni …

Mom’s the Word was created out of a Saturday morning writers’ support group. Getting together to share their experiences, six women performers struck upon the idea to write about what they were going through as mothers trying to maintain their careers, their individual identities and their relationships with their partners. The result is an eve …

Twenty-four hours is a lot of time to kill. Tomorrow, a life will hang in the balance. Watermelon Row, a suspenseful, intricately plotted novel, tracks a day in the life of three men on the brink of violence and ruin.
It tails Ed Harrison, a tough old man in his seventies, Scott Venn, a yuppie lawyer/sports agent, and Peter James, an unemployed l …

A history of men who worked the rivers in the Rocky Mountain Trench. Drift back in history to time when the rivermen still plied their trade through the northern rivers of BC. Crooked River Rats tells the tales of men and women who traveled the river highways living and working in the wilderness. Generations of trappers, hunters, big game guides an …

Throughout the world, the cowboy is an instantly recognized symbol of the North American West. Legends of Our Times breaks the stereotype of “cowboys and Indians” to show an almost unknown side of the West. It tells the story of some of the first cowboys – Native peoples of the northern Plains and Plateau.

Through stories, poetry, art, and re …

Catherine Bauer changed forever the concept of social housing and inspired a generation of urban activists to integrate public housing into the emerging welfare state of the mid-20th century. She was one of a small group of idealists who called themselves “Housers” because of their commitment to raising the quality of urban life through improvi …

Winner, 3-Day Novel-Writing Contest (1999)

Winner, Inaugural ReLit Award (2001)

Salacious, funny, and painfully emotive, Skin is a provocative and ruminative parable about our deep-rooted urge to ostracize the freakish and shun the disfigured among us. An unconventional love story, Bowman probes the surface to reveal deeper, more lingering impulses c …

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 …

In April 1999, the Inuit dream of a self-governing territory in the eastern Arctic - Nunavut (Our Land) - became a reality. In celebration of this historic event comes a new edition of Inuit Journey, a firsthand account of another turning point in Inuit history: the establishment in the early 1960s of member-owned, member-run Inuit co-operatives, w …

In this first-ever insider account of the American Embassy takeover in 1979, Massoumeh Ebtekar sets out to correct 20 years of misrepresentation by the Western media of what the aims of the Iranian students and the populist revolution they personified were, and have since remained.

She also explains, in considerable detail, how one faction of the Sh …

It has been well known since Marius Barbeau’s review of the first edition of Franz Boas’s Tsimshian Mythology in 1917, that something was seriously amiss with Boas’s alleged “translations” of the stories gathered by his chief Tsimshian informant, Henry Tate. But what, exactly, was it that Boas was doing with Tate’s stories? It is this q …

The life story of one of today's NHL superstars at the peak of his profession is told through color photographs of the star in action. In a text aimed at eight- to eleven-year-olds, Kerry Banks focuses on Teemu Selanne, the "Finnish Flash." During his first NHL season in 1992, Selanne demolished all previous rookie records for goals and points and …

In The Chinese in Vancouver, Wing Chung Ng captures the fascinating story of the city's Chinese in their search for identity. He juxtaposes the cultural positions of different generations of Chinese immigrants and their Canadian-born descendants and unveils the ongoing struggle over the definition of being Chinese. It is an engrossing story about c …

The Frontier World of Edgar Dewdney is a biography of a man who played a key role in the events which marked the political, social, and economic transformation of western Canada in the latter half of the nineteenth century. An immigrant adventurer seeking his fortune in the colonies, Dewdney was embroiled in the gold rushes of the 1860s, the B.C. d …

As an innovative chronicler of the "little people" of Quebec, Michel Tremblay has no peer. Yet few Anglophone readers realize that Tremblay began as a writer of works of fantasy. Now, however, Michael Bullock, who won the Canada Council translation award for his translation of Tremblay's first collection of stories - Contes pour buveurs attardés ( …

Lynne Fairbridge's Tangled in Time presents a captivating story of a young girl's travel in time back to the harsh life of the Depression years. The novel opens in Edmonton with Janna's world being turned upside down when her mother tells her that she plans to remarry. Withdrawing from her family and feeling as though her father's memory has been b …

In this lavishly produced volume, Joseph Plaskett has created a prose "life in art" as colourful and vital as his finest paintings. He begins with his early life in New Westminster, BC, at a time when there were no private galleries.

Lawren Harris and Jock Macdonald were among his early mentors, and they helped him to win the first Emily Carr schola …

The first Hot & Bothered, a 1998 collection of short short stories on lesbian desire, went through three printings within its first year and appeared on numerous gay/lesbian bestseller lists, rising as high as No. 2 in the Lambda Book Report in 1999. Hot & Bothered 2, the sequel, contains even more sensuous tales of lesbian seduction and fantasy. …

This irresistabe prose poem is a charming story of two sisters on a berry-picking outing in bear country.

Double Cross: The Inside Story of James A. Richardson and Canadian Airways tells the story of James A. Richardson's dream of promoting commercial aviation in Canada. It is also the tale of how Canada lost its chance to become a world leader in aviation as a result of government short-sightedness, departmental rivalries and bureaucratic bungling. Th …

Wade Davis has been called “a rare combination of scientist, scholar, poet and passionate defender of all of life’s diversity." Driven by the desire to discover new plants for healing and visions, as well as to learn about other ways of knowing the wild, Davis journeys from the rain forests of Borneo to the mountains of Tibet, from the ice floe …

Meadow Muffins: Cowboy Rhymes and Other B.S. is a collection of poems and cartoons designed to entertain and offer a form of modern folklore. Mike Puhallo's rhymes are down-to-earth, honest, and funny. Ranging from the sensitive to the ridiculous, the poems are real stories of today's West.

This charming story is based on a true-life lovable onion peddler from France who sells chain-onions from his bicycle in London. In this story, Quizz, the cat, steals the onions and everyone in the neighbourhood joins a search to find them.

Jailbirds and Stool Pigeons is a story of human weakness. Featuring true crime stories of the Pacific Northwest from the 1880s to 1935, this book is full of flawed characters. Tom McCarty, mentor to Butch Cassidy and Matt Warner, led his clan into a life of crime showing no remorse for crimes they committed. Charles McDonald and George Frankhouser …

Provocative, suspenseful, and dangerously sensual, Jane tells the story of a young woman's need to be loved, her wish to be wanted. Perplexed by a world that treats her as an outsider--a girl with foolish, impudent desires--she becomes that girl, using her youth and sexuality to attract and repel. Yearning to be older, to be an adult, she dances a …

The X-Files was a pop culture phenomenon. When it first hit the airwaves, The X-Files was heralded for being radically different than anything else on television. The rainy, foggy "Wet Coast," which was home to the show, affected the look of the series--dark, haunting, mysterious--and its storylines--paranoid, conspiratorial, fantastic.
Written b …

Using language as exorcism and photographs as a mirror of the shifting unconscious, Florence Treadwell crosses oceans both literal and emotional in Cleaving, her first book of poems. Memories of an elusive father shadow the unfolding love story, haunting the narrator who confuses childhood and adult passion and endows both father and lover with mag …

This modern fantasy novel set in London - for children ages 8 to 12 - tells the story of Elizabeth, a twelve-year-old Canadian girl who feels homesick and lonely after her mother's death when her father moves them to London. Soon, however, she meets an assortment of unusual characters and a strange adventure unfolds. Among her new friends is Maud, …

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 …

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 …

The Mountain Is Moving describes postwar Japanese society and the roles that women are expected to play within it. Based on interviews with hundreds of women, the book examines the education of women, marriage and child rearing, work outside the house, caring for the elderly, political power or lack of it, and volunteerism. Morley also examines a d …

In this immensely popular Canadian classic, Robert Collins describes his boyhood growing up in Saskatchewan during the bleak years of the Depression. Featuring the fine realist paintings of well-known painter Len Gibbs, this special illustrated edition evokes the mood of that era both through Collins's humorous and touching stories and through Gibb …

This creation tale from the Caribbean shows Mama God and Papa God creating a world filled with love and wonder. Richardo Keens-Douglas has dedicated this remarkable retelling of the oldest story in the world to a time of hope when people everywhere will be able to live together in peace and harmony. 

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 …

It began in childhood, when Bruce was a little distant, and progressed into adolescence when Bruce was withdrawn and aggressive but it wasn't until he attempted suicide that the root of Bruce's behaviour was discovered--schizophrenia. After years of successful and unsuccessful treatments, setbacks and progressions, institutionalization and independ …

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 …

In this powerful, shocking and highly absorbing new work, Anne Cameron picks up a thread from her prize-winning novel Dreamspeaker, in which an eleven-year-old abuse survivor and runaway named Peter Baxter is taken from his adopted family - two reclusive Native elders - only to be destroyed by the child welfare system that supposedly exists to prot …

The illegal drug trade in BC's Lower Mainland is a ruthless business. Danger is extreme, stakes are high, human lives are expendable. In this white-knuckled crime thriller set in the thick of drug dealing and organized crime, the action gets underway with a murder, followed by more murders and suicide. In the course of the story, a sophisticated yo …

What would happen if the Messiah was a woman, and not the man people have always taken her to be? What if she showed up in rural America, instead of riding triumphantly into Jerusalem? If she preached moral license, not repentance?
All of that does happen, and more, in this startlingly original, mischievous and penetrating novel by David Homel.
In …

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 …

Arching over the entrance to Vancouver’s harbour is a beautiful web of intricately suspended steel. It is at once a gateway, landmark, symbol and emblem of a Western city, poised at the edge of a continent gazing westward over the wide Pacific Ocean, to the East. Day and night, its taut steel strings sing the original hymn to progress, hope and r …

In these Red Cross memoirs, some 30 women tell their stories of volunteer work with the Canadian Red Cross Corps in overseas postings during World War Two and the Korean War. These dramatic narratives take us across oceans infested with enemy submarines to witness Canadian women on duty in the U.K., in Europe and in Asia.

The volunteers shouldered c …

Joan Givner engages the heart and mind in this refreshing and readable collection of short stories and essays. Nineteen pieces demonstrate, with the author's trademark acuity, how biography — and autobiography — finds its way into fiction.

Implicitly feminist, Givner's compassionate yet unflinching eye vividly renders each secret pain and joy of …

It is the story of a hockey-mad ten-year-old incapable of dealing with the recent, bitter separation of his parents. The target of his frustration becomes none other than hockey legend Ken Dryden -- greatest goaltender in the history of the world -- who, after three brilliant seasons, has suddenly and inexplicably abandoned the boy's favourite team …

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 …

Contra/Diction is an anthology of gay men's fiction to re-establish the queer in queer.
The book is a gay men's fiction anthology that represents the plurality of gay identity; an attempt to show that not all gay men "drive to Ikea, go to the gym, and buy new ties for their management-level positions before taking in the latest stage hit," as sug …

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 …