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Jettison
Nathaniel G. Moore follows up his 2014 ReLit Award win for Savage with a diverse collection of short fiction, his first, Jettison, featuring stories which dangle somewhere between horror and romance.
"Jaws" explores a father's desire to over-share the erotic origins of his children's "Aunt" Louise; "Blade Runner" uncovers the darkest and most hilari …
Garage Criticism
Montaigne Medal Finalist (Eric Hoffer Awards)
In Garage Criticism Peter Babiak eviscerates and deflates some of the cultural sacred cows of our time. From Fifty Shades of Grey ("Hot for Teacher: What Fifty Shades of Grey Taught Me About Salacious Grammar, Sexy Women and the Scandalous Conflation of Cultural and Literary Culture") to the disintegrati …
Chalk
Winner of the 38th Annual 3-Day Novel-Writing Contest
"You" and L, a mysterious third gender runaway, hit the road on a mission to find the meaning of life. Traveling by plane, bus and car, You run into trouble with the cops, mourn a family tragedy, smoke hundreds of cigarettes, attend a retirement party, come to terms with a broken heart, and disco …
Cretacea & Other Stories from the Badlands
Montaigne Medal Finalist (Eric Hoffer Awards)
The stories in Cretacea and Other Stories from the Badlands mostly take place in hot weather, where dust and sweat envelop everyone and everything. A teenage boy spends a summer with his hard-livin', hard-drinkin', messed up uncle and has to fight for a position in his new, temporary "family." A recent w …
As if
As If is a collection of stories that, as its title suggests, points at an indubitable truth: all literature is speculative. Goulden's, however, extends past the boundaries of conventional fiction into areas traditionally occupied by fantasy and magic realism. These stories rail against the industrial and digital mechanisms of our age and, in the g …
Assdeep In Wonder
Assdeep in Wonder is a collection of new poems that explore the idea of identity in a myriad of contexts: personal, sexual, cultural, national, literary, and poetic. The poems are raw and immediate, exploring themes of addiction, sexuality, loss, love, and wonder in equal measures.
Selected Praise: "Gudgeon's first poetry collection is a quirky vale …
Serpentine Loop
"Writers, like skaters, score the blank sheet and test the edge of inclusion and exclusion. Most of these poems begin with a word from skating and push off to another topic. Others revisit ideas of femininity, control and language as pattern, or visit the past through movement, or enact principles from the rink such as symmetry, joy, endurance, …
The Most Heartless Town in Canada
Myrtle is not one of those communities with a town historian or a roster of famous residents. Myrtle does, however, have a poultry plant, and looming above the plant are the eagles, massive birds that roost in trees and feast on entrails left by workers, creatures synonymous with power, freedom and might. The story starts with a newspaper photo tak …
Under the Stone (Sous beton)
From birth, the child was locked away in a minuscule cell, at #804 of level 5969 of the Edifice. Around him ... only concrete, without a view of the outside world. And two people: the tyrannical father, slowly killing himself; and the mother, fearing eviction. Unmoving in his roost, the child's life will be disrupted by a transformation that will r …
Ignite
A finalist for the Alfred G. Bailey Prize, Ignite is a collection of elegiac and experimental poetry powder-kegged with questions about one man's lifelong struggle with schizophrenia. Born into a strict Mennonite family, Abe Spenst's mental illness spanned three decades in and out of mental institutions where he underwent electric shock …
No Flash, Please!
The music scene in the mid-eighties was in transition, just as the entire music business was, unaware that it was all about to change in 1991 when Nirvana's watershed release, Nevermind would unexpectedly hit number one on the Billboard chart. But that explosion didn't happen overnight. It was the product of many things: Toronto's developing music …
Seep
Finalist for the Amazon.ca First Novel Award
Dwight Eliot was born on a baseball diamond in the small town of Seep during a dugout-clearing brawl between his hometown team, The Seep Selects, and a visiting team of barnstorming Cuban All-Stars.
Decades later, Dwight returns to town only to witness his childhood home being moved down the highway on the …
Further Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer
Further Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer takes up where Stuart Ross’s Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer left off in 2005. Memoir, tirade, unsolicited advice — this new volume is drawn largely from Stuart’s notorious “Hunkamooga” column that ran in subTerrain, but also includes pieces from his blog as well as previously unpublis …
Burqa of Skin
Burqa of Skin is a dense collection of writings from Nelly Arcan, channelling harrowing disenchantment and indignation. From her very first novel, Putain (Seuil, 2001), Arcan shook the literary landscape with her flamboyant lyricism and her preoccupations with such recurring themes as our culture’s vertiginous obsession with youth, and its revers …
Moss-Haired Girl
Winner, 3-Day Novel Contest (2013)
Joshua Chapman Green is searching for answers. He is combing through boxes in the attic of his recently deceased mother’s home and uncovering childhood memories, mysterious letters, and perplexing photos of people he does not know. They appear to be circus performers, members of a travelling freak show, or Victor …
Breakneck
Rose Dubois and Julie O’Brien find themselves on the roof of a Montreal apartment building on a scorching summer’s day, and from that moment on their fates are intertwined. Worldwide climate change and dramatic shifts in weather patterns foreshadow their predestined suffering.
As is soon revealed, the two women share a submissive love for the sa …
Vancouver Vanishes
Finalist, Bill Duthie Booksellers' Choice Award (BC Book Prizes), 2016
#1 on the BC Bestseller List
Since 2005, nearly 9,000 demo permits for residential buildings have been issued in Vancouver. An average of three houses a day are torn down, many of them original homes built for the middle and working class in the 1920s, '30s and '40s. Very few are …
Rogues, Rascals, and Scalawags Too
Never before have as many outrageous and out-sized characters appeared in one place at the same time. Words like rogues, rascals, rapscallions, reprobates and rodomontades don't completely describe these individuals; they are more than each or any combination thereof. They are scalawags. People who claim to push the envelope are stamped, sealed and …
Traversing Leonard
Winner, 37th Annual 3-Day Novel Contest
Paul is a young physics professor at a major university in New York state. He is drawn to Leonard Zavitsky, a once promising but now washed up and annoying ex-professor who is kept on the payroll as a custodian, more out of pity than any nod toward professor emeritus status.
The once great Zavitsky has some wil …
10 Women
Ten Women is a new collection of short fiction from one of Canada's preeminent writers. Each of these stories offers us a portrait of a woman with whom the author may or may not have had either an intimate and/or a meaningful relationship. You can't really tell for sure. Depending on your proclivities, some of them might even seem pretty hot - like …
The Revolving City
Finalist for the City of Vancouver Book Award
The Revolving City: 51 Poems and the Stories Behind Them is a vibrant and diverse collection from a who's who of the west coast poetry scene.
The poems assembled here range from the lyric to the experimental and address the theme of disconnection in an urban environment from a variety of positions, concer …
Mirror on the Floor
Reissued as part of Anvil Press's Lost BC Literature series
Set in Vancouver in the mid-1960s, Mirror on the Floor focuses on one summer in the life of UBC grad student Bob Small and his roommate, George Delsing.
They spend their time carousing the downtown eastside and engaging in conversations with the old-timers—dockworkers, unemployed loggers, …
Savour
ReLit Long Shortlist, 2015
Savour is the follow-up to Bateman’s award-winning debut novel, Nondescript Rambunctious, and the second book in a trilogy about a dark, suspected serial killer named Oliver. Savour retains the dark threads of sociopathic depravity that ran through the debut novel, but is once again tempered with a tender ray of humanity …
I, Dr. Greenblatt, Orthodontist, 251-1457
At times comic, tender, dark, compassionate, and arrestingly bizarre, Gary Barwin's latest fiction collection marvels at the strangeness, charm, and beauty that is contemporary life in the quantum world. Raging from short story to postcard fiction, Barwin's stories are mysterious, luminous, hilarious, and surprising. A billionaire falls in love …
Foreign Park
Foreign Park situates itself in an epoch where prior assurances of the natural world's solidity begin to slip. Poisons enter the Fraser River Basin. An oil slick approaches by night engulfing a fishing vessel, leaving its captain in open waters. Page after page, Foreign Park makes strange with its inhabitants. As it unfolds, it plots itself along t …
Rue
In her compelling debut poetry collection, shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award, Melissa Bull explores the familial, romantic, and sexual ties that bind lives to cities. Rue takes us through its alleys, parks, and kitchens with a robust lyricism and language that is at once inventive and plainspoken, compassionate and frank.
In English, to rue …
Jabbering with Bing Bong
Kevin Spenst's much-anticipated debut collection of poetry opens as a coming-of-age narrative of lower-middle class life in Vancouver's suburb of Surrey, embroidered within a myriad of pop-culture and "post-Mennonite." Jabbering with Bing Bong interrogates memory and makes its way into the urban energies of Vancouver.
Language is at play with sit-co …
Hysteric
ReLit Long Shortlist, 2015
Winner, Type Books Award
In this daring act of self-examination and confession, the late novelist Nelly Arcan explores the tortured end of a love affair. All the wrong signals were there from the start, but still, she could not help falling. More than a portrait of an affair gone wrong, Hysteric is a chronicle of life among …
I'm Not Scared of You or Anything
ReLit Long Shortlist, 2015
Finalist, Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction
Winner, National Magazine Award, Silver Medal for Humour, for the story "It Seems Like Sex is a Weird Thing That Used to Happen to Me," from I'm Not Scared of You or Anything
The characters in I’m not Scared of You or Anything are invigilators, fake martial arts experts, buskers, …
The Delusionist
Kobzar Literary Award, Finalist
Eric Hoffer Award, Shortlist
City of Victoria Book Prize, Finalist
Vancouver, summer 1962. Cyril Andrachuk and Connie Chow are seventeen and in love.
Cyril is the only Canadian-born member of the Andrachuk family, his parents and older brother having survived Stalin’s systematic starving of the Ukraine. His brother’s …
Cabalcor
The debut work by Sun Belt is a genre-bending almanac depicting the rise and fall of a company town that, within the span of a century, becomes a desert wasteland.
A full-length album of dusty, surreal songs by the Sun Belt music ensemble both informs and is informed by a blend of transcripts, photographs, micro fictions, wildlife plates, film still …
Burqa of Skin
Burqa of Skin is a dense collection of writings channelling harrowing disenchantment and indignation. From her very first novel, Putain (Seuil, 2001), Nelly Arcan shook the literary landscape with her flamboyant lyricism and her preoccupations with such recurring themes as our culture's vertiginous obsession with youth, and its reverse: the draw of …
Moss-Haired Girl
Winner, 3-Day Novel Contest (2013)
Joshua Chapman Green is searching for answers. He is combing through boxes in the attic of his recently deceased mother's home and uncovering childhood memories, mysterious letters, and perplexing photos of people he does not know. They appear to be circus performers, members of a travelling freak show, or Victoria …
Burnfort, Las Vegas
"She is at once emotional and shrewd: hidden behind the rich lace-curtain of her personal charm, her existentialism sings."-Thomas McCarthy
"Martina Evans's poems are a miracle, for the way they combine total clarity with profundity: the way the apparently innocent and observant humour of their narrative surface covers a compassion and understanding …
Savage
Nate’s nervous mother chews gum at warp speed and has a bob that resembles Darth Vader’s helmet. His icy father dabbles part-time in the death trade at a funeral home after working for a decade in the insurance racket. His older sister Holly is always lurking in the shadows or away at school. Nate, a creative, messy, and anxious teen, has chose …
The Incomparables
The Incomparables is the debut novel from the Trillium-nominated author of Animal. Lydia Templar is obsessed with fabric, the texture and weight of cloth. Through fabrics, curtains, costumes, she expresses herself in a way she feels incapable of doing in words. For the past ten years she's apprenticed in the wardrobe department of a small Shakespea …
Vancouver Confidential
Most civic histories celebrate progress, industry, order, and vision. This isn't one of those.
Vancouver Confidential is a collaboration of artists and writers who plumb the shadows of civic memory looking for the stories that don't fit into mainstream narratives. We honour the chorus line behind the star performer, the mug in the mugshot, the victi …
This Drawn & Quartered Moon
This Drawn & Quartered Moon makes pre-millennial San Francisco its epicenter, and from there ranges out in time and space. Characters abound. The reader will meet a plagiarist, a Vietnam vet named Othello, a Mafia don, a drug mule en route to jail, Elvis Presley (the poet’s father was his doctor), a “Sculptor of the Lower Fillmore Head Shot,” …
Atomic Storybook
Atomic Storybook is a novel about a young painter named Owen who is regularly abducted by beings he calls “the space pricks.” These otherworldly visitors perform experiments on him, befuddle him with an absurd riddle about the moon, and show him scenes from his previous lives — one as a 12th century English monk; in another he shares the ward …
Sensational Vancouver
History books typically show Vancouver as a pioneer city built on forestry, fisheries, and tourism, but behind the snow-capped mountains and rain forests, the Vancouver of the first half of the 20th century was a seething mass of corruption. The top job at the Vancouver Police Department was a revolving door with the average tenure for a police chi …
Some Birds Walk For the Hell of It
Some Birds Walk for the Hell of It is the third volume of poetry from musician and spoken word artist, C.R. Avery. In his take-no-prisoners style of verse and performance, Avery celebrates the virtues of the bohemian lifestyle, late-nite denizens of inconvenient madness, the dissolute and the temporary, lawless black leather pioneers of rap, and ev …
Thorazine Beach
Winner 35th International 3-Day Novel Contest
Jack Minyard is a private eye down on his luck. He’s badly overweight and on the wrong side of sixty. He’s lost his marriage, and maybe a little of his mind, too. After narrowly escaping charges in a statewide fraud and money laundering scandal, Jack has been working private contracts and counting on …