California St. is one of the major thoroughfares in downtown San Francisco, the city where George Stanley was born in 1934, and left at age 37 to move to Vancouver. Associated with the "San Francisco Renaissance" in poetry, moving in circles that included Jack Spicer, Robert Duncan and Robin Blaser, Stanley had won a reputation as an exciting young …

A photo portrait of Vancouver's extended "summer of love," Vladimir Keremidschieff's Seize the Time captures an era of profound change in Lotusland. Vlad's infatuation with photography began in 1967 when a friend introduced him to the craft and then left town, taking his 35mm Pentax camera with him — Vlad just had to get one of his own. His bloss …

Finalist, Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize Few politicians have enraged opponents, frustrated colleagues and polarized Canadians like Svend Robinson — but few embraced the causes he did. Over his twenty-five years as a New Democrat MP, Robinson was imprisoned for blocking loggers from clear-cutting in Clayoquot Sound, assaulted by police while …

Rua Da Felicidade is an actual place, a "Street of Happiness" in colonial Macau, where from the 1920s to the 1950s it was said that every desire could be fulfilled — for a price. It is a book written against the appropriative gesture, against the grain of what we too often believe we can possess for a price. Instead, the book turns on the seams o …

"Hammertown" is Georges Perec's invention, an imaginary fishing port on Vancouver Island that Peter Culley recognized as the Oulipo writer's vision of what Nanaimo might be like. In Parkway, Culley continues his project of describing Perec's Hammertown from the inside. Deeply musical and infused by Culley's love of rhythm, Parkway is an acute and s …

Ron Liversedge could hardly wait for the call from the International Brigades. A veteran of the Great War, Canada's Great Depression, and scores of battles for social justice, he wanted to get to Spain to fight against Franco's attack on the young Spanish republic. It was the spring of 1937; Liversedge was nearly 40. The call came on May Day. Liver …

Extensively revised throughout and including a chapter of new material, Rebel Life chronicles the life of labour organizer, revolutionary, anarchist and labour spy Robert Gosden. Mark Leier's revisions incorporate new information about Gosden's career that has come to light since the first edition was published in 1999. Canada's west coast was rife …

"Don't gaze into the abyss," George Stanley states in his new book. "Gaze out." And this is what the reader receives from Stanley's eighth book, After Desire: the observations of a poet, and a consciousness, as they arrive together at old age. Not what the poet is thinking — although we get to watch him thinking too — but what he sees and notic …

Finalist, Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize Though unaffiliated with any institute of higher learning, Rolf Knight has established himself as a writer of significance, and has produced some of the most influential works of history of British Columbia. A Very Ordinary Life, exploring his mother's life as a working-class immigrant to Vancouver, esta …

NDN word warrior Marie Annharte Baker's fourth book of poems, Indigena Awry, is her largest and wildest yet. It collects a decade's worth of verse — fifty-nine poems. Set noticeably in Winnipeg and Vancouver, but in many other places on either side of the Medicine Line as well, the poems are a laser-eyed meander through contested streets filled w …

Accustomed to the dark, dripping stands of Douglas-fir, spruce and hemlock that blanketed the Hudson's Bay Company outposts on the remote western coast of the "new World," the first Europeans were surely startled to see the wide-open landscapes of the Garry oak meadows they encountered on Southern Vancouver Island — landscapes that might have rem …

Sturgeon Reach is the name some have given to a stretch of the Fraser River between Hope and Pitt Meadows, where its flow slows, and it deposits the gravel it's been carrying from the province's interior. Its story is one of rocks and stones, from its geological origins, from the mythic beginnings of human settlement, and from the arrival of Simon …

Words, Words, Words is a wide-ranging collection of literary essays that astonish the reader with their candor, insight, and generosity. Many of them reveal the absurdity that so often underlies our most passionate thoughts, our most cherished moments, even our most disturbing fears and recognitions. They echo everywhere with a kind of cosmic laugh …

Failures in business and marriage tip poor Mooney into a spell in a psychiatric ward. But he has the great fortune of befriending an Indian seer, one of his pals from the casino where Mooney hangs out, who promises to put Mooney's life back together. Dennis is no ordinary Indian seer. For one thing, he's a rez Indian, from right around Winnipeg, ju …

Roger Farr's IKMQ consists of sixty-four brief passages — stories, descriptions, instructions, scenarios, formulae — each involving the characters represented by the letters I, K, M and Q. Various clues, suggested by the rules of grammar and syntax, hint at connections and continuities, and at narrative peaking out from behind the screen of act …

Franzlations takes the parables and aphorisms of Kafka as a starting point, and steps a few places to the left in order to reinvent them. Sometimes this means walking off a cliff and into the empty air. (Don't look down!) Sometimes this means keeping the cage and replacing the bird. For of course, Kafka's writing is a rich source of ideas, play, st …

In Along the No. 20 Line, Rolf Knight takes the reader on a tour through working-class East Vancouver of a century ago. Knight's "through-line" is literally a line: the old No. 20 streetcar route that ran between downtown Vancouver and the present-day neighbourhood of the Pacific National Exhibition. From 1892 to 1949, when it was shut down and rep …

In Vancouver, $600 a month gets you half a bachelor suite. On Mayne Island, it gets you a three-bedroom house overlooking the waters of Active Pass, with varied wildlife and lush trees as neighbours. With that in mind, Grant Buday trades in the high-powered city life in Vancouver for the small town eccentricities of Mayne Island. The scenery, howev …

This book is published on the occasion of the exhibition The Insurance Man: Kafka in the Penal Colony, held at the Simon Fraser University Gallery from April 25 to June 27, 2009.

Illustrated with 16 pages of colour, the book examines the subject matter of the show — both bureaucracy and penal colonies — and includes short texts by authors who sa …

Visually and conceptually dynamic, Buffet World is Donato Mancini's collection of poems about food, trade and life under late-late-night-snack capitalism. Exploring the relationships between industrial food production, eating, culture, and the politics of language, Mancini organises his controlled palette of words and images around metaphors of con …

Steve Weiner's harrowing portrayal of post-Thatcher England follows a man of no known origin and unstable personality and his efforts to re-enter society after a long and unexplained absence. The reader sees events through Jack's mostly uncomprehending eyes as he negotiates the margins of a London that resembles the city of memory and story only in …

WITH A FOREWORD BY ARITHA VAN HERK.

It's the mid 1890s in Kamloops, British Columbia. Two men argue over a bottle of whisky and, in the struggle Frank Spencer, an American outlaw-turned-farmhand, kills Pete Foster, a French-Canadian and fellow farmhand. Enter Caprice: a vision and a brain. Almost six feet tall, with flaming red hair and long legs, …

City of Love and Revolution takes readers back to Vancouver in the sixties, the decade when everything changed for the Baby Boomer generation. Dozens of rarely seen photos accompany Lawrence Aronsen's account of the tumultuous decade, bringing to life the sights, the sounds, and the passions of the era of psychedelia and free love, when for a brief …

Every Day in the Morning (slow) is a work that looks and reads like no other. Sam, a composer, reflects on his floundering career, life with his lover, and tensions with his father. Some thoughts, like facial hair and breakfast, are mundane; others, like love, money and war, are often overwhelming. At turns laughable and vain, at others, tender and …

Divided into two parts, Robin Blaser consists of two essays by people who knew Blaser intimately, as a life-long friend, a mentor, and intellectual influence. In part one, award-winning author Stan Persky offers a cohesive guide to reading Robin Blaser's poetry and the ways in which Blaser's work was "an attempted rescue or defense of poetry". In p …

About thirty kilometres south of Vancouver, just over the Alex Fraser Bridge and bordering Surrey and Ladner, lies North Delta, a suburb replete with strip malls, single detached family homes, and every-half-hour bus service. It was a sleepy suburb, one considered the boonies, until 1986, when as part of the Expo city-wide upgrades, the Alex Fraser …

Since radio's invention, some Canadians have been concerned about the increasingly commercialized and centralized nature of medium. Sometimes working alone, more often in teams, and always illegally, these activists represent islands of resistance within the ocean of homogenous frequencies, pirating radio signals for personal, political and artisti …

In the Millennium is a thirteen-part sequence written over the last ten years that measures a wide range of the poet's experience. The writing emerges in response to human processes, conditions and places: love, sex, death, the insecurities and pressures of the inner and outer world, and the politics of person and place that act as prompts for what …

In his first work of fiction since 2004's Standing on Richards, George Bowering, Canada's first Poet Laureate, reminds us why he is one of our country's most interesting writers. In a series of ten stories introduced by archival photographs, Bowering leads us through the glory days of 1960s Vancouver, when the Hotel Vancouver boasted an understreet …

Sammy and Anna Ostrove raised a typical Jewish family in Winnipeg: Marilyn, the older daughter who is a successful lawyer and Teddy, a son who was to be a doctor. Life, of course, had other plans. Marilyn just ended an affair that should have been kept a secret. Teddy, who dropped out of medical school, went on a ten-day Birthright Israel tour whe …

"From the opening 'cast list' that includes such characters as 'Grandad' played by 'My mother's father,' to a narrator who admits, 'Actually, this is not even a story,' because, as s/he/it later declares, 'There is always more than one possible life,' this book keeps you guessing, laughing and dropping your jaw at the weird insights and awesomely d …

The Europeans who colonized North America more than three centuries ago encountered fantastical creatures: flying squirrels, ruby-throated hummingbirds, the easily tamed beaver. Their literature of discovery — by turns comic, cruel, and adulatory — provides a revealing glimpse of the taxonomies they carried with them into their so-called New Wo …

With an Introduction by Sherrill Grace.

Cowboys and Indians, sometimes one and the same, occupy the rugged landscape of the late nineteenth-century British Columbia interior in George Bowering's Shoot! Meet the McLean Gang — brothers Allan, Charlie, and Archie — and their sidekick Alex Hare. Halfbreeds who grew up bitter outcasts, rejected by bo …

Stranger Wycott's Place describes John Schreiber's explorations of the Chilcotin on foot, horseback, and by 4-wheel drive. A land of "mountains and old trails, coyotes and bighorn sheep, aboriginal folks, homesteaders, ranches and history," the Chilcotin begins north of Lillooet and lies between the Fraser River and the mighty Coast Mountain Range …

The world's largest manufacturer of the two-stroke engine may seem like an unusual jumping-off point for poetry. But Peter Culley's second book about his hometown Nanaimo stems from his realization that there is not an hour of his waking existence when he cannot somewhere hear a leaf blower, a lawn mower or another piece of Briggs & Stratton-powere …

The Lions bare of snow, crowded express buses, a giant red turning letter W. Vancouver: A Poem is George Stanley's vision of the city where he lives, though he does not call it his own. Vancouver, the city, becomes Stanley's palimpsest: an overwritten manuscript on which the words of others are still faintly visible. Here the Food Floor's canned ex …

First there was Backup to Babylon. Now comes Subway Under Byzantium, the second in Maxine Gadd's double act of works about the Gulf Islands and the Downtown Eastside: twin axes of the fall. Covering the period from 1986 to 1993, Gadd's writing in this volume is by turns intensely personal, slyly funny, and socially incisive. Her poetry draws on the …

First published in 1980 to high acclaim, Burning Water won a Governor General's Award for fiction that year. A rollicking chronicle of Captain Vancouver's search for the Northwest Passage, the book has over its career been mentioned in recommended lists of postmodern fiction, BC historical fiction, gay fiction, and humour. This gives you some idea …

Fascinated by the ligature — a joining of two letters in a single word — Donato Mancini chose, logically, to conjure one up in the title of his second book of concrete poetry, Æthel. "Although," as Mancini remarks parenthetically, "it might be the name of the crabby old blue-rinse who calls the police if you cross her lawn." Æthel, the book, …

Ever wonder how Wreck Beach got its name? Or if it's always been a nude beach? What about the nudity — Is it against the law? Maybe you just want to know how to get to the best spots. Look no further: here's the book with everything you've always wanted to know about Wreck Beach, the best nude beach in the world. On any given day throughout the y …