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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Dwight Eliot was born on a baseball diamond, during a dugout-clearing brawl between his hometown team, The Seep Selects, and a team of barnstorming Cuban All Stars. Decades later, when he sees his childhood home being moved on a truck down the highway, he begins a quest to research the history of his hometown and of his family. Seep is being disman …

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, …

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 …

Further Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer is a continuation of the columns and essays that comprised Stuart's 2005 release, Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer. Again, equal parts literary memoir, reckless tirade, and unsolicited advice for the aspiring writer, Further Confessions is drawn largely from Stuart Ross's notorious "Hunkamooga" c …

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.&nbspA billionaire falls in love …

Rose Dubois and Julie O'Brien find themselves on a burning roof together, on a summer's day, and from then on their fates intertwine, in a world where the natural force that is the changing climate foreshadows and encourages their predestined suffering.

Rose and Julie's submissive love for the same man, Charles, creates in them an arms race of arti …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

"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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

The characters in I'm not Scared of You or Anything are invigilators, fake martial arts experts, buskers, competitive pillow fighters, drug runners, and, of course, grad students. This collection of comedic short stories and exploratory texts is the ninth book by the critically acclaimed and award-winning author Jon Paul Fiorentino. Deftly illustra …

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 the twenty- and thirty-somethings, a life structu …

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 …

The City of Vancouver has been through a lot in its first 125 years. It’s a city that has played host to the likes of Mark Twain, Alice Cooper, Elvis Presley, Winston Churchill, The Beatles, Louis Armstrong, Howard Hughes, Expo ‘86, and the 2010 Olympic Winter Games. It’s the birthplace of Canada’s first female MLA, the country’s first (and la …

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 chosen …

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 with …

Finalist, Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize (BC Book Prizes)

Wood is a pop-culture meditation on parenthood and all its complexities and complications. In her third collection, Harper deftly inhabits the lives of sons and daughters, fathers and mothers - the real, the mythical, the dreamed-up, and the surrogate. Pinocchio tries to make his father proud i …

Jack Minyard is a private dick 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 the kindness of strangers (not to mention a p …

A capricious comedy of errors, Small Apartments resonates with tremulous energy and quirky characters. Franklin Franklin is a fully realized and sympathetic protagonist in the vein of Ignatius Reilly (A Confederacy of Dunces), a simple man who yearns for “a land of pastoral serenity” devoid of the irritations of contemporary urban life. An offbea …

Finalist, Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize (BC Book Prizes)

Winner, CNFC Readers' Choice Award for "Threshold"

In this debut collection of personal essays, Silcott looks at the tangle of midlife, the long look back, the shorter look forward, and the moments right now that shimmer and rustle around her. Here is love, grief, uncertainty, longing, joy, de …

Author Statement: Five years ago I began working on a collection of poems titled Unus Mundus, derived from Marie Louise Von Frantz’s description of human union with “the one cosmos.” In her book, Creation Myths, she writes: “This unus mundus is not the cosmos as it exists now, but an idea in God’s psyche.” When I began this manuscript, I was …

Rowan Friesen has made a career of drug dealing and small-time thievery. He lives a loner’s life on the outer reaches of Saskatoon, selling cystal meth to highschoolers and hawking his pilfered loot on the net. Shiftless and seemingly friendless, he is, at first glance, an unlikely and unlikable protagonist. But as Stolen unfolds, we learn the det …

In prose that’s as sharp as broken glass and shot through with poetry, Teresa McWhirter unlocks the extraordinary subculture of urban adults in their twenties and early thirties. Most startling of all are the portraits of young women—tough, independent party girls who are strong enough to say “no” to love and smart enough to know why. “McWhirt …

This Drawn & Quartered Moon takes pre-millenial San Francisco as 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,” …

Glossolalia is an unflinching exploration of sisterhood, motherhood, and sexuality as told in a series of poetic monologues spoken by the thirty-four polygamous wives of Joseph Smith, founder of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In Marita Dachsel’s second full-length collection, the self-avowed agnostic feminist uses mid-nineteenth …

The follow-up to Eve Lazarus's successful 'At Home with History: The Untold Secrets of Greater Vancouver's Heritage Homes', 'Sensational Victoria' gives us a glimpse into aspects of Victoria rarely talked about in the tourist brochures or flowery garden guidebooks. 'Sensational Victoria' covers legendary women, including Emily Carr, Nellie McClung, …

As with many writers, Jim Christy keeps a "source file," notes, scrawled snippets of conversation, observations made on the run, photographs of people known and unknown, scraps of paper with puzzling notes written on them, receipts, matchpacks, and other assorted parapher-nalia that might come in handy for a future story, article, or essay. For Mr. …

'Mutant Sex Party' is Ed Macdonald's first collection of plays. As well as the title piece, this collection includes 'The Escape Artist, Erratica, Gemini, Smoke & Blood, Hot Meat,' and 'Titus Lucretius Carus'.

"There's an interesting and very complicated relationship to explore here; I was immediately curious about the power dynamic...and also about …

'Whitetail Shooting Gallery', a new novel from award-winning author and Giller Prize nominee, Annette Lapointe, is set in the outer urban, often desolate, landscape of the Saskatchewan prairie. Cousins Jennifer and Jason live close together as small kids, exploring their rural home. They live in adjacent, sometimes overlapping, households. But one …

From the author of 'Dead Man In the Orchestra Pit' and 'Foozlers', comes another tale of madcap human folly. Louella Debra Poule is doing an eighteen-month stint on a weapons charge at a minimum security institution up BC's Fraser Valley. Her drug dealing, sort-of-boyfriend Jimmy Flood, and his sidekick, Blacky Harbottle, should have taken the rap, …

Twenty-first century metalheads; twelfth century troubadours and their female counterparts, the trobairitz- what could they possibly have in common? The creation of an often misunderstood and at times reviled genre for one; for another, a kin preoccupation with the questioning of structures set up by class, gender, and religion.

"Describing metal fa …

Winner, City of Victoria Butler Book Prize

Finalist, Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction

Nominated for the BC National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction

Afflictions & Departures is a collection of first-person experiential essays. However, this is not the realm of traditional memoir—in addition to incidents and feelings recaptured from memory …

'Valery the Great' is a crackling, electric collection of dark humour that follows the bizarre and beautiful lives of its eccentric protagonists. Sometimes sweet and gentle, sometimes sharply sarcastic, the unique narrative voices of this collection are always powerfully touching. In the title story, a young woman from New Brunswick uses figure ska …

Five Little Bitches chronicles the rise and fall of the all-woman band, Wet Leather. Each of the women is plagued by her own unique demons, but their devotion to music and the punk lifestyle keeps them pushing on. As the band progresses, they tour Canadian, American and European towns and cities—and all the alleys, gutters, back stages, vans, hot …