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Heroines Revisited
Heroines Revisited is a large format follow-up volume to the original Heroines: Photographs by Lincoln Clarkes that was released by Anvil in 2002. This new edition features over 150 portraits accompanied by three new critical essays that contextualize the five-year photo project and the controversial body of work.
The Heroines Project is an epic pho …
Les Faux Bourgeois
Les Faux Bourgeois Bistro is an award-winning French bistro situated at the awkward intersection of Kingsway and Fraser Street in an equally disjointed neighbourhood in East Vancouver. Founded in 2007, Les Faux Bourgeois soon became a beacon of French bistro "amor" and garnered a loyal clientele and critical acclaim to match.
Selected by the …
Borderline
Searing and lyrical, Marie-Sissi Labrèche's auto-fictional novel, Borderline, describes a young girl's experience growing up in Montreal's working-class neighbourhood of Hochelaga-Maisonneuve. Raised by her "two mothers" - a stern grandmother and a mother struggling with schizophrenia, the story's protagonist, Sissi, is artistic, feral, fragile, i …
Black Star
ADel Hanks is on the verge of academic tenure, but at forty she’s also perched on the precipice of either the beginning or the end of the rest of her life.
Black Star is a dark comedy, both bitingly funny and transgressive, an unflinching and unsentimental exploration of the female experience, academia, and the idea of power that burns in the mind …
Against Death
Against Death: 35 Essays On Living articulates the personal experiences of each author’s “near-deathness,” utilizing fresh and inventive language to represent what “magical thinking” proposes. These pieces are incisive and articulate, avoiding the usual platitudes, feel-good bromides, and pep talks associated with near-death encounters. T …
Rain City
BC Bestseller! From its Coast Mountain skyline to its seedy waterfront tattoo parlors, from the private downtown booze-cans of the city's business elite and the Faux Chateau enclave of Whistler, to the riot-shaken streets of the early Sixties and the history of pipe bomb attacks in the city, Moore has been there, done that. He's been a graveyard sh …
Bounce House
Bounce House is a collection of small containers for the uncontainable. Restrained in form but not feeling, Harper's fourth book explores the cyclical nature of grief, imperfect parenting, and our willingness to jump without promise of a safe landing. Measured and meticulously weighted, these poems are playful and poignant as they navigate the stra …
Skin House
Oh my goodness. Did you ever get to thinking that "down on your luck" isn't just an expression? And that what we need here is a bigger statement? Something that adequately describes the scope of the situation? Like when your ex-wife spends all of her time angrier than a five-dollar pistol at everything on the planet, but mostly at you (well, really …
A Mysterious Humming Noise
Howard White says, "Some poets try to capture rare butterflies in their writing. The things I go after are more like houseflies." The comparison does him no favours but it is true inasmuch as his writing is notably unpretentious and concerned with common and everyday realities. That is, if your everyday realities include such things as sinking dock …
I Could Have Pretended to Be Better Than You
Spanning more than 25 years, I Could Have Pretended to Be Better Than You gathers work from three distinct eras of Jay Millar's development as a poet: the wonder years of the 1990s culled from a variety of self-published micropress publications, most of which are hiding in special collections; poems from his trade books issued between 2000 and 2015 …
The Inflatable Life
Mark Laba's second full-length poetry collection - and his first in seventeen years - recreates the structure of the old variety shows he watched on TV as a child. Much of the imagery plays across the broad spectrum of these popular cultural tropes, albeit many lost or forgotten in the vault of broadcast history. In The Inflatable Life, the reader …
Motel of the Opposable Thumbs
In Motel of the Opposable Thumbs, Stuart Ross continues to ignore trends in Canadian poetry, and further follow the journey he began over four decades ago with his discoveries of the works of Stephen Crane, E. E. Cummings, Nelson Ball, Ron Padgett, Victor Coleman, Tom Clark, Nicanor Parra, Joe Rosenblatt, and David McFadden. Over the years, his inf …
The Second Detective
Winner of the 40th Annual 3-Day Novel Writing Contest!
If faced with reincarnation, would you want to come back as a dog, an eagle, a plant? Most poison ivy is reincarnated ivy. You can see the complexity of second lives, the intrepid narrator-detective declares. For those yet reincarnated, devotion can become muddled. And as the characters in The S …
His Little Douchebag & Other Stories
His Little Douchebag & Other Stories is a collection of linked narratives set in the working-class community of Windsor, Ontario, from the 1950s to the present day. Pike gives us a gritty look at the lives of factory workers, cashiers, welfare recipients, and the parents and children of the baby-boomer generation. The links between these stories ar …
Trauma Head
Raymond Souster Award nominee. Finalist for the Fred Cogswell Award. In 2012, poet Elee Kraljii Gardiner precipitously lost feeling in, and use of, her left side. The mini-stroke passed quickly but was symptomatic of something larger: a tear in the lining of an artery known as the tunica intima. This long-poem memoir tracks the author's experiences …
On the Count of None
On the Count of None is the first full-length poetry collection by Kingston poet Allison Chisholm. The surprising poems in this audacious debut explore the relationship between the serious and the absurd, the formal and the illogical, whimsy and threat, and meaning and tone. Chisholms poems, whose content is often inspired by guidebooks, podcasts …
Kubrick Red
Stanley Kubrick’s film The Shining was released in 1980 and has been fascinating viewers ever since. It is a psychological thriller about a writer with writer’s block (along with his wife and their young son) who takes a job as caretaker of an isolated hotel in the Colorado mountains during the winter off-season. The boy, Danny, is gifted with …
The Knockoff Eclipse
Melissa Bull's debut short story collection The Knockoff Eclipse and Other Stories hums with the immediacy of distant and future worlds. Firmly rooted in the streets of Montreal and its many neighbourhoods and subcultures, Bull zooms in on the female experience while playing with societal expectation and literary convention. Spattered with bits of …
Attack of the Lonely Hearts
Everything is just a little more difficult for thirty-something Margaret Rudge. Adjusting to single life after her no-good husband Tommy leaves her for a shrink, Margaret manages to snag a job slinging coffee on the street. “Everyone hooks up waiting for their latte,” her sometimes-fabulous friend Cindy advises. And maybe it’s good advice bec …
The Three Pleasures
1940s Vancouver. The Japanese have just bombed Pearl Harbour and racial tension is building in Vancouver. The rcmp are rounding up “suspicious” young men, and fishing boats and property are soon seized from Steveston fishers; internment camps in BC’s interior are only months away.
Daniel Sugiura, a young reporter for the New Canadian, the only …
Slinky Naive
In this debut collection, Caroline Szpak is the grand ventriloquist, manipulating words and voices in strange and fantastical ways. Her phrases, her metaphors and similes, slam up against each other like strangers on the street. Apologies, changes in direction, barometric pressure, objects ping and ricochet, but some residual thing clings after the …
Bolt
BOLT, the debut collection from West Coast performance poet Hilary Peach, ranges over both familiar and unexplored landscapes. From a series of surreal vignettes derived from 20 years as a welder with the Boilermakers' Union, to a suite of poems based on the truths and superstitions of snakelore, to alluring, imagistic, songs of loss and longing, B …
Straight Circles
IPPY Gold Medal (Independent Publisher Book Awards). Domestic satire meets gripping suspense in Straight Circles, the final, explosive chapter of The Lizzy Trilogy. The original and eccentric cast of characters return in this genre-bending thriller, but not everyone's getting out alive.
Newly pregnant Lizzy arrives to revisit old haunts in the bleak …
I Heard Something
In her uncompromising follow-up to 2012's Sympathy Loophole, Jaime Forsythe offers a breathless cascade of evocative somethings: mysterious sounds, faint rumblings, biographies real and imagined, tabloid rumours, nagging memories, an animal stirring, a baby waking, a storm threatening, an escape hatch beckoning, and an inexplicable machine coughing …
Quarrels
Winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize. The acclaimed author of the memoir, In the Slender Margin, turns her focus back to poetry in this amazing and condensed work of prose poetry.
The poems in this collection reach for something other than truth, the marvelous. Leaves fall out of coat sleeves, Gandhi swims in Burrard Inlet. The poems are like empty co …
Hider/Seeker
The Globe 100 (The Globe & Mail's favourite books of 2018). Silver IPPY Award (Independent Publisher Book Awards). Hider/Seeker is the debut fiction collection from award-winning poet Jen Currin. These stories are about addiction and meditation, relationships and almost-relationships, solitude and sexuality. They take place in cafes, in snowy woods …
Atomic Road
Art critic Clement Greenberg, champion of abstract expressionism, is more interested in silencing his rival Harold Rosenberg than with the threat of nuclear destruction.
Greenberg is driving from New York to the Emma Lake artist colony in Saskatchewan, where he intends to silence Rosenberg once and for all. With him is infamous Marxist Louis Althuss …
The Least You Can Do Is Be Magnificent
For over thirty years, Steve Venright has devoted himself to the liberation of the imagination, documenting hallucinatory trips through Southwestern Ontario's deliriomantic landscapes with his signature puns, portmanteaus, and spoonerisms. The Least You Can Do Is Be Magnificent: Selected & New Writings is a generous gathering of Venright's most end …
Sustenance
Writers from BC and Beyond on the Subject of Food will bring to the table some of Canada's best contemporary writers, celebrating all that is unique about Vancouver's literary and culinary scene. Punctuated by beautiful local food photographs, interviews with and recipes from some of our top local chefs, each of these short pieces will shock, comfo …
Long Ride Yellow
Long Ride Yellow is the debut novel from two-time Journey Prize Finalist Martin West. The novel explores the limits of sexual desire and willfully prods the veil at the edge of reality. Nonni is a dominatrix who likes to push the boundaries; she is also easily bored. Her disdain for all that is conventional and "vanilla" launches her on a journey o …
You Are Not Needed Now
You Are Not Needed Now is a brilliant new collection of stories from Annette Lapointe, author of the Giller-nominated novel Stolen.
Often set within the small towns of the Canadian prairies, the stories in You Are Not Needed Now dissect and examine the illusion of appearances, the myth of normalcy, and the allure of artifice. Lapointe presents char …
10 Women
“Literary escapades enlighten and entertain in this boundary-pushing collection.” (Foreword Reviews)
“The maestro is at it again” (The Vancouver Sun)
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 eithe …
Encyclopedia of Lies
”To give a feeling of Christopher Gudgeon’s new collection, let’s turn to the story that gives the book its name. In The Widow Soré, the title character finds among her deceased fiancé Guillermo’s papers what appears to be a stack of letters. Titled The Encyclopedia of Lies, the letters recount the romantic, outsized exploits of another G …
Bad Endings
Finalist for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. Winner of the City of Vancouver Book Award. Top 100 of 2017, Globe and Mail.
“… Baker pushes readers to reconsider their desire for resolution. Eschewing the easy, the neat, the smoothed over, allows us to consider the things about ourselves we might not like. There’s a political dimension …
Chalk
Shortlisted for a Northern Lit Award
Winner of the 38th Annual 3-Day Novel Writing Contest
Chalk is a tender story about love and loss, following a broken-hearted thirty-something cubicle worker, free-falling from every ledge of his life. Post-break-up and blue, he feels like nothing matters, that he has become invisible, like a chalk outline on the …
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 disinteg …
A Temporary Stranger
A Temporary Stranger is comprised of three sections: Homages, Fake Poems, and Recollections. In Homages we find poems of reverence and honour, tributes to writers who had opened up the world of poetry to Jamie. There are poems to Spicer, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Breton, Francis Ponge, Tristan Tzara and others. At the centre of A Temporary Stranger are …
Escape from Wreck City
da Vinci Eye Finalist, Eric Hoffer Awards. Escape from Wreck City is a debut collection of poetry from Calgary author John Creary.
There are poems about nature, poems about love and relationships, poems about living in the city, and poems about traveling the world. And all at once they capture the thrill of being fully engaged with the world, keenl …
The Encyclopedia of Lies
In these sixteen stories, Christopher Gudgeon, bestselling author of the critically acclaimed Song of Kosovo, takes a heartbreaking and hilarious look into the lives, loves, sexual obsessions and delusions that inform a grand cast of off-kilter characters.
Here is a gay couple who persevere with their marriage plans as the world, literally, crumble …
Bad Engine
Selected and with an Introduction by Stuart Ross
Michael Dennis has been hammering his love, his anger, his grief, and his awe into poems for over forty years. With seven books and nearly twenty chapbooks to his credit, Dennis isn't exactly a household name in Canadian poetry, but he is a natural heir to poets like Canadian icon Al Purdy and Am …
Cretacea
Montaigne Medal Finalist (Eric Hoffer Awards). Winner of a gold IPPY.
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, te …
Leaving Mile End
Leaving Mile End is Jon Paul Fiorentino's seventh collection of poetry and tenth book-a collection of poems that documents the daily din and clatter of cafés, galleries, and dive bars that make up Mile End in Montreal, perhaps the most artistically vibrant neighbourhood in the world. But this is no ordinary tour-we take a sharp turn and go online …
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 Shakesp …
I, Dr. Greenblatt, Orthodontist, 251-1457
Shortlisted for the City of Hamilton book award
At times comic, tender, dark, and arrestingly bizarre, Gary Barwin’s latest fiction collection marvels at the strangeness, charm, and beauty that is contemporary life in the quantum world.
Ranging from short story to postcard fiction, Barwin’s stories are luminous, hilarious, and surprising. A billi …
Kubrick Red: A Memoir
The Shining by Stanley Kubrick - that strange story in which a writer and his wife and young son with ESP stay in a mysterious hotel in low season - has been fascinating viewers since its release in 1980. Simon Roy first saw the film when he was 10 and was mesmerized by a particular line: "How'd you like some ice cream, Doc?" He has since seen the …