- canadian (41)
- literary (21)
- post-confederation (1867-) (13)
- personal memoirs (11)
- historical (9)
- jewish (8)
- short stories (single author) (7)
- native american (6)
- pre-confederation (to 1867) (6)
- media studies (5)
- western provinces (5)
- women authors (5)
- action & adventure (4)
- black humor (4)
- essays (4)
- non-classifiable (4)
- poetry (4)
- political (4)
- anarchism (3)
- environmental conservation & protection (3)
Outside
Emotional and uplifting, Outside is the story of a teacher's escape to Japan from classroom, country, and self in the wake of a small-town Ontario tragedy.
David Woods, a first-year teacher, shares his grade-4 students' passion for nature and their reluctance to be hemmed in by classroom walls. He pushes the boundaries of risk and the constraints of …
The Renter
"Absolutely brilliant!" — Guy Maddin
The sentimental and financial education of a young Jewish Winnipegger in and around 1968.
1968. Winnipeg Beach. Summer. Poor Jewish boy meets rich Jewish girl. The sun is high, libidos soar, even the high is high. And as the poor boy tries to marry up, the Jacob-Rachel myth gives way to an Icarian leap.
The stil …
The Sacred Herb / The Devil's Weed
The Sacred Herb / The Devil's Weed is informative and even enlightening, but above all, it's a hilarious look at a humble plant that has entertained, inspired, and occasionally terrified so many for so long. Andrew Struthers directs his "brilliant madness" towards the ambivalent nature of marijuana, once the target of "reefer madness" hysteria and …
The Smallest Objective
From the author of What Species of Creatures, Sharon Kirsch, comes The Smallest Objective, an intricate and melancholy personal memoir about a daughter's last days with her mother, the hidden recesses of family history, and the treasures that the past can bring in the face of a difficult present.
Having moved her elderly mother into a care home, the …
Hungry Slingshots
Since his first book, The Mood Embosser, was published in 2001, Louis Cabri has established himself as a one of the most distinctive, and entertaining, poets in Canada. Steeped in the transformative poetics of the post-New American Poetry world of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, Cabri has followed that impulse into a fresh terrain that is simultaneously familiar …
Writing and Reading
In the course of a writing life that has spanned more than five decades and encompasses almost eighty books of fiction, poetry, history, and criticism he's written and another thirty that he's played an editorial role in, George Bowering has learned a thing or two about the craft.
Writing and Reading features thirty recent essays, ranging from a sin …
Shot Rock
When the smell of October's raked leaves gives way to that of morning frost, a mature Winnipeg man's fancy turns to thoughts of curling.
But this fall Blackie Timmerman has been hogging stones off the ice. His wife of twenty years Deirdre has left him; his precocious son Tino has moved out of the house and into political radicality, mentored by a r …
I Am a City Still But Soon I Shan't Be
"Hailed by the Call as I stepped across
Venables at Clark following a transverse line
like all the other commodities circulating aimlessly
I drifted along corrugated steel walls
sun burning every body every building every form
cash exploding from crowns of distant towers
occupied by the rentiers in this haemopolis of
arteries and conduits branchi …
Collapsible
The short story form is unambiguously un-dead in this new album of thirty fictions from writer Tim Conley, coming at the reader in a variety of shapes and guises running the gamut from elliptical micro-fictions to tales of the inexplicable.
Steeped in Beckett, Borges and Nabokov, Conley's multiple universes allow for werewolves that excite ridicule …
Mudflat Dreaming
Mudflat Dreaming tells the story of two communities on Vancouver's waterfront fringes in the 1970s.
On the North Shore, a counter–cultural village of float houses and shacks on stilts sprouted on the estuarial Maplewood Mudflats. A few miles to the south, on the southern banks of the Fraser River above New Westminster, the long–established …
9x11
‘A small room behind a bay window. A single bed, a table and chair, and a sink. I could manage something larger, with more conveniences, but I could never match the view.’
How you view 21st century life depends largely on the view from your place, which depends on where you can afford to live. In this suite of texts and poems written over twent …
if wants to be the same as is
Drawn from 22 books of poetry published by David Bromige in his lifetime, if wants to be the same as is chronicles the career of one of contemporary poetry's most distinctive writers. Born in London, England, in 1933, raised in Canada, and a resident for most of his adult life of California, David Bromige is just as difficult to pin down in terms o …
The Big Note
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Based on careful listening to authorized and unauthorized recordings, and drawing on hundreds of interviews, letters, and e-mail interviews with scores of musicians, singers, engineers, artists, copyists, and others who worked with Zappa, The Big Note is the complete guide to the music of Frank Zappa.
The product of more than fifteen …
Some End / West Broadway
A masterpiece of late style and friendship, this volume combines back to back two powerful new works by old masters, George Bowering and George Stanley.
Stanley's West Broadway is a long poem, composed over the past decade, following on Stanley's other long city poems, "San Francisco's Gone," "Terrace Landscapes," and Vancouver: A Poem. Like those …
Anarchy Explained to My Father
Translated from the French by John Gilmore
Anarchy Explained to My Father (first published by Lux Éditeur in 2014 as L'anarchie expliquée à mon père) is a provocative and accessible discussion of the revolutionary mode of thought that rejects all forms of domination and seeks, in the words of Louise Michel, "order through harmony." Francis Dupui …
Sitting Shiva on Minto Avenue, by Toots
Sitting Shiva on Minto Avenue, by Toots is the story of a man who had no obituary and no funeral and who would have left no trace if it weren't for the woman he'd called Toots, who took everything she remembered of him and — for seven days — wrote it down.
Erín Moure, a poet who once lived in Vancouver, begins this "work of the imagination" ("m …
The Receiver
The Receiver is Sharon Thesen's thirteenth book, and the first from the three-time Governor-General's Award finalist since Oyama Pink Shale, six years ago.
More formally various than Thesen's recent books, The Receiver includes the short lyrics documenting the poet's witnessing that readers of her work will recognize, as well as various kinds of fou …
Culture Gap
The time is the early 1980s. Judith Plant and her new partner, Kip, are ready for a change. Inspired by the charismatic Fred Brown, their communications professor at Simon Fraser University, they join a commune in a remote valley near the Yalakom River, deep in BC's Coast Mountains. Culture Gap: Towards a New World in the Yalakom Valley tells the s …
Maria Mahoi of the Islands
Since its original publication in 2004, Maria Mahoi of the Islands has become a classic in its field, and an important document on the history of Indigenous Hawaiians known as Kanakas, who had an early presence across the Pacific Northwest and are now part of the broader Hawaiian diaspora across North America. Born in the mid-1850s on Vancouver Isl …
A Short Sad Book
With an Introduction by Erín Moure and an Afterword by George Bowering.
These days, Canada is a heavyweight of world fiction, boasting some of the gaudiest names in the literary firmament, its schools graduating great writers by the frontlist. It's easy to forget that it was not always so. Forty years ago, George Bowering saw a country still strug …
The News We Deserve
The News We Deserve: The Transformation of Canada's Media Landscape documents the most under-reported story in Canadian news: the behind-the-scenes takeovers, mergers, share swaps, regulatory maneuvers, and private ambitions that have reshaped the content and business models of today's print and online newspapers to privilege corporate profits and …
A Series of Dogs
John Armstrong uses his wry wit and vivid prose to evoke a life immeasurably enriched by one best friend after another. He tells boyhood tales of romping along the railroad tracks with Spooky the mutt, touching accounts of Sluggo the Rottweiler befriending sex workers, howl-inducing memories of laying a treasured friend to rest during a rain-and be …
A perimeter
A new child, a new house, a new neighbourhood: rob mclennan takes the measure of his environment in A perimeter, a collection of shorter and longer pieces from 2010 to 2014. The birth of a child, and the moves that follow in its wake, brings about a defamiliarization of the world, and the poems in A perimeter reflect this newly enhanced awareness. …
Piranesi's Figures
Piranesi's Figures is a romp through the magnificent psychological ruins of at least two marriages and one attempt at child-rearing, and a gleefully reckless contortion of novelistic conventions, sexual practices, and family dynamics. As in her first novel, More House, Hannah Calder peers into hidden corners and under creaking beds with such relent …
Clean Sails
The 160 pages of Clean Sails were wrested from dozens of typewriters, some of them hand-modified, through countless thousands of hours of typing over the past half-decade, and informed by Gustave Morin's quarter-century of investigation into the (im)possibilities of concrete poetry. Mr. Morin insists Clean Sails is a volume of poetry; others call i …
Soviet Princeton
The winter of 1932-33 saw the small interior town of Princeton, BC divided. Charges of outside agitators and charges by mounted provincial police into picket lines of workers, Ku Klux Klan threats and a beating and cross-burning, the kidnapping of legendary labour organizer Slim Evans who was bundled onto the next train out of town (though he retur …
The World, I Guess
The World, I Guess is a substantial book, six sections that demonstrate a command of a broad poetic range, a catholic range of interests, and echoes of a lifetime of reading and learning from Pound, Williams, Stanley, and others. The centrepiece is "The Flood," a long, complex, discursive poem whose subject is poesis and whose interest is in the wo …
Dance Moves of the Near Future
Tim Conley's prose whipsaws between carefully observed realism and fantastic absurdity to create surreal, compact worlds. Whether they're sketching the familial fallout of a stentorian patriarch or teaching the eponymous dance moves to survivors of the apocalypse ("With the rise of the invertebrates, spinelessness has never been so hip"), these sto …
Around the World on Minimum Wage
An exciting travel adventure, as the author explores darkest Scotland, equatorial Africa, remote Tibet, rainsoaked Tofino, and inner Struthers. Victoria film maker and writer Andrew Struthers borrows the language and visual layout of the Victorian travelogue to tell his own tale in Around the World on Minimum Wage. While the stories Struthers regal …
Loitersack
"If the loitersacke be gone springing into a taverne, I'll fetch him reeling out." "Loitersack" is 17th century slang for a lay-abed, a lazybones. In his new book, Loitersack, Donato Mancini (You Must Work Harder to Write Poetry of Excellence, Bookthug, 2012) extends his inquiry of Canadian poetry and poetics in the form of a book that contains poe …
Posh Lust
Posh Lust is about poetry that is everywhere findable, provided the bits of "everywhere" are words and provided this life is lettered. People study poetry and some read it. Poetry is a pinnacle art — as in "a small ornamental turret" — even when it's a drunk imaginary communist, or just a drunk imaginary. Kitsch makes the serious art of poetry …
