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 …

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 …

Montaigne Medal Finalist, Eric Hoffer Awards Against Death&nbspis an anthology of creative non-fiction exploring the psychological shifts that occur when we prematurely or unexpectedly confront death.

Against Death is a natural outgrowth of the editor's experience of surviving a vertebral artery dissection and stroke and the subsequent writing&nbspo …

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. Chisholm’s poems, whose content is often inspired by guidebooks, podcasts …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

'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 the Fraser Valley. Her drug-dealing, sometime-boyfriend Jimmy Flood and his sidekick, Blacky Harbottle, should have taken the rap, but th …

The Devil You Know is the follow-up volume to Farrell’s critically acclaimed debut collection, Sugar Bush & Other Stories. These stories deal with sex, love, work, birth, and death in alternately moving, shocking, funny, and at times devastating ways. Whether these characters are facing the death of a parent, bad love choices, the possibility of …

Toy Gun continues the exploration of character and fate on the streets of Vancouver that began with the novel Stupid Crimes (1992) and continued in Krekshuns (1995). Written in the style of the “hard-boiled” detective thriller, Toy Gun is very much a literary treatment of contemporary life in one of the world’s most densely populated urban ce …

'A Dark Boat', a new collection of poetry by Patrick Friesen, is heavily influenced by 'cante jondo' (Spanish "deep song", or flamenco) and 'fado' (Portuguese songs of longing). Friesen approaches music as a method of weaving his poems with both Spanish and Portuguese aspects of longing, imagistic leaps, and darkness.

The poems in 'A Dark Boat' try …

'Afflictions & Departures' is a collection of first-person experiential essays by writer and academic Madeline Sonik. Although Sonik explores some of the salient personal experiences of her young life, the essays in 'Afflictions & Departures' are not traditional memoir. In addition to incidents and feelings recaptured from memory, Sonik seeks out c …

'Vs.' is a collection of poems chronicling the author's foray into the world of amateur boxing. A shy, bookish woman you'd never expect could hit someone in the face, Ryan was soon hooked on the physical and mental challenge of the sport, as well as the camaraderie of the club's members and volunteers. When the club announced an upcoming white coll …

Winner, 2011 ReLit Award

From the author of Pontypool Changes Everything, Ravenna Gets is a new collection of “wheeled” stories that continue the author’s exploration of “apocalypse “ction.”

In a single convulsion of homicide, the population of Ravenna tries to erase the population of Collingwood. The innocent, standing in their living ro …

Distinguished in part by its attention to language of place, natural science, local flora and fauna, land and seascapes, and receptivity to aboriginal forebears, much of the literature from British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest region of the US is increasingly informed by cross-border and multicultural perspectives. Within the context of the r …

The Pacific Cinematheque Monograph Series was initiated to explore the spectrum of contributions and innovations of Western Canadian filmmakers, videomakers, and fringe media artists. Monograph Number One focuses, fittingly, on David Rimmer, one of Canada's foremost experimental filmmakers.

There is no better way to start off Pacific Cinémathèque' …

'Inventory' is a collection of 58 object poems. Taking as a starting point the reciprocal relation between subjects and objects, the book explores the unique way that objects appear in an individual consciousness. Each object in this inventory exists on its own and also reflects the author's experience, from the mundane stapler and tea bag, to the …

In these pages you will encounter gamblers and adventurers, conmen and conwomen, rodomontades and ragamuffins, outright fools and outrageous liars. Scalawags, the lot of them. But you can be an adventurer, a conman or conwoman, a fool, liar, gambler, rodomontade or ragamuffin and not be a scalawag. Many adventurers are not even interesting, come to …

What It Feels Like for a Girl is a series of poems following the intense friendship between two teenagers as they explore pop icons, pornography, and the big, strange world of sex. They soon learn just how complicated sexuality is--and how confusing desire can be.

What It Feels Like for a Girl is about many things: the friendships girls have at the …

Finalist, ReLit Awards (shortlist)

Black Rabbit & Other Stories is a debut collection of great intensity and versatility. The stories range from the fantastic to the gritty, from urban dystopias to worlds of dreamlike possibility. Even in their frequent explorations of brutality, the author remains honest and true to the motivations of his character …

'Black Rabbit & Other Stories' is a debut collection of great intensity and versatility. The stories range from the fantastic to the gritty, from urban dystopias to worlds of dreamlike possibility. Even in their frequent explorations of brutality, the author remains honest and true to the motivations of his characters and the machinations of the wo …

Following the success of his novel, 'The Dreamlife of Bridges', Robert Strandquist makes a much-awaited return to the short story form. As always, Strandquist's works explores relationships both familial and sexual, and plumbs the unspoken communications where things go haywire. This collection is more eclectic than his first collection, 'The Inani …

“Reading the Riot Act” is a phrase that has entered the popular lexicon, meaning the action taken by authority figures when they perceive that their “charges” are getting out of hand. The act itself is a seldom-used piece of legislation actually designed to prevent a riot from taking place. Supposedly, the mere mention of the Riot Act is en …

'Bizarre Winery Tragedy' is a book of lyric poems about country folk, city folk, alcohol and urbanism. These poems continue Neff's quest to explore the modern-day juxtaposition of urban and rural landscapes, and the lines of power between the countryside and the metropolis-firewood, dams and the WiFi-enabled grid. Deeper insights emerge in this, th …

'Toy Gun' continues the exploration of character and fate on the streets of Vancouver that began with the novel 'Stupid Crimes' (1992) and continued in 'Krekshuns' (1995). Written in the style of the "hard-boiled" detective thriller, 'Toy Gun' is very much a literary treatment of contemporary life in one of the world's most densely populated urban …

Best Books of 2005, Ottawa Xpress

Writer's Trust of Canada's "Warm Weather Reads Recommended by Writers" list (recommended by Robert Hough)

Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer is equal parts literary memoir, advice for the emerging writer, and reckless tirade. Ross has been active in the Canadian literary underground for a quarter of a century: he …

Painted Lives & Shifting Landscapes showcases the artwork of Vancouver painter, printmaker and muralist Richard Tetrault. Tetrault's work explores universal themes of the figure and the urban landscape. From Berlin to Bangkok to Vancouver, his artwork revisits these themes over thirty years. His imagery is at its most direct in street drawings and …

'Viral Suite' explores our relationship with self, other, environment, space, and time. The sensual and the cerebral. How the we/here/now is evolving and mutating with each downloaded packet.

"Viral Suite" is a poetic, narrative-driven science lesson. The book is unapologetically cerebral, and it takes risks." - Malahat Review

'Bogman's Music' is a debut collection of poetry that is both elegiac and sensitive in its exploration of family dynamics, the enduring power of childhood experience, and the healing ability of faith and love.

"It's gritty and quirky, and at times almost spins out of but for a formality that always tends to rein in thing." - The Georgia Straight

Gove …

'The Inanimate World' is an affecting suite of stories, with a novella-length piece at its core. The stories within 'The Inanimate World' traverse both rural and urban landscapes, exploring the terrain of the personal as much as the geographic. They span the time period of 1980 to the present, providing relevant insights into the private lives of p …