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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
Black Star
Winner, the CAA Fred Kerner Book Award. Del 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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
Jettison
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 …
Cretacea & Other Stories from the Badlands
Montaigne Medal Finalist (Eric Hoffer Awards)
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, temporary "family." A recent w …
As if
As If is a collection of stories that, as its title suggests, points at an indubitable truth: all literature is speculative. Goulden's, however, extends past the boundaries of conventional fiction into areas traditionally occupied by fantasy and magic realism. These stories rail against the industrial and digital mechanisms of our age and, in the g …
Seep
Finalist for the Amazon.ca First Novel Award
Dwight Eliot was born on a baseball diamond in the small town of Seep during a dugout-clearing brawl between his hometown team, The Seep Selects, and a visiting team of barnstorming Cuban All-Stars.
Decades later, Dwight returns to town only to witness his childhood home being moved down the highway on the …
Burqa of Skin
Burqa of Skin is a dense collection of writings from Nelly Arcan, channelling harrowing disenchantment and indignation. From her very first novel, Putain (Seuil, 2001), 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 revers …
Breakneck
Rose Dubois and Julie O’Brien find themselves on the roof of a Montreal apartment building on a scorching summer’s day, and from that moment on their fates are intertwined. Worldwide climate change and dramatic shifts in weather patterns foreshadow their predestined suffering.
As is soon revealed, the two women share a submissive love for the sa …
The Revolving City
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 …
Rue
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 …
Jabbering with Bing Bong
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 …
I'm Not Scared of You or Anything
ReLit Long Shortlist, 2015
Finalist, Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction
Winner, National Magazine Award, Silver Medal for Humour, for the story "It Seems Like Sex is a Weird Thing That Used to Happen to Me," from I'm Not Scared of You or Anything
The characters in I’m not Scared of You or Anything are invigilators, fake martial arts experts, buskers, …
Savage
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 chose …
This Drawn & Quartered Moon
This Drawn & Quartered Moon makes pre-millennial San Francisco 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,” …
Atomic Storybook
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 …
Stolen
Finalist, Giller Prize
Winner of 2 Saskatchewan Book Awards (Best First Book; City of Saskatoon Book Award)
Finalist, Saskatchewan Book Award (Book of the Year)
Winner, Canadian Authors’ Association-BookTV Emerging Writer Award
Finalist, Amazon/ Books in Canada First Novel Award
Rowan Friesen has made a career of drug-dealing and small-time thievery …
Everything Rustles
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 …
Unus Mundus
Author Statement: Five years ago I began working on a collection of poems titled Unus Mundus, derived from Marie Louise Von Frantzs 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 Gods psyche. When I began this manuscript, I was …
Sweet Assorted
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. …
Whitetail Shooting Gallery
'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 …
Budge
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, …
Afflictions & Departures
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 …