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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
Chalk
Winner of the 38th Annual 3-Day Novel-Writing Contest
"You" and L, a mysterious third gender runaway, hit the road on a mission to find the meaning of life. Traveling by plane, bus and car, You run into trouble with the cops, mourn a family tragedy, smoke hundreds of cigarettes, attend a retirement party, come to terms with a broken heart, and disco …
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 …
Further Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer
Further Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer takes up where Stuart Ross’s Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer left off in 2005. Memoir, tirade, unsolicited advice — this new volume is drawn largely from Stuart’s notorious “Hunkamooga” column that ran in subTerrain, but also includes pieces from his blog as well as previously unpublis …
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 …
Vancouver Vanishes
Finalist, Bill Duthie Booksellers' Choice Award (BC Book Prizes), 2016
#1 on the BC Bestseller List
Since 2005, nearly 9,000 demo permits for residential buildings have been issued in Vancouver. An average of three houses a day are torn down, many of them original homes built for the middle and working class in the 1920s, '30s and '40s. Very few are …
Rogues, Rascals, and Scalawags Too
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 …
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 …
Hysteric
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 …
The Delusionist
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 …
Cabalcor
The debut work by Sun Belt is a genre-bending almanac depicting the rise and fall of a company town that, within the span of a century, becomes a desert wasteland.
A full-length album of dusty, surreal songs by the Sun Belt music ensemble both informs and is informed by a blend of transcripts, photographs, micro fictions, wildlife plates, film still …
Burqa of Skin
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 …
Burnfort, Las Vegas
"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 …
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,” …
Thorazine Beach
Winner 35th International 3-Day Novel Contest
Jack Minyard is a private eye 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 …
Savage 1986-2011
Nates nervous mother chews gum at warp speed and has a bob that resembles Darth Vaders 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 …
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 …
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 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
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 …
Valery The Great
Valery the Great is a crackling, electric collection of dark humour that follows the bizarre and beautiful lives of its protagonists. Sometimes sweet and gentle, sometimes sharply sarcastic, the unique narrative voices in this collection are always powerfully touching.
Praise for Valery the Great:
"15 Finest Book Covers in Spring Fiction This Year" s …
A Dark Boat
'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 …
You Exist. Details Follow.
Each new volume by Stuart Ross is a more confounding grab bag than the last. In 'You Exist. Details Follow.', his seventh full-length collection of poetry, Stuart Ross veers in opposite directions: narrative confessional poems, and works that might be considered abstract expressionist, and a lot both in between and beyond those boundaries. Still, e …
Charles Baudelaire: Paris Blues
Baudelaire's prose poems were written over many years and published in magazines between 1855 and his death in 1867. Francis Scarfe's translations reflect a lifetime's passion for Baudelaire's work and a deep understanding of it. The appeal of this beautiful book', he says in his introduction, lies in its wide range of subjects, its variations of t …
Vancouver Noir
'Vancouver Noir' looks at the period from the 1930s to the 1960s, an era in which there was intensified concern with order, conformity, structure, and restrictions. These are visions of the city, both of what it was and what some of its citizens hoped it would either become, or, conversely, cease to be. The photographs-most of which look like still …
Who Killed Janet Smith?
New Edition as part City of Vancouver’s Legacy Book Project, with foreword by historian Daniel Francis
Who Killed Janet Smith? examines one of the most infamous and still unsolved murder cases in Canadian history: the 1924 murder of twenty-two-year-old Scottish nursemaid Janet Smith. Originally published in 1984, and out of print for over a decade …
Who Killed Janet Smith?
'Who Killed Janet Smith?' examines one of the most infamous and still unsolved murder cases in Canadian History: the 1924 murder of twenty-two-year-old Scottish nursemaid Janet Smith. Originally published in 1984, and out of print for over a decade, this tale of intrigue, racism, privilege, and corruption in high places as a true-crime recreation t …