Mike McCardell’s instinct for finding the perfect story at just the right time has led him to a lifetime of great scoops and gripping tales as an author and Vancouver news icon. Years of chasing and reporting human-interest stories have honed his ability to see the deeper meaning behind the everyday, and to capture the universal and familiar in e …

Mike McCardell has spent his life tracking down thousands upon thousands of stories, from the uplifting to the sobering, from the bizarre to the sublime. As the author of many books and a lifelong reporter, he has stored up a vast collection of anecdotes and is never short of a tale to tell.

With None of This Was Planned, McCardell takes us behind t …

Arthur Black's best lines are like a shot of whisky--sharp, invigorating and with a good kick. Following the success of his many previous titles, the multiple-award-winning humorist once again delivers "black-to-black" laughs with his latest collection, Paint the Town Black.

With his usual off-kilter perspective, Black tackles many of the pressing t …

Writer, environmentalist and gardener Des Kennedy has gathered together his best, most outrageous and most contemplative articles and essays of the past decade into a book full of playful wit and insight.

Kennedy recounts one newspaper's April Fool's Day prank that had men across the UK buying heather in order to propagate a poor-man's Viagra, expan …

History in BC grows profusely and luxuriantly, but with odd undergrowth," observed historian J.M.S. Careless many years ago. This claim is fully borne out by this impressive anthology of some of the province's most distinguished historians, geographers, and writers gleaned from over forty years of British Columbia's leading scholarly journal, BC St …

Christine Allen and Michael Kluckner's portrayal of life on Killara Farm moves thoughtfully through a year of gardening with a rich, detailed narrative that evokes the many pleasures of life in rural Southwestern BC.

Allen, a master gardener, is also a lyrical writer, expressing the tiny details of life on the farm--the "winter jasmine, doggedly flo …

Publishing sensation and popular Global TV personality Mike McCardell returns with a new collection of hilarious, heartwarming and honest stories. These are stories of the defender of a handicapped parking spot, a woman who has delivered homemade Valentine cards to neighbours for twenty years, and love between a widower and a woman who had never be …

Northwest Coast peoples were maritime engineers who mastered the art of building dugout canoes from gigantic red cedars, using only tools made from bone, stone, and wood. Ubiquitous, these elegant craft were used for everyday and ceremonial purposes, for fishing, hunting and trading, for feasting and potlatching, and in warfare—they were the keys …

An ultra-fan whose home is a shrine to the Vancouver Canucks thinks he may have the answer to the team's shocking collapse in the 2011 playoffs; a homeless man who has become a caring mainstay at the Downtown Eastside shelter run by the First United Church, and many anecdotes of generosity among people who have nothing are only a few of the inspira …

Arthur Black's voice is unmistakable on the radio and on the page. His is the voice of reason, with a generous helping of funny; the voice that scolds us for our universal human quirks, but who says it with the tone and words that make us laugh out loud at ourselves and our neighbours.

A Chip Off the Old Black, Black's latest collection of stories …

Mike McCardell is an institution in BC television with his anti-news stories of oddball inspiration that close the News Hour on Global BC. Lately he has become a publishing institution as well with his series of heartwarming books full of stories about the ways in which ordinary people cope with extraordinary challenges. Fresh
from 2009's bestsell …

This book is a lyrical testament to a great love affair between the writer and his region. In A Walk with the Rainy Sisters, one of British Columbia's favourite authors writes with passion about his favourite topic--the geography of British Columbia. Stephen Hume guides readers through the natural world, moving from the thin, cold air of British Co …

In this fascinating collection Canada's most entertaining sportswriter revisits the glories of a career following sporting events and personalities that spanned five decades. Name any memorable event--from Canada-Russia 1972 to Rick Hansen's Man in Motion tour--or any famous name from Wayne Gretzky to Muhammad Ali to the San Diego Chicken, and Jim …

It is generally known that the West Coast's once-great commercial fishing industry has fallen on hard times, but as Alan Haig-Brown demonstrates in this new book, reports of its demise are exaggerated. A veteran of the industry himself, Haig-Brown here offers a "state of the industry" report, discovering pockets of surprising activity among the vi …

This is a book with a mission. On one level it is a celebration of the great Canadian poet Al Purdy by eminent writers who were his contemporaries. It is also part of a campaign to preserve the place that was the centre of Purdy's writing universe--his home, a lakeside A-frame cottage in Ameliasburgh, Ontario, where he and his wife Eurithe lived f …

Mike McCardell's bestselling books about finding rays of pure sunshine among the dark byways of the big city have a full measure of heartwarming tales but this time he declares, "I have found the answer to enjoying an incredible life, no matter who you are or where you are or what you are doing or how much you weigh."

In his 2008 book, Getting to th …

Those who have been following Arthur Black's award-winning publishing ventures over the past few years, or remember him from his long-running CBC radio show, Basic Black, will have come to appreciate the hilarious and unique vision of the world through the eyes of Canada's Blackest humourist. No less hilarious is his newest collection of observatio …

Nominated for ForeWord Magazine's 2008 Book of the Year Award - Nature Category

In 1988, Chris Czajkowski walked into British Columbia's Central Coast Mountains to build a homestead, a business, and a life. A Mountain Year is a beautifully produced art book full of original paintings, sketches and diary entries, offering an awe-inspiring glimpse int …

Mike McCardell, the legendary Vancouver reporter who tries to restore people's faith in living after they've finished watching the appalling mayhem on the evening news, is back with another collection of simple but irresistible stories: there are the ownerless shoes, sitting day after day in a washroom used mainly by big-time celebrities. There are …

Lawyer, politician, radio broadcaster--and crusader! That's Rafe Mair. Even at 75 he is still fighting to save the planet, this country, this province, the Pacific salmon, our public health care and our electoral system. He castigates lawyers for cashing in on the compensation to aboriginals abused in the residential schools, slaps the wrists of st …

Longlisted for the 2007 Victoria Butler Book Prize

Arthur Black--bestselling author, three-time winner of the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour, beloved radio personality, and newspaper columnist-- proves in his latest sidesplitting collection of tales, Black to the Grindstone, that, without a doubt, you not only get better but funnier with age.

Demon …

"I'm no good at writing," says Rafe Mair, paraphrasing Robert Benchley, "but by the time I realized that, I was too famous to stop." He didn't begin writing until he was fifty, but since that time he has won the coveted Michener Canadian Media Award, the Hutchison Award for Lifetime Contribution to BC Journalism and has been inducted into the Broad …

BC's most outspoken broadcaster and writer is back with a collection of all-new essays that are sure to provoke, enrage and entertain. Rafe tackles controversial issues such as the Liberal Party sponsorship scandal, the election of a new Pope and the Anglican Church's debate on same-sex marriage. He suggests that pedophiles should be found Not Gui …

Like a well-delivered punch line, Black & White And Read All Over, the tenth book by award-winning writer Arthur Black, is guaranteed to make you laugh. The beloved radio personality and newspaper columnist tackles a range of subjects from Sasquatch hunters to nose jobs to the legalization of pot. Known for his delight in the bizarre and derision o …

The author of Black Tie and Tales and Black in the Saddle Again, both winners of the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour, returns with a new collection guaranteed to tickle your funny bone and make you scratch your head at the absurdities of life in the early years of the new millennium. In slyly ironic, pointedly witty essays, Black takes aim at the …

In his third collection of essays, veteran journalist Stephen Hume demonstrates yet again that his understanding of British Columbia - and beyond - runs as deep as Hecate Strait and as far-reaching as the Rocky Mountains. In Off the Map, Hume takes his readers on a wondrous journey through western Canada, stopping at little-known places along the w …

Some say Mike McCardell's "feel-good" stories that cap the six o'clock evening news on BCTV are the best part of the program - the only reason they watch the news. One thing is certain, over the years McCardell has earned the loyalty of hundreds of thousands of fans. In this, his first book, he presents an intriguing and often hilarious behind-the- …

From "surviving ground zero in the nuclear family," to "feeling fear at the Fall Fair," to "quelling a taste for champagne on a tap-water budget," Gordon Kirkland writes about survival - survival in the '90s, that is.

Looking back, Kirkland acknowledges his life has always been filled with laughter. He comes from a family who was like "Monty Python …

Islands have always had a special place in our minds, hearts and souls. So too have cottages. Add the two together and what do you get? Eric Nicol's wryly funny, sharply observed new book on the joys and terrors of cottage life on Saturna Island, in BC's Strait of Georgia.

Part loopy guidebook, part madcap how-to manual, part fractured history, When …

He's baaaaack! Get ready for another batch of smart, funny, bang-on stories of the ups and downs of country living.

Ever wondered how to discipline an unruly chicken? How to kill a mouse with a hardcover book? How to survive the pettifogging bureaucrats at your daughter's school? How to save your own butt when a tough guy outside the convenience sto …

Honest, offbeat, and very funny, Tom Henry's stories about living in the country have been broadcast weekly on CBC Radio in British Columbia and have become favourites among listeners in the city, the country, and everywhere in between. This cassette collects some of the best of Henry's anecdotes from Metchosin, a rural area on southern Vancouver I …

During the years Al Purdy was becoming one of Canada's best-loved poets, he also wrote and published many pages of distinctive prose. This selection of almost forty years of essays and anecdotes is vintage Purdy. Part I, No Other Country, consists of essays on seeing the world as a Canadian. It begins as a fascinating travel diary as Purdy takes th …

Short, funny anecdotes from a natural born recycler, do-it-yourselfer, tinkerer and pack rat all rolled into one. They start during the Depression, when young Caplette learned how to make a perfect slingshot and go after gophers in South Battleford, Saskatchewan. They follow him down the road when he gets the bright idea to ride his bicycle to the …

In his introduction to this provocative collection of essays, George Woodcock describes his response to a recent question about national unity. "I remarked impatiently that what interested me was not the achievement of 'national unity, but the accomplishment of creative anti-national disunity."

Woodcock argues that if Canadians are angry about their …

Edith Iglauer has been a journalist for four decades, working for The New Yorker, Harper's, The Atlantic Monthly and other publications. This book is a lively retrospective of her writings, from the 1940s when she covered Eleanor Roosevelt's press conferences, through the 1960s when she was present at the founding of Canada's first Inuit co-operati …

One powerful taboo that still remains in our literature today is the taboo against discussing our most central daily experience: working for a living.

Poet and editor Tom Wayman believes that with the recent appearance of a new kind of work writing we have begun at last to see the end of this limitation. In his essays gathered in Inside Job Wayman c …