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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 Dupu …
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 …
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 …
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 …
Rua da Felicidade
Rua Da Felicidade is an actual place, a "Street of Happiness" in colonial Macau, where from the 1920s to the 1950s it was said that every desire could be fulfilled — for a price. It is a book written against the appropriative gesture, against the grain of what we too often believe we can possess for a price. Instead, the book turns on the seams o …
Indigena Awry
NDN word warrior Marie Annharte Baker's fourth book of poems, Indigena Awry, is her largest and wildest yet. It collects a decade's worth of verse — fifty-nine poems. Set noticeably in Winnipeg and Vancouver, but in many other places on either side of the Medicine Line as well, the poems are a laser-eyed meander through contested streets filled w …
Words, Words, Words
Words, Words, Words is a wide-ranging collection of literary essays that astonish the reader with their candor, insight, and generosity. Many of them reveal the absurdity that so often underlies our most passionate thoughts, our most cherished moments, even our most disturbing fears and recognitions. They echo everywhere with a kind of cosmic laugh …
The Insurance Man
This book is published on the occasion of the exhibition The Insurance Man: Kafka in the Penal Colony, held at the Simon Fraser University Gallery from April 25 to June 27, 2009.
Illustrated with 16 pages of colour, the book examines the subject matter of the show — both bureaucracy and penal colonies — and includes short texts by authors who sa …
Caprice
WITH A FOREWORD BY ARITHA VAN HERK.
It's the mid 1890s in Kamloops, British Columbia. Two men argue over a bottle of whisky and, in the struggle Frank Spencer, an American outlaw-turned-farmhand, kills Pete Foster, a French-Canadian and fellow farmhand. Enter Caprice: a vision and a brain. Almost six feet tall, with flaming red hair and long legs, …
Robin Blaser
Divided into two parts, Robin Blaser consists of two essays by people who knew Blaser intimately, as a life-long friend, a mentor, and intellectual influence. In part one, award-winning author Stan Persky offers a cohesive guide to reading Robin Blaser's poetry and the ways in which Blaser's work was "an attempted rescue or defense of poetry". In p …
Off the Highway
About thirty kilometres south of Vancouver, just over the Alex Fraser Bridge and bordering Surrey and Ladner, lies North Delta, a suburb replete with strip malls, single detached family homes, and every-half-hour bus service. It was a sleepy suburb, one considered the boonies, until 1986, when as part of the Expo city-wide upgrades, the Alex Fraser …
The Box
In his first work of fiction since 2004's Standing on Richards, George Bowering, Canada's first Poet Laureate, reminds us why he is one of our country's most interesting writers. In a series of ten stories introduced by archival photographs, Bowering leads us through the glory days of 1960s Vancouver, when the Hotel Vancouver boasted an understreet …
More House
"From the opening 'cast list' that includes such characters as 'Grandad' played by 'My mother's father,' to a narrator who admits, 'Actually, this is not even a story,' because, as s/he/it later declares, 'There is always more than one possible life,' this book keeps you guessing, laughing and dropping your jaw at the weird insights and awesomely d …
Burning Water
First published in 1980 to high acclaim, Burning Water won a Governor General's Award for fiction that year. A rollicking chronicle of Captain Vancouver's search for the Northwest Passage, the book has over its career been mentioned in recommended lists of postmodern fiction, BC historical fiction, gay fiction, and humour. This gives you some idea …
Æthel
Fascinated by the ligature — a joining of two letters in a single word — Donato Mancini chose, logically, to conjure one up in the title of his second book of concrete poetry, Æthel. "Although," as Mancini remarks parenthetically, "it might be the name of the crabby old blue-rinse who calls the police if you cross her lawn." Æthel, the book, …
Clam Gardens
For many years, archaeologists were unaware of the ancient clam terraces at Waiatt Bay, on Quadra Island. Author Judith Williams knew no differently until she was advised of their existence by a Klahoose elder named Elizabeth Harry (Keekus). By liaising with other observers of clam gardens in the Broughton Archipelago and conducting her own survey …
The Short Version
In a volume inspired by Czeslaw Milosz, Stan Persky appropriates the format of the alphabet book as a springboard for musings both personal and philosophical. The Short Version — which, at 300-plus pages is the author's longest book — is a literal ABC: Persky covers only topics that begin with those three letters, though he can't resist tweakin …
The Last Voyage of the Loch Ryan
Evicted from his Tofino pyramid for the last time, writer Andrew Struthers has the solution: buy an old fishing boat going cheap via the federal government's Mifflin Plan. He takes up residence onboard with his nine-year-old daughter Pasheabel, and his perennial housing problems are solved. Or are they? The Last Voyage of the Loch Ryan picks up whe …
The Cedar Surf
Surf's up! But don't bother to put on your bikini. This is BC's WET coast, where the water temperature never goes above eleven degrees Celsius. BC surfers have been paddling out to catch waves at Sombrio Beach, Tofino, Ucluelet, and Jordan River for over forty years. Today, a mixture of Vancouver Island's first families of surfing and newcomers to …
Calendar Boy
On the edge of adulthood, self-discovery, coming out; in university towns, Europe, Vancouver, Toronto, Sydney, the protagonists of Calendar Boy unravel cultural heritage, community, identity on the road to — they hope — love, happiness, and self-acceptance. Set around the globe, sixteen adventurous stories weave fiction with real-life smarts, g …
Last Stands
Cathedral, cash crop, the Earth's respiratory system: the rainforest is all this and more. Larry Pynn, award?winning environment writer, plunges into coastal forests from California to Alaska to awaken us to this unique ecosystem and to the complex factors that threaten it. Talking with forestry workers, hunters, rangers, Natives, and environmental …
Writing Class
Since the mid 1980s, the Kootenay School of Writing, a writerrun centre in Vancouver, has been the site of some of the most innovative poetry coming out of North America. Leaving behind conventional ideas about syntax and lyricism, the KSW poets have produced a body of work that is jarring, troubling, provocative, funny, and beautiful.
In their in …
XEclogue
First issued by Tsunami Editions in 1993, XEclogue is an exploration of the pleasures of the pastoral poetry from a late-twentieth-century feminist perspective. Robertson, the Governor General's Award finalist, plays in a neo-classical landscape with equal doses of iconoclasm and erudition. This new and revised edition is sure to win new devotees f …
Thirty Four Ways of Looking at Jane Eyre
Joan Givner engages the heart and mind in this refreshing and readable collection of short stories and essays. Nineteen pieces demonstrate, with the author's trademark acuity, how biography — and autobiography — finds its way into fiction.
Implicitly feminist, Givner's compassionate yet unflinching eye vividly renders each secret pain and joy of …
Autobiography of a Tattoo
Autobiography of a Tattoo is an investigative literary work about the education and pursuit of homosexual desire. Its mixture of serial stories and modernist meditations invites readers on a journey that rangers from post?Wall Berlin to Plato's Athens. Stan Persky, the author of Buddy's and Then We Take Breaks, here breaks through the current impas …
Debbie: An Epic
Lisa Robertson has applied her rhetorical skills to the epic, and what emerges is a spectacular, subversive vision of the world through female eyes. This is an act of sheer writerly bravado, taking and tweaking the form, enlarging the world between the covers of a book. The language is lush, the concept superactivated, growing over the page at an a …
Nemiah
Finalist, Bill Duthie Booksellers' Choice Award (1993).
"Chilcotins, they never got beat. Never got beat." — Henry Solomon, in Nemiah: The Unconquered Country
Those words were true in 1864, when the Tsilhqot'in Nation were among the very few First Nations peoples to win a war against European settlers (the Chilcotin War). They were true in 1990, wh …
White Hoods
White Hoods is the first book about the Hooded Empire in Canada. Award?winning journalist and author Julian Sher traces the Canadian Ku Klux Klan from its birth in the early 1920s, through its powerful influence within Saskatchewan's Conservative party in the 1920s and 1930s, to its renaissance under James McQuirter in the 1980s. McQuirter led the …