Les Faux Bourgeois Bistro is an award-winning French bistro situated at the awkward intersection of Kingsway and Fraser Street&nbspin an equally disjointed neighbourhood&nbspin East Vancouver. Founded in 2007, Les Faux Bourgeois soon became a beacon of French bistro "amor" and garnered a loyal clientele and critical acclaim to match.

Selected by the …

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 …

BC Bestseller! From its Coast Mountain skyline to its seedy waterfront tattoo parlors, from the private downtown booze-cans of the city's business elite and the Faux Chateau enclave of Whistler, to the riot-shaken streets of the early Sixties and the history of pipe bomb attacks in the city, Moore has been there, done that. He's been a graveyard sh …

Mark Laba's second full-length poetry collection - and his first in seventeen years - recreates the structure of the old variety shows he watched on TV as a child. Much of the imagery plays across the broad spectrum of these popular cultural tropes, albeit many lost or forgotten in the vault of broadcast history. In The Inflatable Life, the reader …

Stanley Kubrick’s film The Shining was released in 1980 and has been fascinating viewers ever since. It is a psychological thriller about a writer with writer’s block (along with his wife and their young son) who takes a job as caretaker of an isolated hotel in the Colorado mountains during the winter off-season. The boy, Danny, is gifted with …

1940s Vancouver. The Japanese have just bombed Pearl Harbour and racial tension is building in Vancouver. The rcmp are rounding up “suspicious” young men, and fishing boats and property are soon seized from Steveston fishers; internment camps in BC’s interior are only months away.

Daniel Sugiura, a young reporter for the New Canadian, the only …

Writers from BC and Beyond on the Subject of Food will bring to the table some of Canada's best contemporary writers, celebrating all that is unique about Vancouver's literary and culinary scene. Punctuated by beautiful local food photographs, interviews with and recipes from some of our top local chefs, each of these short pieces will shock, comfo …

A finalist for the&nbspAlfred G. Bailey Prize,&nbspIgnite&nbspis a collection of elegiac and experimental poetry powder-kegged with questions about one man's lifelong struggle with schizophrenia. Born into a strict Mennonite family, Abe Spenst's mental illness spanned three decades in and out of mental institutions where he underwent electric shock …

The music scene in the mid-eighties was in transition, just as the entire music business was, unaware that it was all about to change in 1991 when Nirvana's watershed release, Nevermind would unexpectedly hit number one on the Billboard chart. But that explosion didn't happen overnight. It was the product of many things: Toronto's developing music …

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 …

Dwight Eliot was born on a baseball diamond, during a dugout-clearing brawl between his hometown team, The Seep Selects, and a team of barnstorming Cuban All Stars. Decades later, when he sees his childhood home being moved on a truck down the highway, he begins a quest to research the history of his hometown and of his family. Seep is being disman …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Most civic histories celebrate progress, industry, order, and vision. This isn't one of those.

Vancouver Confidential is a collaboration of artists and writers who plumb the shadows of civic memory looking for the stories that don't fit into mainstream narratives. We honour the chorus line behind the star performer, the mug in the mugshot, the victi …

History books typically show Vancouver as a pioneer city built on forestry, fisheries, and tourism, but behind the snow-capped mountains and rain forests, the Vancouver of the first half of the 20th century was a seething mass of corruption. The top job at the Vancouver Police Department was a revolving door with the average tenure for a police chi …

The City of Vancouver has been through a lot in its first 125 years. It’s a city that has played host to the likes of Mark Twain, Alice Cooper, Elvis Presley, Winston Churchill, The Beatles, Louis Armstrong, Howard Hughes, Expo ‘86, and the 2010 Olympic Winter Games. It’s the birthplace of Canada’s first female MLA, the country’s first (and la …

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 …

The follow-up to Eve Lazarus's successful 'At Home with History: The Untold Secrets of Greater Vancouver's Heritage Homes', 'Sensational Victoria' gives us a glimpse into aspects of Victoria rarely talked about in the tourist brochures or flowery garden guidebooks. 'Sensational Victoria' covers legendary women, including Emily Carr, Nellie McClung, …

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 …

'Five Little Bitches' chronicles the intertwining lives of five young women, each of whom is plagued by her own unique demons, and all of whom are devoted to music, the punk-rock lifestyle, and an underground code of solidarity. The novel details each of the girls' personal histories alongside the rise and fall of their band, Wet Leather. As the ba …

'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 …

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?' 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 …

'Hard Hed' is a contemporary retelling of the Johnny Appleseed story. Hoosier Chapman, local historian and apple orchardist, has just been released from a Northwestern Ohio jail after serving two years for planting wild apple trees in a city park. Dropped at the State Line by a deputy sheriff, Hoosier treks west, overland and barefoot into Indiana …

Winner, SFU Writer's Studio's First Book Competition (2010)

Winner, Canadian Authors Association Exporting Alberta Award (2011)

Unmarried and pregnant in 1968 Winnipeg, teenager Myrl Coulter found herself at a loss. Unable (and perhaps unwilling) to support her child, Myrl’s parents forced her to give the baby up for adoption. After being sent to a …

Unmarried and pregnant in 1968 Winnipeg, teenager Myrl Coulter found herself at a loss. Unable (and perhaps unwilling) to support her child, Myrl's parents forced her to give the baby up for adoption. After being sent to a home for unwed mothers, Myrl gave birth in a desolate hospital room and then found herself at the mercy of the closed adoption …

Spat Ryan has demons. They haunt him by day and share his drink at night. Raised in Montreal by a bagman for the Irish mob, Spat has fictionalized or ignored chunks of his life too painful to recall. A chance meeting with an old friend of his father’s in a bar on the Main exposes the dark secret they’ve both been harbouring, the secret that has …

'DAMP: Contemporary Vancouver Media Arts', is a singular effort, a visually exuberant work that is also on the vanguard of theoretical engagement, a symbiosis of form and content, in full-colour throughout, inclusive of extensive imagery, graphic intrigues and typographical accent-a rare and desirable art-infused statement of the city's media art s …

The twenty contemporary writers featured in this anthology have one thing in common: a connection to British Columbia, to a specific time, landscape, or community in BC. Their essays and memoirs have been inspired by, or are in some way affected by, the particular "sense of place" that sets that left-hand corner of the country apart from other prov …

'At Home with History' is a collection of real life stories that bring to life the glamorous and not-so-glamorous social histories of selected heritage homes in Greater Vancouver-stories of brothels and bootleggers, secret rooms, and Shakespearean-style murders. An Italian family survives the depression by selling booze and sandwiches from their ea …

“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 …

Longlisted for the ReLit Award (2006)

Going to New Orleans is the story of Lewis King, a jazz trumpet player who lands a gig in the Big Easy. King is a genius on cornet, but his private life is emotionally, morally, and financially bankrupt. He’s a heavy drinker and compulsive sexual manipulator, prone to paranoid fits of violent rage. His girlfri …

'Touched' renders the emotional and intellectual implosion experienced by Jade King, a young university student. This debut novel challenges the social stigma attached to such altered states and traces the effects of physical violation and psychic trauma. Lundgren encourages a critical examination of current psychiatric labels and treatments throug …

A wonderful hybrid of post-modern genre-bending and conventional narrative-an exploration of a state of mind rather than a description of events. This work deals with subjects as varied as memory; rewriting notions of history; erotic latitude; the blurred border between sleep, dream and reality; isolation; loss; pleasure and change.

This feat represents the first and only shared prize of publication for the 3-Day Novel Contest. One, a nightmarish vision of a land in decline, the other, a finely crafted tale of family history and the effects of the past on the present, rich in mood and evocative in its language.

Joint winners of the 1993 3-Day Novel-Writing Contest

'A Circle of Birds' is an impressionistic, finely wrought tale of lost memory, tangled history, despair and discovery. It is a journey through much Canadian and world history; a mind-melting descent into mental illness, a sordid yarn of death and twisted love.

"This is a surprising tour-de-force, and its author should be praised for it; his vision i …