Outside
Emotional and uplifting, Outside is the story of a teacher's escape to Japan from classroom, country, and self in the wake of a small-town Ontario tragedy.
David Woods, a first-year teacher, shares his grade-4 students' passion for nature and their reluctance to be hemmed in by classroom walls. He pushes the boundaries of risk and the constraints of …
The Sacred Herb / The Devil's Weed
The Sacred Herb / The Devil's Weed is informative and even enlightening, but above all, it's a hilarious look at a humble plant that has entertained, inspired, and occasionally terrified so many for so long. Andrew Struthers directs his "brilliant madness" towards the ambivalent nature of marijuana, once the target of "reefer madness" hysteria and …
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 …
Shot Rock
When the smell of October's raked leaves gives way to that of morning frost, a mature Winnipeg man's fancy turns to thoughts of curling.
But this fall Blackie Timmerman has been hogging stones off the ice. His wife of twenty years Deirdre has left him; his precocious son Tino has moved out of the house and into political radicality, mentored by a r …
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 …
if wants to be the same as is
Drawn from 22 books of poetry published by David Bromige in his lifetime, if wants to be the same as is chronicles the career of one of contemporary poetry's most distinctive writers. Born in London, England, in 1933, raised in Canada, and a resident for most of his adult life of California, David Bromige is just as difficult to pin down in terms o …
Sitting Shiva on Minto Avenue, by Toots
Sitting Shiva on Minto Avenue, by Toots is the story of a man who had no obituary and no funeral and who would have left no trace if it weren't for the woman he'd called Toots, who took everything she remembered of him and — for seven days — wrote it down.
Erín Moure, a poet who once lived in Vancouver, begins this "work of the imagination" ("m …
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 …
Maria Mahoi of the Islands
Since its original publication in 2004, Maria Mahoi of the Islands has become a classic in its field, and an important document on the history of Indigenous Hawaiians known as Kanakas, who had an early presence across the Pacific Northwest and are now part of the broader Hawaiian diaspora across North America. Born in the mid-1850s on Vancouver Isl …
The News We Deserve
The News We Deserve: The Transformation of Canada's Media Landscape documents the most under-reported story in Canadian news: the behind-the-scenes takeovers, mergers, share swaps, regulatory maneuvers, and private ambitions that have reshaped the content and business models of today's print and online newspapers to privilege corporate profits and …
A Series of Dogs
John Armstrong uses his wry wit and vivid prose to evoke a life immeasurably enriched by one best friend after another. He tells boyhood tales of romping along the railroad tracks with Spooky the mutt, touching accounts of Sluggo the Rottweiler befriending sex workers, howl-inducing memories of laying a treasured friend to rest during a rain-and be …
The World, I Guess
The World, I Guess is a substantial book, six sections that demonstrate a command of a broad poetic range, a catholic range of interests, and echoes of a lifetime of reading and learning from Pound, Williams, Stanley, and others. The centrepiece is "The Flood," a long, complex, discursive poem whose subject is poesis and whose interest is in the wo …
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 …
Svend Robinson: A Life in Politics
Finalist, Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize Few politicians have enraged opponents, frustrated colleagues and polarized Canadians like Svend Robinson — but few embraced the causes he did. Over his twenty-five years as a New Democrat MP, Robinson was imprisoned for blocking loggers from clear-cutting in Clayoquot Sound, assaulted by police while …
Rebel Life
Extensively revised throughout and including a chapter of new material, Rebel Life chronicles the life of labour organizer, revolutionary, anarchist and labour spy Robert Gosden. Mark Leier's revisions incorporate new information about Gosden's career that has come to light since the first edition was published in 1999. Canada's west coast was rife …
Gardens Aflame
Accustomed to the dark, dripping stands of Douglas-fir, spruce and hemlock that blanketed the Hudson's Bay Company outposts on the remote western coast of the "new World," the first Europeans were surely startled to see the wide-open landscapes of the Garry oak meadows they encountered on Southern Vancouver Island — landscapes that might have rem …
Sturgeon Reach
Sturgeon Reach is the name some have given to a stretch of the Fraser River between Hope and Pitt Meadows, where its flow slows, and it deposits the gravel it's been carrying from the province's interior. Its story is one of rocks and stones, from its geological origins, from the mythic beginnings of human settlement, and from the arrival of Simon …
IKMQ
Roger Farr's IKMQ consists of sixty-four brief passages — stories, descriptions, instructions, scenarios, formulae — each involving the characters represented by the letters I, K, M and Q. Various clues, suggested by the rules of grammar and syntax, hint at connections and continuities, and at narrative peaking out from behind the screen of act …
Sweet England
Steve Weiner's harrowing portrayal of post-Thatcher England follows a man of no known origin and unstable personality and his efforts to re-enter society after a long and unexplained absence. The reader sees events through Jack's mostly uncomprehending eyes as he negotiates the margins of a London that resembles the city of memory and story only in …
City of Love and Revolution
City of Love and Revolution takes readers back to Vancouver in the sixties, the decade when everything changed for the Baby Boomer generation. Dozens of rarely seen photos accompany Lawrence Aronsen's account of the tumultuous decade, bringing to life the sights, the sounds, and the passions of the era of psychedelia and free love, when for a brief …
Every Day in the Morning (slow)
Every Day in the Morning (slow) is a work that looks and reads like no other. Sam, a composer, reflects on his floundering career, life with his lover, and tensions with his father. Some thoughts, like facial hair and breakfast, are mundane; others, like love, money and war, are often overwhelming. At turns laughable and vain, at others, tender and …
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 …
What Species of Creatures
The Europeans who colonized North America more than three centuries ago encountered fantastical creatures: flying squirrels, ruby-throated hummingbirds, the easily tamed beaver. Their literature of discovery — by turns comic, cruel, and adulatory — provides a revealing glimpse of the taxonomies they carried with them into their so-called New Wo …
Stranger Wycott's Place
Stranger Wycott's Place describes John Schreiber's explorations of the Chilcotin on foot, horseback, and by 4-wheel drive. A land of "mountains and old trails, coyotes and bighorn sheep, aboriginal folks, homesteaders, ranches and history," the Chilcotin begins north of Lillooet and lies between the Fraser River and the mighty Coast Mountain Range …
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 …
Topic Sentence
From the Introduction by Brian Fawcett "A first clue to how this book is going to work lies in the book's title: Topic Sentence. In the title story, written in 1970, Persky took on the two questions that dog every artist in the post-modern: What is the subject matter, and how can it be articulated? Since both questions are unanswerable, Persky twis …
The Woman In the Trees
Often, the way a story is told is as important as the story itself. This is true of the most recent novel by Gerry William, The Woman in the Trees.
Set during the time of first contact, The Woman in the Trees takes place around what is now Vernon, BC. The novel moves effortlessly from myth to dream time to narrative real time. Spanning the historic …
Kokanee
The Kootenays, a region of rivers, lakes and mountains in southeastern British Columbia, is home to the kokanee. This landlocked sibling of the sockeye salmon is an extravagant gift from the Pacific Ocean, an elusive flash of molten silver, a lustful reproductive torrent of fire-engine red, a marvel of interior adaptation, an icon of regional cultu …
Two Wolves at the Dawn of Time
In 1998, Dzawada'enuxw artist Marianne Nicholson scaled a vertical rock face in Kingcome Inlet to paint a massive pictograph to mark the continued vitality of her ancestral village of Gwa'yi. Two Wolves at the Dawn of Time is the story of that painting, of earlier politically defiant rock art, and of "coppers," ceremonial shields that are a central …
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 …
Tungsten John
The South Nahanni, one of North America's wildest and most spectacular rivers, rushes through this park in the southwest corner of the Northwest Territories. John Harris and his partner, climber extraordinaire Vivien Lougheed, mount an expedition to this glorious but dangerous region. Harris's conversational account builds momentum as the party fol …
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 …
