Search results for ""Anvil Press""

Atomic Storybook is a novel about a young painter named Owen who is regularly abducted by beings he calls "the space pricks." These otherworldly visitors perform experiments on him, befuddle him with an absurd riddle about the moon, and show him scenes from his previous lives - one as a 12th century English monk; in another he shares the ward with Albert Einstein's son, Eduard, in the Burghölzli mental hospital. Through all of this, and his lengthy existential conversations with physics professor, Chesley Keeping, Owen comes to doubt the nature of everything around him - all that stuff most of us like to call "reality." Atomic Storybook is a new novel from the author of Spat the Dummy. It's about the early years of Albert Einstein, an explosion on the moon, and a group of friends who feel like they are living in a long, strange dream. A delightful stew of lust, blood, ennui and physics, Atomic Storybook is also about living and dying in what is, undeniably, an illusion. Praise for Atomic Storybook: "Macdonald does an excellent job through multiple perspectives of keeping the reader on edge as to what is real and what is not. ... It's a barometer of excellent writing when a novel can get you to stop reading, causing you to daydream and get lost in one magnificently imagined scene." (The Winnipeg Review) "The humour in Spat was dark, bloody, and laugh-out-loud funny and Storybook is even better. It is also a more thoughtful and emotionally nuanced book and makes the reader experience Macdonald's stated goal as an author to 'feel the shock of the future as it splashes over me like a bucket of ice water on a sunburn.' " (Cape Breton Post) Praise for Ed's previous novel, Spat the Dummy:: "This novel is unforgettable both for its subject matter and its form of narration. The style is electrifying and there are images that will burn in the reader's mind forever. Ed Macdonald is a gripping writer." (Alistair MacLeod, author of No Great Mischief, winner of the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award)

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'The Devil You Know' is the follow-up volume to Farrell's acclaimed debut collection, 'Sugar Bush & Other Stories'. The stories in 'The Devil You Know' deal with the familiar, yet ever-engrossing, territories of sex, love, work, birth, and death. Life's defining moments are explored through the eyes of female characters, from children to teens to adults. Family relationships, particularly between mothers and daughters, are a central theme of this collection. All families have secretsand things unspoken, but eventually these dark truths come to light, often in surprising and transformative ways. "Farrell effectively forges her image as a bad-ass version of Alice Munro. Like Munro, she's a short story writer who focuses on the lives of girls and women in small-town Canada, but Farrell's characters get high on mushrooms and dabble in BDSM." - The Georgia Straight There are points in Jenn Farrell's amazing collection that I felt like I was listening in on the most intimate conversations of strangers-I was rapt with attention, but almost guilty for being privy to such intimacy. 'The Devil You Know' treads familiar territory-small town ennui, adolescent love, grief and self-destruction-but does it with such emotional acuity that it doesn't feel familiar at all, it feels extraordinary. - Catherine Hanrahan author of 'Lost Girls and Love Hotels'

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'Black Rabbit & Other Stories' is a debut collection of great intensity and versatility. The stories range from the fantastic to the gritty, from urban dystopias to worlds of dreamlike possibility. Even in their frequent explorations of brutality, the author remains honest and true to the motivations of his characters and the machinations of the worlds in which they find themselves. These are sure-footed narratives that move with a pre-destined deliberation into a universe that is oftenfraught with desperation and apparent hopelessness; but, ultimately, we find ourselves on a path to redemption, an acceptance of what is, in the final analysis, an incomprehensible matrix. Existential and reflective, brutal and honest, these are stories that will leave you questioning the essence of existence, your own humanity, and the humanity of those around you. This is deft storytelling from a talented new voice. "Difalco is at his strongest when writing about relationships - focusing upon the inherent drama of tight-knit Italian families, couples on the rock, or even corpulent characters' relationships to food and their own bodies. Let's continue to hope he continues to mine the strange lives of his particular brand of disenfranchised heros. In all that roughness, there are diamonds." - Quill & Quire "These are thoughtful, enigmatic stories drawing the reader in with sharp detail, poetic phrasing and recognizable characters. Though we're dealing with thugs, prostitutes and crack heads, they are all folks you'll feel uncomfortably at home with. That's Difalco's magic: scrape characters from the bottom of society's bowl and reveal them in literary daylight as powerless dreamers, failed mothers, caged creatures." - Front & Centre

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Following the success of his novel, 'The Dreamlife of Bridges', Robert Strandquist makes a much-awaited return to the short story form. As always, Strandquist's works explores relationships both familial and sexual, and plumbs the unspoken communications where things go haywire. This collection is more eclectic than his first collection, 'The Inanimate World', covering themes of nature, of building and destruction. Settings are extreme or post-apocalyptic and walk the line of magic realism. Despite the sometimes-alien landscapes his characters inhabit, there is always the motif of adults navigating the riparian paths of longing, love and loss. "The writing is so beautiful, the language shining, enlightening a sacramental universe ... It is not the smallness, nor the dog, but the barking that is important, the raging against the coming of the night." -Prairie Fire "Strandquist's prose is spare and precise, studded with startling, evocative images. ... Strandquist has a wildimagination and an awe-inspiring mastery of language and form ...'A Small Dog Barking' is an excellent collection, well worth reading and rereading." -Books in Canada "Strandquist once again proves he's incapable of writing a dull sentence." -The Vancouver Sun

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Debut novel from the author of '19 Knives' and 'New Orleans is Sinking'. 'Salvage King, Ya!' is a gritty, down-to-earth story of a hockey player's last few years in the minors. Drinkwater, an almost-got-to-the-NHL tough-mouthed romantic is skidding through the tail end of his 30s on a high-octane journey of self-actualization. Chip-toothed and soaring he struggles to come to terms with the conflicting aspirations of his youth and the reality of inheriting the family junkyard. Roving.Luminous. Rowdy. Funny. "If it's the best hockey book ever written, does that make it The Great Canadian Novel?" -The Danforth Review "A brilliant work . . . a postmodern Canadian classic" -The National Post "A wonderfully fierce and funny book . . . imagine Hunter S. Thompson on hockey skates" -The Vancouver Sun "Relentlessly, dizzyingly energetic" -The Globe & Mail

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'The Door Is Open' is a compassionate, reflective, and informative memoir about three-and-a-half years spent volunteering at a skid row drop-in centre in Vancouver's downtown eastside. In an area most renowned for its shocking social ills, and the notorious distinction of holding the country's "very poorest forward sortation area of all 7,000 postal prefixes," Bart Campbell dismantles our hard-held notions about poverty, the disenfranchised, substance abuse, and the nature of charity.'The Door Is Open' is one man's story of a transformative journey into the complicated and complex world of poverty. Finalist BC Book Prize Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize "His narrative reads like a 1930s 'noir' journey into the seamier sides of cities once prowled by the likes of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. It is this straight-up style that is both the book's strength and, on occasion, its only weak link. Readers looking for a sense of hope will find little of it in Campbell'sgritty descriptions. Indeed, some readers might mistake his unrelenting portrayl of skid row inhabitants as representative of the homeless population across Canada, most of whom are not victims of addiction or mental illness, but of an economy that has been stacked against them for most of their lives, if not for generations before." - Quill & Quire "What is most refreshing about Campbell's memoir is that it neither self-aggrandizes nor propagates a misinformed political message. His work has an objective tone and each chapter is well researched...this is one of the best books I've read all year." - Discorder Finalist City of Vancouver Book Prize

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A blackly comic new novel from Vancouver author Grant Buday, based on his eight glorious years working in a mass production bakery. Dickensian in magnitude, 'White Lung' is a sardonic portrait of B.C.'s racial conflicts and chaotic economy. Buday's writing is lean and crisp, thoroughly engaging, and incisive." - Quill & Quire "This is Vancouver novelist Grant Buday's best book yet." - Broken Pencil Finalist, City of Vancouver Book Prize

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Using the numerical structure of pi (3.1415), Mechanophilia is a collaborative epic poem by the American poet Vi Khi Nao and Canadian poet Sarah Burgoyne that follows the omniscient voluble conversations and complaints of ad hoc biblical characters as they attempt to make sense of themselves on an ordered, disordered planet. Nao and Burgoyne, who have never met, began this project after discovering a mutual love of math and unending collaborations. This book, the first of four volumes presently completed, represents the first 1,000 digits of pi. Anachronistic in proportion, this work attempts to queer and rewrite myths in precise, restrictive numerical pi chronology, yet its verses remain free and ludic, time-travelling at will and often looping in present-day figures (Elon Musk, Lady Gaga, Cai Guo-Qiang, Phoebe Philo, Virgil Abloh, Donald Trump) and concerns. Feministic, irreverent, and supremely loquacious, Mechanophilia presents infinity as something reachable yet unrelated to linear time.

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This first collection by Dale Tracy is the atmosphere that derelict bicycles breathe. Like weeds, ones we've built, they burgeon. These poems wonder what sort of a performance thinking is-they perform their own logical hysteria, that emotion that feels what the other emotions feel like. Unconventional but interested in convention, they turn the world in on itself until "[i]t's almost like a curtain / has been pulled and it's a different world. / A curtain has been pulled, but I can't see the curtain." Dale Tracy mines the intersection of the surreal and the philosophical, with a sprinkling of Samuel Beckett and a dash of Hélène Cixous. Tracy is a fresh, original voice in Canadian poetry, locking her startling surprises and beautiful enigmas in quiet but emphatic lines. Each poem in Derelict Bicycles takes things too far, to the edges of its own form

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The city of Fontainebleau, situated on the banks of the Detroit River, is undergoing growing pains and strange things are happening. There's something poisonous in the water, something menacing in the sky, and the soil, laced with an ancient curse, is yielding up unidentified bones along with corn. In this collection of linked stories (part surreal picaresque, part dark comedy, and part murder mystery) magic meets the mundane as misfits and miscreants struggle to free themselves from untenable situations. A girl with mermaid syndrome disappears into a field, a fugitive boy dreams of finding anonymity in Toronto while his abandoned pregnant girlfriend hallucinates his second coming, and a nostalgic chambermaid finds her memories vanish when she puts on a stranger's wig. There's a rash of killings in the city that attract a lovesick police officer. No one knows who's responsible for the crimes, but the city has plenty of candidates, like the crazy son of a judge who murdered a man in Disney World and the grieving vandal who's obsessed with the idea of cutting a woman in half. Then there are the abusive husbands, snuff film producers, inconspicuous con women, and pederasts who live secret double lives. Are the characters in this oddly probable world masters or victims of their own fate? How do their lives intersect? Is it likely that destruction will ultimately prevail over this desolate land, or will consciousness, like a flaming firebird, lead at least some of the city's inhabitants to self-acceptance, redemption, or escape? Praise: "A darkly engrossing and artfully composed sequence of stories from a contemporary master of the form - Sonik's fearsome prose shines sublime light on the plain-sight secrets of modern life." -Lee Henderson, author of The Man Game and The Road Narrows as You Go

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Fool's Gold: The Life and Legacy of Vancouver's Official Town Fool is the second release in Jesse Donaldson's 49.2: Tales from the Off Beat, an ongoing series dedicated to celebrating the eccentric and unusual aspects of Vancouver. In Fool's Gold, Donaldson explores the legacy of Joachim Foikis. On April 1, 1968, a tall, bespectacled, 35-year-old former social worker named Joachim Foikis received $3,500 from the Canada Council for the Arts in order to finance a unique, self-imposed mission unseen since Elizabethan England: reinvent the vanished tradition of "Town Fool." The 35-year-old Foikis, who held two university degrees (one in economics from the University of Berlin, and the other in literature from the University of British Columbia), was already well known throughout the city for his off-kilter antics. His aim, according to interviews with The Sun and The Province, was "to spread joy and confusion" while at the same time "mock the four pillars of society: money, status, respectability, and conformity." Praise for Donaldson's previous book, This Day in Vancouver: "Donaldson combed through archives all around the city and consulted with experts of all stripes to put together the book. The result is a fascinating read - it's everything you never knew about Vancouver and didn't think to ask. Once you flip through this book, you'll never look at the city the same way again." (The Province)

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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 shift cabdriver, deckhand, bartender, emergency room security guard, reporter and even sunk to the depths of freelance journalism, without losing his sense of humour. Whether he's writing about delivering the news of imminent Nuclear Armageddon during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the history of umbrellas, (serious topic in Rain City), the vanishing game of Cribbage (a rainy day pastime), X-treme Sports, vintage sports cars or the proliferation of anti-depressant meds, he's still that a - hole who's always sticking his nose into other peoples' business'. Part memoir, part polemic, Rain City, is his version of a fat old Sixties rock band's Greatest Hits album."

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Oh my goodness. Did you ever get to thinking that "down on your luck" isn't just an expression? And that what we need here is a bigger statement? Something that adequately describes the scope of the situation? Like when your ex-wife spends all of her time angrier than a five-dollar pistol at everything on the planet, but mostly at you (well, really only at you, and she brings back your record collection, but she sets fire to it on your porch and the flames spread to your house and that just proves what you've said all along: that she is crazier than a box of frogs. Or when your ninety-year-old stick of a father uses his gnarled up knuckly fingers to apply "the nut twister" on you every chance that he gets. And you haven't been with a woman for a very long time and about the only chance you will ever have of getting laid again is to crawl up a chicken's ass and wait. This shit is dire. Well, what I mean is that "down on your luck" doesn't quite cut it when bad luck has become a way of life. You just have to remember: You can have everything you want in this life. Provided all you want is a stained mattress and a hangover. Skin House is a story about two guys who end up in the same bar they started out in. Maybe they're slightly better off than they were at the start. Or maybe not. One has a girlfriend though. They both have a little extra cash, enough to order nachos whenever they want to without going through their pockets first. They're not dead, and that's something right there. And they're not arrested, which is the quite surprising part.

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Art critic Clement Greenberg, champion of abstract expressionism, is more interested in silencing his rival Harold Rosenberg than with the threat of nuclear destruction. Greenberg is driving from New York to the Emma Lake artist colony in Saskatchewan, where he intends to silence Rosenberg once and for all. With him is infamous Marxist Louis Althusser, who escaped prosecution for strangling his wife in France on an insanity plea. Althusser is heading to a Saskatchewan hospital for LSD therapy. Pursuing them is Jean Claude Piche, a veteran of the conflicts in Indochina and Algeria, contracted to execute Althusser for the unpunished murder. The 1950s were Greenberg's decade. Yet by 1962, everywhere Greenberg looks he is bedevilled by Andy Warhol's Campbell Soup cans, just as everywhere Althusser looks he sees capitalist decay. Jean Claude catches Greenberg and Althusser at Niagara Falls. The enigmatic arch patriot Swen catches all three in North Dakota. Convinced that they are communist subversives, Swen imprisons and interrogates them even as, hour by hour, minute by minute, Khrushchev and Kennedy threaten to launch World War III. An absurdist romp, Atomic Road charts its own course between historical veracity, fictional invention, and the unfettered egotism of two mad intellectuals.

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Long Ride Yellow is the debut novel from two-time Journey Prize Finalist Martin West. The novel explores the limits of sexual desire and willfully prods the veil at the edge of reality. Nonni is a dominatrix who likes to push the boundaries; she is also easily bored. Her disdain for all that is conventional and "vanilla" launches her on a journey of personal discovery: first via the local swingers' scene, then through the world of clandestine S&M clubs, and on to more adventurous and dangerous "private" diversions. She eventually pushes the envelope so far that she attracts the attention of alien beings she refers to only as the "Woodenheads." They do strange things to her, alchemic things, as she is slowly transformed into wood and steel and electricity. You won't soon forget Nonni; she won't let you. Praise for Cretacea and Other Stories from the Badlands: "[I]n Martin West's impressive debut short story collection ... readers will encounter echoes of Flannery O'Connor and Barry Hannah." (Foreword Magazine) "the 11 tales in Martin West's debut collection ... often surprise with strange, startling images." (Alberta Views)

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'Valery the Great' is a crackling, electric collection of dark humour that follows the bizarre and beautiful lives of its eccentric protagonists. Sometimes sweet and gentle, sometimes sharply sarcastic, the unique narrative voices of this collection are always powerfully touching. In the title story, a young woman from New Brunswick uses figure skating as a way to fill the void left by her deceased father, and ends up as a Russian circus performer who dances on ice with two skating bears. We also meet an unlikely swim-team member, a crude and ineffective search and rescue volunteer, and Sparky, an ancient boxing trainer who recalls the tumultuous life of his childhood friend, a dwarf named Maurice. Throughout 'Valery the Great' we find characters who need to escape their lives, and in the attempt find alternate ways of living. they float outside of the harsh and unromantic everyday existence and into an alternate reality that allows them dreams of solace and fulfilled potential. McCluskey expertly mixes the dramatic with the deadpan to create a very readable and exciting collection, filled with characters who are connected by their longing to be heard. "It may say something about Canada and Canadians that one of our canonical twentieth-century novels was called 'Beautiful Losers'. ...it's the many unique characters and settings that stay with the reader and make this collection well worth reading. Not all of McCluskey's losers are beautiful, but there is real beauty in 'Valery the Great,/i>." - Prairie Fire "Masterfully crafted short stories expose remarkable qualities of ordinary people ...This whole collection is about the unusual. These are stories about people who are ordinary, people who don't stand out in the crowd and yet somehow, they do extraordinary things - although not necessarily good extraordinary things. McCluskey understands that somewhere in the hearts of us all is the desire to be recognized for what we do. Deep down, we want our lives to be special. This is an eclectic, darkly comedic collection, entertaining in their content and hard hitting in their message." - The Halifax Chronicle Herald

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'Afflictions & Departures' is a collection of first-person experiential essays by writer and academic Madeline Sonik. Although Sonik explores some of the salient personal experiences of her young life, the essays in 'Afflictions & Departures' are not traditional memoir. In addition to incidents and feelings recaptured from memory, Sonik seeks out connections between the microcosm of of the daily events of her childhood and the social, historical, and scientific trends of the time. 'Afflicitons & Departures' begins by considering the turbulent and changing nature of the world in the late 1950s and early 1960s-the world in which the author was conceived and born. Like many couples of that era, Madeline Sonik's parents focused on shared social and economic ambitions at the expense of authentic personal feeling. These ambitions would erode and, by the 1970s, completely collapse. In 'Afflictions & Departures ' Sonik exercises both intellectual depth and emotional range. The essays are as incisive as they are deeply moving, and leave the reader with a sense of history as it was lived, not as it is codified in countless textbooks. "Startlingly original, Madeline Sonik's moving story of her childhood defies all our expectations of memoir. She captures crystalline moments of childhood memory and links them in a daisy-chain with corresponding events of the tumultuous societal change taking place outside her home. It is North America in the 1960s and 70s and her letter-perfect, child's-eye view of the world brings back that time with such intensity that the reader can almost smell and taste it. Droll, tragic, and absolutely compelling, 'Afflictions and Departures' is a visceral portrayal of a family imploding." -Jury, Charles Taylor Prize for literary non-fiction "Her memory is dustless, capacious, uncanny. With a storyteller's skill and a poet's depth of vision, she recreates her childhood with one eye on her family and the other on the larger world. Significant cultural markers sit side-by-side with the small, painful intensities of her childhood. This memoir is crammed with pathos, yet is written with a light touch. I adore the narrator who never falls into self-pity or narcissism. The clarity of her vision makes the prose gleam and transforms autobiography into art." -Lorna Crozier, author of 'Small Beneath the Sky' "Honesty has to be at the centre of any memoir, and 'Afflictions & Departures' pulsates with raw, straightforward truth. ... Sonikhas overcome enormous challenges and turned them into literary jewels. This book encourages readers to think about family, memory and history - and above all, resilience." - Times Colonist Winner of the City of Victoria Butler Book Prize Finalist, Charles Taylor Prize for literary non-fiction Nominated for the BC National Award for Canadian non-Fiction

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'Spaz' introduces Walter Finch, an ungainly kid who survives his cloying suburban childhood to make it only as far as the local mall, where he rises through the ranks to become manager of a shoe store. Unlike his other childhood friends, who either flee suburbia or remain as resigned fixtures, Walter is content with his lot and finds the shoe store a perfect environment in which to pursue his grander ambitions. As he delves further into his passion for shoe design, alone in his apartment at night, Walter comes to believe that if he can design the perfect woman's shoe, he will ultimately find the perfect foot to fit it. He becomes convinced that this path will lead him to his princess. His mission becomes all-consuming and plunges Walter into a separate reality: his own fairytale. As things spin out of , Walter's eventual salvation arrives in an unlikely form, should he choose to recognize and accept it. 'Spaz' is a skewed spin on the tale of Cinderella, a complementary follow-up to Bonnie Bowman's first novel, 'Skin', with its elements of 'Beauty and the Beast'. Shoes figure prominently in this novel, and the protagonist views them as both his nemesis and his salvation. They begin his story, he believes they will end it, and they do. Shoes represent every step of his journey. " 'Spaz' really is terrific. Bowman demystifies the aberrant. As in her debut novel, 'Skin' (which I loved when I read it a decade ago), her themes are ugliness and beauty and how the bodyis the engine for desire. If that makes 'Spaz' seem too serious, don't worry. It's jolly fun." - Uptown Magazine (Winnipeg) "In this sly story of a misfit visionary, Bowman assembles a beguiling cast of characters, striking a perfect balance between the completely outrageous and the completely true-to-life. This is a novel that never stops entertaining." - Lynn Coady author of 'The Antagonist' and 'Mean Boy'

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'Kaspoit!' is a novel of our times, told in the language of our times. It's set in the Lower Mainland of Vancouver. The time is now and gangland crime is rampant. Seemingly random murders and takedowns are exploding at a disturbing rate. Criminals are brazen, the cops are jaded, and someone is trying to lay the blame for the disappearance of dozens of women on the head of one man. Shakespearean in its intricacies of plotting and resplendence of vivid characters, the story puts speculative illustration to some of the most brutal Western Canada crimes of the recent past. The story is told almost entirely in dialogue, the scant narrative passages are brief and poetic, written in an invented form of imagistic neologisms. This mode of prose transmits the action at an accelerated, psychologically penetrating pace that hurls the reader through the varied and complicated scenes with a velocity not seen in standard fiction. "... After William Pickton was arrested, media and activist groups had a field day speculating about why women were going missing from the Downtown Eastside for years before the Vancouver Police or RCMP appeared to notice. That's the question Bolen tries to answer in Kaspoit! It's a novel about perception and agendas, about how what we see, and what we think we know, are determined by what we're looking for. ... Bolen's stripped-to-the-frame, dialogue-driven story will be as shocking to CanLit-conditioned sensibilities as a slap in the face with a bag ofcold nails." - BC BookWorld " 'Kaspoit!' is either a sublime literary work of near genius or is one of the most wretched wallows in the dark mire of the soul ever published. ... Reader beware, 'Kaspoit!' is not for the easily upset, but, if you can handle it, you'll soon realize you're reading a work of stark brilliance. ... The story itself is so compelling that the reader returns to the book, though repelled by it. Finally, the conspiracy it posits is startling compared to the vague news coverage that the infamous pig farm case received." - Victoria Times Colonist "A tour de force of thug-life horror, the book is a fictionalized account of what might have gone on at a certain Port Coquitlam pig farm where the DNA of 32 women was found during a massive forensic investigation. If you've ever felt that the publication ban on Robert Pickton's speedy trial and conviction smelled strongly of cover-up, this is for you." - The Georgia Straight

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In these pages you will encounter gamblers and adventurers, conmen and conwomen, rodomontades and ragamuffins, outright fools and outrageous liars. Scalawags, the lot of them. But you can be an adventurer, a conman or conwoman, a fool, liar, gambler, rodomontade or ragamuffin and not be a scalawag. Many adventurers are not even interesting, come to think of it, let alone scalawags. There is an ineffable quality, an indefinable something or other that sets some people apart, places themin the special category that Jim Christy calls "scalawag." You might call them something else: nuts, perhaps. And quite frankly in many instances-George Francis Train, for instance, or Louis De Rougemont-you'd probably be right. But likewise you don't have to be a crackpot to be a scalawag: Two Gun Cohen, for instance, or Lady Jane Digby. What you have to be is outrageous with a bit of what Andre Malraux, an adventurer and liar, perhaps-;but not a scalawag-designated, in reviving an old French word, farfelu. It means that you are willing to risk everything, whether on a grand or small scale, on the craziest of schemes, the wildest of notions. "Curious cases of cannibalism, extreme sado-masochism, and generally irrational behaviour abound, making 'Scalawags' the perfect balm anyone attempting to cloister their desires in a bid for self improvement." - Steven Schelling "My advice: Keep your copy of 'Scalawags' in the bathroom. Or on your bedside table. Or in the bag you carry on thebus. It's perfectly suited to those times when you're seeking a momentary escape. There's nothing like outrageous lives and flamboyant characters to take you out of your dreary day-to-day." - Robert J. Wiersema, The Vancouver Sun

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'Dirtbags' is a novel about reckoning-with one's past, one's choices, and one's expectations for the future. Spider is a scrappy kid growing up in rural B.C., and when a tragic event causes her world to implode she heads to Vancouver for solace, distraction, and experience. We witness a shifting morality as Spider moves through chaos and anarchy, often of her own choosing, with no certainty of truth besides what is found in brief encounters. She soaks up the world around her, getting swept up in an accelerated scene of punk music, partying, booze and drugs, forever dogged by a nagging question from her past: "When everything in your life is fleeting, what do you hold onto?" 'Dirtbags' deals with the bonds between women, the cycle of poverty, self-destruction, loss of family, the outlaw code, and the fragile beauty of the human condition. This is Teresa McWhirter's follow-up novel to 'Some Girls Do'. " 'Some Girls Do' reads like candy, but offers philosophical tidbits and personal revelations. ..." - 'BC BookWorld' "...a sharp poetic glimpse into the yearning but hopelessly unfocused lives of a group of marginal urbanites in a small West Coast city ..." - 'Elle Canada'

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The stories in 'Sugar Bush & Other Stories' deal with gender relations, love, and sex in a frank way. Most of the pieces feature female protagonists who navigate their young adult years in some questionable ways. They make some ill-advised choices, which are driven by their naïve quests for "individuality," while at the same time having an almost pathological need to be loved by everyone-especially men. While the stories in 'Sugar Bush' are intended for an adult audience, they employsome of the conventions of the young adult genre. They are simple, straight-ahead narratives. Part breathless teenaged confessional and part wistful and wiser looks back, 'Sugar Bush' is the first collection of short fiction by award-winning author, Jenn Farrell. "Populated by eccentrics, 'Sugar Bush' is a collection of coming-of-age stories. What makes them unique and engaging in what is often an overwrought genre is Farrell's humour and sense of irony."

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'Shylock' is an award-winning play about a Jewish actor who finds himself condemned by his own community for his portrayal of Shakespeare's notorious Jew.

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But the sun, and the ships, and the fish, and the waves, Conyer Clayton's follow-up to her award-winning debut, We Shed Our Skin Like Dynamite, is a collection of prose poems that employs surrealism, humour, and body horror to cope with CPTSD, assault, loss, fear, and the memories of it all. The narrator weaves her way through largely aquatic landscapes-water parks, ponds, beast-filled lakes, vast oceans. She walks through time, reverting to childhood and back within a few lines, has the sureness of knowledge that exists only in dreamscapes, and foreshadows the inevitable with a calm derived from accepting the absurd. These poems, hallucinatory and unexpected, are threaded by repetition: Here is another car accident. Here is another man to flee from. Here is questioned memory. Here is the site of grief, revisited, and sometimes, within it, tentatively, hope. In these poems, Clayton explores how we question the validity of our own memories, especially those related to abuse and assault, and the way we forget-or obsess over potentially forgetting-memories of those who've died. These poems validate dreams, by proxy, and all internal experience as authentic and valid experience that carries wisdomeven when we don't know it.

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The poems in Catastrophe Theories reflect an increasingly unstable, surreal, and catastrophic world. Written over the past decade, the poems in Mari-Lou Rowley's oracular work capture the zeitgeist of the moment. A world where human folly and frailty compete with corpocracy and technological determinism against the stubborn magnificence of the natural world. Yet, these poems are neither prescriptive nor hopeless. Exploring the lives and concepts of mathematicians such as Euclid, Hypatia, Alan Turing, and René Thom, along with dream imagery and her love of science and nature, Rowley toys with perception, fractures reality into kaleidoscopic visions, then brings the reader back to small, everyday moments of truth or joy. As her speaker says, "Rejoice or regret. You decide."

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il virus brings together 113 poems written over seventy-eight days during the spring 2020 pandemic lockdown in Toronto. These responses to daily news and eclectic media posts encompass dogs (lots of them), Zambonis, jazz and blues, Jackie Gleason, mathematics, thermodynamics, and geography (real and imagined). These miniatures are Lillian Necakov's most spare poems, but each is jam-packed with explosives: anger, grief, love, need, and a foraging for ink.

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Cinematic film, the art form that came into its own in the 20th Century, is not only familiar to all of us, but is likely the form that lodges most clearly in memory. Like music - and the music employed in a film - scenes come back, often carrying emotion as well as remembrance. One such film is Harold and Maude, the 1971 production that brought Bud Cort and Ruth Gordon to what are possibly their most memorable roles, and the film that locked so many Cat Stevens songs in mind. A cockeyed love story that stretches the definition of a May/December romance, it reveals the fact that love can indeed be blind to matters of age or appearance. This book takes us back half a century to when this one-of-a-kind film was released - a time with its own kind of turmoil, but a time as well of a different kind of innocence - one worth exploring again. Fifty years, traditionally a golden anniversary, is surely an appropriate time to celebrate.

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2020 GERALD LAMPERT MEMORIAL AWARD SHORTLIST In acclaimed short-fiction writer Heather Birrell's rollicking debut full-length poetry collection, Mr. T, Joni Mitchell, Fidel Castro, and the poet's mother (among others) barge in to distract and derail the poet's dreams. The poems in this book are playful, hallucinatory, and often funny. They explore the far-fetchedness and perseverance of love between friends and family members, the importance of libraries and locked mental health wards, and ways to live with meaning in the face of a looming apocalypse. Birrell's poetry lines-weaving through an acrobatic breadth of forms and tones-are both precise and plainspoken, and showcase an odd, intuitive logic, embracing the surrealism of this world we're stuck in.

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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, insightful, and wild. The novel flicks between the traumas of Sissi's young childhood and early adulthood, spinning a web of connections between her history and the stories she begins to unspool as she studies writing in school. Raw, violent, and at times absurd, Borderline treats all things - the city, class, education, mental health, despair, sexuality, love, and art, with an unflinching, unblinking regard.

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Bounce House is a collection of small containers for the uncontainable. Restrained in form but not feeling, Harper's fourth book explores the cyclical nature of grief, imperfect parenting, and our willingness to jump without promise of a safe landing. Measured and meticulously weighted, these poems are playful and poignant as they navigate the strange terrain around losing a loved one: how the past and present blur together, the dead simultaneously here and missing, and how joy moves inevitably forward, as if on wheels.

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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 influences have snowballed: Lisa Jarnot, Alice Burdick, Richard Huttel, Opal Louis Nations, Joanne Kyger, Bill Knott, Max Jacob, Larry Fagin, Heather Christle, Charles North, Emily Petit, Paul Guest, James Tate, Valéry Larbaud, Joe Brainard, Matthew Zapruder, Harryette Mullen, Dara Wier, Dag T. Straumsvåg, Mark Strand, Wislawa Szymborska, Mary Ruefle, John Ashbery, Sommer Browning, Jim Smith, Benjamin Peret, Renee Gladman, and more. In this eclectic, pleasurable gathering of poems and sequences, Mr. Ross unapologetically leaps from howls of grief and despair to zany incursions into surrealism and the absurd. He embraces this panoply of approaches to respond to our cantankerous existential dilemma. All that, and it's structured after Bela Bartók's String Quartet No. 4! Get a room and enjoy.

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The Globe 100 (The Globe & Mail's favourite books of 2018). Silver IPPY Award (Independent Publisher Book Awards). Hider/Seeker is the debut fiction collection from award-winning poet Jen Currin. These stories are about addiction and meditation, relationships and almost-relationships, solitude and sexuality. They take place in cafes, in snowy woods, on city street corners, and at Zen retreats - where conversations happen in the margins of books and filthy shoes are treated with reverence. Ex-wives reunite only to be confronted with their past; an aunt believes she has made a heart-breaking discovery about her niece; a seemingly never-ending hysterical pregnancy becomes the talk of a cafe. These stories are always unflinchingly honest in their portrayal of relationships - in particular the relationships of the book's LGBTQ+ characters - as they navigate spirituality, monogamy, and sex. Currin invites the reader into the complicated lives of her characters and invites them to stay.

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IPPY Gold Medal (Independent Publisher Book Awards). Domestic satire meets gripping suspense in Straight Circles, the final, explosive chapter of The Lizzy Trilogy. The original and eccentric cast of characters return in this genre-bending thriller, but not everyone's getting out alive. Newly pregnant Lizzy arrives to revisit old haunts in the bleak Scottish town that she escaped years ago as a teenage runaway. Along with a yearning to rediscover her roots, she wants to confront her harrowing past and learn what happened to her mother, whose disappearance has remained unsolved. Instead, she comes face to face with her estranged father, whose violent side soon emerges with devastating consequences. But someone else is watching, and Lizzy's father will pay. Oliver is back, and this time there will be no waiting, no savouring, and no patience for the small-time victims and criminals in his way. He's ready to claim his little bird' - and to show her exactly what happened to her mother. What Oliver doesn't know is that someone is tracking him, and will do anything to poach his most elusive prize. In Straight Circles, Lizzy returns to the heart of the story, where the stakes are higher than ever. Where it all began is where it will all end, in a chilling confrontation with the man who has been tracking her for years. In a disturbing finale, we are left to watch as Lizzy walks straight into the path of two dark and dangerous killers - and makes the biggest mistake of her life. Praise for Nondescript Rambunctious: "... a thriller that succeeds by nodding politely to the formula, then turning it on its head." (Quill & Quire)

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Winner of the City of Vancouver Book Award Finalist for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. Carleigh Baker likes to make light in the dark. Whether plumbing family ties, the end of a marriage, or death itself, she never lets go of the witty, the ironic, and perhaps most notably, the awkward. Despite the title, the resolution in these stories isn't always tragic, but it's often uncomfortable, unexpected, or just plain strange. Character digressions, bad decisions, and misconceptions abound. While steadfastly local in her choice of setting, Baker's deep appreciation for nature takes a lot of these stories out of Vancouver and into the wild. Salmon and bees play reoccurring roles in these tales, as do rivers. Occasionally, characters blend with their animal counterparts, adding a touch of magic realism. Nature is a place of escape and attempted convalescence for characters suffering from urban burnout. Even if things get weird along the way, as Hunter S. Thompson said, "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro." In Bad Endings, Baker takes troubled characters to a moment of realization or self-revelation, but the results aren't always pretty.

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Winner, the CAA Fred Kerner Book Award. Del Hanks is on the verge of academic tenure, but at forty she's also perched on the precipice of either the beginning or the end of the rest of her life. Black Star is a dark comedy, both bitingly funny and transgressive, an unflinching and unsentimental exploration of the female experience, academia, and the idea of power that burns in the mind as white as acid. Medved's new novel is a searing critique of a world we all know too well, one of sexual exploitation, manipulation, and the subtle machinations of power that Black Star filters through the lens of academia. It is at once poetic, tragic, disturbing and funny. PRAISE FOR BLACK STAR: "A "hideous narrative" about bad behaviour, Black Star elicits frequent guffaws. Philosopher-fools, what's not to like?" (Toronto Star) "The scholarly life has lent itself to fiction and satire for decades now (centuries, if you want to go back to Chaucer). ... Delorosa Hanks, the chaotic narrator of Black Star, is the latest heir in this line. By the second sentence of the scalding new novel by Vancouver author Maureen Medved, Hanks is referring to her academic rival as 'a lesion of carcinogenic proportions capable of rotting and destroying departments'. It just gets darker, funnier, and more acidic from there." (The Georgia Straight) "Maureen Medved masterfully explores her protagonists in all their spangled, fallible glory. Black Star plunges the reader into frantic academic rivalry. Is it paranoia or master manipulation? Every twist and turn will lead you down Medved's darkly compelling rabbit hole." (Eden Robinson, author of Son of a Trickster) "This wild novel is a powerful exploration of imposter syndrome taken to extremes and a story of how the sadistic, competitive world of academia intersects with one woman's unraveling sense of self. Suspenseful and beautifully written." (Zoe Whittall, author of The Best Kind of People, Giller Prize Finalist) "You can read this slender swift novel as a comedy of manners, or a sly take on the corrosions of academe, but on its lower frequencies Maureen Medved's brilliant new book is about the death of dreams and our lost hold on truth and reality, an often funny but finally harrowing look at a dystopia that's come to reside in each of our souls." (Charles D'Ambrosio, author of Loitering)

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