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Finalist for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. Winner of the City of Vancouver Book Award. Top 100 of 2017, Globe and Mail."e; Baker pushes readers to reconsider their desire for resolution. Eschewing the easy, the neat, the smoothed over, allows us to consider the things about ourselves we might not like. There's a political dimension to this. One thread running through this book is the threat of environmental collapse - drought, massive bee death, dwindling salmon stock - and humans' awkward interventions. "e; (The Globe and Mail)"e;Her characters possess an abundance of hard-luck stories, true, but she writes them as sometimes wrong and sometimes foolish and hence eminently human in their fallibility."e; (The Georgia Straight)"e;Baker is a skillful, sensitive writer with an uncanny gift for subtle, dark humor There is no judgment or condemnation in these stories, but a tender, deep savoring of the quirks that make us human."e; (Foreword Magazine)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, "e;When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro."e; In Bad Endings, Baker takes troubled characters to a moment of realization or self-revelation, but the results aren't always pretty.

Poetry. Music. Finalist, Raymond Souster Award League of Canadian Poets. [B]eautiful debut collection...too many great poems inside to quote...Gardiner's lush, piercing collection is layered with climatological subtext and personal history, sure enough of its voice to thaw the coldest of hearts.--BUST, Amber Tamblyn's Poetry Corner Writers, like skaters, score the blank sheet and test the edge of inclusion and exclusion. Most of these poems begin with a word from skating and push off to another topic. Others revisit ideas of femininity, control and language as pattern, or visit the past through movement, or enact principles from the rink such as symmetry, joy, endurance, crescendo and accent, revolution, response. The blade melts ice via friction and pressure. I drifted away from skating but the language is imprinted in me, too, a tracing, a line extending beyond the margins. (from SERPENTINE LOOP) These are engaging and poignant poems about life on and off the ice.

Winner, 35th International 3-Day Novel Contest Jack Minyard is a private eye down on his luck. He's badly overweight and on the wrong side of sixty. He's lost his marriage, and maybe a little of his mind, too. After narrowly escaping charges in a statewide fraud and money laundering scandal, Jack has been working private contracts and counting on the kindness of strangers (not to mention a pile of prescription drugs) to get by. In a last-ditch play to resurrect his career, Jack takes on a case that puts him on the wrong side of the tracks and in the midst of some of the roughest trade going.Praise for Thorazine Beach:"e;This book is recommended as a solid example of 'marathon' novel-writing and as a biting commentary on the cracks beneath social facades."e; (Foreword Reviews)Praise for Ruby, Ruby(the first in the Jack Minyard series):"e;Ruby, Ruby exemplifies the genre it features a couple of ugly murders in the finest 3-day tradition, weird cop Jimmy Page, a half dozen or so y'allin Tenneseeans both black and white and a church-going Rotarian detective who tells the story in a wisecracking style"e; (Vancouver Sun)

Poetry. Surrealism. Compiled and with an Afterword by Alessandro Porco. For over thirty years, Steve Venright has devoted himself to the liberation of the imagination, documenting hallucinatory trips through Southwestern Ontario's deliriomantic landscapes with his signature puns, portmanteaus, and spoonerisms. THE LEAST YOU CAN DO IS BE MAGNIFICENT: SELECTED & NEW WRITINGS is a generous gathering of Venright's most enduring and extraordinary poems, including the revised and expanded Manta Ray Jack and the Crew of the Spooner -- the most outlandish and hilarious seafaring tale since Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark. This volume also features an in-depth examination of Venright's work by scholar Alessandro Porco.

Poetry. A finalist for the Alfred G. Bailey Prize, IGNITE is 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 treatment and coma-induced insulin therapy. Merging memory and medical records, Kevin Spenst recreates his father's life through a cuckoo's nest of styles that both stand as witness and waltz to the interplay between memory, emotion and all our forms of becoming. ...with a fearless layering of voice, IGNITE is upfront and unswerving. A novel- esque torrent tracing a troubling history of illness, part confrontation and part chronicle, this collection is daring with its dark narrative. Here is a willingness for, and enviable strength in, extending poetic range. Ignite heals and ascends. There are books that need to be written and this is one of them. This is a collection which gives more and more with every read.--Sandra Ridley, judge, Alfred G. Bailey Prize A selection of poems from IGNITE won the Lush Triumphant Award for Poetry.

Poetry. Fiction. Literary Nonfiction. Food. SUSTENANCE: WRITERS FROM BC AND BEYOND ON THE SUBJECT OF FOOD brings 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, comfort, praise, entice, or invite reconciliation, all while illuminating our living history through the lens of food. Sustenance is also a community response to the needs of new arrivals or low-income families in our city. The contributors have donated their honoraria to the BC Farmers Market Nutrition Coupon Program. A portion of sales from every book will go towards providing a refugee or low-income family with fresh, locally grown produce, and at the same time will support B.C. farmers, fishers, and gardeners. Contributors include Frank Pabst (Chef, Blue Water Café), Renee Sarojini Saklikar, Mark Winston, Susan Musgrave, Lorna Crozier, Thomas Haas (artisan chocolatier), Meeru Dhalwalla (Chef, Vij's and Rangoli), Ayelet Tsabari, Joan Kane, Thomas Larson, John Pass, and Sarah Leavitt.

Fiction. LGBTQIA Studies. In these sixteen stories, Christopher Gudgeon, bestselling author of the critically acclaimed Song of Kosovo, takes a heartbreaking and hilarious look into the lives, loves, sexual obsessions and delusions that inform a grand cast of off-kilter characters. Here is a gay couple who persevere with their marriage plans as the world literally crumbles around them, a woman who discovers the mysterious collection of letters that reveals a terrifying truth about her deceased fiance, a dutiful son, locked in a life-or-death marathon race with his famous father, and a baby who becomes infested with fruit flies sending his adoptive parents into a spiral of recrimination and self-doubt. At once bitterly funny, provocative and poignant, this remarkable collection builds on Gudgeon's growing literary reputation, offering up the work of a great storyteller at his very best.

Literary Nonfiction. Travel Writing. 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, British Columbia, rarely talked about in the tourist brochures or flowery garden guidebooks. Lavishly illustrated throughout with archival and contemporary photographs, SENSATIONAL VICTORIA is a must-read for both history buffs and regular visitors to The Garden City. One decade's crime scene is another era's bed-and- breakfast. Forget the postcard-perfect Victoria you think you know; SENSATIONAL VICTORIA explores the capital city's old structures and the not-so saintly spirits that haunt them.--Seattle Metropolitan Magazine SENSATIONAL VICTORIA is an eclectic compendium of truly captivating stories. While a few are sensational because they are about murders and ghosts, most of them are sensational because they excite our senses of sight and sound and allude to our sense of smell. The work of selected artists, writers, poets, and gardeners comes to life through Lazarus's carefully written prose, brief quotations, and excellent photographs.--BC Studies Some of the stories are well known but presented from a different perspective, and the chapter on the Linners brings to light a creative group many may not know. Overall, SENSATIONAL VICTORIA: BRIGHT LIGHTS, RED LIGHTS, GHOSTS AND GARDENS provides an interesting portrait of Victoria and some of the personalities that call the city home.--Spacing This has already been a stellar year for books about local history. If you're still looking... there are more than a dozen top-quality choices on the shelves, from books on Victoria City Hall and the University of Victoria to ones on the Japanese community and Government Street. This late arrival, SENSATIONAL VICTORIA, is one of the year's best. ... Dozens of archival and modern photographs of the people and the buildings help to bring the stories to life. It's a great presentation that helps make the book a success... This book is a great addition to any shelf of local history. It really doesn't matter what level of knowledge the reader has; there is something here for everyone.--Times Colonist (reviewed by Dave Obee, Editor-in-Chief of the Times Colonist and author of The Library Book: A History of Service to British Columbia)

Poetry. In 2012, poet Elee Kraljii Gardiner precipitously lost feeling in, and use of, her left side. The mini-stroke passed quickly but was symptomatic of something larger: a tear in the lining of an artery known as the tunica intima. This long-poem memoir tracks the author's experiences with un/wellness and un/re-familiarity with herself. Shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry, TRAUMA HEAD disturbs and disorders language and syntax to reconcile appearance with experience.

Poetry. LGBT Studies. ASSDEEP IN WONDER is a collection of new poems that explore the idea of identity in a myriad of contexts: personal, sexual, cultural, national, literary, and poetic. The poems are raw and immediate, exploring themes of addiction, sexuality, loss, love, and wonder in equal measures.

Literary Nonfiction. Half-finished notes, scrawled snippets of conversation, observations made on the run, photographs of people known and unknown, scraps of paper with puzzling sketches on them, receipts, match packs, postcards, and other assorted paraphernalia...have all ended up in a Peek Frean's tin biscuit box. For nearly forty years, Jim Christy has thrown--willynilly, and with neither rhyme nor reason--such seemingly random items into the box. There has been absolutely no system to it; maybe, the author says, I thought 'I'll pay more attention to this later' or, perhaps, 'I've got to check that one out some day...give it the attention it deserves.' Being a restless traveller, investigative journalist and raconteur, many of these items have rich and alluring stories attached to them. The Peek Frean's biscuit box has provided the essential ingredients for a fascinating assortment of highly entertaining anecdotal tales called SWEET ASSORTED. Sweet Assorted, the latest book from former Gibsons resident Jim Christy, is like being at a cocktail party with strangers. You might hear something colourful - a shared anecdote, a travel tale or someone expounding on a thought du jour written in haste on a napkin. --Coast Reporter ... There was a shine to this eccentric work that I appreciated. Christy is being himself. His tin alternately brings back memories and reveals what he has forgotten. He lays out his successes and his failures and leaves us to form our opinions. I closed the book hoping to meet Jim Christy one day. His curiosity, convictions and thirst for adventure have lasted decades, and they don't seem to be fading with time. I admire that.--Coastal Spectator The richest moments in this book come when the objects become metonyms for events and people from Christy's past, points of reference that he augments with assessments, reflections, and even occasional sales-pitches for his current work...the sheer range of experiences and the quirky (and at times famous) figures from Christy's past intrigue and entertain. Simultaneously, Christy's significant temporal distance from the many figures and events raises the crucial question of autobiography: how factual are these recollections? Christy regularly admits his inability to remember particular details or events surrounding the objects, but at other times is seemingly able to offer decade-old conversations in detail. Thus, the book presents an archive of questionable oft-dissociated anecdotes that blend objects, events, and memories.--Canadian Literature

Poetry. A town is a tin of children in an ocean, writes Anna van Valkenburg in her debut poetry collection, QUEEN AND CARCASS, a rich, unpredictable, and deeply surreal exploration of identity and the multiple contradictions we each embody. These poems, set in locations real and imaginary, magical and banal, inhabited by figures out of Slavic folklore and a Boschian landscape, strive to unearth truths, especially those that are difficult or uncomfortable, using Bertolt Brecht's maxim Do not fear death so much as an inadequate life as a touchstone. At once ecstatic, meditative, and grotesque, the poems in QUEEN AND CARCASS confront some of the most fundamental existential questions.

Literary Nonfiction. #1 on the BC Bestseller List. Gifts for bookworms pick (Best of 2014), Vancouver Sun. BC Books for Everybody selection. Includes essays from Tom Carter, Aaron Chapman, Jesse Donaldson, James Johnston, Lani Russwurm, Eve Lazarus, Diane Purvey, Catherine Rose, Rosanne Sia, Jason Vanderhill, Stevie Wilson, Will Woods, Terry Watada, and John Belshaw. 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 mug shot, the victim in the murder, the teens in the gang, and the 'slum' in the path of the bulldozer. By focusing on the stories of the common people rather than community leaders and headliners, VANCOUVER CONFIDENTIAL shines a light on the lives of Vancouverites that have for so long been ignored. This new collection takes a fresh look at the raw urban culture of a port city in the mid- twentieth century. These were years when Hastings and Main was still a dynamic commercial hub, when streetcars thrummed through the city streets, and when 'theatre' meant vaudeville and burlesque. Street gambling and illegal booze cans peppered the map, brothels and bootleggers served loggers and shore workers, and politicians were almost always larger than life. This collection of essays and art illuminates aspects of a city that was too busy getting into trouble to worry about whether it was 'world class.' ... [a] fascinating anthology of original historical essays by 15 researchers in various fields. The real value of the collection, though, is in how it reveals far less well-known aspects of an introverted city's almost absurdly colourful past, when there were demimonde characters with names such as Tom the Greek, Shorty Miller, and Newsy Bernard.--The Georgia Straight ...terribly engaging and covers a great deal...The book covers the years of Vancouver up to the middle part of the century. The team assembled are some of the best and brightest historians on Vancouver.--commentary .ca ... this collection offers multiple new and valuable views on Vancouver.--BC Studies

Poetry. 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.

Poetry. A TEMPORARY STRANGER is the final manuscript that Jamie Reid was working on when he died unexpectedly in June of 2015. The book is comprised of three sections: Homages, Fake Poems, and Recollections. In Homages we find poems of reverence and honour, tributes to writers who had opened up the world of poetry to Jamie and served as guides as he made his way as a poet in the world. There are poems to Spicer, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Breton, Francis Ponge, Tristan Tzara and others. The centerpiece of A TEMPORARY STRANGER is Fake Poems, so called, the author says in his introduction to the poems, because There is no art on earth that can fully represent the exact and flowing experience of viewing stone within the flow of water and the waving light within the water and around the stone, and the subsequent sense of awe and beauty that arises in the interaction between the seer and the seen... In that sense, all art is fake... The third section, Recollections, is an assemblage of Jamie's articles--paeans, really--that he wrote and published over the years. Here are pieces in praise, and in memory of Warren Tallman, John Newlove, Curt Lang, bill bissett, Nellie McClung, Gerry Gilbert, Artie Gold, Kim Goldberg, Kate Braid, Heidi Greco, Catherine Owen and others.

Literary Nonfiction. Literary Criticism. Cultural Studies. Montaigne Medal Finalist. In GARAGE CRITICISM: CULTURAL MISSIVES IN AN AGE OF DISTRACTION, National Magazine Award-nominated Peter Babiak eviscerates and deflates some of the cultural sacred cows of our time. From Fifty Shades of Grey (Hot for Teacher: What Fifty Shades of Grey Taught Me About Salacious Grammar, Sexy Women and the Scandalous Conflation of Cultural and Literary Culture) to the disintegration of the deep read (F You Professor: Tumblr, Triggers and the Allergies of Reading) to the Hunger Games (The Revolution Will Not Be Televised--But It Might Be Carnivalized 'N' Shit) and Twilight (Really Dumb Students), through to student/professor relationships, inappropriate office visits, and a shared voluptuous appetite for Nabokov. Babiak deconstructs our fascination with internet culture, takes on the inanities of youthful, ungrammatical irises, devolves the rhetorical hallucinations of economics and marketing, and reasserts the supremacy of linguistic thinking in everyday cultural affairs. Babiak's is a new and timely voice in the arena of cultural criticism and critical theory. In essays that are variously insightful, funny, heart-rending and sometimes sleazy, Babiak analyzes the effects of popular culture on how we perceive reality.--John K. Collins

Literary Nonfiction. Travel Writing. Includes a Walking Tour map of historic Strathcona and Chinatown. Winner, City of Vancouver Heritage Award (2015). #1 BC Bestseller List. BC Books for Everybody pick. Recommended by Peter Darbyshire for Non-Fiction of 2014. 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 hotbed of civic corruption. The top job at the Vancouver Police Department was a revolving door with the average tenure for a police chief of just four years. In those early years Detective Joe Ricci's beat was the opium dens and gambling joints of Chinatown, while Lurancy Harris--the first female cop in Canada--patrolled the high-end brothels of Alexander Street. Later, proceeds from rum running produced some of the city's most iconic buildings, cops became robbers, and the city reeled from a series of unsolved murders. But Vancouver is more than bookies, brothels, and bootleggers--the city also produced legendary women, world- class entertainers, and ground-breaking architecture. SENSATIONAL VANCOUVER is a fully illustrated popular history book about Vancouver's famous and infamous, the ordinary and the extraordinary, filtered through the houses in which they lived. SENSATIONAL VANCOUVER covers legendary women including Elsie MacGill, Phyllis Munday, Nellie Yip Quong and Joy Kogawa; high-end brothels, unsolved murders, and the homes and buildings of artists, architects and entertainers including Frederick Varley, Arthur Erickson, and Bryan Adams. Lazarus is an enthusiastic researcher, a quirky writer of prose, and an energetic amateur historian in somewhat the same manner as the late Chuck Davis. Her book jumps around like an antipodean marsupial but it's great fun--particularly when it deals with dope peddlers, hardworking bootleggers, disgraced mayors, and corrupt chief constables.--The Georgia Straight SENSATIONAL VANCOUVER provides lively social history, appeals to a broad readership, and adds to the growing number of enlightening books about our city's past.--BC History SENSATIONAL VANCOUVER is lavishly illustrated with photographs of people and places, and a map makes it easy to tie things together. This book is filled with great stories, and they are short, so it's easy to dip in here and there as the mood strikes. As a package, they make for fascinating reading.--Times Colonist (reviewed by Dave Obee, Editor-in- Chief of the Times Colonist and author of The Library Book: A History of Service to British Columbia)

In prose that's as sharp as broken glass and shot through with poetry, Teresa McWhirter unlocks the extraordinary subculture of urban adults in their twenties and early thirties. Most startling of all are the portraits of young women-tough, independent party girls who are strong enough to say "e;no"e; to love and smart enough to know why.Praise for Some Girls Do:"e;Some Girls Do is a sharp, poetic glimpse into the yearning but hopelessly unfocused lives of a group of marginal urbanitessurprisingly, McWhirter makes them touching rather than alienating."e; (Elle Canada)"e;McWhirter unearths a community of adult-kids seldom chronicled Realistic dialogue-heavily peppered with slang, swearing and esoteric pop-culture references-contributes to the novel's overall believability. The humour and wordplay alone mark McWhirter as a writer to watch."e; (Quill and Quire)"e;In tone and subject matter, McWhirter is revisiting the highly marketable terrain of Armistead Maupin and Candace Bushnell, the literature of urban subculture."e; (EVENT)

Fiction. Women's Studies. Melissa Bull's debut short story collection THE KNOCKOFF ECLIPSE AND OTHER STORIES hums with the immediacy of distant and future worlds. Firmly rooted in the streets of Montreal and its many neighbourhoods and subcultures, Bull zooms in on the female experience while playing with societal expectation and literary convention. Spattered with bits of French, many of the stories pull back the covers on the intersection between French and English Canada. In the titular story The Knockoff Eclipse, we're transported to a future world where women's clothing quite literally advertises their supposed wants and desires. Wanda and Henry meet in an old divebar turned trendy futurist café. I used to be a model. But I got tired of people looking at me, she tells Henry. The theme of looking or being looked at runs through the entire collection; female bodies and the women who inhabit them must constantly contend with the masculine gaze, which is often internalized in such a way that it seems inescapable. THE KNOCKOFF ECLIPSE is dark like Duras, ippant comme Sagan, with elements of the surreal running through. These stories are modern feminist fables for the reader who is decidedly uninterested in upholding the moral of the story as it's been traditionally told.

Finalist, Giller Prize Winner of 2 Saskatchewan Book Awards (Best First Book; City of Saskatoon Book Award)Finalist, Saskatchewan Book Award (Book of the Year)Winner, Canadian Authors' Association-BookTV Emerging Writer AwardFinalist, Amazon/ Books in Canada First Novel AwardRowan Friesen has made a career of drug-dealing and small-time thievery on the outer edges of Saskatoon. Shiftless and seemingly friendless, he is, at first glance, an unlikely protagonist. But as Stolen unfolds, we learn the details of Rowan's life: his well meaning but self-absorbed mother, his mentally ill father, and a high-school friendship both lustful and incendiary. This intriguing back-story runs alongside a current-day murder mystery, complete with road trips, arson, drink and drugs, tech nerds and the RCMP. Rowan Friesen may not be the world's most likable character, but the complexity and honesty of his story is thrilling. Stolen's lean, tight narrative tells a tale of theft, love, and madness on the Canadian prairie, and moves along like a half-ton pickup bouncing over dirt roads.Praise for Stolen:Globe and Mail Top 5 First FictionKate Sutherland's "e;Top Ten Books of 2006"e;"e;Lapointe constructs the familiar world, the one inside each of us, in the lives of strangers. It's what fiction does best."e; (The Globe and Mail)"e;It moves with the force of what's right and true and must not be elided."e; (Giller Prize Jury)"e;One of the many achievements of Stolen is that it offers readers of Canadian literature [a] depiction of a Saskatchewan in transition from a predominantly rural agrarian society to an urban one dominated by global capitalism This Saskatchewan might be fallen, but its residents persevere. Moreover, Stolen proposes that the province was never as pristine as it might have appeared. Lapointe's novel, in its innovative, contemporary depiction of the province, heralds a brave new age of prairie writing. For this it should be celebrated."e; (Canadian Literature)

Literary Nonfiction. Even before it was a city, Vancouver was a property speculator's wet dream. Ever since Europeans first laid claim to the Squamish Nation territory in the 1870s, the real estate industry has held the region in its grip. Its influence has been grotesquely pervasive at every level of civic life, determining landmarks like Stanley Park and City Hall, as well as street names, neighbourhoods--even the name Vancouver itself. LAND OF DESTINY explores that influence, starting in 1862, with the first sale of land in the West End, and continuing up until the housing crisis of today. It also examines the backroom dealings, the skulduggery and nepotism, the racism and the obscene profits, while at the same time revealing that the same forces which made Vancouver what it is--speculation and global capital--are the same ones that shape it today, showing that more than anything else, the history of real estate and the history of Vancouver are one and the same. And it's been dirty as hell.

Fiction. Music. Art. Sun Belt's collaborative work of fiction is a genre-defying chronicle of a tar sands company town. Drawing from an array of invented sources such as journals, film transcripts, environmental studies and police reports, CABALCOR charts the rise and fall of a mythical boomtown that, within the span of a century, becomes a desert wasteland. The multi-layered narrative is woven together by an extraordinary blend of texts, images and a full downloadable album of Sun Belt's quietly surreal, dusty music. ... CABALCOR is not, as far as this reviewer can tell, intended as a thinly veiled commentary on a real-life town or even on the oil sands. Rather, it ruminates on the larger issues of extraction, migration, labour and 'desertification' in all its senses.--The Globe and Mail Sun Belt have done a remarkable job developing a fictional location that has a distinct atmosphere and local character; the album is part of a multi-media release in combination with a book, CALBACOR: AN EXTRACTED HISTORY, which features fictional sources such as journals, film transcripts, environmental studies and police reports that chart the region's descent into a wasteland...--Exclaim ... the subject is incredibly timely, in terms of activism, as Sun Belt's project examines the ramifications of tar sands just as Greenpeace recently published a statement demanding the Canadian government stop such acts and 'end the industrialization of a vast area of Indigenous territories, forests and wetlands in northern Alberta' and thousands of activists in Canada continue to protest the expansion of numerous pipelines.--rabble.ca

Poetry. LEAVING MILE END is Jon Paul Fiorentino's seventh collection of poetry and tenth book--a collection of poems that documents the daily din and clatter of cafés, galleries, and dive bars that make up Mile End in Montreal, perhaps the most artistically vibrant neighbourhood in the world. But this is no ordinary tour--we take a sharp turn and go online as Fiorentino mines the peculiar linguistic resources of a new world of doxxing, swatting, snarking, trolling, catfishing, and shaming. While addressing the disconnect between the way we treat each other online and the way we treat each other irl, LEAVING MILE END provides a new framework for understanding what it means to be home in 2017.

Fiction. Winner of a gold IPPY. Montaigne Medal Finalist. The stories in CRETACEA AND OTHER STORIES FROM THE BADLANDS mostly take place in hot weather, where dust and sweat envelop everyone and everything. A teenage boy spends a summer with his hard-livin', hard-drinkin', messed up uncle and has to fight for a position in his new, temporary family. A recent widower gets swept up in the world of the local swingers' scene. A band of misfits struggles to survive at a makeshift commune. An eccentric woman with OCD has a strange fetish that involves the prescription delivery boy. For no particular reason, a fossil-collecting, poetry-reading loner decides to turn sniper and shoot up the town--selecting only non-human targets. Asphyxia games with a sexy transvestite go seriously awry. A distraught man enlists his friendly neighbour in a nighttime river search for his lost daughter. Bored and desperate couples in a trailer park find unique ways to work out their kinks. The plans of a primed-for-action threesome are suddenly derailed when a badly beaten dog is spotted tied up to a parking meter. Fossils and prehistoric sleeping creatures, cattle, rivers, dusty highway gas stations, truck stop diners, guys in small towns with dead-end jobs and unfulfilled dreams, the smell of sage and the sound of cicadas in the air, and redemption is nowhere to be found... This is not the Alberta world of oil and hockey and wheat, but of people at night, living alternate lives, wearing clothes that usually remain hidden in the depths of closets. When they emerge from these closets wearing these clothes, these shopkeepers, lawyers, and students do things to themselves and each other that it would take Freud to explicate. Everywhere in the valley lies the fear of loneliness, the obsession with desire, and the human fixation with the unknown.

Fiction. Winner of the 3-Day Novel Contest (2013). Joshua Chapman Green is searching...searching for answers. He is combing through boxes in the attic of his recently deceased mother's home and uncovering childhood memories, mysterious letters, and perplexing photos of people he does not know. They appear to be circus performers, members of a travelling freak show, or Victorian-era sideshow performers. Then he finds a crumbling copy of Moss-Haired Girl: Confessions of a Circus Performer by Zara Zalinzi...the clasp falls away, and the pages open revealing a family story that may or may not be true. In this ambitious novella, R.H. Slansky weaves a complex narrative about the very nature of narrative: it is an annotated re-issue of a fictional autobiography that casts a questioning eye on the reliability of family lore. MOSS- HAIRED GIRL is wonderful stuff, punchy and clever and engaging.--San Francisco Book Review Ever wonder if the mad-dash products of speed-writing contests can be any good? With MOSS-HAIRED GIRL, winner of the 2013 Three-Day Novel Contest, R.H. Slanksy answers in the affirmative and offers some guidance by example to would-be contestants: Start with a great premise and bite off only so much as you can chew... At 72 pages, it's a slight but extremely fun read. Let's see what Slansky can do with a few more days.--The Globe and Mail MOSS-HAIRED GIRL is an enjoyable, light read with stylistic flair... the elements of Slansky's writing and the novella's presentation offer the reader plenty to reflect upon.--The Peak

Poetry. SOME BIRDS WALK FOR THE HELL OF IT is the third volume of poetry and prose from artist C.R. Avery. In his take-no-prisoners style of verse and performance, Avery celebrates the virtues of the bohemian brigade, late-nite denizens of inconvenient beauty, the dissolute and the temporary, lawless black leather pioneers of innovation, and every battle scarred member of this helpless grey sky tribe. Like a cross between Lenny Bruce and Anaïs Nin, Avery's poetry is alternately profane, brilliantly vulgar, outrageously funny and brash in its lonesome courage, unsettling, and unquestionably original. Audacious and astounding; 5 star--David Burke, London Time Out First there were the beats... then there was Hunter S. Thompson... now there is C. R. Avery.--Luke Starr, Kruger Magazine, UK Avery... has created his own off-beat world of spoken word and musical soundtrack that is riveting and rewarding.--Lonesome Highway Magazine, Ireland a cultural magpie who's impossible to pigeon- hole--David Kidman, Net Rhythms Magazine ...there's some really solid work in here that will tickle the bongos on any beat/slam fan.--Broken Pencil Praise for CR Avery: Audacious and astounding; 5 star--David Burke international treasure--Julie Holland Raw talent--Utah Phillips

Poetry. This debut collection features poems about nature, poems about love and relationships, poems about living in the city, and poems about traveling the globe. And all at once they capture the thrill of being fully engaged with the world, keenly observing each moment and event that constitutes being human. Whether it's following the wounded insomniac through the desert lushness of sage and creosote or hot lovers who flicker bareback beneath the full moon, panting or drifting, moribund couples on empty streets moving like dead meat or heavy traffic under leaves of an electric yellow Creary's language is potent, lush, playful, witty, and demanding of attention. Sharp with insights that cut to the core of the matter, the poems in ESCAPE FROM WRECK CITY--like the people who inhabit them--are ecstatically alive. John Creary's poems growl, roar, whisper, chortle, purr and shout. He's a writer stoned on words, constantly surprised by what they can and can't do. Language's energy--clean, dirty, pulsing, spiking, minimalist--vibrates through ESCAPE FROM WRECK CITY.--Tom Wayman

Fiction. AS IF is a collection of stories that reminds us that all literature indeed awareness itself is at first speculative. These stories confront the false certainties of the industrial and digital mechanisms of our age and, in the great fabulist tradition, call upon their characters to turn possibilities into action. The stories are set in Vancouver and the prairies, and they are grounded in the people who live there, whose successes and failures are kick-started by abrupt changes in their physical world. How the characters react to those challenges tests their understanding of who and where they are. As if."

Burqa of Skin is a dense collection of writings from Nelly Arcan, channelling harrowing disenchantment and indignation. From her very first novel, Putain (Seuil, 2001), Arcan shook the literary landscape with her flamboyant lyricism and her preoccupations with such recurring themes as our culture's vertiginous obsession with youth, and its reverse: the draw of death. Now beyond the ripples of scandal Arcan's work has caused, here are the last echoes of her work, and it is as stunning as it is brief. Burqa of Skin, with its gruesome title, catapults her work into contemporary debates on culture and gender. The book collects three previously unpublished works: "e;The Dress,"e; "e;The Child in the Mirror"e; and "e;Shame."e; The first two are written in the first person, in that turbulent, suffocating language that was Arcan's singular brand, that of a writer on the edge. In the third text, she analyses with inexhaustible ferocity her humiliating experience on the set of a TV talk show. Two lesser-known non-fiction pieces are also included in this collection: a reflection on speed dating and a column published in 2004 titled "e;Suicide Can Be Harmful to Your Health."e;Praise for Burqa of Skin:"e;A masterpiece, a rare and poisonous plant whose posthumous publication makes [the work] all the more striking."e; (Juliette Einhorn, Le Figaro)"e;... When Arcan's writing is at its sharpest-as it nearly always was, and as Melissa Bull's translation convincingly conveys-practically every sentence can serve as a jumping-off point for sustained contemplation and/or heated debate. ..."e; (The Montreal Gazette)"e;... the writing is genuine and lived, giving an almost real-time picture of the author's philosophical wrestlings ... stylishly translated by Melissa Bull Fantastically intelligent, always trying to second-guess how a woman should be, Arcan finds death the only answer to her predicament. In style and emotion-and honesty-her work is a much closer cousin to Edouard Leve's Suicide than to the archness of Belle de Jour or Catherine Millet. The best way to absorb Arcan's work is to read it in chronological order, and then to lament that the titles of her work-Whore, Hysteric, Breakneck, Exit-so succinctly and poignantly summarize the short life and hard-won philosophy of this exceptional writer."e; (The Times Literary Supplement)

Poetry. Mark Laba's second full-length poetry collection--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 will find a little singing, a little dancing, a little drama, a little comedy, a little experimentation, all rooted in a veritable grab-bag of far-ranging influences. Laba draws on everything from gritty pulp fiction to Borscht Belt humour, from dime-store ventriloquism to twelve-cent comic books (the long poem Tolstoy's Leech Farm is riddled with Laba's own comic drawings). He hurls these surprising and sometimes shocking vaudeville narratives from the peak of the Jewish Alps, and even his most extreme language experiments entertain. Some may call these surreal poems literary atrocities, while others hail them as lyricism for an impossible century--but if Mark Laba didn't write these poems, no one else would.