Capper is a modern chronicle of a handicapped woman who chooses a life of criminality over poverty. Told in gritty realism, the novel is set in the underbelly of Vancouver’s east side. T
The stories in Carthaginian Peace and Other Stories are centred in the domestic and every day. They follow youngish lovers and domestic partners attempting to find a cure for cosmic loneliness in an unstable society.
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.
By Doug Diaczuk
Chalk is a tender story about love and loss, following a broken-hearted thirty-something cubicle worker, free-falling from every ledge of his life. Post-break-up and blue, he feels like nothing matters, that he has become invisible, like a chalk outline on the floor, empty inside.
By Stuart Ross
Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer is equal parts literary memoir, advice for the emerging writer, and reckless tirade. Ross has been active in the Canadian literary underground for a quarter of a century: he’s sold thousands of his books in the streets, published and edited magazines, trained insurgents in his Poetry Boot Camps, and started Canada’s first Small Press Book Fair.
By Truman Green
Set in Surrey, BC circa 1960, A Credit to Your Race is a story about innocent love awakening between a fifteen-year-old black porter’s son and the white girl next door. The novel is a disturbing and convincing portrayal of how the full weight of racism and bigotry came to bear on a youthful, interracial couple.
By Martin West
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.
Rooted in the back alleys, squats and psychiatric wards of contemporary Vancouver and Montreal, these unyielding poems enter the intersecting tensions and intensities in characters such as Mike, a panhandler on Vancouver’s Commercial Drive, Matthew, a runaway punk, and Dara, a single mother.
By Mark Jarman
From the author of 19 Knives and My White Planet comes a brilliant suite of stories built around music and travel. The five stories that comprise Czech Techno are replete with the sizzle and jump we have come to expect from a Mark Jarman story. And matters of the heart are never far away, weaving through these tales like a knife blade through sand.
