Contemporary Canadian Literature with a Distinctly Urban Twist

Anvil Press

DAMP: Contemporary Vancouver Media Arts

By Oliver Hockenhull and Alex Mackenzie

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

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A Dark Boat

By Patrick Friesen

Heavily inspired by cante jondo (Spanish “deep song”) and Portuguese fado, these poems explore the kind of yearning that is contained in the Portuguese word saudad: a longing for something in the past that can never be found because time has shifted everything away from what it was.

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Dead Man in the Orchestra Pit

By Tom Osborne

Dead Man in the Orchestra Pit is a singularly Canadian novel featuring crime, culture, and sports. Written in the vein of John Kennedy Toole (Confederacy of Dunces) and JP Donleavy, Dead Man in the Orchestra Pit is set in Vancouver during an early 80s Grey Cup weekend.

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The Delusionist

By Grant Buday

Vancouver, summer 1962. Cyril Andrachuk and Connie Chow are seventeen and in love.

Cyril is the only Canadian-born member of the Andrachuk family, his parents and older brother having survived Stalin’s systematic starving of the Ukraine. His brother’s brittle bones are not the only legacy of Stalin. Cyril’s famine-free childhood has built up a distance between him and the rest of the household.

Art, love, and history furnish the setting in this tale. The Delusionist is a novel of longing, loss and rediscovered joy.

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Derelict Bicycles

By Dale Tracy

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.

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The Devil You Know

By Jenn Farrell

These stories deal with sex, love, work, birth, and death in alternately moving, shocking, funny, and at times devastating ways. Whether these characters are facing the death of a parent, bad love choices, the possibility of unwanted pregnancy, the rupture of friendships, teen violence, or the exploration of sado-masochistic sex, Farrell exposes their ticking cores and pulls the reader along every step of the way.

“Farrell excels at very short, sharply realized tales that display a startling repertoire of styles and structural innovations.”
Vancouver Review

Make no mistake; The Devil You Know belongs on the shelf alongside Nights Below Station Street.
— Elizabeth Bachinsky

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Dirtbags

By Teresa McWhirter

Dirtbags is a novel about reckoning—with one’s past, one’s choices, and one’s expectations for the future. 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.

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Dismantling

By Eve Joseph

In Eve Joseph’s latest book, the poet is occupied with the idea of poetic imagination and how that often elusive thing can transform the mundane into the mysterious.

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The Door Is Open

By Bart Campbell

Finalist BC Book Prize (Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize)

Finalist City of Vancouver Book Prize

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.

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The Dreamlife of Bridges

By Robert Strandquist

The Dreamlife of Bridges is the debut novel from Vancouver writer Robert Strandquist. Leo is a middle-aged, divorced handyman capable of mending almost anything outside of himself. The denial of his son’s death, and his inability to deal with his own pain, has rendered his life fractured and untenable.

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