Narrative has been central to human life for millennia, and the twentieth century has been preeminently the age of the story. Mass culture and mass leisure have enabled us to spend far more time absorbing stories, real and imaginary, than any of our ancestors. Whether or not this has been to our benefit is one of the questions raised by journalist …

Poles Apart covers a range of themes about the Artic and Antarctic, including the geography, glaciology and glacial history, ecology, living resources, governance, and history of exploration. Topics are examined separately for each pole and each theme is summarized by a rapporteur who draws out the contrast and the similarities. This unique format …

Winner of the Governor General's Literary Award

In this urban adventure story, Khyber, a smart, bold, eleven-year-old girl from a poor neighborhood, sets out to find her friend X, a mysterious homeless woman who has gone missing.

The desperate search takes Khyber on a long, all-night odyssey that proves to be wilder than any adventure she has ever im …

Bears and bureaucrats, timber and telephone lines, poaching and predators, fires and families - all these play a part in this fascinating study of Canada's National Park wardens. The warden service has been integral to Canada's National Parks from their earliest days. First established in Rocky Mountains Park (now Banff National Park) in 1909, the …

During the late 1960s, Normalization and Social Role Valorization (SRV) enabled the widespread emergence of community residential options and then provided the philosophical climate within which educational integration, supported employment, and community participation were able to take firm root. This book is unique in tracing the evolution and im …

This book looks at the role played throughout history by translators and interpreters in international relations. It considers how political linguistics function and have functioned throughout history. It fills a gap left by political historians, who seldom ask themselves in what language the political negotiations they describe were conducted.

Governance connotes the way an organization, an economy, or a social system co-ordinates and steers itself. Some insist that governing is strictly a top-down process guided by authority and coercion, while others emphasize that it emerges bottom-up through the workings of the free market. This book rejects these simplistic views in favour of a more …

Explorer Jacques Cartier dismissed it as the land God gave to Cain, but generations of people from widely differing cultures living in dense wilde ess conditions have forged the people of Labrador into a thriving, vital culture of their own. Here are their stories in their own voices, written by the expert hand of a person whose heart's home is Lab …

Poppy, heroine of the internationally bestselling chapter books A Monster in My Cereal, A Ghost in My Mirror, Witch’s Brew and Poppy’s Whale is involved in a new adventure. When a supply teacher disdainfully accuses her of being a bird brain, Poppy turns

In this lucid yet impassioned book Clarence Bolt reveals how Canada is rapidly losing its sovereign status to the liberal, globalizing drive that has, since Confederation, endeavoured to eliminate regional diversity, self-reliance and distinctiveness by blending our regions into a centralized economic and political system. Echoing George Grant, Bol …

In this book, McHenry challenges the still-regnant paradigm of knowledge acquisition as the end and means of schooling, supplanting it with an inquiry into what knowledge is.  Tracing the development of the idea of knowledge from its roots in Descartes and Locke through the ontological turn in Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Buber,  he provides an alt …

Finalist, City of Vancouver Book Prize

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.

Praise for White Lung:

"a rollicking black comedy of errors with a host o …

The first book in the Notherland Journeys trilogy. Fifteen-year-old Peggy is trying to run away from her problems at home. Before she can decide what to do, she finds herself thrust back into a long-forgotten fantasy world called Notherland, which she had

Ellie and her little brother Max find themselves moving from their grandmother's comfortable home in England to Upper Canada. Their mother is dead, Father wants to start over again, and in 1835 there are many opportunities for settlers in British North America. Despite the strangeness of this vast new world, Ellie is sure things will turn out all r …

Nick and Kia get excited when their school gym teacher announces a "three-on-three" basketball tournament. The two most dedicated players in grade three, they know they'll be tough to beat. But when Nick finds out they'll be up against teams in grade four and five, he is ready to throw in the towel before they start. How can shrimps like them ever …

Naomi Kramer and Ronald Headland to approach the universal issues that inevitably arise in discussing the Holocaust -- evil, courage, human dignity, moral responsibility and the existential qualities of humankind -- through individual experience. Consisting of two main parts, the book explores one individual's experience during the Shoah and the hi …

In a shiny new pickup packed with camping equipment and guitars, and with a $5,000 debt hanging over their heads, Jens and his musician brother, Daniel, take off on an unusual kind of road trip. Little do they know that they are embarking on the longest weekend of their lives -- a weekend in which far more than money is at stake.

A gritty and unforg …

Songs for Relinquishing the Earth contains many poems of praise and grief for the imperilled earth drawing frequently on Jan Zwicky’s experience as a musician and philosopher and on the landscapes of the prairies and rural Ontario.

Winner of the Canadian Library Association Book of the Year Award

In his first year in high school, Hubbo O'Driscoll is torn between his poor but fun friends and the shallow but rich kids.

In this novel based on Great Expectations, Brian Doyle does a brilliant job of dealing with the issue of class and all its implications. Poverty, social climbing a …

Meena hates books. But when she accidentally knocks over a stack, out from the pages tumble an assortment of characters. To find their way back into the proper books, Meena has to read!

Terence isn't cool like his best friend, Tom, but at least he's not a weirdo like Lucy, who sees life upside-down and thinks she's a bat. Yet Lucy knows things that other people don't -- about the gaps in life, and seeing things more clearly with your eyes closed, and how you have to learn to fly on your own if you want to survive.

Sarah Withrow h …

This book offers the first complete analysis of the emergence of simultaneous interpretation a the Nuremburg Trail and the individuals who made the process possible. Francesca Gaiba offers new insight into this monumental event based on extensive archival research and interviews with interpreters, who worked at the trial. This work provides an over …

In Hard Light Michael Crummey retells and reinvents his father’s stories of outport Newfoundland and the Labrador fishery of a half century ago. Speaking through generations of storytellers, he conjures a world of hard toil and heavy weather, shot through with stoicism, grim humour, endurance, and love. This is writing that is supple and charged …

In Sarah Sheard's celebrated novel Almost Japanese, a young girl's obsession with a famous Japanese musician blossoms into personal transformation. In spare, lyrical prose, Sheard documents Emma's discovery of her new next door neighbour, a dazzling Japanese symphony conductor. Things Japanese soon begin to transform Emma's world. Several years lat …

There are no lost women, only women who've forgotten their scripts.' RM Vaughan's play about Hollywood director Dorothy Arzner comes off the stage and onto the page in this handsome edition from Coach House Books. An insightful look at the gender politics behind the cameras and studios of the golden age of cinema.

‘All of Nichol’s work is stamped by his desire to create texts that are engaging in themselves as well as in context, and to use indirect structural and textual devices to carry meaning. In The Martyrology different ways of speaking testify to a journey through different ways of being. Language is both the poet’s instructor and, through its v …

Originally twelve years in the making! Featuring a cast of thousands. It still stars the letter H, and introduces Probable Systems, Negatives, and the Actual Life of Language! Your heart will pound as you see H's turn into I's before your very own eyes. You'll thrill as words fall apart only to create other words. You'll gasp as bpNichol collaborat …

'This is a record of our version of grassroots theatre. The idea was to take a group of actors out to a farming community and build a play of what we could see and learn. There is no story or "plot" as such … Nevertheless, we hope that you can see many stories woven into the themes of this play and that out of it will emerge a picture of a comple …

‘All of Nichol’s work is stamped by his desire to create texts that are engaging in themselves as well as in context, and to use indirect structural and textual devices to carry meaning. In The Martyrology different ways of speaking testify to a journey through different ways of being. Language is both the poet’s instructor and, through its v …

All of Nichol's work is stamped by his desire to create texts that are engaging in themselves as well as in context, and to use indirect structural and textual devices to carry meaning. In The Martyrology different ways of speaking testify to a journey through different ways of being. Language is both the poet's instructor and, through its various …

Let's say you want to know which famous Canadian poet lived in the Waverley Hotel for seven years, constantly changing rooms in fear of RCMP bugs. Or you live at 44 Walmer and want to know what on earth they were thinking with those balconies. Or you want to know what's behind (or underneath!) that giant O hanging over Harbord at Spadina. These thi …

Jay used to have an ego, but had it surgically removed. Get bur'd by Alex Cayce; Perfectly Ordinary Dreams by James Llar; Short Ghosts by John Elliott; heartrants by H. Azel; and Book of Leaves by Conwenna Stokes: five books written in five radically different styles.

'All of Nichol’s work is stamped by his desire to create texts that are engaging in themselves as well as in context, and to use indirect structural and textual devices to carry meaning. In The Martyrology different ways of speaking testify to a journey through different ways of being. Language is both the poet’s instructor and, through its var …

All of Nichol's work is stamped by his desire to create texts that are engaging in themselves as well as in context, and to use indirect structural and textual devices to carry meaning. In The Martyrology different ways of speaking testify to a journey through different ways of being. Language is both the poet's instructor and, through its various …

'All of Nichol's work is stamped by his desire to create texts that are engaging in themselves as well as in context, and to use indirect structural and textual devices to carry meaning. In The Martyrology different ways of speaking testify to a journey through different ways of being. Language is both the poet’s instructor and, through its vario …

During WWII, Jed’s English father serves as a fighter pilot overseas, while Jed and his mother move back to her Tsimshian community on Canada's west coast. When the military sets up a naval base in town, Jed is hired to help out, honored it seems, for both his father's bravery and his own native skills as a hunter. Presented with a military jack …

Susanna Moodie is, of course, best known for her books Roughing It in the Bush and Life in the Clearings, which are largely comprised of short sketches that she had previously published. What is not widely known, however, is that Moodie had a long and prolific literary career in which short sketches and tales were among her favoured genres. This bo …

The North has always had, and still has, an irresistible attraction. This fascination is made up of a mixture of perspectives, among these, the various explorations of the Arctic itself and the Inuk cultural heritage found in the elders' and contemporary stories. This book discusses the different generations of explorers and writers and illustrates …

Alexandra's beloved grandfather was fond of saying, Life is full of surprises, and sometimes the good and the bad get all bunched up together. However, he could not have prepared her for the death of her father, a man she never knew, and his legacy -- a cabin on prairie land formerly owned by the LaFreniere family.

Lonny LaFreniere's stepfather is t …

In his 1968 CBC Massey Lectures R. D. Laing discusses how and why we value society's notions of family over our own.

Using concepts of schizophrenia, R.D. Laing demonstrates that we tend to invalidate the subjective and experiential and accept the proper societal view of what should occur within the family.

A psychoanalyst and psychiatrist, Laing wor …

In this final book in the series, Sonny, a former client from Hong Kong, arrives in Vancouver and Helen agrees to meet him. He's in trouble and doesn't know who's after him or why. At least that's what Sonny says. Despite some nagging apprehensions, Helen decides to help him out. But a kidnapping attempt quickly ensues, forcing our heroine into the …

The first book-length study of whether cannibalism existed on the Pacific Northwest coast. McDowell shows how a "cannibal complex" among Westerners coloured many early accounts of "man-eating," and how this perception obscured the importance of ritual cannibalism in the secret Hamatsa ceremony—a crucial feature of Native spirituality.

"What good is the study of literature? Does it help us think more clearly, or feel more sensitively, or live a better life than we could without it?"

Written in the relaxed and frequently humorous style of his public lectures, this remains, of Northrop Frye's many books, perhaps the easiest introduction to his theories of literature and literary edu …

Winner of the 1997 Howard O’Hagan Short Fiction Award!

“In the Diamond, at the end of a long green vinyl aisle between two booths of chrome, Naugahyde, and Formica, are two large swinging wooden doors, each with a round hatch of face-sized window. Those kitchen doors can be kicked with such a slap they’re heard all the way up to the soda fount …

Winner of the Canadian Library Association Book of the Year Award, and a Horn Book Fanfare Selection

Old Mickey is one hundred and twelve years old. He can't remember what he ate for lunch today, but he can remember every detail of what happened one hundred years ago, when he and his mother ran away from his violent father to take refuge in the hill …

In Lobsticks and Stone Cairns, over one hundred Arctic stories are told about adventurers, military officers, authors, guides, cultural heroes, police, traders, and even the occasional charlatan. While some of the biographies in the book are of people still active in the North, others tell stories from as far back as the sixteenth century. The subj …

Looking for nutritious, deliciously varied and easy meals? Whether you’re already a vegetarian or just want to introduce more healthful cooking into your meal planning, Nettie’s Vegetarian Kitchen is the perfect book for you. Expert chef and teacher Netti

Poppy, the zany character from A Monster in My Cereal, A Ghost in My Mirror, and Witch’s Brew, is back. But this time, Poppy is miserable. Her grandpa has died, and Poppy is as angry as she is sad. Book 2 in the Poppy series by Marie-Francine Hebert.

Burl Crow hasn't had many breaks in his young life. His father is a manipulative lout with a dangerous temper; his mother, worn down by years of abuse, now resorts to her little helpers to get her through the days. Then he meets Nathaniel Orlando Gow, the Maestro, and in just one day, this eccentric genius changes Burl's life forever.

From the author of the award-winning The Sisters Brothers comes a dark, boozy, and hilarious tale from the LA underworld.

A nameless barman tends a decaying bar in Hollywood and takes notes for a book about his clientele. Initially, he is morbidly amused by watching the regulars roll in and fall into their nightly oblivion, pitying them and their lo …