The best books of poetry published in English internationally and in Canada are honoured annually with the Griffin Poetry Prize. The 2009 edition of the anthology includes poems from all the books to be shortlisted this year by judges Michael Redhill, Saskia Hamilton, and Dennis O'Driscoll. The poems in the anthology are selected and introduced by …

In this deeply moving and elegantly written book, Halfdan W. Freihow takes Gabriel, his young autistic son, on a journey through the full spectrum of human experience. With great love, profound tenderness, and gentle wit, Freihow captures Gabriel's triumphs and disappointments, his joy and frustration, while struggling to help him make sense of a w …

Having developed an impressive reputation for his many novels and non-fiction works, Richard Wagamese now presents a collection of stunning poems ranging over a broad landscape. He begins with an immersion in the unforgettable world where “the ancient ones stand at your shoulder . . . making you a circle / containing everything.” These are Medi …

The Story of Dunbar: Voices of a Vancouver Neighbourhood draws on interviews with more than 350 local residents, including recent arrivals, descendants of pioneer settlers and the aboriginal inhabitants. Their personal accounts are woven together with information from diaries, records in the City of Vancouver Archives and carefully chosen published …

Best of 2010 Pick, Uptown Magazine

Meet 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 …

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. June is a single mom struggling in the bottl …

Finalist, ReLit Award

Amazon.ca's 50 Essential Canadian Books selection

First published in 1997 to much critical acclaim, Salvage King, Ya! is a novel firmly rooted in Canada’s favourite national pastime—hockey. Critics have called Salvage King, Ya! “the great Canadian novel,” and a “postmodern Canadian classic.” Drinkwater, Jarman’s n …

Turn Us Again powerfully, painstakingly, and painfully explores a difficult theme, effectively shifting perspectives to show multiple sides of a shattered family history. Readers will find themselves pulled into the darker side of love, partnership and family, the part that usually comes after the movie ends. The writing here is well crafted, devel …

From the author of Dead Man in the Orchestra Pit and Foozlers comes another tale of madcap human folly.

Louella Debra Poule is doing an eighteen-month stint on a weapons charge at a minimum-security institution up the Fraser Valley. Her drug-dealing, sometime-boyfriend Jimmy Flood and his sidekick, Blacky Harbottle, should have taken the rap, but th …

At the heart of every story in Audrey Whitson’s collection is a character seeking personal purpose amongst the deep mysteries of self, and a wholeness amid the fractious nature of life. Whitson’s evocative narration guides us effortlessly through these often turbulent journeys, seamlessly taking in a vast range of time and place along the way. …

Finalist, Trillium Book Award

The stories in Animal depict people on the brink of major life change. Often at a crossroads they are oblivious to, Leggat's characters seem to be captured in a cinematic slo-mo, teetering on the edge of something unknown, heroically resisting the ever-present pull of Fate. It matters little whether the characters take …

From Literature to Biterature is based on the premise that in the foreseeable future computers will become capable of creating works of literature. Among hundreds of other questions, it considers: Under which conditions would machines become capable of creative writing? Given that computer evolution will exceed the pace of natural evolution a milli …

Winner, SFU Writer's Studio's First Book Competition (2010)

Winner, Canadian Authors Association Exporting Alberta Award (2011)

Unmarried and pregnant in 1968 Winnipeg, teenager Myrl Coulter found herself at a loss. Unable (and perhaps unwilling) to support her child, Myrl’s parents forced her to give the baby up for adoption. After being sent to a …

Winner, 2011 ReLit Award

From the author of Pontypool Changes Everything, Ravenna Gets is a new collection of “wheeled” stories that continue the author’s exploration of “apocalypse “ction.”

In a single convulsion of homicide, the population of Ravenna tries to erase the population of Collingwood. The innocent, standing in their living ro …

Winner of the W.O. Mitchell/City of Calgary Award

A debut collection, these stories are set in the corporeal world of adult endeavour: the mall, the office, the subdivision. It’s these settings that W. Mark Giles exploits—locking his sights on eerily familiar characters, excavating their fears, intimacies, and the dark machinery behind their act …

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 …

Fiction Pick, Broken Pencil Magazine

Suburban Pornography is contemporary literature, which documents Canadian urban life in a raw and naked manner. The prose is stripped--minimalist, direct, urgent, unflinching. The stories revolve around ordinary characters and problems--people stuck in bad relationships or jobs. Some yearn for something just beyo …

Jerry Levy’s gritty, urban tales are driven by arresting prose and engaging human drama. Urban Legend is psychologically intense with characters attempting to overcome personal loss in peculiar ways. In “Paris is a Woman” a man hopes that, by escaping to Paris, he will learn to manage his uncontrollable emotions; devastated by the death of hi …

The Devil You Know is the follow-up volume to Farrell’s critically acclaimed debut collection, Sugar Bush & Other Stories. 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 …

Finalist, City of Vancouver Book Award

Monday Night Man is a back alley view of East Vancouver netherworlds. Horst Nunn, Ray Bunce, and Boyle Rupp are a trio of middle-aged, underemployed, intelligent “plungers” striving for redemption through humour and long shots at the track.

Praise for Monday Night Man:

"These stories . . . combine the flavour …

Centuries-old community planning practices in Indigenous communities in Canada, the United States, New Zealand, and Australia have, in modern times, been eclipsed by ill-suited western approaches, mostly derived from colonial and neo-colonial traditions. Since planning outcomes have failed to reflect the rights and interests of Indigenous people, a …

Award Winning mystery author Anne Emery returns with another installment in the Collins-Burke mystery series

“The writing bustles with energy, and with smart, wry dialogue and astute observations about crime and religion.” — Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine

Father Brennan Burke’s patience is tested to the limit when a young woman announces to t …

Finalist, ReLit Awards (shortlist)

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 character …

Epidemic investigator Dr. Zol Szabo and his team are called to a high school in the heart of Ontario's tobacco country, where unexplained deaths from liver failure are creating panic. The team begins to suspect a link with contaminated, cut-price cigarettes manufactured on nearby Grand Basin Indian Reserve led by the Badger, the multimillionaire ki …

Spat Ryan has demons. They haunt him by day and share his drink at night. Raised in Montreal by a bagman for the Irish mob, Spat has fictionalized or ignored chunks of his life too painful to recall. A chance meeting with an old friend of his father’s in a bar on the Main exposes the dark secret they’ve both been harbouring, the secret that has …

Finalist, ReLit Award

Finalist, McNally Robinson Book of the Year (Manitoba Book Awards)

Finalist, Bisexual Book Award (USA)

Whitetail Shooting Gallery, a new novel from award-winning author and Giller Prize nominee, Annette Lapointe, is set in the outer urban, often desolate, landscape of the Saskatchewan prairie.

Cousins Jennifer and Jason live clo …

Valery the Great is a crackling, electric collection of dark humour that follows the bizarre and beautiful lives of its protagonists. Sometimes sweet and gentle, sometimes sharply sarcastic, the unique narrative voices in this collection are always powerfully touching.

Praise for Valery the Great:

"15 Finest Book Covers in Spring Fiction This Year" s …

“Reading the Riot Act” is a phrase that has entered the popular lexicon, meaning the action taken by authority figures when they perceive that their “charges” are getting out of hand. The act itself is a seldom-used piece of legislation actually designed to prevent a riot from taking place. Supposedly, the mere mention of the Riot Act is en …

Can a case be made for reading literature in the digital age? Does literature still matter in this era of instant information? Is it even possible to advocate for serious, sustained reading with all manner of social media distracting us, fragmenting our concentration, and demanding short, rapid communication?

In The Edge of the Precipice, Paul Socke …

A corrupt mining company, repossessed gravestones, a man’s fractured past, mysterious notes posted to lampposts and murder deep in the highlands of Guatemala. In Tailings of Warren Peace, Stephen Law effortlessly weaves these elements into a powerful story of love and memory, exploring how the past haunts us and how solidarity can save us all. My …

This stunning collection will break your heart and put it back together again, as Pamela Porter unravels a long-held family secret in a moving personal search for redemption, face to face with the question of her own identity. As she says, “It was this way when Rome was burning, / and was not so different / when dark fires flared / outside the wa …

Wracked with guilt and self-loathing after the death of his wife, Peter abandons his life in Toronto for one of exile and desolation in rock reject, a ghastly mountain-top asbestos mine in northern British Columbia.

As Peter adapts to his dangerous new surroundings, he witnesses the devastating effects of mining on the health of his fellow miners, …

Yoko Tawada's Portrait of a Tongue: An Experimental Translation by Chantal Wright is a hybrid text, innovatively combining literary criticism, experimental translation, and scholarly commentary. This work centres on a German-language prose text by Yoko Tawada entitled ‘Portrait of a Tongue’ [‘Porträt einer Zunge’, 2002]. Yoko Tawada is a n …

On a publicity tour in Japan, Carl, a Canadian author, finds himself falling in love amidst the sacred stages of Noh theatre and the seedy dance clubs in Tokyo, wired on cocaine and sake. His object of affection is the young, seductive actor, Yori, but the affair becomes complicated when Carl's translator and Yori's sister, Nushi, becomes entranced …

On February 15, 1982, the oil rig Ocean Ranger sank off the coast of Newfoundland taking the entire crew of eighty-four men — including the author’s brother — down with it. It was the worst sea disaster in Canada since the Second World War, but the memory of this event gradually faded into a sad story about a bad storm — relegated to the � …

Provocative, passionate and populist, RMB Manifestos are short and concise non-fiction books of literary, critical, and cultural studies.

We live in critical times. Choices we make daily now will affect the future of life itself. Years from now children will study our era on the brink and ask their elders “When the planet was burning, what did you …

A northern Ontario gothic, Beaver follows Beatrice "Beaver" Jersey as she learns to grow beyond her circumscribed world, struggling with her whacky extended family, her alcoholic father, and her chain-smoking ghost of a mother.

The Earth Remembers Everything is a masterful blend of history, travel and fictional narrative, tracing the author’s journeys to some of the most difficult destinations in the world: the Cui Chi Tunnels in Vietnam, Hiroshima in Japan and Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland, First Nations sites such as Mosquito Lake on Moresby Island, Haida Gwaii and Chi …

We Have Impact is a collection of short essays on design and society. The book was conceived as an exercise in both thinking and framing design into a poetic system of language and verse. The contents and its aggressive periodicity are braided into a single written design project. We Have Impact addresses how the problem of design itself has been o …

In this year’s CBC Massey Lectures, bestselling author Lawrence Hill offers a provocative examination of the scientific and social history of blood, and on the ways that it unites and divides us today.

Blood runs red through every person’s arteries and fulfills the same functions in every human being. The study of blood has advanced our understa …

Brimming with wild imagination and stunning variety, this is one of those beautiful literary anthologies that comes along once a generation, that we’ll look back upon as the beginning of a whole new vision of Canadian fiction.”

— Lee Henderson, author of The Man Game

The stories within Everything Is So Political explore the intersection betw …

Drinkin’ rye and water with Grandma. Guns in False Creek. Frat boy homies from the North Delta ghetto. Samuel L. Jackson. Phantom Lord & Metallica. A kid who’s got the hots for his mom…

Hunh?

That’s right. It’s all here in this collection of immediate, lean and visceral short fiction from Clint Burnham.

Praise for Airborne Photo:

"A stack of …

It is the mid-seventies, and Shaila has returned to Bombay for her father's sixtieth birthday party. In the linked stories that follow, Shree Gatage renders an India that can only be revealed by first leaving, and then returning again -- in the end, for Shaila, for good.

In this highly accomplished first collection, Ghatage reveals a true gift for …

For over a quarter century, many readers have agreed with legendary publisher Jack McClelland, who said, “I have never before encountered a book journal as engaging as BC BookWorld.” But over several decades, the populist style of BC BookWorld has tended to overshadow its literary value and its essentially educational agenda. Here in The Best o …

Sport Policy in Canada provides the first and most comprehensive analysis of the new Canadian Sport Policy adopted in 2012. In light of this new policy, the authors, top scholars in the field, provide detailed accounts of the most salient sport policies and programs, while also discussing issues and challenges facing policy makers. 
In Canada and …

Evelyn Lau’s new book of poems, A Grain of Rice, picks up on some of the themes she covered in her last wonderful book, Living Under Plastic. Once again she honours people, in particular family, and the past; the presence and importance of nature in urban spaces; the influence of other writers on her life and in her career as a writer.

The Deaf House is Joanne Weber’s life story. It illustrates the work and passion of a woman who grew up deaf and became an advocate for the deaf. It is a story of pain, loss and defeat balanced with joy, gain, and victory. Joanne Weber’s creative memoir, shows how deafness can be a brutal oppression of the mind. Her torment of not knowing exact …

Un prétendu éditeur découvre un mystérieux coffre rempli de manuscrits. C’est là le prétexte pour retracer les pas de personnages associés à la famille Ashfaq, issue de la bourgeoisie musulmane d’une ville indienne dévastée par les émeutes religieuses des années 1990.

Au fil des nouvelles de ce recueil, le lecteur voyage en Inde, en …

Cloudburst is a milestone in Canadian literature. For over a half-century, beginning with the Spanish Civil War and continuing through the coups d’état and military repression in South and Central America in the 1970s and 80s, Spanish-speaking writers have been arriving in Canada as exiles and immigrants and have been creating new works in thei …

Before Ontario there was ice. As the last ice age came to an end, land began to emerge from the melting glaciers. With time, plants and animals moved into the new landscape and people followed. For almost 15,000 years, the land that is now Ontario has provided a home for their descendants: hundreds of generations of First Peoples.

With contributions …