On a summer visit to Germany, George, a young medical student at Cambridge, meets Anna von Kleist, whose intellectual force, beauty, and self-assurance smite him full in the heart. It is 1936. Hitler is already in power, and a shift has occurred in Germany that Anna, George, and their friend Werner have not fully grasped. Europe is on the cusp of w …

Suzanne Leblanc's The Thought House of Philippa transposes a theory of individuality into a stunningly reflective, sensuous and frank philosophical novel. Setting the chapters in the various rooms of the house Ludwig Wittgenstein designed for his sister in Vienna, Leblanc's novel lays out P.'s intensely emotional and intellectually acute way of see …

Conrad Kain is a titan amongst climbers in Canada and is well-known in mountaineering circles all over the world. His letters to Amelie Malek-a life-long friend-offer a candid view into the deepest thoughts of the Austrian mountain guide, and are a perfect complement to his autobiography, Where the Clouds Can Go. The 144 letters provide a unique an …

“A visitor from down south stared at my apple tree and said: ‘Those don’t grow here you know. It’s too cold.’ If the apricot tree in Highlands knew it couldn’t live here, it might stop scattering white blossoms over three lawns.” – Bert Almon

Edmonton has a rich and diverse horticultural history. Vacant lot gardeners, rose gardeners, …

"The contribution made by the Edmonton libraries to the sanity and support of the citizens cannot be estimated. No Annual Report can gauge things of this sort." -Annual Report of the Edmonton Public Library, 1931 The Edmonton Public Library turns 100 in 2013! Novelist, journalist, and Edmontonian Todd Babiak tells the story of EPL's birth and comin …

In many commodity-based economies, rollercoaster boom-and-bust cycles have come to be viewed almost as an unavoidable characteristic. Framed mainly in the context of the Alberta economy, the articles in this volume explore a wide range of issues associated with the historical phenomenon of recurring periods of boom and bust, including reasons for t …

Scholar and diplomat Brian L. Evans gives us the first English-language biography of Chester A. Ronning (1894-1984): diplomat, politician, educator, and one of Canada's major public figures. This fascinating story depicts Ronning, the man who received many honours, and deepens readers' knowledge of Canada's post-World War II diplomacy and Canada-Ch …

Butt out, Dante. Move over, Milton. Piss off, Pound. Outta the way, Olson. Here comes Cosmographia—a post-Lucretian faux micro-epic, the latest ground breaking incursion into the ever popular spectacle of the Epic Poem. Tracking the classic epic journey through the unfolding cosmos toward home, though occasionally disoriented by milling cows with …

Finalist for the 2014 LAMBDA Literary Award for Best Gay Mystery!

After a long series of professional and personal upheavals, Detective Lane begins his latest adventure happy, at peace, and enjoying life with his partner Arthur, their children Christine and Matt, and his able new co-worker, RCMP officer Keely Saliba.

But when the body of a young boy …

p>You wake up, and your sister is dead.

With an absent father and their mother constantly ill, sisters Darcy and Carly Nolan were forced to rely on each other growing up. While unpredictable Carly bounced around, her life’s direction uncertain, Darcy fell in love, went to University, and moved to another province. When nineteen-year-old Carly unex …

When Vancouver psychiatric social worker Chris Ryder spots an abandoned cell phone during his afternoon jog, the innocent discovery drags him into the psychotic games of Ray Owens, a former patient at the centre of a high-profile kidnapping and murder case.

As the violence increases, Owens’ intricate web of lies threatens to ensnare the lives of R …

David Sanders is a penniless poet struggling to hold onto his lowly teaching position in his university’s English department. When his girlfriend, botany professor Claire Dumont, receives an invitation from an old friend to investigate a mystery at his vineyard in Niagara wine country, David convinces her to let him tag along. But what starts out …

Calgary and the Bow Valley’s business climates were lively, competitive, and capitalistic in the late 1800s. Eye on the Future sheds light on the challenges of building and maintaining business in this area during this time of vast growth. It provides insight into how entrepreneurs, retailers, manufacturers, bankers, farmers, and ranchers pioneer …

Enrique Tomás lives a quiet life with a large, loving family in an unnamed South American country. But Enrique has secrets. When his second eldest son, Hector, and Hector’s beloved friend Nadia uncover one of Enrique’s secrets, the course of Hector's life is irrevocably altered. Exiled by his parents to the isolated countryside, Hector is accu …

This unfamiliar territory is the borderlands of women’s histories traversing the American and Canadian Wests. Specialists in women’s history, settler societies, colonialism, storytelling, education, and native and borderlands studies introduced by Elizabeth Jameson and Sheila McManus pool their distinct contributions toward forging the very fir …

A play in two acts, Healey introduces two sets of characters. In the first, a lawyer and his partner seek a civil ceremony, but are stopped when the officiant won’t perform a homosexual marriage because tenets of his religious beliefs won’t allow it. But tensions only mount when they learn that the officiant himself is openly gay. In the second …

A vivid, stylish, and fascinating look at internationally acclaimed architects and their work. Beginning in the 1940s, John A. Russell, dean of the School of Architecture at the University of Manitoba, nurtured a strong tradition of Modernist design with close connections to architectural giants such as Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius. Under R …

Iraq’s streets are unsafe, its people tormented, and its identity as a state challenged from within and without. For some, Iraq is synonymous with internal hatred, bloodshed, and sectarianism. The contributors to this book, however, know another Iraq: a country that was once full of hope and achievement and that boasted one of the most educated w …

A Kindly Scrutiny of Human Nature is a collection of essays honouring Richard (Dick) Slobodin, one of the great anthropologists of the Canadian North.

A short biography is followed by essays describing his formative thinking about human nature and human identities, his humanizing force in his example of living a moral, intellectual life, his discern …

Troubling Tricksters is a collection of theoretical essays, creative pieces, and critical ruminations that provides a re-visioning of trickster criticism in light of recent backlash against it. The complaints of some Indigenous writers, the critique from Indigenous nationalist critics, and the changing of academic fashion have resulted in few new s …

Nikki van Schyndel is not your typical grizzled survivalist. She is a contemporary, urban young woman who threw off modern comforts to spend nineteen months in a remote rainforest with her housecat and a virtual stranger.

Set in the Broughton Archipelago—a maze of isolated islands near northern Vancouver Island—Becoming Wild is a story of surviv …

Jonas in Frames is [choose one]: A) a series of loosely connected narrative fragments written in poetic prose; B) a maze of postcard stories bursting with literary in-jokes; C) a delicate sequence of prose poems interspersed with narrative interludes; or D) haunted by the ghost of Samuel Beckett.

In its esoteric glimpse into the disassociated, Jonas …

When Molly learns a talent competition is coming to town, her friend Murphy (A Different Game, Murphy and Mousetrap) becomes her manager. Molly is certain she is a good singer—she has been singing in her head for as long as she can remember. She doesn't sing out loud because of a promise she made to herself. Years ago, Molly vowed that her mom wo …

Justine McKeen is back, and she’s on a deadline. With only days left before Earth Day, Justine enlists the help of her classmates to count flower buds, frogs, spiders and ants in their natural habitat as part of an environmental science project. But there’s a species right in her own classroom that she’ll have to tackle first--a class bully. …

Ria est riche, mince, jolie et populaire. Ses amies pensent qu'elle mène la vie rêvée. Mais sa situation a pris un tournant malencontreux. Ses parents se séparent et, avant qu'elle ait pu absorber le choc de cette nouvelle, son père bien-aimé disparaît dans un accident d'avion. Et comme si ça ne suffisait pas, des rumeurs circulent à l'eff …

Cady has always wanted to be a reporter, like her hero Nellie Bly, so after a fire burns down the orphanage she lives in, she’s ready to leave small-town Ontario and make her mark as a newspaperwoman.

A crumbling newspaper clipping leads her to Orrenstown, Indiana, where her investigation into a long-ago murder earns her a hard lesson in race rela …

Extensively illustrated with Ian McAllister's magnificent photographs, The Salmon Bears explores the delicate balance that exists between the grizzly, black and spirit bears and their natural environment, the last great wilderness along the central coast of British Columbia.

Key to this relationship are the salmon that are born in the rivers each sp …

Ellie is used to getting leading roles in her small-town school’s musicals, but her place at center stage disappears when her dad becomes the host of a breakfast TV show and they have to move to the big city. When Ellie auditions for—and lands—a spot with the Youth Works Theater Company, she comes up against a tight-knit group of talented, ex …

Noah Thorpe is spending the school term in Kangiqsualujjuaq, in Quebec's Far North, where his dad is an English teacher in the Inuit community.

Noah's not too keen about living in the middle of nowhere, but getting away from Montréal has one big advantage: he gets a break from the bully at his old school. But Noah learns that problems have a way of …

A lyrical wilderness of power, wealth, leisure and desire, the poems of Country Club freewheel across state lines with panache and flagrant feeling. In this bold debut from Andy McGuire, all passions – even unpleasant ones – stare down the barrel of a world in which freedom is the fifty-first state, and love is the eleventh province.

The manate …

Thunderbowl, la banda de Jeremy, es excelente, y acaba de conseguir su primera gran oportunidad: una serie de tocadas en el bar local. El problema es que Jeremy debería estar al corriente con sus trabajos para la escuela, pero pasa casi todas las noches en el escandaloso club tratando de mantener a la banda unida. Equilibrar los sueños de éxito …

The six little ninjas of Dojo Daycare are back and rowdier than ever during a field trip to the farm. From the moment the ninja boys and ninja girls step off their minibus, mayhem ensues.

Farm activities like feeding a pig, milking a cow and plowing a field dissolve into chaos as the master slips into the slop trough, is chased by a bull and then is …

something like wait for me
in the braille of scars
tonight can i suggest a little punctuation
circle half-moon vertical line of astonishment
a pause that transforms
light and breath
into language and threshold of fire

Even as vowels tremble in danger and worldly destruction repeats itself on the horizon, Ardour reminds us that the silence pulsing w …

After the orphanage she lives in is destroyed by fire, Betty, an innocent and trusting teen, takes a job as a maid in Kingston, Ontario. Welcomed into the household of the wealthy Remington clan, Betty makes friends with the staff at the house and soon discovers that her mother had also been a maid there—and that her father is in a nearby jail, c …

Fifteen-year-old Kyle Evans has been a jock for years—a triple-threat basketball player who can dribble, pass or shoot with considerable skill.

But once he decides to try out for the school musical production at Sainsbury High, Kyle finds there is much more to life than hightops and hookshots. Conflicting priorities cause problems between Kyle and …

Toni has always had nightmares about fire, and she also has burn scars but no idea how she got them. So when fire destroys the orphanage she has grown up in, she is ready to make her way to Toronto, where she hopes to discover the truth about the mother she believes hurt and then abandoned her. Toronto proves to be both daunting and exciting for To …

The characters from Susan Musgrave’s A Cargo of Orchids are back in this brilliantly engaging novel. Rainy, the Mexican-American woman, and Frenchy, the African-American, along with Musgrave’s narrator X have returned and convincingly insist their story is not done. Once inmates on death row, now reunited and hanging out at an old house in a BC …

Fifty writers on life, art and writing from twenty-two years of Brick, A Literary Journal.

Founded in 1977, Brick, A Literary Journal features a great many of the world’s best-loved writers, and has readers in every corner of the planet. The magazine prizes the personal voice and celebrates opinion, passion, revelation, and the occasional bad joke …

Winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize (2002)

Stunning and masterful in its execution, Eunoia is a five-chapter book in which each chapter is a univocal lipogram.

The word ‘eunoia,’ which literally means ‘beautiful thinking,’ is the shortest word in English that contains all five vowels. Directly inspired by the Oulipo (l’Ouvroir de Littératur …

For forty years, RM Vaughan has been fighting, and failing, to get his forty winks each night. He's not alone, not by any stretch.

More and more studies highlight the health risks of undersleeping, yet we have never been asked to do more, and for longer. And we can't stop thinking that a lack of sleep is heroic: snoozing is a kind of laziness, after …

Finaliste de langue française, Essais, des Prix littéraires du Gouverneur général de 2013! http://ggbooks.canadacouncil.ca/fr

Cet ouvrage présente une analyse discursive des récits identitaires albertains développés par rapport aux ressources pétrolières de l'Alberta, au fil de l'histoire moderne de la province. Par le biais des théories …

The cowboy, as perhaps no other figure, has captured the imagination of North Americans for over a century. Before Owen Wister's publication of The Virginian in 1902, the image of the cowboy was essentially that of the dime novel - a rough, violent, one-dimensional drifter, or the stage cowboy variety found in Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West show. Wi …

"I would have followed him through Hell," said one of the men who was serving with George Pearkes at Passchendaele where he won the Victoria Cross. If his men were devoted to him, he was equally so to them. In the character of this distinguished Canadian soldier and statesman "most conspicuous bravery," "utmost gallantry," and "supreme contempt of …

At 2:21 am on September 8, 1896, authorities in Nova Scotia killed an innocent man. Peter Wheeler — a "coloured" man accused of murdering a white girl — was strung up with a slipknot noose. The hanging was state-sanctioned but it was a lynching all the same. Now, a re-examination of his case using modern forensic science reveals one of the grea …

Rose Dubois and Julie O’Brien find themselves on the roof of a Montreal apartment building on a scorching summer’s day, and from that moment on their fates are intertwined. Worldwide climate change and dramatic shifts in weather patterns foreshadow their predestined suffering.

As is soon revealed, the two women share a submissive love for the sa …

Playing the Inside Out is David Adams Richard’s distilled insight on the artist’s struggle for full access to artistic integrity by remaining an outsider to convention. Richards conjures forth his vision of eternal truths commonly held by all mankind, a Miramichi cosmic consciousness that he has been working at all his life. In an entertaining, …

Getting three trucks and two horses stuck in the mud on "a good road" into BC's wild, remote interior was just the start of Bruce Watt's hilarious adventures—and it was his honeymoon, too. When the newly married Watt moved there in 1948 to take up ranching, he was a just a kid in his early 20s. He and his wife fell in love with Big Creek, three h …

Few writers have Harriet Richards’ understanding of childhood, and fewer still can evoke the never-lost child at the heart of our adult experience. Like her previous, critically-acclaimed books, this new collection is deft, comic, and poignant, but there is malice and tragedy at work in these stories — their gaiety and cool observation counterb …

In these stories, readers will not find heartwarming sentimentality, but mature literary prose with surprising twists and indeterminate endings, and women of intense substance and spirit. P. J. Worrell understands girls who dream of being wives and mothers in safe cozy homes, then find out that trying hard to secure that life does not necessarily m …

Any attempt to restore responsible environmental policies, revive and expand our social programs, rebuild our crumbling infrastructure, and boost our flagging economy will be inadequate unless we also address the need to increase governments? fiscal capacity. The tax system can also play a key role in closing the gap between rich and poor?—a gap …