From a Small Press

In support of Small Press Fair, hosted by Open Space at GVPL Central Branch on September 13, 2025, a list of books from small presses across Canada.

Updated September 6, 2025
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The abduction of seven forgers plus one falsely accused
Dixon, Sean, 1964- author. 
Paper Book
"One day, not long ago, I was kidnapped by a bitter but fun-loving South Korean art collector named Mr. Jackie Lin who had been burned one too many times by art forgers and wanted a bit of revenge." So begins The Abduction of Seven Forgers, a brilliant and immensely...
Accidental blooms a memoir
Honda, Keiko (Artist) 
Paper Book
Keiko Honda is living a successful, busy life as a scientist of cancer epidemiology at Columbia University in New York City when one morning she abruptly loses all strength in her legs. She phones a friend to care for her twenty-month-old daughter and rushes to the hospital. Within hours, she can...
The acid room the psychedelic trials and tribulations of Hollywood Hospital
Donaldson, Jesse, 1982- author. 
Paper Book
From the street, New Westminster's Hollywood Hospital didn't look like much - just a rambling white mansion, mostly obscured behind the holly trees from which it took its name. But, between 1957 and 1968, it was the site of more than 6000 supervised acid trips, as part of the burgeoning (and...
Apocalypse child surviving Doomsday and the search for identity at the end of the world
Butler, Carly 
Paper Book
Carly Butler was a lively, imaginative child being raised by her strong and independent mom, DJ, in 1990s Montana. They were a dynamic duo, working on housing projects and bringing music to the local church. Then, a whisper of a threatened future began to grow louder: Y2K was coming. ...
Arctic patrol Canada's fight for Arctic sovereignty
Jamieson, Eric, 1949- author. 
Paper Book
In the 1920s, Canada's claim on the Arctic archipelago was tenuous at best. In 1880, the United Kingdom had handed over control of the area to the expanding dominion, though much of the area was still unoccupied and unexplored. The North-West Mounted Police, later to become the RCMP in 1920, were...
Art of camouflage stories
Power, Sara 
Paper Book
A powerful debut about the lives of women and girls caught in the orbit of the military. Female recruits weathering toxic masculine environments. Military wives stretched thin across countless military moves, new cities and new selves. Military kids whose mercurial friendships flare...
Beach blues
Reynolds, John (John Lawrence) 
Paper Book
Blues singer Buddy Blaine is overjoyed with his summer gig at Tuffy?s on the beach strip. In exchange for performing two sets a day, he?s awarded room and board, a few hundred bucks a week, and the attention of 40-something Beach Strip celebrity Josie Marshall. Plus the friendship of gorgeous and...
Blue runaways stories
Everard, Jann 
Paper Book
From award-winning writer Jann Everard, a debut short story collection about love and loss. Some of the women in Blue Runaways are grieving. Some are looking for a second chance. All are at a turning point. From Iceland to Bali, from the comfortable houses of Canada's cities to its...
Borderline
Labrèche, Marie-Sissi, 1969- author. 
Paper Book
Searing and lyrical, Marie-Sissi Labrèche's auto-fictional novel, Borderline, describes a young girl's experience growing up in Montreal's working-class neighbourhood of Hochelaga-Maisonneuve. Raised by her "two mothers" - a stern grandmother and a mother struggling with schizophrenia, the story's...
The broken heart of winter
LeBlanc, Judy 
Paper Book
CA
Building a better world an introduction to the labour movement in Canada
Ross, Stephanie, 1970- author. 
Paper Book
This fourth edition of Building a Better World offers a comprehensive introductory overview of Canada's labour movement. The book explores why workers form unions; assesses their organization and democratic potential; examines issues related to collective bargaining, grievances and strike activity;...
C is for carnival
Marshall, Yolanda T. 
Paper Book
D is for dance! E is for emancipation! From A to Z, this is a rhyming alphabet book that celebrates Canada's Caribbean Carnival. This engaging and educational book features a diverse cast of children in vibrant costumes as they 'play mas' while dancing to Soca and Calypso music. A glossary at...
Catastrophe theories [poems]
Rowley, Mari-Lou, 1953- author. 
Paper Book
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...
The consulting trap how professional service firms hook governments & undermine democracy
Hurl, Chris, 1978- author. 
Paper Book
The Consulting Trap does a deep dive into how governments have become hooked on private consultancy firms with dire consequences for democratic decision-making, public accountability and accessible public services. Hurl and Werner contend that firms like McKinsey, Accenture, KPMG and Deloitte...
The death of Tony on belonging in two worlds
Sileika, Antanas, 1953- author. 
Paper Book
A delightful and evocative memoir by Leacock Medal nominee Antanas Sileika. The acclaimed novelist who wrote this book wasn't always Antanas. Growing up in the immigrant hub of Weston, Ontario--with a childhood of Lithuanian summer camp, folk dancing, and booze-soaked Christmases--Sileika...
The Elk Whistle Warrior Society
Revelle, Rick 
Paper Book
The Elk Whistle Warrior Society is a novel about Indigenous women taking back their place on Turtle Island and protecting the vulnerable. In the past, the men were responsible for providing the necessities of life, food, shelter and clothing. Pre--contact Native women in all...
Fishing for Leviathan
DeCroo, Rodney, 1966- author. 
Paper Book
Had Charles Bukowski and Mary Karr birthed a literary bastard-child, it could have been Rodney DeCroo. From the banks of the Allegheny River to the west coast of Canada comes a fighter and survivor that has chosen poetry and song as his weapons of defence. These poems show you what happens to...
Fontainebleau
Sonik, Madeline, 1960- author. 
Paper Book
The city of Fontainebleau, situated on the banks of the Detroit River, is undergoing growing pains and strange things are happening.  There's something poisonous in the water, something menacing in the sky, and the soil, laced with an ancient curse, is yielding up unidentified bones along with...
From up river and for one night only a novel
Grubisic, Brett Josef 
Paper Book
Meet The Gorgons The Legionnaires Chicken Treblinka The Statistics . . . Meet Dee, Gordyn, Em, and Jay, indecisive members of the greatest New Wave band to ever spring from River Bend City. Before they graduate from high school and flee a mill town that's seen better days, these ambitious friends...
Glorious birds a celebratory homage to Harold and Maude
Greco, Heidi 
Paper Book
Cinematic film, the art form that came into its own in the 20th Century, is not only familiar to all of us, but is likely the form that lodges most clearly in memory. Like music - and the music employed in a film - scenes come back, often carrying emotion as well as remembrance.One such film is...
Gumboot guys nautical adventures on British Columbia's North Coast
Allison, Lou, editor. 
Paper Book
Gumboot Girls and Dancing in Gumboots chronicled the fascinating and inspiring stories of the 1970's migration of women seeking a new way of life on BC's West Coast, from Prince Rupert and Haida Gwaii to the Comox Valley on Vancouver Island. But what about the men who came in search of their own...
Heroines revisited
Clarkes, Lincoln, 1957- photographer, interviewee. 
Paper Book
Heroines Revisited is a large format follow-up volume to the original Heroines: Photographs by Lincoln Clarkes that was released by Anvil in 2002. This new edition features over 150 portraits accompanied by three new critical essays that contextualize the five-year photo project and the...
The house on Major Street a novel
Rooke, Leon 
Paper Book
Populated by media personalities, literary characters, three-legged deer-like creatures and an array of idiosyncratic Toronto neighbours, The House on Major Street is an internal and external picaresque tale that begins with a dramatic bicycle accident and explores, along the way, the...
How to Breathe Water.
Butala, Sharon
Paper Book
A road trip through the prairies prompts acclaimed writer Sharon Butala to unearth the stories of the natural world around her, and at the same time revisit her own personal histories. After an isolating and demoralizing year during the COVID-19 pandemic, a friend invites Sharon Butala to...
In the slender margin : the intimate strangeness of death and dying
Joseph, Eve
Paper Book
A journey into the land of death and dying seen through the lens of art and the imagination Part memoir, part meditation on death itself, In the Slender Margin is an exploration of death from an "insider's" point of view. Using the threads of her brother's early death and her twenty years...
Is this an illness or an accident?
Elza, Daniela
Paper Book
CA
Jan in 35 pieces a memoir in music
Hampton, Ian, 1935- author. 
Paper Book
In his memoir, Jan in 35 Pieces, acclaimed cellist Ian Hampton recounts his years of music and camaraderie, ably capturing his life-long dedication to the history and culture of classical musical performance.
Juiceboxers.
Hertwig, Benjamin. 
Paper Book
A powerful debut novel about four young soldiers serving in Afghanistan, and the devastating aftermath of war. Winner of the 2025 Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize Finalist for the 2025 Amazon Canada First Novel Award Finalist for the 2025 Governor General's...
Knots and stitches community quilts across the harbour
Miller, Kristin, 1946- author. 
Paper Book
In 1979, Kristin Miller and her partner hitched a ride on a fishboat to a remote community across the harbour from Prince Rupert, BC. Entranced with the wild beauty of the rocky inlet, they bartered a handmade quilt for half the price of a sturdy skiff and bought a ramshackle cabin for $3,500....
Let go a wordless novel
Huebner, Mark, 1958- author. 
Paper Book
A story of travail and triumph, Mark Huebner's wordless novel Let Go follows a laid-off ad man struggling to carry the deadweight of his past as he labours through a blizzard toward an unknown future.
The lily pad and the spider
Legendre, Claire, 1979- author. 
Paper Book
You're afraid of spiders, heights, sickness, and the way other people look at you. Afraid you'll be betrayed, abandoned, and that the fortune-teller's predictions will come true. You stop smoking, you avoid insects and medical advice, you stop going on stage, taking the airplane, falling in love,...
Little fortified stories
Black, Barbara (Barbara Lynne) 
Paper Book
A spinster in love with a tobacco-smoking ghost. A lonely one-eyed monster who wanders the desert. A Medieval saint who delights in her "miraculous ruine." In Little Fortified Stories, award-winning writer Barbara Black conjures a microcosm of characters that defy convention. In these very short...
Little Red new poems
Gilbert, Kerry 
Paper Book
In Little Red, Gilbert tells a contemporary verse version of the tale of Little Red Riding Hood. Little Red Riding Hood is one of the original didactic stories about missing and murdered girls/women in a long history of this kind of violence against women--especially in...
Little Red new poems
Gilbert, Kerry 
Paper Book
In Little Red, Gilbert tells a contemporary verse version of the tale of Little Red Riding Hood. Little Red Riding Hood is one of the original didactic stories about missing and murdered girls/women in a long history of this kind of violence against women--especially in...
The longest suicide the authorized biography of Art Bergmann
Schneider, Jason, 1971- author. 
Paper Book
As Canada's punk poet laureate, Art Bergmann has been tearing up stages, and terrifying the music industry, for half a century. Often referred to as "Canada's Lou Reed," Art's story is one of rock and roll's great tales untold. Until now. From his days helping to lay the foundation of the Vancouver...
The loyal daughter a novel
Lam, Nancy 
Paper Book
The Loyal Daughter is a novel in stories, told from the perspective of mother, daughter, and granddaughter and spans the 1940s to modern day. A young woman in a village in Communist China finds herself scrapping her way through the crowded streets of Hong Kong. She immigrates to an isolated...
Making a home assisted living in the community for young disabled people
Powley, Jen, 1977- author. 
Paper Book
In most Canadian provinces, people with severe physical disabilities are simply warehoused in nursing homes, where many people, especially in the age of homecare, are in the final stages of their lives. It is difficult for a young person to live in a home geared for death; their physical assistance...
Making space for Indigenous feminism
Starblanket, Gina, editor. 
Paper Book
This book bridges generations of powerful Indigenous feminist thinking to demonstrate the movement's cruciality for today. Indigenous feminists in the first edition fought for feminism to be considered a valid and essential intellectual and activist position. The second edition animated...
Metamorphadox
Heckbert, Jarrett, artist. 
Paper Book
Jarrett Heckbert's Metamorphadox is a wordless novel in which wood engravings tell a story of the perils of technological mediation to the ever-evolving human existence.
Modern fables essays
Jacobsen, Mikka 
Paper Book
Modern Fables is a darkly funny, feminist collection of essays about love and place. In this darkly funny book about love in the digital age, Mikka Jacobsen challenges the notion that a single woman in her thirties writing about love is simply desperate. Instead, in an...
Monster.
Bydlowska, Jowita. 
Paper Book
From the bestselling author of Drunk Mom and Possessed comes MONSTER, a mesmerizing, brave new work of autofiction. MONSTER is a shattering, feminist manifesto exploring sexual awakening, motherhood, immigrant trauma and the power of female rage. Yoveeta is angry. But her...
Mooncalves a novel
Hetherington, Victoria, 1989- author. 
Paper Book
Mooncalves follows the bloody implosion of a cult in Sainte-Pétronille, Quebec, understood through the urgent voices of the living and a ring of ghostly, shape-shifting watchers. Sensing the impending dissolution of society by technological progress, the charismatic, utterly unhinged...
My father, fortune-tellers & me a memoir
Fantetti, Eufemia, 1969- author. 
Paper Book
My Father, Fortune-tellers & Me: A Memoiris a powerful and witty coming-of-age story of fate versus free will. As the daughter of southern Italian immigrants joined in an acrimonious arranged marriage, Eufemia Fantetti weathered the devastating consequences of her mother's treatment...
My father, fortune-tellers & me a memoir
Fantetti, Eufemia, 1969- author. 
Paper Book
My Father, Fortune-tellers & Me: A Memoiris a powerful and witty coming-of-age story of fate versus free will. As the daughter of southern Italian immigrants joined in an acrimonious arranged marriage, Eufemia Fantetti weathered the devastating consequences of her mother's treatment...
My soca birthday party with Jollof rice and steel pans
Marshall, Yolanda T. 
Paper Book
As Anne's birthday drew close, her friends prepared a soca party. Anne loves the sound of Caribbean soca music played on steel pans and West Africa's spicy jollof rice. Hence, her friends planned to celebrate her special day with a fusion of sounds and traditional dishes from Caribbean and African...
Mysterious dreams of the dead
Watada, Terry, 1951- author. 
Paper Book
At the heart of Mysterious Dreams of the Dead is the spiritual search for a father who died in a plane crash north of Lake Superior when his son was fifteen. Mike Shintani decides in his early thirties to address the curious circumstances surrounding his father's death; the senior Shintani's body...
Naming the shadows
Berg, Sharon, 1954- author. 
Paper Book
Sharon Berg's quietly insightful collection focuses on relationships between generations, acknowledging the prevalence of the shadows that are everywhere-but also celebrating the light.
No judgment and other busking stories
Seagram, Philip
Paper Book
CA
Out of the shadows
Henderson, Gordon, 1950- author. 
Paper Book
Set during the dramatic Red River Resistance of 1869-1870 and the birth of Manitoba. The novel is told through the perspective of a young Irish-Canadian journalist, Conor O?Dea. Under mysterious circumstances, after working for the assassinated politician D?Arcy McGee, O?Dea is sent West, and to Sir...
Permission to land a memoir of loss, discovery, and identity
LeBlanc, Judy 
Paper Book
When Judy LeBlanc's mother died in 2015, she embarked on a personal journey of discovery and reconciliation with her known but unacknowledged Coast Salish ancestry on her mother's side. She was to discover that both maternal great-grandparents had Scottish fathers and Coast Salish mothers. Her...
Pinching zwieback made-up stories from the Darp
Toews, Mitch 
Paper Book
Pinching Zwieback: Made-up Stories from the Darp focuses on recurrent, related characters with a common reality: small town Mennonite life. It's socially engaged autofiction based heavily on the author's own background and experiences. The loosely linked stories read, "almost like a novel,"...
Playlist a profligacy of your least-expected poems
Turner, Michael, 1962- author. 
Paper Book
Playlist: a Profligacy of Your Least-Expected Poems documents the life and practice of a writer who grew up in a musical household, spent his early adult years as a touring musician and his later years programming nightclubs, hotels, galleries and festivals. Modelled after the American folk...
Queasy a wannabe writer's bumpy journey through England in the '70s : a memoir
Sonik, Madeline, 1960- author. 
Paper Book
The award-winning author of Afflictions & Departures turns her kaleidoscopic lens on England in the 1970s in Queasy, a series of linked memoirs. While still grieving her father's death and the end of her first romantic relationship, Madeline Sonik moved with her mother from Windsor, Ontario to the...
Real Enough The Unlikely Story of Doug & the Slugs.
Chapman, Aaron. 
Paper Book
Doug and the Slugs carved out a unique spot in the North American music scene after first appearing in Vancouver BC in 1977. Too polished to be punk and too irreverent to be slick radio rock and roll, they quickly became hometown favourites. Through a hard-won, rigorous touring schedule, a bar band...
Resonance essays on the craft and life of writing
Chesham, Andrew, editor. 
Paper Book
Through forty-two personal essays, Resonance: Essays on the Craft and Life of Writing brings together insights from writers and publishers across Canada on the practices that fuel their work, and invites readers to join the conversation through a series of engaging...
Road trips journeys in the unspoiled world
Carolan, Trevor 
Paper Book
Trevor Carolan's eagerness for encountering faraway peoples and places, equals Paul Theroux's excitement when he hits the road again in ,To the Ends of the Earth . With vivid descriptions of life from both the developed and developing worlds, veteran world traveller Trevor...
Rubymusic a popular history of women’s music and culture
Kuhns, Connie 
Paper Book
CA
Scoundrels and shirkers capitalism and poverty in Britain
Silver, Jim, 1946- author. 
Paper Book
Scoundrels and Shirkers examines the deep relationship between capitalism and poverty in England since the 12th century. It exposes the dynamics of capitalism, from its origins in the long transition from feudalism to its current crisis under neoliberal capitalism, in producing poverty. ...
Sisters of the spruce a novel
Shimotakahara, Leslie 
Paper Book
CA
Something's burning
Trull, Janet 
Paper Book
Following on the heels of her critically acclaimed first collection Hot Town and Other Stories an examination of relationships within communities continues in this new collection of short fiction, Something's Burning. The twenty-first century speeds ahead with fast-changing ideas about...
Songs from a small town (in a minor key)
Chamberlain, Penny, 1958- author. 
Paper Book
Inspired by a true incident of mass hysteria in Le Roy, New York in 2011-2012, Songs from a Small Town (in a Minor Key) is a novel written as a series of stories from different points of view. It examines a mysterious condition that strikes only teenage girls in a small farming town--their...
Stasio a novel in three parts
Dobozy, Tamas, 1969- author. 
Paper Book
This detective novel - presented in three distinct novellas - traces the ever deepening involvement of the protagonist Anthony de Stasio in a series of political nightmares, from a cursed firearm in "Steyr Mannlicher" that leads him through the world of a single mother's hardscrabble poverty; to the...
Stoneface memoir of a defiant Dene
Kakfwi, Steve 
Paper Book
CA
Tales for late night bonfires stories
Grisenthwaite, G. A., 1959- author. 
Paper Book
Curious, uncanny tales blending Indigenous oral storytelling and meticulous style, from an electric voice in Canadian fiction These are stories that are a little bit larger than life, or maybe they really happened. Tales that could be told 'round the campfire, each one-upping the...
They called him a radical the memoirs of Pete Maloff and the making of a Doukhobor pacifist
Maloff, Pete, 1900-1971 
Paper Book
Peter "Pete" Maloff was born in Saskatchewan in 1900, the year after the first Doukhobors, including his parents, immigrated to Canada. Living through the eras of WWI and WWII in a Doukhobor community strengthened his deep-rooted belief in pacifism and, at a young age, he dedicated himself...
Thick skin field notes from a sister in the Brotherhood
Peach, Hilary. author. 
Paper Book
Thick Skin: Field Notes from a Sister In The Brotherhood, is a deep dive into the secret language and hidden culture of one of the most esoteric heavy construction trades: Boilermaking. For more than two decades, Hilary Peach worked as a transient welder - and one of the only women - in the...
This location of unknown possibilities a novel
Grubisic, Brett Josef 
Paper Book
When English Professor Marta Spëk is offered a film consultant's contract, she's fighting a bad case of year-end doldrums. She signs on, imagining that exotic hands-on work at the sandy location shoot for a made-in-Canada biopic will open doors of opportunity and spark her creativity - or at the...
This place a stranger Canadian women travelling alone
Johnstone, Vici, 1959-, editor. 
Paper Book
Sometimes tragic, sometimes uproariously funny, this is a diverse collection of Canadian women writing about their experiences of travelling alone. From the deceptiveness of the everyday to the extremes of geography, weather and violence, these stories go beyond the usual tales of intrepid male...
Wabanang ... an Anishinaabe granddaughter's search for the truth : a novel
Merle, Judii 
Paper Book
In the winter of 1876, a baby is born to Anishinaabe parents along the trapline in the northern Ontario wilderness. Seventy five years later, her granddaughter is seeking information about her grandmother's life, why her family is so fractured, and what part the residential school played in the...
Wan a novel
Promislow, Dawn 
Paper Book
Shortlisted for the 2023 Fred Kerner Book Award A Miramichi Reader Best Fiction of 2022 "Wan is a masterpiece. This beautiful, painterly, sublime, and sonically exquisite novel by Dawn Promislow is a work of utter genius." - Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, author of...
Water confidential witnessing justice denied -- the fight for safe drinking water in Indigenous and rural communities in Canada
Blacklin, Susan 
Paper Book
In Water Confidential, Susan Blacklin (formerly Sue Peterson) revisits the important work of her late ex-husband, Dr. Hans Peterson. Beginning in 1996, Peterson, growing frustrated with his work in government funded research in Saskatchewan, brought attention to the desperate need for equal...

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