From a Small PressUnpublished

Share

"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...

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. Within hours, she can barely breathe. She soon discovers she is permanently paralyzed from the chest down due to a...

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...

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. ...

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...

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...

Asking for Directions is open and accessible debut collection. This book is a happy hour of poetry that blurs the lines between straight-up realism, goofy weirdness, linear narrative, dreamscape, lovestruck awe, wonder and joy. Poetry for Firth is under every rock. Poetry is the handyman who should...

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...

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...

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...

In a secularized society, what kind of faith in our collective powers and imaginations can be patch-worked together, and what might be the role of angels? Through multiple locales, languages and spiritualities, A Bouquet Brought Back from Space both subverts and sublimates traditions of religious...

Three generations of Acadian women grapple with the impacts of dislocation, exile, and violence in award-winning writer Judy LeBlanc's debut novel, The Broken Heart of Winter. Lise, Appoline, and Anne are related, though they live on opposite coasts at...

Three generations of Acadian women grapple with the impacts of dislocation, exile, and violence in award-winning writer Judy LeBlanc's debut novel, The Broken Heart of Winter. Lise, Appoline, and Anne are related, though they live on opposite coasts at...

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;...

It is time we resist. And how I have strained and stretched taut against it, this time, tossing it off in some neglected corner of the kitchen, where it does not belong, can be ignored, until the odd moment of late-night coffee, nightmares recalled. --...

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...

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 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 second edition of Mark Abley's acclaimed creative biography, revised and expanded with a new introduction by the author. When he died in 1947, Duncan Campbell Scott was revered as one of his country's finest poets and honoured as a devoted civil servant. Today, because of his work as...

A striking visual saga in linocuts of the life of John `Daddy' Hall, a man of Mohawk and African-American descent who survived war, capture and slavery to become a pillar of the community in nineteenth-century Owen Sound, Ontario.

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 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...

A compelling and inventive collection about the ways we leave and the reasons we choose what to leave behind. Framed within a tale about a journalist investigating choices of life and death, the stories in this collection explore restlessness, belonging, freedom, and mortality. A...

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...

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...

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...

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 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...

A surprising tale of two brothers, and strange and familiar stories of the Cowichan Valley. "Stenson's observations of the ordinariness of people are keen and revelatory."-Prairie Fire These stories shimmer in summer heat under the gaze of a two-humped mountain and...

Poetry. Mandatory reading for devotees of the long poem. In her second collection of poetry, HELL LIGHT FLESH, Klara du Plessis returns with a Dantesque trilogy on family, punishment, and the ferocity and brilliance of creation. HELL LIGHT FLESH drops the reader into a narrative...

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...

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...

In September of 2013, thousands of migratory songbirds perished after being lured like moths to a flame to a hundred-foot-high flare at the Canaport Liquefied Natural Gas plant in Saint John, New Brunswick. Photographer Thaddeus Holownia and poet Harry Thurston sought to memorialize this fateful...

Originally published in 2014, In the Slender Margin was enthusiastically received and applauded for its respectful sensitivity in dealing with a subject that is still, to many, an avoidable topic of conversation: death and dying. Using her 20+ years' experience working as a palliative...

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.

A powerful debut novel about four young soldiers serving in Afghanistan, and the devastating aftermath of war. "An unvarnished, intimately informed dissection of war's physical and emotional derangements." - Omar El Akkad, author of What Strange Paradise and American War<...

In 1979, Kristin Miller and her partner hitched a ride on a fishboat to a remote community across the harbour from Prince Rupert, BC. Together, they imagined settling down in this rustic paradise. But that dream fell apart and Kristin moved in alone. Bereft, angry, and in fragile health after a...

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.

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

An Anthology of New Essays, Memoir and Poetry by 36 BC Writers. A treasury of writing celebrating the importance and beauty of our island archipelagos. Thirty-six accomplished writers share their love of the islands in the Salish Sea. Through new essays, memoir and poetry, they...

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...

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...

The third edition of the iconic collection Making Space for Indigenous Feminism features feminist, queer and two-spirit voices from across generations and locations. Feminism has much to offer Indigenous women, and all Indigenous Peoples, in their struggles against oppression....

In this wordless biography, wood engraver George A. Walker provides a fitting stage to explore the life of Mary Pickford, a silent film star whose groundbreaking contributions to the motion picture industry earned her the title `Queen of the Movies'.

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.

Metamorphosis collects a selection of esteemed Canadian writer-artist P. K. Page's poetry, prose and plays written for and about children.

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...

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 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...

From award-winning poet Catherine Owen, a collection of poems about one woman's journey from BC to a new life in Alberta, where she buys an old house and creates a new meaning of home. In search of stability and rootedness, in 2018 Catherine Owen moved from coastal Vancouver to...

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 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...

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...

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...

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.

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...

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 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 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...

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...

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...

Reckoning is one long poem in search of itself, its own meaning. A synecdoche of verse, segments calling and responding to each other, like jazz musicians riffing back and forth in a late-night smokey speakeasy. Snippets of conversation make it through the air, across the space that...

Writer and educator Mary Bomford describes the formative years of her life working as a teacher in Zambia, and the long-lasting impact those years imprinted upon her. At the age of 21, Canadian teacher Mary Bomford and her husband of just eight weeks embarked on a...

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...

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...

In Rubymusic, award-winning journalist and broadcaster Connie Kuhns takes readers on an explosive journey through the Pacific Northwest's groundbreaking women's music scene in the 80s and 90s. When journalist Connie Kuhns approached Vancouver Cooperative...

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. ...

World War One is in high gear. Fourteen-year-old Khya Terada moves with her family to a remote, misty inlet on Haida Gwaii, then the Queen Charlotte Islands, in northern British Columbia, known for its Sitka spruces. The Canadian government has passed an act to expedite logging of these majestic...

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...

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...

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...

Stephen Kakfwi was born in a bush camp on the edge of the Arctic Circle in 1950. In a family torn apart by tuberculosis, alcohol and the traumas endured by generations in residential school, he emerged as a respected Dene elder and eventually the Premier of the Northwest Territories. ...

In A Sure Connection the author contemplates the connections that matter, and that confirm we matter--connections with others and with our real or re-imagined selves. Through portraits of faith, family, nature, mortality and ordinary life, the work affirms resilience and resolve with clear...

In A Sure Connection the author contemplates the connections that matter, and that confirm we matter--connections with others and with our real or re-imagined selves. Through portraits of faith, family, nature, mortality and ordinary life, the work affirms resilience and resolve with clear...

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...

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, 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...

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...

Sometimes tragic, sometimes uproariously funny, THIS PLACE A STRANGER 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...

il virus brings together 113 poems written over seventy-eight days during the spring 2020 pandemic lockdown in Toronto. These responses to daily news and eclectic media posts encompass dogs (lots of them), Zambonis, jazz and blues, Jackie Gleason, mathematics, thermodynamics, and geography (real and...

il virus brings together 113 poems written over seventy-eight days during the spring 2020 pandemic lockdown in Toronto. These responses to daily news and eclectic media posts encompass dogs (lots of them), Zambonis, jazz and blues, Jackie Gleason, mathematics, thermodynamics, and geography (real and...

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...

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...

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...