Accelerated Paces: Travels Across Borders and Other Imaginary Boundaries

By Jim Oaten

Dodging down back-alleys in bomb-torn Beirut. Wheeling past God and traffic in Mombassa, Kenya. Slipping around the edges of Alzheimer’s disease, the Gulf War, and the eternity of CNN.

Set somewhere between here and the heat-death of the universe, Jim Oaten’s debut collection serves up random samples of literal and literary truth scooped up at top speed. Whether peeking out from the backseat of Mom and Dad’s car or surveying the grimy wings of mental wards, Accelerated Paces hurdles that uneasy terrain between creative fact and honest fiction. These short stories and pieces ignore borders as they jaunt thorough external trips and internal voyages.

This is both creative non-fiction and creative fiction, which follows the idea of crossing boundaries and blurring borders. Think part of this collection will be an explicit demonstration of how the two genres interplay, of how a non-fiction event can inspire a fictional piece, and, interestingly enough, the reverse as well.

Stamp your passport, and step on the edge. Buy a ticket, and take the ride.

ISBN 1895636930
5.5 x 8 | 176 pp
$18 CAN / $18 US
Rights available: World

Afflictions & Departures

By Madeline Sonik

Finalist, Charles Taylor Prize for literary non-fiction
Nominated for the BC National Award for Canadian non-Fiction

Afflictions & Departures is a collection of first-person experiential essays. However, this is not the realm of traditional memoir—in addition to incidents and feelings recaptured from memory, Sonik seeks out connections between the microcosm of the daily events of her childhood and adolescence, and the social, historical, and scientific trends of the time.

Afflictions & Departures begins by considering the turbulent and changing nature of the world in the late 1950s and early 1960s—the world in which the author was conceived and born. Like many couples of that era, Madeline Sonik’s parents focused on shared social and economic ambitions at the expense of authentic personal feeling. These ambitions would erode and, by the 1970s, completely collapse.

These essays are as incisive as they are moving, and leave the reader with a sense of history as it was lived, not as it is codified in countless textbooks.

Praise for Afflictions & Departures:

“Startlingly original, Madeline Sonik’s moving story of her childhood defies all our expectations of memoir. She captures crystalline moments of childhood memory and links them in a daisy-chain with corresponding events of the tumultuous societal change taking place outside her home. It is North America in the 1960s and 70s and her letter-perfect, child’s-eye view of the world brings back that time with such intensity that the reader can almost smell and taste it. Droll, tragic, and absolutely compelling, Afflictions and Departures is a visceral portrayal of a family imploding.”
—Jury, Charles Taylor Prize for literary non-fiction

“Her memory is dustless, capacious, uncanny. With a storyteller’s skill and a poet’s depth of vision, she recreates her childhood with one eye on her family and the other on the larger world. Significant cultural markers sit side-by-side with the small, painful intensities of her childhood. This memoir is crammed with pathos, yet is written with a light touch. I adore the narrator who never falls into self-pity or narcissism. The clarity of her vision makes the prose gleam and transforms autobiography into art.”
—Lorna Crozier, author of Small Beneath the Sky

“From the patchwork craziness of a sixties and seventies suburban childhood, Madeline Sonik has fashioned a singular coming-of-age story in which the age itself assumes a starring role. Sharply observed, hilarious, and heartbreaking, Afflictions and Departures is a wise, tender, and beautifully written book.”
—Susan Olding, author of Pathologies: a life in essays

“Vivid and compelling, Afflictions & Departures can’t help but make you reexamine your own life, and take another look back at the family and friends who helped shape you into who you are today.”
—John Threlfall, former editor of Monday Magazine

ISBN 978-1-897535-67-7
5.75 x 8.75 | 184 pp
$20 CAN / $20 US
Rights available:  World

Airborne Photo

By Clint Burnham

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.

ISBN 1895636221
4.25 x 7.5 | 184 pp
13.95 CAN / 10.95 US
Rights available:  World

Animal

By Alexandra Leggat

Finalist for the Trillium Book Award

In a style reminiscent of Raymond Carver, the stories contained in Animal depict people on the brink of major life change. They stand at crossroads they are often oblivious to; they suck thick air in rooms filled with palpable tension. Leggat’s characters often seem 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 action or refuse to act; life acts for them. The reader is left to wonder: When does “meaning” cease to have meaning? Like travelling a mountain highway at night, what’s just around the next bend is never known. The stories in Animal never fail to deliver potent surprises.

———

“I’m tempted to say it’s a slim, distilled masterpiece.”
– Michael Bryson, Underground Book Club

“these quickly unfolding stories are elliptically drawn, tense with action and dark humour. Leggat is a shape-shifting writer”
– Ibi Kaslik, The Globe and Mail

“this immensely rewarding collection is worth picking up”
– eye weekly

ISBN 9781897535011
5.5 x 8 | 160 pp
$18 CAN / $18 US
Rights available:  World

Articles of Faith: The Battle of St. Alban's

By Mark Leiren-Young

Articles of Faith is a play designed to promote understanding of the controversial subject of the blessing of same-sex unions. The play is based on a series of interviews conducted by the author in a Pacific Northwest community where the issue of formal condoning and blessing of same-sex unions divided and eventually split an Anglican parish.

ISBN 1895636418
5 x 8 | 56 pp
10.00 CAN / 7.00 US
Rights available:  World

At Home With History

By Eve Lazarus

The Untold Secrets of Greater Vancouver’s Heritage Homes

At Home with History is a collection of real life stories that bring to life the glamorous and not-so-glamorous social histories of selected heritage homes in Greater Vancouver—stories of brothels and bootleggers, secret rooms, and Shakespearean-style murders. An Italian family survives the depression by selling booze and sandwiches from their eastside home. A Shaughnessy mansion headquarters the Ku Klux Klan and then a children’s hospice. A secret radio room is uncovered during renovations. Every home has a social history and a genealogy that tells a tremendous amount about the history of the times and offers up a sense of place. Current home-owners are only temporary custodians, part of the chain in the ongoing narrative of the house. People change, styles change, colours change, cars change, but through it all, the house remains a central fixture and the structure for the stories in At Home with History.

ISBN 1895636809
7.5 x 9.5 | 192 pp
20.00 CAN / 18.00 US
Rights available:  World

The Beautiful Dead End

By Clint Hutzulak

Finalist, Books in Canada/Amazon.ca First Novel Award

The Beautiful Dead End is a visceral crime thriller that takes the reader on an existential journey to the “other side” and almost back again. In a bizarre, shadowy interzone populated by disturbing characters, our anti-hero confronts the dark secrets of his past, and comes face to face with the consequences of having lived an unexamined life.

ISBN 1895636396
5 x 7.25 | 210 pp
14.95 CAN / 10.95 US
Rights available:  World

Bizarre Winery Tragedy

By Lyle Neff

Bizarre Winery Tragedy is a book of lyric poems about country folk, city folk, alcohol and urbanism. These poems continue Neff’s quest to explore the modern-day juxtaposition of urban and rural landscapes, and the lines of power between the countryside and the metropolis-firewood, dams and the WiFi-enabled grid. Deeper insights emerge in this, the author’s third published collection. Bizarre Winery Tragedy is 21st-century poetry that juggles death and technology and finds some nasty laughs in the process. Think of it as a strange and tragic road trip through British Columbia’s wine-consuming regions, with Neff at the wheel.

Praise for Lyle Neff:

“These poems pack a wallop. They’re full of outrage and bravado, tempered by amazing insights and a highly developed musical sensibility. They ‘steam and churn’ with the energy of the city, they burn with this young poet’s ‘hottest fire of sight’.” —Lorna Crozier

“Lyle Neff understands, without the melodrama and hysterics of so many of his contemporaries, the duality of his natural surroundings-trees and skyscrapers, mountains and public transit-and never once portrays this with anything less than a lyric beauty full of imagination, humour, and optimism.”
—Evan Jones, New Canadian Poetry

“Lyle Neff’s as indiosyncratic and epigrammatic, as off-kilter and dead-on, as insolent and restless and thoughtfully skilled as a poet should be. From here on in almost everybody else is playing catch-up.”
—Michael Holmes

ISBN 1-895636-66-3
5 x 7 | 64 pp
14.00 CAN / 12.00 US
Rights available:  World

Black Rabbit & Other Stories

By Salvatore Difalco

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 characters and the machinations of the worlds in which they find themselves. These are sure-footed narratives that move with a pre-destined deliberation into a universe that is often fraught with desperation and apparent hopelessness; but, ultimately, we find ourselves on a path to redemption, an acceptance of what is, in the final analysis, an incomprehensible matrix. Existential and reflective, brutal and honest, these are stories that will leave you questioning the essence of existence, your own humanity, and the humanity of those around you. This is deft storytelling from a talented new voice.

ISBN 1895636787
5.5 x 8.5 | 208 pp
18.00 CAN / 16.00 US
Rights available:  World

Body Breakdowns: Tales of Illness & Recovery

By Janis Harper, Editor

Body Breakdowns is a collection of true tales about brushes with mortality and the medical establishment. Some are serious, some are funny; all are about illnesses, both minor and major.

The pieces are all related to aging and are told in strong, engaging, and authentic voices. They are about people suddenly discovering they’re vulnerable and the different ways they come to terms with that, as well as how they deal with the health professionals whose job it is to provide care for our bodies. They are also about how people who have physically suffered learn to find words for and, thus, shape the new world they find themselves in.

These stories remind us that everything can change in a moment. And that we’re all in these aging bodies together.

Body Breakdowns features writing from: Brad Zembic, Emma Kivisild, Grant Buday, Susan Olding, Bob Wakulich, Adrienne Mercer, Alan Girling, Beverley A. Feather, Jane Silcott, Kim Clark, Denise Halpern, Bonnie Bowman, Melody Hessing, Stephen Osborne, Luanne Armstrong, Dennis E. Bolen, J. Cates, Ruth Murdoch, Doreen Colmer, Crystal Hurdle, and Janis Harper.

ISBN 1895636868
5.25 x 7.5 | 168 pp
18.00 CAN / 15.00 US
Rights available:  World

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