Contemporary Canadian Literature with a Distinctly Urban Twist

Anvil Press

A Verse Map of Vancouver

By George McWhirter, Ed.

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Accelerated Paces: Travels Across Borders and Other Imaginary Boundaries

By Jim Oaten

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.

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Afflictions & Departures

By Madeline Sonik

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.

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After We Drowned

By Jill Yonit Goldberg

Influenced by the dark edginess of Southern Gothic literature but set in 1984 to the music of Tina Turner, Madonna, and Stevie Nicks, After We Drowned ties together themes of environmental crisis and poverty, noting that it is poor people who often bear the brunt of ecological disaster. This is a coming-of-age story with a stealthy, yet kick-ass feminist subplot set in the swampy heart of Cajun America.

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Against Death: 35 Essays On Living

By Elee Kraljii Gardiner (Editor)

Against Death: 35 Essay On Living articulates the personal experiences of each author’s “near-deathness,” utilizing fresh and inventive language to represent what “magical thinking” proposes.

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Airborne Photo

By Clint Burnham

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All the Broken Things

By Geoff Inverarity

In this debut collection Inverarity writes of broken things, things that have come apart at the seams, things that ought not to but sometimes do dissolve with time: friendships, relationships, promises, aging parents, hearts, bodies, love, and even time itself.

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Animal

By Alexandra Leggat

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.

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As If (stories)

By Alban Goulden

As If is a collection of stories that reminds us that all literature—indeed awareness itself—is at first speculative. These stories confront the false certainties of the industrial and digital mechanisms of our age and, in the great fabulist tradition, call upon their characters to turn possibilities into action.

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