Bogman's Music

By Tammy Armstrong

GOVERNOR GENERAL’S LITERARY AWARD NOMINEE

Bogman’s Music is a debut collection of poetry that is both elegiac and sensitive in its exploration of family dynamics, the enduring power of childhood experience, and the healing ability of faith and love.

ISBN 189563637x
6 x 9 | 96 pp
13.95 CAN / 9.95 US
Rights available:  World

Brave New Play Rites: Highlights plays from UBC's Creative Writing Department

By Bryan Wade

Brave New Play Rites presents twenty years of original and startling theatre from Canada’s best young writers. The book is a collection of short one-act plays written by students in the Creative Writing Program at UBC and produced at the annual festival, Brave New Play Rites, for public performances. Many successful writers have had their plays produced in the festival, including Lynn Coady, Steven Galloway, Dennis Bolen, Kevin Chong, and Aaron Bushkowsky. The release of Brave New Play Rites coincides with the 20th anniversary year of the festival, and the familiar names in this collection will be of interest both critically, and to readers who already follow the careers of these writers.

ISBN 1895636752
5.25 x 8.25 | 208 pp
20.00 CAN / 16.00 US
Rights available:  World

Circle of Birds

By Hayden Trenholm

Winner of the 15th annual 3-Day Novel-Writing Contest

A Circle of Birds is an impressionistic, finely wrought tale of lost memory, tangled history, despair and discovery. It is a journey through much Canadian and world history; a mind-melting descent into mental illness, a sordid yarn of death and twisted love.

ISBN 1895636035
5.5 x 8.5 | 100 pp
9.95 CAN / 9.95 US
Rights available:  World

Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer

By Stuart Ross

Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer is equal parts literary memoir, advice for the emerging writer, and reckless tirade. Ross has been active in the Canadian literary underground for a quarter of a century: he’s sold thousands of his books in the streets, published and edited magazines, trained insurgents in his Poetry Boot Camps, and started Canada’s first Small Press Book Fair. Where the media focusses only on the glamorous literary lives of its few superstars, Ross gives us a glimpse into How Writers Really Live. In Confessions, he declares himself the King of Poetry, explores his floundering Jewish identity, wanders into the best bookstore in Canada, offers a crash course in avoiding writing, pisses off his publishers, runs a renegade Canada booth at the International Book Fair in Managua, and begs egomaniacal young writers to stop bugging the hell out of him. Many of these essays are culled from Ross’s bimonthly “Hunkamooga” column in Word: Toronto’s Literary Calendar. Others are written specifically for this collection.

ISBN 1895636655
6 x 8 | 80 pp
16.00 CAN / 14.00 US
Rights available:  World

Cusp/detritus: an experiment in alleyways

By Catherine Owen & Karen Moe

Rooted in the back alleys, squats and psychiatric wards of contemporary Vancouver and Montreal, these unyielding poems enter the intersecting tensions and intensities in characters such as Mike, a panhandler on Vancouver’s Commercial Drive, Matthew, a runaway punk, and Dara, a single mother. Cusp’s central sequence, however, concerns the tragic life and death of Frank Bonneville, a schizophrenic and drug-addicted artist who became Ms. Owen’s muse between their 2001 meeting and his 2003 suicide. Complemented by Karen Moe’s haunting photographs of Vancouver’s neglected spaces and rejected objects, Cusp/detritus is a testimony to an obsession with the lost.

ISBN 1895636744
7 x 7 | 128 pp
16.00 CAN / 14.00 US
Rights available:  World

DAMP: Contemporary Vancouver Media Arts

By Oliver Hockenhull and Alex Mackenzie

DAMP: Contemporary Vancouver Media Arts, is a singular effort, a visually exuberant work that is also on the vanguard of theoretical engagement, a symbiosis of form and content, in full-colour throughout, inclusive of extensive imagery, graphic intrigues and typographical accent—a rare and desirable art-infused statement of the city’s media art scene—now.

DAMP is a long overdue critical engagement regarding the specificities of contemporary Vancouver media arts. The editors’ effort is not so much to look to the past, nor to confine themselves within the borders of a collective of one sort or another. Their intent is to examine and speak to the now and the future of practice in Vancouver, its relationship to world art-media, and to the strategies of artists in this particular region. Origins of thought—from First Nations source code onwards—create a framework and starting point from which to study this mediacity. By re-focussing on the relative unknowns of this scene—the hidden and supressed histories, the city’s internal and external mythologies and imaginary futures—they are revealing a plainly visible but unacknowledged praxis. DAMP will act as a catalyst for discussion that stretches well beyond this locale, as it creates response and reaction from points east, internal, and beyond nation borders.

DAMP includes over 25 contributions from such artists as Laiwan, Fiona Bowie, Ann Marie Fleming, David Rimmer, Warren Arcan, and Yum Lam Li, and critical essays by such well respected Vancouver theorists as Clint Burnham, Jayce Salloum, and Randy Lee Cutler.

ISBN 1895636892
11 x 7.5 | 144
40.00 CAN / 40.00 US
Rights available:  World

Dead Man in the Orchestra Pit

By Tom Osborne

Dead Man in the Orchestra Pit is a singularly Canadian novel featuring crime, culture, and sports. Written in the vein of John Kennedy Toole (Confederacy of Dunces) and JP Donleavy, Dead Man in the Orchestra Pit is set in Vancouver during an early 80s Grey Cup weekend. Tourists and sports aficionados have descended on the city in record droves. There are, however, a few folks who have other interests and plans. Three small-time career crooks are planning a heist on one of the city’s exclusive hotels. Enter Harry Pazik Jr., a good ole boy from Calgary, who is inadvertently swept up in the mayhem of the crooks’ boondoggle. Meanwhile, across town at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre, rehearsals of La Traviata are in full swing. The 300-pound stage manager has toppled to the orchestra pit, crushing the tuba player, while Jorgen Thrapp, assistant to the Lighting Director, is busy behind the scenes with his dealings in drugs and numbers running for a crooked printer intent on making a killing on the big game. Everyone gets more than they bargained for in this slapstick Grey Cup-meets-Goodfellas romp.

ISBN 1895636728
5.5 x 8 | 160 pp
18.00 CAN / 13.00 US
Rights available:  World

The Devil You Know

By Jenn Farrell

The Devil You Know is the follow-up volume to Farrell’s critically acclaimed debut collection, Sugar Bush & Other Stories.

These stories deal with sex, love, work, birth, and death in alternately moving, shocking, funny, and at times devastating ways. Whether these characters are facing the death of a parent, bad love choices, the possibility of unwanted pregnancy, the rupture of friendships, teen violence, or the exploration of sado-masochistic sex, Farrell exposes their ticking cores and pulls the reader along every step of the way.

“Farrell effectively forges her image as a bad-ass version of Alice Munro. Like Munro, she’s a short story writer who focuses on the lives of girls and women in small-town Canada, but Farrell’s characters get high on mushrooms and dabble in BDSM.”
— The Georgia Straight

Jenn Farrell’s smart, observant stories about desire and escape take us to the places we’re all afraid to admit we’ve been. Read The Devil You Know with greed and a hot, pleasurable hint of guilt.
— Sally Cooper
author of Love Object and Tell Everything

There are points in Jenn Farrell’s amazing collection that I felt like I was listening in on the most intimate conversations of strangers—I was rapt with attention, but almost guilty for being privy to such intimacy. The Devil You Know treads familiar territory—small town ennui, adolescent love, grief and self-destruction—but does it with such emotional acuity that it doesn’t feel familiar at all, it feels extraordinary.
— Catherine Hanrahan
author of Lost Girls and Love Hotels

Make no mistake; The Devil You Know belongs on the shelf alongside Nights Below Station Street. In this confident, insightful, often horrifyingly funny collection, Jenn Farrell distinguishes herself as one of Canada’s finest contemporary writers of short fiction. Here are working class family dramas boiled down to the bone. Quick and mean as a Virginia Slim and bright and harsh as a Rexall at midnight, Farrell never fails to bring us down to earth to meet those beautiful, flawed, undeniably human devils we know so well. Refreshingly honest, impeccably written. A very, very good book.
— Elizabeth Bachinsky
author of Home of Sudden Service

ISBN 9781897535066
5.75 x 8 | 128 pp
$16 CAN / $16 US
Rights available:  World

Dirtbags

By Teresa McWhirter

Dirtbags is a novel about reckoning—with one’s past, one’s choices, and one’s expectations for the future. Spider is a scrappy kid growing up in rural B.C., and when a tragic event causes her world to implode she heads to Vancouver for solace, distraction, and experience.

We witness a shifting morality as Spider moves through chaos and anarchy, often of her own choosing, with no certainty of truth besides what is found in brief encounters. She soaks up the world around her, getting swept up in an accelerated scene of punk music, partying, booze and drugs, but she is forever dogged by a nagging question from her past: “When everything in your life is fleeting, what do you hold onto?”

Dirtbags deals with the bonds between women, the cycle of poverty, self-destruction, loss of family, the outlaw code, and the fragile beauty of the human condition.

This is Teresa McWhirter’s follow-up novel to Some Girls Do.

Praise for Some Girls Do:
“Some Girls Do reads like candy, but offers philosophical tidbits and personal revelations. …” —BC BookWorld

“… a sharp poetic glimpse into the yearning but hopelessly unfocused lives of a group of marginal urbanites in a small West Coast city …” —Elle Canada

ISBN 1895636884
5 x 7.5 | 224 pp
20.00 CAN / 18.00 US
Rights available:  World

The Door Is Open

By Bart Campbell

Finalist BC Book Prize (Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize)

Finalist City of Vancouver Book Prize

The Door Is Open is a compassionate, reflective, and informative memoir about three-and-a-half years spent volunteering at a skid row drop-in centre in Vancouver’s downtown eastside. In an area most renowned for its shocking social ills, and the notorious distinction of holding the country‘s “very poorest forward sortation area of all 7,000 postal prefixes,” Bart Campbell dismantles our hard-held notions about poverty, the disenfranchised, substance abuse, and the nature of charity.

The Door Is Open is one man’s story of a transformative journey into the complicated and complex world of poverty.

ISBN 1895636361
5.5 x 8.5 | 144 pp
16.00 CAN / 10.95 US
Rights available:  World



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