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.

Praise for Dead Man in the Orchestra Pit

“‘Only connect’ was E.M. Forster’s advice to writers, and Osborne connects like a mad electrician in a power plant.”
—The Vancouver Sun

“Smart dialogue, fast action, and a mix of liquor and drugs fuel this clever tale.”
—North Shore News

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

“The Devil You Know has a distinctly urban thrust, with many of the stories taking a voyeuristic view of small-town girls trying to make their way in big cities. The reader watches them discover that it’s the same shit, different town. … Complex, multi-layered sentences and language achieve a ‘simple’ colloquial voice that is not simple to achieve. …”
— The Malahat Review

“Farrell excels at very short, sharply realized tales that display a startling repertoire of styles and structural innovations.”
— Vancouver Review

“The Devil You Know is a powerful, revealing read from an uncompromising writer. The women in these stories are real, three-dimensional, alive, and thinking. Smart and sexy.”
— The Rover

“… [Farrell] works her characters expertly through each story, holding the reader in her hand and showing readers something fresh, provocative, sombre, sad and — above all — real about human behaviour via her voyeuristic fiction. Excellent stuff.”
— Front&Centre

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

The Dreamlife of Bridges

By Robert Strandquist

The Dreamlife of Bridges is the debut novel from Vancouver writer Robert Strandquist. Leo is a middle-aged, divorced handyman capable of mending almost anything outside of himself. The denial of his son’s death, and his inability to deal with his own pain, has rendered his life fractured and untenable. June is a single mom struggling in the bottleneck of poverty, fighting to retain custody of her son. From their precarious vantage points they behold a world of human frailty and tenuous beauty, a place where the damaged victims of a cruel epoch might be made whole again.

ISBN 1895636469
5.5 x 8.5 | 216 pp
18.00 CAN / 13.00 US
Rights available:  World

Dry Shave

By Rod Filbrandt

If you like your comic strip characters cute and cuddly, you’ll hate Dry Shave. Dry Shave cracks open a hardboiled world of laconic lowlifes, pugnacious palookas, shiftless grifters and demented dames—with a tip of the pork-pie hat to Robert Mitchum. As featured in Vancouver’s The Georgia Straight and Toronto’s eye weekly magazine, Rod Filbrandt’s wacky cast of noir characters is brought together in his first collected edition.

ISBN 1895636213
5.5 x 6.75 | 120 pp
12.95 CAN / 10.95 US
Rights available:  World

Elysium

By Pamela Stewart

Pamela Stewart is a self-described “literary proctologist,” and her writing often looks into places that people generally don’t want to look. The stories in Elysium are about the difficulties of life we all encounter as human beings, the fragility of life—the physical, mental, and spiritual challenges we must try to overcome. They are about ordinary people, characters searching for meaning. People are rescued, but not always in the way they hoped for or expected. Stewart’s work is character-driven and empathetic.

Pamela Stewart spent twenty years as a private investigator, which gave her a special insight into human behaviour. “Because I spent so many years alone in a car watching people, my perspective on people is a bit different. I would watch someone for three or so days in a row, and in that time get a capsule version of their life; but it was skewed because I was part of their life, yet not part. They didn’t know I was in it,” she says. “Writing about people is kind of like that too.”

ISBN 1895636914
5.5 x 8 | 208
18.00 CAN / 18.00 US
Rights available:  World

Everything Rustles

By Jane Silcott

In this debut collection of personal essays, Silcott looks at the tangle of midlife, the long look back, the shorter look forward, and the moments right now that shimmer and rustle around her. Here is love, grief, uncertainty, longing, joy, desire, fury, and fear. Also wandering bears, marauding llamas, light and laundry rooms.

“Jane Silcott writes crisp and compelling narratives; as their import emerges, small epiphanies wink into consciousness, and we are taken up into everyday life. Reading this collection of her work we glimpse layers of the real that seem so often to conceal the world from us. A wonderful book, a book of wonders.”
— Stephen Osborne, Publisher, Geist Magazine

“Reading ‘Fish,’ I was so deeply brought back to my own subdued memories of losing my mother, that I felt in Jane the presence of a found sister. For me, these essays are about what we once were, about ageing itself, about the solidity of those we love and the porousness of who we are. They are searching, self-deprecating, celebratory and sorrowful, and they rustle with wondrous detail and brave observation.”
— Madeleine Thien, author of Dogs at the Perimeter

“Jane Silcott is the kind of writer we discover and then immediately wonder where she has been all our lives. Her work is fearless, honest, and every sentence is edged like a gem. Her insight and intelligence locate human grace in the midst of even the most difficult of subjects. She is a writer to put your faith in.”
— Curtis Gillespie, Editor, Eighteen Bridges

“Read these wonderful essays slowly; savour their lively intelligence, their thoughtfulness, their cheek. Silcott takes the personal essay right back to its most productive origins and purpose: to explore (essayer) our world’s mysteries with amazement and humility.”
— Andreas Schroeder, author of Renovating Heaven

ISBN 978-1-927380-41-3
5.5 x 8 | 192 pp
$18 CAN / $18 US
Rights available:  World

Exact Fare Only : Good, Bad and Ugly Rides on Public Transit

By Grant Buday

We’ve all had good, bad, and sometimes ugly experiences on public transit. Exact Fare Only is an anthology of real life stories about heading out, heading back, and everything that happened in between, whether the trip was across the country or just across town.

ISBN 1895636299
5 x 8 | 176 pp
15.95 CAN / 15.95 US
Rights available:  World

Exact Fare Only II: Good, Bad and Ugly Trips on Public Transit

By Ian Cockfield

Back with more, Exact Fare Only 2 is the follow-up collection of the weird, the wild and the wonderful of commuter literature. Whether by land, sea or air, public transit around the world says more about the human condition than many want to admit. These real-life tales, reflections, poems, and rants are required reading for commuters everywhere. Join Teresa McWhirter as she gets propositioned on a cross-country Greyhound, Matthew Firth accidentally witnessing a midnight exchange of essential services, Scott Gunning encountering compassion on a third-class bus in southern India, Catherine McNeil who misses her ride and discovers the cost of a stranger’s kindness, and follow ten years of Patricia Rutale’s life as a TTC rider negotiating urban legends, prejudice, come-ons and bright-eyed awe.

ISBN 1895636558
5 x 8 | 180 pp
18.00 CAN / 13.00 US
Rights available:  World

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