Contemporary Canadian Literature with a Distinctly Urban Twist

Anvil Press

Derelict Bicycles

By Dale Tracy

This first collection by Dale Tracy is the atmosphere that derelict bicycles breathe. Like weeds, ones we’ve built, they burgeon. These poems wonder what sort of a performance thinking is—they perform their own logical hysteria, that emotion that feels what the other emotions feel like.

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The Devil You Know

By Jenn Farrell

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

Make no mistake; The Devil You Know belongs on the shelf alongside Nights Below Station Street.
— Elizabeth Bachinsky

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Dirtbags

By Teresa McWhirter

Dirtbags is a novel about reckoning—with one’s past, one’s choices, and one’s expectations for the future. 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.

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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.

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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.

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Dry Shave

By Rod Filbrandt

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Elysium

By Pamela Stewart

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.

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The Encyclopedia of Lies

By Christopher Gudgeon

At once bitterly funny, provocative and poignant, this remarkable collection – follow up to Greeting from the Vodka Sea, Gudgeon’s short story debut – The Encyclopedia of Lies builds on his growing literary reputation, offering up the work of a great storyteller at his very best.

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Escape from Wreck City

By John Creary

Sharp with insights that cut to the core of the matter, the poems in Escape from Wreck City – like the people who inhabit them – are ecstatically alive.

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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.

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