Contemporary Canadian Literature with a Distinctly Urban Twist

Anvil Press

The Second Detective

By Shannon Mullally


The Second Detective is a deliriously entertaining reimagining of the hard-boiled detective novel, featuring a mysterious narrator, a missing husband, and a lascivious mountain goat with interspecies interests.

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  • us $16
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Finalist, Amazon.ca First Novel Award

Seep

By W. Mark Giles

Seep limns the tension between land development and landscape, trauma and nostalgia, dysfunction and intimacy in a narrative of twenty-first century Canada.

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Sensational Vancouver

By Eve Lazarus

Sensational Vancouver is a fully illustrated popular history book about Vancouver’s famous and infamous, the ordinary and the extraordinary, filtered through the houses in which they lived. Sensational Vancouver covers legendary women including Elsie MacGill, Phyllis Munday, Nellie Yip Quong and Joy Kogawa; high-end brothels, unsolved murders, and the homes and buildings of artists, architects and entertainers including Frederick Varley, Arthur Erickson, Bryan Adams, and Michael Bublé. Includes a Walking Tour map of historic Strathcona and Chinatown.

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Sensational Victoria: Bright Lights, Red Lights, Murders, Ghosts & Gardens

By Eve Lazarus

The follow-up to Eve Lazarus’s successful At Home with History: The Untold Secrets of Greater Vancouver’s Heritage Homes, Sensational Victoria gives us a glimpse into aspects of Victoria rarely talked about in the tourist brochures or flowery garden guidebooks.

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Serpentine Loop

By Elee Kraljii Gardiner

Writers, like skaters, score the blank sheet and test the edge of inclusion and exclusion. Most of these poems begin with a word from skating and push off to another topic. Others revisit ideas of femininity, control, and language as pattern, or visit the past through movement, or enact principles from the rink such as symmetry, joy, endurance, crescendo and accent, revolution, response.

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Several Small Animals Enclosed in a Benedictine Monastery

By Vera Hadzic

In this debut collection, Ontario poet Vera Hadzic explores themes of anxiety, eating, excretion, compulsion, and change. Several Small Animals Enclosed in a Benedictine Monastery follows the construction and deconstruction of the body, both human and animal.

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  • us $14
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Shag Carpet Action

By Matthew Firth

Shag Carpet Action is Matthew Firth’s boldest and brashest collection of stories to date. These are absurd, raunchy, funny stories whose sharp, salty characters are boldly credible and wonderfully rendered by one of Canada’s most adventurous and courageous fiction writers.

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Shylock

By Mark Leiren-Young

Shylock is an award-winning play about a Jewish actor who finds himself condemned by his own community for his portrayal of Shakespeare’s notorious Jew.

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  • us 8.95
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Sideways

By Heather Haley

Heather Haley’s poetry is tough, irreverent, and in-your-face. She asks all the questions that a nice girl’s not supposed to ask. Down back roads and highways, her characters long to possess the past and harness the future. Cowboys, car accidents, broken hearts, dead lovers—and potential violence—hover like heat on the horizon.

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A Sign of the Times: The Best of the Penthouse Marquee

By Benjamin Jackson & Aaron Chapman

For nearly 80 years, the Penthouse Nightclub has been the home of some of Vancouver’s naughtiest behaviour. But lately, it’s the nightclub’s neon marquee that hangs over its sidewalk that has become the talk of the town, its comic and witty messages going viral on social media and being mentioned on talk shows and news reports around the world.

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  • us $28.
  • world (outside Canada/US) orders US $28.