Contemporary Canadian Literature with a Distinctly Urban Twist

Anvil Press

The Lily Pad and the Spider

By Claire Legendre

An autobiographical essay on fear, The Lily Pad and the Spider (Le nénuphar et l’araignée) explores the symptoms, sources, and genesis of anxiety, from the most intimate to the most ordinary kind. Using short chapters that are fragments of her life, Claire Legendre breaks down the psychological, physical, and social mechanisms associated with that emotion. Her style is lively, often funny, sometimes dark — though never complacent — and the story traces a unique path between France, Canada, and the Czech Republic, casting a defiant yet vulnerable gaze upon the world.

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Lonesome Monsters

By Bud Osborn

Lonesome Monsters is a collection of prose and poetry from Vancouver writer Bud Osborn.

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Winner, 2018 ReLit Award!

Long Ride Yellow

By Martin West

Long Ride Yellow is the debut novel from two-time Journey Prize finalist Martin West. The novel explores the limits of sexual desire, personal choice and the edge of reality. Nonni is a dominatrix who likes to play. She hates to pay.

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The Longest Suicide: The Authorized Biography of Art Bergmann

By Jason Schneider

As Canada’s punk poet laureate, Art Bergmann has been tearing up stages, and terrifying the music industry, for half a century. Often referred to as “Canada’s Lou Reed,” Art’s story is one of rock and roll’s great tales untold. Until now. From his days helping to lay the foundation of the Vancouver punk scene with The K-Tels, to his acclaimed solo work in the ’80s and ’90s, and a late career resurgence that has culminated with being named to the Order of Canada, The Longest Suicide chronicles every unlikely twist and turn Art’s life has taken.

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The Loop

By Dan Sanders

The Loop chronicles the life of an alcoholic who is unable to escape his past to explore the ways in which abuse can shape someone into their abuser and the ways trauma can transfer from one generation to the next. How much of who we are is who we are? How much of it is someone else? What if this has all happened before?

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Loop, Print, Fade + Flicker: David Rimmer's Moving Images

By Mike Hoolboom & Alex MacKenzie

Rimmer emerged as a young visionary in the late sixties with such startlingly original works as Square Inch Field and Migration. His films of the early seventies—Surfacing on the Thames, Variations on a Cellophane Wrapper, The Dance, and Seashore—drew much critical acclaim for taking structuralist film in new directions. After spending several years in New York city he returned to Vancouver in the mid-1970s and made Canadian Pacific and Canadian Pacific II, which helped establish him as one of the world’s most accomplished cinematic artists.

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Low Centre of Gravity

By Michael Dennis

These poems ask the questions you’d really like answered, sauntering into the room and staking claim.

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Making Waves: Reading BC and Pacific Northwest Literature

By Trevor Carolan

Making Waves offers a mosaic of fresh approaches toward shaping a new “literacy of place”—a more coherent understanding of B.C. and Pacific Northwest literature in the 21st century.

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Mayan Horror: How To Survive the End of the World in 2012

By Bob Robertson

On December 21st, 2012 the eerily accurate Mayan Calendar, which goes back over 5,000 years, suddenly comes to a stop. Obviously this means only one thing: the world will end. What no one knows is how the world will end and that’s where this book will be an invaluable companion as the conflagration begins. Will it be a massive earthquake,

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Mechanophilia

By Vi Khi Nao & Sarah Burgoyne

Using the numerical structure of pi, Mechanophilia is a collaborative epic by American poet Vi Khi Nao and Canadian poet Sarah Burgoyne (who have never met) that follows the omniscient conversations and complaints of ad hoc biblical characters as they attempt to make sense of themselves on an ordered, disordered planet.

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