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.

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.

Exit is at once a profound examination of what it is that drives someone to want to end their life, as well as how that urge can be turned on its head against all odds. Written with her signature brio and acerbic wit, Nelly Arcan’s last novel is a hymn to life.

Mysteriously, overnight, a father disappears from his family home. A few months later, the mother vanishes too. As the police investigations go on and on and reporters descend on the home week after week — as well as visits by social workers, doctors, and concerned relatives — the abandoned seventeen-year-old Cirrus starts his own investigation into who his parents really were, or who they might have been.

With a thousand members throughout the province, the Federation of BC Writers is one of the most active and vigorous writers’ organizations in the country. The Fed Anthology, edited by Susan Musgrave on the occasion of the group’s 25th anniversary, is a colourful bazaar of previously unpublished fiction and poetry by nearly 50 of those members.

Part punk rock travelogue, Five Little Bitches is full-throttle grit-lit. The novel is a testimony to a generation of grrrls in revolt. Suck it up!

In this collection of linked stories—part surreal picaresque, part dark comedy, and part murder mystery—magic meets the mundane as misfits and miscreants struggle to free themselves from untenable situations.

On April 1, 1968, a tall, bespectacled, thirty-five-year-old former social worker named Joachim Foikis received $3,500 from the Canada Council for the Arts in order to finance a unique, self-imposed mission unseen since Elizabethan England: reinvent the vanished tradition of “Town Fool.”