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edited by Susan Musgrave on the occasion of the group’s 25th anniversary, is a colourful bazaar of previously unpublished fiction and poetry by nearly 50 of those members.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.
By Tom Osborne
Foozlers is a 24-hour “Odyssey” that runs a juggernaut through the high- and lowlands of Vancouver. Jerry Lowe is the reluctant driver of a getaway car for two sketchy junkies on the make. A pair of cops spend a shift wobbling on the cusp of total breakdown. The groom-to-be in an Indian arranged marriage seeks an escape of the carnal variety. Soon, they will all intersect paths with a gas station attendant and a very “special” car wash operator. And somebody’s got to do something about that noisy, bad-tempered cockatoo.
Going to New Orleans is a fantastic and graphic first-person narrative that serves as a surreal-but-faithful guide to the music, food, history, and literature of New Orleans. A spiritual book, as well as a dirty one.
Hard Hed is a contemporary retelling of the Johnny Appleseed story. Hoosier Chapman, local historian and apple orchardist, has just been released from a Northwestern Ohio jail after serving two years for planting wild apple trees in a city park.
By Jen Currin
Hider/Seeker is the debut fiction collection from award-winning poet Jen Currin. These stories are about addiction and meditation, relationships and almost-relationships, solitude and sexuality.
By Nelly Arcan (translated by David Homel & Jacob Homel)
In this daring act of self-examination and confession, the late novelist Nelly Arcan explores the tortured end of a love affair. All the wrong signals were there from the start, but still, she could not help falling.
History tells us that the short and violent life of William Bonney, better known as Billy the Kid, ended at the hand of Pat Garrett on the moonless night of July 14, 1881. But I Am Billy the Kid tells a different story, straight from Billy himself. This revisionist history seen through the lens of a twenty-first century sensibility features the picaresque hero we thought we knew and the unexpected one that we don’t: a fearless and determined young woman who is in no mood to be saved and would much prefer exacting her own revenge.
