Contemporary Canadian Literature with a Distinctly Urban Twist

Anvil Press

Queasy: a wannabe writer's bumpy journey through England in the '70s

By Madeline Sonik

The award-winning author of Afflictions & Departures turns her kaleidoscopic lens on England in the 1970s in Queasy, a series of linked memoirs. While still grieving her father’s death and the end of her first romantic relationship, Madeline Sonik moved with her mother from Windsor, Ontario to the seaside village of Ilfracombe in North Devon, England.

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Queen and Carcass

By Anna van Valkenburg

Anna van Valkenburg’s debut poetry collection, Queen and Carcass, is a rich, unpredictable, and deeply surreal exploration of identity and the contradictions we embody. These poems, set in locations real and imaginary, magical and banal, inhabited by figures out of Slavic folklore and a Boschian landscape, strive to unearth truths—especially those that are difficult or uncomfortable. At once ecstatic, meditative, and grotesque, these poems confront some of the most fundamental existential questions.

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Rain City: Vancouver Reflections

By John Moore

Part memoir, part polemic, Rain City, is his version of a fat old Sixties rock band’s Greatest Hits album.

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Resonance: Essays on the Craft and Life of Writing

By Andrew Chesham & Laura Farina (Eds.)

Through forty-three personal essays, Resonance: Essays on the Craft and Life of Writing brings together insights from writers and publishers across Canada on the practices that fuel their work.

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Scofflaw

By Garry Thomas Morse

Scofflaw is a long poem, a playful exploration of Indigenous-Settler relations amid globalized pressures.

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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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Best Novel, 2020 ReLit Award

Skin House

By Michael Blouin

Skin House is a story about two guys who end up in the same bar they started out in. Maybe they’re slightly better off than they were at the start. Or maybe not. One has a girlfriend though. They both have a little extra cash, enough to order nachos whenever they want to without going through their pockets first. They’re not dead, and that’s something right there. And they’re not arrested, which is the quite surprising part.

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Slinky Naive

By Caroline Szpak

In this debut collection, Caroline Szpak is the grand ventriloquist, manipulating words and voices in strange and fantastical ways.

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Stasio: A Novel in 3 Parts

By Tamas Dobozy

This detective novel — presented in three distinct novellas — traces the ever-deepening involvement of the protagonist Anthony de Stasio in a series of political nightmares …

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Straight Circles

By Jackie Bateman

Domestic satire meets gripping suspense in Straight Circles, the final, explosive chapter of Jackie Bateman’s Lizzy Trilogy. The original and eccentric cast of characters return in this genre-bending thriller, but not everyone’s getting out alive.

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