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<p>In prose that’s as sharp as broken glass and shot through with poetry, Teresa McWhirter unlocks the extraordinary subculture of urban adults in their twenties and early thirties.

<p>Winner of the W.O. Mitchell/City of Calgary Award</p> <p>A debut collection, these stories are set in the corporeal world of adult endeavour: the mall, the office, the subdivision. It’s these settings that W. Mark Giles exploits—locking his sights on eerily familiar characters, excavating their fears, intimacies, and the dark machinery behind their actions. He taps into our collective longing for moments of clarity and awe, recognizes our thwarted potential for wonder, and sees our secrets played out in cruelty.

<p>Kobzar Literary Award, Finalist</p> <p>Eric Hoffer Award, Shortlist</p> <p>City of Victoria Book Prize, Finalist</p> <p>Vancouver, summer 1962. Cyril Andrachuk and Connie Chow are seventeen and in love.</p> <p>Cyril is the only Canadian-born member of the Andrachuk family, his parents and older brother having survived Stalin’s systematic starving of the Ukraine. His brother’s brittle bones are not the only legacy of Stalin.

<p><i>Atomic Storybook</i> is a novel about a young painter named Owen who is regularly abducted by beings he calls “the space pricks.” These otherworldly visitors perform experiments on him, befuddle him with an absurd riddle about the moon, and show him scenes from his previous lives — one as a 12th century English monk; in another he shares the ward with Albert Einstein’s son, Eduard, in the Burghölzli mental hospital.</p> <p>Through all of this, and his lengthy existential conversations with physics professor, Chesley Keeping, Owen comes to doubt the nature

<p>From the author of <i>Dead Man in the Orchestra Pit</i> and <i>Foozlers</i> comes another tale of madcap human folly.</p> <p>Louella Debra Poule is doing an eighteen-month stint on a weapons charge at a minimum-security institution up the Fraser Valley. Her drug-dealing, sometime-boyfriend Jimmy Flood and his sidekick, Blacky Harbottle, should have taken the rap, but their list of ?priors? would have put them in the slammer for quite a little stay. Louella ?did the right thing?

<p><i>Five Little Bitches</i> chronicles the rise and fall of the all-woman band, Wet Leather. Each of the women is plagued by her own unique demons, but their devotion to music and the punk lifestyle keeps them pushing on. As the band progresses, they tour Canadian, American and European towns and cities—and all the alleys, gutters, back stages, vans, hotel rooms, highways and airways in between.</p> <p>Part punk rock travelogue, <i>Five Little Bitches</i> is full-throttle grit-lit.

<p>Longlisted for the ReLit Award</p> <p>Best Fiction 2006, <i>Ottawa Xpress</i></p> <p><i>Dead Man in the Orchestra Pit</i> is a singularly Canadian novel featuring crime, culture, and sports. Written in the vein of John Kennedy Toole (<i>Confederacy of Dunces</i>) and JP Donleavy, <i>Dead Man in the Orchestra Pit</i> is set in Vancouver during an early 80s Grey Cup weekend. Tourists and sports aficionados have descended on the city in record droves.

<p><i>The Dreamlife of Bridges</i> is the debut novel from Vancouver writer Robert Strandquist. Leo is a middle-aged, divorced handyman capable of mending almost anything outside of himself. The denial of his son’s death, and his inability to deal with his own pain, has rendered his life fractured and untenable. June is a single mom struggling in the bottleneck of poverty, fighting to retain custody of her son.

<p>Reissued as part of Anvil Press's Lost BC Literature series</p> <p>Set in Vancouver in the mid-1960s, <i>Mirror on the Floor</i> focuses on one summer in the life of UBC grad student Bob Small and his roommate, George Delsing.</p> <p>They spend their time carousing the downtown eastside and engaging in conversations with the old-timers—dockworkers, unemployed loggers, and retired seamen.

<p>Winner, 3-Day Novel Contest </p> <p><i>Tacones</i> is a hangout for a subculture of outlaws and rejects--crackhead murderers, transvestite prostitutes, biastogerontophiles, hustler boys, and addicts?all painfully beyond denial, searching for connection, solace, humour, thrills, sex, and the perfect high. A rollicking and caustic romp through the violent and ambivalent world of the Toronto after-hours scene. Descend, if you dare?</p> <p><i>Tacones</i> was first published in 1997 after winning the 19th annual 3-Day Novel Contest.