Contemporary Canadian Literature with a Distinctly Urban Twist

Anvil Press

Fred Kerner Book Award

Black Star

By Maureen Medved

Black Star is a dark comedy, both bitingly funny and transgressive, an unflinching and unsentimental exploration of the female experience, academia, and the idea of power that burns in the mind as white as acid.

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Body Speaking Words

By Loree Harrell

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Borderline

By Marie-Sissi Labrèche

Raw, violent, and at times absurd, Borderline treats all things — the city, class, education, mental health, despair, sexuality, love, and art, with an unflinching, unblinking regard.

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Breakneck

By Nelly Arcan (translated by Jacob Homel)

Rose Dubois and Julie O’Brien find themselves on the roof of a Montreal apartment building on a scorching summer’s day, and from that moment on their fates are intertwined. Worldwide climate change and dramatic shifts in weather patterns foreshadow their predestined suffering.

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Budge

By Tom Osborne

From the author of Dead Man in the Orchestra Pit and Foozlers comes another tale of madcap human folly. Budge is a novel about addiction, rehabilitation, and finding the meaning of life.

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Cabalcor: An Extracted History

By Sun Belt

Sun Belt’s collaborative work of fiction is a genre-defying chronicle of a tar sands company town.

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Chalk (Winner of the 38th Annual 3-Day Novel Writing Contest)

By Doug Diaczuk

Chalk is a tender story about love and loss, following a broken-hearted thirty-something cubicle worker, free-falling from every ledge of his life. Post-break-up and blue, he feels like nothing matters, that he has become invisible, like a chalk outline on the floor, empty inside.

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Circle of Birds

By Hayden Trenholm

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A Credit To Your Race

By Truman Green

Set in Surrey, BC circa 1960, A Credit to Your Race is a story about innocent love awakening between a fifteen-year-old black porter’s son and the white girl next door. The novel is a disturbing and convincing portrayal of how the full weight of racism and bigotry came to bear on a youthful, interracial couple.

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Cretacea & Other Stories from the Badlands

By Martin West

This is not the Alberta world of oil and hockey and wheat, but of people at night, living alternate lives, wearing clothes that usually remain hidden in the depths of closets. When they emerge from these closets wearing these clothes, these shopkeepers, lawyers, and students do things to themselves and each other that it would take Freud to explicate. Everywhere in the valley lies the fear of loneliness, the obsession with desire, and the human fixation with the unknown.

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