Contemporary Canadian Literature with a Distinctly Urban Twist

Anvil Press

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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So We Blush Less When the Phone Rings

By Mark Wagstaff

So We Blush Less When The Phone Rings presents a world where differences hinge on whether we’re organic or customised, whether we’re physical creatures or a controlled visualisation. This is a world where power dynamics are hazy and the old uncertainties of romance mean nothing in the face of reliable engineering.

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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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45th Annual 3-Day Novel Contest Winner!

The Tenants

By Pat Dobie

In the city of Vancouver, even dirt costs. In The Tenants three of its residents are struggling with their homes — whether that’s grappling with real estate prices, simmering resentments, or an uneasy co-living arrangement with the local wildlife.

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That Gun in Your Hand: The Strange Saga of ‘Hey Joe’ and Popular Music’s History of Violence

By Jason Schneider

This is the story of a song. Yet, it is a song that binds nearly every strand of 20th-century American popular music.

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Thick Skin: Field Notes from a Sister in the Brotherhood

By Hilary Peach

For more than two decades, Hilary Peach worked as a transient welder – and one of the only women — in the Boilermakers Union. This is her story.

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Trauma Head

By Elee Kraljii Gardiner

In 2012, poet Elee Kraljii Gardiner precipitously lost feeling in, and use of, her left side. The mini-stroke passed quickly but was symptomatic of something larger: a tear in the lining of an artery that opened an examination of mortality and crisis. This long-poem memoir tracks the author’s experiences with un/wellness and un/re-familiarity with herself.

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Unfinished Wilderness

By Jason Heroux

Jason Heroux’s Unfinished Wilderness continues his ever-morphing journey into the far reaches of a gentle surrealism and the deeply human. At times melancholy and darkly slapstick, these poems explore the growing struggle to feel at home in a world where global concepts of shelter and belonging remain scarce.

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