Anvil Press: 77 books

Winner, 3-Day Novel-Writing Contest (1999) Winner, Inaugural ReLit Award (2001) Salacious, funny, and painfully emotive, Skin is a provocative and ruminative parable about our deep-rooted urge to ostracize the freakish and shun the disfigured among us. An unconventional love story, Bowman...

Pamela Stewart is a self-described ?literary proctologist,? and her writing often looks into places that people generally don?t want to look. The stories in Elysium are about the difficulties of life we all encounter as human beings, the fragility of life?the physical, mental, and spiritual challenges...

What It Feels Like for a Girl is a series of poems following the intense friendship between two teenagers as they explore pop icons, pornography, and the big, strange world of sex. They soon learn just how complicated sexuality is--and how confusing desire can be. What It Feels Like for a Girl...

Winner, 2011 ReLit Award From the author of Pontypool Changes Everything, Ravenna Gets is a new collection of “wheeled” stories that continue the author’s exploration of “apocalypse ?ction.” In a single convulsion of homicide, the population of Ravenna tries to erase the population...

Winner, 3-Day Novel Contest Tacones 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....

Kaspoit! puts speculative illustration to the most profuse series of crimes ever to take place on Canadian soil. Set in the lower mainland of Vancouver, the time is now—criminals are brazen, cops are cynical—and no one is trying to solve the disappearance of dozens of women. Throughout,...

Four disparate people confront each other--their memory and their responsibility--at the emergency room of a hospital when brought together by the crisis of a teenager suffering a psychiatric episode. Tortoise Boy is a “chamber play,” four monologues, or mon-dialogues, if you will. Through...

Burqa of Skin is a dense collection of writings from Nelly Arcan, channelling harrowing disenchantment and indignation. From her very first novel, Putain (Seuil, 2001), Arcan shook the literary landscape with her flamboyant lyricism and her preoccupations with such recurring themes as our culture’s...

Monday Night Man is a back alley view of East Vancouver netherworlds. Horst Nunn, Ray Bunce, and Boyle Rupp are a trio of middle-aged, underemployed, intelligent “plungers” striving for redemption through humour and long shots at the track.

Second Prize Winner, Canada's National One-Act Playwriting Competition (1994) Shylock is an award-winning play about a Jewish actor who finds himself condemned by his own community for his portrayal of Shakespeare’s notorious Jew. Shylock has provided much fuel for the fiery debates surrounding...

Longlisted for the ReLit Award Editor's Pick, Vancouver Sun Dirtbags is a novel about reckoning?with one?s past, one?s choices, and one?s expectations for the future. Spider is a scrappy kid growing up in rural B.C., and when a tragic event causes her world to implode she heads to Vancouver...

Drinkin’ rye and water with Grandma. Guns in False Creek. Frat boy homies from the North Delta ghetto. Samuel L. Jackson. Phantom Lord & Metallica. A kid who’s got the hots for his mom…Hunh? That’s right. It’s all here in this collection of immediate, lean and visceral short fiction from Clint Burnham.

Dodging down back-alleys in bomb-torn Beirut. Wheeling past God and traffic in Mombassa, Kenya. Slipping around the edges of Alzheimer?s disease, the Gulf War, and the eternity of CNN. Set somewhere between here and the heat-death of the universe, Jim Oaten?s debut collection serves up random...

”To give a feeling of Christopher Gudgeon’s new collection, let’s turn to the story that gives the book its name. In The Widow Soré, the title character finds among her deceased fiancé Guillermo’s papers what appears to be a stack of letters. Titled The Encyclopedia of Lies, the letters...