Anvil Press: 77 books

Who Killed Janet Smith? examines one of the most infamous and still unsolved murder cases in Canadian history: the 1924 murder of twenty-two-year-old Scottish nursemaid Janet Smith. Originally published in 1984, and out of print for over a decade, this tale of intrigue, racism, privilege, and corruption...

Finalist, Trillium Book Award The stories in Animal depict people on the brink of major life change. Often at a crossroads they are oblivious to, Leggat?s characters seem to be captured in a cinematic slo-mo, teetering on the edge of something unknown, heroically resisting the ever-present...

Winner, City of Victoria Butler Book Prize Finalist, Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction Nominated for the BC National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction Afflictions & Departures is a collection of first-person experiential essays. However, this is not the realm of traditional...

Fiction Pick, Broken Pencil Magazine Suburban Pornography is contemporary literature, which documents Canadian urban life in a raw and naked manner. The prose is stripped--minimalist, direct, urgent, unflinching. The stories revolve around ordinary characters and problems--people stuck in bad...

The Beautiful Dead End is a visceral crime thriller that takes the reader on an existential journey to the “other side” and almost back again. In a bizarre, shadowy interzone populated by disturbing characters, our anti-hero confronts the dark secrets of his past, and comes face to face with the consequences of having lived an unexamined life.

Kobzar Literary Award, Finalist Eric Hoffer Award, Shortlist City of Victoria Book Prize, Finalist Vancouver, summer 1962. Cyril Andrachuk and Connie Chow are seventeen and in love. Cyril is the only Canadian-born member of the Andrachuk family, his parents and older brother...

Winner of the W.O. Mitchell/City of Calgary Award 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...

Five Little Bitches 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...

When jazz musicians of the ’30s and ’40s were gettin’ down, when things were really cookin’ they’d say, Yeah, make it tight like that. It meant things were good, as good as they could get. It’s a good thing in fiction, too. The stories in Jim Christy’s latest collection span time and...

Rowan Friesen has made a career of drug-dealing and small-time thievery on the outer edges of Saskatoon. Shiftless and seemingly friendless, he is, at first glance, an unlikely protagonist. But as Stolen unfolds, we learn the details of Rowan’s life: his well meaning but self-absorbed mother, his...

Finalist, City of Vancouver Book Award 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. Praise...

The Devil You Know is the follow-up volume to Farrell’s critically acclaimed debut collection, Sugar Bush & Other Stories. These stories deal with sex, love, work, birth, and death in alternately moving, shocking, funny, and at times devastating ways. Whether these characters are facing...

Best of 2010 Pick, Uptown Magazine Meet Walter Finch, an ungainly kid who survives his cloying suburban childhood to make it only as far as the local mall, where he rises through the ranks to become manager of a shoe store. Unlike his other childhood friends who either flee suburbia or remain...

Finalist for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. Winner of the City of Vancouver Book Award. Top 100 of 2017, Globe and Mail. “… Baker pushes readers to reconsider their desire for resolution. Eschewing the easy, the neat, the smoothed over, allows us to consider the things about ourselves...