National Network for Equitable Library Service

<p><i>Valery the Great</i> is a crackling, electric collection of dark humour that follows the bizarre and beautiful lives of its protagonists.

<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><b>Shortlisted for the City of Hamilton book award</b></p> <p>At times comic, tender, dark, and arrestingly bizarre, Gary Barwin’s latest fiction collection marvels at the strangeness, charm, and beauty that is contemporary life in the quantum world.</p> <p>Ranging from short story to postcard fiction, Barwin’s stories are luminous, hilarious, and surprising.

<p>Finalist, ReLit Award </p> <p>Amazon.ca's 50 Essential Canadian Books selection</p> <p>First published in 1997 to much critical acclaim, <i>Salvage King, Ya!</i> is a novel firmly rooted in Canada’s favourite national pastime—hockey. Critics have called <i>Salvage King, Ya!</i> “the great Canadian novel,” and a “postmodern Canadian classic.” Drinkwater, Jarman’s narrator, is the “heir reluctant” of the family business (the salvage company of the book’s title) and an aspiring NHL defenceman.

<p>Winner, 3-Day Novel-Writing Contest (1999)</p> <p>Winner, Inaugural ReLit Award (2001)</p> <p>Salacious, funny, and painfully emotive, <i>Skin</i> 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 probes the surface to reveal deeper, more lingering impulses connected to desire, understanding, and love. It is only on very extraordinary occasions when beauty and the beast get together, but they do here.

<p>Finalist, City of Vancouver Book Award</p> <p><i>Monday Night Man</i> 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.</p> <p>Praise for <i>Monday Night Man</i>:</p> <p>"These stories . . .

<p>Grand Prize Winner, 23rd Annual International 3-Day Novel-Writing Contest</p> <p>Now a Major Motion Picture from Sony Entertainment Directed by Grammy Award winner Jonas Akerlund</p> <p>Often drawing comparison to comic classics like John Kennedy Toole’s <i>Confederacy of Dunces</i> and Charles Portis’s <i>The Dog of the South</i>, <i>Small Apartments</i> follows the misadventures of corpulent misanthrope, Franklin Franklin, as he tries to dispose of his dead landlord.

<p>Finalist, City of Vancouver Book Prize</p> <p>A blackly comic new novel from Vancouver author Grant Buday, based on his eight glorious years working in a mass production bakery.

After losing her job and learning she might also lose her house because of a bad investment, Jess, a fiercely independent and hilariously wry BC grandma, resorts to growing pot in her basement to make ends meet. She then has to juggle her public life as a grandmother and member of the town’s senior women’s group – The Company of Crones – with her secret life as a pot grower. The unusual characters she meets along the way include Swan, the enigmatic young woman who introduces her to the grower’s world, and Marcus, the socially awkward “gardener” who shows her the tricks of the trade.

A wicked Richleresque satire about a charismatic advertising executive and the three beautiful women who turn his life upside down. Julius Roebuck is the creative director of a successful ad agency, husband to the headstrong Anne, and father to three lively children. He is also the attentive lover of a poet named Lily. When his wife’s beautiful friend Yasmin announces her plan to get pregnant and describes him as the perfect sperm donor, Julius is startled at first. Then he decides that if she wants his DNA, she must also want him.