The best of beloved poet Alden Nowlan's explicitly honest, direct, and insightful poetry. Now featuring an introduction by Susan Musgrave.

Alden Nowlan, one of Canada's finest and most influential poets, died in 1983. He leaves a rich legacy of poetry that is accessible yet profound, and that speaks to people's lives with wry observation and keen insight. Alden Nowlan Selected Poems is for Nowlan fans and new readers alike. The poems included in this volume reflect the recurring themes that illuminate Nowlan's work, and it is truly the best of his poetry. Above all, this volume is a tribute to a poet who deserves to be treasured for all time.

A classic of Canadian literature, here is the A List edition of Daphne Marlatt’s utterly original novel about rescuing a forgotten woman from obscurity. Featuring a new introduced by celebrated author Lynn Crosbie.

Ana Historic is the story of Mrs. Richards, a woman of no history, who appears briefly in 1873 in the civic archives of Vancouver. It is also the story of Annie, a contemporary, who becomes obsessed with the possibilities of Mrs. Richards’s life.

A lost feminist classic — and winner of the Toronto Book Award — reissued to coincide with the 35th anniversary of publication.

In her yearning, elusive search for a lover, Shirley Kaszenbowski sheds her drab “basic black” existence together with torturous memories of guilt and loss as a Jewish immigrant in Toronto.

Shirley Kaszenbowski, née Silverberg, is a middle-aged, middle-class woman in a Holt Renfrew tweed coat, a basic black dress, and a strand of real pearls. She may seem ordinary enough, pricing silk scarves at Eaton’s or idling in hotel coffee shops, but in fact she is searching for her lover. He is an elusive figure, a man connected with “The Agency,” a powerful technocrat who may or may not have suggested a rendezvous based on a secret code in the National Geographic.

Her search takes her to the world of her past as a Jewish immigrant in the Spadina-Dundas area of Toronto. She finds the bakeries and rooming houses of her youth still haunted by survivors of postwar Europe and by her own memories of guilt and loss, while the consolations of art, opera, and pornography offer only echoes of her own illusions and desires. Her strange, wryly funny odyssey ends in a dramatic confrontation scene with her husband and “the other woman,” as she trades in her basic black for another chance.

In Basic Black with Pearls, Weinzweig displays her gift for creating sympathetic characters in a slightly surreal, but always recognizable world.

HELEN WEINZWEIG is the author of the novels Passing Ceremony and Basic Black with Pearls, winner of the Toronto Book Award. Her short story collection, A View from the Roof, was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction. Helen Weinzweig died in Toronto in 2010.

Civil Elegies is Dennis Lee's uncompromising exploration of citizenship, both Canadian and human. Eli Mandel has called Civil Elegies one of the most important contemporary books of poetry in our country. It was the winner of the Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry in 1972. This edition features a new introduction by noted academic Nick Mount, who places this important collection in the context of Canadian literature and Lee’s career.

NICK MOUNT is a professor of English literature at the University of Toronto and an award-winning critic. He regularly gives public talks on the arts in Canada, and has appeared on TVO’s Big Ideas and CBC Radio’s Sunday Edition. In 2011, he was awarded a 3M National Teaching Fellowship, the country’s highest teaching award. He lives in Toronto.

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. In Rawi Hage's unforgettable novel, winner of the 2008 IMPAC Prize, this famous quote by Camus becomes a touchstone for two young men caught in Lebanon's civil war. Bassam and George are childhood best friends who have grown to adulthood in war torn Beirut. Now they must choose their futures: to stay in the city and consolidate power through crime; or to go into exile abroad, alienated from the only existence they have known. Bassam chooses one path: obsessed with leaving Beirut, he embarks on a series of petty crimes to finance his departure. Meanwhile, George builds his power in the underworld of the city and embraces a life of military service, crime for profit, killing, and drugs

Told in the voice of Bassam, De Niro's Game is a beautiful, explosive portrait of a contemporary young man shaped by a lifelong experience of war. Rawi Hage's brilliant style mimics a world gone mad: so smooth and apparently sane that its razor-sharp edges surprise and cut deeply. A powerful meditation on life and death in a war zone, and what comes after.

Rawi Hage is a writer, a visual artist, and curator. His debut novel, De Niro’s Game, won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and was translated into several languages. Cockroach, his second novel, was a finalist for many prestigious awards, including the Scotiabank Giller Prize. He lives in Montreal.

COLM TOIBIN is an award-winning novelist, short story writer and essayist. He is currently Mellon Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York.

Originally published in 1967, Dave Godfrey’s debut collection features stories about hunting — in Florida, in Africa, and in northern Ontario. They are about the interplay of gun and subway, decoy and stock market, guide and draft dodger. But they are more than just stories about hunting. Death Goes Better with Coca-Cola is a powerful example of the idiosyncratic imagination of a writer who broke new ground in fiction. It is a seminal collection by one of Canada’s most influential literary figures and it is a must-read for those who want to understand Canada’s literary landscape, past and present.

DAVE GODFREY was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, in 1938. A writer, publisher, and academic, Godfrey published three works of fiction: the novel The New Ancestors, winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, and the short story collections Death Goes Better with Coca-Cola and Dark Must Yield. He was co-founder of both House of Anansi and New Press, and ran Press Porcépic with his wife, writer Ellen Godfrey. He studied at the University of Toronto, Iowa, and Stanford, and taught literature at the University of Toronto and the University of Victoria. Dave Godfrey died in Victoria, B.C., in 2015.

LEE HENDERSON is the author of two novels The Man Game, which won the 2009 BC Book Prize for Fiction and was shortlisted for the Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and The Road Narrows As You Go, published in 2014, and the award-winning short story collection The Broken Record Technique. He is a contributing editor to the arts magazine Border Crossings in Canada and has published fiction and art criticism in numerous periodicals. He lives in Victoria, B.C., and teaches creative writing at UVic.

Originally published in 1970, Eleven Canadian Novelists Interviewed by Graeme Gibson is a collection of candid and wide-ranging interviews with Canadian writers, including Alice Munro, Mordecai Richler, Margaret Laurence, and more.

With the intuition of an insider, Gibson asks the important questions: In what way is writing important to you? Do writers know something special? Does he or she have any responsibility to society? The result is a fascinating and immensely readable series of conversations with famed writers at the beginning of their careers.

The A List edition will feature a new introduction by Graeme Gibson and interviews with the following authors:
Margaret Atwood
Austin Clarke
Matt Cohen
Marian Engel
Timothy Findley
Dave Godfrey
Margaret Laurence
Jack Ludwig
Alice Munro
Mordecai Richler
Scott Symons

First published by Anansi in 1969, Five Legs was a breakthrough for Canadian experimental fiction, selling 1,000 copies in its first week. At the time Scott Symons wrote that "Five Legs has more potent writing in it, page for page, than any other young Canadian novel that I can think of." Or indeed any young American novel — including Pynchon and Farina.

Five Legs is the subversive tale of two guilt-ridden young men, Lucan Crackell and Felix Oswald — one a professor, the other his student — caught in the grip of the North American Protestant ethic, with its emotional web-spinning and sexual torments. Gibson captures both their mortifications and their spirited resistance to all things WASP, themselves included, in stream-of-consciousness prose that is at once fluid, disjointed, and hilarious. Essential reading for any Canlit junkie, and quite a trip. This edition features a new introduction by Sean Kane.

The twentieth-anniversary edition of Nick Craine’s searing graphic novel about a legendary Canadian punk band, based on the feature film by Bruce McDonald and the novel by Michael Turner.

Joe Dick, Billy Tallent, John Oxenburger, and Pipefitter are Hard Core Logo — Vancouver’s legendary, but now defunct, punk band.

Joe Dick coaxes his former bandmates to overcome personal differences and reunite for a benefit concert for their ageing punk mentor, Bucky Haight, who has been shot. But the concert’s not enough for Joe; he wants the band to hit the road again. For the Hard Cores this means the beginning of the end, and they come to realize that they can neither relive nor alter the past.

From the pen of hugely talented Canadian comic artist and illustrator Nick Craine comes a searing rendition of those Hard Core days and nights. In this graphic take on the story originally conceived by Michael Turner and made into a critically acclaimed film by Bruce McDonald, Craine pits the legendary Hard Cores against a collage-like backdrop of bars, hotel rooms, the road, and the Canadian Prairies.

Featuring a new introduction by Lynn Crosbie and a tear-out guitar chord book, Hard Core Logo: Portrait of a Thousand Punks weaves together a patchwork narrative of found art, dialogue, songs, and incidental bystanders. Craine skillfully renders his own unique cover-version of this cult film classic in graphic novel form.

A classic of Canadian literature by the great Quebecoise writer, Kamouraska is based on a real nineteenth-century love-triangle in rural Quebec. It paints a poetic and terrifying tableau of the life of Elisabeth d'Aulnieres: her marriage to Antoine Tassy, squire of Kamouraska; his violent murder; and her passion for George Nelson, an American doctor.

Passionate and evocative, Kamouraska is the timeless story of one woman's destructive commitment to an ideal love. Translated into seven languages, Kamouraska won the Paris book prize and was made into a landmark feature film by Claude Jutra. This edition features a brilliant new introduction by Noah Richler.

Noah Richler is the acclaimed author of This is My Country, What's Yours? and What We Talk About When We Talk About War.