Vancouver Short Stories

"In a sense, we haven’t got an identity until somebody tells our story. The fiction makes us real."--Robert Kroetsch in Creation Spanning a period of nearly eighty years, the stories in this collection present the experience of living in Vancouver as filtered through the imagination of many of Canada’s most famous writers. The romantic attitude of some of the early writers is balanced by the more sombre version of many later authors, some of whom show the city as a place of loneliness and corruption. In tone, the stories range from the grimness of Dorothy Livesay’s account of Depression misery, to the irony of Ethel Wilson’s narrative of an evening garden party, to the playfulness of George Bowering’s ellipticla story of student life. Other well-known atuhors include Pauline Johnson, Emily Carr, Malcolm Lowry, Audrey Thomas, Alice Munro, and Joy Kogawa--as well as some who have been undeservedly consigned to obscurity--M.A. Grainger, Bertrand Sinclair, Jean Burton, and William McConnell. The more prolific among the younger writers--Frances Duncan, Cynthia Flood, and Kevin Roberts--are in the process of achieving national recognition. The stories evoke a strong sense of place, of Vancouver’s essential relation to its natural setting--forest, mountains, and sea--and its existence as a modern urban centre. Individual episodes recall the great fire of 1886, turn-of-the-century loggers on Cordova Street, rum-running in the twenties, the internment of Japanese-Canadians after Pearl Harbor, the hippie era, and the modern sub-culture of beer parlours and drugs. Particular locales include downtown streets, the east end, the North Shore, U.B.C, Stanley Park, Kitsilano, and the Vancouver Aquarium. Stories of the city’s social and cultural life describe the process of growing up and growing old, family and marital matters, the Chinese community, and the legends and reality of Native Americans. Vancouver Short Stories indicates some of the ways that a particular locality has been transformed into art that, in turn, enriches our understanding of its reality and enhances our sense of identity.

The city of Vancouver means different things to different people, but it is as revered and beloved by its residents as it is by the millions of people who visit every year. It's a diverse, thrumming metropolis and a calm and beautiful recreation destination; it's a young city still striving for identity and a storied settlement rich in legend. And it has been both the inspiration and setting for some of Canada's most interesting fiction.Framed by an incisive introduction from West Coast literary doyen Douglas Coupland, the wide array of short fiction collected in Vancouver Stories reveals just how varied Vancouver really is. Discover this great city through the stories of Pauline Johnson and Emily Carr, through the eyes of such 20th-century literary giants as Alice Munro, Ethel Wilson and Malcolm Lowry, and through the words of more contemporary writers such as William Gibson, Timothy Taylor, Zsuzsi Gartner and Madeline Thien.Spanning a period of nearly 80 years, the 15 stories in this collection present the experience of Vancouver-living here, visiting or just passing through-filtered through the imaginations of some of Canada's most famous fiction stylists."Sooner or later, everyone in the country came to this city by the mountains and the sea. Some just to ogle, many to stay. People here liked it with something that bordered on religious fervour." -from "City of My Dreams" by Zsuzsi Gartner

Winner of the 2020 Western Canada Jewish Book Awards, The Lohn Foundation Prize for Poetry In Vancouver for Beginners, the nostalgia of place is dissected through the mapping of a city where readers are led past surrealist development proposals, post-apocalyptic postcards, childhood landmarks long gone and a developer who paces at the city's edge, shoring it up with aquariums. In these poems you will traverse a city lined with rivers, not streets. Memory traps and tourist traps reveal themselves, and the ocean glints, elusive, in the background. Here there are many Vancouvers and no Vancouver, a city meant for elsewhere after the flood has swept through. This place of the living and the dead has been rewritten: forests are subsumed by parks, buildings sink and morph, and the climate has changed. Vancouver for Beginners is a ghost story, an elegy, a love song for a city that is both indecipherable and a microcosm of a world on fire. Praise for Alex Leslie: Alex Leslie is a tremendously gifted and compassionate writer. This bold and searing collection is a wonder. --Madeleine Thien, Scotiabank Giller Prize winning author of Do Not Say We Have Nothing A magnetic collection that must be read over and over. --Kirkus Reviews

This “excellent anthology” of noir fiction set in Canada’s City of Glass features all-new stories by Linda L. Richards, Sam Wiebe, Yasuko Thanh and more (Quill & Quire, starred review). For many people, Vancouver is a city of affluence, athleisure, and craft beer. But if look a little closer at this gentrified paradise, you’ll find the old saying holds true: behind every fortune there’s a crime. Hidden beneath Vancouver’s gleaming glass skyscrapers are shadowy streets where poverty, drugs, and violence rule the day. These fourteen stories of crime and mayhem in the Pacific Northwest offer an entertaining “mix of wily pros, moody misfits, bewildered bystanders, and a touch of the supernatural” (Kirkus). Vancouver Noir features the Arthur Ellis Award-winning story “Terminal City” by Linda L. Richards, and the Arthur Ellis Award-finalist “Wonderful Life” by Sam Wiebe. It also includes entries by Timothy Taylor, Sheena Kamal, Robin Spano, Carleigh Baker, Dietrich Kalteis, Nathan Ripley, Yasuko Thanh, Kristi Charish, Don English, Nick Mamatas, S.G. Wong, and R.M. Greenaway.

Carleigh Baker likes to make light in the dark. Whether plumbing family ties, the end of a marriage, or death itself, she never lets go of the witty, the ironic, and perhaps most notably, the awkward. Despite the title, the resolution in these stories isn't always tragic, but it's often uncomfortable, unexpected, or just plain strange. Character digressions, bad decisions, and misconceptions abound.

In stories both absurd and all-too-real, Christopher Evans paints a portrait of the uncanniness of modern life. The president of a holistic dog food company is haunted by a pop song from her past. Nine siblings band together to raise themselves after parental abandonment. A domestic argument reveals a woman’s supernatural gift. A failing musician finds his calling soundtracking another man’s life. Christopher Evans's stories are people with strays — those who fall for the allure of nostalgia, grapple with male fragility, deny family trauma, and acquiesce to authority. For these characters, resignation and reinvention are only a breath apart. Nothing Could Be Further from the Truth is a bold debut collection that sits at the threshold of expectation and reality.

Three siblings tell the stories of their very different childhoods in Vancouver's Chinatown before and during World War II.

Collects twenty-two stories in which children explain the history and culture of Vancouver.