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50 Books for 50 Years
A collection of 50 landmark books to celebrate the Literary Press Group of Canada’s 50th Anniversary in 2025.
All Books in this Collection
Showing 41–50 of 50 resultsSorted by average rating
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Bad Endings
$18.00Winner of the City of Vancouver Book Award
Finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize.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.
While steadfastly local in her choice of setting, Baker’s deep appreciation for nature takes a lot of these stories out of Vancouver and into the wild. Salmon and bees play reoccurring roles in these tales, as do rivers. Occasionally, characters blend with their animal counterparts, adding a touch of magic realism. Nature is a place of escape and attempted convalescence for characters suffering from urban burnout. Even if things get weird along the way, as Hunter S. Thompson said, “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”
In Bad Endings, Baker takes troubled characters to a moment of realization or self-revelation, but the results aren’t always pretty.
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On Not Losing My Father’s Ashes in the Flood
$18.00Winner of the 3rd Prize for Poetry in the 2017 Alcuin Society’s Book Design Awards
Winner of the Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry
Shortlisted for the City of Calgary 2016 W.O. Mitchell Book Prize
Finalist for the Poetry category of the High Plains Book Awards
In his final years, Richard Harrison’s father suffered from a form of dementia, but he died without ever forgetting the poems he had memorized as a student and had taught to Richard as a child. In 2013, the poet feared his father’s ashes had been lost in the flood water that ravaged Alberta?a crisis that would become the inciting event and central theme of this collection. Combining elements of memoir, elegy, lyrical essay and personal correspondence with appreciations of literary works ranging from haiku to comic books, Richard Harrison has written a book of great intellectual depth that is as generous as it is enchanting.
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Vile and Miserable
$22.95The indie comic classic that inspired the hit motion picture!
Lucius Vile is a demon condemned to work in a used car dealership-slash-bookstore. With coworkers who seemingly hate his guts, a therapist whose methods aren’t quite sound, an annoying new assistant named Daniel, and a sex life that could be kindly described as highly complicated, let’s just say things are getting a bit hectic for Lucius… But who cares, right? Because today, it’s Halloween, Lucius’s favorite day of the year.
Animated by an absurd and transgressive sense of humor, Vile and Miserable is raw, laugh-out-loud comedy of terrors for grown-ups.
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Fifteen Dogs
$19.95An utterly convincing and moving look at the beauty and perils of consciousness.
WINNER OF CANADA READS 2017
WINNER OF THE 2015 GILLER PRIZE
WINNER OF THE 2015 ROGERS WRITERS’ TRUST FICTION PRIZE
FINALIST FOR THE 2015 TORONTO BOOK AWARDS
— I wonder, said Hermes, what it would be like if animals had human intelligence.
—I’ll wager a year’s servitude, answered Apollo, that animals – any animal you like – would be even more unhappy than humans are, if they were given human intelligence.
And so it begins: a bet between the gods Hermes and Apollo leads them to grant human consciousness and language to a group of dogs overnighting at a Toronto veterinary clinic. Suddenly capable of more complex thought, the pack is torn between those who resist the new ways of thinking, preferringthe old ‘dog’ ways, and those who embrace the change. The gods watch from above as the dogs venture into their newly unfamiliar world, as they become divided among themselves, as each struggles with new thoughts and feelings. Wily Benjy moves from home to home, Prince becomes a poet, and Majnoun forges a relationship with a kind couple that stops even the Fates in their tracks.
André Alexis’s contemporary take on the apologue offers an utterly compelling and affecting look at the beauty and perils of human consciousness. By turns meditative and devastating, charming and strange, Fifteen Dogs shows you can teach an old genre new tricks.
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Solitaria
$19.95When Vito Santoro’s body is inadvertently unearthed by a demolition crew in Fregene, Italy, his siblings are thrown into turmoil, having been told by their sister Piera that Vito had fled to Argentina fifty years earlier after abandoning his wife and son. Piera, the self-proclaimed matriarch, locks herself in her room, refusing to speak to anyone but her Canadian nephew, David. Now scattered over three continents, the family members regroup in Italy to try to discover the truth.
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Canada Lives Here
$16.95Canada Lives Here tells the tumultuous story of public broadcasting in Canada, from its inception in 1933 to the CBC’s current, controversial attempts to adapt to collapsing revenues and new technologies. It explores in detail the struggle to preserve public space and foster community in an environment devoted to profit-making, arguing that the ideals of public service broadcasting are more relevant now than ever. Rowland, author of the influential Saving the CBC: Balancing Profit and Public Service (2013), identifies the issues crucial to the CBC’s survival and proposes carefully considered policy options. This is a book for everyone who wants to understand what’s really at stake with the threatened eclipse of the nation’s most important cultural institution.
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Islands of Decolonial Love
$19.00In her debut collection of short stories, Islands of Decolonial Love, renowned writer and activist Leanne Simpson vividly explores the lives of contemporary Indigenous Peoples and communities, especially those of her own Nishnaabeg nation. Found on reserves, in cities and small towns, in bars and curling rinks, canoes and community centres, doctors offices and pickup trucks, Simpson’s characters confront the often heartbreaking challenge of pairing the desire to live loving and observant lives with a constant struggle to simply survive the historical and ongoing injustices of racism and colonialism. Told with voices that are rarely recorded but need to be heard, and incorporating the language and history of her people, Leanne Simpson’s Islands of Decolonial Love is a profound, important, and beautiful book of fiction.
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Live from the Afrikan Resistance!
$22.00Live from the Afrikan Resistance! is the first collection of spoken word poetry by Halifax’s fifth Poet Laureate, El Jones. These poems speak of community and struggle. They are grounded in the political culture of African Nova Scotia and inherit the styles and substances of hip- hop, dub and calypso’s political commentary. They engage historical themes and figures and analyze contemporary issues — racism, environmental racism, poverty and, violence — as well as confront the realities of life as a Black woman. The voice is urgent, uncompromising and passionate in its advocacy and demands. One of Canada’s most controversial spoken word artists, El Jones writes to educate, to move communities to action and to demonstrate the possibilities of resistance and empowerment. Gathered from seven years of performances, these poems represent the tradition of the prophetic voice in Black Nova Scotia.
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Bearskin Diary
$21.95Raw and honest, Bearskin Diary gives voice to a generation of First Nations women who have always been silenced, at a time when movements like Idle No More call for a national inquiry into the missing and murdered Aboriginal women. Carol Daniels adds an important perspective to the Canadian literary landscape.
Taken from the arms of her mother as soon as she was born, Sandy was only one of over twenty thousand Aboriginal children scooped up by the federal government between the 1960s and 1980s. Sandy was adopted by a Ukrainian family and grew up as the only First Nations child in a town of white people. Ostracized by everyone around her and tired of being different, at the early age of five she tried to scrub the brown off her skin. But she was never sent back into the foster system, and for that she considers herself lucky.
From this tragic period in her personal life and in Canadian history, Sandy does not emerge unscathed, but she emerges strong–finding her way by embracing the First Nations culture that the Sixties Scoop had tried to deny. Those very roots allow Sandy to overcome the discriminations that she suffers every day from her co-workers, from strangers and sometimes even from herself.
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Where The Sun Shines Best
$15.00Three Canadian soldiers awaiting deployment to the war in Afghanistan beat a homeless man to death on the steps of their armoury after a night of heavy drinking. The poet, whose downtown Toronto home overlooks the armoury and surrounding park, describes the crime, its perpetrators, the victim, and a cast of homeless witnesses that includes the woman, a prostitute, who first alerts police. The subsequent trial evokes reflection on the immigrant experience the poet shares with one of the accused, and on the agony of that young soldier? mother. From Kandahar to Bridgetown to Mississauga, Ontario, Where the Sun Shines Best encompasses a tragedy of epic scope, a lyrical meditation on poverty, racism and war, and a powerful indictment of the ravages of imperialism.