Published originally by Key Porter, now distributed by Lazara Press
1st Ed:April 13 2002
ISBN-10: 1552634523; ISBN-13: 978-1552634523
$15.00

When curmudgeonly Owen Jones died in a Bella Coola nursing home, no one who knew the elderly man could imagine the extraordinary story of his life.

Spooling backwards through time against the backdrop of Vancouver’s raw, exuberant growth over the last hundred years, Making a Stone of the Heart tells Owen’s story and those of his lover, Dora Dow, and of Dr. Jonathan Smyth.

Original publisher: Talonbooks; distributed by Lazara Press
1st Ed: Feb. 15, 1987
ISBN-10: 0889222495; ISBN-13: 978-0889222496
$15.00

A woman goes to Toronto to sort out her deceased mother’s things; an obnoxious father-to-be disrupts a prenatal class; an orphaned British boy is sent to Canada to be raised by his unmarried aunt.

The people in these stories have familiar concerns – attachment, loss, aging, and coming of age – and the fluid writing gives easy access to their lives.

Publisher: Talonbooks; distributed currently by Lazara Press
2nd Printing: Feb. 15, 1992
ISBN-10: 0889223106; ISBN-13: 978-0889223103
$15.00

Cynthia Flood is the winner of the prestigious Journey prize for Fiction for the title story in this collection.

For more information about Cynthia’s work, visit her web site

177 pp; 5 1/2 x 8 1/2
ISBN 1-55192-374-2
$14.95

These stories recount the troubled lives of Ernst and Hannah Birnbaum, displaced German Jews who flee Hitler but cannot escape the shadow of the Holocaust. Their uprooted existence takes them from Europe to the Holy Land and eventually to Montreal where they attempt to create a shelter for their children. The new generation struggles with the inherited alienation that accompanies exile, striving to both protect and escape their vulnerable elders.

Originally published by Raincoast Books.

“In her first book, Gabriella Goliger takes the reader on a journey through the lives and memories of displaced and often damaged people. Writing with delicate strength and humour, she reveals a deep understanding of the dark places in their souls as they search for the light.” — Rachel Wyatt

Gabriella Goliger emerges with an experienced and assured voice. Her writing is incisive, her stories fierce with compassion and truth. In this powerful work one senses danger, portend. Very impressive.” — Frances Itani

175 pp; 5 1/2 x 8 1/2
ISBN 0-88974-047-X
$15.00

“These are stories about ordinary Canadians, the kind that used to be told on winter evenings when the work was done. They are not intended to be representative but are about people I interviewed or talked to or saw or heard about. The intention is to add acquaintances to the variety of people you already know.

Most of the stories are an attempt to portray what the person told me as it was presented, others are fictional constructs of some aspect of an event. Some names have been changed, some have not.

I am of the opinion that history cannot be told through recitals of the deeds of mad kings, but only through descriptions of the work of ordinary citizens.” — from the Introduction

To order, click on “ordering information” on the right.

$10.00 plus shipping charges.

The Globe and Mail discovers Helen Potrebenko’s Taxi as a “Buried Treasure”.

“In the 1970s and ’80s, Helen Potrebenko was a cherished and important Vancouver writer, well known for her early writing in Pedestal, Canada’s first women’s-liberation newspaper, and for her numerous books that included short stories, novels, poems and plays. Hers was the significant working-class urban feminist voice. She also had jokes, good ones. Modern Times, a major bookstore in San Francisco, had a big sign telling customers that if they only read one book in 1975, it should be Taxi!” — Anakana Schofield

Check out Anakana’s blog, Have You Read Taxi? for the story of Taxi!’s 30th birthday party at Vancouver Public Library on April 29, 2010.

It is rare for working-class women to be given a voice in literature; Helen Potrebenko has long had the reputation of giving women this voice. From the waitress in the title story, to a fictitious interview with a not so fictitious author (herself) on CBC’s Morningside, Potrebenko once again makes people the subject, not the object of their own lives. This diverse collection of stories introduces Potrebenko fans and new readers alike to biting social satire with real people and real lives firmly attached.

“A hard hitting social satirist, Potrebenko attacks conventional middle-class assumptions by understanding them from within.” — The Vancouver Sun

“Helen Potrebenko’s collection of short fiction, Hey Waitress and Other Stories, is just plain good reading. Her stories expose us to a medley of ordinary lives; stories of office temps, bank clerks, secretaries, and waitresses are told with honesty, accuracy and warmth.” — Quill and Quire

“… so real and touch that postmodern jargon seems incapable of deconstructing it.” –Canadian Literature

190 pp; 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 , $12.00, paper
ISBN 0-920999-12-3. 1989

Smiling Under Water is a collection of stories about travelling internally into the depths of relationships and into the narrator’s own heart.

“Hollingsworth’s humour is like the sting in a scorpion’s tail; it flashes in a character description or lurks in the final line of a paragraph.” — The Globe and Mail

135 pp, 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 , $12.00, paper
ISBN 0-920999-14-X. 1989

168 pp; $12.95, paper
ISBN 0-920999-0-0
A woman encounters a fag hag, a medieval queen and a seventeenth-century voyageur in an airport lounge…The fall of the Berlin Wall becomes a backdrop for an international lesbian love-triangle. Sexy and funny, these stories move across identities and communities, from Baba’s kitchen and suburban shopping malls to the demi-monde of queer sex and love. Layered with metaphors and lust, this is gutsy, sensual writing juxtaposing lesbian street lore with explorations of feminism, family and cultural location.

“Bociurkiw writes with a sure hand — a hand that is gentle and compassionate as well as swift and sharp. This book feels like panne velvet, lustrous and rippling. Its humour is generous and deep.” –Beth Brant

“In a movement against forgetting, words under the skin of difference spell episodic tales of love and cultural memory. The Woman Who Loved Airports untangles the pleasures (and sometime sadness) of women who defy convention, lesbian and otherwise.” — Janice Williamson

This book was originally published by Press Gang Publishers in 1994, and is now distributed by Lazara Press.