Wayde Compton's debut story collection is imbued with the color of speculative fiction; one strand of stories follows the emergence of a volcanic island, which alternatively becomes the site of a radical Native peoples' occupation, a real-estate development, and finally a detention center for illegal immigrants. Moving from 2001 through to 2025, The Outer Harbour is at once a history book and a cautionary tale of the future, condensing and confounding our preconceived ideas around...

In this stunning graphic novel, Lacuna is a girl without a family, a past, or a proper home. She lives alone in a swamp made of ink, but with the help of Polaris, a will-o’-the-wisp, she embarks for the fabled Northern Kingdom, where she might find people like her. The only way to get there, though, is to travel the strange and dangerous Blue Road that stretches to the horizon like a mark upon a page. Along the way, Lacuna must overcome trials such as the twisted briars of the Thicket of T...

"Compton pushes us to look beneath the surface—past those comforting tales of nationhood and racial solidarity—to the more nebulous and ever-shifting truth. This is a brilliant and original work that should be mandatory reading for any student of race and history."—Danzy Senna, author of CaucasiaAfter Canaan, the first nonfiction book by acclaimed African Canadian poet Wayde Compton, repositions the North American discussion of race in the wake of the tumultuous t...

Toward an Anti-Racist Poetics seeks to dislodge the often unspoken white universalism that underpins literary production and reception today. In this personal and thoughtful book, award-winning author Wayde Compton explores how we might collectively develop a poetic approach that makes space for diversity by doing away with universalism in both lyric and avant-garde verse. Poignant and contemporary examples reveal how white authors often forget that their whiteness is a racial position. In...

"Imagine it is the mid 1800’s, Western Canada. Also known as ""the father of British Columbia"", James Douglas is the governor of the colonies of Vancouver Island and British Columbia. Governor Douglas was born in British Guiana into a ""Scotch West Indian"" family with a Scottish father and a Caribbean mother. At Fort St. James he married Amelia Connolly, of Métis ancestry. In 1864 Douglas stepped down as governor and was knighted as a reward for his services. Inspired by extensive histor...

Steven panics when he hits an eagle with his car. He turns up at the narrator’s door. “You’re Native,” he says. “Do something.” Memories of their love, now gone, and the time they spent together at Haida Gwaii come flooding back.A Short History of Indians in Canada, Thomas King’s bestselling collection of twenty tales, is a comic tour de force, showcasing the author at his hilarious and provocative best. With his razor-sharp observations and mystical characters, including ...

In an expanding and socially fractious early twentieth-century Winnipeg, Lewis Benjamin Foote (1873-1957) rose to become the city’s pre-eminent commercial photographer. Documenting everything from royal visits to deep poverty, from the building of the landmark Fort Garry Hotel to the riots of the 1919 General Strike, Foote’s photographs have come to be iconic representations of early Winnipeg life. They have been used to illustrate everything from academic histories to posters for rock con...

Why do Internet, financial service, and beer commercials dominate Super Bowl advertising? How do political ceremonies establish authority? Why does repetition characterize anthems and ritual speech? Why were circular forms favored for public festivals during the French Revolution? This book answers these questions using a single concept: common knowledge.Game theory shows that in order to coordinate its actions, a group of people must form "common knowledge." Each person wants to p...

A new short story by award-winning author Pasha Malla.Set during the summer in a small town on the edge of the Arctic Circle, To Sweep the Light is a love story about solitude and companionship, proximity and distance, and the quest for intimacy between a boy and a girl.

Depicting Canada’s Children is a critical analysis of the visual representation of Canadian children from the seventeenth century to the present. Recognizing the importance of methodological diversity, these essays discuss understandings of children and childhood derived from depictions across a wide range of media and contexts. But rather than simply examine images in formal settings, the authors take into account the components of the images and the role of image-making in every...

In honour of Alice Munro's Nobel Prize for Literature, Anansi Digital is re-releasing a candid interview with Munro by Canadian novelist Graeme Gibson.Taken from Eleven Canadian Novelists, which was originally published in 1973 by House of Anansi Press, the interview is a revealing and wide-ranging dialogue between two writers, and a rare view of Munro and her work.With the intuition of an insider, Gibson asks the important questions: In what way is writing importa...

Eggleston, the iconoclastic and colorful groundbreaker, imbues the mundane with vibrancy.This article appears in the Summer 2011 issue of Southern Cultures:The Photography Issue. “When the color photographs of William Eggleston first appeared at the Museum of Modern Art in 1976, the boldness of Eggleston’s palette and his disregard for the conventions of black-and-white photography were shocking; nearly all the major critics were scornful, and Ansel Adams wrote a scathing letter of protest...