Arsenal Pulp Press

09/29/2025

New this week! POST-MAN by Alex Manley is a collection of intimate confessionals on contemporary masculinity and neurodivergence from a non-binary perspective.

In this divisive moment in the history of gender politics, Manley navigates life as a neurodivergent non-binary person and explores their dislocations from the norm.
POST-MAN delves into the ways in which Manley has always felt apart, alone, and othered—how they always felt there was something wrong with them. In adulthood they came to recognize that in addition to suffering from depression, anxiety, ADHD, and possibly more, they understood themselves as existing outside the neat binary of gender that modern society imposes on us.

With this understanding of themself, Manley takes readers through the stultifying machismo of hockey culture, the improbable job of working for a men’s website, the strange unpleasantness of going bald as a non-binary person, and more. Heart-wrenching and profound, POST-MAN is a book that will make you reconsider your own perceptions of masculinity and manhood.

🌟 “An unapologetic jaywalk through ideas so potent, they bleed into one another: the tenderness of becoming, the unlit edges of desire, chance encounters that change us forever, and being misunderstood through it all. In these razor-tipped essays, Alex Manley is both vulnerable and unrelentingly curious, a perpetual work-in-progress. You can’t read this book and not feel something, everything.” —Daniel Allen Cox, author of I FELT THE END BEFORE IT CAME

👉 Available Sep 30, 2025, in Canada & the US. Get your copy from your favourite local bookstore, or order direct from Arsenal Pulp Press: https://arsenalpulp.com/Books/P/Post-Man

09/23/2025

New! A PERFECT DAY FOR A WALK BY THE WATER is a personable, informative guide to Vancouver by way of its waterways and coastlines.

Located on Canada’s West Coast, one of Vancouver’s greatest and most spectacular assets is its proximity to water. In this follow-up to the 2024 BC bestseller A PERFECT DAY FOR A WALK, author Bill Arnott takes readers on another exploration of Vancouver by way of its shores. With numerous maps and photographs included, A PERFECT DAY FOR A WALK BY THE WATER is an informative, eclectic series of excursions in, on, and under the water around Greater Vancouver, delving into cultures, histories, and narratives that make this region unique.

Join Arnott as he goes scuba diving off the shores of West Vancouver, becomes steeped in the watery traditions of the Coast Salish people at the Museum of Anthropology, visits the stomping grounds of legendary Indigenous leader Chief Joe Capilano and the longshoremen of Burrard Dry Dock, and learns about the history of Burrard Inlet aboard a SeaBus. From Granville Island and the North Shore’s Spirit Trail to False Creek, English Bay, and the Lions Gate Bridge, A PERFECT DAY FOR A WALK BY THE WATER is an engaging and invigorating tour of the city as expressed in its beautiful shores and waterways. Using footwear and flippers, not to mention paddles, oars, engines, and sails, Arnott offers a whole new perspective on Vancouver's diverse coastline and what it means to our present and future.

🌟 “A lyrical journey along Vancouver’s coastline. Blending history, adventure, and poetic insight, [Arnott] explores beaches, inlets, and maritime culture with humour and heart—a gorgeously fresh take on the city’s storied shore for locals and visitors alike.” —Wayne Ng, award-winning author of JOHNNY DELIVERS

👉 Out now in Canada (USA May 5, 2026). Get your copy from your favourite local bookstore, or order direct from Arsenal Pulp Press: https://arsenalpulp.com/Books/A/A-Perfect-Day-for-a-Walk-by-the-Water

09/21/2025

Taha Siddiqui and his Paris bar the Dissident Club are the subject of a profile in Vanity Fair! Taha is the co-author of THE DISSIDENT CLUB: Chronicle of a Pakistani Journalist in Exile, published in English earlier this year. See link in comments.

09/16/2025

New! RUNS IN THE BLOOD by Matthew J. Trafford is a dark and funny short story collection that reveals poignant truths about q***r chosen family.

A le***an mother feels out of place taking her daughter to a princess party; a gay couple turns to unconventional means to create their baby; a grieving man winds up on a date with a centaur; an agoraphobic must make an impossible choice before time runs out. This is the unnerving world of RUNS IN THE BLOOD, Matthew J. Trafford’s sophomore story collection, and it pulses with humour, anxiety, and profound disquiet.

Darkly satirical and unflinchingly human, the stories of RUNS IN THE BLOOD unsettle our notions of family, whether biological or chosen. Careening through the space beyond nature versus nurture, its characters—betrayed, wounded, unequipped—wrangle with their own worst instincts and the grotesqueries of the modern world, attempting to create families worth holding on to and to protect the children they love.

Delightful and disarming, odd and audacious, RUNS IN THE BLOOD announces the return of a bold and fearless writer.

🌟 “What I love about RUNS IN THE BLOOD—aside from Trafford’s masterful writing—is the way the stories unravel to reveal such tenderness, horror, and heartbreak. I’ve never read a collection of stories with this unique focus on families. This book and these characters feel like a revelation.” —Brian Francis, author of FRUIT

👉 Out now in Canada & the US. Get your copy from your favourite local bookstore, or order direct from Arsenal Pulp Press: https://arsenalpulp.com/Books/R/Runs-in-the-Blood

09/09/2025

There's not even a pretence that Palestinian life has any meaningful worth at all.

Imagine a British minister tweeting this humanising statement about Palestinians killed by Israel:

"My thoughts are with the victims and their families at this awful time."

You can't.

09/09/2025

New! BEAVER HILLS FOREVER by Conor Kerr is an irreverent and playful novella of Métis voices that reflects the complexities of contemporary prairie life.

Kerr’s 2024 novel PRAIRIE EDGE was a finalist for both the Giller Prize and the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust of Canada Fiction Prize. His latest book, BEAVER HILLS FOREVER, takes a riotous, uncompromising look at the intertwined lives of four characters, each an abstract expression of the few paths available to Métis people on the Prairies. In alternating poetic verses, Buddy, Baby Momma, Fancy University Boy, and Aunty Prof share their inner dreams, hardships, delusions of grandeur, and existential plights. While the messy day-to-day is created by their own doing, the lives of these four individuals are doubly compromised by Canada’s colonial education system and resource extraction industries.

A beguiling and genre-bending work, BEAVER HILLS FOREVER offers a moving, necessary exploration of education, labour, and the dynamic, ever-changing bonds that bring us back to each other. Here is a diverse, funny, pitch-perfect chorus of voices that rings loud and true over the wide prairie landscape.

🌟 “Aho, fancy reader! Welcome to Conor Kerr’s BEAVER HILLS FOREVER. We’ll laugh, we’ll cry. We’ll smoke, we’ll die. Etc, etc. BEAVER HILLS FOREVER is funny, heartfelt, poetic, badass. It’s Bald Boy, Goodbye, Sad Story, Indigenous Canon. Etc, etc. Magpie cackles, Métis literatures, Aunty Prof wonders, realizes, smudges, feel-good energy. F**k all the ongoing bu****it internal politics and academic distortion and just hear the truth, etc, etc.” —Jordan Abel, author of EMPTY SPACES and NISHGA

👉 Out now in Canada & the US. Get your copy from your favourite local bookstore, or order direct from Arsenal Pulp Press: https://arsenalpulp.com/Books/B/Beaver-Hills-Forever

09/09/2025

Out now! CROHNIC by Jason Purcell is a poetic meditation on what it means to live a medicated life, looking toward sites of nature where life and death exist side by side.

CROHNIC is a brilliant and moving collection of poems that asks, what is the landscape of a medicated life? From their convalescence in a room that overlooks the North Saskatchewan River, author Jason Purcell thinks ecologically with medical records, prescriptions, and dosages, staying attuned to place and to what it might mean to live a life relying on something—in this case, an interminable course of medication—that hurts you in some ways to help you in others. How does the terrain of life change?

Picking up the threads of sickness first plucked in SWOLLENING, CROHNIC charts two years of Purcell’s treatment for Crohn's disease, journeying from hospital rooms to bogs and muskeg, places where life and death intermingle and create the conditions for one another’s flourishing. This is a world populated by coyotes, ermines, steroids, pine, infusion drips, moss, pills, and ice. These other-than-human beings come together in CROHNIC, coalescing into relations that together form a personal narrative of the management of chronic illness.

🌟 “Jason Purcell has woven together an engrossing narrative and mastery of language that had me wanting more, reaching for a ‘spoiled horizon.’ I will return to this book over and over again to admire its form and flow. This is a timeless work that will remain important to q***r prairie literature for generations.” —Emily Riddle, author of THE BIG MELT, winner of the Griffin Poetry Canadian First Book Prize

👉 Out now in Canada & the US. Get your copy from your favourite local bookstore, or order direct from Arsenal Pulp Press: https://arsenalpulp.com/Books/C/Crohnic

09/03/2025

Bill Arnott at APP HQ signing copies of his latest book A PERFECT DAY FOR A WALK BY THE WATER, a walking guide to Vancouver by way of its waterways and coastlines! Signed copies now available (see link in comments); available in bookstores September 23!

09/02/2025

New! OF FLOATING ISLES is an immersive journey into author Kawika Guillermo’s lifelong attachment to video games, revealing how they shape us, shatter us, and give us the courage to start again.

OF FLOATING ISLES is a captivating collection of personal essays that unpack the mystifying and often intimate roles that video games play in our lives. Interweaving memoir with cultural critique, Kawika Guillermo explores the subtle yet transformative influences of video games in shaping them as a q***r and mixed-race grandson of two preachers; as a traveller, immigrant, and games scholar; and as a father, caregiver, and mourner. Through a mixture of fanciful musing, rigorous inquiry, and unflinching self-reflection, OF FLOATING ISLES reframes the gamer’s retreat from others not as social isolation, but as a quest for a different community, one where they feel seen, heard, and understood. This deep-seated longing to belong, Guillermo suggests, forms the imaginative worlds of video games and the floating isles they conjure.

By exploring their own lifelong attachment to video games, Guillermo shows how games can spark rage, confusion, and the desire to escape, but these emotions are not necessarily bad—they are the growing pains that many young people must work through. So too can games provide reflective realms to dwell, to imagine, and to build spaces for q***r, trans, racialized, and neurodiverse groups. Envisioning games as forms of poetic interaction, OF FLOATING ISLES boldly conveys their truth-telling powers: their ability to offer guidance in times of loss and hardship, and their power to reveal the oppressive mechanisms of our “real” world.

🌟 “A mind-blowing odyssey through the ‘person-shaping’ world of gaming. OF FLOATING ISLES is a reckoning with the wicked and violent ways society under late capitalism plays us, winnowing us into narrower and narrower spaces of existence, and it's an exploration of how—through one of its most villainized ‘pastimes’—we might imagine wider ways of living and reclaim our most tender creative selves.” —Kyo Maclear, author of UNEARTHING

👉 Out now in Canada & the US. Get your copy from your favourite local bookstore, or order direct from Arsenal Pulp Press: https://arsenalpulp.com/Books/O/Of-Floating-Isles

08/26/2025

With fascism in our midst, Indigenous artist Gord Hill revises and expands his brilliant graphic history of fascism and anti-fascist movements, THE ANTIFA COMIC BOOK.

When it was first published in 2018, the book was heralded for its searing imagery documenting the history of fascism and anti-fascist movements over the last century. In the years since its publication, the term “antifa” has been co-opted by the right to falsely describe far-left political extremism and even terrorism. But the role played by antifa movements in fighting fascism and racism around the world remains as relevant and important as ever.

For this expanded edition, Gord Hill adds new material depicting more recent flashpoints of fascist activity, including the January 6, 2021, US Capitol attack, the murderous spree by Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik, the infamous 2022 Canadian convoy protests, and Islamophobic and anti-migrant sentiment in a growing number of fascist governments in Europe. At the same time, Hill depicts the important work being done by anti-fascist individuals and organizations to combat this worrisome trend, made all the more crucial by Donald Trump’s return to the White House.

Powerful and inspiring, THE ANTIFA COMIC BOOK is an important reminder of fascism in our midst and what can be done to stop it.

👉 Out now in Canada (USA September 2, 2025). Get your copy from your favourite local bookstore, or order direct from Arsenal Pulp Press: https://arsenalpulp.com/Books/T/The-Antifa-Comic-Book-Revised-and-Expanded

08/25/2025

Thrilled to be working with the brilliant Lindsay Wong on this new opportunity for emerging BIPOC writers in Canada! Hat tip to Vivek Shraya and VS. Books for paving the way. See link to call for submissions in the comments.

08/20/2025

Featuring reporter, bestselling author, and true crime podcaster Eve Lazarus (Every Place has a Story)!

Eve’s latest book, BENEATH DARK WATERS, delves into the poignant and very human drama of the sinking of the RMS Empress of Ireland in the St. Lawrence River in 1914, which claimed more passenger lives than the Titanic. https://arsenalpulp.com/Books/B/Beneath-Dark-Waters

We have news!!

Long story short: two great supporters and friends of Words in the Burbs - Carmen Farrell and Frances Peck - have been brewing up a plan to bring the Words in the Burbs vibe to the North Shore.

Yep, we've got a North Shore chapter now (or, as we are thinking of it, a new baby in the WIB family!)

Come September 16, you can check out this new edition of WIB ... and they've got a powerhouse lineup for the first session! Check out all the details below and SEE YOU THERE!