In his first work of fiction since 2004's Standing on Richards, George Bowering, Canada's first Poet Laureate, reminds us why he is one of our country's most interesting writers. In a series of ten stories introduced by archival photographs, Bowering leads us through the glory days of 1960s Vancouver, when the Hotel Vancouver boasted an understreet level bar whose businessmen swooped in and out in trenchcoats; and a time when Japanese tourists with cameras were a novelty. The Box breaks with the conventional genre of short stories, weaving together biography, autobiography, parable, and drama. Here is fourteen-year old Drew, transplanted from the coast to the Okanagan, and working at his first summer job picking prunes for the town MILF. Here, too, is the extraordinary tale of minor-league pitcher Bunny Watson who strings together an amazing twenty wins without a loss. Bowering trades witty barbs with the poet Phyllis Webb in the experimental story "Phyllis's Questions," while the title story "The Box" explores romantic and platonic relationships as the characters play with the art of opening a box. At times cerebral, The Box is always playful, clever, and entertaining. Each of the ten stories in The Box has previously appeared, sometimes in different form, in the Vancouver Review, Matrix, dANDelion, filling Station, Rampike, Open Letter, Prism International, The Capilano Review and on CBC Radio One's "Sounds Like Canada".

George Bowering, Canada’s first Poet Laureate, was born in the Okanagan Valley.After serving as an aerial photographer in the Royal Canadian Air Force, Bowering earned a BA in English and an MA in history at the University of British Columbia, where he became one of the co-founders of the avant-garde poetry magazine TISH. He has taught literature at the University of Calgary, the University of Western Ontario, and Simon Fraser University, and he continues to act as a Canadian literary ambassador at international conferences and readings.A distinguished novelist, poet, editor, professor, historian, and tireless supporter of fellow writers, Bowering has authored more than eighty books, including works of poetry, fiction, autobiography, biography, and youth fiction. His writing has been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, German, Chinese, and Romanian.Bowering has twice won the Governor General’s Award, Canada’s top literary prize. In 2019 he received the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement for an outstanding literary career in British Columbia.

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