Poetry

• United States of Heaven — 1968
• My Experience in the War — 1970
• Our Man in Utopia — 1971
• Café Terminus — 1973
• Eleven Early Poems — 1973
• Achilles' Navel — 1974
• Subroutines — 1981
• Variorum: New Poems and Old, 1965-1985 — 1985
• Moving Towards the Vertical Horizon — 1986
• Rites of Alienation — 1988
• The Dreams of Ancient Peoples — 1990
• Selected Poems — 1994
• Madagascar — 2000
• Singer, An Elegy — 2004

Fiction

• The File on Arthur Moss — 1994
• Jericho — 2005
• Tales of Two Cities — 2006

Non-fiction

• The Five Lives of Ben Hecht — 1977
• Gold Diggers of 1929: Canada and the Great Stock Market Crash — 1979
• The Blue Notebook: Reports on Canadian Culture — 1985
• The Crowded Darkness — 1988
• The Gold Crusades: A Social History of the Gold Rushes, 1849-1929 — 1988
• The Rise of the Canadian Newspaper — 1990
• A LIttle Bit of Thunder: The Strange Inner LIfe of the Kingston Whig-Standard — 1993
• The Book of Assassins — 2001
• River of Gold: The Fraser and Cariboo Gold Rushes — 2008

Biography

• The Gentle Anarchist: A Life of George Woodcock — 1998

Memoir

• Notes from a Journal 1978-1980 — 1987
• Travels By Night: A Memoir of the Sixties — 1994
• Way Down Deep in the Belly of the Beast: A Memoir of the Seventies — 1996

Travel writing

• Year of the Horse: A Journey Through Russia and China — 1991
• The Other China: Journeys Around Taiwan — 1995
• Running Away to Sea: Round the World on a Tramp Freighter — 1998
• Three Pagodas Pass: A Roundabout Journey to Burma — 2002
• One Russia, Two Chinas — 2004

Anthologies edited

• A George Woodcock Reader — 1980
• Carl Sandburg at the Movies: A Poet in the Silent Era 1920-1927 — 1985 (with Dale Fetherling)
• Documents in Canadian Art — 1987
• Documents in Canadian Film — 1988
• The Broadview Book of Canadian Anecdotes — 1988
• Best Canadian Essays 1989 — 1989
• Best Canadian Essays 1990 — 1990
• The Vintage Book of Canadian Memoirs — 2001