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16 Reads for Women’s History Month
To honour Women’s History Month in Canada this October, we rounded up 16 choice titles by women about women.
All Books in this Collection
Showing all 14 results
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A Ramshackle Home
$22.95Felicia Mihali writes: “I would like this novel to be read as a universal story about little girls born in small and poor villages around the world who are not as lucky as those born in big cities and in good families. These are girls who have to struggle to succeed, to fight their own complexes and their shame over not being more fortunate. For many of them their only escape is through the imagination.”
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BLEED
$24.95“A brilliant, blistering read.” — Heather O’Neill, author of When We Lost Our Heads
A scorching examination of how we treat endometriosis today
Have you ever been told that your pain is imaginary? That feeling better just takes yoga, CBD oil, and the blood of a unicorn on a full moon? That’s the reality of the more than 190 million people suffering the excruciating condition known as endometriosis. This disease affecting one in ten cis women and uncounted numbers of others is chronically overlooked, underfunded, and misunderstood — and improperly treated across the medical system. Discrimination and medical gaslighting are rife in endo care, often leaving patients worse off than when they arrived.
Journalist Tracey Lindeman knows it all too well. Decades of suffering from endometriosis propelled the creation of BLEED — part memoir, part investigative journalism, and all scathing indictment of how the medical system fails patients. Through extensive interviews and research, BLEED tracks the modern endo experience to the origins of medicine and how the system gained its power by marginalizing women. Using an intersectional lens, BLEED dives into how the system perpetuates misogyny, racism, classism, ageism, transphobia, fatphobia, and other prejudices to this day.
BLEED isn’t a self-help book. It’s an evidence file and an eye-opening, enraging read. It will validate those who have been gaslit, mistreated, or ignored by medicine and spur readers to fight for nothing short of revolution.
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Dancing in Small Spaces
$22.00An unstintingly honest and surprisingly humorous memoir that charts a couple’s parallel diagnoses of Parkinson’s and Lewy body dementia.
In 2011, Leslie Davidson and her husband Lincoln Ford were enjoying retired life to the fullest as ardent outdoor enthusiasts, energetic travellers, and soon-to-be grandparents. But when Lincoln’s confusion became a concern and Leslie began to experience a hesitant leg and uncontrollable tremors in one arm, a devastating double diagnosis completely changed their life.
In this personal and unstintingly honest memoir, Leslie recounts the years that follow the diagnoses—her Parkinson’s and Lincoln’s Lewy body dementia—charting physical changes, mastering medications (and sometimes flubbing it), the logistical puzzles of caregiving, and the steady support of their close-knit community in the small town of Grand Forks in south central British Columbia.
She describes her struggle to maintain perspective while questioning what having perspective even means, and the work of being an advocate while needing an advocate. And she explains how, amid all the challenges and tears, shared laughter remained all-important to their survival, especially in times when Lincoln saw her as an imposter. She shares powerful lessons in love, courage, and grace from the man who had always led the way and who, despite the ravages of his illness, in many ways, still did.
At once poignant and unflinchingly frank Dancing in Small Spaces is the story of a long and adventurous marriage, of deep gratitude, and, ultimately, of writing one’s way toward understanding and acceptance.
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Emily & Elspeth
$20.00Emily & Elspeth follows two women and their unique paths to love… and each other. Catherine McNeil’s latest collection is a delightful romp through Mexico, the imagined inner-workings of Frida Kahlo’s relationship(s), and Vancouver bedrooms. Through poems that flirt with the intersections of desire, art, and commitment, she pieces together Emily and Elspeth’s relationship as playfully as she takes it apart.
Along the way, Emily & Elspeth brings you to places both intimate and unexpected: a belly where a uterus used to be; a girl matador facing off against a bull; and “fat, honeyed days, swollen with desire” that risk being destroyed by the nefarious aims of a government spy.
Weird, wonderful, and slightly dangerous, this is a queer love story that’s anything but typical.
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Flyway
$18.00This Meditation on the impact of human and ecological trauma explores the cost of survival for three generations of women living between empires. Writing from within the disappearing tallgrass prairie, Sarah Ens follows connections between the Russian Mennonite diaspora and the disrupted migratory patterns of grassland birds. Drawing on family history, eco-poetics, and the rich tradition of the Canadian long poem, Flyway migrates along pathways of geography and the heart to grapple with complexities of home.
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Fuse
$20.00Drawing on her own experiences as a woman of Iranian and British Isle descent, writer Hollay Ghadery dives into conflicts and uncertainty surrounding the bi-racial female body and identity, especially as it butts up against the disparate expectations of each culture. Painfully and at times, reluctantly, Fuse probes and explores the documented prevalence of mental health issues in bi-racial women.
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How She Read
$20.00How She Read is a collection of genre-blurring poems about the representation of Black women, their hearts, minds and bodies, across the Canadian cultural imagination.
Drawing from grade-school vocabulary spellers, literature, history, art, media and pop culture, Chantal Gibson’s sassy semiotics highlight the depth and duration of the imperialist ideas embedded in everyday things, from storybooks to coloured pencils, from paintings to postage stamps.
A mediation on motherhood and daughterhood, belonging, loss and recovery, the collection weaves the voices of Black women, past and present. As Gibson dismantles the grammar of her Queen Elizabeth English, sister scholars talk back, whisper, suck teeth, curse and carry on from canonized texts, photographs and art gallery walls, reinterpreting their image, re-reading their bodies and claiming their space in a white, hegemonic landscape.
Using genre-bending dialogue poems and ekphrasis, Gibson reveals the dehumanizing effects of mystifying and simplifying images of Blackness. Undoing the North Star freedom myth, Harriet Tubman and Viola Desmond shed light on the effects of erasure in the time of reconciliation and the dangers of squeezing the past into a Canada History Minute or a single postage stamp. Centrefolds Delia and Marie Therese discuss their naked Black bodies and what it means to be enslaved, a human subject of art and an object of science, while Veronica? tells it like it is, what it means to hang with the Group of Seven on the walls of the Art Gallery of Ontario amongst the lakes, the glaciers, the mountains and the dying trees. Supported by the voices of Black women writers, the poems unloose the racist misogyny, myths, tropes and stereotypes women of colour continue to navigate every day.
Thoughtful, sassy, reflective and irreverent, How She Read leaves a Black mark on the landscape as it illustrates a writer’s journey from passive receiver of racist ideology to active cultural critic in the process of decolonizing her mind.
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Scar Tissue
$18.95Perhaps more than any other relationship or identity, motherhood is both organic and constructed. Mothers are created by their children, and then simultaneously expanded and abbreviated by maternity as a social category. In Scar Tissue: Tracing Motherhood, Montreal writer and literary philosopher Sara Danièle Michaud brings her considerable intellectual scope to the impossible intimacy of this most primal human relationship. Intense and intertextual, the book draws as easily from Saint Augustine as from Sheila Heti, weaving a long essay that is both deeply personal and eloquently universal.
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Semi-Detached
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Send Me Into the Woods Alone
$20.95Dispatches from modern motherhood by a reluctant suburbanite.
Send Me Into The Woods Alone is an honest, heartfelt, and often hilarious collection of essays on the joys, struggles, and complexities of motherhood.
These essays touch on the major milestones of raising children, from giving birth (and having approximately a million hands in your vagina) and taking your beautiful newborn home (and feeling like you’ve stolen your baby from the hospital), to lying to kids about the Tooth Fairy and mastering the subtle art of beating children at board games. Plus the pitfalls of online culture and the #winemom phenomenon, and the unattainable expectations placed on mothers today.
Written from the perspective of an always tired, often anxious, and reluctant suburbanite who is doing her damn best, these essays articulate one woman’s experience in order to help mothers of all kinds process the wildly variable, deeply different ways in which being a mom changes our lives.
“Easily the most validating book you’ll read this year.”—Ann Douglas, author of Happy Parents, Happy Kids and The Mother of All Pregnancy Books
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Shut Up You’re Pretty
$17.95CANADA READS RUNNER-UP, 2024
Winner, Trillium Book Award and Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction; Finalist, Rogers Writers’ Trust of Canada Fiction Prize; a Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year
In Tea Mutonji’s disarming debut story collection, a woman contemplates her Congolese traditions during a family wedding, a teenage girl looks for happiness inside a pack of cigarettes, a mother reconnects with her daughter through their shared interest in fish, and a young woman decides to shave her head in the waiting room of an abortion clinic. These punchy, sharply observed stories blur the lines between longing and choosing, exploring the narrator’s experience as an involuntary one. Tinged with pathos and humour, they interrogate the moments in which femininity, womanness, and identity are not only questioned but also imposed.
Shut Up You’re Pretty is the first book to be published under the imprint VS. Books, a series of books curated and edited by writer-musician Vivek Shraya featuring work by new and emerging Indigenous or Black writers, or writers of colour.
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The Broken Heart of Winter
$24.95Lise, Appoline and Anne are related, though they live on opposite coasts at different moments of time, with the vast geography of Canada and decades of change in between. The three women are linked by generations of hardship, displacement, and an eighteenth-century French musket that has been passed down through the LeBlanc family since the time of the Acadian expulsion. In contemporary Victoria, BC, Lise’s estranged son, Daniel, reappears in Nova Scotia just when she’s making significant changes in her life, including a nasty divorce from Daniel’s father. Upon learning that her son is living with a distant relative Lise barely knows and causing enough trouble to draw the attention of the authorities, Lise goes to him and begins to unravel a family history that brings about unintended consequences. In 1832, on Isle Madame, Nova Scotia, eighteen-year-old Appoline is left by her older brother to overwinter in an isolated cove, where she’s in charge of five members of her family ranging in age from ten to ninety-nine. Grand-mère, the family matriarch, refuses to leave despite the wishes of her family. Tension grows between Appoline and her younger sister, coming to a head when the sister brings home a young ‘Jersey man.’ Finally, Grand-mère tells her own story of the Acadian expulsion of 1755. Her memories follow a group of Acadian fugitives on their flight into what is now northern New Brunswick, seeking refuge at the infamous Camp D’Espérance. In each successive generation, the imprint of the expulsion perpetuates further suffering, severs a connection to the past and contributes to the gradual erosion of cultural identity. Nevertheless, these three women are resilient in the face of great obstacles. The Broken Heart of Winter speaks to the capacity of the human spirit to love, to adapt, and to carry on.
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The Endless Garment
$18.00In a fresh and unique look at epic poetry, Marguerite Pigeon has created what may be a new classic. With equal parts love of the art form and social critique, Pigeon ranges over time and space in a series of long poems that delve into the history and impact of fashion. Guided, and haunted, by a series of ghosts, from Coco Chanel to Gypsy Rose Lee to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Pigeon’s narrator moves through the floors of a grand existential department store, comprehending, reinventing and questioning her approach to, and understanding of, fashion. At times manic, at times surreal and always needle sharp, The Endless Garment is an extraordinary work of imagination that every reader will want to try on.
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The Seed
$14.95Notes on desire, reproduction, and grief, and how feminism doesn’t support women struggling to have children
In pop culture as much as in policy advocacy, the feminist movement has historically left infertile women out in the cold. This book traverses the chilly landscape of miscarriage, and the particular grief that accompanies the longing to make a family. Framed by her own desire for a child, journalist Alexandra Kimball brilliantly reveals the pain and loneliness of infertility, especially as a lifelong feminist. Her experience of online infertility support groups – where women gather in forums to discuss IVF, surrogacy, and isolation – leaves her longing for a real life community of women working to break down the stigma of infertility.
In the tradition of Eula Biss’s On Immunity and Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-sided, Kimball marries perceptive analysis with deep reportage – her findings show the lie behind the prevailing, and at times paradoxical, cultural attitudes regarding women’s right to actively choose to have children. Braiding together feminist history, memoir, and reporting from the front lines of the battle for reproductive rights and technology, The Seed plants in readers the desire for a world where no woman is made to feel that her biology is her destiny.