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2022 ReLit Award Finalists
The ReLit Awards celebrate the best in poetry, short fiction, and novels published by independent Canadian presses every year. We love to see it! Browse the ALU finalists here.
All Books in this Collection
Showing 49–54 of 54 results
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The Winter Knight
$24.95Arthurian legends are reborn in this upbeat queer urban fantasy with a mystery at its heartThe knights of the round table are alive in Vancouver, but when one winds up dead, it’s clear the familiar stories have taken a left turn. Hildie, a Valkyrie and the investigator assigned to the case, wants to find the killer — and maybe figure her life out while she’s at it. On her short list of suspects is Wayne, an autistic college student and the reincarnation of Sir Gawain, who these days is just trying to survive in a world that wasn’t made for him. After finding himself at the scene of the crime, Wayne is pulled deeper into his medieval family history while trying to navigate a new relationship with the dean’s charming assistant, Bert — who also happens to be a prime murder suspect. To figure out the truth, Wayne and Hildie have to connect with dangerous forces: fallen knights, tricky runesmiths, the Wyrd Sisters of Gastown. And a hungry beast that stalks Wayne’s dreams.The Winter Knight is a propulsive urban fairy tale and detective story with queer and trans heroes that asks what it means to be a myth, who gets to star in these tales, and ultimately, how we make our stories our own.
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Urban Disturbances
$19.95Bruce McDougall’s skilful short stories sketch a warts-and-all portrait of humanity, illuminating the mysterious forces that drive people to behave in unique-and uniquely human-ways.
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Wave Forms and Doom Scrolls
$20.00In this heart-twisting collection, Tysdal delves deep into the human experience. Throughout, Tysdal looks unflinchingly at the darkness of society, at suicide, at internet trolls, at violence, but the powerful empathy of his writing brings significance to even the most tragic moments. These stories have intricate and unexpected plots, filmic descriptions and crisp writing. These stories will break the reader’s heart and then put it back together again filled with compassion for these lost souls.
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We, Jane
$23.00Shortlisted for the 2022 Amazon Canada First Novel Award
Longlisted for the 2021 Scotiabank Giller Prize
Shortlisted for the 2021 BMO Winterset Award
Shortlisted for the 2021 Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction
Shortlisted for the 2021 Concordia University First Book Prize
Shortlisted for the 2022 ReLit Award for FictionA remarkable debut about intergenerational female relationships and resistance found in the unlikeliest of places, We, Jane explores the precarity of rural existence and the essential nature of abortion.
Searching for meaning in her Montreal life, Marthe begins an intense friendship with an older woman, also from Newfoundland, who tells her a story about purpose, about a duty to fulfill. It’s back home, and it goes by the name of Jane.
Marthe travels back to a small community on the island with the older woman to continue the work of an underground movement in 60s Chicago: abortion services performed by women, always referred to as Jane. She commits to learning how to continue this legacy and protect such essential knowledge. But the nobility of her task and the reality of small-town life compete, and personal fractures within their group begin to grow.
We, Jane probes the importance of care work by women for women, underscores the complexity of relationships in close circles, and beautifully captures the inevitable heartache of understanding home.
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White Lie
$18.00Part travelogue, part autofiction, part record of living under Western regimes that torture, kidnap, and murder its own citizens and those who wish to cross its borders, White Lie is a collection of super-short fictions. Written to be read in a book, but written on a phone, about that technology, about how our stories today blend into factual-seeming fictions and lying propaganda. Repressed memories of living in repressive societies. Like Tierra Whack’s album of one-minute rap songs or Stan Douglas’ Monodramas. Shorter than a stand-up comic’s joke and longer than a criminal tyrannical president’s tweet. A museum room full of paintings you zoom thru in thirty seconds or Thirty Two Short Films about Glenn Gould.
New fakes for attention spans that … what was I saying? Something something the age of distraction. You get me.
Clint Burnham’s White Lie is a series of quick bursts – hilarious, tragic, and thoughtful in turn. You won’t forget these paragraph-length stories because you will read them again and again.
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Why I Was Late
$20.00With kitchen-table candour and empathy, Charlie Petch’s debut collection of poems offers witness to a decades-long trans/personal coming of age, finding heroes in unexpected places.
Why I Was Late fuses text with performance, brings a transmasculine wisdom, humour, and experience to bear upon tailgates, spaceships, and wrestling rings. Fierce, tender, convention re-inventing–Petch works hard. And whether it’s as a film union lighting technician, a hospital bed allocator, a Toronto hot dog vendor, or a performer/player of the musical saw, the work is survival. Heroes are found in unexpected places, elevated by both large and small gestures of kindness, accountability and acceptance. No subject–grief, disability, kink, sexuality, gender politics, violence–is off limits.
A poet so good at drag they had everyone convinced that they were a woman for the first forty years of their life, Petch has somehow brought the stage and its attendant thrills into the book. Better late than. And better.
“Charlie Petch’s Why I Was Late is a poetic debut with the wisdom of a sage and the emotional range of an expert comedian. … Do yourself a favor and read this book. This is a master at work.”–Kai Cheng Thom, author of I Hope We Choose Love: A Trans Girl’s Notes from the End of the World