A note to US-based customers: All Lit Up is pausing print orders to the USA until further notice. Read more
All Books
All Books in this Collection
Showing 1825–1840 of 9481 results
-
Cultural Mischief
$17.95Cultural Mischief is a collection of prose poems on the hyperbolic absurdities of multiculturalism in action. Whether digging up the midden under Greg Curnoe’s house, revisiting Hiroshima, attending a dog breeder’s show or retelling the history of Quebec from the point of view of its founding nations, the Mohawks and Algonquins, Davey delivers startling vignettes at their funniest and most thoughtful.
This book is delightfully—and deceptively—simple. It provides the reader at one and the same time the most exquisitely enjoyable bedtime reading, and a wake-up call with a better hit than the best designer espresso.
-
Culture in Transit
$21.95Translators connect languages and landscapes, sparking conversations that enlarge our imagination. In Canada, where translation has had an especially important role to play, the nature of the connections has changed. These wide-ranging essays, by Canada’s most prominent translators, chart a journey that begins with the sharp divides of English and French in the 1970s and then confronts the much more complex explosion of identities today. Engaging with the politics of meaning but also with the creative role of the translator, these beautifully-written reflections illuminate a practice that is today finally receiving due recognition.
Contributors include Wayne Grady, Rhonda Mullins, Michelle Hartman, Erin Moure, Barbara Godard, Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood, Linda Gaboriau, Sheila Fischman, Kathy Mezei, Philip Stratford, Louise von Flotow, Ray Ellenwood, Betty Bednarski, William Findlay, David Homel, Jane Brierley, Katia Grubisic.
Culture in Transit was originally published in 1995. This edition, with a new introduction by Sherry Simon, has been revised, and expanded to include four new contributors to reflect changes in the translation scene over the last decades.
-
Cumberland
$22.95A stunning first novel full of empathy, marked by an astounding maturity of insight. Cumberland is both a place and a state of mind; it is a small-town story of longing and loss in the manner of David Adams Richards. It is an exploration of loneliness and the fear of loneliness in lives limited by circumstance.
Cumberland is an industrial town located halfway between Ottawa and Montreal on the shore of the St. Lawrence River. It’s facing the close of its factories and mills in the wake of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Ernest, a mill worker whose job is lost when the mill closes, is fifty-two; his employment prospects are poor. His life to this point hasn’t equipped him to face any more loss. Longing for companionship, he meets Bea, a waitress at Malouf’s, the local pub. Bea lives in an apartment with Amanda, who left home at seventeen because she couldn¹t live with her mother and stepfather. Yearning for a better life, Amanda develops a crush on Nick, Ernest’s drinking buddy, who represents many aspects of a better life — he has a Range Rover, owns a house — he is emotionally unavailable to Amanda, being a recently widowed single father.
The lives of Ernest, Bea, Amanda, Nick, and his son Aaron come together, fall apart, and come together again in this memorable and emotionally satisfying novel.
-
Cup of Coffee
$19.95A full-colour compendium of Toronto’s “Brief Leafs”
Over the past 100 years, close to 1,000 players have suited up for at least one game with the legendary Toronto Maple Leafs, and more than 250 did in the most turbulent era in club history, 1978–1999. In that time span, the Leafs made more than 300 trades, signed 20 free agents, and claimed eight players on waivers while almost 100 draft selections changed hands in addition to dozens of Toronto’s own picks.
Unlike NHLers elsewhere, the names of Toronto players aren’t quickly forgotten by fans. A stint with the Leafs, no matter how short, carries a certain cachet; the names and sweater numbers, and the compelling stories behind them, live on as trivia talk for years. Featuring 256 players, Cup of Coffee tells those stories with full-colour action pictures shot by veteran Leafs photographer Graig Abel. Learn about these “Brief Leafs” — their backgrounds, statistics, and memorable tales — as detailed by veteran Leafs journalist Lance Hornby.
-
Cupboard Love
$29.99From everyday foods to exotic dishes, from the herbs and spices of medieval England to the cooking implements of the modern kitchen, Cupboard Love is a sumptuous feast that explores the fascinating stories behind familiar and not-so-familiar gastronomic terms.
Who knew that the word “pomegranate” is related to the word “grenade”? That “baguette” is a cousin of “bacteria”? That “soufflé” comes from the same root as “flatulence”? Who knew that “vermicelli” is Italian for “little worms,” that “avocado” comes from an Aztec word meaning “testicle,” or that “catillation” denotes the unseemly licking of plates?
Originally published in 1996 and revised and expanded in 2004, and now available again for the first time in two decades in this new edition, Cupboard Love was one of three books nominated for a 1996 Julia Child Cookbook Award in the Food Reference/Technical Category (Calphalon Award), and was included in The Globe and Mail‘s list of “required reading” notable books for 1997.
Addictively readable, it takes us on a journey across cultures and history to arrive at the explanations behind some of our favorite culinary words and phrases, answering along the way those questions we’ve always had about food but were afraid to ask the cook.
-
Curationism
$13.95Now that we ‘curate’ even lunch, what happens to the role of the connoisseur in contemporary culture?
‘Curate’ is now a buzzword, applied to everything from music festivals to artisanal cheese. Inside the art world, the curator reigns supreme, acting as the face of high-profile group shows and biennials in a way that can eclipse and assimilate the contributions of individual artists. Curatorial-studies programs continue to grow, and the business world is adopting curation as a means of adding value to content. Everyone, it seems, is a curator.
But what is a curator, exactly? And what does the explosive popularity of curating say about our culture’s relationship with taste, labour and the avant-garde? In this vibrant, revelatory and original study, David Balzer travels through art history and around the globe to explore the cult of curation, from superstar curator Hans Ulrich Obrist’s war with sleep to Subway’s ‘sandwich artists.’ Recalling such landmark works of cultural criticism as Tom Wolfe’s The Painted Word and John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, Curationism will change the way you look at art – and maybe even the way you see yourself.
‘This is an unusual art book. It is a book you should read and one that you can. Balzer traces the history and current hegemony of curationism, a practice of jumped-up interior decorators who double as priests explaining the gospel to the unlettered masses. A good read, if you don’t mind reading things that you don’t want to know.’
– Dave Hickey
-
Curb Angels
$24.95In the post-punk, global economy of the 1980’s, four young women from very different backgrounds are united by a common goal: justice. Curb Angels features fearless female characters on a mission that crosses borders and challenges the status quo. In the face of exploitation and violence against women, they carve their own path and leave a touch of well-deserved wreckage along the way. Powerhouse team Lisa Mendis and Christopher Ducharme join forces in this tour-de-force graphic novel debut to push boundaries and buttons as they explore culturally taboo subjects through sequential art.
-
Curb Angels
$24.95In the post-punk, global economy of the 1980’s, four young women from very different backgrounds are united by a common goal: justice. Curb Angels features fearless female characters on a mission that crosses borders and challenges the status quo. In the face of exploitation and violence against women, they carve their own path and leave a touch of well-deserved wreckage along the way. Powerhouse team Lisa Mendis and Christopher Ducharme join forces in this tour-de-force graphic novel debut to push boundaries and buttons as they explore culturally taboo subjects through sequential art.
-
Curb Angels
$18.99In the post-punk, global economy of the 1980’s, four young women from very different backgrounds are united by a common goal: justice. Curb Angels features fearless female characters on a mission that crosses borders and challenges the status quo. In the face of exploitation and violence against women, they carve their own path and leave a touch of well-deserved wreckage along the way. Powerhouse team Lisa Mendis and Christopher Ducharme join forces in this tour-de-force graphic novel debut to push boundaries and buttons as they explore culturally taboo subjects through sequential art.
-
Cures for Hunger
$22.95Almost unbelievable. You’ll swear it’s fiction.
“You haven’t read a story like this one, even if your father was the kind of magnificent scoundrel you only find in Russian novels. Béchard is the rare writer who knows the secret to telling the true story.” — Marlon James, author of A Brief History of Seven Killings
Growing up in rural British Columbia, Deni Béchard worships his father, believing that he can do no wrong. Although his charismatic father is prone to racing trains and brawling, Deni has no idea how unusual his family is.
But when Deni discovers his father’s true identity (and his other life as a bank robber), his imagination is set on fire. Before long, he begins to see himself as a character in one of his father’s stories. He can’t escape the sense that his father’s life holds the key to understanding his own passions, aversions, and motivations.
Eventually Deni finds himself ensnared in the controlling impulses of his mysterious father and increasingly obsessed by his father’s own muted recollections: the impoverished childhood in the Gaspé he’d fled long ago, the hunger for excitement and a better life, and a trail of crimes leading from Québec to the American west.
At once an extraordinary family story and an unconventional portrait of the artist as a young man, Cures for Hunger is a singular, deeply affecting memoir by an acclaimed writer.
-
CURIO
$20.00Still tired of the same old Can Lit? Had your fill of The Beautiful Poetry? You’re not alone. For those of you who missed it the first time, BookThug is pleased to RE/present West Coast poet Elizabeth Bachinsky’s first full-length collection of poems, CURIO: Grotesques and Satires From The Electronic Age.
CURIO: Grotesques & Satires From the Electronic Age is Elizabeth Bachinsky’s ellusive first book of poetry. Published just prior to Home of Sudden Service, a collection that went so far in another direction as to be nominated for a Governor General’s Award in 2006, CURIO offers a very different view of what Bachinsky is capable of as a poet, and invites her readers to consider a much wider vision of her work as a whole. No one can truly hope to understand her work without reading this volume.
Witness Antonin Artaud climbing a beanstalk and eating his lover’s foot, as his most torrid affair is revealed in letters; fear the Spy Cam’s omniscient eye; test your paranoiac tendencies as an alien abductee; watch as The Waste Land and The River Merchant’s Wife hit the blender; rejoice in poems without people, poems without authors, and poems with no audience. Informed by the writings of the 20th century’s (and even the 21st’s!) most eclectic authors, CURIO is quirky and sly—an ironic mixture simultaneously engaged with formal innovation and a retro avant garde that heralded the arrival of a brave new poet.
-
Curious Masonry
$15.95Christopher Patton’s translations from the Exeter Booka volume of Old English poetry used, over centuries, to store gold foil for illumination of texts thought more meaningfuldraw the poems into a modern idiom without quieting their unearthly strangeness. His sense of their passage through time also yields “Hearth,” a take on “The Earthwalker” that uses type and white space, speech and silence, to embody the “play of duration and flux” consuming both the physical manuscript, and the worried, reflective speakers of its poems.
-
Curry
$14.95No two curries are the same. This Curry asks why the dish is supposed to represent everything brown people eat, read, and do.
Curry is a dish that doesn’t quite exist, but, as this wildly funny and sharp essay points out, a dish that doesn’t properly exist can have infinite, equally authentic variations. By grappling with novels, recipes, travelogues, pop culture, and his own upbringing, Naben Ruthnum depicts how the distinctive taste of curry has often become maladroit shorthand for brown identity. With the sardonic wit of Gita Mehta’s Karma Cola and the refined, obsessive palette of Bill Buford’s Heat, Ruthnum sinks his teeth into the story of how the beloved flavor calcified into an aesthetic genre that limits the imaginations of writers, readers, and eaters. Following in the footsteps of Salman Rushdie’s Imaginary Homelands, Curry cracks open anew the staid narrative of an authentically Indian diasporic experience.
-
Cursed Objects
$19.95What happens to identity when we’re obsessed with self-surveillance and devalued words? Now that we’ve sold ourselves to ourselves, shuffling letters and sounds around to hide the pain, how do we represent the uncanny valley in which we’ve set up shop? In Cursed Objects, Jason Christie recoils in horror at the thoroughness of his self, then begins to write toward a new understanding brokered between all the things that define him and who he thinks he should be and interrogates how we reduce people to words, especially online, turning them into objects.
-
Curtained Windows, Lighted Rooms
$16.95Bal Sethi pens his reflections on all that is happening around him with wisdom and a (sometimes) heavy heart. An example is the poem “Home for the Holidays” where the narrator discovers that his wife has been unfaithful. Yet Bal never seems to lose hope for the world. This is a truly beautiful compilation of poetry concerning all that matters most to mankind.
-
Curtains for Roy
$21.00Alex is a playwright suffering from writer’s block and harsh reviews. His best friend, Roy, is a theatre director with lung cancer and six months left to live. In pursuit of fresh air and great wine, they go on a road trip to the Okanagan Valley, where Roy rediscovers his passion for theatre. But when he decides to stage a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at a winery, disaster ensues: the woman cast in the lead is the winery owner’s wife and has no talent; wildfires encroach upon the surrounding forest; and Roy slips closer to death, one cigarette at a time.
Curtains for Roy is a hilarious peek into the world of theatre, where the greatest drama is offstage and the best performances take place behind the curtain.