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 2449–2464 of 9493 results
-
Exit
$20.00Somewhere in Montreal, in the not too distant future, an obscure company offers custom-designed suicides for its clients with one condition: their desire to die must be pure and absolute. Antoinette Beauchamp is a successful candidate but her suicide is not. Now a bedridden paraplegic, hooked up to machines that monitor all her bodily functions, she tells her story, taking the reader into the Kafkaesque world of the company and its bewildering cast of characters. ‘Exit’ is at once a profound examination of what it is that drives someone to want to end their life, as well as how that urge can be turned on its head against all odds. Written with her signature brio and acerbic wit, Nelly Arcan’s last novel is a hymn to life.
“[The protagonist’s] voice is thoroughly belligerent, as she mercilessly explains why she is bent on pursuing hopelessness, ugliness, all that is antithetical to life, and what it means to exist without that strength of will to desire, to discover, to love,to believe’… Ultimately, though, ‘Exit’ is a strangely hopeful novel…” – Canadian Literature
“This book plucked the brain from my skull and punted it through the uprights of remembering what writing can be like when a true artist unleashes her talent, passion and fearlessness in a book. No false compromises here. No half-steps. Just a rigorous exercise in ethics and contemporary morals wrapped in humour, helplessness and the absurd. For a book about suicide the writing is tight, energetic, rigorous … This book will be on my best of the year list.” – Sean Cranbury, Books on the Radio
“A powerful argument for suicide as a human right, ‘Exit’ is also strangely life-affirming. Ordinarily, these contradictory positions could suffice as the motor of a plot. Arcan’s protagonist is the irascible, narcissistic Antoinette Beauchamp, who seeks strength and reason to live from within the depths of her own twisted psychology. Knowing that the young woman who wrote this outrageously beautiful, thoroughly original novel did not is, well, heartbreaking. Cruel, even. So ‘Exit’ and the late Nelly Arcan’s life are a package. In the end, though, I only thought of Nelly Arcan. How could she have had this book inside her, let it out, and still leave us? Great beauty can be found in very dark places.” -The Rover
Govenor General’s Award Finalist
The Globe 100: The very best of 2011
-
Exit Strategies: Stories
$22.95A compelling and inventive collection about the ways we leave and the reasons we choose what to leave behind.
Framed within a tale about a journalist investigating choices of life and death, the eighteen stories in this collection explore restlessness, belonging, freedom, and mortality. A prisoner falls in love with his cellmate’s fiancée and breaks out to confess his feelings. A woman journeys from Honduras to the United States in the hope of a better life. Convenience store owners attempt to free themselves from financial burden by withholding evidence to a murder. The characters in Exit Strategies are all in need of a way out, a way forward, a way through.
In Exit Strategies, it is less about the destination and more about the initial decision to leave. In this daring and inventive debut, Paul Cresey weaves narratives that are sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking, but always utterly captivating.
-
Exit Wounds
$20.00What does it mean to feel at home? In his groundbreaking debut collection Exit Wounds, Indo-Canadian poet Tariq Malik weaves together history and myth with his own family’s experiences of immigration to uncover what it truly means to belong. Whether he is recalling his childhood memories of the death of his father, imaging himself as a dead soldier lost in the sands of the Kuwaiti desert, or drawing upon his family’s experience of ‘three wars and migrations,’ Malik’s moving search for home will resonate with anyone who has ever felt at odds with a dominant monoculture.
Malik’s poetry combines traditional Punjabi mythology and First Nations’ symbolism with contemporary events that have shaped the lives of immigrants: 9/11, RCMP violence, war. The result is a defiant triumph of the plurality of minority experiences—a poetic chorus of immigrants and their descendants coming home to the truth and power of their many worlds.
-
Exovede in the Darkroom
$24.00The first collection celebrating the work of celebrated experimental filmmaker Rhayne Vermette, Exovede in the Darkroom is a series of responses, critical and poetic, to Vermette?s visually explosive, materially distinct, and conceptually singular practice. Exploring Vermette?s shorts that engage a number of 16mm collage practices, as well as her feature film Ste. Anne, a film that mesmerized festival circuit critics and audiences alike with a metered and visually resplendent story of a return to a Métis community, in which sequences of images dominate the narrative. Contributors include Jennifer Smith, Gwynne Fulton, Lawrene Bird, Mónica Savirón, Joshua Minsoo Kim, Sky Hopinka, Stephen Broomer, Claudia Sicondolfo, Inney Prakash, José Sarmiento Hinojosa, Irene Bindi, and Janet Blatter.
Rhayne Vermette was born in Notre Dame de Lourdes, Manitoba. It was while studying architecture at the University of Manitoba, that she fell into the practices of image making and storytelling. Primarily self taught, Rhayne?s films are opulent collages of fiction, animation, documentary, reenactments and divine interruption. Her work has screened internationally and highlights screenings at the Berlinale, Toronto International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Mar Del Plata IFF, Viennale, Jeonju IFF, Valdivia International FIlm Festival and DocumentaMadrid. Her first feature narrative, Ste. Anne, exploded into the world and was awarded TIFF?s Amplify Voices Award for Best Canadian Feature Film in 2021.
-
Exploded View
$19.99From ocean floors to the darkest parts of space, science fiction has been built on creative and challenging short stories. Cloudscape Comics adds to this tradition by presenting the next generation of scifi storytelling in its anthology, Exploded View. This collection includes unique stories by 25 individual artists, tales of android companions, future worlds without engineers and intercultural alien exchanges. It’s enough to blow your mind along with the mind of your time-travelling, parallel dimension self, too!
-
Exploring Montreal’s Underground City
$17.95For almost six decades Montreal’s fabled underground city has been an inspiration to civic planners from around the world. What began as a subterranean pedestrian network beneath Place Ville Marie is now an integral part of the city and a major tourist attraction. It has developed into a parallel metropolis, an amazing labyrinth of passageways, alleys, atriums, and hallways that snake their way along 40 km, connecting 85 downtown skyscrapers, ten hotels, 2000 stores apartment blocks and 68 Métro stations. Alan Hustak looks at its history, takes you on a personal tour of the multi-level environment, and reveals its many hidden surprises along the way.
Like the city above ground the underground city has its own mix of sun and shade, public squares, fountains, green spaces, and even an indoor skating rink. It is not so much an underground city–that’s a misnomer–as it is an enclosed, weather proof city: a climate-controlled environment, above and below ground that is air-conditioned in summer and warm against the blast of winter.
For Montrealers and visitors alike, Exploring Montreal’s Underground City is an indispensable guide with tours, maps, and indexes, and full colour photographs.
-
Exploring Old Quebec
$12.99Quebec is one of the most visited cities in North America, for good reason-it has a unique charm. A romantic city, it attracts lovers as well as families and tourists interested in history. In 1985 UNESCO named Quebec a World Heritage Site. It is the only city in either Canada or the United States to have preserved its original walls and fortifications. Although the city has been the scene of armed conflict, many historical buildings remain.
For the curious travellers, the seven walking tours in Exploring Old Quebec are a voyage of discovery through the rich history of an extraordinary city founded by Samuel de Champlain in 1608. This completely revised guide also includes four thematic itineraries, maps, and practical information.
-
Explosions
$24.95Mathieu Poulin brings us an action comedy of a novel, starring big-budget, explosion-happy movie director Michael Bay. What if Bay were, against all odds, a misunderstood genius right up there with the likes of Plato, Sartre, and Nietzsche? What if his films were more than just Baydiocre, high-grossing box-office successes held in low esteem by most movie critics? What if Bad Boys was a film about decolonization? What if The Rock was about failing to be recognized by one’s peers? If Armageddon was about a post-human future? And Pearl Harbor was a reflection on the freedom afforded an artist when striving to transform fact into fiction? Poulin takes his hypothesis and runs with it. Bayhem ensues as our leading man sets out in hot pursuit of the truth, finding more questions than answers between epic car chases and sexy love interests. Who are his real parents and why did they abandon him? Who keeps following him? Did someone intentionally try to poison him, aware of his deathly allergy to sesame? And most importantly: What is meaning?
-
Expressway
$16.95Shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry
This poem resembles urban sprawl. This poem resembles the freedom to charge a fee. The fee occurs in the gaps. It is an event. It is not without precedent. It is a moment in which you pay money. It is a tribute to freedom of choice.
Reality is a parking lot in Qatar. Reality is an airstrip in Malawi.
Meanwhile the expressway encloses, the expressway round and around the perimeters like wagon trains circling the bonfire, all of them, guns pointed, Busby Berkeley in the night sky.
Echoing the pastoral and elegiac modes of the Romantic poets, whose reverence for nature never prevented them from addressing it with all the ideas and sensibilities their times allowed, Sina Queyras’s stunning collection explores the infrastructures and means of modern mobility. Addressing the human project not so much as something imposed on nature but as an increasingly disturbing activity within it, Expressway exposes the paradox of modern mobility: the more roads and connections we build, the more separate we feel. ‘Cleanse the doors of perception,’ Blake urged, and with that in mind, Queyras has written a bravely lyrical critique of our ethical and ecological imprint, a legacy easily blamed on corporations and commerce, but one we’ve allowed, through our tacit acquiescence, to overwhelm us. Every brush stroke, every bolt and nut, every form and curve in our networks of oil and rubber, every thought and its material outcome – each decision can make or unmake us.
‘The works in Expressway are all so tightly wound, hyper-distilled and stressed … This is poetry for the apocalypse.’
—Broken Pencil
‘As a poet, Queyras is secretly romantic, writing with lyricism and a voice that’s unafraid of sentiment or emotion … Queyras’ words spark like pickaxes on old asphalt.’
— Eye Weekly
‘Queyras show[s] what poetry can do when it simultaneously maps roadways of transportation and lines of human thought.’
—Spacing
‘Eclectic engagements characterize Queyras’s work, but any suggestion of characterization of her work immediately brings a morphing to something new, intelligent, and provocative … Sina Queyras is a poet to read and reckon with.’
—Lambda Literary Review
-
Expulsion & Other Stories
$20.00Expulsion & Other Stories consists of two parts: a novella followed by a group of short stories. But the main protagonists have one thing in common: they are all women coming of age in difficult times. In the short stories, set in post-Stalinist Russia, the women are confronted by dictatorship’s mundane face — a minor bureaucrat, a school teacher, a doctor. Nobody spells out the rules of survival to the young girls and women, yet each learns to play — or pays the price, that of facing “expulsion”. The novella “Face” shares a similar motif of expulsion but takes the reader to a different place — the urban sprawl and property greed of modern Vancouver.
-
Exquisite Monsters
$19.00The ordinary becomes the extraordinary in K. I. Press’s latest collection of poems, Exquisite Monsters. Filled with gods, monsters, saints and small children, Press draws together myth, magic and the forces of science Press to examine the power of creation and the creatures that lie beneath the skin. She peers into our blood and bones and teases out the beasts that bury themselves inside our minds. With precision, K. I. Press conjures fantastic images and constructs an elegant poetic machine for her readers.
-
Extensions
$22.95When she makes the chance discovery of a framed sepia photograph of her grandmother and her twin sister, RCMP Constable Arabella Dryvynsydes decides to investigate how a picture taken in 1914 in the mining town of Extension, B.C. wound up at a garage sale in small-town Saskatchewan almost one hundred years later. As Arabella sifts through caches of long-forgotten letters and unearths long-buried memories, she pieces together the heartbreaking truth of her family history and resolves a nearly century-old murder. In her debut novel, Myrna Dey skillfully moves back and forth between two time periods and two memorably resourceful heroines.
-
Extra Salty
$18.95Megan Fox, a diabolic indie rock band, toxic friendship, fluid sexuality, feminist reckoning, and a literal man-eater in the body of a high school cheerleader: Jennifer’s Body has it all Featuring an original interview with director Karyn KusamaWhat would be an easy sell in 2021 — women at the helm (screenwriter Diablo Cody, director Karyn Kusama), a bankable cast (Megan Fox, Amanda Seyfried), and a deceptively complex skewering of gender politics — was a box office flop in 2009. In Extra Salty, Frederick Blichert flips the script on how Jennifer’s Body was labeled a failure to celebrate all that is scrumptious (as Jennifer would say) about it: supernatural horror, dark comedy, queer love, and a nuanced handling of gendered violence. The movie could have been to the aughts what Heathers was to the eighties, and it’s finally getting its due — whether in the flood of tenth-anniversary praise, the parade of Jennifer Halloween costumes, or Halsey’s nod to it (“Killing Boys”) on her platinum-selling album.With insight into the genre’s cinematic tropes, our current cultural reckoning with misogyny, and an original interview with director Karyn Kusama, Extra Salty solidifies the status of Jennifer’s Body as a cult classic.About the Pop Classics SeriesShort books that pack a big punch, Pop Classics offer intelligent, fun, and accessible arguments about why a particular pop phenomenon matters.
-
Extraordinaire
$24.95Extraordinaire raconte l’histoire d’une solution communautaire extraordinaire à un problème chronique : la pénurie de médecins dans le Nord du Canada.
La communauté a décidé que la solution était de former ses propres médecins.
L’École de médecine du Nord de l’Ontario a produit plus de 700 médecins dont un pourcentage étonnant exerce dans le Nord du Canada pour répondre aux besoins uniques de leurs communautés d’origine, quelles soient rurales, autochtones ou francophones. La plupart des diplômées et diplômés sont non seulement restés travailler dans le Nord mais apportent aussi une contribution à l’École en tant que mentors, précepteurs et membres du corps professoral.
En presque vingt ans depuis sa création, l’École de médecine du Nord de l’Ontario a transformé les soins de santé dans le Nord et laissé une marque loin d’être ordinaire.
-
Extraordinaire
Extraordinaire
-
Eye
$20.00Finalist for the 2019 Governor General’s Literary Award
Myth, folklore, and magic permeate the stories in Marianne Micros’ collection Eye. Set in ancient and modern Greece, and in contemporary Europe and North America, these tales tell of evil-eye curses, women healers, ghosts, a changeling, and people struggling to retain or gain power in a world of changing beliefs. Here you will find stories of a nymph transformed into a heifer, a young soldier who returns home to discover that his brother is a changeling, an ancient temple uncovered during the construction of a church, a betrayed woman lost in a labyrinth, a wise woman confronting changes to her position when modern technology comes to her village. Some stories show that people still seek refuge in myth and folk beliefs; the ways of the past are not gone. The paving of a village does not destroy the power of the evil eye or the ability to repel it. A temple in honour of the old gods comes again to the surface. An unfinished musical composition for piano magically completes itself whenever it is played.