A note to US-based customers: All Lit Up is pausing print orders to the USA until further notice. Read more
Showing 3313–3328 of 9481 results
From the acclaimed author of Visible Light comes a collection of seven outstanding stories, each set against the rural landscape of Vancouver Island and the cities of the Pacific Northwest. In these stories the memories and dreams of characters are examined, revealing them to be both cages and keys to the cages.
The life lessons learned by the characters are often as complicated and painful as they are illuminating. In the title story, two sisters fall in love with their math tutor on one of the Gulf Islands, inhabited equally by the ghosts of the misfits and Hollywood stars who came to live there, and the children of an alternative school, run by the girls’ criminally optimistic father. In “Sand and Frost,” a young girl drops out of UBC, returns home, and discovers that her domineering grandmother is the sole survivor of a shocking act of family violence. In “What Saffi Knows,” a child, unable to explain to her self-involved parents, struggles with the knowledge of the whereabouts of another missing child. In these remarkable seven stories, Carol Windley creates a sense of place and of people that breathe the cool wet air of a spring morning on Gabriola Island.
Home is like a leaf on a tree: other people, other homes, are the other leaves. They live beneath the same sky, share the same memories, survive the same storms.
But one leaf is a solitude.
After twenty-five years on a New Brunswick farm, award-winning Canadian author Beth Powning came to understand the land she calls home. Now, almost twenty years after the initial publication of Home, readers may once again experience the spirit of home in nature in this new edition of her seminal book.
Time has made the subtle messages beyond her door become clearer, if not less mysterious: the glorious rawness of winter storms, the effortless dominance of oak trees, the distinctive poetry of night, the universes found within a humble garden.
Placing herself in the dual roles of explorer and storyteller, Powning waltzes the unspoken divide between the untamed and the domestic, revelling in the complex bonds that exist between the natural world and those who would seek to navigate its wonders.
Originally released in Canada as Seeds of Another Summer, this new edition, which includes a new introduction and gorgeous reproductions of Powning’s sumptuous nature photography, will inspire those who seek a simpler life and enchant those who are already there.
Between 1860 and 1930 an officially sanctioned child migration from Britain to Canada took place. During that time over 80,000 children, unaccompanied by their parents or siblings and often separated from them forever, were placed at Canadian factories and farms where, more often than not, they were exploited as indentured child labourers.
Alistair is a retired farmer who lives with his sister-in-law Flora and son Ewan on their family homestead. No longer a profitable or even a viable enterprise, the fields have long been leased out and the house is in serious disrepair. The scattered remnants of the family are vainly trying to hold it together and not doing a very good job of it. Lorna, Alistair’s daughter, comes to visit for the first time since her marriage failed, for a shaky reunion that soon turns acrimonious. Alistair, grumpy and distracted as ever, suffers a stroke and his illness finally releases the memory of a secret that he had buried deep within himself years ago. He longs for Katie, the younger sister he was forced to leave behind in Scotland when he came to Canada in 1922 as a “home child.”
This is a play about family secrets and about the many forms of love, longing and aspiration they conceal. And it’s about loss. It takes a piece of history from a dark corner of our country’s past and dramatizes its tragic impact through the generations of one family. Homechild is set in Glengarry County in eastern Ontario where both of Joan MacLeod’s parents were raised on farms just a few miles apart. Each had home children working on their family’s farms in the 1920s, something she wasn’t aware of when she first started her research for this play.
Homechild premiered at The Belfry in Victoria on September 18, 2007.
Homecoming is a poetry collection that reflects our human journey as we grow and learn, and author’s personal journey through childhood, marriage, divorce, parenthood, and parents’ old age, as well as the author’s quest to reclaim and celebrate her Native heritage. The poems in Homecoming are grouped according to the four directions of the Medicine Wheel: East for Beginnings, South for Innocence, West for Going Within, North for Elder and Wisdom, plus three poems for the Centre, the Great Mystery.
Hilarious and poignant, Homer in Flight draws a brilliant picture of a chronic malcontent roving from high-rise to housing development along the 401 and the QEW. Homer remains utterly displaced, not because of what other people do or don’t do, but because he lives in his imagination instead of embracing an imperfect but fairly benign reality.
A classic work of award-winning Atlantic fiction
Leah is haunted: by the things she’s done, and the things she has failed to do. And then there’s the the ghost of her brother. She has to learn to let go of the past if she, or her brother, are ever going to move on.
A funny, urban story, Homing is about love, death, and rock and roll-through the eyes of a woman who’s grown afraid of the city, a ghost who’s lost his way, a musician who’s trying to find his, and Sandy and Harold, a pair of homing pigeons who help each of them bring it all home.
“Domet’s writing style is amusing and engaging, and you really end up caring about her characters.”—Consumed by Ink
“Homing anchored me from the first page… I wanted to hide away and not come out of my reading nook until it was all done.”—R.H. Downs
A memoir about abandoning an exhausting commuter lifestyle to move to a cabin in the woods, embracing imperfection while cultivating a life of care for self and nature.
Alice Irene Whittaker was addicted to productivity, perfectionism, and discipline. She was used to rushing between multiple jobs, her demanding ballet training, and volunteering for social justice causes, making sure that every single moment of her day was accounted for. But then she finds herself as a new mother, commuting four hours a day into the city and exhausted by the state of the world and paralyzed by climate guilt and anxiety. Something has got to give. Overnight, Alice Irene and her husband decide to retreat to a cabin in the woods, in search of a new kind of life.
Surrounded by creek, meadow, and forest, Alice Irene begins a new lifelong journey of repairing her fractured relationship with both herself and the natural world. Dismantling a history of anorexia, obsessiveness, and workaholism, she decides to stop taking and start caretaking. She asks herself, “How can I take care of the Earth if I don’t know how to take care of myself?”
Her quest takes her to meet a renowned economist-rancher in Colorado, to stand at the side of a runway at a sustainable fashion show in Portland, and to witness firsthand rewilding of wolves in Yellowstone. She interviews and learns from dozens of people who are building homes, growing food, making clothes, raising families, and living their lives in regenerative ways.
Braiding together her personal journey with the stories of others who are tending to the Earth, Alice Irene Whittaker has crafted a lyrical, relatable memoir about regeneration and moving from a life of despair to a life of care. Searching for the spaces between the sorrow of wildfires and the beauty of wildflowers, Homing is about returning home to our bodies, geographies, communities, and place, all as a part of nature.
About one million years ago when Homo Erectus decided to walk on two legs he must have sensed that things would never be the same for him again—that he could kiss his old ape habits good bye. No more swinging from tree branch to tree branch, no more throwing his feces around. He would have also been the first to admit that he wasn’t quite ready yet for martinis, smoking jackets and Masterpiece Theatre. A lot of men today find themselves in a similar position—aware they can’t go back to what they were and, at the same time, unable to figure out what they are supposed to become.
Women are trying to figure out the New Man too. And who better to ask than an insider, a man? Joel Yanofsky says, “When I was approached about writing a book about sex from a guy’s point of view, I began to laugh. I don’t mean giggle or chuckle either. I mean laugh uncontrollably, hysterically. Which is one of the reasons for writing this book: to figure out what the joke is and, better yet, whom it is on. Women are more confusing than ever, not always a bad thing. So is knowing what it means to be a man, not always a bad thing either. I still don’t know what it is I find so amusing. Except I’m still laughing. I can’t promise answers, but I do have a few theories.”
You’ll be laughing too as you follow Yanofsky through the minefields of dating, mating, and breaking up.
The third book in a trilogy that explores the limits of individual expression, Honestly is an intimate, quiet, and unresolved little book about talking and listening.
It begins with research into a forgotten relative who was kicked out of the author’s family after he was jailed for conscientious objection to WWII, and who then moved to New York to become a composer. From there the poem swerves into a series of minor-key personal anecdotes, interlaced with conversations with friends about work and relationships. Throughout, communication is framed by the economics and psychology of the home. Dialogue takes place in close quarters—constrained by money, space, ego, and empathy.
Rose Gold can’t catch a break. Her latest “golden opportunity” has given way to a madcap adventure through the soft underbelly of Bonneville City. She finds herself cast in the role of renegade mentor and hero to a trio of idealistic young rebels. Together, they perpetrate an act of subversion targeting “future-mover” and celebrity CEO Moses Honeydew, which puts them in the crosshairs of his Substrate Inc.
Along the way, they join forces with family-doctor-by-day and fixer-by-night, Dr. Hansjorg Winteregg, and go on the lam. Meanwhile, there are rumours about Honeydew’s private space station, The Visionary, which may or may not have forced its first passengers into working off their debt. Rose’s boss and his crew go missing. Honeydew announces his plan to take a manned submersible drill to Earth’s mantle to burnish his brand as a fearless and impossibly cool maverick.
With her faithful charges by her side, Rose finds herself at the centre of an unfolding conspiracy. Did she ever truly have a hand on the rudder of fate? And what chance does a quartet of second-rate saboteurs have against a multinational corporation with a vendetta and a trillion-dollar market capitalization?
‘Honeymoon in Berlin’ examines the extremes of human desire, and investigates the human fascination with limits, the line between courage and fear, life and death.
“A book of bold contrasts, ‘Honeymoon in Berlin’ is simultaneously beautiful and ugly, alluring and repulsive. It’s an achievement. It’s art.” – Front & Centre
The Honeymoon Wilderness is Pier Giorgio Di Cicco’s first full-length collection of new poetry to be published since 1986 when he withdrew from the world of literature to join a monastery. These are poems of fear and wonder from a man deeply engaged in the contemplation of the everyday. They resonate with the surprising imagery and heart-wrenching lyrical intelligence that is the hallmark of Di Cicco’s best work. The Honeymoon Wilderness amply demonstrates why Di Cicco must still be considered one of our major, essential poets.
Hong Kong Poems is the first-ever collection of poems about Hong Kong in parallel English and Chinese texts. Appearing in the year when Hong Kong returns to Chinese sovereignty, this collection offers insights into what Hong Kong was and is on the edge of becoming. Parkin and Wong speak of the dynamism of Hong Kong, of a city where the present meets the future. As well, they depict the “astronauts” with their families in Canada and their businesses in Hong Kong. They also evoke the feelings of the poor who are leaving the countryside for the dreams and hopes of magical Hong Kong. Many of the poems develop from within the Chinese poetic tradition of nature writing, while also recreating the troubled world of developers and their need of land for expansion. The juxtaposition of an English-Canadian poet and a Chinese-Canadian poet – with their poems in both English and Chinese – allows the reader to enter a dialogue about Asian modernity, a state of being that the Hong Kong critic Ackbar Abbas has called “postculture.”