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 337–352 of 9248 results
-
A Very Small Something
$9.95Olive Bezzlebee lives by the sea in a fantastic town with the world’s biggest bubblegum factory, where its citizens blow bubbles all day. But Olivia can’t blow a single one and feels as if everyone looks down on her. Leaving Covington to find a place where she might belong, she learns the true meaning of both family and home.
A Very Small Something, beautifully illustrated by Alexander Griggs-Burr, is a story to which all children – and any tuned-in parent – will be able to relate. Blowing bubbles may indeed be a very small something . . . but when you are a small child and it’s the thing you most want to do, a bubble can mean the whole world.
-
A Very Special Episode
$20.00nathan dueck thinks really hard about pop culture. In his new collection, A Very Special Episode, he pays serious attention to the pieces of our past that have been lost in the internet era, whether it is magnetic tapes or the Smurfs, rabbit-ear antennas or She-Ra. A child of the ’80s dueck plays with the past and with our ideas of a poetry canon. In these playfully challenging recreations we find Mr. T in The Waste Land and a selection of sonnets – one for every letter of the alphabet – on topics from the Care Bears to Zoobilee Zoo. This is a smart, entertaining and ultimately questioning collection, one that asks us to consider how our ideas are shaped by the cultures surrounding us.
-
A Very Stable Genius
$24.95How do you poke fun at a man who’s so absurd he practically satirizes himself? Even two-time Pulitzer Prize–winning cartoonist Mike Luckovich admits it’s been a challenge covering the Cheeto-in-Chief in his internationally syndicated political cartoons. But Mike rose to the challenge, pulling no punches and stripping down Trump and his cronies with his signature wit and style.
Covering Trump’s antics from the 2016 election through to the Mueller investigation, the cartoons in A Very Stable Genius tackle key moments in Trump’s political career, offering scathing insights on everything from his disastrous track record with women to his revolving-door cabinet to his suspiciously intimate relationship with a certain Russian leader. Woven through with searing commentary and personal anecdotes, Mike’s cartoons will shock and delight you, making you think as much as they make you laugh — when you’re not too busy being terrified.
-
A View from the Porch
$25.00A View from the Porch is an illuminating collection of 22 essays about the points where design touches life and the big and small things that make us appreciate, or become disconnected from, our homes and neighbourhoods.Drawing on his experiences as an architect, planner, world traveller, and educator, Friedman delves into issues such as the North American obsession with monster homes, the impact of scale on the feeling of comfort in our communities, environmental concerns such as deforestation, innovative recycling methods in building materials, the booming do-it-yourself industry, the decline of craftsmanship, and the role of good design in bringing families together. Written with Friedman’s trademark flare A View from the Porch offers a compelling vision of the influence of design in our everyday lives from one of the world’s most innovative thinkers. This is a totally revised edition, with new material, of Room for Thought published in 2005.
-
A Vision in Wood and Stone
$65.95Founded as an academy for boys in 1839, Mount Allison University has grown into one of Canada’s most highly-revered undergraduate institutions. The vision of excellence that motivated its founders had a tremendous impact on the university’s success, influencing not only the characteristics of its academic program but also the arrangement of its campus and the quality of its architecture. The Sackville, New Brunswick campus is not only richly diverse and aesthetically beautiful, beloved by many, but also emblematic of the broader development of architecture in the Atlantic region.
In A Vision in Wood and Stone, art historian and architect John Leroux collaborates with photographer Thaddeus Holownia to chronicle the story of Mount Allison’s campus, charting its development from a few wooden structures to its present diversity of building materials and architectural styles. At the heart of their lavishly illustrated study is a conversation about the nature of architectural change and its role in the formation of the campus. Whether spurred by the calamity of fire or by the visionary (or sometimes revisionary) impulses of the university’s leadership, Mount Allison’s architecture has been repeatedly transformed, each new building expressing both the localized needs and aspirations that animated its construction and aspects of the global events and aesthetic movements that informed its design.
Leroux and Holownia demonstrate how architecture can record the complex story of an institution’s development and embody the hopes and dreams of a community.
-
A Visit
$9.50World-renowned cartoonist Seth returns with three new ghost stories for 2022.
Margaret visits the lavish home of her friend Carla Rhodes for the summer holidays. But when Carla’s brother arrives with a mysterious friend, strange occurrences cause tensions to rise within the group, and secrets hidden within the house begin to emerge.
-
A Walker in the City
$19.00A fascinating, ambling, loitering mystery story in verse, a whoizzit rather than a whodunit.
In this innovative and arresting narrative poem, Méira Cook’s walker, a young woman, is a character being written by an “old city poet,” who is in turn being written by another poet, for whom the young woman, “Ms. Em Cook,” has been an amanuensis. Always witty and often hilarious, feather-light in touch, the book is an entertaining exploration of serious issues: youth and age; life, death and rebirth; the (dis)connection of language and reality; tradition and the now. It is an assemblage of seven nesting sections, each of them a sort of chapbook speaking to each of the others and rounding out a long poem of great freshness. A Walker in the City is one of a kind, one of the most original books Brick has ever published.
-
A Way to Be Happy
$22.95Longlisted for the 2024 Giller Prize • A Globe 100 Best Book of 2024
Short stories about disparate characters consider what it means to find happiness.
On New Year’s Eve, a pair of addicts robs a string of high-end parties in order to fund their own recovery. A recently separated woman relocates to a small northern town, where she receives a life-changing visitation, and a Russian hitman, suffering from a mysterious lung ailment, retrieves long-buried memories of his past. In the nineteenth century, a disparate group of women coalesce in the attempt to aid a young girl in her escape from a hospital for the insane. These are but some of the remarkable characters who populate these stories, all of them grappling with conflicts ranging from mundane to extraordinary. Caroline Adderson’s A Way to Be Happy considers what it means to find happiness—and how often it comes through the grace of others.
-
A Week of This
$26.95A brilliant, darkly comic, and startlingly honest novel, A Week of This follows the lives of an extended family over one increasingly desperate week. At the centre of the novel is 38-year-old Manda, a tough, sarcastic woman who has yet to make peace with the town she was brought to as a teenager after her parents’ messy divorce. Her estranged mother is crazy, her father is ill and in retreat, her damaged older brother is growing restless and distant, her stepbrother is a grown-up teenager without any real friends, and her husband is a tight-lipped, depressed store-owner who has been pressing Manda to have a baby.
Full of barbed dialogue and hilariously deadpan descriptions of family dynamics and the kind of awkward social dances that get performed every day, A Week of This is a book for people who always feel a little out of place, right where they are. People who are smart enough to know something has gone wrong, but can’t figure out how to fix it. People who know they aren’t kids anymore, but are not quite ready to grow up.
“A Week of This is bleak, funny, sad, smart, and unlike any novel I have ever read. The lives of these characters are so richly imagined I could taste the furnace dust, smell the backed-up sewer, feel the thump of every hangover. It’s an authentic, unsentimental literary experiment that doesn’t read like an experiment. Nathan Whitlock has exposed the timeless heart of lower-middle-class everywhere.” — Todd Babiak, author of The Book of Stanley and The Garneau Block.
-
A Week of This
$16.95A brilliant, darkly comic, and startlingly honest novel, A Week of This follows the lives of an extended family over one increasingly desperate week. At the centre of the novel is 38-year-old Manda, a tough, sarcastic woman who has yet to make peace with the town she was brought to as a teenager after her parents’ messy divorce. Her estranged mother is crazy, her father is ill and in retreat, her damaged older brother is growing restless and distant, her stepbrother is a grown-up teenager without any real friends, and her husband is a tight-lipped, depressed store-owner who has been pressing Manda to have a baby.
Full of barbed dialogue and hilariously deadpan descriptions of family dynamics and the kind of awkward social dances that get performed every day, A Week of This is a book for people who always feel a little out of place, right where they are. People who are smart enough to know something has gone wrong, but can’t figure out how to fix it. People who know they aren’t kids anymore, but are not quite ready to grow up.
“A Week of This is bleak, funny, sad, smart, and unlike any novel I have ever read. The lives of these characters are so richly imagined I could taste the furnace dust, smell the backed-up sewer, feel the thump of every hangover. It’s an authentic, unsentimental literary experiment that doesn’t read like an experiment. Nathan Whitlock has exposed the timeless heart of lower-middle-class everywhere.” — Todd Babiak, author of The Book of Stanley and The Garneau Block.
BackLit bonus material includes an explorative essay by the author and more.
-
A Well-Mannered Storm
$16.95“Selected for Poetry in Transit 2009”, A Well-Mannered Storm is an exploration of loose correspondence between one of Canada’s greatest musicians, Glenn Gould, and “K,” an admiring fan. Braid weaves an intimate dynamic as K struggles with the loss of her hearing in one ear, finding her greatest comfort in Gould’s music–particularly when he plays Bach. Gould’s poems don’t directly reply, but they do echo a response as he struggles with his own difficult life; his family, his health, his strong beliefs in how music should be presented and his personal habits considered “eccentric” by an ever-watchful press. K starts to accept her changing world, just as Gould begins a downward spiral into disintegration. In his final reflection, Gould acknowledges that in spite of his personal trials, his music now circles the world in the spacecraft Voyager as Earth’s example to other possible life forms of what is most beautiful in this civilization.
A Well-Mannered Storm is a striking and masterful volume of poems that does justice to Gould’s brilliance, offering insights into his personal life and art, even as it showcases Braid’s own virtuosity. -
A Wild Stab For It
$19.95On the 40th anniversary of the 1972 Summit Series, a personal and poetic journey into the heart of hockey in Canada
As summer turned to fall in 1972, Canada was redefining itself and its place in the world. Politically, a spirited election campaign asked probing questions about the nation’s past, present, and future — the nationalist pride of recent centennial celebrations contrasted with the stressed relationship between English and French Canada post-FLQ crisis. In a very different arena, similar issues were raised by the trials and triumphs of the players of Canada’s game.
On the 40th anniversary of what is arguably the single most important sporting event in Canadian history, Dave Bidini travels back through time to September 28, 1972. By asking Canadians of all stripes — athletes, artists, politicians, and pundits — to share their memories, whether they were there in Moscow’s Luzhniki Ice Palace or watching a TV rolled into a classroom, Bidini explores how the legendary Canada–Russia Summit Series changed hockey history and helped shape a nation’s identity.
Doing what John McPhee’s Levels of the Game did for tennis and American culture, Bidini asks: did something about being Canadian influence the outcome of the series, or did the outcome of the series change what it means to be Canadian?
-
A Woman of Her Time
$21.95In this memoir, the distinguished feminist author and poet Louise Dupré conjures up the tragedies and joys of her mother’s life–and does so not only in the personal context of the family but as a woman of her time in the dramatically changing backdrop of Quebec before, during, and after the heady days of the Quiet Revolution. A compelling read that will expand your understanding of the complexity of Quebec society over the past century, as well as your appreciation of the great, wise, and compassionate Louise Dupré.
-
A Work in Progress
$19.95Writer Danny Bayle’s life is in shambles. His true love has left him and his grandfather — the last and most important influence in his life — has just passed away. Danny has spent the last few months languishing, unable to write a single word, but at the urging of a friend ventures out into the world in an attempt to jumpstart a new life, befriending in the process an interesting assortment of characters including an author, a musician, an artist, and an elderly retired nurse. Garnering the attention of more than one woman, Danny sees his new friends unwittingly begin to shape what could just be the story of his life. But will he ever let go of the girl that got away?
-
A World for My Daughter
$24.95As an ecologist, Alejandro Frid is haunted by the irrevocable changes that humans are forcing upon Earth-the loss of ancient forests, the demise of large predators, shifts in the chemistry and circulation patterns of the atmosphere and more. Feeling completely discouraged by his research on endangered species and various forms of ecological meltdown, Alejandro accepts defeat and simply escapes from this world without a future by retreating to Earth’s few remaining wild places. Then Twyla Bella, his daughter, is born. He wonders, how can he bring a child into a world he believes is doomed? Does this very belief make the situation hopeless? Faced with these questions, Alejandro begins his search for optimism. A World for My Daughter takes readers to the sharp knife-edge on which the fate of the biosphere rests. Merging the perspective of a scientist compelled to share the significance of his research, glimpses into the worldview of modern indigenous hunters and the voice of a parent speaking to his child about life’s conundrums, A World for My Daughter steers readers toward imagining their own role in preserving the vibrancy of our planet.
-
A World to Win
$24.95In this time of economic, ecological and social crises, a diverse array of collective movements carry the possibilities of deep democratization and alternative futures. A World to Win brings these movements alive as agents of history-in-the-making. It situates Quebec student strikers, Indigenous resistance and resurgence, Occupy, workers, feminist and queer movements and many others in their struggle against the hegemonic institutions of capitalism. Using theory and case studies, this book articulates the particular histories and structures facing social movements while also building bridges to comprehensive analyses of our current era of crisis and change–in Canada and the world.
Contributors to A World to Win include well-known political and social theorists, activist-intellectuals who have made significant contributions to movement politics and emerging voices in this field. Bridging the conceptual and the practical, this book will be of value to activists whose interventions can be sharpened through critical reflection and to students and scholars who will find pathways to activism.