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 353–368 of 9481 results
-
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.
-
A World Under Sentence
$20.00Writers read more than just other writers. They read the social, cultural, and economic structures that determine the world into which they were born. And they also read other writers. A World Under Sentence reads these various “texts” that the early Canadian novelist John Richardson (author of Wacousta, 1776-1852) himself read. Through this, it compels its own readers to rethink the writings of this once-marginalized figure. Richardson wrote Gothic romances with outlandish plots and improbable characters; it is easy to dismiss his work as Upper Canada’s clumsy, homegrown version of the potboiler fiction popular in Britain and the United States. But something more is at work. He was born into a garrisoned, fur-trading world that was one large balancing act. The new United States, the newly-sundered British North American Empire, the still-powerful indigenous societies, the mixed societies that ran the fur trade, the imperial ones that owned it, the U.S. settler society that would extinguish tribe and trader alike: all these forces contended.
-
A Year At River Mountain
$19.95Part intellectual mystery and part spiritual adventure, A Year At River Mountain tells the story of an aging actor from Vancouver who has immersed himself in monastic life in China and is now examining his past as an actor, husband, and father. As his Western consciousness grapples with Taoist philosophies and acupressure techniques, he assesses his life and records the struggles of transformation that accompany such thinking. The monastery’s Old Master has given the narrator permission to write the commentary he shares with us while raising the question of who ‘reader and narrator’ really are. At times uncertainty leads him to confuse the monastery with another kind of institution. Fellow monks, particularly the American bellringer, Frank, are often as humorously baffling as they are ritualistically inviting. But the force driving his obsessive commentary and his year at River Mountain is the anticipation of the arrival of Imogen, an American actor and monastery patron. Kenyon balances the narrator’s interior life with hints of external disturbance and with purposeful missions outside the monastery. Village unrest threatens the monks’ balance and harmony; the nightmarish rape of a village woman uncovers a trapdoor to chaos; travel over the mountain conjures a snow leopard in a blizzard-choked pass; an arduous journey to wild islands off the coast offers ancient discoveries; and a trip to the city to find a prophet changes time forever. Crises build as war threatens; floods occur and a devastating event leads our narrator to a beautiful and surprising formulation of how things are.
-
A.J.M. Smith
$25.00Courageous poet, tireless critic, and leading anthologist of his time, Arthur James Marshall Smith is recognized as one of the most influential and vital forces in Canadian literature. Instrumental in both defining a Canadian tradition in poetry and in promoting the modernist movement in Canadian literature, Smith was a very public figure. This prominent writer, however, produced an impersonal, yet intensely private, intellectual poetry. In A.J.M. Smith: Canadian Metaphysical, Compton exposes “the mind of A.J.M. Smith — its range and development — as revealed in [his] poetry.” Charting and evaluating the overall development of his work, Compton provides fresh insights into Smith’s “least discussed” poems.
-
A.J.M. Smith and His Works
$9.95A study of the Canadian poet A.J.M. Smith and his works.
-
A.M. Klein
$65.00Following the general model of The Annotated Bibliography of Canada’s Major Authors series, this A.M. Klein bibliography lists primary and secondary material, with annotations of all books, articles, and reviews on Klein. Of special interest is the annotated and indexed bibliography of Klein’s journalism — some 3500 items. The material will enable students of Klein to follow his writings on a weekly basis.
-
A/Z Does It
$8.95A/Z Does It is a collection of conceptual wordplays and concrete puns, by an innovative writer who literally draws the line between impractical fictions and improbable art.
-
ABC Monstrosity
$14.99ABC Monstrosity is a freaky-fun book designed to thrill adults and kids alike with pages that teach and terrify all at once. As each new letter is introduced with a drawing of a familiar object or animal, the previous ones are continuously combined to create bizarre monstrosities.The detailed drawings are beautifully hand coloured by Shea.
ABC Monstrosity includes a zany glossary featuring fascinating scientific facts augmented with humour. The detailed monstrosities have goofball nonsense definitions, but the science behind how we might define more ordinary seeming animals and objects in our lives is surprisingly complex. ABC Monstrosity is both hideous and hilarious, with creepy creations sure to delight children and adults alike.
-
ABC Monstrosity
$19.99ABC Monstrosity is a freaky-fun book designed to thrill adults and kids alike with pages that teach and terrify all at once. As each new letter is introduced with a drawing of a familiar object or animal, the previous ones are continuously combined to create bizarre monstrosities.The detailed drawings are beautifully hand coloured by Shea.
ABC Monstrosity includes a zany glossary featuring fascinating scientific facts augmented with humour. The detailed monstrosities have goofball nonsense definitions, but the science behind how we might define more ordinary seeming animals and objects in our lives is surprisingly complex. ABC Monstrosity is both hideous and hilarious, with creepy creations sure to delight children and adults alike.
-
ABC of Reading TRG
$17.95ABC of Reading TRG examines the writings of Steve McCaffery and bpNichol, with a special focus on their collaborative work as the Toronto Research Group (TRG). The book expands what little criticism there is on the Group’s collaborations by exploring their engagements with literary theory, by differentiating between each writer’s personal concerns, and by reading their reports in conjunction with their individually authored writings.
On the one hand, it reads TRG’s reports “against the grain”: it attempts to uncover the unconscious links among repressed affective and political elements that circulate throughout their writing. This approach predominantly entails situating TRG in the shadow of perspectives developed by Lacan, Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Zizek. On the other hand, it also reads the TRG reports sympathetically, by underlining their construction of a positive, productive desire which does not centre on lack, but which actively celebrates multiplicity and affirmation, an approach that chiefly reads the group in the light of theories proposed by Barthes, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and Julia Kristeva. Readers can operate this book either by reading it conventionally from beginning to end, or by following chains of thought, indicated by superscript letters which link non-sequential chapters together-a device borrowed from Book 5 of bpNichol’s The Martyrology. The rhetorical artifice of the alphabetical framework affords a means to preserve one of the TRG’s most significant contributions to research writing on contemporary poetics, i.e., their simultaneous stress on both form and critical investigation.
In the end, ABC of Reading TRG discusses not so much what the Toronto Research Group’s reports are about, but what they invite us to think about.
-
Abode of Love
$19.95When Kate Barlow was a little girl, she moved with her mother and her older sisters to a ramshackle English mansion. They were not alone on the once-grand estate, surrounded as they were by twenty eccentric, elderly women, one of whom was her grandmother…or was she?
This remarkable memoir is the true story of life inside “The A,” the infamous Agapemone, named for the Greek word meaning Abode of Love. It was a religious cult founded in mid-19th century England by a defrocked clergyman who claimed to be guided personally by the Holy Ghost. Agapemonites, many of whom were wealthy, unmarried women, lived together on the estate. They believed the Second Coming was imminent and that their founder would live forever. When Henry James Prince died unexpectedly, his successor declared himself the reincarnation of Jesus Christ, an announcement which caused rioting in the streets.
The book reveals the author’s gradual awakening to the religious and sexual scandal that enveloped her family, as first the founder and then his heir — Kate’s grandfather — continued the practice of taking so-called “spiritual” brides. In fact, these relationships were physical as well as spiritual, and some produced illegitimate children, Kate’s mother being one of them.
This first inside account of the infamous cult is also a story about family, and its lingering legacy on several generations, including Kate Barlow’s own mother. It is a gripping, sometimes humourous, deeply human tale.