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 3809–3824 of 9248 results
-
Journeywoman
$18.95Journeywoman is the story in poems of the explicitly female journey made by women through girlhood, motherhood and beyond. The play on the word journeyman is intentional with the notion of completing an apprenticeship and seeking mastery of the trade implicit. The actual journey, both physical and intellectual, however, is what brings woman to that state of mastery and Journeywoman, through verse, provides just one itinerary. This unique collection explores the stages of womanhood as defined by this author: the waif, the mother and the crone. It invokes the stories of many to describe the process of mastering the craft of being female, with all its inherent complexities. The journey involves not only the physical alterations a woman undergoes through the changing of stages–the metamorphosing required to achieve mastery–but also true travel, the road embarked upon to achieve enlightenment, the attempt to grasp the intangible, the ethereal, the metaphysical, the disembodied, the sacred.
-
Joy Is So Exhausting
$16.95Joyfully melding knowing humour and torqued-up wordplay, Holbrook’s second collection is a comic fusion of the experimental and the experiential, the procedural and the lyric. Punch lines become sucker punches, line breaks slip into breakdowns, the serious plays comical and the comical turns deadly serious. Holbrook’s poems don’t use humour as much as they deconstruct the comic impulse, exposing its roots in the political, the psychological and the emotional life of the mind. Many of these poems import shapes and source texts from elsewhere – home inspection reports, tampon instructions, poems by Lorca – in a series of translations, transpositions and transgressions that invite a more intimate and critical rapport with the written word. This is not merely a book, it is a chocolate-covered artificially intelligent virus with an impish sense of humour that will continue to replicate in your mind long after initial exposure.
-
Joyce Wieland
$19.95?Joyce Wieland is one of Canada’s greatest artists of the last half of the twentieth century.” ? Pierre Theberge, director of the National Gallery of Canada. Joyce Wieland triumphed over what she called ?obscene poverty” to achieve international celebrity as a painter, collagist, quiltmaker, and filmmaker, celebrated as Canada’s most important woman artist next to Emily Carr. Joyce Wieland’s art stands alone. Her strikingly Canadian themes of environmental issues, historical passages, and aboriginal rights appear in buoyant, satirical images. Her powerful erotic themes linger in the mind. Just as her dark, troubling renderings of catastrophes and grotesque happenings will not vanish. To make her distinctive, highly personal art, Wieland uses toys, paper cut-outs, wood, glass, and pieces of her panties and dresses just as boldly and felicitously as she uses oils, watercolours, and pencils. Some of her most famous works are quilts, such as Reason Over Passion and Confedspread. She made underground films long before Andy Warhol did, producing a total of sixteen. Joyce Wieland achieved her deserved acclaim through unstinting courage, vivacity, and her off-the-wall humour. She was known for tucking away her secrets in her work. Author Iris Nowell has uncovered some of these secrets through primary sources, such as Joyce’s friends and family, and through her own perspective of having known Joyce for many years. This intimate, rollicking, poignant biography uncovers Joyce Wieland’s life as she lived it, intimately and fully ? through the 1950s ?Dark Ages of Art” in Toronto, for much of the 1960s in New York’s grungy artist’s loft community and the underground film scene, and back to Toronto for the most productive, stunning years of her life.
-
Joyce Wieland
$75.00Bold, audacious, and colourful, Joyce Wieland was the first woman living artist to have a solo exhibition at both the National Gallery of Canada and the Art Gallery of Ontario. She was a major figure in the avant-garde film scene of the 1960s and ’70s, and together with Michael Snow, she was one of the founders of Canadian experimental cinema. Her work left an indelible mark on Canadian art.
Joyce Wieland: Heart On is the first publication to offer a comprehensive view of Wieland’s multifaceted career as a painter, experimental filmmaker, and cultural activist. Using her seductive wit as a powerful tool of social and political critique, Wieland embedded disruptive and unexpected elements and imagery in her work with compelling effect.
Richly illustrated with over 250 reproductions, Joyce Wieland: Heart On includes texts by curators, scholars, and artists, as well as personal reflections from Wieland’s friends and collaborators. Archival materials, an extensive chronology, and passages from Wieland’s own writings offer a new understanding of the artist’s extraordinary career and the social and political context in which she was creating.
-
Joyce Wieland
$75.00Déterminée, audacieuse, colorée, Joyce Wieland a été la première femme artiste à exposer en solo de son vivant au Musée des beaux-arts du Canada et au Musée des beaux-arts de l’Ontario. Grande figure du cinéma d’avant-garde dans les années 1960 et 1970, elle a, avec Michael Snow, mis au monde le cinéma expérimental canadien. Son œuvre a laissé une empreinte indélébile sur l’art du Canada.
Joyce Wieland : À cœur battant est la première publication qui présente de manière exhaustive les multiples facettes d’une carrière qui embrasse la peinture, le cinéma expérimental et l’activisme culturel. Forte d’une vivacité d’esprit engageante comme puissant instrument de critique sociale et politique, Joyce Wieland infuse ses œuvres d’éléments dérangeants et inattendus, pour un effet implacable.
Somptueusement illustré de plus de 250 reproductions, Joyce Wieland : À cœur battant est riche de textes éclairants de conservateurs, d’universitaires et d’artistes, ainsi que de réflexions personnelles d’amis et de collaborateurs de Wieland. Des documents d’archives, une chronologie détaillée et des extraits des propres écrits de Joyce Wieland montrent sous de nouveaux angles l’extraordinaire carrière de l’artiste et le contexte sociopolitique dans lequel son art s’est épanoui.
-
Joyland
$24.95“Like a Reagan-era Ice Storm, Emily Schultz’s novel Joyland captures the confusion of adolescent sexuality in a tangle of pixelated icons via the video-game generation. Set in the summer of 1984, this book will have you thinking twice about the video-game generation and the power of pining and Pac-Man.” — Flare
Welcome to 1984 and the town of South Wakefield. Chris Lane is 14 and he’s sure that he can see the future, or at least guess what’s inside of Christie Brinkley’s mind. But he can’t foresee the closing of Joyland, the town’s only video arcade.
With the arcade’s passing comes a summer of teenage lust, violence, and a search for new entertainment. Never far away is Chris’s younger sister, Tammy, who plays spy to the events that will change the lives of her family and town forever. Joyland is a novel about the impossibility of knowing the future. Schultz bring the Cold War home in a novel set to the digital pulse of video games and the echoes of hair metal. Joyland is illustrated throughout by graphic novelist Nate Powell, whose work has been praised by Sin City creator Frank Miller as “observant, intimate cartooning [that] surgically cuts to the bone.”
-
Joyland
$16.95“Like a Reagan-era Ice Storm, Emily Schultz’s novel Joyland captures the confusion of adolescent sexuality in a tangle of pixelated icons via the video-game generation. Set in the summer of 1984, this book will have you thinking twice about the video-game generation and the power of pining and Pac-Man.” — Flare
Welcome to 1984 and the town of South Wakefield. Chris Lane is 14 and he’s sure that he can see the future, or at least guess what’s inside of Christie Brinkley’s mind. But he can’t foresee the closing of Joyland, the town’s only video arcade.
With the arcade’s passing comes a summer of teenage lust, violence, and a search for new entertainment. Never far away is Chris’s younger sister, Tammy, who plays spy to the events that will change the lives of her family and town forever. Joyland is a novel about the impossibility of knowing the future. Schultz bring the Cold War home in a novel set to the digital pulse of video games and the echoes of hair metal. Joyland is illustrated throughout by graphic novelist Nate Powell, whose work has been praised by Sin City creator Frank Miller as “observant, intimate cartooning [that] surgically cuts to the bone.”
BackLit bonus material includes an alternate ending and an author
interview. -
Jude and Diana
$22.00OUT NOW as an Audiobook!
Narrated by
Shelley Hamilton
The only mention of Jude in Nova Scotia’s official history relates to her death: a slave-owning family was brought to trial for her murder in 1801. They were acquitted despite overwhelming evidence that they were guilty. Sharon Robart-Johnson pays tribute to such archival glimpses of enslaved people by re-creating the fullness of sisters Jude and Diana’s survival, emphasizing their joys alongside their hardship. She stories their movements through the U.S. to Nova Scotia, Canada, with the arrival of the United Empire Loyalists in 1783. As a child, Jude is sold away and then, by a lucky turn of fate, reunited with her fiercely loving family. Jude’s experiences harden her into a rebel who resists injustice without heeding consequences, and after her death, Diana is left alone to deal with racist and sexual violence.
Through Robart-Johnson’s research, we experience nineteenth-century Nova Scotia, when political debates about abolishing slavery were just beginning to emerge. Through Robart-Johnson’s creativity, we enter the historical fiction of Jude and Diana and their strong familial bonds, each character developed with nuance and care. While chronicling the cruelty they endured, Robart-Johnson’s storytelling powerfully honours their humour, strength, and shining dignity.
-
Judge’s Wife, The
$19.95These memoirs offer a compelling account of life in early British Columbia from the 1860s to the first decade of the 20th century. The wife of Judge Eli Harrison, one of the province’s foremost lawyers and judges, Mrs. Harrison gives intimate glimpses into daily life in Victoria, Nanaimo and New Westminster, and her visits as a young woman to Granville (as Vancouver was then called) for dances and picnics.
Mrs. Harrison describes the interests of a well-educated woman of her time who was fascinated by the growth of British Columbia. She knew many of the important people in the colony and province, including the Douglas family, and speaks freely about everyday events in British Columbia, such as famous murders, rides on “the unfinished transcontinental” and her meetings with First Nations people. She also includes descriptions of her husband’s many hazardous trips over the Brigade Trail into the interior of the province to dispense frontier justice.
In the final sections, she describes her visit to San Francisco where she was caught in the earthquake of 1906 and the subsequent fire that destroyed much of the city. With her daughter and son at her side, Harrison walked the length of the city to the dockyards – avoiding the burning buildings and the mobs of people taking advantage of the chaos – to board the ship that would take her out of the flames and back to Canada. The volume includes many original black & white photos from the Harrison personal files.
-
Judith Thompson
$25.00Volume 3 in the series Critical Perspectives on Canadian Theatre in English.
“This book publishes what I take to be a representative sampling—by no means complete—of critical writings about [Judith Thompson’s] plays, covering what might be regarded as the dominant critical tradition on her work, together with some new and exciting initiatives by younger scholars that respond to new (and exciting) directions in Thompson’s own work.” —from the Introduction
-
Judith’s Sister
$14.95In the seemingly endless small-town summer of 1968, a twelve-year-old girl contemplates with dread the social prospects of her fast-approaching enrollment in a class for gifted students at the local high school, arranged by her mother who “blows up” at the drop of a hat—she doesn’t intend to let her daughter marry “the first man to come along,” and she is prepared to do anything to make sure her children don’t grow up “ignorant,” like Judith’s sister, Claire. To escape her mother’s unpredictable and interminable rants, the young girl locks herself in her room with her books, escaping into a life of imagination and dreams, mostly of older guys like Marius, as beautiful as a god when he dons his softball uniform every Wednesday to play in the community park, and to whom she writes anonymous love letters.
Fortunately, there’s the prettiest girl in town to look up to. Recruited by the pop music band Bruce and the Sultans as their go-go dancer, if her audition in the big city of Montreal goes well, Claire is to accompany the band on their upcoming provincial tour. Idolized by the story’s unnamed narrator, Claire is the “big sister” she never had, but whom she shares by proxy with her best friend, Judith.
In this, her fifth book, Lise Tremblay paints a picture of rural Quebec in the years following the Quiet Revolution in her signature style so refreshingly free of artifice and literary hyperbole. Society is changing fast, new values are making inroads, but old traditions remain deeply rooted. Judith’s Sister is a coming-of-age novel that focuses on the timeless themes that preoccupy all adolescent girls: solitude, alienation, obesity, lies, sexuality, shame, madness and fear of strangers; and our inevitable first encounters with the grown-up betrayals of friends, family and community.
-
Juiceboxers
$24.95A finalist for the Amazon Canada First Novel Award, a powerful debut novel about four young soldiers serving in Afghanistan, and the devastating aftermath of war.
Winner of the 2025 Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize
Finalist for the 2025 Amazon Canada First Novel Award
“An unvarnished, intimately informed dissection of war’s physical and emotional derangements.” – Omar El Akkad, author of What Strange Paradise and American War
Sixteen-year-old Plinko is attending basic training before high school starts up again in the fall. Feeling adrift from his own family, he moves in with an older soldier, where he forges an unlikely group of friends in the military: the very tall Walsh, who moves in shortly after Plinko does; Abdi, whose Somali immigrant parents often welcome the group of young men over for dinner; and the unpredictable and gun-loving Krug, who is brash and exasperating yet magnetic.
After 9/11, the military prepares to move into Afghanistan — to go to war. Plinko and his friends have no idea that the trajectory of their lives is about to be irrevocably altered.
Drawn from the author’s experiences as a soldier in Afghanistan, Juiceboxers tenderly traces the story of a young man’s journey from basic training, to the battlefields of Kandahar, to the inner city of Edmonton, braiding together questions of masculinity and militarism, friendship and white supremacy, loss and trauma and hard-won recovery.
-
Julebord
$29.95Should chief investigator James Wiley Redding of the Norwegian Police suspect that any of the doctors working in the small rural hospital of Godshus, located where a fjord meets the North Sea, might be linked to the gruesome discovery made on a December morning after their annual Julebord (holiday party)? Much more whodunit than a diversified nordic noir novel, JULEBORD is laced with what life is like to work in a small rural hospital, where things and humans occasionally get dirty. Not merely a piece of – at times – a bit upmarket crime fiction, the story brings to the realization that in today’s small global village we are linked to each other in some way – whether we want to be or not and cannot hide from the events that affect us all.
-
Julian Schnabel
$35.00A personal look at a highly curated and special glimpse at the art of Julian Schnabel. The only comprehensive look at Schnabel’s work.
American art superstar Julian Schnabel has spent his life pushing the limits of painting and crossing artistic boundaries as an award-winning filmmaker. This major volume examines the connections between painting and film in Schnabel’s work, tracing how his paintings exist in dialogue with the cinema and revealing the rich interplay between the two media. Julian Schnabel: Art and Film surveys Schnabel’s work as a painter from the mid-1970s to the present and features more than 25 key works.
Surveying Schnabel’s career from the 1970s through to the present, Julian Schnabel: Art and Film juxtaposes his large-scale paintings with several of his critically acclaimed films, including Basquiat (1996), Before Night Falls (2000), The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007), and Miral (2010). Included in the book are the complete scripts of each of these films, stills chosen by Schnabel, and an interview with Schnabel himself. Julian Schnabel: Art and Film is the first appraisal of how Schnabel’s oeuvre bridges painting, writing, and cinema.
-
Jump Scare
$19.95At once raw and skillful, painful and funny, personal and pervasive, the poems in Jump Scare dig deep into mental health, neurodivergence, grief, dreams, monstrosity, sexuality, pop culture, queer consumer culture, and the commodification of identity. Jump Scare tackles isolation and loss head-on and thinks hard and with wry humour about how to position ourselves in our lonely, scary, compelling lives.
-
Just a Mother
$22.95The fourth installment in Roy Jacobsen’s bestselling Barrøy Chronicles.
After a long journey through Norway, Ingrid has returned to Barrøy, the island that bears her family name. The Second World War still casts its long shadow: former collaborators face cold shoulders, while others wish to leave the painful years in the past. When a boy arrives on the island, Ingrid assumes responsibility for him, and so he joins the Barrøy community, raised alongside Ingrid’s own daughter, another child of war.
As letters from distant friends arrive with news of a society undergoing dramatic changes, Ingrid must decide which stories to keep to herself, and which she should she bring to light. What kind of future does she imagine—for herself, and for the children?