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 385–400 of 9248 results
-
Accusation
$21.95Selected as an Amazon.ca Best Book of 2013, a Canada Reads Top 40 Pick, and a NOW Magazine Book of the Year
An accusation, regardless of truth, has its own life when let loose in the world.
Accusation, hailed by the Globe and Mail as “a psychological thriller . . . deeply considered, calm on the surface yet, on closer reading, full of ambiguities,” again proves Bush to be one of Canada’s finest authors. Examining the impracticability of determining “truth,” Bush crafts a tale the Montreal Gazette believes “could almost be a crime novel of the Scandinavian variety, striding headlong into the murkier reaches of human motivation.”
While in Copenhagen, journalist Sara Wheeler happens upon a touring Ethiopian circus. After a friend begins a documentary about the circus, unsettling charges begin to float to the surface — disturbing tales of sexual and physical abuse. Accounts and anecdotes mount, denunciations fly, and while we strive to untangle the narrative slipknots, the concept of “truth” begins to unravel.
Travelling from Canada to Ethiopia and Australia, Accusation follows a network of lives that intersect with life-altering consequence, painfully revealing that the best of intentions can still lead to disaster.
-
Accusation
$32.95Selected as an Amazon.ca Best Book of 2013, a Canada Reads Top 40 Pick, and a NOW Magazine Book of the Year
While in Copenhagen, Sara Wheeler, a Toronto journalist, happens upon Cirkus Mirak, a touring Ethiopian children’s circus. She later meets and is convinced to drive the circus founder, Raymond Renaud, through the night from Toronto to Montreal. Such chance beginnings lead to later fateful encounters, as renowned novelist Catherine Bush artfully confronts the destructive power of allegations.
With Accusation, Bush again proves herself one of Canada’s finest authors as she examines the impossibility inherent in attempting to uncover “the truth.” After a friend of Sara’s begins work on a documentary about the circus, unsettling charges begin to float to the surface, disturbing tales of sexual and physical abuse at the hands of Raymond. Accounts and anecdotes mount, denunciations fly, and while Sara tries to untangle the narrative knots and determine what to believe, the concept of a singular (truth) becomes slippery. Her present search is simultaneously haunted by her past.
Moving between Canada, Ethiopia, and Australia, Accusation follows a network of lives that intersect with life-altering consequence, painfully revealing that the best of intentions can still lead to disaster, yet from disaster spring seeds of renewal and hope.
-
Acqua Sacra
$21.95Everything seems broken in Suzanna Ricci’s life. Only 42, her marriage to Len has disintegrated. Her relationship to their teenage boys, Robin and Logan, is in need of repair. Now her mother, ‘that martial soul,’ wants her to restore the family home in Acqua Sacra, damaged by earthquake. And she doesn’t care how many trips from Montreal to their vivid Italian patria of Abruzzo her daughter has to make. At least when Len, a dodgy accountant, encourages her to take a job with a Montreal law firm headed by a man named Robert Bliss, Suzanna feels hopeful of being freer of her ex. Until she realizes the crazy cost of disentangling herself, and not just from him or his ‘associates.’ Old World skepticism kicks at New World concerns in Acqua Sacra, Keith Henderson’s brisk new novel about private deception and public corruption. His cast includes an honest architect, a gutsy office clerk, the modern-day witch of a drained lake, and at least one (reformed) dirt-digging lawyer. But what is Suzanna to do when the mob and their extralegal cross-border political shenanigans invade her life? While Montreal’s underworld seems as full of venomous snakes and mean dogs as the Abruzzo mountains, Roman history, Italian mafiosi, dutiful Canadians, and migrant African workers collide, headlong and bizarrely comedic. At the centre of the crash, stunned and sheep-like, lies Suzanna. Henderson, the author ofThe Roof Walkers, again delivers an entertaining and perceptive story in Acqua Sacra about the nature of personal responsibility, this time in an age of multinational delinquency. If Suzanna survives the wreckage, it’ll be by honouring the true meaning of ‘family’ in any global village.
-
Across Canada by Story
$22.95More adventures from one of Canada’s premier editors and storytellers
Canada is a country rich in stories, and few take as much joy as Douglas Gibson in discovering them. As one of the country’s leading editors and publishers for 40 years, he coaxed modern classics out of some of Canada’s finest minds, and then took to telling his own stories in his first memoir, Stories About Storytellers.
Gibson turned his memoir into a one-man stage show that eventually played almost 100 times, in all ten provinces, from coast to coast. As a literary tourist, he discovered even more about the land and its writers and harvested many more stories, from distant past and recent memory, to share.
Now in Across Canada by Story, Gibson brings new stories about Robertson Davies, Jack Hodgins, W.O. Mitchell, Alistair MacLeod, and Alice Munro, and adds lively portraits of Al Purdy, Marshall McLuhan, Margaret Laurence, Guy Vanderhaeghe, Margaret Atwood, Wayne Johnston, Linwood Barclay, Michael Ondaatje, and many, many others. Whether fly fishing in Haida Gwaii or sailing off Labrador, Douglas Gibson is a first-rate ambassador for Canada and the power of great stories.
-
Across the Face of the Storm
$20.00This is an apprenticeship novel, the story of Isabel Cooper, 17, and her 15-year-old brother, Frederick. In early 1911, they leave their Georgetown home after the sudden death of their Mexican mother. They are determined to find their father, a college professor who – like many American leftists – had joined the Mexican revolution a few months earlier. They travel by train, stagecoach, and wagon, at first put off by what they see of turn-of-the-century American South. But they soon learn of the quiet dignity of their mother’s homeland. After an ugly incident not of their making, they escape the federales with the help of Pepe, a lad of many talents. He leads them to refuge with a ragtag militia on its way to join Carranza’s Army of the North, commanded by a woman known as La Maestra
-
Act
$19.95“Simply put, I don’t think I would’ve found my voice as an actor without David.” — Scott Speedman, actor
“Act has the roadmap for the most crucial task of an actor: getting present.” — Shawn Doyle, actor
A lively, conversational textbook dedicated to the art of acting from a master teacher.
Act: The Modern Actor’s Handbook is the result of 30 years of one of North America’s most renowned acting teachers teaching some of the world’s most talented screen actors. This is a full tour through the concepts at the heart of Rotenberg’s techniques: states of being, primaries and secondaries, images that you elaborate up or distill down, modifiers, actions and beats, and more. Although his methods loosely draw on the great acting teachers like Hagen and Meisner back to Stanislavski, he teaches new techniques suited to the best of today’s screen actors. This is a major new work in the actor’s library and will be pulled off the shelf time and again to find that key into a scene, to prepare for an audition, or to find that right technique to make the art come alive again.
-
Actor Needs Restraint!
$24.95Three plays from the repertoire of iconic Newfoundland and Labrador playwright, actor, and member of the groundbreaking Newfoundland comedy troupe CODCO, Andy Jones.
Based on Jones’ well-known epistolary radio series, An Evening with Uncle Val is a set of comic reportages from the perspective of a retired outport-dweller now living with his family in St. John’s. Uncle Val is sometimes bemused, sometimes outraged by modern life; he has charmed readers over the decades with his stalwart heart concealed in a curmudgeon’s exterior.
Out of the Bin and King o’ Fun are zany, fragmented, occasionally philosophical, always hilarious renditions of contemporary life that demonstrate the versatility of one of Canada’s most talented and beloved theatremakers.
-
Acts of the Compassionates
$16.95Acts of the Compassionates
-
Actualities
$16.95Gathered from its author’s wide-ranging experience, Monica Kidd’s debut collection includes local legends and personalities, imagined scenarios based on found photographs, lamentations and confessions of love, lyrical studies of medical anomalies, and landscape portraits. Kidd’s deft imagery and songlike stride render her subjects in striking, familiar gestures that bring the reader alongside her gait and into her mind’s eye.
The collection opens with a series of poems that tell stories from Kidd’s adopted home in Newfoundland. A drowning, a shipwreck, a community referendum, an abandoned town, a birthday party and other landmark events are relayed in a fashion that relies less on strict narrative account than on associative brush strokes. Infusing her subjects with emblematic strength, Kidd resurrects family tragedies, nights of revelry and community politics in coastal towns.
“Found” is a collection of photographs purchased from a second-hand store in Winnipeg and paired with Kidd’s imaginative translations of their black-and-white foregrounds into full-colour memories. In one photo a woman surveys a snow-covered field, in another three young girls at the beach squint into the sun. How they got there, where they are going, and the expectations surrounding the captured moment are the poet’s invention.
Actualities closes with a sequence of “Field Notes” written during Kidd’s stay at a biology station on Lake Opinicon in southern Ontario. The notes address fields, woods, ponds, night skies and thunder storms, brought to the page with the country lilt and painterly memory that mark Kidd’s work throughout the collection.
-
Ad Sanctos
$19.95All of Nichol’s work is stamped by his desire to create texts that are engaging in themselves as well as in context, and to use indirect structural and textual devices to carry meaning. In The Martyrology different ways of speaking testify to a journey through different ways of being. Language is both the poet’s instructor and, through its various permutations, the dominant ‘image’ of the poem. The [nine] books of The Martyrology document a poet’s quest for insight into himself andhis writing through scrupulous attention to the messages hidden in the morphology of his own speech.’ – Frank Davey
-
Adagio for the Horizon
$17.95The horizon is a type of boundary phenomenon. This book embraces the horizon literally understood, as the apparent boundary between earth and sky. It also draws on various metaphorical horizons, tracing the limits of human perception, knowledge and experience. It is especially attentive to the horizons of the Anthropocene, reflecting on their significance for us as a species and as cultural and historical beings, bound to human and other-than-human communities of various sorts. The Adagio poems explore changes that are pending, as well as already underway, in the wake of global warming and sea level rise. Tracing the arc of human perception, they pause in places that are — like our shadow or skin — part us and part of the world that surrounds us.
-
Adapt or Die
$29.95The murder of a wealthy landowner leads to the arrest of his eldest son. A grieving widow matches wits with her late husband’s aggressive creditor. Family loyalties are severely tested over the fate of a beloved summer home. Factory workers kill a hated boss and connive to hide the killer.
The Brothers Karamazov captures the spirit, scope and dark humour of the Dostoevsky novel. Gorky’s unknown gem Enemies and Chekhov’s bright farce The Bear are given vibrant, contemporary language. Joining these three adaptations is an entirely new play, After the Orchard, inspired by Chekhov’s last play and placed in contemporary Ontario cottage country. No matter the setting, Russian never sounded so good.
Includes:
THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV, from the novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky (Constance Garnett translation)
THE BEAR, a new version of the vaudeville by Anton Chekhov
ENEMIES, an adaptation of the play by Maxim Gorky
AFTER THE ORCHARD, a new play inspired by Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard -
Adele Wiseman
$30.00Best known as the author of The Sacrifice and Crackpot, Adele Wiseman has also written children’s stories, plays, and memoirs. There has been a significant quantity of criticism about her writing, from book reviews and interviews to more serious scholarly articles. All of this material is now available in Panofsky’s unique work.
-
Adjacentland
$22.00A man awakens with no memory in a strange, rundown institution. Struggling to make sense of his surroundings, he begins to piece together the story of his life from clues someone has left for him – drawings that line the walls of his room and fragments of letters hidden in the lining of his jacket. When he leaves his room to venture into the surrounding Compound, he encounters a group of oddly familiar people that urge him to undertake a desperate mission.
In dreamlike prose, award-winning novelist Rabindranath Maharaj, weaves a story of fragments in which our narrator comes to believe he was once a comic book writer who warned against humanity’s reliance on artificial intelligence. Meanwhile, his caretakers try to convince him he’s insane. Soon he uncovers more clues that suggest memory is stored outside the body, and he learns of Adjacentland, a primitive land of outsiders where human imagination still survives. Together with a motley group of inmates from the Compound, he decides he must make his way there. In this brilliant, unsettling novel, Maharaj asks us, “What happens to the soul when all minds are tied together?”
-
Adrift
$16.95A group of almost-over-the-hill urban Egyptian hipsters gathers every night on a Cairo houseboat where they smoke weed, gab on their cell phones, and rag on everything they think is messing up their lives. Led by their master of ceremonies, a near catatonic petty bureaucrat named Anis, they get baked and try to forget that secularists like them are being shunted to the sidelines in the wave of alleged “fundamentalist” Islamic politics sweeping Egypt and much of the Arab world.
When Samara, a young Islamic journalist joins the group, however, Anis’s spell is broken. From the moment he sees this hijab-clad woman, he starts to remember the ugly journey that brought him to his almost total detachment from the harsh realities of the outside world. Threatened by this incursion into their long-established sanctuary, his buddies try to drive Samara away. But Anis resists. He has fallen in love. Unfortunately for him, however, this seemingly devout journalist also has a couple of secrets of her own.
While Adrift begins as a stoners’ drawing-room comedy, it ends in random, chaotic tragedy—by the end of the play the Nile River houseboat feels like it’s been transplanted to flood-ravaged New Orleans. It is a play about the tragedy of the innocents caught between the Holy Wars of our twenty-first century.
Inspired by the novel Adrift on the Nile by Egyptian Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz, Adrift is set against the backdrop of the US war on Iraq and a region burdened by the gorgon-head legacies of colonialism, corruption and violent dictatorship. It is about a group of people at the epicentre of conflict between the West’s ever-accelerating and utterly ahistorical imperial culture, and its doppelgänger: the tide of religious fundamentalism that is growing ever more powerful in its wake.
Cast of 4 women and 6 men.
-
Adrift: A Novel
$22.95John arrives in a Montreal airport with a suitcase in hand. We do not know where he is from, or who he is. The novel sets out to explore his identity by following his daily movements and intimate thoughts, as well as his connections to those coming into contact with him. He writes his own reflections and impressions in a notebook which he carries with him at all times.
The story unfolds through non-linear narrative connections that flow across city blocks, continents and oceans, and meander in and out of characters’ minds, dealing with questions of displacement, identity and meaning.