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

  • Midway Radicals & Archi-Poems

    Midway Radicals & Archi-Poems

    $17.95

    Midway Radicals & Archi-Poems is a provocative foray into experimental poetry. Exploring fertile gaps and overlaps between the architecture of poetry and poetry of architecture, this work of serious play is sparked by a double inquiry. Shaped by rules found, broken or bent along the way to archi-poetry, many of the poems are also transformative responses, remediating off-cuts and jump-cuts, radically renovating exemplary sources (archai): Homer and Aristotle; Berrigan, Hejinian and Silliman; Bök, Bowering, Olson and Creeley; Musil, Barthes and Lefebvre; Shklovsky, Ruskin and Poe. Harmonizing with and against this global carnival of “midway radical” wisdom, the layered voice of the poems does not belong to a single poet, genre or discipline, but resonates in the polylogue of an open chorus.

  • Mieko Ouchi: Two Plays

    Mieko Ouchi: Two Plays

    $19.95

    The Blue Light: Leni Riefenstahl, one hundred years old, is in the office of a young female Hollywood studio executive. Leni’s reason to be there is clear: to make one last desperate pitch to direct her first feature film in fifty years. A thought-provoking contemplation on art, politics, and the seduction of fascism, and a theatrical examination of a woman who danced one perfect dance with the devil and forever changed the way films are made. Leni Riefenstahl was one of the most remarkable and controversial women of the twentieth century. Dancer, actor, photographer, and filmmaker, Riefenstahl caught the eye of Adolf Hitler with her prodigious first film: The Blue Light. A cinematic innovator, her decision to direct Triumph of the Will, got her blacklisted as a filmmaker until her death in 2003 at 101, unrepentant and mostly forgotten.

    The Red Priest (Eight Ways To Say Goodbye): Trapped in a loveless and abusive marriage, a young unnamed woman is forced by her husband, a rich courtier of Louis XV, to take violin lessons from the aging and desperate Italian composer Antonio Vivaldi, and within six weeks play a concerto for the court in Paris in 1741. All for a bet. The delicate, complex, and combative journey they embark on will not only decide their futures, but also change them both in ways they never imagined. A story about the healing power of music and the journey to become an artist. Finalist for the 2004 Governor General’s Literary Award for Drama. Winner of the 2005 CAA Carol Bolt Award

  • Mighty

    Mighty

    $25.00

    With great powerchair comes great responsibility…

    It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s… accessibility!

    You wouldn’t like me when I’m out of spoons…

    All too often, superhero media depicts disability as something to overcome on the journey to becoming a hero, or as a sign of villainy. It’s time to make heroism accessible for everyone.

    In these 15 stories, you’ll meet winged wheelchair users, supernatural spoonies, guardians with glaucoma, and many more. These disabled superheroes fight villains as well as outdated ableist stereotypes, and show that anyone can be Mighty.

  • Mighty Carlins and Other Plays, The

    Mighty Carlins and Other Plays, The

    $19.95

    “Let the Light of Day Through” is a finalist for the Gwen Pharis Ringwood Award for Drama at the 2019 Alberta Literary Awards!

    Award-winning playwright Collin Doyle has crafted three gripping plays that display a keen understanding of human relationships, both functional and dysfunctional.

    In The Mighty Carlins, an irascible father reunites with his two sons – one a naïve idealist, the other a compulsive manipulative liar – to commemorate the anniversary of their mother’s death. In the dynamic Let the Light of Day Through, a couple in their thirties reimage their relationship and their future, in order to leave behind the memory of their dead teenage son. And in Routes, a lonely teenager rides the Mill Woods bus almost every night to escape the violence of his home life, only to find that violence cannot be avoided with the purchase of a bus ticket.

  • Mike Grandmaison’s Ontario

    Mike Grandmaison’s Ontario

    $35.00

    Award-winning photographer Mike Grandmaison has photographed some of the most beautiful places in Canada. In his newest pictorial, Mike Grandmaison’s Ontario, Mike turns his lens to the landscape he grew up in. Born in Sudbury, Ontario, Mike Grandmaison has travelled to every corner of this great territory and captured vistas that hardly seem possible, from the untamed wilderness of the Canadian Shield, to the rolling green of the Niagaras. With his eye for the extraordinary, Grandmaison will help readers discover Ontario’s great outdoors.

    In this handsome hardcover edition readers will find over 220 beautiful photographs of Ontario’s diverse and spell-binding landscape. Readers will also delight in the photo note section that provides insight into the stories behind the images.

  • Mile End

    Mile End

    $22.95

    A candid memoir which chronicles life in the Mile End, Montreal’s hippest neighborhood, Michel Hellman’s book begins with the author moving in as a student looking for a cheap apartment and ends with the birth of his first child. Nominated for a Bédéis Causa Award and a Bédélys Award.

  • Mile End, by Lise Tremblay

    Mile End, by Lise Tremblay

    $17.95

    The narrator of this Governor General’s Award-winning novel does not have a name. She is simply a grotesque “fat woman,” getting larger every day—a clown, a monster, in her own words, with no self, no identity save her enormous mound of flesh, its blubber, its perceived deformity. She is used by men who find her a convenience—for their careers, for a sympathetic ear, for someone to screw. No one thinks she understands anything. She feels displaced. Everyone, they keep telling her, is from “another world,” which they are sure she can never penetrate or understand. Not that they really want her to. Her father precariously hosts a popular TV show, in which middle-class people confess the error of their ways, and return perpetually to the safety of the middle road. His family is an embarrassment to him, his daughter a disappointment.

    Yet within this spreading body crouches the still point of a sharply observant intelligence, a vision unclouded by fantasy or illusions, least of all about herself. Her resignation to her indifferent suburban upbringing, the callousness of her grandparents, her accomplished but talentless musicianship, but most of all to the accusatory criticisms of her pathetically self-involved father, is a tightly-wound emotional spring, set to lash out terribly on a world of blind, and therefore tormenting indifference.

    Mile End [La danse juive, Leméac, 1999] is a chilling and masterful look at the interior landscapes of psychosis which mirror so perfectly the emptiness of the exterior surfaces they reflect.

  • Milk of Birds, The

    Milk of Birds, The

    $16.95

    The 100 poems making up The Milk of Birds (the title comes from a chocolate candy the author’s partner loved when she was a girl in Poland) began as a deliberate homage to Kenneth Rexroth’s 100 Poems from the Chinese (1971). Soon into his progress, however, the author felt the writing beginning to pull away from the Rexroth model, becoming, instead, a series of short, sometimes plangent, sometimes meditative, sometimes exuberant takes on the beauty and travail of domestic life, on the separateness that is the enemy to love, on the witnessing of the night and the cold that lies at the heart of age and one’s overview of all that life has meant.

  • Miller Brittain

    Miller Brittain

    $65.00

    Miller Gore Brittain (1912-1968) had an unerring sense of structure and composition. In the early 1930s, at the Art Students’ League in New York, he experienced the pivotal moment in American art: the shift from tradition to abstract expressionism. When he returned to Canada, the Group of Seven still defined Canadian art, and he burst upon the scene with emotion-filled drawings and paintings of the human form. Later, combining figuration and abstraction, he explored the limits of the body and the borderlands of sanity to express the depths of despair and the heights of ecstasy.

    World War II interrupted Brittain’s career and on his bombing missions he carried William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience with him. Blake’s poetry, particularly “The Tyger,” inspired the pervasive motif of Brittain’s later career. At first a description of searchlights and shot-down aircraft, the star and spear motif later developed into iconic flowers and stems, heads and necks, sunbursts and smoke.

    In this illuminating and provocative book, Tom Smart examines the sweep of Brittain’s work, his progression from social realism to abstraction and surrealism, while Allen Bentley shows the profound influence of Blake’s thought in Brittain’s painting and drawings.

  • Miller Brittain

    Miller Brittain

    $65.00

    Dans Miller Brittain : Quand les étoiles jetèrent leurs lances, Tom Smart démontre pour la première fois la cohésion de l’imagerie de Brittain et les liens entre le réalisme social de ses premières œuvres ultérieures, des abstractions figuratives et des compositions d’inspiration surréaliste.

    Miller Brittain a fait irruption sur la scène artistique canadienne à la fin des années 1930, avec ses dessins et ses peintures du corps humain temples d’émotion et admirablement exécutés. Pendant ses études à l’Art Students League, à New York, il avait intériorisé un point tournant de l’art américain, alors que les modes réalistes traditionnels étaient remis en question par une nouvelle génération d’artistes radicaux selon qui l’art se devait de refléter la vie de l’artiste et les conditions de vie des sujets représentés. À une époque où les paysages du Groupe des Sept dominaient la peinture canadienne, Brittain défia l’establishment avec son sens infallible de la ligne et de la composition, et ses récits humains attrayants. Plus tard, alliant l’art figurative et l’art abstrait, il explora les limites du corps et les confines de la raison afin d’exprimer les profondeurs du désespoir et les sommets de l’extase.

    Au cours de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, Brittain s’enrôla dans l’Aviation royale du Canada, fut décoré de la Croix du service distingué dans l’Aviation et devint un artiste de guerre canadien. Quand il partait en mission de bombardement, il emportait avec lui un exemplaire des Chants d’expérience, de William Blake. Dans Miller Brittain : Quand les étoiles jetèrent leurs lances, Smart fait voir comment le célèbre poéme « Le tigre », de Blake, inspira le motif omniprésent dans les œuvres de Brittain après la guerre, c’est-à-dire la cominaison de l’étoile et de la lance. Ce qui au départ représentait des faisceaux de projecteurs et des avions abattus devint au fil des années des représentationsiconiques de fleurs et de tiges, de têtes et de cous, de rayons de soleil et de fumée. Allen Bentley appuie les observations de Smart en montrant la profonde influence exercée par les théories de Blake sur l’œuvre de Brittain dans l’après-guerre.

  • Milosz

    Milosz

    $19.95

    Milo doesn’t quite have it all together. His acting career has stalled. His girlfriend dumped him. His miserable father has vanished, and people keep moving into his house. When Robertson, the autistic eleven-year-old next door – the only person Milo really likes – gets bullied, Milo is finally spurred to action. Milo being Milo, that doesn’t really go his way either, and soon people are winding up in the hospital, lost in the woods or possibly returned from the dead. Milosz is a novel about family: the blood kind, the accidental kind and the kind you rediscover on reality TV.

  • Milton Acorn

    Milton Acorn

    $22.95

    When Canadian icon and original Canadian People’s Poet Milton Acorn was passed over for the Governor General’s Award for his 1969 collection I’ve Tasted My Blood, several of his peers, including Margaret Atwood, Pat Lane and Mordecai Richler, established the People’s Poetry Award, which they presented to Milton at a ceremony at Grossman’s Tavern in Toronto in 1970.

    When I’ve Tasted My Blood was re-issued in 1978 by Steel Rail Publishing, Milton wrote corrections and edits for the new edition on a copy of the original book. Milton Acorn: The People’s Poet reproduces that copy of I’ve Tasted My Blood with Milton’s handwritten notes. It also includes never-before-published photographs of Milton taken by Kent Nason, a studio recording of Milton reading many of his poems, and a 1971 documentary film about Milton Acorn made by Kent Martin and Errol Sharpe.

    Though Milton Acorn died in 1986 at a young age, the prolific poet, writer and playwright is still remembered as one of Canada’s greatest poets. This one-of-a-kind multi-media collectors item and memorial is a must have for everyone who counts themselves a fan of the original Canadian People’s Poet.

  • Milton Acorn and His Works

    Milton Acorn and His Works

    $9.95

    This volume explores the life and works of Milton Acorn. These studies of Canadian authors fulfill a real need in the study of Canadian literature. Each monograph is a separately bound study that contains a biography of the author, a description of the tradition and milieu that influenced the author, a survey of the criticism on the author, a comprehensive essay on all the author’s key works, and a detailed bibliography of primary and secondary works.

  • Mimosa

    Mimosa

    $24.95

    An authentic recreation of an extraordinary life set against the turbulent background of colonial Africa. Schermbrucker’s enigmatic prose creates a sweeping historical saga from Cairo to the Cape.

    Mimosa is Bill Schermbrucker’s second published work of fiction. His first book Chameleon was published by Talonbooks to high critical acclaim.

  • Min Fami

    Min Fami

    $29.95

    Min Fami: Arab Feminist Reflections on Identity, Space, and Resistance is an anthology that cradles the thoughts of Arab feminists, articulated through personal critical narratives, academic essays, poetry, short stories, and visual art. It is a meeting space where discussions on home(land), exile, feminism, borders, gender and sexual identity, solidarity, language, creative resistance, and de(colonization) are shared, confronted, and subverted. In a world that has increasingly found monolithic and one-dimensional ways of representing Arab womyn, this anthology comes as an alternate space in which we connect on the basis of our shared identities, despite physical, theoretical, and metaphorical distances, to celebrate our multiple voices, honour our ancestry, and build community on our own terms, and in our own voices.

  • Min Hayati

    Min Hayati

    $18.95

    This collection travels through a daughter’s childhood memories in Montreal, her mother’s homeland of Lebanon, and the dark realities of grief across borders. Min Hayati uncovers the well of sorrow and the depth of love discovered only through loss. Poetry pays homage to the author’s maternal lineage, her mixed ethnicity, and the ways in which “mother” transcends all aspects of life.

    Min Hayati advocates for a radical change in our approach to grief and the (still) taboo subjects of death, dying, and grief. Poems speak in particular to motherless-daughters around the world. Most importantly, the poet’s Arab roots sets her apart as a Canadian poet with a different story.