Your cart is currently empty!
Important Shipping Notice: Due to the ongoing Canada Post strike, delivery times may be longer than usual. Where possible, we’ll use alternative shipping methods to help get your order to you sooner. We appreciate your patience and understanding as your order makes its way to you.
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 6513–6528 of 9311 results
-
Splitsville
$19.95A bookseller’s love affair, start to finish, against the backdrop of a city in protest.
It’s 1971. Hal Sachs runs a used bookstore. Business isn’t so great, and the store is in a part of Toronto that’s about to be paved over with a behemoth expressway. And then Hal meets Lily Klein, an activist schoolteacher who’ll do just about anything to stop the highway. It’s love at first sight. Until it isn’t. And then Hal vanishes.A half-century later, Hal’s nephew, Aitch, waits for his baby to be born as he tries to piece together facts and fictions about Hal’s disappearance.
Splitsville is a diamond-cut love letter to a city whose defining moment was to say ‘no way’ to a highway, and a look at the obsessions that carry down through a family.
-
Splitting Off
$15.95Triny Finlay’s debut collection of poetry is a meditation on the self’s negotiation with the material world. Finlay pushes poetic form and language, creating images of love and loss that are at once playful and profoundly disturbing. The poems in this collection are rife with metaphorical leaps and unexpected associations: the troubled self as conjoined twins or as a flatiron building; the predatory lover as axe-wielding gardener; coming-of-age as a surgical procedure. Blurring the line between subject and object, the voices in these poems explore individual experience from multiple points of view, never privileging any one possibility. These voices fill the book with startling discoveries of conflict and hope, simultaneously stitching and ripping the fabric of female identity.
-
Sports and Pastimes
$20.00Inspired by Erik Satie’s work of the same name, Sports and Pastimes is the latest novel by acclaimed Montreal playwright and author Jean-Philippe Baril Guérard.
Translated by Aimee Wall (whose translation of Vickie Gendreau’s Testament for BookThug in 2016 drew critical reviews), this fast-paced story follows the daily life, at once empty and overloaded, of a group of friends who spend all their energy trying to distract themselves with huge hits of endorphins, art and various substances, navigating pleasure and boredom, the extraordinary and the banal, as (more or less) worthy representatives of the best and worst of what their era has to offer.
-
Spotted
$17.95Best friends, boyfriends, high school and haute couture — Gossip Girl has gone from a guilty pleasure to becoming the show everyone is talking about, from Rolling Stone to Vanity Fair, from gossip columnists to President Obama. From its not-so-humble beginnings as a bestselling book series set in the posh Upper East Side private schools of New York City, this show the Boston Herald deemed “every parent’s nightmare” has catapulted into the pop culture stratosphere. In the first two seasons Gossip Girl has proved itself a popular and critical darling, influencing the culture it critiques and setting trends while providing biting social commentary on this generation of entitled, tech-savvy youth.
In Spotted: Your One and Only Unofficial Guide to Gossip Girl, you’ll find:
- an episode-by-episode exploration of seasons 1 and 2, tracing the development of the characters and storylines
- bios of the cast and the show’s creators, Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage
- comparisons to the show’s teen soap and literary predecessors, including how the Gossip Girl books were adapted
- summaries of the movies that inspire each episode’s title
- sidebars of fun trivia
- all the details on the music, the fashion, and the NYC locations where Gossip Girl films (complete with exclusive photos!)
- Chuck Bass. (And he’s wearing purple.)
Second only to a Blair Waldorf–inspired hair band, Spotted is the must-have accessory for any fan who says, “Not enough!” when the end credits roll.
-
Spring Planting
$14.95Spring Planting tells the story of two neighbours, Garnet Black and Jill Foster. Garnet, in his eighties, and Jill, in her thirties, have outlived their respective spouses. They have a lot of unspoken guilt and anger about the deaths of their partners. Garnet’s grandson and Jill’s daughter have their own problems. The hidden secrets among the four of them eventually spring to the surface like weeds. The result is physical and emotional violence.
-
Spring Rice Document, The
$18.95Within ten days of the Newfoundland Governor receiving the ‘Spring Rice Document’, two armed patrol vessels, each carrying an armed forty man unit of the Newfoundland Regiment, were on their way to the Harbour Deep area of northern Newfoundland. The Newfoundland Government, acting on information contained in the document, ordered all enemy aliens in Newfoundland to be detained; including eight of nine Moravian missionaries in Labrador. While these events were unfolding, Newfoundlanders in Europe were being slaughtered in battles fought on poorly based strategies, which Winston Churchill described as “doomed offences”. The Spring Rice Document not only tells the story of Newfoundland in WWI, but also sheds new light on the decisions made and the battles fought and enhances the admiration and respect for those whose courage, dedication, and loyalty contributed to changing world history.
-
Sputnik’s Children
$19.95A literary, genre-bending novel full of heart
Cult comic book creator Debbie Reynolds Biondi has been riding the success of her Cold War era–inspired superhero series, Sputnik Chick: Girl with No Past, for more than 25 years. But with the comic book losing fans and Debbie struggling to come up with new plotlines for her badass, mutant-killing heroine, she decides to finally tell Sputnik Chick’s origin story.
Debbie’s never had to make anything up before and she isn’t starting now. Sputnik Chick is based on Debbie’s own life in an alternate timeline called Atomic Mean Time. As a teenager growing up in Shipman’s Corners — a Rust Belt town voted by Popular Science magazine as “most likely to be nuked” — she was recruited by a self-proclaimed time traveller to collapse Atomic Mean Time before an all-out nuclear war grotesquely altered humanity. In trying to save the world, Debbie risked obliterating everyone she’d ever loved — as well as her own past — in the process.
Or so she believes . . . Present-day Debbie is addicted to lorazepam and dirty, wet martinis, making her an unreliable narrator, at best. A time-bending novel that delves into the origin story of the Girl with No Past, Sputnik’s Children explores what it was like to come of age in the Atomic Age.
-
Squall
$20.00What if the lady — Jane Austen’s contemporary –who conceived the world’s most intriguing modern monster (Doc Frankenstein’s creature) — was also a proto-suffragette, precursor-feminist, and, simultaneously, much to her chagrin, wedded to a narcissist poet, whose liberalism urged on his libertinism? How would such a woman think? What would she say about her majuscule Romantic dilemma and miniscule romantic predicament? Such are the questions that Chad Norman pursues in his act (and art) of sympathetic re-animation: Squall: Poems in the Voice of Mary Shelley.
-
Square Root of the Verb To Be
$20.95Haven’t we all wondered what our lives would have been like had we taken another direction? What if . . . ? To escape the civil war devastating Lebanon in 1978, Talyani Waqar Malik’s family takes the first available flight to Paris. What might have been their destinies had they fled to Rome, Houston, or Montreal, or had they stayed in Paris or Beirut?
Forty-two years after their exile, Talyani describes their lives in the week following the August 2020 explosion in the Port of Beirut from the point of view of an Italian neurosurgeon, a Parisian taxi driver, a Québécois painter, a Texan on death row, and the Lebanese owner of a blue jeans boutique, all iterations of the same man pursued by the same ghosts.
This uchronic story brings together the iconic characters from Wajdi Mouawad’s Cycle domestique—father, mother, brother, and sister and the imagined descendants of Talyani, the playwright’s alter ego—as well as the major themes of his dramatic universe: war and exile, rape and incest, imponderable relationships and identities, crime and redemption. An epic forty years in the making that delves into ecology, cancel culture, medical-assisted dying, and the perennial question of love.
-
Squawk
$17.95Annie Runningbird doesn’t have time for the games boys want her to play. She’s aging out of foster care on her next birthday. The system has decided she is an adult, so Annie must make adult decisions. Where will she live? How will she make money? Demanding grown-up choices preoccupy the young girl’s mind as she navigates relationships with boys and men in her company. Does she like Isaac, a cute yet naive boy she met at the mall food court? Can she trust Louis, her older and increasingly overbearing foster care worker? Who can Annie depend on in her ever-shifting world? This intel is important. Because Annie needs to win the very real game she’s playing. She must save herself to save the day.
This daring new play from Newfoundland playwright Megan Gail Coles showcases a bold and refreshing approach to theatre for young audiences. Coles deftly interweaves Canada’s colonial history with online gaming as our Indigenous protagonist struggles to understand and reconcile her past, present and future.
-
Squishy
$18.95Arjun Basu’s fiction collection is a wry and consistently provocative book which exposes the realities beneath social conventions. Squishy asks: Do you still love me? Do you want fries with that? Do I look fat? Life is full of small moments that define us, tangents that lead us to unexpected places, bad decisions and no decisions with repercussions you couldn’t possibly predict. This is the world of Squishy, where subtle truths emerge from just beneath our seeming contentment and happiness, our layered social obligations. An aspiring actress fast approaching her best before date, a world weary travel writer, a disgraced ballplayer suffering the lingering effects of a wardrobe malfunction – all characters aware of life’s promise and impossibility, all tempted by something just beyond, something surely delicious. Full of sharp urbane dialogue and characters that always manage to act in a way that celebrates their humanity, this is a confident, stunning debut collection from a powerful and original voice.
-
St. Andrews Architecture 16041966
$24.95In this book John Leroux and Thaddeus Holownia explore the rich architectural heritage of St. Andrews, New Brunswick. From the site of the first attempt at permanent European-based architecture in Canada on St. Croix Island in 1604 to the rational grid of streets developed upon the arrival of the United Empire Loyalists in the 1780s, from modest wooden Cape Cod cottages and mercantile buildings to refined Georgian manors and grand Shingle Style summer homes, St Andrews exhibits an impressive diversity of styles, building materials and techniques. St. Andrews Architecture attempts to articulate the social history of this town, demonstrating how architecture can unmistakably expresses the spirit of a place and of the people who built it.
-
St. Anne’s Reel
$15.95Daniel, a washed-up Dollywood rhinestone cowboy, returns home to the farm near Wingham after many years, on the occasion of his mother’s death. Despite his best intentions, Daniel gets drawn right back into scrapping with his old man, Walter, who used to play fiddle with the Ranch Boys on Circle 8. This drama about a prodigal son and his cantankerous father is by turns starkly humorous and deeply moving
-
St. Boniface Elegies
$17.95In four sections, St. Boniface Elegies traces a poet’s relationships with her family and her community through poems about travel, love, illness, work, and the writing life.
The first section, “Submission,” focuses on the importance of place: the Cape Cod poems describe a holiday taken in the midst of a period of grieving, while the Irish poems delve into the poet’s relationship to her ancestors, the Banff poems look at the irony of an injury to the writer’s hand while away at a writing retreat, and the poem “Oodena,” set at the junction of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers, describes a magical place where birth, marriage, death, and the imagination converge.
“Winter Archive” questions the role of the poet in the contemporary urban environment and shifting cityscape of poverty, broken families, and broken promises in the state of emergency that is Winnipeg.
“The News” is a suite of poems about the effect of a devastating medical diagnosis on a marriage, and the final illness of Hunter’s partner.
The final section, “The Reader,” includes a rhythmic Twitter-generated description of Canada’s “poetry wars”; a humorous but loving homage to Al Purdy; and three glosas that respond to work by the writers Adrienne Rich, Richard Wilbur and Rainer Maria Rilke.
-
St. George
$27.00New Brunswick’s Fundy Coast has always been a place of movement. The massive tides are so integral to the region’s identity that their ebb and flow defines the character of the place.
St. George has seen more than its fair share of the ebb and flow of people and prospects — the typical story of incoming trade and riches, followed by dwindling opportunities. But interest has recently returned to St. George, drawn there by an appreciation for non-urban locales of stark natural beauty, affordability, and down-to-earth people.
Photographer Susan Lapides has been visiting St. George for over twenty-five years. Her deep commitment to capturing the character of place is brilliantly matched by her innate sense of composition and colour. Her work testifies to the fact that the everyday can be mesmerizing if we are lucky enough to have the right interpreter behind the lens. In Lapides’s photographs, the dusk cobalt blues of the ocean and sky become symphonic and a windswept cliff with a lighthouse, dog, lacrosse player, and tree appear as powerful and enigmatic as an Edward Hopper painting.
La côte de Fundy a toujours été un lieu de mouvements. Les marées d’une amplitude hors du commun ont marqué l’identité de cette région du Nouveau-Brunswick, dont le caractère s’est forgé au gré des vagues.
Il y en a eu, des vagues, à St. George! De gens, de perspectives et de fortunes. L’histoire typique d’un essor commercial et de richesses qui abondent, puis déclinent. Et voilà que St. George suscite un regain d’intérêt notable, alimenté par la beauté brute des environs de la ville, des prix abordables et le charme des gens sans prétention.
Susan Lapides fréquente St. George depuis plus de vingt-cinq ans, appareil photo à l’œil. Sa détermination à saisir la personnalité du lieu n’a d’égal que son sens inné de la composition et de la couleur. Ses clichés prouvent que le quotidien peut être fascinant, pour peu que l’interprète derrière la lentille en soit parfaitement conscient. Le bleu cobalt de l’océan et du ciel au crépuscule a une nette tonalité symphonique. Le phare, le chien, le joueur de crosse et l’arbre qui animent une falaise balayée par le vent évoquent autant de présence et de mystère qu’un tableau d’Edward Hopper.
-
St. Michael’s Residential School
$21.95One of the few accounts by care-givers in an Indian Residential School describing the
horrific conditions.
Nancy Dyson and Dan Rubenstein In 1970, the authors, Nancy Dyson and Dan Rubenstein, were hired as childcare workers at the Alert Bay Student Residence (formerly St. Michael’s Indian Residential School) on northern Vancouver Island. Shocked when Indigenous children were forcibly taken from their families, punished for speaking their native language, fed substandard food and severely disciplined for minor offences, Dan and Nancy questioned the way the school was run with its underlying missionary philosophy. When a delegation from the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs visited St. Michael’s, the couple presented a long list of concerns, which were ignored. The next day they were dismissed by the administrator of the school. Some years later, in 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Reports were released. The raw grief and anger of residential school survivors were palpable and the authors’ troubling memories of St. Michael’s resurfaced. Dan called Reconciliation Canada, and Chief Dr. Robert Joseph encouraged the couple to share their story with today’s Canadians. St. Michael’s Residential School: Lament and Legacy is a moving narrative – one of the few told by caregivers who experienced on a daily basis the degradation of Indigenous children. Their account will help to ensure that what went on in the Residential Schools is neither forgotten nor denied.