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 6833–6848 of 9311 results
-
Tell Anna She’s Safe
$22.95Based on a true story, Tell Anna She’s Safe is the tale of two women, one missing, the other searching for her. Driving home alongside West Quebec’s Gatineau River one April afternoon, researcher Ellen McGinn spots a parked car that looks like it might belong to her friend and colleague, Lucy Stockman. Lucy, a freelance writer, lives in nearby Ottawa. Shortly after arriving home, Ellen receives a phone call from Lucy’s common-law partner: Lucy has disappeared. That night Ellen has an unusual dream in which she receives three clear messages: she is to search and to write everything down–and Lucy is safe. But is she? Ellen’s continuing dreams seem to indicate otherwise, and then there is the suspicious behaviour of Lucy’s partner, a man with a violent past that includes a manslaughter conviction. Led by a series of disturbing visions she doubts but can’t ignore, Ellen embarks on a nerve-wracking search that takes her to wooded areas, abandoned buildings, and even the river. But what begins as a physical search soon also becomes a determined quest for the truth beyond the stereotypical appearances of her friend’s risky relationship. Terrified for her own life and getting in over her head with a compelling police detective, Ellen reaches a deeper than bargained for understanding of Lucy’s dark journey–and of her own psychic abilities. Through the intertwining stories of the two women and the enduring presence of the river, Tell Anna She’s Safe takes the reader below the sometimes frightening, uncontrollable surface circumstances of our lives, to reveal the steady current of power and knowing we all hold within.
-
Tell Me I Can’t
$23.95James Piccoli barreled through all the obstacles thrown in his way en route to the WorldTour. Unscrupulous European team owners, unimaginative Canadian sports bureaucrats, and even some unusually bad racing luck couldn’t stop him. Follow along as he meets cycling legends in Italy, encounters hostile police in Texas, surfs couches in New Mexico, gets stranded in Taiwan, and ultimately triumphs at the sport’s highest level. This is the story behind the headlines, a raw, unfiltered look at the underbelly of international cycling.
-
Tell Me What Moves You
$20.00Haeck’s intensity is such that he needs to use the fragment to complete an on-going project of finding his way to luminosity. Behind a deliberate modesty, the output is voluminous. Never boastful, Haeck introduces his prose as notes, poem-essay, poem, life-poem, life-novel, as if what he wrote did not merit adjectives such ‘completed’ or ‘final’. He has invented a genre that was missing in Canada. The verse has prolonged itself into a regular paragraph. Fiction reads like a telecast, and reality made to look like conscientious invention. The writer is not an outsider; he is one of the many who just happens to jot down notes to try to come up with some sort of understanding. He is writing, and the reader looks at the writer writing. This participatory element in this literary project is translucent and incandescent.
-
Tell Them It Was Mozart
$20.00Linked poems that uncover the ache and whimsy of raising children on the autism spectrum.
Through public judgments, detouring dreams and unspoken prayers, Tell Them It Was Mozart, Angeline Schellenberg’s debut collection, traces both a slow bonding and the emergence of a defiant humour. This is a book that keens and cherishes, a work full of the earthiness and transcendence of mother-love. One of the pleasures of this collection is its playful range of forms: there are erasure poems, prose poems, lists, found poems, laments, odes, monologues and dialogues in the voices of the children, even an oulipo that deconstructs the DSM definition of autism. From a newborn “glossed and quivering” to a child conquering the fear of strange toilets, Tell Them It Was Mozart is bracing in its honesty, healing in its jubilance.
Michelangelo slept in his clothes and seldom ate Newton lectured to empty rooms at scheduled times if no one showed up to hear him … Only staying where room numbers were divisible by three, Tesla tested turbines in his mind, would not touch round objects … Charles Darwin formulated the theory of natural selection, the foundation for our understanding of the diversity of life on earth: advantageous traits survive Mozart meowed on tables –from “Posthumously diagnosed”
Praise for Tell Them It Was Mozart:
“By turns, Angeline Schellenberg’s words are blunt, musical, unflinching, transcendent. Her speaker raises two children on the autism spectrum, but she is never a martyr, never a victim, never a saint. Schellenberg has drawn a woman who turns the experience inside out–finding its humour, its turbulence, and ultimately, its joy.” –Kimmy Beach -
Tell Us What Happened
$15.95For the past three years, Charlie and her two roommates have been running a secret online girl group, “Tell Us What Happened,” which boasts over 400 members and prides itself on being a safe space for young women to disclose their stories and support each other. Tensions rise when a handful of members come to realize they have all been sexually mistreated by the same guy–and that guy happens to be Charlie’s best friend, Josh. Alliances are stretched to the breaking point as the girls pursue justice while Josh and Charlie fight for their friendship.
Tell Us What Happened is a charged investigation into the mechanics of sexual assault reconciliation in the age of social media.
-
Temporary Shelter
$12.95In Temporary Shelter, Travis Lane demonstrates that she is one of Canada’s finest and most rigorous poets. Yet, she writes with a subtle, sometimes muted, voice and from a position refreshingly removed from current fashion and ideology. Celebrating the open against the enclosed, the wildnerness against the city, the imagination against things tidily nailed down, the poems in this collection might best be seen as separate illuminations.
-
Temptations for a Juvenile Delinquent
$16.95This collection takes off from where Sky Gilbert’s first volume of poetry concluded and begs the question: Has Sky Gilbert grown up? Thankfully, the answer is no.
Like Digressions of a Naked Party Girl, Temptations of a Juvenile Deliquent does not represent a fine literary turn by a respected man of letters, nor is it an experiment in metaphor and metonymy ripe for exegesis and respect. Instead, it’s a personal, confessional, hilarious, rant-filled thrill-ride — where familiar streets are filled with gay boys, hookers, Key West sunshine, and movie stars. These are poems written on the run, between tricks, after orgies, and before that last cigarette at 4 in the morning. They are meant to be read: out loud, in bed, or simply as a tool for seduction. This dangerous book is recommended to minors, the inexperienced, the virginal, shut ins, and the sexually repressed, not University courses or best-seller lists anywhere. -
Ten Letters
$4.50A sequence of elegiac poems by the least recognized major poet in Canada, celebrating place all the way to glory.
-
Ten Thousand Views of Rain
$12.95This beautiful collection of lyrical poems explores the dynamic interaction of Japanese and Canadian cultures, utilizing the powerful and universal elements of weather, art and family. Stylistically fluid and graceful, Ten Thousand Views of Rain evokes a world in which tradition and modern life mesh through a compelling imagination.
-
Ten Years
$19.95The field of photography has been described as one that exacerbates antagonisms, “a permanent hotbed of contradictions.” This is also an apt description for the work of the artists who have participated in the Aimia | AGO Photography Prize in its first decade.
From the beginning, the Prize advocated a broad idea of photography, as broad as the range of possibilities that contemporary artists continue to see for the medium. The images have run the spectrum, with some directly observed, others highly staged, and yet others culled from the family record, YouTube, a library picture collection, press photographs, tourist brochures, and textbooks. Subjects have included family relations, sports, advertising conventions, imaging technologies, urban planning, colonialism, industry, and environmental degradation. This retrospective volume brings together the winners and shortlisted works from the Aimia-AGO Photography Prize, between 2008 to 2017, including essays by Alden Hadwen, Sean O’Neill, and Sophie Hackett and biographical notes on the nominees by Sam Cotter.
-
Ten-Headed Alien
$18.00Ten-Headed Alien draws from sci-fi and poli-sci, prog rock and politics, climate fiction and ancient mythology to create poems that are at once global and personal. The opening sections of the book take the reader on a harrowing sea-to-sky epic, from a drunken plane crash in the BC interior to the quiet beaches of Crete. Mythological creatures battle for the attention of an inverted mermaid, bionic pigeons flee their creators, barflies conjure soulmates, balloon farms exist on the moon and pigs, of course, fly. From Lake Nipissing to the moons of Jupiter, these poems travel around the world (and off it) united by the language of human fragility, and a sense of the body as engineered, temporary and exquisitely sad.
The book’s final section brings an uncanny ten-headed alien to Earth and the apocalypse that unfolds is complex and devastating. Ten-Headed Alien, broad in scope, revels in strange, protean imagery to explore the swamps between our natural and technological worlds.
-
Tenant, The
$23.95When famous author Amy Ellis relocates to Germany for a year with her family, she hopes to find the cure for a bad case of writer’s block which is preventing her next novel from hitting the shelves. With her vacation home accidentally double-booked by a kindly but unexpected tenant, and terrifying international headlines, Amy’s new book practically writes itself. But will the plot and peril prove too much?
-
TENDER
$18.95Within the contours of TENDER lie field notes from a life lived across multiple affinities, kinships, and desires. Equally visual and textual, TENDER is a beautifully complex collection spanning thirty years of curious inquiry into our shared human–animal condition. Laiwan traverses diverse terrains – the body, land, language – which are rooted in her courageous and uncompromising history of activism and in experiences of building community across and beyond difference. TENDER offers a radical and decolonizing cleansing of all that oppresses and alienates. The words and images in this collection reveal the heroic struggles of gendered, raced, and sexual differences from a place of incredible tenderness and vulnerability. Laiwan’s words imprint in us the need to breathe our animal skins back to life after the scarring of fearful states of abandonment and betrayal. Read as a retrospective and as a continued call for a passionate caring for one another, TENDER offers us freedom in the face of limitation: a working at setting free. Each section of the book captures a moment in time and feeling. Ghostly images are choreographed to leave us alerted to longing and hope, absence and presence. It is as if the entire collection were a garden at different stages of growth, with the inevitable decay and renewal that each season brings. Haunting, political, and defiantly sexy, Laiwan’s voice is a guiding force.
-
Tender Buttons
$15.00A seminal text in the history of poetry and poetics, Tender Buttons was originally published in 1914 and is considered one of the great Modern experiments in verse. At one time or another it has been thought of as a masterpiece of Cubism, a modernist triumph, a spectacular failure, a collection of confusing gibberish, and an intentional hoax. Despite the fact that it was written by an ex-pat American, the text of Tender Buttons has had massive influence on Canadian poetry and poetics for nearly three quarters of a century. Therefore, Book*hug is pleased to produce the first Canadian Edition of this important text in a publication that pays homage to the original 1914 edition.
-
Tenderman
$18.95“I grew up in a blue-collar town ten minutes down the road from a white-collar town. And I’ve spent most of my life uncomfortable in both places.”
With these opening words, accomplished poet Tim Bowling outlines the central tension that acts as a vital force in his newest book, Tenderman—the dichotomy between the sensitive poetic observer and the tough, working-class subject. Bowling returns again to the shores of his BC hometown that exert such a strong hold on his imagination, but through his focus on the tenderman figure, he also demonstrates wry self-awareness in doing so. The tenderman (a crewman on a salmon packing boat), who represents a fiercely independent everyman, acts as unintentional muse to the collection; its poems are often delivered through dialogues between poet and fisherman, reminiscences of their shared childhoods, or narratives delivered by the tenderman himself.
As always, Bowling’s verse is stunning in its haunting portrayal of West Coast imagery, depicting both natural beauty (“the Spanish silhouette/ crouched in warm salt dark”) and the grim realities of fishing (“The kicks and slaps of a hold of dying fish—/ hands in an auditorium”) with effortless grace.
-
Tent of Blue
$22.95Tent of Blue, Rachael Preston’s richly conceived first novel, seduces readers with images of captivity and escape. Passing back and forth through time, the novel has its beginnings in England before and during the Second World War. The present is a somewhat seedy mansion-turned-apartment in Vancouver’s Shaughnessy neighbourhood and the beaches of Kitsilano and Jericho in the 1950s. The future, or at least the fantasy, is the unattainable Salt Spring Island.
In this astonishing novel, Preston creates characters that are trapped by cruelty, poverty, war, and their own minds and bodies. Gradually they awaken to the fact that they carry within themselves the possibility of freedom and the power to achieve it. The novel’s images of war-torn beaches, cold, dank theatres, and travelling by bicycle through the streets of Vancouver will linger with readers long after the book is closed.
The book tells the story of Anton, a boy of almost sixteen, who suffers the challenges of a clubfoot and Yvonne, his mother, a dance teacher who spent her youth in the decayed music halls of 1930s England. Grotesquely mistreated by her drunken mother, fourteen-year-old Yvonne finds fleeting freedom with a Russian-born dancer. After his death, needing to provide for herself and Anton, she falls into the grip of a brutal impresario and eventually migrates to Montreal and shortly thereafter to Vancouver. Yvonne alternately spurns and smothers her son as she plays the only two roles she knows: victim and victimizer. Both have been imprisoned their whole lives: Yvonne by her fear of her abusive mother, of losing her lover, and of Harold, the man who sweeps her into his control and makes her his wife. Anton has been a prisoner of his physical handicap, of Yvonne’s unhappiness, and of Harold’s hold on both his and his mother’s life.
In their Vancouver apartment, Yvonne and Anton struggle to live heroically despite the scathing violence of love. Yvonne opens a dance school where she teaches her few ballet students. Anton struggles for respect and independence and finds a measure of freedom through his wheelchair and apartment bound neighbour, Tom Hart, a World War I vet, who supplies Anton with an old bicycle. Anton tries to return the favour in the only way that he can imagine. Dickensian in its complexity, Tent of Blue marks the career debut of a fascinating new Canadian writer.