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 673–688 of 9248 results
-
Appetite
$15.00Verve, energy, wit, piquance and pure linguistic excitement: Mia Anderson’s poetry is a whole cookbook of poetic experiences. Anderson is always ready to take big risks, and her work shows her love of life in its manyness and accident, as well as a delight in the intricate prism of language. Appetite includes the long poem sequence “The Saugeen Sonata” which won The Malahat Review’s Long Poem Prize in 1988.
-
Apple S
$19.95In Apple S, the kaleidoscopic worldview of celebrated Québécois novelist Éric Plamondon sets its sights on Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and the seeds of Silicon Valley. Concluding a wide-lens journey through the American West that began with Tarzan actor Johnny Weissmuller (Hungary-Hollywood Express, 2016) and continued with counter-culture poet Richard Brautigan (Mayonnaise, 2018), the final installment of the 1984 trilogy delivers a heart-rending meta-biography of a technological mastermind. With Plamondon’s alter ego, Gabriel Rivages, using his Mac computer to dig deep into the internet’s detritus to reconstruct Jobs, the author devises the story of the personal computer with episodes from the lives of Alan Turing, Charles Babbage, Lord Byron, Albert Einstein, George Orwell, and numerous other figures who inflected the arc of one of the twentieth century’s most influential figures.
-
Apples on the Windowsill
$21.95Apples on a Windowsill is a series of meditations on still life, photography, beauty, and marriage. Full of personal reflections, charming anecdotes, and the history behind the art of still lifes, this lyrical memoir takes us from Edmonton to Rome to museums all over North America as Lemay discusses the craft of writing, the ups and downs of being married to a painter, and her focus on living a life in art and in beauty. A must read for fans of The Flower Can Always Be Changing, Everything Affects Everyone, and Rumi and the Red Handbag.
-
Approaching Fire
$19.95***IPPY AWARDS: BEST REGIONAL NON-FICTION: CANADA-WEST – SILVER***
***INDIGENOUS VOICES AWARDS 2021, PUBLISHED PROSE IN ENGLISH: CREATIVE NON-FICTION AND LIFE-WRITING: FINALIST***
***FIRST NATION COMMUNITIES READ AWARDS 2021/22: LONGLIST***
***NEXT GENERATION INDIE BOOK AWARDS, REGIONAL (NON-FICTION): FINALIST***
***THE MIRAMICHI READER‘S 2020 MOST PROMISING AUTHOR AWARD***
***BMO WINTERSET AWARD 2020 LONGLIST***
In Approaching Fire, Michelle Porter embarks on a quest to find her great-grandfather, the Métis fiddler and performer Léon Robert Goulet. Through musicology, jigs and reels, poetry, photographs, and the ecology of fire, Porter invests biography with the power of reflective ingenuity, creating a portrait which expands beyond documentation into a private realm where truth meets metaphor.
Weaving through multiple genres and traditions, Approaching Fire fashions a textual documentary of rescue and insight, and a glowing contemplation of the ways in which loss can generate unbridled renewal.
-
Approaching the Possible
$22.95Decode SG-1.
Stargate SG-1 was a television hit for ten years (an almost unheard-of run in science-fiction television), with ten seasons, and boasts a devoted and vocal online community. Based on the feature length movie, the series SG-1 is the longest-running North American science fiction television series. It follows the flagship team, designated SG-1, of a secret military base. Transported instantly by a Stargate to distant planets, Colonel Jack O’Neill (MacGyver star Richard Dean Anderson) and his team race to save the galaxy from ruthless enslaving aliens, the Goa’uld. What is it about this show that has made it so popular? What makes it different from other science fiction series on television today?
Approaching the Possible: The World of Stargate SG-1 answers these questions and more. It serves as a comprehensive introduction for those who are just starting to watch SG-1 with an episode guide to the series, examining SG-1 season by season. For the long-time viewer, author Jo Storm explores multi-season storylines and character developments. Interesting facts for each episode and numerous sidebars uncover the mythology and science not only of the stories, but of the writing, directing, and special effects used to tell the stories.
Exclusive interviews with cast members such as Teryl Rothery, Alex Zahara, and Christopher Judge, and writer Joseph Mallozzi and special effects supervisor James Tichenor, engage the Stargate universe from multiple angles. Including chapters devoted to the franchise as well as the ‘fanchise’ element of the MGM original series, the book showcases the passion this show inspires in its viewers—from real-life scientists to fan fiction writers. Approaching the Possible offers insight into the multiple reasons for the show’s popularity while tackling everything from the mythology of Ancient Egypt to the series’ evolution as a CGI wunderkind. With no other episode guide on the market that covers every season of the series, this book is a must-have addition to any fan’s library.
-
Après Satie
$20.00Poems that echo Satie’s haunting music and refract the ironies of the Parisian Dada movement. A man who might be Erik Satie floats, à la Magritte, above Paris rooftops, thinking of a newly-extinct species of songbirds, “contemplating grief in the absence of song.” By turns tender, wry, playful and fierce, the poems in Dean Steadman’s second collection, Après Satie – For Two and Four Hands, use surreal imagery, recurring characters and cyclical themes to evoke the repetitive nature of much of Satie’s music, as well as the artistic and intellectual temperament of Paris during Satie’s most creative years. The prose poems in the collection borrow titles from Satie’s piano compositions, and all of the poems are annotated in a manner similar to Satie’s published scores, using a selection of his performance instructions (for example, “like a nightingale with a toothache”). From the affair of Satie and painter Suzanne Valadon to the glimpsed lives of a contortionist, a French cowboy, a Falling Man and a Floating Woman in the Dada-inflected prose poems, to the musings in other poetic forms that draw us forward in time, to a present-day hospice, or back, to the gallop of a mounted huntress, Après Satie involves us in the ongoing muddle of pain, sorrow, compassion, passion, joy and curiousness that is our human condition. “When he died, Erik Satie left twelve grey suits hanging in his closet. With surreal virtuosity Dean Steadman has pulled eighty-four sinuous poems and prose riffs out of their velvet pockets.” –William Aide, renowned classical pianist and poet “Shifting geography and perspective as easily as form, [these] poems beguile the senses as deftly as a menagerie of circus contortionists.” –Sandra Ridley/
-
April Fool
$17.95A new edition of the Arthur Ellis Award winning crime novel
Arthur Beauchamp, the scholarly, self-doubting legend of the B.C. criminal bar, is enjoying his retirement on B.C.’s Garibaldi Island when he is dragged back to court to defend an old client. Nick “The Owl” Faloon, one of the world’s top jewel thieves, has been accused of raping and murdering a psychologist. Beauchamp has scarcely registered how unlikely it is that the rascally Faloon could commit a savage murder when his own personal life takes an abrupt turn. His new wife, Margaret Blake, organic farmer and environmental activist, has taken up residence 50 feet above ground in a tree of an old-growth forest that she is determined to save for the eagles and from the loggers. Beauchamp shuttles between Vancouver and the island, doing what he can to defend Faloon, save the forest, and rescue his wife. Part courtroom thriller, part classic whodunit, April Fool sees Deverell writing at the top of his form, with a big dollop of humour.
-
April on Paris Street
$25.00Most Anticipated Fall Fiction from 49th Shelf
Your basic damsel-in-distress gig sounds perfect to private investigator Ashley Smeeton, who’s got her own personal and professional struggles in Montreal. Against the backdrop of the winter Carnaval, the job first takes her to Paris where she’s drawn into an unsettling world of mirages and masks, not to mention the murderous Bortnik brothers. When she returns to Montreal, a city rife with its own unreasonable facsimiles, the case incomprehensibly picks up again. Convinced she’s being played, Ashley embarks on an even more dangerous journey into duplicity. In a world of masks behind masks, it’s hard to say where the truth lies.
-
Apron Strings
$24.95Shortlisted, 2018 Taste Canada Awards and 2018 Writers’ Federation of New Brunswick Book Award for Non-Fiction
Longlisted, 2018 RBC Taylor PrizeJan Wong knows food is better when shared, so when she set out to write a book about home cooking in France, Italy, and China, she asked her 22-year-old son, Sam, to join her. While he wasn’t keen on spending excessive time with his mom, he dreamed of becoming a chef. Ultimately, it was an opportunity he couldn’t pass up.
On their journey, Jan and Sam live and cook with locals, seeing first-hand how globalization is changing food, families, and cultures. In southeast France, they move in with a family sheltering undocumented migrants. From Bernadette, the housekeeper, they learn classic French family fare such as blanquette de veau. In a hamlet in the heart of Italy’s Slow Food country, the villagers teach them without fuss or fanfare how to make authentic spaghetti alle vongole and a proper risotto with leeks. In Shanghai, they home-cook firecracker chicken and scallion pancakes with the nouveaux riches and their migrant maids, who comprise one of the biggest demographic shift in world history. Along the way, mother and son explore their sometimes-fraught relationship, uniting — and occasionally clashing — over their mutual love of cooking.
A memoir about family, an exploration of the globalization of food cultures, and a meditation on the complicated relationships between mothers and sons, Apron Strings is complex, unpredictable, and unexpectedly hilarious.
-
Aqueduct
$14.951919 is often recalled as the year of the Winnipeg General Strike, but it was also the year that water from Shoal Lake first flowed in Winnipeg taps. For the Anishinaabe community of Shoal Lake 40 First Nation, construction of the Winnipeg Aqueduct led to a chain of difficult circumstances that culminated in their isolation on an artificial island where, for almost two decades, they have lacked access to clean drinking water.
In Aqueduct: Colonialism, Resources, and the Histories We Remember, Adele Perry analyses the development of Winnipeg’s municipal water supply as an example of the history of settler colonialism. Drawing from a rich archive of historical sources, this timely book exposes the cultural, social, political, and legal mechanisms that allowed the rapidly growing city of Winnipeg to obtain its water supply by dispossessing an Indigenous people of their land, and ultimately depriving them of the very commodity–clean drinking water–that the city secured for itself.
-
Aqueous
$20.00Aqueous by Nathanael Jones is a collection of prose poems that address the ways in which post-colonial realities in the black diaspora continue to fracture concepts of identity, history and memory, place, and community. Through the use of extended metaphors relating to the transatlantic slave trade, contemporary art, marine biology, and the commercial construction industry, both personal and collective experiences of being Afro-Caribbean Canadian in North America/Turtle Island are described and enacted as indefinitely liminal. Organized into three main poem sequences, the collection first uses a fictional sound art piece as a way of diagramming the kinds of fractured subjectivities engendered by colonialism and its after effects. In the second sequence, a beleaguered speaker navigates realities of manual labour and how they are used to shape racialized and gendered identities, and the pressures these forces exert upon interpersonal relationships. Lastly, the third sequence delves further into oceanographic themes in order to compose a portrait of Montreal’s black anglophone communities as both invisible and yet forever in the peripherals of mainstream cultures in Canada.
-
Arabian Nights
$14.95A Queer Film Classic on 1974’s Arabian Nights by Pier Paolo Pasolini, the controversial Italian director who was murdered under mysterious circumstances in 1975.
Already internationally distinguished as a poet, novelist, and outspoken social critic of the postwar period, Pasolini turned to filmmaking around 1960. In little more than a decade, he produced one of the most remarkable bodies of work in cinema history, beginning with his early film-portraits of the struggles of underclass youths and extending through his adaptations of such sacred or mythic narratives as the stories of Oedipus and Medea and the Gospel of St. Matthew. In what turned out to be the last years of his career, Pasolini turned to several classic works of chain-narrative –The Arabian Nights, The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales, and Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom–as models for his own radical expansion of cinema’s capacities for telling, showing, and enacting embodiment, nudity, and sexual desires and behaviours.
This book explores the legacy and context of Arabian Nights, in many ways the most optimistic and appealing of Pasolini’s late films, not only in the final explosive phase of Pasolini’s career but also more broadly in the global history of film spectacle from Douglas Fairbanks to Maria Montez.
-
Arabic for Beginners
$18.95When Hannah accompanies her husband and small children to Jerusalem for the year, she becomes fascinated with a group of expat women at her son’s daycare, as well as a young Palestinian woman named Jenna. As she grows close to Jenna she starts to question her own marriage and her relationship to Israel. A novel of domestic and political ambivalence, Arabic for Beginners is about marriage, motherhood, friendship, nation, and the complicated ways we think of home. It is the winner of the J. I. Segal 2018 Mona Elaine Adilman English Fiction and Poetry Award on a Jewish Theme.
-
Arbutus/Madrone Files, The
$34.95The first book-length commentary on twentieth-century Pacific Northwest writing, The Arbutus / Madrone Files explores the dynamics of the Pacific Northwest. Laurie Ricou’s meditations are dropped into thirteen files—such as, the "Island File," the "Salmon File," and inevitably, the "Rain File." Resonant quotations, poetry, song lyrics, and art from the region enhance Ricou’s own readings, which move from an academic perspective on the narratives of bio-region toward more personal reflections on home and the local.
-
Archaic Torso of Gumby
$22.00Archaic Torso of Gumby is a series of interlinked stories and essays by Geoffrey Morrison and Matthew Tomkinson that explore the gooey, prickly, sticky materials of late-capitalist pop culture, from video games to claymation to children’s picture-books commissioned by oil and gas companies. Here lyric essay, personal memoir, fable, pseudohistory, and science fiction all coexist alongside more conventional short story forms. Each part reveals unlikely connections between subjects as different as a sentient wallet, a gathering of headless saints, abject descriptions of 3D-printed food, a sixteenth-century courtier who thinks he’s a horse, a virtual reality religious experience, and a couple with a fetish involving crustaceans. By turns cerebral, goofy, and heartfelt, Archaic Torso of Gumby is a delirious rabbit hole for the adventurous reader.
-
Archer
$29.95Fictional epic: three years in the life of Ray Archer.
Archer portrays three years in the life of Ray Archer, a fictional Canadian actor/director dedicated to exploring performance styles with his diverse company. Following a Canada-wide tour of King Lear performed in mask, Archer takes his new epic history of Canada across the country and to Ireland, where a strange encounter changes his life in ways he could not imagine. Written in both modern and traditional poetic styles, Archer is Book Three of the epic trilogy On the River of Time, which examines three figures—one mythical (Odysseus), one historical (Edmund Spenser), and one fictional (Archer)—and the links between them across 3,000 years