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 7233–7248 of 9492 results
-
The Chimney Stone
$17.95In this eagerly anticipated follow-up to his award-winning, critically lauded debut, Rob Winger’s sophomore collection, The Chimney Stone, bends the contemporary lyric into startling new shapes. Concentrating on a splendid mess of headlines, wars, politics, relationships and artistic influences, Winger’s ghazals ask us how to negotiate the complex commitments and chaotic tumult of our dailylives. Making use of the ghazal’s original address to both a secular lover and a sacred ethics, Winger’s four sections move from examinations of gender in “Iron John” and “Bloody Mary,” to an ironic investigation of common experience in “Idiot Wind,” to a record of both human rights abuses and personal epiphany in “Blind Date.” In the process, Winger not only engages in dialogue with other poets–John Thompson, Phyllis Webb, Adrienne Rich, Ghalib, and more–but also welcomes other voices, measures, and musical phrases into his couplets. Here, Rimbaud rubs shoulders with Joe Strummer and David Byrne; Dylan exchanges one-liners with Gaston Bachelard; Johnny Cash spars with the Fisk Jubilee Singers; and Gretzky makes a pass to a smooth right winger. Drifting from razor-carved sternums, to Lhasa runways, to Southeast Asian temples and beaches, to eighteenth-century shipwrecks, bloody tanks, rusty apartheid, blind genocide and burning teddy bears, The Chimney Stone urges us to re-examine not only how we order the contemporary world, but also how we become its citizens or revolutionaries, grandparents or kids, protestors or politicians. Ethically charged, tenderly observed, and masterfully realized, Winger’s poems are a vital addition to the ghazal’s continued evolution.
-
The Church Not Made with Hands
$17.00“John Terpstra’s meditations have the soundness and snug fit of consummate carpentry, measure in language and in thought… This is religious writing from the ground up, negotiating the difficult moral terrain between wildness and ‘development’ with an imaginative grasp reminiscent of Dennis Lee’s Civil Elegies. This is an important book, with the toughness of maple, the compassion of cedar.”
? Don Mckay
-
The Cipher
$22.95It is June 1940 and fifteen-year-old Olivia Baldini’s idyllic English life is shattered as Britain declares war on Italy. With hyperthymesia, Olivia possesses an extraordinary ability to recall information with vivid detail, a gift that makes her invaluable to Churchill’s secret sabotage army, the Special Operations Executive (SOE). Trained in nursing, coding, and espionage, Olivia is dispatched behind enemy lines in Italy, aiding partisans and resistance fighters.
Nino Fabris, dreaming of world travel with the merchant marines, is thrust into the war when his ship is conscripted. Captured in North Africa and sent to a POW camp in Kenya, Nino seizes a chance for freedom by joining the SOE.
In the chaos of war, Olivia and Nino’s paths intertwine. The Cipher is a gripping tale of love, resilience, and the power of the truth — and who you trust with it.
-
The Circle Game
$20.00More than forty years ago, Joni Mitchell’s music helped define a generation of young people. Now, one of her classic songs is introduced to a new generation through the remarkable art of Brian Deines.
The Circle Game, a charming nod to childhood dreams and memories, tells the story of a young boy experiencing the simple wonders of life: dragonflies in jars, the night sky, frozen streams, and carousels. As the years go by, cartwheels are replaced by car wheels and the boy’s dreams change, but the sense of wonder remains. The Circle Game captures the timeless magic of youth.
-
The Circus Performers’ Bar
$17.95The Circus Performers’ Bar is a second collection of finely crafted stories by David Arnason, written in every conceivable style: the urbane New Yorker story, the fireside chat, the war correspondent’s report, the poignant personal memoir and the hysterical small-town gossip. Hilarious role reversals and role substitutions provide the context through which a male neo-consciousness takes shape in a world dominated by the feminist vision. Various adorations of Snow White by her seven dwarves and the de-fanging of the wolf by Little Red Riding Hood are guaranteed to leave the reader choking with laughter and howling far into the night. Each story constitutes a new search for competence in a world where innate ability may have become historically déclassé, and laboriously-acquired facility may lead only to seasickness.
-
The City Man
$18.95Nominated for a Commonwealth Writers Prize (Canada and Caribbean region), a Toronto Book Award and a Books in Canada/Amazon.ca First Novel Award.
March 6, 1934. Hundreds gather outside City Hall to celebrate the Toronto Centenary. In the crowd, pickpocket Mona Kantor and her partner, Chesler, are ‘in the tip,’ finding easy pickings among the jostling masses. Eli Morenz, city man for the Daily Star, is covering the festivities and uncovering the pickpocket racket working the scene. A surreptitious photo and some keen research lead him to an underworld dive in Kensington Market where Toronto’s pickpockets converge – and to Mona.
Moving from a tense newsroom on King Street to the frenetic grift at Union Station, The City Man is a romance that begins in an instant and careens towards peril. Akler’s prose is as deft as a thief’s fingers, as precise and powerful as a heavyweight’s punch. Packed with enchanting, arcane period slang and comparable in its evocation of a lost Toronto to Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion, this is a novel of exceptional grace, excitement and beauty.
‘The City Man is a fast and iridescent look at the world of big-city pickpockets circa 1934 … Akler delivers the goods with originality and flare, with language as gorgeous as a Jean Harlow pin-up and dialogue sharper than a burst from a Thompson submachine gun.’ – The Globe and Mail
‘Crafted period piece, sly crime novel, nouveau noir, edgy love story – this wonderful first novel outs not only its tremendously gifted author, but the city of Toronto itself. If Akler’s deft dance of pickpockets, hacks, cops, suckers, “stalls” and “cannons” stands at odds with the stale-bread image of Toronto the Good, that’s the idea. Who knew hard-boiled fiction could sidestep its own clichés so effortlessly?’ – Kevin Connolly
-
The City Still Breathing
$18.95A body is found on the side of a highway. Naked, throat slashed, no identification. It disappears from the back of a police van and begins a strange odyssey, making its way, over the course of one early winter night, all around the northern town of Sudbury and through the lives and dreams of eleven very different people.
These eleven people Â? from the police officers who retrieve the body to the teenager who carries it away to the young waitrress planning to strike out for Toronto and Sudbury’s local drug dealer Â? are all damaged in some way, and eventually, through the body itself, are brought together in a strange moment of violence.
‘Heiti’s Sudbury is a dark place, his characters caught between the desire to stay and the urge to flee … The City Still Breathing brings to life the strange, proud beauty of has-beens and also-rans in one relentlessly hard-luck town.’
–National Post
-
The City That Is Leaving Forever
The City That Is Leaving Forever is a unique twenty-first-century time capsule: an instant-message exchange between Kashmir and British Columbia spanning more than five years in the lives of two Muslim Kashmiri women poets. In 2016, as India’s military carries out extrajudicial killings and imposes a lengthy curfew in Srinagar, Kurd is forced to cancel her family trip to Kashmir. Syed and Kurd confide in each other as the weeks and months pass, working through drafts of new poems, reading each other’s work, discussing multilingual poetics, the challenges of translation, and the contrasts of daily life in their two cities. The result is a rigorously feminist record of thinking through trauma as it unfolds and a document of life under military lockdown, “a book like a cluster of thorns with some few fragrant petals caught in them.”
-
The City’s Gates
$22.00 -
The Clarion
$22.95Longlisted for the 2023 Scotiabank Giller Prize
Globe and Mail 100 Best Book of 2023
CBC Books, Best Canadian Fiction 2023
Apple Books, Best Canadian Debut 2023 and Best Book of the Month for September 2023
“We all lined up for our whipping by the shouting beauty and tender traumas of life. All of us so sensitive, and now this beautiful girl, with soft brown hair that was shot with gold in the sun. Another one of us starting to stumble.”
Peter plays the trumpet and works in a kitchen, partying; Stasi tries to climb the corporate ladder and lands in therapy. These sensitive siblings struggle to find their place in the world, seeking intimacy and belonging – or trying to escape it.
A promising audition, a lost promotion, intriguing strangers, a silent lover, and a grieving neighbour—in rich, sensual scenes and moody brilliance, The Clarion explores rituals of connection and belonging, themes of intimacy and performance, and how far we wander to find, or lose, our sense of self.
Alternating between five days in Peter’s life and several months of Stasi’s, Dunic’s debut novel captures the vague if hopeful melancholy of any generation that believes it was never “called” to something great.
-
The Clay Girl
$18.95“It is the voice of the characters, the kindness of strangers, and the ingenuity and determination of our protagonist against terrible forces that make this story sing.” — San Francisco Chronicle
“[An] unbelievably accomplished first novel.” — NOW Magazine
American Booksellers Association Indie Next List pick
Shortlisted for the 2017 Kobo Emerging Writer Prize
Shortlisted for the 2017 Atlantic Book Awards
Publishers Weekly, starred review
A deeply compassionate novel about a gentle child who radiates goodness and the way that light refracts — even in the harshest of circumstances.
For the Appleton sisters, life has unravelled many times before. But with a sudden gunshot, it finally explodes.
In the aftermath of chaos and tragedy, eight-year-old Hariet Appleton, known to all as Ari, is shipped off to Cape Breton and her Aunt Mary, who is purported to eat little girls. But Mary and her partner, Nia, offer an unexpected refuge to Ari and her steadfast companion, Jasper, an imaginary seahorse. Yet the respite does not last, and Ari is forced to return to her addiction-addled mother and broken sisters.
Through the sexual revolution and drug culture of the 1960s, Ari struggles with her father’s legacy and her mother’s addictions, testing limits with substances that numb and men who show her kindness. Through it all, her epic imagination colors her grim reality. Ari spins through a chaotic decade of loss and love with wit, tenacity, and the astonishing balance unique to seahorses.
The Clay Girl is a beautiful tour de force with the voice of an unforgetting child, sculpted by kindness, cruelty, and the extraordinary power of imagination.
-
The Clichéist
$15.95Amanda Lamarche’s debut collection of poetry is a work of imaginative grace and power. These poems topple the normal hierarchy of everyday concerns, promoting fears unlikely in the “normal” state of being–the fear of buttons, of dying to the wrong song, of houses built on corners–to the same stage and emotional impact as the more common (perhaps more clichéd) fears of car crashes and collapsing bridges.The clever combination of explorations emotional and playful carries on. Technical advice for cutting down trees is juxtaposed with the development of ominous personal overtones. The title sequence takes issue with the easy laying down of language by recasting well-worn sayings: giving them back-stories, situating them in real time and real places, and reinvigorating them by providing each its own individual universe from which to draw meaning.Amanda Lamarche’s refreshing poems refuse at all the right moments to take themselves too seriously. They have the amazing ability to make readers shift from out-loud laughter to profound insight in a gasp of breath.
-
The Cloud Versus Grand Unification Theory
$18.95Consciousness and nostalgia in the Swipe Right age
This collection attempts to find poetry, or what Gwendolyn MacEwen once called “a single symmetry,” amid the chaos of 21st-century life. A powerful catalogue of loss and human connection, it considers not only how our identities are formed by places and experiences rooted in childhood, but also by digital newsfeeds, YouTube, and the “gospel of Spotify.” These poems intimately confront topics as diverse as quantum physics, video arcades, mental illness, climate change, road rage, alcoholism, endangered species, and even a gigantic Noah’s Ark replica.
Chris Banks is a poet known for packing his lines with thought and feeling. Building on the generous work of John Koethe, Larry Levis, and Ada Limón, Banks’s wildly expansive, often lyric, deeply accessible poems are brilliant meditations on what it means to be human in a brave new world of cloud computing and smart phones.
-
The Club
$14.95“A strong, accessible, and relevant story about modern families.” — Kirkus Reviews
Jax has big plans for grade eight: seeing if his maybe-girlfriend, Samantha, will become his actual girlfriend, and being first trumpet in the school band.
Enter Liv, the new girl Jax meets at band auditions. Liv’s a star on the trumpet too. In fact, she might be better than Jax.
When Jax and Liv start rehearsing together, they go from duet partners to fast friends. Soon, they learn that they share something more than a love of music — something that will change their whole world and make them rethink what it means to be “family.”
-
The Co-op Revolution
$24.95“We were undercapitalized, inexperienced, practiced democratic decision-making and some of us smoked dope occasionally. All elements that would make us grow as human beings and as business people. We ran a helluva show.”
In the spring of 1975, a free-spirited Jan DeGrass backpacked across Canada in search of adventure and greater meaning in life. When she arrived in Vancouver, she met a group of people committed to social change; together they reimagined the food industry in BC.
In The Co-op Revolution: Vancouver’s Search for Food Alternatives, author and journalist DeGrass writes about her journey as a founding member of the Collective Resource and Services Workers’ Co-op. Bounding to life during the heady, activist, grant-funded years of 1974-1980, the CRS Co-op became one of the most successful co-ops in BC and was committed to co-operation and worker ownership. While the decade of the seventies is remembered for its new wave of co-ops–usually organized by a ”free-flowing” collection of women and men in their twenties–CRS was unique in its success. Among its many accolades, it created the Tunnel Canary cannery, the Queenright Co-operative Beekeepers, Vancouver’s popular Uprising Breads Bakery and a food wholesaler, which later became Horizon Distributors. The economic, political and social skyline of Vancouver was changing. For some, the co-op movement was about crushing capitalism; for others it was simply about buying cheap, wholesome food from people they trusted, and living in communal camaraderie. No matter the pursuit, co-operation was the answer.
-
The Cobra and the Key
$22.00“A relentlessly witty work of satire, the mastery of which is veiled behind Shelstad’s deceptively clean and cool prose.” —Fawn Parker, Giller Prize–longlisted author of What We Both Know
“The Canadian literary landscape is all the richer for Sam Shelstad and his brilliant twisted books.” —Anna Fitzpatrick, author of Good Girl
Sam Shelstad’s brilliantly funny, slightly unhinged creative writing guide is How Fiction Works by James Wood meets Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov.
To the untrained eye, Sam Shelstad may look a lot like a Value Village cashier who shares an apartment with his Uncle Herman and has just emerged from a failed relationship with a woman forty years his senior whom he met at his mother’s book club. But Sam is a successful novelist—or will be soon, he’s certain. The manuscript of his debut novel, The Emerald, is currently on the desk of a celebrated indie publisher. While he waits to hear back, he’s hard at work on two ambitious writing projects. The first is the Molly novel, a fictional rendering of Sam’s newly defunct relationship. The second is a guide for aspiring fiction writers like yourself. The two have much to teach one another, and much to teach you.
Drawing on examples from the work of greats like George Orwell, Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Alice Munro, Kazuo Ishiguro, Clarise Lispector, and Sam Shelstad, The Cobra and the Key takes the novice through aspects of character, detail, plot, style, point of view, dialogue, and meaning. Before long, you’ll be ready to print off your first draft and embark on revisions. Then it’s time to learn some of the tricks of the publishing biz. Having just been threatened with legal action by his soon-to-be publisher for stalking said publisher’s son via Instagram, Sam knows a thing or two about that too. Are you ready to get serious about your writing?