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 7393–7408 of 9492 results
-
The Eighth Wonder of the World
$34.95From field producer for HBO’s André the Giant Pat Laprade and renowned wrestling historian Bertrand Hébert comes a definitive and exhaustive biography of André the Giant.
“The gold standard for wrestling biographies.” — Wrestling Observer
Is there a way to find truth in the stuff of legend? You may think you know André the Giant — but who was André Roussimoff? Through exhaustive research and exclusive interviews with family and friends, The Eighth Wonder of the World offers a comprehensive exploration of André’s amazing wrestling career and the indelible mark he left on pop culture, including his role in the cult classic film The Princess Bride.
Born in France, André worked on his family’s farm until he was 18, when he moved to Paris to pursue professional wrestling. A truly extraordinary figure, André went on to become an international icon and world traveler, all while battling acromegaly. While his disorder is what made him a giant and a household name, it’s also what caused his untimely death at 46.
This biography addresses the burning questions, outrageous stories and common misconceptions about his height, his weight, his drawing power as a superstar, and his seemingly unparalleled capacity for food and alcohol. Transporting readers beyond the smoke and mirrors of professional wrestling into the life of a real man, Laprade and Hébert have crafted the most complete portrait of a modern-day mythical being.
-
The Eighth Wonder of the World
$24.95From field producer for HBO’s André the Giant Pat Laprade and renowned wrestling historian Bertrand Hébert comes a definitive and exhaustive biography of André the Giant … now in paperback!
“The gold standard for wrestling biographies.” — Wrestling Observer
Is there a way to find truth in the stuff of legend? You may think you know André the Giant — but who was André Roussimoff? Through exhaustive research and exclusive interviews with family and friends, The Eighth Wonder of the World offers a comprehensive exploration of André’s amazing wrestling career and the indelible mark he left on pop culture, including his role in the cult classic film The Princess Bride.
Born in France, André worked on his family’s farm until he was 18, when he moved to Paris to pursue professional wrestling. A truly extraordinary figure, André went on to become an international icon and world traveler, all while battling acromegaly. While his disorder is what made him a giant and a household name, it’s also what caused his untimely death at 46.
This biography addresses the burning questions, outrageous stories and common misconceptions about his height, his weight, his drawing power as a superstar, and his seemingly unparalleled capacity for food and alcohol. Transporting readers beyond the smoke and mirrors of professional wrestling into the life of a real man, Laprade and Hébert have crafted the most complete portrait of a modern-day mythical being.
-
The Elements of Mentality
$29.95In the 18th century, David Hume suggested that the “science of man” (psychology) was the foundation for all other sciences (philosophy). Now a latter-day Hume offers a model of mentality that sets psychology and philosophy on common footings, eliminating the breach between the sciences and the humanities. From this backdrop, the author offers solutions to some of the great questions: the nature of reality, value, certainty, validity, free will, morality, and justice.
-
The Elephant on Karluv Bridge
$24.95Set in Prague and narrated by the 600-year-old Charles Bridge, this novel begins with an lephant named Sál escaping the Prague Zoo. As the elephant moves through the beautiful Czech city, the lives of the men and women she meets are altered by the encounter. Each character is at a crossroads, and desperately seeking the wisdom they need to wrestle with profound questions—how to live, how to love, who to love, how to heal. And the elephant herself is haunted, as memories of her long-ago capture in Africa resurface.
Sál carries the narrative from one point of view to another: Vasha, a writer and night watchman at the zoo, and his wife Marta, a psychotherapist, confront the question of whether to have a child; Šárka, Marta’s patient
and a dancer at the end of her career, is visited by a charming and often abrasive manifestation of the long-dead ballerina Anna Pavlova; Joseph, a clown and bouffon, performs on the Karlův Bridge itself, and he is about to be struck down (literally and figuratively) by a new love…
Through it all, Sál steals the show, wandering the streets in search of water and food, bearing her own share of sadness and painful memories as she struggles to find her way out of her bewildering predicament. Though she, like the humans she encounters, is free now to make her own choices, she is also displaced and lost.
Thomas Trofimuk’s novel masterfully convinces us to accept all the wonders contained in it: that a bridge can tell a story, that art is integral to our survival, that an elephant can scatter sudden flashes of insight in her wake, that there is no separation between the grief of elephants and
the grief of humans. -
The Elephant Song
$16.95An eminent psychiatrist has vanished from his office. The last person to have seen him is Michael, a troubled patient.
Dr. Greenberg, the hospital director, is determined to question Michael, ignoring the head nurse’s cryptic warnings. Michael speaks of elephants and opera—with the occasional hint of murder and foul play. Fraught with mind games and verbal tugs-of-war, The Elephant Song is a cat-and-mouse game that will keep you guessing until its haunting conclusion.
-
The Elephant Talks to God
$16.95The Elephant Talks to God is an endearing collection of whimsical tales in which a young elephant forages for answers to that age-old existential puzzle: What is the meaning of life? In this new edition of Dale Estey’s best-selling book, this pachyderm philosopher asks questions and God answers — sometimes cryptically, sometimes humorously but always with love and patience.
The answers unfold in a series of conversations between this humble, though occasionally impertinent, beast and the Almighty. The free-ranging exchanges between the two include contributions from popes, missionaries and various monkeys, birds and insects. This sweet, sometimes satirical, and occasionally moving story will appeal to readers of all ages. The book includes most of the original stories from the popular 1989 collection as well as many new ones.
Original, fresh and unsentimental, The Elephant Talks to God belongs on the bookshelves of anyone who, just like the inquisitive elephant, has ever wondered about life, love and the true nature of happiness.
-
The Embalmer
$17.95A small-town embalmer’s daughter lifts the shroud on the fascinating minutiae of dealing with the dead.
Imagine rubbing shoulders with the dead for most of your life. As she picks the brain of her father for the most gruesome and thought-provoking secrets of his embalming career – from the drowned boy whose organs were eaten by eels to how to inject just the right amount of colour into a corpse’s skin for that blushing look – the narrator must look her parents’ deaths, and her relationship with them, straight in the eye.
Quietly poetic, The Embalmer glimpses at something most would rather look away from.
-
The Emily Valentine Poems
$16.95The Emily Valentine Poems is an innovative book that challenges the impossible notions of femininity that permeate our culture. The texts within include self-portraits, prose poems, fake fan letters, and confessional lyric snapshots. These are pharmaceutically enhanced tributes to the hangovers of twenty-something love and to the pop icons from an unconventional 1980s childhood. With The Emily Valentine Poems, Zoe Whittall provides us with the perfect soundtrack for the culturally literate rebel in all of us.
“Zoe Whittall might just be the cockiest, brashest, funniest, toughest, most life-affirming, elegant, scruffy, no-holds-barred writer to emerge from Montreal since Mordecai Richler.”—The Globe and Mail
“This reminds me that I would like to know everything about this person.”—Eileen Myles
-
The Emir’s Falcon
$18.99“She was raised to be free, not some rich man’s pet . . . It’s just not right!”
Bernie Cholach’s dad wants him to take over the family’s rural Alberta feedlot, but Bernie has other ideas: he wants to be a biologist, an interest sparked by his experiences as a volunteer bird handler at a Canadian Wildlife Service facility that breeds and rears peregrine falcons for release into the wild.
Sheik Nasur bin Mukhta, son of a Persian Gulf emir studying petroleum engineering at the University of Alberta, dutifully accepts his life’s course, laid out for him by his traditionalist culture.
Rosie Leboucan, daughter of a Metis trapper, running her injured dad’s trap line in the Swan Hills is focused on keeping a roof over their heads and food on the table.
Then, the Government of Canada decides to give the emir one of the peregrines as a diplomatic gift. It’s more than Bernie can stand. Impulsively, he takes the bird he has been tending–he’s named it Skyrider–and flees to a remote cabin in the Swan Hills wilderness.
The RCMP mount a search. Nasur, sent by his father to collect the bird, insists on being on the scene–which turns out to be both Rosie’s trapping territory and the territory of a hungry and dangerous mama grizzly bear with cubs.
The paths of the young people and the bear converge–and their coming together will send each in a new direction.
-
The Emperor’s Sofa
$16.95 -
The Empire
$24.95Explore a world on the edge of change through three epic stories spanning five hundred years of imagined history, unpacking systems of power and what we are capable of in the pursuit of freedom.
The story starts in The Philosopher’s Wife. Deep in the North, a philosopher exiled for promoting his atheist work amidst a bloody religious war yearns to ignite a revolution, but his personal life has collapsed into chaos. What begins as a desperate attempt to cure his wife’s animalistic behaviour erupts into a power struggle between the sexes, unleashing violent reckonings while the world outside hurtles towards an epoch-changing revolution.
Over twenty years later, The Scavenger’s Daughter examines the true face of empire as Northern forces continue to march against the South, “liberating” all who stand in their way. In a landscape blown apart by war, we follow Jack and Ash, orphan soldiers belonging to the Black Swan army, trying to survive the camp, toxic masculinity, and each other until they can be free. When Jack returns to camp, his freedom having been bought for him by a mysterious philosopher, he believes his new life is just around the corner. But as rations wear thin and the king seizes the opium trails, the camp is thrown into chaos, putting everything Jack and Ash have known—including Jack’s first love, Sarah—at risk.
Centuries later, in Four Sisters, we meet Sarah again as a woman and former Madam who has survived death, the toppling of regimes, and centuries of war. When a mysterious plague breaks out, she is forced to relocate to a quarantined zone called “The Skirts” with four young girls who were orphaned by the women she once employed. But when a strange doctor arrives and discovers the girls are plague-positive, Sarah must decide whether to go ahead with an experimental treatment or none at all. As time itself begins to erode, this found family of women must face loss, love, and their individual struggles for power in a violent world.
For fans of Game of Thrones, The Handmaid’s Tale, and The Mists of Avalon, The Empire is both foreign and shockingly familiar, leaving you asking, how did we get here, and where are we going?
-
The Employees
$20.00Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize and the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction, The Employees reshuffles a sci-fi voyage into a riotously original existential nightmare.
Funny and doom-drenched, The Employees chronicles the fate of the Six-Thousand Ship. The human and humanoid crew members alike complain about their daily tasks in a series of staff reports and memos. When the ship takes on a number of strange objects from the planet New Discovery, the crew become strangely and deeply attached to them, and start aching for the same things—warmth and intimacy, loved ones who have passed, shopping and child-rearing, and faraway Earth, which now only persists in memory—even as tensions boil toward mutiny, especially among the humanoids.
Olga Ravn’s prose is chilling, crackling, exhilarating, and foreboding. The Employees probes into what makes us human, while delivering a hilariously stinging critique of life governed by the logic of productivity.
-
The Empress Has No Closure
$16.95The Empress Has No Closure contains, as a centre-piece, the “Alefbet Transfers,” a meditative, spacial explication of the 22 figures of the Hebrew alphabet.
-
The Enchanted Loom
$19.95The Sri Lankan civil war has left many scars on Thangan and his family, most noticeably the loss of his eldest son and the crippling epileptic seizures brought on by his torture. As the final days of the war play out, the family bears witness from their new home of Toronto. Thangan’s other son Kanan comes home from a protest, shaken that someone referred to him by his brother’s name. His young daughter Kavitha innocently dances around with a mysterious pair of anklets that she found. And Thangan’s wife Sevi is consumed with feeling responsible for her broken family. Amidst the ongoing trauma, the family is faced with the possibility of Thangan undergoing neurological surgery. Will the surgery give them a chance to heal, or will it cause even more pain?
Presented in both English and Tamil, this poetic play is both medical and mystical, drawing a connection between trauma and memory that creates a stark reminder of loss, hope, family, and freedom.
-
The Encyclopedia of Lies
$20.00In these sixteen stories, Christopher Gudgeon, bestselling author of the critically acclaimed Song of Kosovo, takes a heartbreaking and hilarious look into the lives, loves, sexual obsessions and delusions that inform a grand cast of off-kilter characters.
Here is a gay couple who persevere with their marriage plans as the world, literally, crumbles around them, a woman who discovers the mysterious collection of letters that reveals a terrifying truth about her deceased fiancée, a dutiful son, locked in an life-or-death marathon race with his famous father, and a baby who becomes infested with fruit flies, sending his adoptive parents into a spiral of recrimination and self-doubt.
At once bitterly funny, provocative and poignant, this remarkable collection builds on Gudgeon’s growing literary reputation, offering up the work of a great storyteller at his very best.
“Gudgeon is . . . a major new talent in Canadian literature.” (The Quill and Quire on Greetings from the Vodka Sea)
“a remarkable first novel.” (The Victoria Times-Colonist on Song of Kosovo) -
The End Is in the Middle
$19.95Shortlisted, Nelson Ball Prize
Longlisted, Raymond Souster Award
Long-Shortlisted, ReLit Award (Poetry)Daring in form and unflinching in its gaze, Daniel Scott Tysdal’s latest poetry collection examines madness as lived experience and artistic method. Taking inspiration from Al Jaffee’s illustrated fold-ins in MAD magazine, Tysdal explores living with mental illness through a new kind of poetry: the fold-in poem.
In this innovative collection, each poem does not end at the bottom of the page; instead, the reader is invited to complete the poem by folding the page to reveal the final line. From the effects of being “smiled into an elephantine line” at Pearson International Airport to the rites of official memory and forgetting at a baseball game in the aftermath of tragedy, Tysdal probes both his own psyche and the myriad environments that work to enfold those who are deemed mad.