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 769–784 of 9481 results
-
Assertions of Likeness
$4.95Assertions of Likeness
-
Assi Manifesto
$20.95Translated from French by Howard Scott
Assi Manifesto is a celebration of the Innu land in the tradition of Joséphine Bacon. This telluric power is reminiscent of Paul Chamberland’s Terre Québec. Natasha Kanapé’s challenge is to name her land, but also to reconcile opposites.
In this collection of poetry, the author engages with the environment, colonialism, anxiety, anger, healing, solitude, and love. “Assi” in Innu means Land. Assi Manifesto is primarily a land of women. If the manifesto is a public space, Assi is a forum of life, a song for those who open their spirit to its mystery.
-
Assignment: Avalon
$19.99Can a young, shipwrecked space pilot, trapped on a backward planet where the only aircraft are biplanes, stop the rebirth of an evil interstellar empire?
Pilot First Class Melodan Castille of the Revolutionary Space Force has just graduated top of her class from the RSF Academy. She’s a good pilot and knows it: what she doesn’t know is why she’s out in the boondocks when her classmates are gearing up for the final assault on the Preceptorate’s headquarters on Earth that will end the century-old Revolution. By comparison, her assignment to scout the mysterious planet Avalon means nothing.
Nothing, that is, until her scoutcraft is shot out of space as she enters the system; nothing, until her lifeslip crashes in the middle of a local uprising; nothing, until she finds out that the “final” attack on Earth her classmates are making is really only a prelude to the long, bloody struggle that will come if the evil Preceptorate succeeds in its plans to make Avalon its last, secret stronghold.
Though mistrusted by the local freedom fighters who should be her allies and hunted by the planetary governor, Melodan must find a way to get a message to the Revolutionary Space Force — before it’s too late, for her, for Avalon, and for the galaxy’s hope for freedom and peace.
-
Assorted Candies for the Theatre
$15.95Assorted Candies for the Theatre is a stage adaptation of Michel Tremblay’s fourth book of autobiographical sketches, Bonbons Assortis / Assorted Candies, offering a rich and colourful cast of characters in this exquisite remembrance of childhood past in Montreal’s Plateau Mont-Royal neighbourhood. Much more than a mere adaptation of a prose memoir for the stage, in re-crafting his characters from the realm of thought and memory to the present action of the theatre, Tremblay generously reveals how it’s done. Here is the beginning of the narrator’s opening speech from the play:
Memory is a mirror that chooses what it wants to reflect. Memory is a mirror that distorts. And cheats. And lies. Memory can embellish things or make them ugly, it interprets as it sees fit and draws its own conclusions. And all too often our memory leads us down paths that our conscience would advise us to avoid, but those paths seem so promising and irresistible. Memory revives events that never happened and obliterates important facts, it emphasizes the most absurd trivia and chooses to forget essential details. In short, our memory fabricates a distorted image of the past, then imposes it as gospel truth when it’s really just a sketchy interpretation—but always more interesting, livelier and more vivid than reality. Memory is the mother of invention. And the big sister of imagination.
-
Astatine
$20.00Astatine is an Italian girl, who like Dante’s Beatrice, haunts the narrator of Michael Kenyon’s incandescent fourth book of poetry. Named after a radioactive element whose isotopes endure half-lives of mere seconds, she is simultaneously a disappearing and abiding presence who cajoles and comforts, who questions and points, who often leaves the poet puzzled, electrified, heart-broken, and wanting more. Astatine is Kenyon’s meditation on the evanescent and persevering tragedy of our lives on Earth. He takes us on an inspirational journey through time that embraces all we are born to and must too soon let go of, even as we make peace with the ever-changing fortunes of existence, even as we come upon unexpected joy.
Husband of a broken arm, take your time.
Joy is waiting. Joy is almost here.Look twice at the black dog with three legs.
You just saw a black dog with four legs.
– from “Orpheus XVI” -
Astonishment of Stars
$24.95A beautifully written short story collection that charts the lives of racialized women as they navigate their relationships, aspirations, and the burdens of memory and expectationsThis collection of finely wrought short stories explores the often invisible lives of racialized women as they walk through their days, navigating mundane microaggressions, trying on ill-fitting roles, and managing emotions they never allow others to see. There is the wife who uses the name of her white husband in public. There is the mother who cleans the small-town hospital while her daughter moves to the city and suppresses their shared past. There is the teen girl who obeys her parents even as she watches her rebellious older sister slip further and further away. Each of these characters is both familiar and singular, reminding us of women we have been, of our mothers and daughters, neighbors and adversaries.Like Alice Munro, Kirti Bhadresa is a keen observer of humanity, especially of the BIPOC women whose domestic and professional work is the backbone of late-stage capitalism but whose lives receive so little attention in mainstream culture. An Astonishment of Stars is a collection that sees those who are unseen and cuts to the heart of contemporary womanhood, community collisions, and relationships both chosen and forced upon us.
-
At Alberta
$20.00The talks collected in At Alberta have as their ironic coincidence: place. Spatially concurrent (they were all delivered in Edmonton) they deliberately thwart the systematic treatment of genre, translation, desire, and territorialisation through reiterated displacement, subterfuge and irritation. Stephens makes often uncomfortable ethical demands on the present, in order that it may accommodate the fluctuations necessary to make the languages in our mouths and the places from which we speak, more elusive, and paradoxically more inhabitable. Entre-genre, Nathanaël’s work strives toward an ethics of correspondence through a dismantling of the body’s relationship to the notion of place, the body’s own damningly elusive where. Distrustful of genre delineation, Nathanaël pursues her work away from the usual generic safeguards, preferring instead the unexpected that arises from the arguably disreputable and misunderstood place where various lines cross. At Alberta persues a new critical position in her delineation.
-
At Geronimo’s Grave
$18.00From soldiers parachuting into battle to children jumping from a swing, the name Geronimo echoes through time. But the reality of the great Apache warrior’s fate is little remembered. In At Geronimo’s Grave, award-winning poet Armand Garnet Ruffo uses Geronimo’s life as a metaphor for the lives of the many downtrodden and abandoned Indigenous people on this continent. With affection and concern, Ruffo considers the lives and experiences of those who struggle to make their way in a world that has no place for them. Once feared for his great prowess, Geronimo, the resistance fighter, was reduced to wearing a top hat and riding in an early Ford Model T car, a grim caricature of assimilation into the dominant culture. The bitter irony of this fate echoes through the personal poems in At Geronimo’s Grave. This collection is a love letter to a people trapped in the slow-moving vehicle of another culture that is taking them nowhere.
-
At Home
$29.95In this intimate investigation of the artistic process, Lezli Rubin-Kunda explores the nuanced path of creative work and the way artists make sense of home and place within their art practice and their lives. Rubin-Kunda is a multidisciplinary artist who examines these issues in her own work. But in this book, she expands her horizons, travelling across Canada to talk to more than fifty practicing artists, including Amalie Atkins, Aganetha Dyck, Francois Morelli, Simon Frank, and Sharon Alward, about their work, their creative process, and the place of “home": in their work.
What emerges from these thoughtful conversations are fascinating and unexpected orientations to place, ranging from deep connections to a specific childhood home, to more conscious adoptions of place, to somewhat fluid approaches in which the very concept of “home” seems to dissolve.
Moving from physical landscapes to the geography of memories and recorded histories, from territories of emotion to social environments that condition and contribute to the idea of home, Rubin-Kunda touches on indigenous approaches to ancestral homelands, the land as physical place and emotional territory, the historic role of women in creating and taking care of “home,” ideas of home disconnected from place, and liberating concepts of “homelessness.” Woven through these encounters with other artists are Rubin-Kunda’s reflections on her own artistic path.
Candid, empathetic, and insightful, At Home explores the creative process and the ways that artists find and create meaning within a fragmented contemporary landscape.
-
At Nanny’s House
$12.95There’s just no place quite like Nanny’s house. When you’re little, it’s a fascinating world of nooks, crannies, knick-knacks, and adventures around every corner. It’s hard not to be pokey… and nosey… and, well, downright messy. Before the day is through, eggs will break, paint will spill and the cat will be wearing a molasses hairdo. Here’s a fun peek in and around Nanny’s house, from the blissfully carefree perspective of an inquisitive and vivacious little girl. A humorous, gentle reminder of how much fun getting into mischief can be.
-
At Odds in the World
$25.95This volume brings together a series of scholarly essays that reflects the author’s career-long interest in writing by Jewish Canadian women, in particular work that is situated at the margins of literary and Jewish studies. Collectively the essays show a consistent engagement with issues of cultural identity, specifically how female Jewish identity is constructed in Canadian prose works that span the years 1956 to 2004. As the first book to focus exclusively on writing by Jewish Canadian women, this collection aims to deepen and broaden the scholarly canvas, to situate key representative works within a North American critical paradigm of Jewish literary studies. These essays, which include critiques of two widely known Jewish writers Miriam Waddington and Adele Wiseman, are also intended to introduce readers to lesser known writers: Helen Weinzweig, Fredelle Bruser Maynard and her daughter Joyce Maynard, Nora Gold, and Lilian Nattel. Each writer seeks to investigate the intersecting complexities of her identity as a Canadian, a Jew, and a woman and to critique prevailing notions, for example, of Canada as a country that embraces people of all faiths, of Judaism as open to female participation, and of Jewish women as submissive within marriage.
-
At the Crossroads
$27.95The U.S. auto industry has struck a brick wall. Can it get back on the road to recovery? At the Crossroads: Middle America and the Battle to Save the Car Industry argues that the Obama administration missed an historic opportunity in 2009 to launch a Manhattan Projectstyle effort to save not only Detroit, but the entire manufacturing base in Middle America.
Abe Aamidor and Ted Evanoff explain how Washington¹s intervention fell short and how it is holding back American economic recovery. The authors take a thoughtful look at the root causes behind the auto industry¹s crash, including disastrous labor contracts such as the 1950s¹ ³Treaty of Detroit,² which set the stage for crushing legacy costs; Wall Street¹s predatory financial practices ushered in under the Reagan administration; and a largely unregulated free trade regime that undermined the competitiveness of American manufacturing.
At the Crossroads tells the story of Detroit¹s collapse and a failed national industrial policy from the point of view of those most affected by it ? the factory workers, small business owners, and mayors of small manufacturing towns like Kokomo, Marion, and Bedford in Indiana, the number two auto manufacturing state after Michigan and the number one manufacturing state overall based on a percentage of population. Washington could debate the pros and cons of a national industrial policy and an auto industry bailout ad nauseum, but it was the people in small towns in Middle America who would live or die by the policy decisions of their distant national leaders.
-
At the Gates of the Theme Park
$16.95In Peter Norman’s exciting debut collection, the poet stands, awed and perhaps a tad scared, at the brink of a loud, swirling, thrilling world. Its mysteries and its upheavals spark amusement, sadness and occasionally anger. Whether navigating love and loss, facing the trauma of modern warfare or simply trying to pick up some bread at the supermarket, Norman Ñ already an accomplished writer with a broad arsenal of poetic forms and tones Ñ steps through the theme park’s gate and into its carnival whirlwind. Clear and plainspoken, these eclectic poems deliver pleasure, mystery and the unexpected.
-
At the Zenith of the Empire
$18.95In 1913, legendary tragedienne Sarah Bernhardt travelled to Edmonton, Alberta, to perform the last act of Alexandre Dumas’s The Lady of the Camellias before two packed houses at the Empire Theatre. Augmenting well-documented accounts of both the Bernhardt visit and the surprisingly active local live theatre scene during the pre-First World War years, At the Zenith of the Empire creates a swirling speculative scenario about the impact of a very special day in the lives of Edmonton’s earliest theatre-goers and theatre practitioners. The Divine Sarah herself narrates this sumptuous romp of reminiscence, in which she and her eccentric co-star Lou Tellegen become instantly embroiled in the lives of the people they’ve come to entertain. Playwright Stewart Lemoine combines drama with hilarity in a play that visits such local landmarks as Ada Boulevard, the Groat Ravine, newly annexed Strathcona, and the not-quite-completed High Level Bridge–all the while celebrating that most crucial component of the theatrical equation–the audience!
-
At this Juncture
$19.95Alarmed that Canada Post keeps losing money, Ariadne Jensen, a woman in her fifties, pitches the CEO with a scheme to save the corporation: she will get people to start writing and mailing letters again. As an inspiration to others, Ariadne writes bundles of letters for all to see; some are historical fiction, while others are drawn from her own correspondence. Each letter itself tells a story, while together they form a bigger story–about Ariadne, her determination to set wrongs right, her sly humour, and her loyalty to her best friend Leo, a gay man in his early twenties–that leaves the reader of At This Juncture informed, educated and, most importantly, entertained.
-
Atacama
$22.00Firmly rooted in historical events, Atacama tells the story of Manuel Garay, the son of a communist miner/union leader and an anarchist organizer of working-class women, and Lucía Céspedes, the daughter of a fascist army officer and a socialite. A fateful turn of events leads to twelve-year-old Lucía befriending twelve-year-old Manuel, inextricably connecting them to a common denominator: Lucía’s adoring father and the perpetrator of the heinous crimes that have caused both children immeasurable suffering. Manuel and Lucía forge a friendship that grows as they come of age and realize that their lives are not only linked by Ernesto Céspedes’ actions, but also by a deep understanding of the other’s emotional predicaments, their commitment to social justice and their belief in the power of writing and art. Set in the first half of the twentieth century, but resonating loudly with today’s changing times, beautifully crafted Atacama covers themes related to class, gender, trauma, survival and the role of art in society.