Your cart is currently empty!
A note to US-based customers: All Lit Up is pausing print orders to the USA until further notice. Read more
Showing 65–80 of 8929 results
This work of historical fiction deals with the occupation of Quebec by the Canadian Army and the massive imprisonment of French-speaking Canadian artists and trade unionists, based on the pretext of two political kidnappings.
In October 1970, 21 days was the legal limit, under the War Measures Act, during which the Canadian government could hold prisoners incommunicado without charging them or justifying their arrest. Gaetan is 16. He has quit school, works in a factory in Montreal?s Saint-Henri district, and finds himself embroiled in a political conflict. His good friend is arrested for taking part in a union meeting, his father, for speaking out too loudly about city elections held during the crisis. By chance, Gaetan meets Louise, a young college student who, although she is from a different background and is involved with radical friends, takes a keen interest in him. In this troubled period of Quebec?s and Canada?s history, young people are confronted with unrelenting factory work, unemployment, harsh police and military action, and imprisonment, but also, hope, political commitment and first love.
21 Journeys is a Shuster award nominated, 250-page anthology centered around the theme of travel. These stories take the reader to all points of the globe, from wartime Germany to modern Uganda, from the tip of the Matterhorn to deep beneath the Gulf Stream, from the other side of the world to just down the street. You meet students, soldiers, and scientists; businessmen, teachers, and priests; people from every imaginable profession, each following their own path.
Eighteen exhilarating journeys into Rush-inspired worlds
The music of Rush, one of the most successful bands in history, is filled with fantastic stories, evocative images, and thought-provoking futures and pasts. In this anthology, notable, bestselling, and award-winning writers each chose a Rush song as the spark for a new story, drawing inspiration from the visionary trio that is Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson, and Neil Peart.
Enduring stark dystopian struggles or testing the limits of the human spirit, the characters populating 2113 find strength while searching for hope in a world that is repressive, dangerous, or just debilitatingly bland. Most of these tales are science fiction, but some are fantasies, thrillers, even edgy mainstream. Many of Rush’s big hits are represented, as well as deeper cuts . . . with wonderful results. This anthology also includes the seminal stories that inspired the Rush classics “Red Barchetta” and “Roll the Bones,” as well as Kevin J. Anderson’s novella sequel to the groundbreaking Rush album 2112.
2113 contains stories by New York Times bestselling authors Kevin J. Anderson, Michael Z. Williamson, David Mack, David Farland, Dayton Ward, and Mercedes Lackey; award winners Fritz Leiber, Steven Savile, Brad R. Torgersen, Ron Collins, David Niall Wilson, and Brian Hodge, as well as many other authors with imaginations on fire.
Richard Harrison’s The Hero of the Play has been in print continuously for twenty-five years, with a tenth anniversary edition released in 2004. 25 is a celebration of this fact, as well as a meditation on twenty-five years of hockey poetry. This collection is a cataloguing of the way the game has woven itself into the life of the Governor General’s Award–winning poet, from childhood to fatherhood to death. It is a reflection on how the game has become such a large part of Canadian identity, shifting and changing with the times. In 25 Harrison captures the grace of the player in fluid lines, sketches the arc of the play and delivers the myth of the frozen pond to our human reality.
A CBC Best Book of 2019
A crackling debut, 26 Knots starts with a fire and never stops smouldering.
Grand in scope, spare in execution, and lush in language, 26 Knots is a fable-like tale of love, obsession, and everything in between. Araceli loves Adrien. Adrien loves Pénélope. Pénélope marries Gabriel, who is tormented by the search for the father he never knew. Set in Montreal, but spiralling out across Canada, Bindu Suresh’s debut novel deftly reveals the devastating consequences of betrayal and commitment, of grief and hope.
“Such a good read. Fast. And rich and dark and passionate. SO MANY FEELS.”—Jael Richardson, CBC Radio’s Q Book Columnist
“One of the most striking Canadian literary debuts of the year.”—Montreal Gazette
A grappling with time, form and embodiment.
Recite your poem to your aunt.
I threw myself to the ground.
Where were you in the night?
In a school among the pines.
What was the meaning of the dream?
Organs, hormones, toxins, lesions: what is a body? In 3 Summers, Lisa Robertson takes up her earlier concerns with form and literary precedent, and turns toward the timeliness of embodiment. What is form’s time? Here the form of life called a poem speaks with the body’s mortality, its thickness, its play. The ten poem-sequences in 3 Summers inflect a history of textual voices – Lucretius, Marx, Aby Warburg, Deleuze, the Sogdian Sutras – in a lyricism that insists on analysis and revolt, as well as the pleasures of description. The poet explores the mysterious oddness of the body, its languor and persistence, to test how it shapes the materiality of thinking, which includes rivers and forests. But in these poems’ landscapes, the time of nature is inherently political. Now only time is wild, and only time – embodied here in Lisa Robertson’s forceful cadences – can tell.
‘Robertson proves hard to explain but easy to enjoy … Dauntlessly and resourcefully intellectual, Robertson can also be playful or blunt … She wields language expertly, even beautifully.’
—The New York Times
‘Robertson makes intellect seductive; only her poetry could turn swooning into a critical gesture.’
—The Village Voice
Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain could not have envisioned what his death would mean to Generation X — or that he would influence one young man from small-town Quebec to take his own life…
3,000 Miles is the story of Andre, a man entering his twenties with very little going for him. The only stabilizing influence in his life is music, but the news of Kurt Cobain’s suicide finally pushes him over the edge. He leaves town and joins his friends Richard and Stephane in Quebec City to sell drugs. Eventually, the reserves of his self-centred nihilism run dry, and this prompts him to devise a plan: the trio will embark on a journey across North America. When they reach the end—Seattle—they’ll sacrifice themselves.
Andre’s problem, of course, is convincing his friends to join him, but they decide to call his bluff. Their own young lives are in constant turmoil, and a road trip seems like the perfect distraction. But things quickly move from bad to worse when Andre’s spurned girlfriend, Sylvie, makes her own cross-country journey in a last-ditch attempt to prove her love.
If Kerouac’s On The Road mapped the landscape of a new America, 3,000 Miles explores its ultimate dead end.
Winner, AIGA 50 Books | 50 Covers and Alcuin Society Book Design Awards Second Prize (Prose Illustrated)
A National Bestseller
The legacies of theaters, hotels, fire stations, flour mills, and more — torn down, burned down, and otherwise lost — are uncovered in this bittersweet collection. Using archival photographs, blueprints, and written reports, Raymond Biesinger has rendered a selection of Canada’s most iconic lost buildings in his signature minimalist style.
Accompanying Biesinger’s illustrations are Alex Bozikovic’s descriptions which capture each building’s historical, cultural, and architectural significance. Bozikovic draws on local histories, archived building permits and his own extensive knowledge of the Canadian urban architectural landscape and its history — from the letters passed through Kelowna’s unlikely art deco post office to the destruction of a home in Halifax’s Africville — to offer fascinating, sometimes forgotten stories about each building and its significance.
An impossible architectural walking tour, 305 Lost Buildings of Canada spans the country, its cities and countryside, and its history. Cities change, buildings come and go, but in this fact-filed compendium, you’ll find the lost wonders of Canada’s architecture.
Honourable Mention in Quill & Quire’s “Best Books of 1996” This unconventional biography of the woman who wrote Jalna and other chronicles of the Whiteoak family, approaches her life from multiple angles, including an interview with an old neighbour of the subject; critical commentary on her texts; photographs; conversations with the last living relatives of Mazo and her cousin, Caroline Clement; and a chronology and bibliography. This book draws on the research of earlier biographers, but Daniel Bratton broadens the scope of the discussion to include new areas of investigation. Besides archival research, he has reinterviewed subjects interviewed by previous biographers, and tracked down previously withheld information. He has also explored, as no one else has done, the geographical settings of Mazo’s life and fictions, looking at them from a new perspective. The real strength of this book, however, which gives it an importance beyond de la Roche studies and Canadian literature, is its innovative format. Bratton’s approach will recommend the book to those interested in the theory and practice of biography. It can be read as a book about life-writing, as well as a writing of the life of Mazo de la Roche.
If small-town reporter Polly Stern has to cover one more manure runoff story, she’s going to lose her already unmindful mind. Polly thought she’d end up as a serious photojournalist, traveling the world, meeting important people, and documenting significant environmental and social events. Life didn’t turn out as expected. With her career at a standstill, her marriage over, her nest empty, her spiritual foundation precarious, and her family keeping a vital secret from her, Polly is desperate for answers. And change. She sets out on an unintended journey, stumbling upon story after story that for some reason—coincidence, fate?—all occurred in 1937. Polly’s path leads her to: a troubled teen on a stone bridge high in the Green Mountains of Vermont, a political refugee on a kosher farm carved out of the Dominican Republic jungle, a tribal chief near a remote hut in uncharted Papua New Guinea, a volunteer soldier in a foggy olive grove in Spain, an artistic Italian savant in a tenement on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and to a Tibetan boy and his snow-white mastiff as they begin their trek across the Himalayas. As the lines blur between reality and fantasy, between truth and fiction, between present and past, Polly writes about these inspiring characters, and others, in nine short stories—all set in 1937—embedded throughout the novel. Her compelling international literary voyage reveals clues that allow Polly to uncover the truth about her own history, opening a new path for understanding, forgiveness, and love.
The Dokic family, like any other, has its problems. Brothers Clint and Darryl are constantly at odds and just similar enough not to cut each other any slack or let past feuds slide. Darryl sees real-estate salesman Clint as a slick boor, overly fond of himself and his achievements. Clint sees Darryl as an over-educated under-achiever, who flaunts his smarts to belittle others. Their mother, Meg, referees their sniping with more knowledge than either of them imagines.
400 Kilometres is the third play in Drew Hayden Taylor’s hilarious and heart-wrenching identity-politics trilogy. Janice Wirth, a thirty-something urban professional, having discovered her roots as the Ojibway orphan Grace Wabung in Someday, and having visited her birth family on the Otter Lake Reserve in Only Drunks and Children Tell the Truth, is pregnant, and must now come to grips with the question of her “true identity.” Her adoptive parents have just retired, and are about to sell their house to embark on a quest for their own identity by “returning” to England. Meanwhile, the Native father of her child-to-be is attempting to convince Janice/Grace that their new generation’s future lies with their “own people” at Otter Lake.
Which path for the future is Janice/Grace to choose, for herself, her families and her child, having spent a lifetime caught between the questions of “what I am” and “who I am”?
Cast of 3 women and 2 men.
50 Greatest Red Wings