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 8193–8208 of 9492 results
-
The Tablecloth Trick
$16.95An unrequited love story? Possibly. (Probably?) A suicide note? Perhaps.
The Tablecloth Trick’s unnamed narrator recalls a childhood spent with Caroline — always Caroline — the centre of his universe, delving into books (hundreds of them) at a Winnipeg library and sharing an extraordinary friendship and a recondite sense of wonderment in scientific and ontological inquiry. Until one day Caroline opens her school locker and finds a MASH note from an astronaut — that is, she discovers other boys.
When she leaves for university, memories of Caroline are put in a closet; he starts working at Estella’s Pie in the Sky Bakery. His search for illumination continues in a lonely, insular world of reading and acutely imagined juxtaposition — of disease and art; of Catholic mythology and the female body.
Now, years later, after rediscovering Caroline at St. Boniface Hospital, the narrator is compelled by old emotions to return to the phantasmagorical thoughts of his childhood — to imagine two of them together, the life he was never meant to live.
Collecting linguistic oddities, scraps of images, bits of text, and hybridized references, Rick Crilly cuts-up and collages, disassembles and recreates an anatomical mystery where a blank page becomes a meditation on grief, and a crossed out word is a librarian’s scalpel. The Tablecloth Trick whips away the artifice between Fiction and fact (that’s Fiction with a capital F — because Plato loved capital letters, after all) to see what, if anything, is left standing.
-
The Tale of Don L’Orignal
$16.95Winner of the 1979 Governor General’s Award for fiction, Antonine Maillet’s virtuoso creation, The Tale of Don L’Orignal, is now back in print. Maillet’s tale begins one day, not so very long ago but back in the youth of the world, when a hay-covered island materialized off shore, an island populated by fleas who soon took human form. The leader of this uncouth crew of have-nots, Don l’Orignal, wore a moose-antler crown as his badge of office. At his right hand were his brave lieutenants: his son, Noume, and his general, Michel-Archange. The general’s wife, the doughty charwoman, spy, and rabble-rouser La Sagouine, had one finger in every pie and one raised to her neighbour, La Sainte.
The Flea Islanders were constantly at odds with the almost as clever but far more civilized upper crust of the mainland village: the mayoress, the schoolteacher, the merchant, the banker. When they invaded and tried to steal a keg of molasses, the outcome of the mock-heroic battle was unclear, except that La Sainte’s son, the hapless young Citrouille, and Adeline, the merchant’s lovely daughter, had fallen in love.
With the insider’s accumulation of oral history, gossip, and shrewd hindsight, Antonine Maillet has conjured up a fictional Acadia that her ancestors would relish. Perhaps those who could read it would have even understood it: she wrote Don l’Orignal in a version of 16th-century domestic French that she adapted for modern readers. In this far-fetched, but always entertaining fable, Maillet holds up a mirror to Acadian history and to an all too fallible human nature.
-
The Tale of Teeka
$15.95Rural Quebec in the fifties. A battered child, Maurice, has taken refuge in a fantasy world. Alone on the farm one afternoon, he invites his pet goose, Teeka, into the house where his bedroom and the bathroom become the scene of some of Tarzan’s most terrifying adventures. His parents unexpected return forces Maurice to commit a desperate and cruel act of violence.
The original production of L’Histoire de l’Oie, toured by Théâtre des Deux Mondes in French, English, German and spanish, represented Canada at numerous international festivals and garnered rave reviews and several prizes in Dublin, Glasgow, Hong Kong, Limoges, London, Mexico City, Munich, Toronto, and at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York.
Adapted for television by the playwright and directed by Tim Southam, L’Histoire de l’Oie / The Tale of Teeka was broadcast in French and English on the CBC / Radio Canada National Networks in the spring of 1999. The production won the Banff Television Festival Telefilm Canada Award for Best Canadian English-Language Production.
-
The Tale-Teller
$21.95The year is 1738. Jacques Lafargue, a wide-eyed young Frenchman, arrives in New France aboard the Saint Michel. But before his Canadian adventure has a chance to begin, he is detained at Quebec harbour by suspicious port officials. Their distrust proves warranted: instead of a young man named Jacques Lafargue their captive turns out to be a young woman named Esther Brandeau, and instead of answers to their questions about who she is and where she came from, they are given tales of castaways raised by apes, of blind lovelorn sailors and merciless pirates, of runaway slaves and kindly desert nomads, and of other curiosities in a limitless world.
Few suspect the truth: Esther is a Jew, which by law prohibits her from entering New France, and she is using her tale-telling to escape the restrictions placed upon her race and gender. And no one – not even Esther herself – realizes the power her stories have to open their hearts and minds to old dreams and new possibilities.
The Tale-Teller is a marvel. Susan Glickman takes readers on a journey of discovery – starting with the fascinating true story of an obscure historical figure, and continuing through an intimate and richly-detailed portrait of Canadian colonial society, guided always by a map of wonders – to reveal timeless truths.
-
The Tangled Miracle
$21.95A first-rate thriller from one of Canada’s pioneer abstract painters.
A cult leader announces a miracle will take place and she will rise to heaven. A medium prophesies the date, publicity gets to work, and all of America hums with anticipation. On the appointed day, she disappears and scientist Mortimer Hood, there to verify the miracle, must investigate how—and whether—the whole thing is a hoax, or if the priestess has been murdered.
Originally published in 1936, this edition features a new introduction by poet and academic Gregory Betts.
-
The Tartarus House on Crab
$19.95Jack Tartarus, a photographer, has returned to his family’s house on Crab, an island off the east coast of Vancouver Island. After mulling it over for ten years, Jack has decided to tear his family’s house down, board-by-board, just as his father built it up. He purchases a wrecking bar. Struggling with the first piece of siding, his wrecking bar jammed between ancient planks, it seems the house is determined to remain. The people on Crab Island are also angrily opposed to his plan—including his responsible sister, his self-centered niece, a beautiful woman he knew intimately long ago, and Turtle, the hardware store clerk and the island’s self-proclaimed guardian.
In a story about families and family history, Jack’s calculated plans for demolition are fired by the memory of his parents and the other losses he has felt. Like the others who have retreated to Crab Island, Jack has come to a place where he must make peace with the house, in order to construct his future.
-
The Taste of Ashes
$24.95Isabel Lee’s early life in rural BC was forever changed by a brief but powerful love affair with a young Oblate priest. Now a recovering alcoholic, Isabel struggles to pull the tattered fragments of her life together and repair the damage to her relationship with her estranged daughter. Once idealistic and hopeful, Father Alvaro Ruiz now has his own demons to confront. Brutally tortured at the hands of the Guatemalan authorities and unable to escape from the wounds of his past, Alvaro returns to Canada seeking sanctuary, a broken man with a tenuous grip on his faith in God and humanity. Isabel and Alvaro’s stories slowly weave together and they are eventually faced with their greatest challenge yet: can they carry on in the wake of the damage and bring themselves to forgive? Compelling and disturbing, but ultimately hopeful, this is the story of how we find grace in the most unexpected places.
-
The Taste of Penny
$12.00
Jeff Parker’s characters stumble awkwardly into situations that reveal the darkest sides of themselves: Encountering a female Chechen suicide bomber on a bus ride in Russia, a man finds himself sexually aroused by the terrorist act he’s sure she’ll commit. A father reluctantly accompanies his draft dodger son to Quebec where he erects an enormous and obscene American flag in his front yard. A character who accidentally swallows a penny during a roadside sobriety test finds himself in a state of existential angst when it stays inside him. The characters in these fifteen voice-driven, comic stories show the trammelled among us, beaten down time and time again, still finding cause in the world for hope. -
The Teller from the Tale
$22.00In The Teller from the Tale, award winning author Ven Begamudré spins three stories in a masterful blend of myth and realism. In “Amar’s Gift,” a magical sculptor observes a princess, though it is forbidden for commoners to do so, and is determined to marry her. A father narrates a story called “Rainbow Knights” to his children every evening. Seven knights and their sister are offered to a fisherman and his wife, who have lost their only son to the god of the sea. The family travels to a bleak island cursed by a sorceress on their quest to rescue their missing child. “Sushila Is at Home,” is a mystical, powerful tale about a bio-mathematician who ponders the choices she has made in her life since leaving India for North America, as the gods lounge on her sofa and provide commentary. Part two is the delightful re-telling of an Indian folktale, about a young widow who tricks the God of the Dead into returning her husband.
-
The Tempest
$18.95Bearing witness to truth, The Tempest is invested in poetry that attempts to reveal human pain through the art of words. Each poem is powerful, but the book’s strength emerges from its collective voice: different political conflicts, cultures, genders, ages, racesone shared human narrative. As we follow these survivors into their past and present lives we learn that poetry was the gift that restored.
The book’s wanderings in and out of formserasure poetry, free verse, prose poetry, haiku, tanka, haibunsignal its approach to some important preoccupations. The collection includes tales of love and ragefrom displacement and homecoming, Budapest and its lilac hills above the Danube, where bombs fall, where at a train station cattle wagons wait for Jews to be deported to Auschwitz, where her family lives in Pirka, a Bavarian war refugee settlement to immigrating to Montreal’s ice and snow, founding a family, fleeing an abusive marriage, and becoming an activist and taking a stand against domestic violence.
Like the figure she describes in her ekphrastic poem “Clotho” as “Ensnared in long tentacles of hair, skeletal, toothless, chiseled in white marble…” Martonfi’s The Tempest has hewn her own spare lines to recast her book’s obsession with the politics, violences, and musics of the oral.
-
The Tenants
$18.00Winner of the 45th annual 3-Day Novel Contest
In the city of Vancouver, even dirt costs. In The Tenants, three of its residents are struggling with their homes – whether that’s grappling with real estate prices, simmering resentments, or an uneasy co-living arrangement with the local wildlife.
Scott and Dave are an odd couple. Scott is single-minded in his goal of buying a house, leading to too-long work hours and an oppressive budgeting system. Dave hides artisanal beard products in the trunk of his car and tries to prioritize his comfort in the rental he’s happily lived in for years. For Maeve, their new “neighbour” in the tweed suit, her goals are much more simple: safety, shelter, and attempting to live peacefully with the local raccoons.
For all the things these folks lack – communication, shared goals, a home address – their differing motivations form an uneasy picture of the reality of living among a city that is inhospitable to many of its citizens. Stark, observational, darkly comic, and deeply human, The Tenants is a view inside the homes of some of Vancouver’s most vulnerable inhabitants as their lives intersect and diverge atop its shifting soil.
-
The Tender Birds
$22.95Winner of the 2020 IPPY Silver Medal for Literary Fiction; Winner, 2020 The Miramichi Reader’s “Very Best” Book Awards for Fiction
Matthew Reilly is a busy academic, a lonely priest haunted by secrets. Young Alison is the shy and devoted keeper of Daisy, a falcon which suffered an accident and can no longer fly. The three of them meet in a Boston parish, but Matt has forgotten a momentary but disturbing meetup with Alison, homeless eight years earlier in Toronto. Close to exhaustion, he’s forced to reflect on what’s become of his life, including the loss of a son that no one knew he’d fathered. Alison and Matt had a fateful encounter during her homeless period, but Matt doesn’t connect that frail teenager with the healthy young woman she’d become. It’s left to Alison to uncover Matt’s past and for Matt to come to terms with it.
-
The Tenderness and the Wood
$20.00The Tenderness and the Wood traverses cities, continents, and centuries searching for elusive swallows, symbolic of angels. It is a search for pre-religious purity in lyricism, resisting any sort of paraphrase or story that might later lead to easy codification. The result is an existential and agnostic gospel wherein redemption emerges as the transformative beauty of language itself
-
The Terracotta Army
$14.95In 1985, Gary Geddes won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, Americas Region, for The Terracotta Army, a brilliant sequence of his Chinese sonnets. The nine-couplet poems were inspired by his 1981 visit to the archaeological site in China where more than 8,000 individually sculpted, life-sized soldiers and horses were interred in the third century to accompany Emperor Ch’in Shi Huang Di into the afterlife.
In this ideologically charged volume, Geddes gives voice to a few soldiers, who engage in myriad debates about the abuse of power, the yin-yang dance of narrative and silence, and the sanctity of the idiosyncratic self in the face of conformity.
This new edition of The Terracotta Army, published to coincide with the Canadian tour of The Warrior Emperor and China’s Terracotta Army, opening at the ROM in late June 2010, pairs Geddes’ poems with photographs of the terracotta soldiers.
-
The Terrible Fours
$24.95The Terrible Fours
-
The Terror of the Coast
$29.95On April 20, 1863, the British naval gunboat Forward attacked a Native village on Kuper Island. The naval officers believed that the village harboured individuals involved in two recent assaults against European transients in the Gulf Islands. The gunboat fired on the village and was repulsed with casualties after a fierce battle with a handful of warriors. Following this defeat, the colonial government responded with one of the largest military operations in the history of British Columbia, which took place on the east coast of Vancouver Island and extended throughout the waters and islands of Active Pass, Trincomalee Channel and Stuart Channel, from Saturna Island north to Comox.
Previously ignored or misunderstood by historians, the war between the Hwulmuhw or “People of the Land” and the colonial government of British Columbia remains of utmost significance in today’s world of unsettled First Nations land claims. Chris Arnett reconstructs the fascinating account of the events of 1863 using newspaper editorials, letters and articles; government and police correspondence; naval ship logs; and “Letters of Proceedings.” He demonstrates how the first treaty process initiated by the colonial government ended in military action. After the war of 1863, Aboriginal land continued to be alienated and Native jurisdiction eroded throughout British Columbia—leaving an inequity that remains unresolved almost a century and a half later.