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 9481 results
-
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.
-
The Theories of Fish
$3.95An early collection from a widely published poet featuring sometimes ironic poems on subjects ranging from haunted houses to lycanthropy to a tongue-in-cheek poem about editors.
-
The Theory of the Loser Class
$16.95We are all entitled to our own hyperbole,
especially you.Montreal has made a fool of me
for the second last time.I’m not suggesting we’re all losers
I’m insisting upon it.In the early nineties, Beck sang ‘I’m a loser, baby, so why don’t you kill me?’ and changed everything. Suddenly, it wasn’t so bad to be a nerd or an oddball; loser chic had begun.
Ten years later, after all the computer nerds have had the last laugh, Jon Paul Fiorentino turns to Thorstein Veblen’s seminal social science text from 1899, The Theory of the Leisure Class. Veblen’s book introduced to our culture the terms ‘conspicuous consumption’ and ‘nouveau riche’; it identified a new demographic, the leisure class, and demarcated its position in culture. The Theory of the Loser Class, then, is an art manifesto for the aesthetics and ethics of loser culture.
If the Anthony Michael Hall character in The Breakfast Club wrote poems (and, deep down, you know that he did), they’d probably read a lot like The Theory of the Loser Class. Drawing on texts ranging from Thorstein Veblen’s groundbreaking The Theory of the Leisure Class to Star Wars (the nerd Bible) for inspiration, this carefully crafted suite of poems documents the tribulations and insecurities of everyone’s inner geek. Fiorentino maps the psychic territory of abjection across the shopworn spaces of suburban Winnipeg, where a landscape of aging strip malls, burned-out houses and living rooms littered with video-game consoles serves as a mirror to the inner states of urban ennui among the socially inept and the culturally vexed.
By turns compassionate, funny and filled with selfloathing, The Theory of the Loser Class is never without the possibility of redemption; ‘And if a loser falls,’ says the narrator of ‘Right in the Spine,’ ‘I feel it.’ The Theory of the Loser Class is the perfect soundtrack for the alienated and the hopeless.
‘[Fiorentino’s The Theory of the Loser Class is] a glamously designed, serious, wrenching tour de force of intellectual stamina and his signature brand of lyrical self-torture.’
– Hour
‘Fiorentino is smart and deft.’
– Globe and Mail
-
The Thickness of Ice
$27.95The Thickness of Ice is a tender and tragic tale set in the remote sub-arctic tundra, in the small town of Churchill with a transient population on Hudson Bay. The barren icy landscape pervades the characters’ lives and relationships. As the novel opens Wade confesses that he was responsible for the death of his best friend Jack, out on the tundra, three years after meeting him. They had been arguing about a Dene woman, Tess, they were both in love with. Jack’s body was never found, and Wade never admitted to the act. It was assumed that Jack had left abruptly. However, many years later, Wade meets Esther who moves to Churchill to live with him. She hears the story of Jack’s disappearance. For Wade’s sake, she determines to resolve what happened to Jack and bring some closure. For Wade, everything is now threatened.
-
The Things I Came Here With
$22.95“Does it hurt?” When you’re a tattoo artist, that’s the most universal question. For Chris MacDonald, the answer is simple: hurts less than a broken heart. Those words are painted above the entrance to his shop, Under My Thumb Tattoos, as a reminder.Chris and his brothers were as wild as the wind, in their house among the fields of Alliston, Ontario, when their parents divorced. Shell-shocked, they were uprooted and brought to Toronto by their dad. Their mother’s mental illness worsened in the aftermath, and she disappeared. As a teenager, Chris left home and found himself immersed in the city’s underbelly, a world where drugs, skateboarding, and punk rock reigned. Between the youth shelters, suicidal thoughts, and haunted apartments, a light shined: and it was art.He eventually found himself following the path of his brother, Rob, and pursuing life as a tattooist. Then, at the height of a destructive summer, everything changed: he met Megan, the girl who would become his rock of ages.This remarkable memoir examines what tattooing means to MacDonald and traces the connection his artistic motives have to both his family and childhood. The Things I Came Here With is about how crucial our past is to understanding our future, but it’s also a love letter to his daughter about the importance of expression, life’s uncertainty, and beauty.
-
The Things She’ll Be Leaving Behind
$19.95The stories in Farnsworth’s The Things She’ll Be Leaving Behind explore what it means to be a woman in the modern world, struggling against circumstances that are often unfair, inexplicable, and destructive. The women in this book don’t always behave in ways that are sensible or advisable or, for that matter, likely to result in success, but there’s a warped logic to what they do and the reasons they do it are intrinsically human. These women have nothing in common except that they all find themselves trying to find their footings, preserve their sanity, and just generally survive in circumstances they never thought they would encounter. They don’t always do it gracefully. Occasionally alcohol or firearms are involved. Just like in real life.
The twenty-eight stories in the collection vary in length, intensity and impact. The short pieces that fluctuate between flash fiction and apologue are interspersed with events where women explore how to pick up a man, with more surreal episodes that deconstruct office reality, or even experimenting with rainfall with God and the devil. The longer stories in The Things She’ll Be Leaving Behind stray into the deep and dark territories of women’s suffering, guilt, and survival. In these tales, anxiety, restlessness and volatility are tapped like raw nerves, and the dangers and menace of events only mitigated by Farnsworth’s savvy use of black comedy and irony. Here women go toe-to-toe with chronic liars, dead grandfathers, beleaguered sons, mysterious voices, unfaithful husbands, midnight callers, spiteful sisters, and hallucinated clowns. Husbands go crazy or wayward or missing. Life hits walls and somersaults and does breathless, tactless things. The end result is fascinating inventive fiction.
-
The Third Best Hull
$19.95A much-loved memoir now back in print
Hockey legend Gordie Howe once said there were two superstars in the Hull family: Bobby, the Golden Jet and one of the greatest players ever to tie up a pair of skates, and his brother Dennis, who had a solid career with the Chicago Blackhawks, and is now one of the most sought-after public speakers in North America.
In The Third Best Hull, Dennis Hull outlines his life in hockey with humorous anecdotes, insights, and stories. Not just another sports autobiography, this book provides insight into the life of a hockey star without taking itself too seriously. You’ll find out about the time Hull taught Guy Lafleur to speak English; how he once won a coin toss worth $250,000; and about his ongoing rivalry with Henri Richard, the younger brother of the legendary Canadiens great Maurice Richard. Along the way, Dennis gives the reader an account of the famed 1972 Russia–Canada series and speaks with stunning candour about his brother, Bobby, his nephew and St. Louis Blues’ star Brett Hull, and hockey legends like Howe, Ken Dryden, and Bobby Orr.
The Third Best Hull was originally released in 1998. This edition includes new photos and brings the Hull family story up to date.
-
The Third Colour
$15.95The Third Colour features two ancient spirits who have been reborn repeatedly. With each rebirth, the two must relearn everything, from their own names to basic vocabulary. They must also relearn, and relate to each other through allegorical tales, the history of the land where they find themselves. And this time, the spirits are reborn as two Indigenous women, Agatu and Head Full of Lice, who are forced to revisit the history of Indigenous-settler relations in Canada. Ian Ross employs humour, anger, and a finely-honed sense of the absurd to tackle the colonialism, trauma, and the disconnect between settlers and Indigenous peoples. How do we bridge the two worlds? Or should we? Is it better, Head Full of Lice asks, to burn it all down and start fresh? Or can we, as Agatu hopes, reconcile?
-
The Third Person
$20.00Two’s company, three’s a crowd–and sometimes it’s more than that.
In The Third Person, a collection of uncanny short stories by Emily Anglin, a sequence of tense professional and personal negotiations between two people is complicated when a third person arrives. Within these triangulated microworlds, disorienting gaps open up between words and reality: employees dissolve from job titles, neighbours overstep comfortable boundaries, voices distanced by space or time make their presence felt. Uneasiness builds among these separate but entangled lives.
Anglin’s darkly humorous stories contemplate situations in which characters refashion themselves to fit a new competitive milieu. The Third Person reveals how people can become complicit in these milieus, even desire them, often while being led into the loneliness they can instil.