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 8561–8576 of 9481 results
-
To the Barricades
$19.95In To the Barricades we move back and forth between historical and contemporary scenes of revolt, from nineteenth-century Parisian street barricades to twenty-first-century occupations and street marches, shifting along the active seam between poetry and revolution. At once elegy (poems dedicated “to” past revolutionary figures and scenes) and a call for renewed struggle in the here and now, this collection of “social lyrics” and serial explosions seeks to drive apathy from the field and to recover forgotten “radical ideas” amidst our current “amnesiac condition.” Avant-garde technique is donated to lyric ends (the expression of social affects), as Arthur Rimbaud presides and the commune is reconvened in Vancouver’s streets.
To the Barricades continues Collis’s “life” poem, “The Barricades Project,” which also includes Anarchive (2005) and The Commons (2008). Both the anti-archive of the revolutionary record and the dream of a once and future “commons” upon which all can equally dwell continue to shape these poems where words are hurried bricks thrown up as “barricades” in language.
“Dear effects of / tireless treason / the social only / shuffles if you / move your feet / we’ve learned this / in a place invaders / called Vancouver / even if we are only / a few and even if / it rains on the day / of the demo”
-
To the Edge of the Sea
$19.95Alex was in harmony with the water. He taught himself to swim, and liked working the sea off Prince Edward Island as his fisherman father did, but he always yearned for something more. His brother Reggie despised it all – the water that brought death, the seasickness, and he needed to breathe the air of farms. Reggie yearned for escape. Mercy Coles lived on the same island as Alex and Reggie, but lived in Charlottetown’s society and yearned for experience.
All three would get their wish, but coincidence would shape those wishes in profound ways. Alex would find himself on a circus trapeze fated to meet the Niagara Falls tightrope artist, Farini. Alex would join the farmers’ protests against the tax collectors, and battle the demons of guilt in the supposed death of his brother. Mercy would find herself landlocked on John A. Macdonald’s hard-drinking and dancing campaign to sell confederation statutes, attracted to his power while thinking him the ugliest man in Canada.
Anne McDonald weaves a series of spells that pull this beautifully written novel through a tightly woven script. Rich in tone and textured for a very rewarding reading experience, To the Edge of the Sea combines great storytelling with polished literary control.
Buy an eBook version of this book at Kobo, Amazon Kindle Store, or your favourite eBook store -
To the Forest
$23.95CBC BOOKS WORKS OF CANADIAN FICTION TO READ IN THE FIRST HALF OF 2023
49th SHELF EDITORS’ PICK FOR JUNE 2023
When a family is forced to return to the mother’s childhood home, she seeks meaning in her ancestral roots and the violent beauty of the natural world.
Fleeing the city at the beginning of the pandemic, two families are cramped together in a small century-old country house. Winter seeps through the walls, the wallpaper is peeling, and mice make their nest in the piano. Without phones or internet, they turn to the outdoors, where a new language unfolds, a language of fireflies and clover. The five children explore nature and its treasures, while our narrator, Anaïs, turns to the eccentric neighbours and her own family history to find peace and meaning in the middle of her life.
To the Forest is a field guide to a quieter life, a call to return to the places where we can reweave the threads of memory, where existence waltzes with death, where we can recapture what it means to be alive.
-
To the Men Who Write Goodbye Letters
$18.95The poems in The Men Who Write Good-bye Letters deal with death and our relationship with time, making sense of the choices made when we “end” things, or when things end without our permission, whether it be the end of a life, the end of a romance, or the result of an unexpected tragedy. These poems are a poet’s observation and reflection on the reasons for loss and endings, for survival and redemption, and an exploration of the poetry in the choices made. The collection also examines lives searching for clarity and value, ultimately leading to self-discovery and self-affirmation.
-
To This Cedar Fountain
$17.95Emily Carr recorded the experience of the West Coast soul in her living landscapes and her portraits of BC’s towering firs. Kate Braid, in To This Cedar Fountain, engages Carr in conversation as only a kindred spirit could: a West Coaster, an artist, a woman with an affinity for timber. In these poems Carr’s sensual paintings envelop Braid; Emily romances the trees while Kate bears witness.
To This Cedar Fountain is a dialogue between two BC legends, each a distinct voice for her own generation but both indisputably coastal souls. The first edition of this book was nominated for a Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize.
-
To Those Who Killed Me
$21.95Disgraced ex-cop Sloane Donovan has relied on her job as a fitness instructor to keep her mental illness and PTSD in check–until she finds a close friend dead, apparently by her own hand. Obsessive demons triggered and doubtful of the official narrative, she teams up with Wayne Capson, a PI willing to bend the law, to find out who really killed her friend. The search leads Sloane from Vancouver’s wealthiest enclaves to the street’s darkest corners, questioning millionaires, tennis instructors, sex workers, former police colleagues–anyone who might provide answers.
J.T. Siemens’s To Those Who Killed Me is a debut that provides a heavy dose of hardboiled suspense and introduces a fiery new heroine in crime fiction.
-
To Touch a Dream
$21.95This warm-hearted memoir tells the story of the dream of many North Americans: to throw up a dull job and journey into the wilderness to live off the land. Sunny Wright does exactly that when she decides at age twenty-eight to quit working at a “man-sized job for a female wage” in a Vancouver sawmill. With her young daughter Lisa and friend Betty, they sell off everything from their urban existence and outfit themselves with two trucks full of goods for the journey in to northern B.C in search of a place to live.
They have never even gone camping before, but they are determined to succeed, and they do. After much searching they find land near Vanderhoof and begin the hard but joy-filled labour of constructing their own house, their own barn and setting up as subsistence farmers. Eventually they will learn how to run a bootleg still for extra money and will become famous in the area for the dogs they raise and the winter trips they take by dogsled.
This is a book that readers can enjoy as they live alongside Sunny, Betty and Lisa in the bush, watching them learn to build log houses, make friends with the fiercely individualistic people of the back country, survive the desperately cold winters and enjoy the independence of rural life. The volume includes many black-and-white photos of their life in the bush.
-
Toe Blake
$24.95The first ever biography of Toe Blake — Hockey Hall of Famer and eleven-time Stanley Cup winner
“Holy Dirty Dora!” Hector “Toe” Blake would bark while pacing behind the Montreal Canadiens bench, hands thrust into his pockets, jawing at chewing gum before intentionally banging his forehead into the glass that separates players and fans. No lead was safe or sufficient for the lifelong hockey man at the helm of the greatest dynasty in NHL history. As a player, Toe won a Stanley Cup with the Montreal Maroons before captaining a stumbling Canadiens organization to glory and a pair of Cups. As the Habs coach, Toe cemented the team’s status as lords of the league with eight more.
Born into a family of 11, Blake emerged from the poverty of the Depression and a youth spent working the mines of Sudbury’s Nickel Belt to find junior hockey success and an unlikely shot at the NHL. While a fiery temper and penchant for stick-swinging nearly railroaded Toe’s promise, the Canadiens recognized his talent and leadership, and he went on to spend more than 50 years with the organization.
History remembers Toe being hoisted onto the shoulders of his beloved players, waving his signature fedora and sipping from the Cup, but behind the success was a man driven by fear and an obsessive desire for victory. Despite personal tragedy, Toe always put winning first, and as a result, there are few coaches in any sport who have enjoyed Blake’s success and even fewer who endured the toll that came with it.
-
Tokio Hotel Fever
$19.95Tokio Hotel — twin brothers Bill (vocalist) and Tom (guitarist) Kaulitz, drummer Gustav Schäfer, and bassist Georg Listing — were already multi-platinum-selling superstars in their native Germany when they decided to take the rest of the world by storm. Tokio Hotel translated their two albums from German and found English-speaking audiences just as receptive to their alt-rock music, moving lyrics, and distinct visual style as European fans are, with Scream going platinum. In addition to a nomination for Best Pop Video for “Ready Set Go!” the band won the MTV Video Music Award for Best New Artist in 2008 (beating Miley Cyrus, Katy Perry, and Taylor Swift) and hit the road, touring America and winning over the hearts of audiences. In October 2009, their third album, Humanoid (Universal), was released simultaneously in German and English.Already a bestselling book in Europe and available for the first time in English, Béatrice Nouveau’s Tokio Hotel Fever is a full-colour tribute to Bill, Tom, Gustav, and Georg, featuring stunning photos of the band — in performance, off stage, and as children — and all the details on their early days, their musical and style influences, their love for their devoted legions of fans, as well as updates on their new album and tour.
-
Tolstoy’s Words To Live By
$24.95Here is Leo Tolstoy’s first book of “Daily Thoughts,” never before translated into English, compiled by Tolstoy in 1906 to share inspiring quotes from more than forty philosophers for each day of the year. Aphorisms and ideas collected by Tolstoy in his other volumes have affected the lives of millions. Among those who were profoundly influenced by Tolstoy and his radical efforts to encourage higher morals were a young Hindu lawyer named Mahatma Gandhi and a young preacher in the Southern U.S. named Martin Luther King. Gandhi described himself as being “overwhelmed” by Leo Tolstoy’s “independent thinking, profound morality and truthfulness.” Tolstoy was one of the first intellectuals to seek the cross-cultural wisdom of as many great thinkers as he could, from all centuries. When Leo Tolstoy went viral one hundred years before the internet, authorities in Russia sought to limit his influence. Now, re-discovered and revived by two Canadians, here are the once-suppressed ideas from the likes of Confucius and Aristotle and Lao-Tse to modern thinkers of Tolstoy’s era that he first began collecting in 1903. Tolstoy felt his novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina were far less important than his distillations of wisdom. Tolstoy’s Words To Live By shows why.
-
Tom at the Farm
$16.95Lambda Literary Award, Drama: Michel Marc Bouchard, Tom at the Farm, translated by Linda Gaboriau (Winner)
Following the accidental death of his lover, and in the throes of his grief, urban ad executive Tom travels to the country to attend the funeral and to meet his mother-in-law, Agatha, and her son, Francis – neither of whom know Tom even exists. Arriving at the remote rural farm, and immediately drawn into the dysfunction of the family’s relationships, Tom is blindsided by his lost partner’s legacy of untruth. With the mother expecting a chainsmoking girlfriend, and the older brother hellbent on preserving a facade of normalcy, Tom is coerced into joining the duplicity until, at last, he confronts the torment that drove his lover to live in the shadows of deceit.
The lover – the friend, the son, the brother, the nameless dead man – has left behind a fable woven of false-truths which, according to his own teenage diaries, were essential to his survival. In this same rural setting, one young man had once destroyed another young man who loved yet another. Like an ancient tragedy, years later, this drama will shape the destiny of Tom.
In a play that unfolds with progressively blurred boundaries between lust and brutality, between truth and elaborate fiction, Bouchard dramatizes how gay men often must learn to lie before they learn how to love. Throughout 2011 and 2012, Tom at the Farm was produced in Quebec and France, as Tom à la ferme, and in Mexico, as Tom en la granja. Award-winning Quebec director Xavier Dolan adapted the play for the screen in 2013, with Caleb Landry Jones in the leading role.
Cast of 2 women and 2 men.
-
Tom Green
$16.95“Tom Green is the son I would have chopped off my penis to avoid having.” — Mike Bullard, host of Open Mike.
Udder Insanity tells the story of Tom Green’s life from his early beginnings as the host of the late-night Ottawa radio show Midnight Caller, through his transformation into a Juno-nominated rap artist, to The Tom Green Show‘s great success on the Canadian Comedy Network, and to his antics in the early 2000s as MTV’s renegade prankster, who sets out to taunt and tease a generation of South Park-loving television viewers.
Described as the “Master of Mayhem,” Tom Green has built an entire career on the vile and the vulgar: munching on a handful of gooey Vaseline-coated human hair, turning his parents’ car into the infamous “Slut Mobile” (featuring an airbrushed portrait of an explicit lesbian love scene on the hood), dragging a rotten raccoon corpse on to Open Mike, and getting up-close-and-personal with his bovine friends . . . Tom milks it all wholeheartedly! As Udder Insanity reveals, it seems nothing or no one is above being sucked into the underbelly of Tom’s demented and hilarious world.
-
Tom Thomson
$60.00Tom Thomson is the undisputed master of the oil sketch. A towering figure in the history of Canadian art after just five years of professional practise, he stunned audiences with his fresh and avant-garde experimentation, evoking his experience of the Ontario landscape in dozens of dazzling miniature masterworks.
Thomson’s death in 1917 triggered the formation of the Group of Seven and the ascendancy of landscape painting as a national preoccupation. Tom Thomson: North Star is the first book to focus on Thomson’s small-scale sketches and brings together a variety of voices to interpret his legacy with fresh eyes. Among them are the McMichael’s Executive Director Ian A.C. Dejardin, historian Douglas Hunter, and Algonquin knowledge-keeper and cultural activist Christine McRae Luckasavitch, as well as a number of contemporary Canadian artists from all parts of Canada. The essays in combination with more than 150 reproductions of Thomson’s painted sketches cast new light on the enduring influence of one of Canada’s most iconic artists.
-
Tomboy Survival Guide
$19.95Shortlisted for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust of Canada Prize for Nonfiction; Longlisted for the BC National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction; Stonewall Book Award Honor Book winner; Longlisted for Canada Reads
Ivan Coyote is a celebrated storyteller and the author of ten previous books, including Gender Failure (with Rae Spoon) and One in Every Crowd, a collection for LGBT youth. Tomboy Survival Guide is a funny and moving memoir told in stories, about how they learned to embrace their tomboy past while carving out a space for those of us who don’t fit neatly into boxes or identities or labels.
Ivan writes about their years as a young butch, dealing with new infatuations and old baggage, and life as a gender-box-defying adult, in which they offer advice to young people while seeking guidance from others. (And for tomboys in training, there are even directions on building your very own unicorn trap.)
Tomboy Survival Guide warmly recounts Ivan’s past as a diffident yet free-spirited tomboy, and maps their journey through treacherous gender landscapes and a maze of labels that don’t quite stick, to a place of self-acceptance and an authentic and personal strength.
-
Tombstone Blues
$16.00After beating back the might of Surtur, Ted Callan is getting used to his immortal powers. The man who once would stop at nothing to rid himself of his tattoos and their power might even be said to be enjoying his new-found abilities.
However, not everyone is happy the glory of Valhalla has risen from the ashes of RagnarÖk. With every crash of MjÖlnir, Thor, former god of thunder, rages in Niflheim, the land of the dead.
Now that Ted’s woken the dead, there’s going to be hell to pay.
-
Tonight at the Tarragon
$29.95Just in time for its fortieth birthday, Tonight at the Tarragon is the first ever anthology of plays that originated in or received their English-language premiere at Toronto’s leading playhouse, the Tarragon Theatre. Handpicked and edited by former Eye Weekly and Globe and Mail theatre critic Kamal Al-Solaylee, this anthology captures the theatre during a transitional phase in its history: 1998–2005, the final years of late Artistic Director Urjo Kareda and the first seasons of his successor Richard Rose. Overlapping Al-Solaylee’s experience as a critic in Toronto and underlining Tarragon’s survival instincts during this period, the book serves as a record of some of the most exciting theatre created in Canada as one century gave way to another.
Includes:
Half Life by John Mighton
Rune Arlidge by Michael Healey
The Optimists by Morwyn Brebner
I, Claudia by Kristen Thomson
Motel Hélène by Serge Boucher, adapted by Judith Thompson from a translation by Morwyn Brebner
It’s All True by Jason Sherman