Your cart is currently empty!
Important Shipping Notice: Due to the ongoing Canada Post strike, delivery times may be longer than usual. Where possible, we’ll use alternative shipping methods to help get your order to you sooner. We appreciate your patience and understanding as your order makes its way to you.
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 8721–8736 of 9311 results
-
Vancouver Anthology
$35.00To commemorate its 25th Anniversary, the Or Gallery is co-publishing with Talonbooks a second, updated edition of Vancouver Anthology, edited by acclaimed artist Stan Douglas, first published in 1991.
Featuring a larger format, new hardcover design and a new afterword by Stan Douglas, the republication of Vancouver Anthology coincides with a renewal of the Or Gallery’s mandate to incite and promote critical discourse both within and outside of the Vancouver art community.
The essays collected in this book were first presented in the autumn of 1990 as part of a lecture series entitled Vancouver Anthology, a forum in which each contributing writer could test his or her research on the question of art and politics in public, before their papers were sent into print. Every piece of writing included here has changed dramatically since its initial presentation, in part as a reflection of the immediate response it received from the local art community at the forum and, more significantly, as a reflection of responses which continued long after that first instance of presentation. What these presentations are clearly able to provide is a critique of the institutionalization of what had been previously considered alternative art practices, a contemporary notion not unrelated to what the artistic milieu of another generation, continent and historical age might have called the “avant-garde.” Contributors include: Keith Wallace, Sara Diamond, Nancy Shaw, Maria Insell, William Wood, Carol Williams, Robin Peck, Robert Linsley, Scott Watson and Marcia Crosby.
-
Vancouver Confidential
$20.00Most civic histories celebrate progress, industry, order, and vision. This isn’t one of those.
Vancouver Confidential is a collaboration of artists and writers who plumb the shadows of civic memory looking for the stories that don’t fit into mainstream narratives. We honour the chorus line behind the star performer, the mug in the mugshot, the victim in the murder, the teens in the gang, and the “slum” in the path of the bulldozer. By focusing on the stories of the common people rather than community leaders and headliners, Vancouver Confidential shines a light on the lives of Vancouverites that have for so long been ignored.
This new collection takes a fresh look at the raw urban culture of a port city in the mid-twentieth century. These were years when Hastings and Main was still a dynamic commercial hub, when streetcars thrummed through the city streets, and when “theatre” meant vaudeville and burlesque. Street gambling and illegal boozecans peppered the map, brothels and bootleggers served loggers and shoreworkers, and politicians were almost always larger than life.
This collection of essays and art illuminates aspects of a city that was too busy getting into trouble to worry about whether it was “world class.”
The collection includes essays from Tom Carter, Aaron Chapman, Jesse Donaldson, James Johnston, Lani Russwurm, Eve Lazarus, Diane Purvey, Catherine Rose, Rosanne Sia, Jason Vanderhill, Stevie Wilson, Jim Wong-Chu, Will Woods, Terry Watada, and John Belshaw.
-
Vancouver for Beginners
$18.00Winner of the 2020 Western Canada Jewish Book Awards, The Lohn Foundation Prize for Poetry
In Vancouver for Beginners, the nostalgia of place is dissected through the mapping of a city where readers are led past surrealist development proposals, post-apocalyptic postcards, childhood landmarks long gone and a developer who paces at the city’s edge, shoring it up with aquariums.
In these poems you will traverse a city lined with rivers, not streets. Memory traps and tourist traps reveal themselves, and the ocean glints, elusive, in the background. Here there are many Vancouvers and no Vancouver, a city meant for elsewhere after the flood has swept through. This place of the living and the dead has been rewritten: forests are subsumed by parks, buildings sink and morph, and the climate has changed.
Vancouver for Beginners is a ghost story, an elegy, a love song for a city that is both indecipherable and a microcosm of a world on fire.
-
Vancouver Is Ashes
$22.95On the morning of June 13, 1886, a rogue wind fanned the flames of a small clearing fire-and within five hours, the newly incorporated city of Vancouver, British Columbia, had been reduced to smoldering ash. Vancouver is Ashes: The Great Fire of 1886 is the first detailed exploration of what happened on that pivotal, yet seldom revisited day in the history of Canada’s third-largest city. Lisa Anne Smith tells the story with numerous archival photographs. She uses eye-witness accounts to describe flames sweeping down wooden sidewalks “faster than a man could run,” houses that were constructed of freshly milled lumber, which virtually exploded in the onslaught, as well as hair-breadth escapes of Vancouver citizens from all walks of life. She records how two businessmen lying face-down in a patch of gravel bid each other goodbye, while a young married couple cling to a makeshift raft, and a mother and her children cower in fear beneath a stable blanket in a shallow ditch. Strange, often unlikely stories emerge in the aftermath, such as the pile of ice discovered amidst the burned out wreckage and the near-miraculous survival of a downtown hotel. Ramifications of the catastrophe that continued into the days, months and years following are examined, resulting in some surprisingly positive, as well as negative conclusions. Part proceeds from sales of Vancouver is Ashes are being donated to the Vancouver Firefighters’ Charitable Society.
-
Vancouver Noir
$25.00Vancouver Sun books list: “30 best reads from B.C. and beyond”
It was an era of gambling, smuggling rings, grifters, police corruption, bootleggers, brothels, murders, and more. It was also a time of intensified concern with order, conformity, structure, and restrictions.Vancouver Noir provides a fascinating insight into life in the Terminal City, noir-style.
These are visions of the city, both of what it was and what some of its citizens hoped it would either become or conversely cease to be. The photographs – most of which look like stills from period movies featuring detectives with chiselled features, tough women, and bullet-ridden cars – speak to the styles of the Noir era and tell us something special about the ways in which a city is made and unmade.
The authors argue that Noir-era values and perspectives are to be found in the photographic record of the city in this era, specifically in police and newspaper pictures. These photographs document changing values by emphasizing behaviours and sites that were increasingly viewed as deviant by the community’s elite. They chart an age of rising moral panics. Public violence, smuggling rings, police corruption, crime waves, the sex trade, and the glamourization of sex in burlesques along and nearby Granville Street’s neon alley belonged to an array of public concerns against which media and political campaigns were repeatedly launched.
Praise for Vancouver Noir:
“Vancouver Noir: City comes of age in fascinating text … City outgrew its steam-age industrial economy, but the changes didn’t come easily or overnight … This is a book about working-class Vancouver in the three decades between, say, the opening of the Marine Building in 1930 and the death, in 1959, of Errol Flynn, in the arms of his teenage girlfriend after an enthusiastic evening at the Penthouse Cabaret on Seymour Street.
“It’s illustrated with about 150 maps and black-and-white photos, including shots of murder victims and other crime scenes: the sort of images that always contain a great deal of visual information.” (Vancouver Sun)
“Much like a ride on the Giant Dipper rollercoaster at Happyland (the 1930s precursor to Playland), Vancouver Noir is chock full of informative thrills, spills, and chills.” (BC Studies)
“The atmosphere of the mean streets is conveyed in the book’s many photographs: black-and-white images of rain-slick pavement, crime scenes, nightclubs, mobsters and hookers… Vancouver Noir retrieves this disreputable side of the city’s history and presents it in all its black-and-white glory.” (Geist)
-
Vancouver Vanishes
$32.95Finalist, Bill Duthie Booksellers’ Choice Award (BC Book Prizes), 2016
#1 on the BC Bestseller List
Since 2005, nearly 9,000 demo permits for residential buildings have been issued in Vancouver. An average of three houses a day are torn down, many of them original homes built for the middle and working class in the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s. Very few are deemed significant enough to earn the protection of a heritage designation, but they are part of our heritage nonetheless and their demolition is not only an architectural loss.
When these old homes come down, a whole history goes with them – the materials that were used to build them, the gardens, the successive owners and their secrets. These old houses and apartments are repositories of narrative. The story of our city is diminished every time one disappears.
Based on the popular Facebook Page, Vancouver Vanishes is a collection of essays and photographs that together form a lament for, and celebration of, the vanishing character homes and apartments in the city.
Vancouver Vanishes includes essays from Caroline Adderson, Kerry Gold, John Atkin, Elise & Stephen Partridge, John Mackie, and Eve Lazarus as well as poems from Evelyn Lau and Bren Simmers. Introduction by Michael Kluckner.
The majority of photographs (b/w & colour throughout) are by Tracey Ayton and Caroline Adderson.
The book is large format (9.25 × 10.25) with French flaps.
Praise for Vancouver Vanishes:
“provides a most useful contribution to the increasingly anxiety-ridden conversation that continues to grip this town over the subject of housing” (Allen Garr, Vancouver Courier)
“a gorgeous but troubling commentary on the disposability of our young city’s architectural history” (Shelley Fralic, The Vancouver Sun)
“… a shared attempt to document and protest the rampant destruction of perfectly fine family dwellings in Vancouver for no reason other than speculative profit… difficult to debunk her contention that wide-scale destruction of wooden houses is antithetical to the conceit of Vancouver City council to make Vancouver into the greenest city on the planet.” (BC BookWorld)
-
Vandal Confession
$19.95This is the manuscript of Xavier Bernard, an average, mundane and altogether unexceptional author who has attempted to claw back his lackluster life story by writing it himself. Free to invent the facts and improve on truth, he will stop at nothing to get the ending he desires. But when his closest friend begins to separate truth from fiction, spotting mysterious gaps and overlaps in the storyline, it becomes a race against the clock to decipher just what sort of ending Xavier plans to write.
-
Vanishing Signs
$24.00Vanishing Signs
-
Variations on Herb
$11.95Variations on Herb is the latest in a lengthening series of books that emanate from the south-western Ontario farm of John B. Lee’s childhood. The focus of Variations is Herb Lee, John B’s grandfather (and an absolutely unforgettable curmudgeon) but the background of rural Ontario is also made palpable entirely without indulgent explanation. This grain, this rich vein that appears in book after book, may well be inexhaustible; the cumulative effect certainly has few parallels in Canadian writing.
-
Variations on Hölderlin
$10.00
Variations on Hölderlin is informed by a particular etymology of the verb “to translate”: to move the dead from one place to another. The corpse in question here belongs to Friedrich Hölderlin, the schizophrenic Romantic poet subsequently canonized by such figures as Nietzsche and Heidegger. But whereas these theorists all too often arrest his corpus in order to conduct their critical autopsies, the Variations resurrect Hölderlin to the modern day, where his schizophrenic obsessions with the gods are now updated through contemporary celestial phenomena: astronauts, radio transmissions and satellites provide a new context above, while the underground churns with the sounds of subways and cloud chambers. Caught between these two levels, Hölderlin’s poetry is reconfigured not through an accurate reproduction of his work, but rather through the fluidity of variations: “I am not mad / chronology just made me look that way.” The Variations remind us that poetry is, above all, an ongoing conversation between the dead and the living. -
Veal
$24.95Delores “Lawrence” Franklin is a failed capitalist and a runaway headcase. Following a corporate meltdown, she decides to start fresh in Mistaken Point, a small town known for two things — Mistaken Point University, where she and her best friend, Anastasia Lanes, are now enrolled, and the grisly murders of countless young women.
At her new part-time arcade job, Lawrence meets Francesca “Franky” Delores — gritty, off-putting, and chronically serious, as opposite to Lawrence as her name would suggest. Soon, Lawrence discovers Franky is convinced there is a monster on the loose, a patchwork creature born of hatred and responsible for the supposedly solved string of violence haunting the town.
Against the advice of Franky’s closest friend, Pippa, Lawrence, and Stasia join Franky in a sticky, summertime search for a yellow-eyed monster between classes, shifts at the arcade, and eating popsicles by the pool. Motivated mostly by her unquenchable attraction to Franky, Lawrence allows herself to be pulled in strange directions, trying to appease Franky’s mania. Through the trials of hunting a monster only some of them believe in, Pippa, Lawrence, Stasia, and Franky discover truths about womanhood, relationships, and the reliability of urban legends.
-
Vegas or Bust
$19.95Can a former semi-pro win against the best poker players in the world?
In 2006, Johnny’s pie-in-the-sky dreams of becoming world champion were dashed when his kings ran into aces in the World Series of Poker Main Event. But lady luck was with him when he met Amy, the woman of his dreams, who soon became his wife.
Like many players, he drifted away from the game after Congress passed a law later that year that cut off funds to online poker and harkened the decline of the game. But even as Johnny returned to the working world, the itch remained.
A decade later, now with two small kids in tow, Johnny convinces Amy to take a six-week family trip from their home in rural Alabama to Las Vegas, where he will risk his $10,000 bankroll in hopes of playing in the Main Event again and winning millions. Along the way, he examines how the game has changed since 2006. Although the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act was the beginning of the end of the poker boom, the game still thrives, and WSOP is Exhibit A. Johnny also muses on the outlandishness of the adult fairyland that is Vegas.
-
Vehicle Poets Now, The
$18.9525 years ago, the Montreal poetry scene experienced an unprecedented eruption of activity that resulted in collaborative poems, simultaneous readings, multimedia performances, videopoems, poetry on the city’s buses, English poetry programs on French CBC, concrete poems, a dozen issues of poetry magazines and more than a dozen books. This and more was the result of the individual and collective effort of Endre Farkas, Artie Gold, Tom Konyves, Claudia (Cel) Lapp, Stephen Morrissey, John McAuley and Ken Norris who became labelled the Vehicule Poets. The Vehicule Poets came together to form the most cohesive poetry movement in Canada since the TISH days of the early 1960s. Their work tended toward the fresh and the experimental as they shared a spirit of collectivity and collaboration. They were the leading proponents of literary community and poetic experimentation. One of the results of this collaborative work was the publication of The Vehicule Poets in 1979. To mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of this important book, The Muses’ Company is publishing The Vehicule Poets Now. This is not a nostalgic look back but a view of the present. The poems in this anthology reveal a still very vibrant and vital body of work. These poems continue to push boundaries and test limits.
-
Vehicule Days
$16.95This group of poets who gathered in the mid-70s around the alternative gallery Vehicule Art Inc. and the printing operation Vehicule Press was initially interested in gaining access to the means of production. But a funny thing happened on the way to print. The various poets coalesced into a group, feeding off each other’s experiences and innovations. Inspired by the experimental environment of the gallery, the Vehicule Poets worked at the cutting edge of mixed media, poetry and video art. They took poetry out of the closet and put it on the buses, in the parks, on the dance floor and in the subway.
The Vehicule Poets were an irreverent, adventurous lot, provoking both praise and vitriol from the public and the critics. Vehicule Days is an important record of literary and cultural history. The collection includes articles, essays and interviews, as well as a sampling from the works of the Vehicule Poets then and now.
-
Venera Dreams
$25.00Venera Dreams is a mosaic novel, a surreal history of a fictional and fantastical European city-state, inspired in part by Venice, The Arabian Nights, and the architecture of Antoni Gaudí. It is divided in three sections. The first, The Lure of Vermilion, describes the impact of Venera’s lure on various characters. The second section, Adventures in Times Past, ranges from the Roman Empire’s invasion of Venera and an intrigue involving a Veneran spy at the court of the Chinese Zhengde Emperor during the Renaissance to a tale of Salvador Dalí’s ties to Venera and a metafictional exploration of Scheherazade’s relationship to Venera. The final section, The Secret Histories of Magus Amore, returns to the present to resolve the mysteries of Venera.
-
Venus of Dublin
$14.95In Venus of Dublin Marianne Ackerman has spun a spellbinding tale about an actor, a painter and their muse. The play was inspired by a famous portrait of the actor Edmund Kean that hangs in London?s Garrick Club. In it, Kean is depicted as a Huron prince, Alanienouidet, wearing a costume which the chiefs of a small community near Quebec City gave him when he visited in 1826. The chiefs, him on what became known as Kean?s lost weekend in the wilderness. Five years later, while on tour in Dublin, the once-great, untamable stage performer Edmund Kean hires a local renegade to paint his portrait. As Kean relives his encounters with the Huron of Quebec, the spirits of the wilderness inhabit him and unleash a mystical and surprising portrait of desire. What results is an entirely unexpected rendering of the artist. Venus of Dublin is a poignant tale about the personal cost and public inspiration of an artist?s quest for immortality. The play premiered at Montreal?s Centaur Theatre in April, 2000.