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 8881–8896 of 9311 results
-
we are no longer the smart kids in class
$18.00From the drunk tank to the graduate seminar, we are no longer the smart kids in class asks what it means to think and be, play and learn, ride bikes and make love in a world of depleting resources, technological proliferation, and corroding ecosystems. A fantasia of academic disillusionment and deflating youth, this collection contemplates moustaches, mountains, and oceans from Halifax to Victoria, always wondering how poetry matters to the heaving, melting, masturbating world it dramatizes.
-
We Are Not in Pakistan
$22.95A Quill & Quire Book of the Year
Ten years after her stunning debut, Shauna Singh Baldwin returns to Goose Lane with an outstanding new collection of ten stories. Migrating from Central America to the American South, from Metro Toronto to the Ukraine, this book features an unforgettable cast of characters. In the title story, 16-year-old Megan hates her Pakistani grandmother — until Grandma disappears. In the enchanting magical realism of “Naina,” an Indo-Canadian woman is pregnant with a baby girl who refuses to be born. “The View from the Mountain” introduces Wilson Gonzales, who makes friends with his new American boss, the aptly named Ted Grand. But following 9/11, Ted’s suspicions cloud his judgment and threaten his friendship with Wilson.
Each containing an entire world, these stories are marked by indelible images and unforgettable turns of phrase — hallmarks of Baldwin’s fictional world.
-
We are One
$14.95An anthology of Canadian poets marking the 2020 Pandemic.
-
We Are Still Here
$17.95Part mystery, part dystopian prophesy, We Are Still Here probes the implosion of the vagrant goals and economic aimlessness in one man and his resulting quest for purpose. Through a blending of mythical forces and mythological archetypes that idealize the Innu tales of cultural heroes, and shape-shifters, We Are Still Here acts as traditional account of the life events of a self-proclaimed Innu oracle, and how his gathered tribe emerge as the future of civilization by returning to a world in which humans and animals are not yet differentiated.
Highly entertaining and deceptively simple, Beuhler’s tale works for a wide reading audience.“An exciting new voice on the scene, Chris Beuhler’s enormous imaginative scope, his vigorous prose, and the high tension he creates will have everyone reading this book.” – Sharon Butala
-
We Don’t Listen to Them
$18.95In an inviting and challenging series of fictions, Sean Johnston’s We Don’t Listen to Them will leave readers puzzling while they smile at the acrobatics of his words and techniques. Some of Johnston’s stories border on “flash fiction” where incidents rather than an actual narrative drive the story. In the open piece “How Blue” the boy Ronnie is caught in the vortex of his father who drinks and a mother who condones, and a church representative who reforms. There is no plot, just Ronnie eating his purple ice cream and thinking his way through the maze. Several stories, particularly “Whose Origins Escaped Him” and “We Don’t Celebrate That” feature meta-fiction that explores writing about writing. In the former elaborate footnotes delineate the characters and their actions, explaining why the story is unfolding the way it is and why the writer has chosen to do this. In the later story “We Don’t Celebrate That”, the narrator, a writer, explains how rules can be absurdly imposed on writers in a futile attempt to govern the writing process. The story, which might have been about someone looking intently into their dying mother’s eyes and finding confusion there isn’t about that because section 18 of the rules says ‘All stories must say what they are not’. Such paradox is at work in many of the fictions in this collection, but so too are the small epiphanies of the characters who evolve within the work.
At various junctures in the collection Johnston employs devices that adjust his writing to be focused with the lens of meta-fiction. Shifts in narrative, jumps in time, intrusions into the narrative tension are all common here.But so too is pathos as seen in the family dilemma of a recovering alcoholic in the story “We All Considered This”. And we do find compassion in the son-in-law who holds sympathy and kindness for his father-in-law afflicted with Alzheimer’s in “You Didn’t Have to Tell Him”, and share the weighted sadness of the husband dressing his dead wife for the funeral in “He Hasn’t Been to the Bank in Weeks”. While the world will turn upside down in Johnston’s stories, and the logic and reality will be violated, and a bank teller will hand a patron his bank robber note, it is fiction that also ebbs and flows with human struggle, that is recognizable and relatable and, despite the challenges and uncertainties placed in the reader’s path, there is always a way to see more clearly than think we do.
Buy an eBook version of this book at Kobo, Amazon Kindle Store, or your favourite eBook store
-
We Follow the River
$20.00We Follow the River tells the story of one family’s escape from military violence in Myanmar, their exiled existence in Thailand, and their immigration to Canada with only a pile of beat up suitcases on a luggage cart. It is about growing up as a foreigner in a foreign land, sifting through family history and grief, and alighting across cultures and continents to find a home.
Onjana Yawnghwe’s third poetry book reveals an expertise in language—at times joyful, disobedient, wild, and other times condensed and restrained. A work of over twenty years, these poems are written and rewritten through the retroactive prism of experience, polished and honed, eroded and erased. Sweeping in scope, intimate and honest, these poems tell of the quiet moments, the unruly moments of rage and sorrow, the rough distillation of self, both hated and loved. These poems reside behind the secret, dark door of the self.
-
We Gladly Feast
$20.00We Gladly Feast marks a significant formal shift for award-winning poet Roxanna Bennet, away from the recombinant sonnets that she employed so deftly over three volumes. She reformulates disability poetics in this new collection by infusing concepts of collage, enacting the improvised experience of disabled persons who use whatever comes to hand in order to negotiate the inaccessibly-constructed world. Though her formal strategies have changed, Bennet’s voice remains as unique and as powerful as ever.
-
We Meant Well
$24.95Longlisted for the 2023 Scotiabank Giller Prize September 2023 selection for Great Group Reads by the Women’s National Book Association“Unsparing and compassionate … A novel of harrowing eloquence, We Meant Well explores compelling cultural contrasts and the ambiguity of charitable outreach.” — Foreword ReviewsA propulsive debut that grapples with timely questions about what it means to be charitable, who deserves what, and who gets the power to decideIt’s the middle of the night in Los Angeles when Maya, a married mother of one, receives the phone call. Her colleague Marc has been accused of assaulting a local girl in Likanni, where they operate a charitable orphanage. Can she get on the next flight?When Maya arrives, protesters surround the compound. The accuser is Lele, her former protégé and the chief’s daughter. There are no witnesses, no proof of any crime.What happened that night? And what will happen to the orphanage if this becomes a scandal? Caught between Marc and Lele, the charity and the villagers, her marriage and new temptations, and between worlds, Maya lives the secret contradictions of the aid worker: there to serve the most deprived, but ultimately there to govern.As Maya feels the pleasures, freedoms, and humanity of life in Likanni, she recognizes that her American life is inextricably woven into this violent reality — and that dishonesty in one place affects the realities in another.
-
We Oughta Know
$24.95A lively collection of essays that re-examines the extraordinary legacies of the four Canadian women who dominated ’90s music and changed the industry foreverFully revised and updated, with a foreword by Vivek Shraya In this of-the-moment essay collection, celebrated music journalist Andrea Warner explores the ways in which Céline Dion, Shania Twain, Alanis Morissette, and Sarah McLachlan became legit global superstars and revolutionized ’90s music. In an era when male-fronted musical acts were given magazine covers, Grammys and Junos, and serious critical consideration, these four women were reduced, mocked, and disparaged by the media and became pop culture jokes even as their recordings were demolishing sales records. The world is now reconsidering the treatment and reputations of key women in ’90s entertainment, and We Oughta Know is a crucial part of that conversation.With empathy, humor, and reflections on her own teenaged perceptions of Céline, Shania, Alanis, and Sarah, Warner offers us a new perspective on the music and legacies of the four Canadian women who dominated the ’90s airwaves and influenced an entire generation of current-day popstars with their voices, fashion, and advocacy.
-
We Shed Our Skin Like Dynamite
$20.00Winner of the 2021 Ottawa Book Award for English Fiction
In her debut collection of poetry, Conyer Clayton hovers in the ether, grasping wildly for a fleeting sense of certitude. Through experiences with addiction and co-dependence, sex and art, nature and death, she grapples for transcendence while exploring what it means to disengage. What is revealed when you allow yourself to truly feel? What do you ask for to carry you into life, and where do you land when this fails? And when you are finally, beautifully, emptied out, who are you? The poems in We Shed Our Skin Like Dynamite wonder aloud amidst tangled revelations, and yearn to be lifted away.
-
We Were Like Everyone Else
$18.95Traversing the world from the Garden of Eden to a grandmother asking what’s a tweet, We Were Like Everyone Else explores the daily humanity of family, the folly of our politics, and a natural world that seems to offer the promise of consolation but never quite does. In poems both lyrical and narrative, the possibility of violence is never far off, but the same can be said of love, our capacity to endure, our hunger for healing and redemption. And yet these poems offer no prescription, no bulwark to keep menace from our children or despair from encroaching on our few vestiges of hope. Ken Victor’s first collection of poems takes us back to children ducking under desks in the nuclear fear of the 50’s, to the collapse of innocence in the face of the Vietnam War, to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the depravity of the siege of Sarejevo. Always the question of whether or not we can survive our own missteps lingers in the background of our 21st century lives as we go about raising our children, dining in restaurants, walking in woods, working from a home office. As one poem puts it, you’ve got to live your life like you’re in control of it, pray like you aren’t.
-
We, the Others
$22.95Ungrateful, opportunistic, moochers, dangerous, incompatible with our values and our way of life?
Every immigrant demographic has heard these descriptors at some point in their migration history. We, the Others takes a contemporary look at the xenophobia, ethno-nationalism, and fear of the other that leads to discrimination and the belief that immigration is a polluting force.Rooted in the author’s personal family history as the second-generation daughter of Greek immigrants, and from her research as a journalist and columnist covering identity politics and social issues in Quebec and Canada for the past 20 years, Drimonis courageously tackles this country’s history and practices, divisive legislation like Bill 21, and various nationalist movements that have influenced policy. We, the Others is a poignant look at inter-generational struggles, conflicting loyalties and heartfelt questions of belonging.
-
We’re Somewhere Else Now
$21.95Nominated for a 2025 National Magazine Award in Poetry
In her first collection of new poetry in a decade, Robyn Sarah chronicles the pandemic years with quiet wisdom and her flair for meshing the familiar with the numinous.
In We’re Somewhere Else Now, Robyn Sarah moves with ease from the particular to the abstract. These are poems of grief and unexpected change, of quiet awe at the human experience. Each poem is a window for the reader to look into, “lit room to lit room,” tracking empty, desultory days of isolation and uncertainty, while also highlighting reasons to pay attention: playing with a grandchild, the rarity of a leap year, the call of the birds.
-
Weasel Tail
$32.95The generation to which Joe and Josephine Crowshoe belonged spanned more than the length of their lifetimes. That generation fought heroically in world wars and at the same time raised children under a paternalistic federal regime that denied both a culture and a heritage. The Crowshoes regained their heritage and shared it with the larger community, gaining respect from all the people with whom they were in contact and becoming articulate representatives and the holders of stories, legends, and customs. The interviews in Weasel Tail track not just their personal stories but the stories of a people who insisted on being recognized and a culture born out of the land of southern Alberta. Paralleling the interviews, Mike Ross has included historical photographs and documentation of a world and people who are a rich part of Alberta’s history.
-
Weather Diviner
$24.95Set in a tragic, transformative year in an extraordinary place with larger-than-life characters, The Weather Diviner is a story of self-discovery—not just for one young woman, but for Newfoundland itself.
It’s 1942. With polished boots and bulging wallets, the Americans have come to defend a highly strategic location—Newfoundland: the Allies’ new transatlantic transportation hub. Like thousands of others chasing new opportunities, Violet Morgen abandons her remote outport home and heads to St. John’s. An amateur forecaster with a powerful sixth sense for the island’s tempestuous winds and weather, Violet is determined to help the Americans fight the enemy. But determination, it turns out, is not enough.
Carefully-researched and -crafted, entertaining, and informative, The Weather Diviner is a heart-felt tale in which friends make a difference, weather makes for interesting conversation, and opportunity comes to those who dare to dream.
-
Weather Permitting & Other Stories
$20.00The stories in this collection centre around new immigrants ? spirited people who are prepared to leave their home and hearth to travel to distant lands to pursue their dreams of a better life. But often times there?s a reality check , and they are left to grapple with unexpected challenges of cultural shock, paucity of jobs, lack of Canadian work experience, absence of affordable daycare, and non-recognition of their educational credentials. Though the accounts are fictional they show the determination of new immigrants to survive on alien soil.