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 9041–9056 of 9311 results
-
White Piano
$17.95language I’ll say yes
from the top of my rib cage
language will you come
out and unearth the salt the certitudeBetween the verbs quivering and streaming, White Piano unfolds its variations like musical scores. A play of resonance between pronouns and persons, freely percussive between prose and poetry, and narrating a constellation of questions, White Piano offers readers a ‘language that cultivates its own craters of fire and savoir-vie.’
‘At once achingly aware of mortality and hell-bound in its determination to press forward, change, and grow, White Piano is as brave as it is linguistically rich.’
– Quill & Quire
‘[Brossard] writes with a poetic intensity that burns select lines and sometimes entire paragraphs into the reader’s mind.’
– Montreal Gazette
-
White Porcupine
$20.00Two porcupines walk into a bar. No, wait. One porcupine walks into a bar. Well, actually, it’s a poet. And he walks into a library. He opens books and shakes them until they look like porcupines dancing. He is looking for old photos to eat. He likes the salt taste of the chemicals. Chewing, he crawls oot. Toying with the confessional, Phil Hall’s White Porcupine is a self-portrait of the artist from ages fifty to fifty-four. The creature of the title suggests (as in White Buffalo, White Whale, White Moose) the sacred primitive wild…though small…(a bit like poems); also, Death Itself (bugga-bugga); and snow rushing at the window of a moving car, years ago…tire-chains…fins; and greying hair, stubble chin; and honestly who doesn’t bristle about getting old? and young St Sebastian, that doofus…naked, glowing, multi-skewered; and a black and white group photo outside a one room school house in winter…(there’s mom!) each student a quill, with its name underneath. The punchline: White Porcupine is a long border-line-incomprehensible confessional poem about being miserable (oh boy!). Well, really it’s about being a poet (even better!). Or, is it?
-
White Riot
$32.95WINNER, Dr. Edgar Wickberg Book Prize for the Best Book on Chinese Canadian History (Chinese Canadian Historical Society of BC); FINALIST, Bill Duthie Booksellers’ Choice Prize (BC and Yukon Book Prizes)
Essays and photographs that document the anti-Asian riots of 1907 in the context of contemporary anti-Asian sentiment.
White Riot: The 1907 Anti-Asian Riots in Vancouver explores the conditions leading up to and the impact of a demonstration and parade in Vancouver, Canada, organized by the Asiatic Exclusion League and the ensuing mob attack on the city’s Chinese Canadian and Japanese Canadian communities. Emblematic of a systemically racist era, White Riot reveals the social and political environment of the time, when racialized communities were targeted through legislated as well as physical acts of exclusion and violence.
Based on 360 Riot Walk, a 360-degree video walking tour by artist and author Henry Tsang, White Riot offers an intersectional approach to this pivotal moment in the history of racialized communities and a cultural and social context for understanding for the current wave of anti-Asian sentiment. It features photographs of the riots colourized by Tsang as well as those of contemporary Vancouver where the riots took place. Essays by Tsang and others speak to the colonial times that preceded and followed the 1907 riots, as well as issues that Chinese and Japanese communities (and other racialized communities) in North America are facing today. White Riot poses the question: in the current ethos of anti-racism and decolonization, what does it take to reconcile our collective histories within the legacy of white supremacy?
Includes essays by the Asian Canadian Labour Alliance, Paul Englesberg, Melody Ma, Angela May and Nicole Yakashiro, Jeffery R. Masuda, Aaron Franks, Audrey Kobayashi and Trevor Wideman, and Andy Yan, with a foreword by Patricia E. Roy.
-
White Salt Mountain
$27.95In this remarkable follow-up to Spar: Words in Place (Gaspereau Press, 2002), Peter Sanger explores the scope of words in time. Offering significant new material to the study of linguist Silas Rand and poet John Thompson, Sanger introduces Susan Barss and Florence Ayscough, notable but largely unsung contributors to Rand’s and Thompson’s work. With the same passion for reading and exploration, along with several of the neighbourhood landmarks, symbolic imagery and literary influences that first emerged in Spar, Sanger joins the lives and work of key authors and translators in Canada’s literary history. Sanger’s unique and far-sighted approach to words and time illuminates critical intersections between authors, readers and texts.
“White Salt Mountain is a mystery,” says Sanger. “The consistent theme of the book is the source and meaning, at the most profound levels, of its title. This book fits into the literary category also occupied by Poe’s ‘Gold Bug’ story and more recently by A. S. Byatt’s Possession about the detection of the real life of a Victorian poetess and the parallel life lived by the modern detective literary scholars. . . . The reader of White Salt Mountain participates not only in the detection of a phrase but also in discovering Florence Ayscough and Susan Barss, discovering certain feminine continuities in Canadian cultural history which had been lost. . . . At base, White Salt Mountain is structured according to the most ancient of narrative formsthe quest for hidden and lost treasure. Its Shangri-la is St. Andrew’sits Treasure Island rests in the Bay of Fundy”
On a journey to MacMaster Island in Passamaquoddy Bay, New Brunswick, Sanger introduces the work of nineteenth-century translator and poet Florence Ayscough. He provides the first comprehensive account of Ayscough’s life, including her years in Shanghai, her study of Chinese, her collaboration with American poet Amy Lowell on translations of Chinese poetry, and the influence of these translations and others on the Canadian poetic idiom that persists today.
Sanger’s work illustrates the power words carry across time beyond their volumes. In his discussion of New Brunswick poet John Thompson’s Stilt Jack, a collection that continues as one of the most widely influential works in Canadian poetry, Sanger works from inside and outside of Thompson’s words, bringing to life the poet’s guiding mythology and influences, and testing them in transit and in conversation with other texts.
Sanger’s final chapter begins in a canoe on the Shubenacadie River as he sets out to locate ‘Grandmother’s Place’, described in Silas Rand’s Legends of the Micmacs. Sanger also presents his recent discovery of Rand’s original transcripts of two stories told by Susan Barss in 1847, among the earliest surviving records of Native storytelling in North America. Sanger’s sleuthing, and the kinds of parallels and intersections it brings to light, embodies a departure from the conventions of literary criticism into a style of reading that is grounded in locale and attuned to the way a literary culture takes shape over time.
Peter Sanger has published five collections of poetry, including Earth Moth (1991) and Ironworks (2001), a collaborative project with photographer Thaddeus Holownia. His most recent work is Spar: Words in Place (2002), a collection of essays based on life in rural Nova Scotia. Sanger has been the poetry editor of The Antigonish Review since 1985. He lives on a farm in South Maitland, Nova Scotia.
The trade edition of this book is a 5 x 8-inch, smyth-sewn paperback bound in card stock with a letterpress-printed jacket. The text is printed offset on laid paper.
-
White World
$24.95Pakistan, 2083 AD.
For Avaan, a gun in his hand feels as natural as breathing. As a Pakistani without citizenship, living under martial law and religious bigotry, violence has become a way of life. What respite he had from the world — his brother, his family, and Doua, the love of his life — was snatched away in a military raid.
Now broken, Avaan finds himself involved in a civil war that poisons everything he’s ever touched. The army shadows his every move, a mob boss wants him dead, and a legendary resistance leader has taken a keen interest in him. But there is a ray of hope: Avaan discovers that Doua is alive. Obsessed with finding her, he takes a stand against the army, the mob, and Pakistan itself with the only thing he could ever count on: the gun in his hand.
-
Whitemud Walking
$23.95WINNER OF THE 2020/2021 ALCUIN SOCIETY BOOK DESIGN AWARD FOR POETRY
WINNER OF THE ROBERT KROETSCH CITY OF EDMONTON BOOK PRIZE
WINNER OF THE 2023 STEPHAN G. STEPHANSSON AWARD FOR POETRY
WINNER OF THE GERALD LAMPERT MEMORIAL AWARD
WINNER OF THE INDIGENOUS VOICES AWARD FOR PUBLISHED POETRY IN ENGLISH
SHORTLISTED FOR THE DAYNE OGILVIE PRIZE FOR LGBTQ2S+ EMERGING WRITERS
LONGLISTED FOR THE RAYMOND SOUSTER AWARD
An Indigenous resistance historiography, poetry that interrogates the colonial violence of the archive
Whitemud Walking is about the land Matthew Weigel was born on and the institutions that occupy that land. It is about the interrelatedness of his own story with that of the colonial history of Canada, which considers the numbered treaties of the North-West to be historical and completed events. But they are eternal agreements that entail complex reciprocity and obligations. The state and archival institutions work together to sequester documents and knowledge in ways that resonate violently in people’s lives, including the dispossession and extinguishment of Indigenous title to land.
Using photos, documents, and recordings that are about or involve his ancestors, but are kept in archives, Weigel examines the consequences of this erasure and sequestration. Memories cling to documents and sometimes this palimpsest can be read, other times the margins must be centered to gain a fuller picture. Whitemud Walking is a genre-bending work of visual and lyric poetry, non-fiction prose, photography, and digital art and design.
-
Whiteout
$24.95In Whiteout: How Canada Cancels Blackness, his new and essential collection of essays, George Elliott Clarke exposes the various ways in which the Canadian imagination demonizes, excludes, and oppresses Blackness. Clarke’s range is extraordinary: he canvasses African-Canadian writers who have tracked Black invisibility, highlights the racist bias of our true crime writing, reveals the whitewashing of African-Canadian perspectives in universities, and excoriates the political failure to reckon with the tragedy of Africville, the once-thriving, “Africadian” community whose last home was razed in 1970. For Clarke, Canada’s relentless celebration of itself as a site of “multicultural humanitarianism” has blinded White leaders and citizens to the country’s many crimes, at home and abroad, thus blacking out the historical record. These essays yield an alternate history of Canada, a corrective revision that Clarke describes as “inking words on snow, evanescent and ephemeral.”
-
Whiteout: Poems
$18.95Poetry that explores how accidental voyeurism can force reconsideration and reconciliation
White·out: n. a surface condition … in which no object casts a shadow, the horizon cannot be seen, and only dark objects are discernible …
Whiteout: when the heavy weather of daily life establishes the measure of the measureless; when the predatory nature of the accidental conjures cowboys and the comatose; when the sickly sweet pop of life underfoot contrasts the televised image, shrinking to a pinprick.
Whiteout: calques and towers, twin polar storms, falling, burning.
Whiteout: “a book of white nothing.”
George Murray’s sixth collection has been a decade in the making. At once taut, tender and terrifying, haunted and haunting, Whiteout shatters convention in the collision of order and rage, formlessness and hard-won serenity.
-
Who Belongs in Quebec?
$18.95Are Quebecers less tolerant than other Canadians? Ongoing debate about secularism and religious symbols has led many observers to ask this very question. Premier François Legault denies that racism or Islamophobia exists in Quebec, even after a gunman opened fire in a Quebec City mosque in 2017, killing six people and wounding 19 others. Two years later, the Quebec government established Bill 21, a religious symbols ban for public employees. The province’s increasingly diverse new reality is sometimes embraced and sometimes met with hostility from alt-right groups and emboldened anti-immigrant sentiment.
What does diversity mean for the Quebec identity? Who gets to consider themselves a Quebecer? The author, a young journalist who moved to Quebec City from Saskatchewan, has some critical questions for the adopted province she loves.
-
Who by Fire
$24.95“Rhyno delivers a wholly intriguing mystery unlike any other.” — The Miramichi Reader
Haunted by a childhood of picking locks and tailing suspects with her private-eye dad, Dame Polara desperately wants to leave the mysteries behind and lead an average life with average ambitions: to preserve heritage buildings through her job at City Hall, to care for her father’s mounting health complications, and to one day raise a family of her own.
But when her landlord serves her an eviction notice, and Dame agrees to investigate his wife’s infidelity in exchange for keeping the apartment. A simple domestic case, or so Dame believes, until her investigation uncovers a serial arsonist targeting the very buildings she’s fighting to preserve.
When this new mystery reopens old wounds, Dame must use every trick her father taught her to discover the truth and protect those she loves — lest the dangers of the job catch up to her and burn her whole life to the ground.
-
Who Else in the Dark Headed There
$21.95In his first collection since the GG-nominated Prologue for the Age of Consequence, Martens adds an autobiographical lens to his concerns about class and labour, sharpening the landscape of 80s and 90s northern Alberta with a controlled, imagist eye.
In Who Else in the Dark Headed There, we meet someone right up against the loss of his mother in a place where the feeling of the darkheaded there and the person who is moving toward it, or who is in it, can be set. As in a scene in a play. As in a dream. There is, from the difficulty of childhood, which can’t be changed, an understanding that time is not fixed and that distance is fluctuating. Here, in many registers, the language of memory is disturbed, syntax and point of view are disturbed. It is a self looking back at an earlier self as if it is possible to be objective, when we know it’s not possible, and therein is the grief and the searching and the resonance of the machinery of time.
Grappling with familial inheritances, and charged with undercurrents of violence, alcoholism, and isolation, Garth Martens writes with a language that is both clear-cut and surreal, evoking a rural, unstable portrait of childhood.
-
Who Is Kim Ondaatje?
$34.95This book is a biography of artist, film maker, and photographer, Kim Ondaatje, née Betty Jane Kimbark. Born into a wealthy family, Kim’s story is a reverse of the rags to riches narrative. She married two highly successful writers, Douglas Jones and Michael Ondaatje, had six children, and managed to carve a career as a respected artist whose works are in all major galleries/museums in Canada. Kim Ondaatje’s life is fascinating on many fronts. She is undoubtedly talented, and has contributed significantly to the Canadian art scene. One of her paintings from the Factory series hangs in the newly opened Canadian gallery at the Art Gallery of Ontario. She continues to be creative as she approaches her nineties.
-
Who Is The Doctor
$19.95The essential companion for everyone from casual viewer to avid fan
Doctor Who was already the world’s longest-running science fiction series when it returned in 2005 to huge success. An enormously popular series among genre fans in North America, Doctor Who encompasses horror, science fiction, comedy, action, and historical adventure and is loved for its uniquely British wit and clever scripting. It’s no wonder the series’ hero, monsters, and even its theme song are pop culture icons.
In Who Is The Doctor, experts Graeme Burk and Robert Smith? bring insights into all facets of Doctor Who’s triumphant return to television from the history of Daleks, Cybermen, and the eight classic series Doctors, to a guide to every episode of the new series. Covering the six seasons of the new series, this is the essential companion for the most avid fan as well as the more casual viewer. Allons-y!
-
Who Is The Doctor 2
$24.95Travel with the Doctor in this essential companion for the modern Doctor Who era
Since its return to British television in 2005, through its 50th anniversary in 2013, to its historic casting of actress Jodie Whittaker in the title role, Doctor Who continues to be one of the most popular series in Britain and all over the world.
Who Is The Doctor 2 is a guide to the new series of Doctor Who starring Matt Smith, Peter Capaldi, and Jodie Whittaker. Every episode in series 7 to 11, as well as the 50th anniversary specials, is examined, analyzed, and discussed in thoughtful detail, highlighting the exhilarating moments, the connections to Doctor Who lore, the story arcs, the relationships, the goofs, the accumulated trivia and much, much more. Designed for die-hard Whovians and Who newbies alike, Who Is The Doctor 2 explores time and space with the Doctor and chronicles the imagination that has made Doctor Who an iconic part of culture for over 50 years.
-
Who Killed Janet Smith?
$24.00New Edition as part City of Vancouver’s Legacy Book Project, with a foreword by historian Daniel Francis
Who Killed Janet Smith? examines one of the most infamous and still unsolved murder cases in Canadian history: the 1924 murder of twenty-two-year-old Scottish nursemaid Janet Smith. Originally published in 1984, and out of print for over a decade, this tale of intrigue, racism, privilege, and corruption in high places is a true-crime recreation that reads like a complex thriller.
We are pleased to be reissuing this title as part of the City of Vancouver’s Legacy Book Project. This new edition features a Foreword by historian Daniel Francis.
Praise for Who Killed Janet Smith?:
“… drug traffic, Roaring Twenties hedonism, official corruption, cutthroat competition among newspapers, a public taste for occultism, etc. – and entrust the whole works to a good storyteller, and you have one terrific political history of Vancouver.” (Geist Magazine)
“Starkins has written an engaging and well-crafted popular social history of Vancouver in the ostensibly hopeful, materially buoyant flapper era’ between the end of the slaughter of the Great War and the onset of the Depression. He reveals the serious fault-lines and profound anxieties of a community emerging in this decade from both its recent frontier past and a costly war into becoming a settled North American city. … this is a very worthwhile and informative case study, one that is likely to keep the conundrum in the title alive and encourage further research on the topic. … And who did kill Janet Smith and why? Despite the author’s attempt to follow up as many leads as he could find, the answer remains elusive. Despite the presence of a smoking gun, whose hand pressed the trigger is still a mystery, although in an updated afterword Starkins warms to one explanation. As with all mysteries, that should remain for now a mystery.” (BC Studies)
“Mr. Starkins excavates each layer of the story like an archaeologist with a trowel and camel-hair brush. He misses nothing. The result is one of those unputdownable reads that stays in your memory.” (Howard Engel)
-
Who Killed Ty Conn
$19.95Who Killed Ty Conn is the brilliant investigative work of Linden MacIntyre and Theresa Burke, the current host and producer respectively of the CBC’s the fifth estate. It tells the tragic story of Ty Conn’s life of crime and misfortune. Originally published by Viking Canada in 2000, the book has been updated and reissued with a new afterword from the author and a new foreword by author and criminologist Elliott Leyton.
A classic in the literature of true crime, Who Killed Ty Conn portrays a man coming to terms with a life of rejection – and the social system that failed to save him.