A note to US-based customers: All Lit Up is pausing print orders to the USA until further notice. Read more
Showing 1137–1152 of 9481 results
“Blue to the Sky is a fabulous book that fills a niche of families and children living with severe allergies. … Highly Recommended.” — Canadian Review of Materials
The journey to conquering your fears starts with 1,776 steps.
Starting sixth grade after years of homeschooling, Ella is tired of being known as Allergic-to-Everything Girl. She just wants to eat pizza without breaking into hives, convince her mom to adopt a Whoodle dog, and get over her stage fright so she can perform her poem to her class.
When her best friend signs up for a CN Tower climb for charity, Ella knows she has to join. If she can climb to the top and summon the courage to recite her poem over the city, she’s convinced she’ll finally be cured of her fears.
In the spring of 1964, troubled teenager Cookie Blue is found dead in the Red River.Blue Vengeance follows her younger brother Danny and Cookie’s friend Janine through a lazy Winnipeg summer, as they plot to kill the despised teacher they blame for Cookie’s death. Danny’s father is long gone, and his mother suffers from a debilitating medical condition. Her illness and self-medicated state free Danny from certain constraints traditionally put upon a young teenager by a parent…like committing murder.
“In the new world, we wake up/to a bone ark bobbing on a blue wherever,” Dempster writes in the title poem of this new collection, his twelfth book of poetry. He connects the intensity of loving someone with the visceral vividness of being alive, as though waking from a beautiful dream and finding the world still sparkling. Granted, there is still loss and loneliness, even huge awols of hope, but the particulars of the outside world remain spectacular despite their ordinariness: cedar wax-wings with their “little caramel whisks/of hairdo above Lone Ranger masks;” the one-eyed horse who “wouldn’t/blame you if you ran, muck flicking/from the soles of your shoes;” the river rocks in the front garden “pretending/the inanimate way is holy,/a stunning coldness in the place of eyes.”
Blue Wherever returns us to being in the moment with an intensity and beguilement often reserved for romantic love, and from the various perspectives of observer and creator.
Whether it be Pancake Tuesday, a lonely Office Party or a Sunday drive through strip-mall Wastelands, Dempster reminds us there is still much to see and myriad reasons for staying awake and alive.
A captivating memoir set during the pinnacle of West Coast fishing
More than a history of the Vancouver fishing industry, Bluebacks and Silver Brights is a collection of great adventures set on the Pacific coast. With dozens of salty tales of hardworking and hard-living fisherman and fish industry workers, this is Norman Safarik’s story of West Coast fishing from the Gulf of Georgia to Prince Rupert, with a detour to New York’s old-time fish markets. With wisdom and insight, Safarik’s story is also an ecological warning, recalling the lost bounty of Canada’s natural resources of a century ago, and their possible extinction today at the hands of government mismanagement and overfishing.
Étaples, France, 1918. Nurses Christy, Maggie, and Bab have crossed oceans to care for wounded Canadian soldiers in the Great War. Despite the terrible injuries they must deal with, they manage to stay hopeful as the dangers of the front draw closer to their hospital.
As each woman becomes accustomed to her duties and patients, they reveal more personal details to one another and through letters to loved ones. Maggie misses her close friend she lived with back home and worries for their future together. Christy writes to her soldier husband, but she knows there’s a difference between the life she should lead with him and the one she wants. Bab longs for what she can’t have: her beloved grandpa, a married soldier, a child. Through it all, the three women find friendship, independence, power, and influence in a place where men, once again, are trying to destroy the world.
On September 2, 1998, a fire in the cockpit sent Swissair Flight 111 plunging into the sea off Peggy’s Cove, Nova Scotia. All 229 men, women and children on board perished, including Ivy Bannister’s sister, Patty. Set in Dublin, New York and the South Shore of Nova Scotia, Blunt Trauma is the true story of how one family’s life was ravaged by the terrible event.
When Ivy Bannister switched on BBC radio from her home in Dublin the following morning, she had no idea that that the first thing she’d hear would change her life forever. An ocean away from the tragedy that claimed her sister’s life, Ivy soon left her family to be with her 80-year-old mother in New York City. What follows is a poignant day-by-day account of how she coped with the tragic death of her sister, and the painful practicalities of identifying remains and disposing of possessions.
Blunt Trauma takes a powerful look at tragedy, grief and acceptance in an intimate, fast-paced, and sometimes startling story that shows the past as illuminated by the present and explores how catastrophe shatters imperfect familial relationships.
With echoes of Sunset Boulevard, Michelle Berry’s Blur brings the warped world of Hollywood stardom into lurid focus. Tabloid reporter Bruce Dermott has been waiting seven long years for his moment in the sun when he strikes pay dirt in Emma Fine. Emma, a former Hollywood starlet, has been out of the spotlight for years after her lover was found dead in her swimming pool. As Bruce digs deeper he discovers lives twisted and misshapen by jealousy, obsession, and narcissism, lives we crave to hear about today more than ever.
Out of the museum and into the wild, Katherine Knight’s photographs imagine model boats reconnected to their stories and sites of origin. Since 2015, she has been photographing model boats — imagining them at sea, on display, and in the changing weather of a maritime landscape. In this fascinating and highly original book, she teases out the allure of the boat model while also exploring the impulse to collect and the desire to tell stories in material form.
Knight’s camera knows no bounds. Her photographs include a tribute to a beloved dory, a memory of a passing ship, a mashup of several ferries, and a ship caught in the snow and ice — hand-crafted models linking places and people of the North Atlantic. Accompanied by first-person recollections and insights into model making, these models by builders across Atlantic Canada celebrate the tenacity and creativity of their makers and the stories that inspired them. At once the material residue of historical patterns of leisure and labour and resilient artifacts that linger on, these model boats bridge fact and fiction, reconnecting treasured artifacts to lived experience.
To Calvin White, “political” means taking a stand on issues that matter, wading into the nitty-gritty of who we are as humans and the lives we live and are sometimes forced to live. Poetojournalism is commentary and exposure: words create the imagery; poems create the photo; the photo tells the story. Our wars, our crimes, our relationships to others, the chronicling of our deeper selves–this is the world The Bodies explores.
Body & Soul: Stories for Skeptics and Seekers is a spiritual journey through experiences that can be liberating but also awkward and sometimes even dangerous, because women are so often excluded from conversations about spirituality. Liberation comes with breaking that age-old code of silence to talk about the messiness of faith, practice, religion and ceremony, to confess our sublimely unconventional modes of spiritual yearning. The writers in this volume, including Sharon Bala, Carleigh Baker, Eufemia Fantetti, Sue Goyette, K.D. Miller, Zarqa Nawaz, Alison Pick, Sigal Samuel, Ayelet Tsabari, Betsy Warland and others, many from marginalized or misunderstood communities, are speaking out so that others will speak up. Enough of fear. Enough of hiding out, tongue-tied. It’s time for joy, humanity and frankness. It’s time to step up and lead–not by running after answers, but by asking caring, daring questions. It’s time for body and soul.
Body Breakdowns is a collection of true tales about brushes with mortality and the medical establishment. Some are serious, some are funny; all are about illnesses, both minor and major.
The pieces are all related to aging and are told in strong, engaging, and authentic voices. They are about people suddenly discovering they’re vulnerable and the different ways they come to terms with that, as well as how they deal with the health professionals whose job it is to provide care for our bodies. They are also about how people who have physically suffered learn to find words for and, thus, shape the new world they find themselves in.
These stories remind us that everything can change in a moment. And that we’re all in these aging bodies together.
Body Breakdowns features writing from: Brad Zembic, Emma Kivisild, Grant Buday, Susan Olding, Bob Wakulich, Adrienne Mercer, Alan Girling, Beverley A. Feather, Jane Silcott, Kim Clark, Denise Halpern, Bonnie Bowman, Melody Hessing, Stephen Osborne, Luanne Armstrong, Dennis E. Bolen, J. Cates, Ruth Murdoch, Doreen Colmer, Crystal Hurdle, and Janis Harper.
Praise for Body Breakdowns:
Reader’s Digest Book Choice (2010)
Editor’s Pick, Shared Vision Magazine
“These twenty-one lives are all different except for one thing. Each life is temporary, and come to think of it, so is mine and yours. Yet, when a person has a heart attack or news about cancer, she can feel private and alone on her voyage. Janis Harper wanted those travellers to know how many other people are on this road. The stories they tell here are filled with terror, humour, panic, wit, frustration, and wisdom – and they are the truest stories in the world.” (George Bowering, Canada’s first Poet Laureate and author of over 100 books of fiction and nonfiction)
“21 contemplative essays on the slow creep toward mortality and the illnesses that threaten to push us closer to its edge. In this almost uniformly rewarding collection, British Columbia writers (along with 2 Ontario imports) offer deeply personal accounts, at times as frightening as they are confident or meditative … ” (Prairie Fire)
“uplifting… invariably enlightening.” (BC BookWorld)
In The Body of My Garden, Rishma Dunlop takes a voyage around the heart in poems that embody the burdens and exhilaration of love. Whether recreating the paradise gardens of Moghul India, or writing an erotically charged poetry of absent lovers, Dunlop uses language in a painterly way, creating sensory images that shimmer with light and humanity while probing the darkness of a sometimes paradoxical and violent world. Ultimately this romantic collection of poems is about seeking grace in the eros and desires of everyday life.
‘Body Speaking Words’ is a novel about-what else-writing a novel in three days, at the same time offering insights into family, friendship, growing up female, and delighting in strange foods; a poignant, funny and sexy account of one woman’s attempt to understand what drives us to document the essential stories of our lives.
Winner of the 1995 3-Day Novel-Writing Contest
Body Trade follows Rosie and Tanya, two young Canadian women who decide to leave the Northwest Territories and head south on an ill-conceived road trip through California, Mexico and Central America. The story takes a life-defining twist when their search for freedom and adventure brings them into contact with predators of the Central American sex trafficking trade.