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 1201–1216 of 9481 results
-
Born to Walk: My Journey of Trials and Resilience
$26.00“My grandparents used to tell me Rwanda is a country unlike any other, and I knew they spoke the truth. Blessed with majestic mountains and breathtaking valleys, it is a sacred and spiritual land. And yet Rwandan men drenched the land in blood in acts of hate so horrific that the stains of those three years will not fade in one hundred lifetimes.”
At the age of eight, Alpha Nkuranga made a fateful decision. With war raging around her, she grabbed the hand of her younger brother, Elijah, and ran from her grandparents’ home. When they came to a swamp, they hid until it was safe to escape. Weeks later, they joined a group of refugees, who were fleeing to Tanzania. “If I kept walking,” Alpha remembers thinking, “I could tell my story.”
Nkuranga emigrated to Canada more than a decade later. She now works with women and children who face abuse and homelessness. In Born to Walk, she tells a remarkable story of resistance and survival.
-
Borrowed Days
$20.00Present and past collide in Marc Plourde’s poems, which sketch out a multifaceted portrait of his home territory over a period of half a century. Set in rural Quebec and Montreal, Park Extension’s immigrant streets, College Notre Dame in the 1960s, McGill Ghetto’s bohemia of the 1970s and the city’s changing downtown core, they focus on family, neighbours, and strangers, seen through the eyes of a sometimes bemused but compassionate observer of the human drama.
-
Borrowed Rooms
$15.95These poems, spare and nuanced, explore the borrowed rooms we inhabit in personal relationships: the temporary homes of marriage and parenting; the personas we carry for a little while and must ultimately abandon. In tight and unsentimental poems, Barbara Pelman grieves the death of a father, notes the changing dynamics of mothers and daughters, watches the doors irrevocably close on a marriage, and delights in the temporal beauty surrounding her: the simple splendour of garry oak and hawthorn, arbutus branches bent to the shape of wind, and the stutter of shoreline.
-
Bosun Chair, The
$17.95Part family memoir, part poetry, part love letter to Newfoundland and its people, The Bosun Chair is a lyrical exploration of how we are fortified by the places of our foremothers and forefathers and by how they endured.
Like ‘ballycater,’ the ice that gathers in harbours along the coast, Jennifer Bowering Delisle gathers fragments of history, family lore, and poetry–both her own and that of her great-grandparents–to tell stories of shipwrecks, war, resettlement, and men and women’s labour in early twentieth-century Newfoundland. With deftness and haunting imagery, The Bosun Chair reveals the inherent gaps in ancestral history and the drive to understand a story that can never fully be told.
-
Both Boys Climb Trees They Can’t Climb Down
$14.95Both Boys Climb Trees They Can’t Climb Down is Stephanie Yorke’s homage to lost homes. The poems in the collection commemorate a home that is at turns too ugly to look at, and too profound to ignore. The remembered home is both a depleted space where “women climb flimsy ladders/ to rag and harangue mildew from awnings/ over the doors,” and a potent space where a “volcano spits like a roast pig/ initial ash on your window.”
Yorke approaches her subject obliquely, giving a monolithic topic the sidelong glance it demands: home looms on the periphery, as different speakers offer their far-flung or down-to-earth versions of the past. The opening poem establishes the contrast between nostalgic and pragmatic temperaments that will be developed in relief to one another, as the irreconcilable manias of regret and memory compete for dominance. Pop culture and art – ranging from Steve Urkel’s greeting to Lawren Stewart Harris’ paintings – are important to the development of the small town environment, but lived experience and vernacular stories remain key. The lost home, be it precious or repugnant, is like “a coin in a shallow pond:/ brighter once it’s thrown.”
-
Botticelli in the Fire & Sunday in Sodom
$18.95Botticelli in the Fire & Sunday in Sodom presents wildly apocryphal retellings of two events—one historic, one mythic—that reconsider the official record through decidedly queer and feminist lenses.
Painter Sandro Botticelli is an irrepressible libertine, renowned for his weekend-long orgies as much as he is for his great masterpieces of the early Renaissance. But things get complicated when Lorenzo de’ Medici commissions Botticelli to paint a portrait of his wife, Clarice. What emerges is the famed The Birth of Venus and a love triangle involving Botticelli’s young assistant Leonardo that risks setting their world alight. For while Florence of 1497 is a liberal city, civil unrest is stoked by the charismatic friar Girolamo Savonarola who begins calling for sodomites to be burned at the pyre.
In the Bible she is unnamed, referred to simply as “Lot’s wife.” In Sunday in Sodom, Edith recounts how her husband welcomed two American soldiers into their house, the fury this sparked in their village, and the chain of events that led to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. But most importantly, Edith sets the record straight as to why, after being told not to, she looked back upon the destruction of her hometown and turned into a pillar of salt.
-
Bottle Rocket Hearts
$19.95Welcome to ’90s Montreal. It’s been five years since the OKA crisis and the sex garage riots; the queers are rioting against assimilation, cocktail AIDS drugs are starting to work, and the city walls on either side of the Main are spray-painted with the words YES or NO. Revolution seems possible to eighteen-year-old Eve, who is pining to get out of her parent’s house in Dorval and find a girl who wants to kiss her back. She meets Della: ten years older, mysterious, defiantly non-monogamous, and an avid separatist. Their explosive beginning and volatile relationship paves a path for the personal and political to collide on the night of the referendum.
-
Bottles and Bones
$13.95Lyrical poems of celebration and nostalgia from one of Canada’s young, outstanding poets.
-
Bottom Line, The
$9.95The Alberta government has been looking to the private sector—and in particular to private health insurance—to solve health care problems. In this highly readable and well-researched book, Diana Gibson and Colleen Fuller get to the real story behind private health insurance and offer viable solutions for strengthening Canada’s public health care system from within.
-
Bottom Rail on Top
$22.95FINALIST FOR THE 2024 A.M. KLEIN POETRY PRIZE
A rolling call and response between antebellum Black history and the present that mediates it.Somewhere in the cut between Harriet Jacobs and surveillance, Southampton and sneaker game, Lake Providence and the supply chain, Bottom Rail on Top sets off a mediation between the complications of legacy and selfhood. In a kind of archives-powered unmooring of the linear progress story, award-winning poet D.M. Bradford fragments and recomposes American histories of antebellum Black life and emancipation, and stages the action in tandem with the matter of his own life. Amidst echoes and complicities, roots and flights, lineage and mastery, it’s a story of stories told in knots and asides, held together with paper trails, curiosities, and hooks – a study that doesn’t end.
-
Bottoms Up
$21.95In 1617, Lord Falkland’s colonists in Newfoundland were instructed to bring, among other things, 20 barrels of caske (ale), 90 bushels of malt, a malt mill, 4500 pounds of hops, 1 firkin of Aqua vitae, 1 firkin of canarie wine, and 1 firkin of methaglyne (mead). And so began the time-honoured tradition of countering the rugged Newfoundland environment with a nip of something stronger. Now, four hundred years later, from our famous kitchen parties to the bars and pubs of George Street, the history of our cultural traditions is intertwined with the history of liquor and beer.
Bottoms Up is the story of alcohol in Newfoundland and Labrador, and reveals how the drink helped shape so much of the province’s culture. What did Newfoundlanders drink 400 years ago? Where were the most popular drinking establishments of the past? Why does one of our streets have the most pubs per square foot in North America? Distilling four centuries of fact and anecdote, Sheilah Roberts Lukins serves up a revealing and often amusing survey of our fascination with good spirits.
-
Bounce House
$18.00Bounce House is a collection of small containers for the uncontainable. Restrained in form but not feeling, Harper’s fourth book explores the cyclical nature of grief, imperfect parenting, and our willingness to jump without promise of a safe landing. Measured and meticulously weighted, these poems are playful and poignant as they navigate the strange terrain around losing a loved one: how the past and present blur together, the dead simultaneously here and missing, and how joy moves inevitably forward, as if on wheels.
-
Boundary
$19.95Longlisted for the 2017 Scotiabank Giller Prize
In the deep woods of the Maine borderlands, the legend of huntsman Pete Landry is still told around cottage campfires to scare children, a tragic story of love, lust, and madness. During the early summer of 1967, inseparable teenage beauties Sissy Morgan and Zaza Mulligan wander among the vacation cottages in the community of Boundary, drinking and smoking and swearing, attracting the attention of boys and men. First one, and then the other, goes missing, and both are eventually found dead in the forest. Have they been the victims of freak accidents? Or is someone hunting the young women of Boundary? And if there is a hunter, who might be next? The Summer of Love quickly becomes the Summer of Fear, and detective Stan Michaud, already haunted by a case he could not solve, is determined to find out what exactly is happening in Boundary before someone else is found dead.
A story of deep psychological power and unbearable suspense, Andrée A. Michaud’s award-winning Boundary is an utterly gripping read about a community divided by suspicion and driven together by primal terror.
-
Boundary Country
$18.95Stories that stalk the borderlands between people, eras and geographies – half the tales roam today’s BC Interior valleys, and half range from the US Civil War, to 1930s Europe and Toronto, to contemporary Vancouver.
Boundary Country is a hitchhiker’s guide to the quirks and foibles of those who live in British Columbia’s distinctive Kootenay mountain region. The stories capture those precise moments where history becomes memory, desire transforms into belief, and where some locale or condition alters and we name it a boundary. Deploying a heady mix of settlers’ descendants from the US Civil War and 1930s Europe to contemporary resource industry employees, back-to-thelanders, and the new wave of transplanted urban professionals, Wayman’s first person narratives capture those voices in near perfect pitch – their personalities echoing their geography, their substance steeped in authenticity and their collective truth reminding us that the only true wilderness that remains is within ourselves.
-
Boundary Problems
$19.95In his confident debut, Greg Bechtel offers ten charged stories about the impossible-turned-possible—secrets, paranoia, sex, conspiracies, and magic—our world distilled and transmuted.
Boundary Problems vibrates on the edge of meaning, as carjackers, accidental gunrunners, small-town cabbies, and confused physics students struggle to wring meaning from the strange events that overtake them. Bechtel’s worlds of mystery, physics, and magic constantly challenge his characters’ pursuit of logical explanations. These compelling tales blur lines and push boundaries—into the surreal, into the playful, into the irresistibility of uncertainty.
-
Boundary Territory
$19.95Boundary Territory finds its locus in British Columbia’s sparsely populated interior valleys-on greyhound buses, in motel rooms paid for by social services, and in the unsettled body of its speaker. This collection of poems offers a dual perspective, exploring geographic location from the vantage point of a transient teenager navigating small towns and the immediacy of trauma, as well as that of an adult interrogating the language of academia and examining landscape through the lens of ecocritical theory, situating themselves within geographic and emotional landscapes and a family lineage of failed settlements. With precision and care, the poems of Boundary Territory offer meditations on homelessness, trauma and resilience as they find their footing in the sensory details of geographic space.