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LGBTQ+ Stories
Books for our LGBTQ+ community.
All Books in this Collection
Showing all 14 results
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Any Other Way
$25.95Toronto is home to multiple and thriving queer communities that reflect the dynamism of a global city. Any Other Way is an eclectic and richly illustrated local history that reveals how these individuals and community networks have transformed Toronto from a place of churches and conservative mores into a city that has consistently led the way in queer activism, not just in Canada but internationally.
From the earliest pioneersto the parades, pride and politics of the contemporary era, Any Other Way draws on a range of voices to explore how the residents of queer Toronto have shaped and reshaped one of the world’s most diverse cities.
Any Other Way includes chapters on: Oscar Wilde’s trip to Toronto; early cruising areas and gay/lesbian bars; queer shared houses; a pioneering collective trans archive project; bath house raids; LBGT-police conflicts; the Queen Street art/music/activist scene; and a profile of Jackie Shane, the gay R&B singer who performed in drag in both Toronto and Los Angeles, and gained international fame with his 1962 chart-topping single, ‘Any Other Way.’
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Bodymap
$20.95Finalist for the Triangle Awards, Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry, 2015
Shortlisted for the ReLit Award, Poetry, 2016In Bodymap, Lambda Award-winner Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha sings a queer disabled femme-of-colour love song filled with hard femme poetics and disability justice. In this volume, Leah Lakshmi maps hard and vulnerable terrains of queer desire, survivorhood, transformative love, sick and disabled queer genius and all the homes we claim and deserve.
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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.
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Concord Floral
$17.95Concord Floral is a one-million-square-foot abandoned greenhouse and a refuge for neighbourhood kids; a place all to themselves in which to dream, dare, and come of age. But hidden there is a secret no one wants to confront, and when two friends stumble upon it they set off an unstoppable chain of events, from shadows in parking lots to phone calls from the grave. It’s time for the teens of Concord Floral to start talking.
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Crisp
$17.95Crisp confronts the unspeakable parts of memory, meditating on characters caught in isolation and struggling to make sense of grief, disappointment, and the occasional dinner party gone wrong. The characters in Crisp’s stories don’t always make sound decisions: a grieving widow pursues a priest, an unhappy wife whittles her husband to bits, and a nostalgic man has a one-night stand with a whale trainer. Ranging from the mystical to the eccentric, Gray masterfully uncovers human reactions to loneliness and unrest through tales about relationships, secrets, and a longing to connect.
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Dr. Edith Vane and the Hares of Crawley Hall
$18.95Dr. Edith Vane, scholar of English literature, is contentedly ensconced at the University of Inivea. Her dissertation on pioneer housewife memoirist Beulah Crump-Withers is about to be published, and her job’s finally safe, if she only can fill out her AAO properly. She’s a little anxious, but a new floral blouse and her therapist’s repeated assurance that she is the architect of her own life should fix that. All should be well, really. Except for her broken washing machine, her fickle new girlfriend, her missing friend Coral, her backstabbing fellow professors, a cutthroat new dean – and the fact that the sentient and malevolent Crawley Hall has decided it wants them all out, and the hall and its hellish hares will stop at nothing to get rid of them.
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Entropic
$19.95Winner of the 2016 Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award at the East Coast Literary Awards!
Shortlisted for the Book Design Award at the 2016 Alberta Book Publishing Awards!
Shortlisted for the 2015 New Brunswick Book Awards!In this collection of stories, author and filmmaker R. W. Gray (Crisp) finds the place where the beautiful, the strange, and the surreal all meet–sometimes meshing harmoniously, sometimes colliding with terrible violence, launching his characters into a redefined reality.
A lovestruck man discovers the secret editing room where his girlfriend erases all her flaws; a massage artist finds that she has a gift, but is uncertain of the price; a beautiful man sets out to be done with beauty; and a gay couple meets what appear to be younger versions of themselves, learning that history can indeed repeat itself.
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Foxed
$18.95After a long series of professional and personal upheavals, Detective Lane begins his latest adventure happy, at peace, and enjoying life with his partner Arthur, their children Christine and Matt, and his able new co-worker, RCMP officer Keely Saliba.
But when the body of a young boy is unearthed ten years after he was reported missing, Lane’s investigation into the crime puts him in conflict with a powerful and charismatic Calgary real estate developer and restaurateur–a cunning sociopath whose desire to suppress any threat to his empire will endanger the safety of Lane’s own family.
The sixth book in Garry Ryan’s award-winning and Calgary Herald bestselling series of Detective Lane mysteries pits Lane against his most dangerous antagonist yet.
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Indiana Pulcinella
$18.95After saving the Calgary Stampede from a potential terror attack in Glycerine, Detectives Lane and Li find themselves on the hunt yet again, this time following a pair of gruesome killers whose perfectly composed crime scenes match those of an inmate put away by Calgary Police years earlier. As more people come into the line of fire, Lane must team up with some unlikely new allies in order to crack the case.
Meanwhile, with the birth of a new nephew, the happily chaotic Lane household must deal with the taciturn detective’s estranged, fundamentalist family and their efforts to interfere in raising the child.
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Lucky Elephant Restaurant, The
$10.95When the young daughter of popular radio talk show host Bobbie Reddie disappears along with Bobbie’s ex-husband, Detectives Lane and Harper are on the case. Haunted by flashbacks from a previous missing child case, Lane once again takes to the streets of Calgary looking for answers.
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Sotto Voce
$20.00Poems that give full attention to a world in shambles, a world in which “mercy is failing.”
Maureen Hynes, in her fifth book of poetry, speaks tenderly yet vehemently about the threatened worlds that concern her. From Toronto, where she lives and walks the city’s afflicted watershed, she turns her attention to the near and far, shifting it from the First Nations’ stolen lands to Syria and the refugee crisis in the Mediterranean; from the deaths of family and friends to the newborns into whose care our endangered planet will pass; and from love’s transient regrets to the sustaining love two women share. Hynes’ is a gaze that grieves quietly, delights humbly, and, in the search for solace, never rests. Each poem in Sotto Voce is a recitative of healing. Hear the music in every word and, despite the damaged environments Hynes gives voice to, be restored.
This is a book that bears witness to the “dynamite stick of injustice,” one that balances fear and hope, misfortune and renewal, calamity and natural beauty. Sotto Voce carries the complexity and seriousness of its themes lightly–it’s important to know when to speak loudly, and when to whisper.
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The Girls with Stone Faces
$20.00A long poem memorializing the art and lives of sculptors Frances Loring and Florence Wyle.
Arleen Paré, in her first book-length poem after her Governor General Literary Award-winning Lake of Two Mountains, turns her cool, benevolent eye to the shared lives of Florence Wyle and Frances Loring, two of Canada’s greatest artists, whose sculptures she comes face to face with at the National Gallery of Canada. In the guise of a curator, Paré takes us on a moving, carefully structured tour through the rooms where their work is displayed, the Gallery’s walls falling away to travel in time to Chicago (where they met at art school and fell in love in the 1910s), New York, and Toronto (where they lived and worked for the next six decades). Along the way, Paré looks at fashions in art, the politics of gender, and the love that longtime proximity calls forth in us. The Girls with Stone Faces is one of the finest collections of poetry about the lives of artists–and most importantly their work–to appear in Canada in many years.
Although Wyle and Loring were well known during their lifetimes, they have dropped out of common memory. Paré’s collection is art loving art, women loving women, words loving shape, poetry loving stone, the curve of jaw, the trajectory of days.
“… Like the sculpted female figures she describes as ‘tacking their bodies against the history of storm,’ Paré has positioned her own graceful, finely chiselled lines to recast the history of women in art, in society, in love.” –Anita Lahey
“… A distinctive and memorable book, sympathetic and gloriously questioning.” –Stephanie Bolster
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Two-Spirit Acts
$22.95In this collection of short but powerful two-spirit plays, characters dispel conventional notions of gender and sexuality while celebrating Indigenous understandings. With a refreshing spin, the plays touch on topics of desire, identity, and community as they humorously tackle the colonial misunderstandings of Indigenous people. From a female trickster story centred on erotic lesbian tales to the farcical story about a new nation of Indigenous people called the Nation of Mischief, this collection creates a space to explore what it means to be queer and Indigenous.
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You Only Live Twice
$14.95YOLT explores two artists’ lives before and after transitions: from female to male, and from near-dead to alive.
The unspoken promise was that in our second life we would become the question to every answer, jumping across borders until they finally dissolve. Man and woman. Queer and straight.
What if it’s not true that you only live once? In this genre-transcending book, trans writer and media artist Chase Joynt and HIV-positive movie artist Mike Hoolboom come together over the films of Chris Marker to exchange transition tales, confessional missives that map out the particularities of occupying what they call ‘second lives’: Chase’s transition from female to male and Mike’s near-death from AIDS.
Weaving cultural theory with memoir and media analysis, YOLT asks intimate questions about what it might meanto find love and hope through conversation across generations.
‘Chase Joynt and Mike Hoolboom here give each other the gift so many people only dream of: ample, unhurried space to unspool crucial stories of one’s life, and an attentive, impassioned, invested, intelligent receiver on the other side. The gift to the reader is both the example of their exchange, and the nuanced, idiosyncratic, finely rendered examination it offers of biopolitical experiences which, in many ways, define our times. I’m so glad they have each other, and that we have this.’
– Maggie Nelson
‘Despite its complexity, the book is refreshingly clear, direct, and elegant, and pleasingly consistent in tone despite its shared authorship … This is an ode to friendship that is as beautiful as it is revelatory.’
– Shawn Syms, Quill & Quire
‘You Only Live Twice is an intelligent ode to enchantment, to the possibilities that arise in ‘second lives’ when all past expectations have been foreclosed.’
– Chris Kraus
‘The writing is out of the park – strong and surprising, a relay race of brilliant twirling, tossing thoughts back and forth like balletic rugby bros. Joynt and Hoolboom’s dances of disclosure are so courageous and generative, gifts to us all.’
– John Greyson