LGBTQ+ Stories

Haunting of Adrian Yates, The

Adrian’s best friend and his boyfriend don’t get along. Oh, and his boyfriend is a ghost.

Adrian Yates expected his summer would involve sharing Slurpees with his best friend Zoomer and pretending not to hear his dads’ whispered fighting. And that’s exactly how it was going, until the night Sorel appeared in the graveyard by Adrian’s apartment. Sorel gets Adrian in ways no one else has; the fact that he’s not technically alive only makes things exciting. But Sorel can’t always control his otherworldly behaviour, and Zoomer’s worried he might be hiding something. On stormy summer nights behind the cemetery’s iron gates, Adrian and Sorel meet in secret and the pair begin to experiment with consensual possession. Despite the warning signs, Adrian is certain he has everything under control–until suddenly he finds himself fighting for his life.

In Search of Pure Lust

By: Lisa Weil

$22.95

Winner, IPPY Bronze Medal for LGBT Non- Fiction; Finalist, 2019 International Book Awards for LGBTQ – Non-Fiction; Finalist, 2018 Foreword INDIES Award for LGBT Adult Nonfiction; Finalist, American Book Fest 2019 Best Book Awards for LGBTQ Non-Fiction)

In Search of Pure Lust documents an important chapter in lesbian history that is already being distorted and erased, a time when lesbians were reinventing everything from the ground up. Along with violence against women around the globe, lesbians of the 1970s and ’80s were motivated by growing militarism, rampant development, species loss, and living systems in decline. For many, this was the logical conclusion to a state of law/mind/rule that had prevailed for thousands of years — patriarchy.

This is a long overdue and unvarnished insider’s account of those times. The memoir, centered in the Northeast U.S. and then later in Quebec, combines a personal story with the story of a political movement. The book is full of celebration, but also depicts the shadow side of the lesbian movement, taking the reader into the bitter squabbles that divided women, both personally and politically. On a deeper level, the memoir charts a long and difficult quest for love. Over and over, the narrator dives headlong into rapturous passions that either fizzle out or come to brutal and ugly endings.

In the mid-’80s, when a friend invites her to a Zen retreat, she as desperate enough to say yes. A period of difficult self-examination ensues and, over a period of years, she begins to learn an altogether different approach to desire. The last section of the memoir traces the fallout from that collision between hot-blooded lesbian desire and spacious, temperate Zen mind. What the search for pure lust uncovers, in the end, is something that looks a lot like love.

Indiana Pulcinella

By: Garry Ryan

$18.95

After 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.

Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian)

By: Hazel Plante

$18.95

The playful and poignant novel Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian) sifts through a queer trans woman’s unrequited love for her straight trans friend who died. A queer love letter steeped in desire, grief, and delight, the story is interspersed with encyclopedia entries about a fictional TV show set on an isolated island.

The experimental form functions at once as a manual for how pop culture can help soothe and mend us and as an exploration of oft-overlooked sources of pleasure, including karaoke, birding, and butt toys. Ultimately, Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian) reveals with glorious detail and emotional nuance the woman the narrator loved, why she loved her, and the depths of what she has lost.

LOTE

By: Shola von Reinhold

$21.95

What was beyond doubt by the time I got back was that a new Transfixion had arrived in the form of Hermia Druitt, the woman in this photograph. This was confirmed by the sensations: flashes from Arcadia. Moonlight, of a kind, sighed up and down the tube of my spine, but above all, that indescribable note which accompanied all my Transfixions was present: humming beneath the high fine rush–probably not dissimilar to holy rapture–was an almost violent familiarity. The feeling of not only recognising, but of having been recognised.

A new Transfixion.

Shola von Reinhold’s lavish debut novel lays bare, through ornate, layered prose, the gaps and fault lines in the archive. Through obsessive research on an overlooked Black modernist poet, the narrator buckles under the vacuousness of the art world and also curates a queer historical scene, breaking it open and reveling in it. Originally published in the UK by Jacaranda as part of the Twenty in 2020 Black British writers series, LOTE won both the James Tait Black Prize and The Republic of Consciousness Prize in 2021.

Lucky Elephant Restaurant, The

By: Garry Ryan

$10.95

When the young daughter of popular radio talk show host Bobbie Reddie disappears along with Bobbie&#146s ex&#45husband&#44 Detectives Lane and Harper are on the case&#46 Haunted by flashbacks from a previous missing child case&#44 Lane once again takes to the streets of Calgary looking for answers&#46

Lyric Sexology Vol. 1

By: Trish Salah

$19.95

Largely written before the current cultural visibility of trans lit, Lyric Sexology Vol. 1 is Salah’s prescient contribution to a canon of self-determined literature that explores transness. In this case, the author sidesteps the “I” in the text and instead draws on archives–sexological, anthropological, psychological, among others–to demonstrate the shifting and shifty nature of our identities, affiliations, and narratives.

This 2017 edition is the first to be published in Canada and features four new poems and a new cover design by Kai Yun Ching and Wai-Yant Li.

Mythical Man

By: David Ly

$18.95

In Mythical Man, David Ly builds, and then tears down, an army of men in a quest to explore personhood in the 21st century. Tenderness, toxic masculinity, nuances of queer love, and questions of race and identity mix in Ly?s poetry, casting a spell that enters like “a warm tongue on a first date.” Mythical Man is an authentic and accomplished debut.

Personal Attention Roleplay

By: H. Felix Chau Bradley

$18.95

A young gymnast crushes on an older, more talented teammate while contending with her overworked mother. A newly queer twenty-something juggles two intimate relationships–with a slippery anarchist lover and an idiosyncratic meals-on-wheels recipient. A queer metal band’s summer tour unravels amid the sticky heat of the Northeastern US. A codependent listicle writer becomes obsessed with a Japanese ASMR channel.

The stories in Personal Attention Roleplay are propelled by queer loneliness, mixed-race confusion, late capitalist despondency, and the pitfalls of intimacy. Taking place in Montreal, Toronto, and elsewhere, they feature young Asian misfits struggling with the desire to see themselves reflected–in their surroundings, in others, online. Chau Bradley’s precise language and investigation of our more troubling motivations stand out in this wryly funny debut, through stories that hint at the uncanny while remaining grounded in the everyday.

Poetry is Queer

By: J Kirby

$19.95

Poetry is Queer is a kaleidoscope of sexual outlaws, gay icons, Sapphic poets, and great lovers?real and imagined?conjured like gateway drugs to a queer world. Claiming the word ?queer? for those who self-proclaim the authority of their own bodies in defiance of church and state, Kirby pays tribute to gay touchstones while embodying both their work and joy. From gazing upon street boys with constant companion C.P. Cavafy, to end of day observances with Frank O Hara, to mowing Walt Whitman s grass, Poetry Is Queer is a hybrid-genre memoir like no other.

Rage Letters, The

By: Valérie Bah

$19.95

An exhausted security guard dreams of home. A sculptor and a pothead have great sex — in the shadow of wax ex-lovers. A diversity workshop devolves into a familiar nightmare.

Throughout this deadpan collection, determined, damned, and triumphant characters appear and reappear, and their links become clear over the course of the fragmented narrative. The author playfully traces the portrait of the intertwined lives of a group of Black queer and trans friends as they navigate the social violence, traumas, and contradictions of their circumstances.

Originally published in French in 2021 by les Éditions du remue-ménage, as part of the Martiales collection, the stories in Bah’s The Rage Letters — set in Montreal and beyond — are sometimes brief, often conversational, and always generative of possibilities through the characters’ desire, rage, and acts of rebellion.

She Is Sitting in the Night

By: Oliver Pickle

$22.00

A contemporary queer re-visioning of a beautiful feminist tarot deck from the 80s–documenting a conversation across generations and mediums–She Is Sitting in the Night emerges as both a tool for tarot reading and a celebration of queer and feminist cultural production, past and present.

By embracing an older deck and simultaneously developing current and re-visioned ways of interpreting its images and the cards’ meanings, She Is Sitting in the Night provides a much-needed informed, aesthetically strong, accessible queer tarot book for feminists, queers, and tarot readers new and old.

Small Beauty

By: jia qing wilson-yang

Coping with the death of her cousin, Mei abandons her life in the city to live in his now empty house in a small town. There she connects with his history as well as her own, learns about her aunt’s long-term secret relationship, and reflects on the trans women she has left behind.

Small Beauty explores the protagonist’s transness, but it also tenderly yet bitterly unpacks her experiences as a mixed-race person of Chinese descent, cycles of death and loss, and queer and intergenerational community. Small Beauty wanders through isolation, and then breaks it.

Sotto Voce

By: Maureen Hynes

$20.00

Poems 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.

The Discovery of Flight

By: Susan Glickman

$19.95

Finalist for the 2019 International Book Awards ofr Young Adult Fiction

The Discovery of Flight is a novel in two voices about the relationship between two sisters, the older of whom is disabled by cerebral palsy and only able to communicate with assistive technology (she can control her computer by moving her eyes). It interweaves the fantasy novel sixteen-year-old Libby is writing for Sophie’s thirteenth birthday, and Sophie’s diary, in which she discusses the deteriorating condition of her older sister. The book’s title is also the title of Libby’s novel, in which Libby takes the form of a hawk telepathically linked to a girl who, like her sister, is a good artist. Sophie’s diary is in fact illustrated with the occasional black-and-white drawing. The sicker Libby gets, the more she retreats into her novel and the less she interacts with the outside world. Though the situation is tragic, Sophie’s voice is extremely funny and wry. In addition, through her storytelling, Libby becomes a heroic figure rather than a helpless victim. After Libby’s death, the girls’ mother presents Sophie with the novel and Sophie writes its final chapter, bringing the voices of the two girls together.

The Girls with Stone Faces

By: Arleen Paré

$20.00

A 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

All Books in this Collection