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LGBTQ+ Stories
Books for our LGBTQ+ community.
All Books in this Collection
Showing 33–44 of 44 results
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She Is Sitting in the Night
$22.00A 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.
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Small Beauty
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.
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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 Complete Lockpick Pornography
$14.95Now in one volume, Lockpick Pornography and its thematic sequel, We all Got it Coming
Lockpick Pornography is a genderqueer adventure story, and We All Got It Coming is about a young couple dealing with the aftermath of an act of violence. From kidnapping the son of a “family values” politician in Lockpick Pornography to the violent confrontation of We All Got It Coming, these are characters who fight back.
Comeau explores the effects of prejudice and the ramifications of violence with his signature mix of unhinged humour and unexpected tenderness.
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The Discovery of Flight
$19.95Finalist 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.
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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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The Unfinished Dollhouse
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transVersing
$19.95Originally produced for the stage by Artistic Fraud of Newfoundland and For the Love of Learning, transVersing features some of Newfoundland’s most vibrant and necessary trans-youth voices. Gathering the work of Violet Drake, Daze Jefferies, Fionn Shea, Perin Squires, Taylor Stocks, and Dane Woodland, and including the dramatic text by Berni Stapleton and Sharon King-Campbell, transVersing is where Shakespeare meets slam poetry and the fiddle meets soapbox rant. These are the creative and courageous voices charting our course to understanding and social justice for all.
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Twenty-One Cardinals
$19.95From the author and translator of And the Birds Rained Down, a 2015 CBC Canada Reads selection
Winner of the 2015 Governor General’s Literary Award for French-to-English Translation
An abandoned mine. A large family driven by honour. And a source of pain, buried deep in the ground.
We’re nothing like other families. We are self-made. We are an essence unto ourselves, unique and dissonant, the only members of our species. Livers of humdrum lives who flitted around us got their wings burned. We’re not mean, but we can bare our teeth. People didn’t hang around when a band of Cardinals made its presence known.
With twenty-one kids, the Cardinal family is a force of nature. And now, after not being in the same room for decades, they’re congregating to celebrate their father, a prospector who discovered the zinc mine their now-deserted hometown in northern Quebec was built around. But as the siblings tell the tales of their feral childhood, we discover that Angèle, the only Cardinal with a penchant for happiness, has gone missing – although everyone has pretended not to notice for years. Why the silence? What secrets does the mine hold?
‘Rhonda Mullins’ translation of Twenty-One Cardinals expertly embodies the multiple voices in Jocelyne Saucier’s complex novel. More than inhabiting the world of one writer, Mullins single-handedly performs the roles of an entire cast of characters. As a translator, her virtuosic deftness is in the restrained power of her writing.’
– GG jury citation
Praise for the French edition of Twenty-One Cardinals:
‘With its explosive, poignant, funny and tragicstory and memorable characters, Les héritiers de la mine is an important novel … Through the destiny of this large family, the author talks about Abitibi, where she lives, and of its broken dreams and cheated workers, the blind power of multinationals, the disappearance of villages and families decimated. Her protagonists have the makings of heroes, the stuff to withstand adversity; they may be local heroes, but their fight is universal.’
– Voir (translated from the French)
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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
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ZOM-FAM
$16.00In their debut poetry collection, Kama La Mackerel mythologizes a queer/trans narrative of and for their home island, Mauritius. Composed of expansive lyric poems, ZOM-FAM (meaning “man-woman” or “transgender” in Mauritian Kreol) is a voyage into the coming of age of a gender-creative child growing up in the 80s and 90s on the plantation island, as they seek vocabularies for loving and honouring their queer/trans self amidst the legacy of colonial silences. Multiply voiced and imbued with complex storytelling, ZOM-FAM showcases a fluid narrative that summons ancestral voices, femme tongues, broken colonial languages, and a tender queer subjectivity, all of which grapple with the legacy of plantation servitude.
Emerging from a creative process in spoken word and live performance, these poems transform the page into a stage where the queer femme body is written and mapped onto the colonial space of the home/island. Interwoven with Kreol, ZOM-FAM showcases a unique lyrical sensibility, a musicality influenced by the both unforgiving and soothing rhythms of the ocean, where the poet enunciates the complexity of their displaced Indo-African roots, “the lineage of silence / that we weave in-between our intimacies.”