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ebooks for Everyone Lists

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Showing 301–320 of 803 results

Hymn

By: John Barton

$19.00

A journey in search of love through the contemporary homoerotic male body.
Improvising on a variety of poetic forms and traversing disparate landscapes — from Belfast to the clear-cuts of Vancouver Island, from the subterranean heat of Jules Verne’s Iceland to the ventriloquism of the Alberta Rockies’ echoing eastern slopes — John Barton documents the path of the male body in the search for love in an increasingly unstable, supposedly tolerant contemporary world. Hymn, stokes the fires of homoerotic romantic love with its polar extremes of intimacy and solitude.
… though he files all forethought of the unknown life now going

on without him, a life he confuses with his own, his life promiscuous
however rearranged his surfaces or clean his drawers, the unclarifying

distractions of the body portentous in his downfall, the downfall
of his own body a matter of time, but thinking of the man who left
the accidental man come between them, the man he may yet become
it is impossible for him not to sing them unwashed hymns of praise.

— from “Hymn”
I Am Full

By: Dan Yashinsky

$19.95

Dan Yashinsky’s son Jacob died tragically in a car accident at the age of 26. Dan, Jacob and Jacob’s best friend Effie were driving back to Toronto after a magical trip to Montreal when Dan fell asleep at the wheel and crashed. Dan and Effie survived, but Jacob did not. When the unimaginable happens–a parent is still somehow here but their child is gone–all that’s left are stories. In the process of grieving his son, Dan realized that he was now Jacob’s storykeeper, and I Am Full is Jacob’s story.

Jacob’s death is the least interesting thing about him. How he lived, the kind of man he became, is what matters most. All his life, Jacob had struggled with Prader-Willi Syndrome, but rather than let it defeat him, he became an advocate for people suffering from PWS as well as people coping with various other disabilities. He was a jewelry-maker, a photographer, a songwriter, a TPS crossing guard, and an avid fisherman. Six months after Jacob’s death, Dan began to gather and create the texts that make up this chronicle, all the while guided by Jacob’s imagined voice. The events in I Am Full are drawn from many periods of Jacob’s life. Much of it–poems, sayings, speeches, letters, notes–are in Jacob’s own words and the rest is told in his imagined voice narrating things that Dan saw him do or hear him talk about. Jacob’s voice has been captured and carried in this unique book, which goes beyond the terrible grief of losing a child to preserving and sharing his story.
I Built a Cabin

By: Sara Jewell

$13.99

Eager for some peace and quiet, the main character of this tale in verse moves to the woods and builds a little cabin getaway. She?s found the perfect retreat?or so she thinks until she meets her neighbours: an array of loud and lively creatures who crunch and crack and hoot their way into her life. Young listeners will delight in the animals? playful antics and learn a bit about life in the wild.
I Hate Parties

By: Jes Battis

$19.95

Fifty poems to dance (awkwardly) between queer and anxious spaces.

Social anxiety runs through I Hate Parties like a current. Recorded on deliberately shaky media, this collection offers the B-side of growing up queer, autistic and nonbinary. From Scruff dates to mix tapes, Jes Battis cruises (and crashes) through wild feelings and minor catastrophes. Dipping readers into a world of missed connections, social disasters and life as a queer party that constantly surprises, Battis uses a light touch and neurodiverse prosody as they chronicle middle-grade queerness and a kind of meandering surreality. From difficult desires, panic attacks and environmental sensitivities, Battis weaves nineties metaphors with current discussions of neurodiversity and trans rights in Canada as they ruminate between past and present like a cat refusing to settle. I Hate Parties guides us through all the best and worst parties of our lives—to the secret room beyond, where being awkward is the one and only dress code.
i heard a crow before i was born

By: Jules Delorme

$22.95

i heard a crow before i was born.
i heard tsó:ka’we before i was born.

i heard a crow before i was born opens with a dream-memory that transforms into a stark, poetic reflection on the generational trauma faced by many Indigenous families. Jules Delorme was born to resentful and abusive parents, in a world in which he never felt he belonged. Yet, buoyed by the love shown to him by his tóta (grandmother) and his many animal protectors, Delorme gained the strength to reckon with his brutal childhood and create this transformative and evocative memoir.

Across chapters that tell of his troubled relationships, Delorme unwraps the pain at the centre of his own story: the residential schools and the aftershocks that continue to reverberate.

In this stunning testament to the power of storytelling — to help us grieve and help us survive — Delorme tells the story of his spirit walk as he embraces the contradictions of his identity. As he writes, “i heard a crow before i was born is a man looking back, and dreaming back, and seeing that life, in whatever form it takes, however harsh it might seem, is beautiful.”
I Left You Behind

By: Nazneen Sheikh

$22.95

Spanning several decades and three countries, these enchanting short stories dwell unsentimentally on shifting homes and lost ancestral homelands, distant memories and fragmented family ties. Largely inspired by the author’s own life experiences, they depict close parental bonds, poignant encounters, tragedies and personal triumphs.

Injustice, the importance of education and a love of literature are recurring themes in the more autobiographical stories. At the age of thirteen in Pakistan “the girl” is forced to learn to read the Quran, without understanding its verses until adulthood. During a school year spent in Texas, she witnesses the ugly realities of American racism and segregation. At university in Pakistan, she visits a teenaged royal bride who is forced to observe purdah, to whom she later sends samples of classical English fiction, in the hope of inspiring her, and being a comfort and an inspiration. Years later, she visits her former philosophy professor at Oxford, with whom she shares her decision to become a writer.

These are stories of dislocation, relocation, and longing, evoking the physical and mental isolation made so tangible during the Covid pandemic. Rich in dialogue and description, the seventeen stories are Persian carpets, interwoven with numerous threads to produce a vivid tapestry of lives lived.
I Remember Lights

By: Ben Ladouceur

$24.95

The first novel from award-winning poet Ben Ladouceur, I Remember Lights depicts a time when the world promised everything to everyone, however irresponsibly.

In summer 1967, love is all you need…but some forms of love are criminal. As the spectacular Expo 67 celebrations take shape, a young man new to Montreal learns about gay life from cruising partners, one-night stands, live-in lovers, and friends. Once Expo begins, he finds romance with a charismatic visitor, but their time is limited. When the fireworks wither into smoke, so do their options.

A decade later, during the notorious 1977 police raid on a gay bar called Truxx, he comes to understand even more about the bitter choice, so often made by men like him, between happiness and safety.

I Remember Lights is a vital reminder of forgotten history and a visceral exploration of the details of queer life: tribulation and joy, exile and solidarity, cruelty and fortitude.
Ice Diaries

By: Jean McNeil

$26.95

What do we stand to lose in a world without ice?

A decade ago, novelist and short story writer Jean McNeil spent a year as writer-in-residence with the British Antarctic Survey, and four months on the world’s most enigmatic continent — Antarctica. Access to the Antarctic remains largely reserved for scientists, and it is the only piece of earth that is nobody’s country. Ice Diaries is the story of McNeil’s years spent in ice, not only in the Antarctic but her subsequent travels to Greenland, Iceland, and Svalbard, culminating in a strange event in Cape Town, South Africa, where she journeyed to make what was to be her final trip to the southernmost continent.

In the spirit of the diaries of Antarctic explorers Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton, McNeil mixes travelogue, popular science, and memoir to examine the history of our fascination with ice. In entering this world, McNeil unexpectedly finds herself confronting her own upbringing in the Maritimes, the lifelong effects of growing up in a cold place, and how the climates of childhood frame our emotional thermodynamics for life. Ice Diaries is a haunting story of the relationship between beauty and terror, loss and abandonment, transformation and triumph.
If Clara

By: Martha Baillie

$19.95

In If Clara, nobody stands on firm ground. Daisy, a writer confined to her home, her leg in a cast from hip to ankle, receives a parcel containing the manuscript of a novel about a Syrian refugee and is asked to pose as its writer. Julia, the curator at the Kleinzahler Gallery, has no idea that her sister, Clara, has written a novel. However, she does know that Clara suffers from a debilitating mental illness, is unpredictable, and lapses easily into hostility. Maurice’s life is changed by an art installation involving a pair of binoculars welded to the wall through which visitors are invited to observe passersby outside. An ultralight aircraft’s collision with a quiet lawn brings them all together. If Clara explores the emotional weight of friendship, the complexity of family, and people inextricably entwined.
If Sylvie Had Nine Lives

By: Leona Theis

$22.95

Winner of the High Plains Book Award and the Saskatchewan Fiction Award.

An innovative, gorgeously written story about the small decisions that shape our lives.

Meet Sylvie—funny, sly, sensual and flawed. She can’t always count on herself to make good choices. She may or may not recognize a life-or-death moment, may or may not cancel her own wedding with a day to spare, might just try to walk past store security with a little something in her pocket. Like all of us, Sylvie must make decisions that have reverberations for years to come. Unlike the rest of us, Sylvie gets to live more than one life.

In airy prose imbued with humour, this novel asks the big questions: is there a right path and a wrong path, or does each possibility hold its share of pleasure and pain? Does a person have an immutable self, or is her essence dependent on circumstances? In this energetic and innovative book, Leona Theis creates a world without the usual limits and a protaganist who is conflicted, charismatic, brave, and full of curiosity. If Sylvie Had Nine Lives is for everyone who has ever asked, What if…?
If We Caught Fire

By: Beth Ryan

$22.95

If We Caught Fire brings two families together for a wedding in St. John’s, an event that sets off a summer of fireworks in the lives of the people around them.

Edie’s calm and contained life is knocked awry when her mother decides to marry a man she met online after just a few months of dating. The groom’s son, Harlow, is a joyful adventurer who shows up for the wedding and quickly recruits Edie as his sidekick.

Harlow runs toward risk and adventure with arms wide open, unconcerned about what other people expect from him. Edie plans every step carefully and keeps her dreams small and attainable, even when others encourage her to want more. Over a few months, they develop a connection that defies definition, a situation that leaves Edie queasy with fear and tingly with possibility.

Edie and Harlow (and the rest of their new unwieldy family) do an elaborate dance, trying to discover just what they are to one another. When Edie thinks she’s figured him out, Harlow reveals a depth and darkness she didn’t see coming. By Labour Day, they’ve created connections, tested boundaries, and found they’ve come together and apart in unexpected ways.
If We Were Birds

By: Erin Shields

$16.95

If We Were Birds is a shocking, uncompromising examination of the horrors of war, giving voice to a woman long ago forced into silence, and placing a spotlight on millions of female victims who have been silenced through violence. A deeply affecting and thought-provoking re-imagining of Ovid’s masterpiece “Tereus, Procne, and Philomela,” Erin Shields’s award-winning play is an unflinching commentary on contemporary war and its aftermath delivered through the lens of Greek tragedy.
Immigrant Blues

By: Goran Simic

$15.00

Immigrant Blues, an extension and deepening of the famous poems of the siege of Sarajevo translated in Simic’s Sprinting from the Graveyard (Oxford, 1997), explores the personal and the public devastations of war, especially its effects on the emotions, thoughts and memories of exiled survivors. Simic’s genius is to present this disturbing reality in terms so vigorous and humane that pain is mixed with the solace and pleasure of great art.

Open the doors, the guests are coming
some of them burned by the sun, some of them pale
but every one with suitcases made of human skin.
If you look carefully at the handles, fragile as birds’ spines,
you will find your own fingerprints, your mother’s tears,
your grandpa’s sweat.
The rain just started. The world is grey.

from “Open the Door”

“The brilliance of these poems lies in their detail, their lack of rhetoric, and their passion.” — Helen Dunmore, reviewing Sprinting from the Graveyard in The Observer

“Goran Simic has written with tact and restraint in daunting and provocative conditions. The fact that his terrifying testimony seems more whispered than screamed is part of its power.” — Denis O’Driscoll, on Sprinting from the Graveyard in The Times Literary Supplement
impact statement

By: Jody Chan

$23.95

Longlisted Pat Lowther Award

A revolutionary call to arms wherein the arms are love, art, self-definition, and community care as an alternative to so-called care under carceral capitalism.

Borrowing and disrupting the forms of patient records, psychiatric assessments, and court documents, Jody Chan’s impact statement traces a history of psychiatric institutions within a settler colonial state. These poems bring the reader into the present moment of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, capitalism and “money models of madness,” and “wellness” checks. Forming a ghost chorus, they sing an impact statement on migration and intergenerational trauma, gentrification, and police neglect of racialized violence against queer communities in Toronto–and how the “wrong” kinds of desire, be it across class, race, or gender lines, or towards other worlds, are often punished or disappeared. And yet, these poems also make space for what can take root, despite the impacts–care teams, collective grief rituals, dinners around a table with too many friends to fit. impact statement imagines, and re-imagines, and re-imagines again, a queer, disabled, abolitionist revolution towards our communal flourishing.
In Defence of Copyright

By: Hugh Stephens

$19.95

“This book is filled with important information and excellent insights. … You should buy it … please don’t illegally download it.” — John Degen, The British Columbia Review

Copyright is one of the cornerstones of western civilization; it is as relevant today, if not more so, than it was when the first formal copyright laws were enacted in the eighteenth century.

With the rise of the Digital Age, new challenges have been brought to the frontlines of the copyright battle. Online piracy, extensive unauthorized use of copyrighted works by educational institutions, and artificial intelligence are testing the ability of copyright laws to protect creators and their intellectual property.

Canada’s copyright laws are out of step with other western democracies and are overdue for updating. They need to be resilient and adaptive to the digital age to promote the production of new work and ideas.
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.
In Spirit

By: Tara Beagan

$17.95

Twelve-year-old Molly was riding her new bicycle on a deserted road when a man in a truck pulled up next to her, saying he was lost. He asked if she could get in and help him back to the highway, and said he could bring her back to her bike after. Molly declined, out of interest for her own safety. The next things Molly remembers are dirt, branches, trees, pain, and darkness.

Molly is now a spirit.

Mustering up some courage, she pieces together her short life for herself and her family while she reassembles her bicycle—the same one that was found thrown into the trees on the side of the road. Juxtaposed with flashes of news, sounds, and videos, Molly’s chilling tale becomes more and more vivid, challenging humanity not to forget her presence and importance.

In an intimate, loving approach to the tragic subject of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, the acclaimed author of Dreary and Izzy shines a light on the haunting tale of a preteen’s last moments.
In the Black

By: B. Denham Jolly

$29.95

Winner of the 2017 Toronto Book AwardA remarkable memoir about achieving prosperity in the face of relentless prejudiceIn the Black traces B. Denham Jolly’s personal and professional struggle for a place in a country where Black Canadians have faced systematic discrimination. He arrived from Jamaica to attend university in the mid-1950s and worked as a high school teacher before going into the nursing and retirement-home business. Though he was ultimately successful in his business ventures, Jolly faced both overt and covert discrimination, which led him into social activism. The need for a stronger voice for the Black community fuelled Jolly’s 12-year battle to get a licence for a Black-owned radio station in Toronto. At its launch in 2001, Flow 93.5 became the model for urban music stations across the country, helping to launch the careers of artists like Drake.Jolly chronicles not only his own journey; he tells the story of a generation of activists who worked to reshape the country into a more open and just society. While celebrating these successes, In the Black also measures the distance Canada still has to travel before we reach our stated ideals of equality.
In the Country in the Dark

By: Daryl Sneath

$19.95

When Landon and Joy meet they feel an instant connection and quickly become inseparable. One day shortly after they’ve met, they take a trip to view The Hart Farm, an idyllic property located in a remote area. It’s perfect, with room for Landon to set up his carpentry shop and Joy to have an art studio. The real estate agent feels complete disclosure of the property’s tragic and potentially violent past is necessary but Landon and Joy decide ignorance is bliss and ask to not be told the details. They’re in love and smitten with the farm and decide on the spot to buy it.

As they spend their days creating art, reading, cooking for each other, listening to music, and making love, they can barely believe their good fortune. However, when the heat of summer–as well as their initial infatuation–begins to wane, Landon and Joy realize how little they know about each other or the house they now call home. They begin to feel a mounting sense of danger and uncertainty about what they used to delight in–the mysterious and tragic history of The Hart Farm, the wolves that prowl in the dark of night, and the near stranger they share a bed with.

In the Country in the Dark is a thrilling psychological exploration of the secrets we keep and why, the obsessions we live with, the love we all need, the family we sometimes find–and the lengths we might go to keep it.
In the Key of Decay

By: Em Dial

$21.95

Triangulated against the backdrop of a deteriorating world, In the Key of Decay pushes past borders both real and imagined to attend to those failed by history. Attuned to scientific racism, systemic medical failures, and climate change, Em Dial’s poems incisively carve out space for interrogation. Their place-finding and place-making is often surprising, centring care and desire, where Dial’s speaker “calls for someone to call me what I am and for that someone to be a lover, bare on silk sheets, inside walls of confidential lilac.” In the Key of Decay doesn’t just hum along, it sings.