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Winner, New Brunswick Book Award (Non-Fiction) and APMA Best Atlantic-Published Book Award
Mary Pratt’s art has captivated millions of Canadians. Her luminescent paintings capture reality in a way that few artists have been able to achieve — the chip in a glass bowl, the play of light across a dish-strewn supper table, the vulnerability of a naked woman. Replete with symbolism, Pratt’s work elevates the traditional still life by transforming the everyday into the iconic.
Art historian Anne Koval wrote Mary Pratt: A Love Affair with Vision in close consultation with Pratt. The book is informed by extensive interviews with the artist, and her family, friends, and colleagues and by unprecedented access to Pratt’s archival holdings at Mount Allison University. This in-depth study of Pratt’s life and work explores the complex issues of gender, feminism, and realism in Canadian art, resulting in a richly layered biography of an artist who redefined the visual culture of her period and whose art and life intersect in varied and surprising ways.
On the night before her wedding, Mary dreams of a thunderstorm, during which she unexpectedly meets Charlie sheltering in a barn beside his horse. With innocence and humour, the two discover a charming first love. But the year is 1914, and the world is collapsing into a brutal war. Together, they attempt to hide their love, galloping through the fields for a place and time where the tumultuous uncertainties of battle can’t find them. A play with a heart as big as the skies that serve as its stage, Mary’s Wedding is an epic, unforgettable story of love, hope, and survival.
Set in Spain and Mexico during the 1930s, Matadora tells the story of Luna Caballero Garcia, an impoverished and intrepid servant attempting to make her name in the bullring at a time when it was illegal for a girl to do so. Matadora carries readers from bohemian artistic circles in Mexico City and Andalusia to Norman Bethune’s mobile blood transfusions on the Madrid front.
Against a backdrop of rising fascism and the Spanish Civil War, Elizabeth Ruth has created a powerful and compelling exploration of love, art, and politics, and an intelligent mirror for our times.
Boldly sensual, with a cast of unforgettable characters and a plot that will keep readers on the edge of their seats, Matadora is easily one of the most original books of the year.
His psyche still reeling from having to kill a criminal in the line of duty, Calgary’s Detective Lane flies to Cuba to celebrate the wedding of his beloved niece. While there, though, he finds himself drafted by the local police into investigating the murder of a Canadian tourist.
Upon his return to Calgary, links between this incident and the deaths of local elderly pensioners start to make themselves known, drawing Lane and his partner Nigel Li further into a web of conspiracy, politics and big money.
Garry Ryan’s award-winning, best-selling mystery series continues with all the intrigue, good humour and mochaccinos that fans have come to expect.
For most of his adult life, Adrian Michael Kelly specialized in failure — serial, sometimes comic, but also epic failure. Born to a gambling-addicted, compulsively spending mother who left when he was five, and raised by his dad, a haunted and often violent hard-drinking Scot, Kelly learned failure early and learned it remarkably well: how to be small, how to be safe, how to be self-defeating. By the age of 30, he was larking around abroad, trying (and failing) to write like his literary heroes while mired in bad relationships and dead-end work.
On a gray October morning in 1999, thunderously hungover and sick to death of himself, he boarded a train in Zurich bound for Bergamo and entered the initial, terrifying stages of a months-long collapse, less a psychological than a spiritual emergency — full-bore and loud.
Maybe It’s Me recounts what led up to that emergency as well as its aftermath, when Kelly came back to Canada to try to rebuild his life. For a while he did just that, but at the very summit of his hard-won achievements, life and his own folly brought him low again. Chronically unemployed, crippled by hideous back pain, and driven to despair by the mother of all writer’s block, he was divorced and nearly homeless at age 47. But along with how to fail, Kelly knew how not to quit, and he set about the process — long and difficult — of creating a consequential, good-enough life.
Free of self-pity and beautifully told, Maybe It’s Me is for everyone who gets in their own way — and can still have a laugh about it.
Contemporary Indigenous theatre in Canada is only thirty-three years old, if one begins counting from the premiere of Maria Campbell’s Jessica in Saskatoon and the establishment of Native Earth Performing Arts in Toronto. Since those contemporaneous events in 1982, the Canadian community of Indigenous theatre artists has grown and inspired one another.Medicine Shows: Indigenous Performance Culture traces the work of a host of these artists over the past three decades, illuminating the connections, the artistic genealogy, and the development of a contemporary Indigenous theatre practice. Neither a history nor a chronicle,Medicine Shows examines how theatre has been used to make medicine, reconnecting individuals and communities, giving voice to the silenced and disappeared, staging ceremony, and honouring the ancestors.
Micro Miracle is the moving account of a first-time mother whose expectations of childbirth and parenting are dramatically altered when she gives birth sixteen weeks prematurely to Madeline. Weighing just over a pound, with eyes fused shut, and thin, fragile skin, Madeline could fit in a hand, but she’s too ill to be touched. Unflinchingly honest, Micro Miracle is a true story of a medical triumph.
“This is the definitive text on the life of bodybuilding’s greatest iconoclast … A towering achievement.” — Jack Neary, former senior editor of Muscle & Fitness magazine
Mike Mentzer was a strikingly handsome man with a brilliant mind and a “perfect” physique — the first bodybuilder to receive a perfect score in both amateur and professional competitions. In the late ’70s, Mentzer rose to the very top of his sport (despite the efforts made by industry power brokers, such as Arnold Schwarzenegger), was featured in GQ magazine, and profiled on national television. But he was also a man who wrestled with mental illness his entire life and ended up living on the streets and being sent to prison. Just when it seemed his career was over, he found it within himself to reboot his intellect and revolutionize bodybuilding training, arguing bodybuilders should not forsake their mental development in favor of developing their bodies. He became a pariah in the fitness industry (which only cared about selling supplements and other products) but a hero to legions of fans who earnestly sought truth.
Mike Mentzer: American Odysseus is the first biography of Mike Mentzer to appear in North America written by his close friend of 21 years, John Little, “one of the leading fitness researchers in North America” (Iron Man magazine). Drawing upon audio recordings, letters, diary excerpts, as well as interviews with those closest to him, this is the true story of one man who stood up to an entire industry — and paid the ultimate price.
Mischief in High Places examines the spectacular career and personal life of the man who, in 1919, first became elected prime minister of Newfoundland.
The political successes of Sir Richard Squires’ career are overshadowed by a legacy of scandal and deceit that paved the way for Newfoundland’s loss of democracy in 1933.
Perhaps best known for slipping out of the Colonial Building during the 1932 riot, Squires had survived three corruption-ridden terms in office in the final decades of responsible government while living a high-flying lifestyle with his wife, Helena.
Fran longs to be a star of stage and screen, but she’s too poor to afford elocution and dance lessons. When she lands the leading role of Miss Matty in a school production of Cranford, she’s determined to make a splash. Far away, in Europe, World War II rages on, but Fran isn’t worried, because her boyfriend is stationed in Canada. Her life seems to be heading in the right direction, finally — until she begins to unravel a web of lies and deception. Much as she wants to cling to familiar fantasies, Fran may have no choice but to face the truth.
Evade your eye. Try to see as others do
what is desired or refused. What went wrong.
Or right, then wrong. Objectively, what hangs.
Pull yourself together. Years are neither kind
nor cruel. You drag on. The girl is gone.
Consider that it might be time to call in
a professional. Blood is fearless, runs
to meet a touch, indiscriminate, remembering
the first time it fell in love with the world, unaware
that now you are alone.
From “Mirror”
In Modern and Normal, Karen Solie takes her on-the-road fascination with being between places to a new level, exploring conceptual and perceptual states of in-betweenness – for example, between what is perceived and what is actually there, or between and among the patterns the world repeats from the cell to the structure of the universe — to find points of intersection. Solie finds a middle ground between the discourses of the hard sciences and the intuitive, a realm of weird overlap wherein lie questions of probability, fate, determinism, chance, luck, and faith. She writes about fractals and physics, but also about bar bands, broken hearts, and the trappings of desire. Some splendid landscape poems celebrate nature while mourning the way in which it’s often exploited and used. Once again Karen Solie offers readers her lovely dexterity and skill in poems which entertain as they move.
Comic and sober by turns, these poems ask us what is sufficient, what will suffice?
… a mandrill, a middle-aged woman, a shattered Baghdad neighbourhood, a long marriage, even a spoon, grapple with this unanswerable conundrum — sometimes with rage, or plain persistence, sometimes with the furious joy of a dog who gets to ride with his head through a truck’s passenger window. Julie Bruck’s third book of poetry is a brilliant and unusual blend of pathos and play, of deep seriousness and wildly veering humour. Though Bruck “does not stammer when it’s time to speak up,” and “will not blink when it’s time to stare directly at the uncomfortable,” as Cornelius Eady says in his blurb for the book, “in Monkey Ranch she celebrates more than she sighs, and she smartly avoids the shallow trap of mere indignation by infusing her lines with bright, nimble turns, the small, yet indelible detail. Bruck sees everything we do; she just seems to see it wiser. Her poems sing and roil with everything complicated and joyous we human monkeys are.”
2023 Canada Reads Longlist Selection
National Bestseller
Winner of the 2019 OLA Forest of Reading Evergreen Award
Shortlisted for the 2019 John W. Campbell Memorial Award
Shortlisted for the 2019/20 First Nation Communities READ Indigenous Literature Award
2020 Burlington Library Selection; 2020 Hamilton Reads One Book One Community Selection; 2020 Region of Waterloo One Book One Community Selection; 2019 Ontario Library Association Ontario Together We Read Program Selection; 2019 Women’s National Book Association’s Great Group Reads; 2019 Amnesty International Book Club Pick
January 2020 Reddit r/bookclub pick of the month
“This slow-burning thriller is also a powerful story of survival and will leave readers breathless.” — Publishers Weekly
“Rice seamlessly injects Anishinaabe language into the dialogue and creates a beautiful rendering of the natural world … This title will appeal to fans of literary science-fiction akin to Cormac McCarthy as well as to readers looking for a fresh voice in indigenous fiction.” — Booklist
A daring post-apocalyptic novel from a powerful rising literary voice
With winter looming, a small northern Anishinaabe community goes dark. Cut off, people become passive and confused. Panic builds as the food supply dwindles. While the band council and a pocket of community members struggle to maintain order, an unexpected visitor arrives, escaping the crumbling society to the south. Soon after, others follow.
The community leadership loses its grip on power as the visitors manipulate the tired and hungry to take control of the reserve. Tensions rise and, as the months pass, so does the death toll due to sickness and despair. Frustrated by the building chaos, a group of young friends and their families turn to the land and Anishinaabe tradition in hopes of helping their community thrive again. Guided through the chaos by an unlikely leader named Evan Whitesky, they endeavor to restore order while grappling with a grave decision.
Blending action and allegory, Moon of the Crusted Snow upends our expectations. Out of catastrophe comes resilience. And as one society collapses, another is reborn.
Evolving from a routine of long walks he began to help him quit smoking, Winnipeg singer, songwriter and musician, Scott Nolan’s debut poetry collection Moon Was a Feather reflects on a life well-considered. Poems that chronicle a difficult youth, experience with drugs, friendships, and music are interwoven with insights gleaned from the eclectic jumble of neighbourhoods and people he encounters on his long walks. Spare — eloquent with a healthy dose of grit — the poems of Moon Was a Feather are infused with the poet’s deep appreciation for the eccentricities of fate that life throws at him, and the love for music that helps him make sense of them.
Lyrical poetry inspired by popular songs, Rogal sweeps the reader through the journey of creation.
In More Songs the Radio Won’t Play, Stan Rogal takes formerly “popular” tunes (from various genres) and transforms them. Self-referentiality; mashups of the erudite and profane; allusions to other arts and sciences; the insertion and bending of biographical and historical facts; problematic snippets of philosophy and literary theory, quotes, and bastardizations; deploying non- or a-political language to challenge notions of how a poem should work; sampling; and off-kilter humour work together to update Rogal’s playlist for a present-day audience.
While his poems unavoidably serve to comment on the world today, Rogal resists a central message. The true emphasis of this collection is on the process of creation. It’s not the destination but the journey that is of significance. Not mere cover versions, not exactly parodies (though parodic), these poems are redactions, mutations, Frankenstein’s monsters … they resemble the original — somewhat — yet are also grossly different.
For decades, the Holloways have operated a convenience store in the working-class neighborhood of Rabbittown in St. John’s, and every customer has a story. In a vibrant, contemporary family saga, filled with idiosyncratic characters, Trudy Morgan-Cole tells the tale of three generations of Holloway women—Ellen, Audrey, and Rachel—their loves and their livelihood in times of great change. Most Anything You Please captures the spirit of a community and the women who hold it together, revealing the bonds that break and the ties that bind.
How do we speak what feels unspeakable?
Exploring the landscape of grief in the wake of divorce, Most of All the Wanting is a treatise on intimacy in the face of change. Throughout, Amanda Merpaw’s poems attend to the fluidity of queer desire, documenting the complexities of intimacy, longing, and joy where “there’s burning beyond / the cusp of our cups.” Set in an environment of political and ecological upheaval, Most of All the Wanting asks what queerness makes possible within the self and the world. An essential debut.
Finalist for the Governor Generals Award for Drama. Mother Tongue is a unique and innovative play that weaves together Cantonese, English, and sign language. It is about family loyalties, youthful dreams, and generational and cultural differences.