A note to US-based customers: All Lit Up is pausing print orders to the USA until further notice. Read more
Browse featured titles from the ebooks for Everyone collection of accessible epubs.
Showing 841–860 of 867 results
“Nora Decter has written a wrenching, knowing, and wry novel about coming of age into a rough world.” — Meg Wolitzer, author of The Female PersuasionFor fans of Miriam Toews, an absorbing, darkly funny story of family, addiction, and survivalThe summer Bria Powers turns 16 is sinister. Waves of insects plague her hometown of Beauchamp, where fentanyl has recently infiltrated the drug stream. Forest fires muddy the normally wide-open skies, and everything smells like a barbecue all the time. It’s also the summer Bria goes from having saved a life to ruining her own.Since her drug-dealing father disappeared and his girlfriend overdosed, Bria has lived with her aunt Tash and best friend/cousin Ains. By day, Bria and Ains babysit Ains’s younger siblings and sling fast food at Burger Shack. But at night, Bria has her own secret world, sneaking out to see Someboy, an older guy who captivates her sometimes. Other times, he angers-insults-upends her, and that has a certain charm too.But trouble comes for Beauchamp and for Bria in the form of bears that wander into town, dick pics texted from a mystery number, and a creeping dependence on what Bria should hate most of all.Steeped in tragicomedy and written in starkly observed prose, What’s Not Mine explores inheritance, addiction, and survival when the odds are against you.
When the grey bus came to take Rainor Schacht and his friends in the ward for disabled children to a remote hospital called Trutzburg, they had no idea what dark reality awaited them.
No one would tell them what to expect — not Nurse Hilde; not Peter Berger, the kind bus driver; not Dr. Lutz, who ran the Nazi hospital with ruthless efficiency.
Years later, with Berger’s coded diary in hand, Rainor sets out to find Emmi, a fellow survivor of Trutzburg, who looked past Rainor’s disfigurement and elicited the magic that gave purpose to Rainor and solace to Emmi and the other children.
Set against the backdrop of the Second World War, Andrew Boden’s When We Were Ashes takes us to the chilling depths of Aktion T4, one of the darkest chapters in the history of Nazi Germany. In this hauntingly poignant novel, Rainor is led on an illuminating journey to learn the truth about his past and the even more extraordinary truth about his present.
“As a poet and writer, [Rosemary Sullivan] knows that life is lived not as theory but as practice, that . . . you can understand nothing about a place without listening to individual people and their stories.” — Margaret Atwood
Incomparable writer, activist, and world traveller Rosemary Sullivan has at long last written a book about herself, about her life quest to “meet the world, to celebrate its richness, to face its darkness.”
And what a fascinating book it is! Comprised of 21 essays spanning 5 decades and multiple continents, Where the World Was offers a vivid portrait of a writer who is instinctively drawn to other cultures and places.
Whether writing about a solo vacation inside the Iron Curtain, meeting the reclusive writer Elizabeth Smart in a dilapidated cottage in the English countryside, reflecting on how Chilean society responded to Pinochet’s coup, or tracking down the people who knew Svetlana Alliluyeva for Stalin’s Daughter, Sullivan delivers a master class in cultural studies, human rights advocacy, and empathy for the human condition.
Anita Lahey writes the kind of rigorously observed, emotionally charged poetry few can match. In While Supplies Last, her first collection in eleven years, Lahey throws herself on the mercy of a changing climate, takes refuge in art and revels in everyday wonders. In the final section, about a forest fire that devastated the Cape Breton village of Main-à-dieu in 1976, she becomes a custodian of local histories. No matter the subject, whether traffic reports during the pandemic, a fossilized baby mammoth, or Toronto’s iconic Don River, Lahey extends the sense of what language can do and say. This is tour de force writing: mischievous, unpredictable, urgent, never boring. In While Supplies Last, Lahey comes fully into her own.
Miskozi is searching for something…
There’s something missing.
And she’s not sure what it is.
She goes on a search for herself and her culture, accompanied by her inner white girl, Waabishkizi, and guided by Ziibi, a manifestation of an ancestral river, both provoking her to try and find the answers.
She begins the journey back before she was even born, right at the seeds of colonization when her ancestors were forced to hide their culture anywhere they could.
Burying their language.
Their teachings.
Their bundles.
Their moccasins.
White Girls in Moccasins is a hilarious and poignant reclamation story that world-hops between dreams, memories, and a surreal game show. Miskozi recounts her life and is forced to grapple with her own truth, while existing in a society steeped in white supremacy.
A love letter to brown kids born in the 80s, surviving in the 90s and all those continuing to deeply reclaim.
“Rhyno delivers a wholly intriguing mystery unlike any other.” — The Miramichi Reader
Haunted by a childhood of picking locks and tailing suspects with her private-eye dad, Dame Polara desperately wants to leave the mysteries behind and lead an average life with average ambitions: to preserve heritage buildings through her job at City Hall, to care for her father’s mounting health complications, and to one day raise a family of her own.
But when her landlord serves her an eviction notice, and Dame agrees to investigate his wife’s infidelity in exchange for keeping the apartment. A simple domestic case, or so Dame believes, until her investigation uncovers a serial arsonist targeting the very buildings she’s fighting to preserve.
When this new mystery reopens old wounds, Dame must use every trick her father taught her to discover the truth and protect those she loves — lest the dangers of the job catch up to her and burn her whole life to the ground.
Sit down, Daniel’s going to tell you a story.
On the weekend of January 10, 2004, American monologist Spalding Gray killed himself by jumping off the Staten Island Ferry in New York City. That same weekend, Daniel MacIvor was in California, visiting a psychic surgeon who offered to save his life by removing a spiritual entity that had attached to him. But what if Spalding’s death had something to do with Daniel’s entity? Linking these two true parallel stories is fiction derived from Gray’s obsessions and MacIvor’s inventions about a man named Howard who had forgotten how to live.
Poems that stride bravely into the day-to-day, recovering the misdirected intensity at its core.
Brenda Leifso’s Wild Madder is about way-finding–through those moments in which you no longer recognize where you are. It’s about not knowing–who you are anymore, how to be in the world, how to love. It’s about what’s unspoken and about what speaks–conversation with the wild and animate world. It’s about marriage, family, motherhood–the drudgery in them and the quiet beauty.
This is lyric poetry wracked with pain, rage, and longing. In the beginning, the collection may read as though it’s been steeped in bitterness. Family can ask everything of a partner and parent and then turn around and take even more; Wild Madder feels like a note in a bottle washed up on the shores of a rough sea. But Leifso is not one to stand still or cling to darkness; in fact, we end up so far into the darkness that when she breaks through into light, it’s a conflagration of all the things that make us human.
These frank, bracingly recognizable poems will be irresistible–and cathartic–for anyone who has ever felt their life chewing them into little pieces.
“Brenda Leifso writes fearless poetry. Wild Madder turns the domestic inside out, revealing the ‘promise of thunder’ in the familiar. Hers is a generous voice, yet at the same time it is a charged one, calling us into the ‘long-toothed sun’. This is a book of fierce delights.” –Anne Simpson
The fascinating true story of Viola MacMillan and the scandal that transformed the Toronto Stock Exchange
Viola MacMillan had it all: success, money, respect … and even influence. But in 1964, after three decades in the mining industry, one of the most fascinating women in Canadian business history was the central character in one of the country’s most famous stock scandals.
MacMillan was a prospector who’d gone on to put together big deals, develop lucrative mines, and head a major industry association — all at a time when career women were a rarity. But she still dreamed of “a major discovery.” Early in July 1964, shares in her company, Windfall Oil and Mines, took off. In the absence of any information about what Windfall had found on its claims near Timmins, rumours and greed pushed the share price to a high of $5.70. MacMillan stayed quiet. Finally, after three weeks of market frenzy, Windfall admitted it had nothing. When the stock crashed, so many small investors lost money that the Ontario government appointed a royal commission to examine what had happened. Meaningful changes at the Toronto Stock Exchange and the Ontario Securities Commission followed.
Windfall: Viola MacMillan and Her Notorious Mining Scandal is biographical history at its finest: the unlikely story of a trailblazer who, although convicted and imprisoned, would later receive the Order of Canada.
A queer paranormal horror novel in the style of showrunner Mike Flannagan, showing the complex real-life terror inherent in grief and mental illnessAfter the tragic death of their father and surviving a life-threatening eating disorder, 18-year-old Ellis moves with their mother to the small town of Black Stone, seeking a simpler life and some space to recover. But Black Stone feels off; it’s a disquieting place surrounded by towns with some of the highest death rates in the country. It doesn’t help that everyone says Ellis’s new house is haunted — everyone including Quinn, a local girl who has quickly captured Ellis’s attention. And Ellis has started to believe what people are saying: they see pulsing veins in their bedroom walls and specters in dark corners of the cellar. Together, Ellis and Quinn dig deep into Black Stone’s past and soon discover that their town, and Ellis’s house in particular, is the battleground in a decades-long spectral war, one that will claim their family — and the town — if it’s allowed to continue.Withered is queer psychological horror, a compelling tale of heartache, loss, and revenge that tackles important issues of mental health in the way that only horror can: by delving deep into them, cracking them open, and exposing their gruesome entrails.
New and revised edition of an early work by the Governor General’s Award-winning poet.
On the occasion of the press’s 40th anniversary, Brick Books is proud to present the last of our six new editions of classic books from our back catalogue. This edition of Wittgenstein Elegies features an expansive Introduction by Sue Sinclair, a new Afterword by the author and a new cover and design by the renowned typographer Robert Bringhurst.
First published in 1986, Wittgenstein Elegies is a polyphonic poem in five parts. It establishes the parameters of a long conversation between logic and the lyre that has continued over multiple books and in multiple genres. Long out of print, this revised edition is both a must-have for Zwicky’s readers and a perfect introduction to her work.
“Here was the one guy in recent history who appeared to have got it right and he was being taught all wrong. I wroteWittgenstein Elegies in an attempt to respond to this state of affairs. I wanted to draw attention to the unity of Wittgenstein’s life and work. I hoped to show how profoundly he experienced the moral dimensions of language’s relation to the world.” –Jan Zwicky, from the Afterword
“Zwicky shows us that there is a way of speaking that leaves room for what cannot be spoken.” –Sue Sinclair, from the Introduction
In his commanding poetry debut, Wolf Sonnets, R. P. LaRose undoes the sonnet’s classical constraints, retooling the form for current political circumstances. Packed with family lore, these poems reflect on how deeply we can trust the terms we use to construct our identity. A proud citizen of the Métis Nation, LaRose even questions his right to identify as such: “I was made in someone else’s home,” he writes. Wolf Sonnets is verse obsessed with names, infinity, numbers, categories, and interconnectedness. Depicting his ancestors as wolves—symbols of survival and protection—LaRose brings fresh insight to his wider poetic project: castigating the inequality, greed, and racism inherent to colonialism.
Since selections first appeared in the New Quarterly and the National Post as part of “The Afterword,” Steven Heighton’s memos and dispatches to himself — a writer’s pointed, cutting take on his own work and the work of writing — have been tweeted and retweeted, discussed and tacked to bulletin boards everywhere. Coalesced, completed, and collected here for the first time, a wholly new kind of book has emerged, one that’s as much about creative process as it is about created product, at once about living life and the writing life.
“I stick to a form that bluntly admits its own limitation and partiality and makes a virtue of both things,” Heighton writes in his foreword, “a form that lodges no claim to encyclopedic completeness, balance, or conclusive truth. At times, this form (I’m going to call it the memo) is a hybrid of the epigram and the précis, or of the aphorism and the abstract, the maxim and the debater’s initial be-it-resolved. At other times it’s a meditation in the Aurelian sense, a dispatch-to-self that aspires to address other selves — readers — as well.”
It’s in these very aspirations, reaching both back into and forward in time — and, ultimately, outside of the pages of the book itself — that Heighton offers perhaps the freshest, most provocative picture of what it means to create the literature of the modern world.
A rare glimpse not only into the life of a professional wrestler, but the life of a gay man in a straight world, this tragic memoir is told in Chris Kanyon’s own words, with the help of journalist Ryan Clark.One of the most popular wrestlers of the late 1990s, Kanyon kept his personal life private from his fans until finally revealing his biggest secret in 2004: he was gay. Going through the various roles that Kanyon played, both in the ring and out of it, as well as his battle with manic depression, this book explores the factors that led to his suicide in 2010.In his voice and the way he wanted it told, these are Kanyon’s last words about his experience rising through the ranks to the top of the professional wrestling world while keeping his sexuality hidden.
J. Robert Oppenheimer: reluctant father of the atomic bomb, enthusiastic lover of books, devoted husband and philanderer. Engaging with the books he voraciously read, and especially the Bhagavad Gita, his moral compass, this lyrical novel takes us through his story, from his tumultuous youth to his marriage with a radical communist and the two secret, consuming affairs he carried on, all the while bringing us deep inside the mind of the man behind the Manhattan Project. With the stunning backdrop of Los Alamos, New Mexico, Oppenheimer’s spiritual home, and using progressively shorter chapters that shape into an inward spiral, Y brings us deep inside the passions and moral qualms of this man with pacifist, communist leanings as he created and tested the world’s first weapon of mass destruction? and, in the process, changed the world we live in immeasurably.
With the caustic daring of Bret Easton Ellis and the offbeat, psychological insight of Douglas Coupland, You Crushed It is a captivating exploration of love and the corroding nature of power in creative industries.
Raph Massi is crushing it. A young up-and-coming comedian, he’s successfully navigating the internal cosmos of the stand-up industry and burying long-borne insecurities with each successful gig. He does so with the support of his girlfriend, Laurie, who narrates the book, sharing their sensual, mundane moments of new love and the creative collaborations that follow.
But, when Laurie dumps him, Raph’s heartbreak metastasizes into paranoia, cruelty, and a path that is as lonely as it is destructive. Baril Guérard shares an exacting portrayal of the innermost thoughts we hide from the world and from ourselves. The result is a devastating critique of the soft underbelly of toxic masculinity and the complicated ferocity of those who protect it.
You Crushed It is an eminently readable, witty reflection on artistic prowess, community, and the intoxication of success.