Your cart is currently empty!
LGBTQ+ Stories
Books for our LGBTQ+ community.
All Books in this Collection
Showing 1–16 of 36 results
-
A Natural History of Transition
$18.95A Natural History of Transition is a collection of short stories that disrupts the notion that trans people can only have one transformation. Like the landscape studied over eons, change does not have an expiration date for these trans characters, who grow as tall as buildings, turn into mountains, unravel hometown mysteries, and give birth to cocoons. Portland-based author Callum Angus infuses his work with a mix of alternative history, horror, and a reality heavily dosed with magic.
-
Any Other Way
$25.95Toronto is home to multiple and thriving queer communities that reflect the dynamism of a global city. Any Other Way is an eclectic and richly illustrated local history that reveals how these individuals and community networks have transformed Toronto from a place of churches and conservative mores into a city that has consistently led the way in queer activism, not just in Canada but internationally.
From the earliest pioneersto the parades, pride and politics of the contemporary era, Any Other Way draws on a range of voices to explore how the residents of queer Toronto have shaped and reshaped one of the world’s most diverse cities.
Any Other Way includes chapters on: Oscar Wilde’s trip to Toronto; early cruising areas and gay/lesbian bars; queer shared houses; a pioneering collective trans archive project; bath house raids; LBGT-police conflicts; the Queen Street art/music/activist scene; and a profile of Jackie Shane, the gay R&B singer who performed in drag in both Toronto and Los Angeles, and gained international fame with his 1962 chart-topping single, ‘Any Other Way.’
-
Bodymap
$20.95Finalist for the Triangle Awards, Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry, 2015
Shortlisted for the ReLit Award, Poetry, 2016In Bodymap, Lambda Award-winner Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha sings a queer disabled femme-of-colour love song filled with hard femme poetics and disability justice. In this volume, Leah Lakshmi maps hard and vulnerable terrains of queer desire, survivorhood, transformative love, sick and disabled queer genius and all the homes we claim and deserve.
-
Bottle Rocket Hearts
$19.95Welcome to ’90s Montreal. It’s been five years since the OKA crisis and the sex garage riots; the queers are rioting against assimilation, cocktail AIDS drugs are starting to work, and the city walls on either side of the Main are spray-painted with the words YES or NO. Revolution seems possible to eighteen-year-old Eve, who is pining to get out of her parent’s house in Dorval and find a girl who wants to kiss her back. She meets Della: ten years older, mysterious, defiantly non-monogamous, and an avid separatist. Their explosive beginning and volatile relationship paves a path for the personal and political to collide on the night of the referendum.
-
Carousel
$22.95Winner of the 2020 International Book Award for LGBTQ Fiction; Finalist for the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards
Margot Wright has led a deliberate life. At 18, she left her unusual and abusive family situation and never looked back, and then two years later she devoted herself wholly to Estelle Coté, her first and only love. But now, at 45, freshly retired from a career in antique firearms dealing, and settling into a new home with her wife, Margot finds herself feeling restless. Bored. She admits this to herself on the day she visits Le Galopant, a historic carousel that has become bafflingly meaningful to Estelle; and, as with anyone wishing to dodge a midlife crisis, Margot sets her feelings aside, intending to ignore them for as long as possible.
At La Ronde, the amusement park where Le Galopant is showcased, Margot is accosted by a 17-year-old girl named Katherine de Wilde. Katy is hyper and unrefined, “rural,” everything Margot cannot stand, yet she finds herself thinking more and more about the lisping girl in the Converse sneakers and “Meat is Murder” T-shirt as the days tread on. Even after Estelle discovers a massive secret she’s been keeping for a decade, forces her into couples counseling and then on a road trip to confront this secret, Margot is unable to stop Katy from seeping into her thoughts. So when Katy phones her one morning with bad news, “They’re taking down Le Galopant for good. It’s broken!” Margot yields to impulse and pursues her interest in the girl.
Set between Montreal, Quebec and various American cities, Carousel is a story about secrets–secret yearnings, lives, and losses–and the measures we take to protect our loved ones from the monsters we see ourselves to be.
-
Claws of the Panda
$24.95Claws of the Panda tells the story of Canada’s failure to construct a workable policy towards the People’s Republic of China. In particular the book tells of Ottawa’s failure to recognize and confront the efforts by the Chinese Communist Party to infiltrate and influence Canadian politics, academia, and media, and to exert control over Canadians of Chinese heritage. Claws of the Panda gives a detailed description of the CCP’s campaign to embed agents of influence in Canadian business, politics, media and academia. The party’s aims are to be able to turn Canadian public policy to China’s advantage, to acquire useful technology and intellectual property, to influence Canada’s international diplomacy, and, most important, to be able to monitor and intimidate Chinese Canadians and others it considers dissidents. The book traces the evolution of the Canada-China relationship over nearly 150 years. It shows how Canadian leaders have constantly misjudged the reality and potential of the relationship while the CCP and its agents have benefited from Canadian naivete.
-
Concord Floral
$17.95Concord Floral is a one-million-square-foot abandoned greenhouse and a refuge for neighbourhood kids; a place all to themselves in which to dream, dare, and come of age. But hidden there is a secret no one wants to confront, and when two friends stumble upon it they set off an unstoppable chain of events, from shadows in parking lots to phone calls from the grave. It’s time for the teens of Concord Floral to start talking.
-
Crisp
$17.95Crisp confronts the unspeakable parts of memory, meditating on characters caught in isolation and struggling to make sense of grief, disappointment, and the occasional dinner party gone wrong. The characters in Crisp’s stories don’t always make sound decisions: a grieving widow pursues a priest, an unhappy wife whittles her husband to bits, and a nostalgic man has a one-night stand with a whale trainer. Ranging from the mystical to the eccentric, Gray masterfully uncovers human reactions to loneliness and unrest through tales about relationships, secrets, and a longing to connect.
-
Danger Flower
$18.95A baby transforms into a reverse mermaid in a baptism gone wrong. After being stepped on, a snail exacts revenge. In Danger Flower, Jaclyn Desforges leads enlightened witnesses through a wild garden where archetypal tales are treated with tongue-in-cheek irreverence. Amidst nesting dolls and opossums, poison oak and Tamagotchis, the poet navigates gender roles, sexual indiscretions, episodic depression, and mothering, forming essential survival strategies for a changing world. Danger Floweris a necessary debut.
-
Days of Moonlight
$22.95Finalist for the 2019 Fred Kerner Book Award; Finalist for the 2019 International Book Awards for Literary Fiction
Upon receiving a letter and a package of journals from a dying Mehtap, her mother Nuray’s close friend in Turkey, a young Toronto woman immerses herself in the old woman’s memories. She uncovers Mehtap’s story as a factory worker in the 1960s who is infatuated with her boss, a man she willingly lies for, and even wrap presents for that he gives to his mistress and his wife. When her friend, Nuray, moves in with her, something unexpected happens and Mehtap is forced to choose between her two loves. Mehtap’s story is interwoven with that of her parents, Cretan refugees who landed in Izmir in the mid-twenties as a result of the disastrous population exchange, only to discover an inescapable and tragic truth that shatters their lives. As Mehtap’s writings unfurl, Nuray’s daughter — Mehtap’s namesake — now the keeper of the journals, notebooks and letters written by her mother’s friend, also uncovers her own mother’s deeply-held secrets, furtive yearnings, and forbidden love.
-
Dear Twin
$18.95Poppy wants to go to college like everyone else, but her father has other ideas. Ever since her twin sister, Lola, mysteriously vanished, Poppy’s father has been depressed and forces her to stick around. She hopes she can convince Lola to come home, and perhaps also procure her freedom, by sending her twin a series of nineteen letters, one for each year of their lives.
When not excavating childhood memories, Poppy is sneaking away with her girlfriend Juniper, the only person who understands her. But negotiating the complexities of queer love and childhood trauma are anything but simple. And as a twin? That’s a whole different story.
-
Dr. Edith Vane and the Hares of Crawley Hall
$18.95Dr. Edith Vane, scholar of English literature, is contentedly ensconced at the University of Inivea. Her dissertation on pioneer housewife memoirist Beulah Crump-Withers is about to be published, and her job’s finally safe, if she only can fill out her AAO properly. She’s a little anxious, but a new floral blouse and her therapist’s repeated assurance that she is the architect of her own life should fix that. All should be well, really. Except for her broken washing machine, her fickle new girlfriend, her missing friend Coral, her backstabbing fellow professors, a cutthroat new dean – and the fact that the sentient and malevolent Crawley Hall has decided it wants them all out, and the hall and its hellish hares will stop at nothing to get rid of them.
-
Entropic
$19.95Winner of the 2016 Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award at the East Coast Literary Awards!
Shortlisted for the Book Design Award at the 2016 Alberta Book Publishing Awards!
Shortlisted for the 2015 New Brunswick Book Awards!In this collection of stories, author and filmmaker R. W. Gray (Crisp) finds the place where the beautiful, the strange, and the surreal all meet–sometimes meshing harmoniously, sometimes colliding with terrible violence, launching his characters into a redefined reality.
A lovestruck man discovers the secret editing room where his girlfriend erases all her flaws; a massage artist finds that she has a gift, but is uncertain of the price; a beautiful man sets out to be done with beauty; and a gay couple meets what appear to be younger versions of themselves, learning that history can indeed repeat itself.
-
Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars
$16.95At once a love letter and challenge to the traditional transgender memoir, Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars is a playful, surrealist dance through queer coming of age.
A haunted young girl (who happens to be a kung-fu expert and pathological liar) runsaway from an oppressive city, where the sky is always grey, in search of love and sisterhood–and finds herself in a magical place known only as the Street of Miracles.There, she is quickly adopted into a vigilante gang of glamorous warrior femmes called the Lipstick Lacerators, whose mission is to scour the Street of violent men and avenge murdered trans women everywhere. But when disaster strikes, can our intrepid heroine find the truth within herself in order to protect her new family and heal her broken heart?
-
Foxed
$18.95After a long series of professional and personal upheavals, Detective Lane begins his latest adventure happy, at peace, and enjoying life with his partner Arthur, their children Christine and Matt, and his able new co-worker, RCMP officer Keely Saliba.
But when the body of a young boy is unearthed ten years after he was reported missing, Lane’s investigation into the crime puts him in conflict with a powerful and charismatic Calgary real estate developer and restaurateur–a cunning sociopath whose desire to suppress any threat to his empire will endanger the safety of Lane’s own family.
The sixth book in Garry Ryan’s award-winning and Calgary Herald bestselling series of Detective Lane mysteries pits Lane against his most dangerous antagonist yet.
-
Good Arabs, The
$17.95Swinging from post-explosion Beirut to a Parc-Extension balcony in summer, the verse and prose poems in The Good Arabs ground the reader in place, language, and the body. Peeling and rinsing radishes. Dancing as a pre-teen to Nancy Ajram. Being drenched in stares on the city bus. The collection is an interlocking and rich offering of the speaker’s communities, geographical surroundings both expansive and precise, and family both biological and chosen.
The Good Arabs gifts the reader with insight into cycles and repetition in ourselves and our broken nations. This genre-defying collection maps Arab and trans identity through the immensity of experience felt in one body, the sorrow of citizens let down by their countries, and the garbage crisis in Lebanon. Ultimately, it shows how we might love amid dismay, adore the pungent and the ugly, and exist in our multiplicity across spaces.