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Pride Reads
Happy Pride, June and all year long! Discover these amazing titles by LGBTQ2SIA+ writers from across Canada.
All Books in this Collection
Showing 1–16 of 175 results
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#IndianLovePoems
$17.95Covering Indigenous adventures from Ontario?s Walpole Island to Northern Saskatchewan to the BC coast, #IndianLovePoems is a poetry collection that delves into the humour and truths of love and lust within Indigenous communities. Sharing stories in search of The One, or even better, the One-Night-Stand, or the opening of boundaries this collection fearlessly sheds light on the sharing and honesty that comes with discussions of men, women, sex, and relationships, using humour to explore the complexities of race, culture and intent within relationships.
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A Boy at the Edge of the World
$25.00Meet Daniel Garneau, your average gay hockey player from small-town Ontario. After moving to Toronto to attend university, Daniel embarks on a series of misadventures both comic and tragic, as he navigates the pitfalls of dating and relationships while juggling the needs of his eccentric family and newfound friends. A Boy at the Edge of the World is a coming-of-age novel that explores the variegations of sex, intimacy, and queer desire. It is both a rollicking dramedy and a philosophical reflection. In the end, Daniel’s story is the story of each of us: our universal search for love and family — at the edge of the world.
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A Cannibal and Melancholy Mourning
$18.95French novelist Hervé Guilbert’s 1991 novel, To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, is about a narrator named Hervé Guilbert who, after his close friend Muzil (really, Michel Foucault) dies of AIDS, begins to realize his symptoms are the same. In this same tradition of fictionalized memoir, this novel’s narrator, called Catherine Mavrikakis, explores the perspective not of dying, but of the one left behind.
In the book, a series of Mavrikakis’s friends die, many of AIDS. As each person becomes a Hervé to her, she begins to explore the idea of death as a universal yet individual experience. Furious, relieved, terrified and confused, the novel’s narrator confronts the way people think about and respond to death, and quiet mourning is replaced by a series of encounters between the living and the dead. Drawing on Deleuze, Freud, Foucault and, of course, Guilbert, Mavrikakis creates a kind of living mausoleum where those unable to speak can still be heard, and where their voices challenge our passivity in the face of death.
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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.
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Age of Minority
$19.95Winner of the 2014 Governor General’s Literary Award
Based on a true story, Get Yourself Home Skyler James follows the harrowing journey of a young lesbian who defects from the army when she is outed by fellow soldiers. The award-winning rihannaboi95 centres around a Toronto teen whose world comes crashing in when YouTube videos of him dancing to songs by his favourite pop heroine go viral. Finally, Peter Fechter: 59 Minutes chronicles the last hour of Peter Fechter’s life, a teenager in East Berlin shot while attempting to cross the Berlin Wall in 1962 with his companion. Together these solo plays explore the lives of three queer youth and their resilience in the face of violence and intolerance.
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All That Sang
$19.95Obsession, unrequited passions and the power of music.
A visceral tale of obsession and creativity, unrequited passions and the power of music. A love story in which art is a foil to companionship, and the intellect an interlocutor of the heart.
In the utterly unique All that Sang, the second fiction by Lambda Literary Award-finalist Lydia Perovic, a Toronto opera critic on assignment in Paris falls in love with the subject she’s been sent to interview, France’s leading female conductor. But is the attention evenly matched, is genuine connection even possible?
Perovic guides us through the panorama that orbits contemporary courtship. The jilted lover, the housekeeper, the chiropractor, the manager, all take part in a chorus of voices that illustrate the unknowable creative spirit whose inaccessibility fires the writer’s obsession.
Reminiscent of the bold and inventive fictions of Ali Smith and Siri Hustvedt, postmodern refractions play with the reader’s sense of perspective to build the persona of affection, a figure of reality and imagination that we all recognize but can never truly access.
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Almost Feral
$24.95***CANADA BOOK AWARD WINNER******IPPY AWARDS SILVER MEDAL, CANADA-EAST BEST REGIONAL NONFICTION CATEGORY*****BEST ATLANTIC-PUBLISHED BOOK AWARD WINNER******MARGARET AND JOHN SAVAGE FIRST BOOK AWARD – NON-FICTION WINNER******CBC BOOKS WRITER TO WATCH LIST***
On July 2, 2015, influential social activist Gemma Hickey began a 908-kilometer walk across the island of Newfoundland to raise awareness and funds for survivors of religious institutional abuse. Almost Feral celebrates the community of support that gathered around this journey and recounts Hickey’s remarkable story of self-discovery which led to the realization that they are transgender. In this thought-provoking and wide-ranging autobiography, Hickey counters memories of sexual assault, bullying, and depression with inspiring reflections on faith, love, family, individual and communal identity, sex, gender, and acceptance. Through complex feelings of empathy and solitude, weakness and strength, suffering and recovery, Gemma Hickey’s Almost Feral chronicles a journey from one side of an island to the other side of personal identity—charting an unknown territory where one’s body becomes the map that leads to home. -
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.’
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At the Bottom of the Sky
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Autowar
$20.00A visceral, vital, unblinking debut collection of poems exploring kinesthetic memory and longing, inherited violence, and the body as a geographical site.
We’re often told that we are given only what we can bear. For some of us our first lessons are in how much pain we’re made to think we deserve–and the resulting scars are always meant to be kept secret. Assiyah Jamilla Touré’s debut collection is a record of those scars–not those inflicted on us by the thousands of little wars we live in everyday, but those that come afterwards, those we inflict upon ourselves to mark the path.
Each and every poem in Autowar was written on a cell phone, transcribing an urgent revisiting of old sites of pain, and also a revisiting of one young person’s power and ability–to hurt themself, or others. These poems are powerful evocations of how even our scars have worlds and lives.
here in the dark, me-space
i am insatiable for my flesh
i just can’t get enough
of tiny after-wounds
that’s me giving, still too soft
for my own teethCover image by Ayo Tsalithaba.
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Beast at Every Threshold
$17.95A formidable collection of poems that deconstructs the notion of “otherness” through folklore and myth.
An unflinching shapeshifter, Beast at Every Threshold dances between familial hauntings and cultural histories, intimate hungers and broader griefs. Memories become malleable, pop culture provides a backdrop to glittery queer love, and folklore speaks back as a radical tool of survival. With unapologetic precision, Natalie Wee unravels constructs of “otherness” and names language our most familiar weapon, illuminating the intersections of queerness, diaspora, and loss with obsessive, inexhaustible ferocity – and in resurrecting the self rendered a site of violence, makes visible the “Beast at Every Threshold.”
Beguiling and deeply imagined, Wee’s poems explore thresholds of marginality, queerness, immigration, nationhood, and reinvention of the self through myth.
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Bedtime Stories for the Edge of the World
$21.95Into their re-imaginings of colonial North American myths, artists Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan have inserted women who question puritanical values of good and evil, right and wrong, and the sense of promise, space, resource, and opportunity that the so-called New World has traditionally implied. The eight short stories of this volume span the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, exploring the distinctly North American fictions that justice and equality exist, that infinite growth is feasible and desirable, and that anything is possible. Pirate queens, inventrixes and sideshow performers stumble through tall tales usually reserved for Lone Rangers and Horatio Algers; plucky spinsters, religious zealots, deities and office workers challenge well-worn fables that continue to shape North America’s notion of itself and its dreams for the future. These rollicking yarns of personal survival are set amidst shifting frontiers of power and possibility.
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Belated Bris of the Brainsick
$18.95Belated Bris of the Brainsick traces 1) a belated and in some ways violent revelation about one’s ancestry and one’s past, 2) a resultant mental breakdown and 3) the pursuit of a new life with someone else who lives with mental illness. These events and the styles in which they are told are inflected by queer, transgender and disabled perspectives and aesthetics. If there is a narrative arc to the collection, it is not the usual one of falling ill and then regaining health; rather, it is the pursuit of a “queered” version of health.
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Big Island, Small
$21.00Sola is confused the first time she sees Judith, a fair skinned woman with dreadlocks dancing to reggae music. Meeting her gaze, Judith thinks Sola is judging her for appropriating Black culture. A few days later, up against an interlocking fence, Judith kisses Sola. Onlookers hurl stones and racial and gay slurs. Thus begins the complicated friendship between Judith and Sola who live in between the land they were born, the Caribbean, and the land where they presently live, North America.
Winner of the 2016 Beacon Award for Social Justice Literature and the 2015 Atlantic Writer’s Competition, Big Island, Small is a story of intimacy and friendship between two Caribbean/Canadian women with similar, yet vastly different, backgrounds who must dismantle their assumptions and biases around race, class, gender and sexuality in order to make amends with violent pasts, release shame, find joy and reconnect with themselves and each other.
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Blue: The Derek Jarman Poems
$14.95In Blue: The Derek Jarman Poems, Keith Garebian, himself an insatiable cineaste, has masterfully spliced together an engaging book-length portrait of a filmmaker, visual artist, poet, sexual rebel, and gardener who double-dared the conventions of art, desire, and filmmaking. Derek Jarman’s final film, Blue, is a work without visuals except International Klein Blue, and it provides Garebian with an inspired backdrop against which he explores, in the book’s poignant closing section, the filmmaker’s descent into illness-induced blindness, charting his physical and emotional decline while also building towards a kind of defiant holy death equal to the passions of Jarman’s most sacred martyrs: Caravaggio, St. Sebastian, and Jesus Christ.
In this life-affirming, cinematic, at turns randy and elegiac verse-biography, Keith Garebian celebrates one of the world’s truly unforgettable and rebellious spirits.
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Body Count
$18.95In this vital début, Kyla Jamieson sifts through the raw material of her life before and after a disabling concussion in search of new understandings of self and worth. Energized by the tensions between embodiment and dissociation, Body Count flickers between Vancouver and New York, passing through dreamscapes and pain states. Both earnest and irreverent, comedic and cosmic, these poems come from a full heart (“You came here / for a kind of truth / & I want to give / you everything”) that often finds its way obstructed by fear, anxiety, and the myriad ways trauma can pattern a life. Here, we see the work of removing the barriers between this heart and the world, and glimpse the labour it takes to heal a body and mind discarded by capitalism. One part rape culture protest anthem, one part long-distance love story, one part invisible illness testimony, and 100% epistolary intimacy, Body Count is a tonic for the times we live in, an open invitation to question the textures of our realities, the ways we inhabit our bodies, and the futures we envision for ourselves and our communities.