Pride Reads 2024

Get into the spirit of Pride Month with these books from the LGBTQ2SIA+ community.

All Books in this Collection

Showing 21–30 of 30 results

  • On Community

    On Community

    $19.95

    Finalist for the 2024 Firecracker Award in Creative Nonfiction • Shortlisted for the 2024 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction • Finalist for the 2024 Leslie Feinberg Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature • One of CBC Books‘ Canadian Nonfiction to Read in the Fall • A Tyee Best Book of 2023 • A CBC Books Best Nonfiction Book of 2023 • A Hamilton Review of Books Best Book of 2023 • An Autostraddle Best Queer Book of 2023

    We need community to live. But what does it look like? Why does it often feel like it’s slipping away?

    We are all hinged to some definition of a community, be it as simple as where we live, complex as the beliefs we share, or as intentional as those we call family. In an episodic personal essay, Casey Plett draws on a range of firsthand experiences to start a conversation about the larger implications of community as a word, an idea, and a symbol. With each thread a cumulative definition of community, and what it has come to mean to Plett, emerges.

    Looking at phenomena from transgender literature, to Mennonite history, to hacker houses of Silicon Valley, and the rise of nationalism in North America, Plett delves into the thorny intractability of community’s boons and faults. Deeply personal, authoritative in its illuminations, On Community is an essential contribution to the larger cultural discourse that asks how, and to what socio-political ends, we form bonds with one another.

  • Pervatory

    Pervatory

    $21.95

    LAMBDA LITERARY OCTOBER’S MOST ANTICIPATED LGBTQIA+ LITERATURE

    THE GLOBE AND MAIL TOP 30 CANADIAN BOOKS TO READ IN 2023

    A novel about Berlin: a city for artists and libertines, a perfect place to find love and madness.

    When he tired of Toronto’s insular scene, art critic Martin Heather fled to Berlin, where he tried to sleep his way through the entire population of gay men. And then he met Alexandar, who began to tutor Martin in increasingly violent sex – and in love.

    Pervatory is a series of journal entries about Martin and Alexandar’s relationship. But interjections from the present, where Martin has been institutionalized, suggest that the hints we get of his increasing instability and obsession with the idea that his apartment is haunted by an evil spirit may have led to something dire …

    RM Vaughan was an astute art critic, a dazzling poet, and an important queer activist. His untimely death in October 2020 was a tremendous loss to the queer and literary communities. This novel is what he left for us.

    Pervatory is RM Vaughan’s perverse Valentine to Berlin. It is sexy, funny, often elegant, and a fitting elegiac punctuation mark to his incredible body of work. Given the way he left us, it is as devastating as it is exhilarating.” – journalist and Lambda Award–winning author Matthew Hays

    “RM Vaughan was a promiscuous pansy, a louche moralist, a lonely heart, but most importantly, he was a writer, an irritating, idiosyncratic, incisive writer. This country, with its mawkish, mediocre literary culture, didn’t know what to do with him. Pervatory is his final affront.” – Derek McCormack, author of Castle Faggot

    “Brilliant, funny, propulsive.” – Zoe Whittall, author of The Best Kind of People

  • Pirate Glitterbeard

    Pirate Glitterbeard

    $14.95

    Alone In his cabin, Pirate Glitterbeard sprinkled pink glitter onto his beard and put on his finest pink skirt!

    All aboard The Heart’s Desire! Pirate Glitterbeard loves everything pink and glittery. Will his crew rebel when they find out? In this rollicking sea tale, the captain and his quirky crew journey to find their treasure – the Wikkie-Tikkie’s legendary meat pies. But, argh, evil Pirate Squidlips and her ship, The Rotten Turnip draw near…

    teacher resources available https://www.rebelmountainpress.com/pirate-glitterbeard-teacher-resources.html

  • Special Topics in Being a Parent

    Special Topics in Being a Parent

    $26.95

    An illustrated guide of practical parenting advice informed by queer experiences for anyone doing the work of parenting, from the author and illustrator of Special Topics in Being a Human

    Being a parent is enormously joyful, but it is also an enormous amount of work. Parenting requires you to make dozens of decisions a day, every one of which in some way shapes the person your child will grow into. It can be difficult to know in these moments whether you’re on the right track. Progressive parents especially can feel adrift when caregiving in ways that were not modelled for them.

    From S. Bear Bergman – advice columnist, educator, and queer dad with fifteen years of parenting under his belt – comes Special Topics in Being a Parent, a witty and insightful collection of child-rearing tips for those in search of realistic ideas about screens and lunches that don’t come with a side order of judgment. Using his own choices – and errors – by way of example, Bergman offers suggestions for various stages of the parenting journey, from asking “Are we ready to have a kid?” to talking with children about diversity and difference, to questioning gender expectations placed on both kids and parents. With plenty of humour and compassion, and featuring charming illustrations by Saul Freedman-Lawson, this guide helps parents to live their parenting values while enabling their kids to grow their capacities, understand the world, and above all, feel connected and loved.

  • The B-Side of Daniel Garneau

    The B-Side of Daniel Garneau

    The B-Side of Daniel Garneau concludes a rollicking three-book series set in Toronto featuring the misadventures of boyfriends Daniel and David, their eccentric family and friends. As Daniel prepares to graduate from med school and propose marriage, David sets out to donate his sperm so his brother can have a baby. But as his celebrity ex, Marcus, launches his boldest exhibit yet, an unexpected crisis forces Daniel to re-evaluate his priorities in life.

    The B-Side of Daniel Garneau is the inspirational follow-up to A Boy at the Edge of the World (2018) and Tales from the Bottom of My Sole (2020). At turns both comic and tragic, it is a celebration of queer identities and non-traditional families, as Daniel struggles to discover himself and his path in the world. At its heart, it is a philosophical reflection on acceptance and living with courage and love.

  • The Game of Giants

    The Game of Giants

    $24.95

    A novel about the unpredictability of parenthood, a journey into the unchartered territory that is having a child, especially when that child turns out to be different.

    Rose Drury has just learned that her son, Roger, is below average—at the third-percentile rank, according to the pediatrician. Co-parenting with her partner, Lucy, in a 1980s Calgary only just starting to accept same-sex relationships, Rose works to unearth her own desires from the quagmire of directives from others, while she grapples with the implications of Roger’s developmental delays.

    Though Rose herself is a developmental psychologist and knows all of the “right” answers and “correct” things to do, she finds that she is all too human, struggling with the many social forces that converge on a mother of a kid who is different. With humour and desperation in equal measure, Rose reviews her life history for the definitive moment that could explain how she and her son got to this point.

    In this sparkling and empathetic novel, Marion Douglas digs into a young mother’s uncertainty, fear, and hard-won wisdom as she and her son—an odd and lovable giant of unpredictability—forge a path forward.

  • The Jellyfish

    The Jellyfish

    By: Boum
    $29.95

    Odette is a hip, young twenty-something with her own place, a steady job at a local bookstore, an adorable pet rabbit, and a burgeoning crush on a cute girl in the neighborhood. But Odette is haunted by something only she can see… A jellyfish. A jellyfish that floats in her eye, blocking her vision. It’s a seemingly minor annoyance… Until one day there are TWO jellyfish. Showcasing stunning and inventive artwork by Boum (Boumeries), The Jellyfish is a tour-de-force of graphic storytelling, a powerful, occasionally terrifying story of facing the thing that we fear the most, and finding a light to guide us through the darkness.

  • The Sum of One Man’s Pleasure

    The Sum of One Man’s Pleasure

    $22.95

    1963 – Finn Kenny fled Ottawa after being implicated in an RCMP purge of suspected Communist sympathisers and “homosexuals”, ending up on Vancouver Island working for the Spencerwood Estate alongside devoted caretakers, the Bishops. Theodore Spencer was Finn’s saviour, a barroom companion who offered him a way out of his predicament. But when Spencer dies suddenly, Finn’s life is turned upside down as he’s forced to work with the cold, calculating lady of the house.

    Thrown together unexpectedly, Finn, Lady Spencer, and the Bishops are faced with the worst of one another, as they struggle to keep the estate together. Learning more about each other’s lives, they must come to terms with the truth that everyone has secrets buried at the centre of themselves.

    In his searching sixth novel, Danial Neil questions the stories we tell of our own lives, the version of ourselves we show to those closest, and the ways in which we are able to find common ground.

  • The Weight of Survival

    The Weight of Survival

    $20.00

    Nestled in a small logging town near Lake Cowichan is an old elementary school. The child of immigrants from post-war Italy attends this school among the population of mostly white, anglo-saxon families. She does not speak English.

    Her family is one of four who emigrated from southern Italy, to this small forested community. There are other families, from India, who share a kinship of ‘other’ with the Italian families. What happens when your voice, your food, your home is different? How do you know how to be queer when there is no language or place for it? How do you remember a time not spoken of, but passed on through the smell of walnut blossoms in the spring, grapes in the fall? In The Weight of Survival, Tina Biello chronicles this upbringing of otherness, of being shaped by two very different communities, of blending identities into one, and what is left behind in the process.

  • Withered

    Withered

    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.