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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 145–160 of 167 results
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The Subtweet
$21.952021 Dublin Literary Award Finalist
2021 Lambda Literary Awards Finalist for Transgender Fiction
2020 Toronto Book Awards Finalist“The Subtweet is affecting, unnerving, empowering, and often truly LOL.” — Foreword Reviews, starred review
“A beautifully crafted novel about race, music, and social media.” — Booklist
Includes an exclusive free soundtrack
Celebrated multidisciplinary artist Vivek Shraya’s second novel is a no-holds-barred examination of the music industry, social media, and making art in the modern era, shining a light on the promise and peril of being seen.
Indie musician Neela Devaki has built a career writing the songs she wants to hear but nobody else is singing. When one of Neela’s songs is covered by internet artist RUK-MINI and becomes a viral sensation, the two musicians meet and a transformative friendship begins. But before long, the systemic pressures that pit women against one another begin to bear down on Neela and RUK-MINI, stirring up self-doubt and jealousy. With a single tweet, their friendship implodes, a career is destroyed, and the two women find themselves at the centre of an internet firestorm.
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The Tales of Dwipa
$14.95***2023 IPPY AWARDS: MULTI CULTURAL NONFICTION – JUVENILE-YOUNG ADULT***
Through a framework of traditional tales, fantastic creatures struggle with issues of marginalization, opening discussion for parents and children in an accessible form.
The Tales Of Dwipa is a collection of short stories adapted from the Panchatantra, a collection of simple, engaging, and interrelated animal tales penned by Pandit Vishnu Sharma in the hopes of awakening the dim intelligence of a powerful Indian king’s idle sons. The ancient stories of the Panchatantra still find meaning in today’s world despite originating in India before 300 BCE. These stories are set in a Canadian context with topical themes, bringing together two distinct cultures—Indian and Canadian—for the most impressionable minds of our society.
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The Videofag Book
$20.00Longlisted for the 2018 Toronto Book Awards
In October 2012, lovers William Ellis and Jordan Tannahill moved into a former barbershop in Toronto’s Kensington Market neighbourhood and turned it into an art space called Videofag. Over the next four years Videofag became a hub for counterculture in the city, playing host to a litany of performances, screenings, parties, exhibitions, and all manner of queer fuckery. But hosting a city in their house took its toll and eventually William and Jordan broke up, closing the space for good in June 2016.
The Videofag Book is a chronicle of those four years told through multiple voices and mediums: a personal history by William and Jordan; a love letter by Jon Davies; a communal oral history compiled by Chandler Levack; a play by Greg MacArthur; a poem by Aisha Sasha John; a chronological history of Videofag’s programming; and a photo archive curated by William and Jordan in full colour.
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The Winter Knight
$24.95Arthurian legends are reborn in this upbeat queer urban fantasy with a mystery at its heartThe knights of the round table are alive in Vancouver, but when one winds up dead, it’s clear the familiar stories have taken a left turn. Hildie, a Valkyrie and the investigator assigned to the case, wants to find the killer — and maybe figure her life out while she’s at it. On her short list of suspects is Wayne, an autistic college student and the reincarnation of Sir Gawain, who these days is just trying to survive in a world that wasn’t made for him. After finding himself at the scene of the crime, Wayne is pulled deeper into his medieval family history while trying to navigate a new relationship with the dean’s charming assistant, Bert — who also happens to be a prime murder suspect. To figure out the truth, Wayne and Hildie have to connect with dangerous forces: fallen knights, tricky runesmiths, the Wyrd Sisters of Gastown. And a hungry beast that stalks Wayne’s dreams.The Winter Knight is a propulsive urban fairy tale and detective story with queer and trans heroes that asks what it means to be a myth, who gets to star in these tales, and ultimately, how we make our stories our own.
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Thin Air of the Knowable
$20.00An elegiac and incisive debut that blends poems of social justice with poems of ordinary life.
In her first collection, Thin Air of the Knowable, the physical landscapes of Wendy Donawa’s life–West Coast, Caribbean, prairies–ground many of her poems and often reflect the inner geography of her preoccupations. A road-trip poem moves from prairie winter, “an icy scatter of gravel / the moving centre of this unpeopled world,” past a cattle liner on its way to the slaughter house, but it also passes beneath the sky’s “blazing scroll of light,” and magpies “flashing black and teal in the sun.” Landscape also functions metaphorically to suggest how historical settings play out in the exigencies of individual lives.
Other preoccupations include poems that reflect on poesis itself–the strange poem-making compulsion to capture that which is largely inexpressible (hence “the thin air of the knowable”), and the role of dreams, memory, and intuition in shaping a poem’s knowledge.
Donawa is, in many ways, a political poet, yet manages to put flesh and blood into everything she writes. In the end,
Perhaps there is only the demonic journey.
Small beauties by the roadside, and
such love as we can muster.
(from “Pu Ru Paints Zhong Kui the Demon Queller on a Mule”)Praise for Thin Air of the Knowable:
“Wendy Donawa’s poetry rests at the very edge of beauty where a wild delicacy resides.” –Patrick Lane
“Like the watchmakers of old, Wendy Donawa puts a spyglass to her eye and fixes her vision to the minute, to all that carries on beneath our imperfect sight–worlds upon worlds brought into the sharpest focus.” –Pamela Porter
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This Cleaving and This Burning
$20.00Two unrelated, aspiring writers, born on the same day in the same year to parents with the same first names, grow up together and eventually gain national prominence as authors. As the years pass, the complex sexual identities of Miller Sark and Hal Pierce undermine their intense private relationship, inflicting damage that cannot be undone by the distinction of their fiction and poetry. Inspired by the lives and works of American literary giants Ernest Hemingway and Hart Crane, This Cleaving and This Burning reveals the passion and purpose behind masks of public reputation and creative expression.
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This Location of Unknown Possibilities
$19.95When English Professor Marta Spëk is offered a film consultant’s contract, she’s fighting a bad case of year-end doldrums. She signs on, imagining that exotic hands-on work at the sandy location shoot for a made-in-Canada biopic will open doors of opportunity and spark her creativity – or at the very least supply interesting material for her family’s annual Labour Day gathering. Meanwhile, her soon-to-be boss, the handsome cynic Jake Nugent, who’s well experienced with shoot dynamics in remote sites, hopes only to stamp out inevitable problems before they swallow the budget and cost him a job. Script changes (massive), on-set mishaps (minor), and after-hours misadventures (many) guarantee that Marta and Jake won’t easily forget this week in the Okanagan Valley. A wry look at the shoestring end of a billion-dollar industry and the occasional but profound foolishness of the human heart, This Location of Unknown Possibilities makes a case for black comedy being the best lens for viewing contemporary life.
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Touch Anywhere to Begin by Jim Nason
$14.95In Touch Anywhere To Begin, Jim Nason’s fifth collection of poetry, poems are set in a physical world where full-throttle desire commingles with love, loss and grief. Although death is ever present, death of a father, death of a friend, there is a life-affirming/mystical quality at the core of this book. Nason reminds us that the city is both real and surreal, a place of creatures and buildings, imagination and deep emotions. He celebrates demolition as enthusiastically as construction. The death of a child is no more or less significant than an elderly woman?s sickly body or a young man’s seductive powers. Finalist for the 2015 CBC poetry prize, the long poem, City With Animals, which celebrates one billion transformations in the body per second, is a tribute to Max Ernst.
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transVersing
$19.95Originally produced for the stage by Artistic Fraud of Newfoundland and For the Love of Learning, transVersing features some of Newfoundland’s most vibrant and necessary trans-youth voices. Gathering the work of Violet Drake, Daze Jefferies, Fionn Shea, Perin Squires, Taylor Stocks, and Dane Woodland, and including the dramatic text by Berni Stapleton and Sharon King-Campbell, transVersing is where Shakespeare meets slam poetry and the fiddle meets soapbox rant. These are the creative and courageous voices charting our course to understanding and social justice for all.
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Twenty Miles
$19.95Isabel Norris has never left the ice. Her father was a hockey legend who died before she was born, and her grandparents have raised her in his skates.
When Iz leaves her grandmother behind to play for the Winnipeg University Scarlets, she struggles to fit in on this team of hard-hitting, tough-talking women with a penchant for buffets, beer bongs and raunchy humour – and a fierce loyalty to one another and to their sport. But in their raucousmidst, Iz can’t quite find her own place in the game.
As she moves between the rowdy hilarity of the Scarlets’ dressing room and quiet, lyrical contemplations, Iz tries to navigate the ways loss plays out on the ice. Based largely on author Cara Hedley’s three seasons on the University of Manitoba Bison, Twenty Miles celebrates women’s hockey and offers an uncompromising look at the ways in which the sport both haunts and redeems the women who play it.
‘[A] work of literary fiction that is surprisingly touching, honest, engaging and unusual – both in terms of its subject matter and perspective … Hedley stickhandles her way around Iz’s conundrum with beautiful agility, using deftly lyrical prose and insight to describe the rough and tumble of a hard-hitting game and the harsh realities of life.’
– Winnipeg Free Press
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Twin Studies
$24.95An engrossing, timely, and contemporary novel about the bonds between twins, about sexuality and gender fluidity, and about the messy complexities of modern family life – the much-anticipated new novel in more than a decade by acclaimed writer Keith Maillard.
Dr. Erica Bauer – an identical twin – studies twins at the university in Vancouver. Through the course of her research, she meets a set of preteen twins who are evidently fraternal, but who insist emphatically that they are identical. Their mother, Karen Oxley, is a West Van single mum whose life is on the wrong road – and who discovers an urgent need to put it back on the right one. As Erica sets out to help the twins, their lives become increasingly intertwined in unexpected ways.
Twin Studies is a masterful novel that explores the complicated bonds between twins and siblings, friends and lovers; the role of class and money; and the nature of gender and sexuality. It’s a novel with characters who are real, their relationships a rich world that readers will thoroughly lose themselves in. No other contemporary novel so deftly explores the intersection between our inner lives and our public lives – that “we’re not what people see.”
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Two-Man Tent
$19.95In Two-Man Tent, one of Canada’s most celebrated writers, Robert Chafe, offers his long-awaited collection of short fiction. The individual stories are thematically linked by an interwoven, recurring tale of a long-distance relationship told in the form of text messages, chat sessions, and emails, as Chafe bring his singular talent for dialogue and scripting to work within new forms of communication. The results are stunning in an absorbing and thoroughly contemporary collection that reads like no other.
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Two-Spirit Acts
$22.95In this collection of short but powerful two-spirit plays, characters dispel conventional notions of gender and sexuality while celebrating Indigenous understandings. With a refreshing spin, the plays touch on topics of desire, identity, and community as they humorously tackle the colonial misunderstandings of Indigenous people. From a female trickster story centred on erotic lesbian tales to the farcical story about a new nation of Indigenous people called the Nation of Mischief, this collection creates a space to explore what it means to be queer and Indigenous.
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We All Need To Eat
$20.00Finalist for the 2020 Western Canada Jewish Book Awards, The Nancy Richler Memorial Prize for Fiction
Finalist for the 2020 Kobzar Book Award
Finalist for the 2019 Ethel Wilson Fiction Award
We All Need to Eat is a new collection of linked stories from award-winning author Alex Leslie that revolve around Soma, a young Queer woman in Vancouver, chronicling her attempts to come to grips with herself, her family and her sexuality.
Set in different moments falling between Soma’s childhood and her late thirties, each story–bold and varying in its approach to narrative–presents a sea change in Soma’s life, from Soma becoming addicted to weightlifting while going through a break-up in her thirties; to her complex relationship with her younger brother after she leaves home revealed over the course of a long family chicken dinner; to Soma’s struggles to cope with her mother’s increasing instability by becoming fixated on buying her a lamp for seasonal affective disorder; and the far-reaching impact and lasting reverberations of Soma’s family’s experience of the Holocaust as it scrapes up against the rise of Alt Right media. Lyrical, gritty and atmospheric, Soma’s stories refuse to shy away from the contradictions inherent to human experience, exploring one young person’s journey through mourning, escapism, and the search for nourishment.
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We Are Not Avatars
$19.95In We Are Not the Avatars, renowned poet and editor John Barton collects his most provocative essays, public lectures, and reviews produced over the past twenty-five years. Though Canadians still have some way to go, Barton began publishing in an era much less attentive to queer voices. In this special book, Barton grafts his own memoir about finding his voice as a poet and feet as an editor to astute takes on Margaret Avison, Emily Carr, Pat Lowther, Maureen Hynes, Anne Szumigalski, and many others. Making this book even more essential reading is the larger cultural context Barton brings to bear by writing about the historical production evolution and reception of queer writing in the lengthening shadow of equity.
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Western Alienation Merit Badge, The
$20.00Set in Calgary in 1982, during the recession that arrived on the heels of Canada’s National Energy Program, The Western Alienation Merit Badge follows the Murray family as they struggle with grief and find themselves on the brink of financial ruin. After the death of her stepmother, Frances “Frankie” Murray returns to Calgary to help her father, Jimmy, and her sister, Bernadette, pay the mortgage on the family home. When Robyn, a long-lost friend, becomes their house guest old tensions are reignited and Jimmy, Bernadette and Frances find themselves increasingly alienated from one another.
Part family drama, part queer coming-of-age story, The Western Alienation Merit Badge explores the complex dynamics of a small family falling apart.