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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 161–175 of 175 results
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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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Under Wraps
$16.95The moment Mark meets David his world is thrown off balance. Who could have predicted finding love in a furniture store, or finding it with an unemployed lifeguard? But despite their immediate connection, Mark isn’t sure if David is gay. Mark isn’t even sure if Mark is gay. As he falls deeper in love, Mark works desperately to make David nothing more than a friend and to make that enough. Filled with hopeful exhilaration and devastating missed opportunities, Under Wraps nimbly tracks one man’s tumultuous quest to finally love himself and let it all out.
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Untethered
$12.99During a teenage adventure abroad, twins Petal and Rose find their lives diverging in ways they could not have imagined, highlighting the complexities of their relationship and shrouded family history.
Free-spirited Rose becomes enraptured with the ultra-orthodox community, while Petal delays her schooling to watch over her sister. Saddled with too much responsibility, Petal’s clinical depression manifests in self-destructive behaviour. She finds refuge on a kibbutz, as her sister grows further from her, marrying a man Petal does not deem worthy.
Years later, Petal confronts her prejudices about her sister’s life, her resentment, and the effects of generational trauma on both their lives as she is called back to Toronto from New York City to support Rose during a crisis.
Told through the eyes of two generations, Untethered provides context and insights into orthodoxy, post-war experience, mental illness, generational trauma, and grief while laying the foundations for understanding and a path towards healing.
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Up for Grabs
$9.99Frida wasn’t expecting to find much while digging through relics at her late grandmother’s house. But when she comes across a mysterious painting, family secrets, and a nosy auctioneer, she knows the real digging has just begun.
Frida and her brother, Zac, have lived in seven countries in ten years. In fact, they’ve been traveling for so long that Frida has never considered herself from anywhere — until they inherit their grandmother’s house in Victoria, British Columbia. Now they’re up to their ears in family heirlooms, paintings of dead relatives, vintage paper clips, and ceramic animals.
Then a nosy antique dealer takes an interest in her grandmother’s stuff. A big, sneaking-around-trying-to-break-in-to-the-house kind of interest. Is this strange neighbor looking for something specific? And will Frida and Hazeem figure it out before it’s too late?
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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.
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What You Can’t Have
$14.95What You Can’t Have is a candid exploration of sex, sexuality, and sexualities.
Michael V. Smith explores desire, looking at the difference between wants and needs in this collection of poems about longing to belong and acceptance.
Some of the poems are concerned with adolescent awareness of sexuality and self while others are concerned with gender transgression. All examine the limits of our cultural norms in a collection that is carnal, corporeally driven, and relishes in the body. Smith uses language that is plain-spoken, artful and yet undecorated.
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Whitetail Shooting Gallery
$20.00Finalist, ReLit Award
Finalist, McNally Robinson Book of the Year (Manitoba Book Awards)
Finalist, Bisexual Book Award (USA)
Whitetail Shooting Gallery, a new novel from award-winning author and Giller Prize nominee, Annette Lapointe, is set in the outer urban, often desolate, landscape of the Saskatchewan prairie.
Cousins Jennifer and Jason live close together as small kids, exploring their rural home. They live in adjacent, sometimes overlapping, households. But one act of family violence begets another, and the cousins drift apart. By adolescence, the two are estranged. Jennifer grows closer to her best friend, Donna, an evangelical minister’s daughter who rebels against her family by immersing herself in a world of vectors, fractals, perfect math, and porn.
Jason’s world is hockey. Donna likes his street-hockey bruises. Jason’s also interested in Gordon, a semi-recluse ex-teacher who lives on the periphery of town and constructs art installations from leather, tamarack, animal skulls, and other found items.
Horses, bears, kissing cousins, and other human animals conspire in a series of conflicts that result in accidental gunfire and scarring – both physical and emotional – that takes many years to heal.
Praise for Whitetail Shooting Gallery:
BC Books for BC Schools Pick
“Imagine Alissa York’s Fauna but in rural Saskatchewan and with all the sentimentality stripped away. Imagine lots of sex, kissing cousins, a gunshot to the face, and a set of teeth that get kicked in over and over again. Imagine a family farmhouse, country roads, the kind of place you might want to move to raise your kids if you don’t look too closely. The hockey player, the pastor’s daughter, how he’s giving blow jobs to his teammates, and she’s having sex with her best friend. … Whitetail Shooting Gallery baffled me thoughout, disturbed and troubled me, but it also intrigued me, continually surprised me, never stopped me wondering what would happen next. It’s an anti-pastoral, a complicated portrayal of rural life. … Annette Lapointe’s literary reputation was established with Stolen, which was nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize in 2006. And here in her second book, she’s turning Can-Lit on its head, challenging not only her readers’ sensibilities, but also ideas about what a novel should be. And the latter seems to be a requirement for the kind of book that I like best.” (Pickle Me This, blog)
“Wintry, notably offbeat, written with an elegant precision, and at times slyly funny … Lapointe’s beautiful treatment of poète maudit subject matter never fails to impress.” (The Vancouver Sun)
“In Whitetail Shooting Gallery, Lapointe gives us an animalistic view of the teen world. This is not small-town rural life as idyllic or pastoral. Lapointe’s world reflects the turmoil, raging emotions and hormones brewing inside adolescents. … the plot is almost secondary to Lapointe’s vivid, powerful voice and her beautifully savage view of rural prairie life.” (Winnipeg Free Press)
Most Anticipated Books of Fall 2012 pick, 49th Shelf
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Why I Was Late
$20.00With kitchen-table candour and empathy, Charlie Petch’s debut collection of poems offers witness to a decades-long trans/personal coming of age, finding heroes in unexpected places.
Why I Was Late fuses text with performance, brings a transmasculine wisdom, humour, and experience to bear upon tailgates, spaceships, and wrestling rings. Fierce, tender, convention re-inventing–Petch works hard. And whether it’s as a film union lighting technician, a hospital bed allocator, a Toronto hot dog vendor, or a performer/player of the musical saw, the work is survival. Heroes are found in unexpected places, elevated by both large and small gestures of kindness, accountability and acceptance. No subject–grief, disability, kink, sexuality, gender politics, violence–is off limits.
A poet so good at drag they had everyone convinced that they were a woman for the first forty years of their life, Petch has somehow brought the stage and its attendant thrills into the book. Better late than. And better.
“Charlie Petch’s Why I Was Late is a poetic debut with the wisdom of a sage and the emotional range of an expert comedian. … Do yourself a favor and read this book. This is a master at work.”–Kai Cheng Thom, author of I Hope We Choose Love: A Trans Girl’s Notes from the End of the World
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Winter’s Cold Girls
$18.00In her debut collection of poetry, Lisa Baird explores themes of trauma and recovery, everyday violence and queerness from a personal point of view as well as a wider political scope. These poems bear witness to the resilience of bodies and sexualities and are grounded in an earthy humour. Baird’s poetic style shifts from lyric to deeply personal to fantastical: an old woman plants broken light bulbs and harvests dark flowers; two sisters grow feathers in a nest in the backyard maple; a mother turns into a deer and escapes the unspeakable through a kitchen window. These are poems of disruption, discovery, and witness–they balance brutal honesty with a welcoming intensity. They want you to come close.
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Wrist
$19.95In 1872, dinosaur hunters become embroiled in a battle over the discovery of fossils in Northern Ontario as their excavation crews are driven mad by a bizarre and terrifying illness. Over a hundred years later, Church and his family show signs of the same monstrous affliction. As he begins to unravel his family’s dark history, Church must race to protect the secrets buried deep in bones and blood. A fascinating story embracing Anishinaabe legend, culture, and language, Wrist is set in the fictional town of Sterling and Ghost Lake Reserve, and is Nathan Adler’s debut novel. It is the companion volume to Ghost Lake, which won the 2021 Indigenous Voices Award in Published English Fiction.
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You are Enough
$16.00Finalist for the 2019 Indigenous Voices Award for Published Poetry in English. In his debut poetry collection you are enough: love poems for the end of the world, Smokii Sumac has curated a selection of works from two years of a near daily poetry practice. What began as a sort of daily online poetry journal using the hashtag #haikuaday, has since transformed into a brilliant collection of storytelling drawing upon Indigenous literary practice, and inspired by works like Billy Ray Belcourt’s This Wound is a World, and Tenille Campbell’s #IndianLovePoems. With sections dealing with recovery from addiction and depression, coming home through ceremony, and of course, as the title suggests, on falling in and out of love, Sumac brings the reader through two years of life as a Ktunaxa Two-Spirit person. This collection addresses the grief of being an Indigenous person in Canada, shares timely (and sometimes hilarious) musings on consent, sex, and gender, and through it all, helps us come to know that we are enough, just as we are.
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You Only Live Twice
$14.95YOLT explores two artists’ lives before and after transitions: from female to male, and from near-dead to alive.
The unspoken promise was that in our second life we would become the question to every answer, jumping across borders until they finally dissolve. Man and woman. Queer and straight.
What if it’s not true that you only live once? In this genre-transcending book, trans writer and media artist Chase Joynt and HIV-positive movie artist Mike Hoolboom come together over the films of Chris Marker to exchange transition tales, confessional missives that map out the particularities of occupying what they call ‘second lives’: Chase’s transition from female to male and Mike’s near-death from AIDS.
Weaving cultural theory with memoir and media analysis, YOLT asks intimate questions about what it might meanto find love and hope through conversation across generations.
‘Chase Joynt and Mike Hoolboom here give each other the gift so many people only dream of: ample, unhurried space to unspool crucial stories of one’s life, and an attentive, impassioned, invested, intelligent receiver on the other side. The gift to the reader is both the example of their exchange, and the nuanced, idiosyncratic, finely rendered examination it offers of biopolitical experiences which, in many ways, define our times. I’m so glad they have each other, and that we have this.’
– Maggie Nelson
‘Despite its complexity, the book is refreshingly clear, direct, and elegant, and pleasingly consistent in tone despite its shared authorship … This is an ode to friendship that is as beautiful as it is revelatory.’
– Shawn Syms, Quill & Quire
‘You Only Live Twice is an intelligent ode to enchantment, to the possibilities that arise in ‘second lives’ when all past expectations have been foreclosed.’
– Chris Kraus
‘The writing is out of the park – strong and surprising, a relay race of brilliant twirling, tossing thoughts back and forth like balletic rugby bros. Joynt and Hoolboom’s dances of disclosure are so courageous and generative, gifts to us all.’
– John Greyson