Pride Reads

transVersing

$19.95

Originally 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.

Twenty Miles

By: Cara Hedley

$19.95

Isabel 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

Twin Studies

By: Keith Maillard

$24.95

An 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.”

Two-Man Tent

By: Robert Chafe

$19.95

In 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.

Two-Spirit Acts

$22.95

In 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.

Under Wraps

By: Robert Chafe

$16.95

The 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.

Untethered

By: Ruth Rakoff

$12.99

During 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.

Up for Grabs

By: Michelle Mulder

$9.99

Frida 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?

We All Need To Eat

By: Alex Leslie

$20.00

Finalist 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.

We Are Not Avatars

By: John Barton

$19.95

In 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.

Western Alienation Merit Badge, The

By: Nancy Jo Cullen

$20.00

Set 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.

What You Can’t Have

By: Michael V. Smith

$14.95

What 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.

Whitetail Shooting Gallery

By: Annette Lapointe

$20.00

‘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 bestfriend, Donna, an evangelical minister’s daughter who rebels against her family by immersing her- self 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 con- structs 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 take many years to heal.

“The teen world in ‘Whitetail Shooting Gallery’ will make you squirm. It’s dark and gritty, but it’s also pretty funny. … 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 … Her writing isstrong, sharp and visceral. Lapointe finds the beauty and, equally importantly, the humour in this ugly, carnal world … Lapointe’s vivid, powerful voice and her beautifully savage view of rural prairie life.” – Winnipeg Free Press

Why I Was Late

By: Charlie Petch

$20.00

With 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

Winter’s Cold Girls

By: Lisa Baird

$18.00

In 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.

Wrist

By: Nathan Adler

$19.95

In 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.

All Books in this Collection