Pride Reads

Compulsive Acts

$25.00

Compulsive Acts explores the films, plays and personality of prolific playwright, novelist, filmmaker and poet Sky Gilbert through the eyes of a handful of the people who have observed his work closely over the past two decades — as audience members and arts workers. Actors, academics, performance artists, journalists, filmmakers, playwrights, poets and his partner of many years tackle his immense output with a queer eye for the intricacies of a unique and astute aesthetic vision — a vision that has placed him securely within Canadian Theatre history as an iconic and consistently provocative dramatic force to be reckoned with.

Crisp

By: R.W. Gray

$17.95

Crisp confronts the unspeakable parts of memory, meditating on characters caught in isolation and struggling to make sense of grief, disappointment, and the occasional dinner party gone wrong. The characters in Crisp’s stories don’t always make sound decisions: a grieving widow pursues a priest, an unhappy wife whittles her husband to bits, and a nostalgic man has a one-night stand with a whale trainer. Ranging from the mystical to the eccentric, Gray masterfully uncovers human reactions to loneliness and unrest through tales about relationships, secrets, and a longing to connect.

Cut to Fortress

By: Tawahum Bige

$19.95

A stunning debut poetry collection confronting colonialism, relationships, grief and intergenerational wounds.Cut to Fortress considers the possibility of decolonization through a personal lens, urging for a resistance that is tied using cord and old-growth tree roots; a resistance that tethers us all together in this contemporary existence.With an upbringing in Surrey, fraught familial conflicts, the passing of his older brother and its influence on his world view, Bige slices through the forts built overtop occupied Turtle Island to examine their origin and his own. His journey climbs into the mountains while he reconnects with his Dene and Cree cultures like a gripping hand on jagged rock. His path draws into the concrete urban streets that Wetako-medicine lurks through, especially for his people. The labour of these travels brings him to the springs where healing passed-down traumas becomes possible by drawing water through vulnerability.

Dandelion Daughter

By: Gabrielle Boulianne-Tremblay

$21.95

A runaway bestseller in Québec, where it has captured the hearts of readers and pushed trans-identity into the mainstream conversation

Dandelion Daughter is an intimate, courageous portrait of what it’s like to grow up having been assigned the wrong sex at birth. Set against the windswept countryside of the remote Charlevoix region some five hours north of Montreal, Gabrielle Boulianne-Tremblay‘s autobiographical novel immortalizes her early years as an alienated boy trapped in a world of small-town values and her parents’ dissolving marriage, through complex adolescent years of self-discovery and first loves, to the harrowing episodes that fuel the growing realization that she must transition and give birth to her new self if she is to continue living at all. One of the first novels of its kind to appear in Québec, this inspiring story has already connected with a wide readership, and has been adopted by many schools to help expand worldviews and curriculums.

Dear Twin

By: Addie Tsai

$18.95

Poppy wants to go to college like everyone else, but her father has other ideas. Ever since her twin sister, Lola, mysteriously vanished, Poppy’s father has been depressed and forces her to stick around. She hopes she can convince Lola to come home, and perhaps also procure her freedom, by sending her twin a series of nineteen letters, one for each year of their lives.

When not excavating childhood memories, Poppy is sneaking away with her girlfriend Juniper, the only person who understands her. But negotiating the complexities of queer love and childhood trauma are anything but simple. And as a twin? That’s a whole different story.

Disabled Voices Anthology

$18.95

Written and illustrated by the Disabled community about the Disabled community in North America, Disabled Voices is an international anthology collection of short stories (both fiction and non-fiction), personal essay, poetry, and artwork. Featuring both new as well as established authors, Disabled Voices is comprised of submissions written by Canadian, American, and UK authors.
A first of its kind, Disabled Voices captures life as a Disabled person: from the bad and ugly, to the good and victorious, and anything in between. Likewise, some pieces may not fit the mainstream idea of what the Disabled community is. This is a must have book for members of the Disabled community, but it is also very necessary to bring awareness and understanding to readers of all kinds.

Disintegrate/Dissociate

By: Arielle Twist

$16.95

Winner, Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ Emerging Writers (Writers’ Trust of Canada) and the Indigenous Voices Award; finalist, Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature

In her powerful debut collection of poetry, Arielle Twist unravels the complexities of human relationships after death and metamorphosis. In these spare yet powerful poems, she explores, with both rage and tenderness, the parameters of grief, trauma, displacement, and identity. Weaving together a past made murky by uncertainty and a present which exists in multitudes, Arielle Twist poetically navigates through what it means to be an Indigenous trans woman, discovering the possibilities of a hopeful future and a transcendent, beautiful path to regaining softness.

Dragonfly

By: Lara Rae

$15.95

In this original and poetic new work, Lara Rae tells the raw and heartfelt story of her half-century long (and counting) gender odyssey. Dragonfly presents us with two actors, one male, one female, who illuminate the inner life of a trans woman from her Scottish childhood in the 1960s to the present day. Matching our inside to our outside is always hard, but for trans people it’s often a matter of life and death. Stripping away the visual cues that both define and imprison transgender people, Dragonfly is a call to all of us to forge creativity from chaos. So often, it is the external changes in trans lives that the world is exposed to and confronts. Here as Lara says, is the “inside voice” of a trans child, ever present, ever demanding to be heard, ever rising upward, to growth, peace, security and love.

Emanations

By: Prathna Lor

$18.00

In Prathna Lor’s first full-length collection we are introduced to a unique voice in Canadian poetry. Moving fluidly between prose poems and more fractured, open verse, Lor meditates on voice, on disaster and on identity, pushing always against commodification, against a consumable narrative.

Entropic

By: R.W. Gray

$19.95

Winner of the 2016 Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award at the East Coast Literary Awards!
Shortlisted for the Book Design Award at the 2016 Alberta Book Publishing Awards!
Shortlisted for the 2015 New Brunswick Book Awards!

In this collection of stories, author and filmmaker R. W. Gray (Crisp) finds the place where the beautiful, the strange, and the surreal all meet–sometimes meshing harmoniously, sometimes colliding with terrible violence, launching his characters into a redefined reality.

A lovestruck man discovers the secret editing room where his girlfriend erases all her flaws; a massage artist finds that she has a gift, but is uncertain of the price; a beautiful man sets out to be done with beauty; and a gay couple meets what appear to be younger versions of themselves, learning that history can indeed repeat itself.

Even Weirder Than Before

By: Susie Taylor

$22.95

***CANADA BOOK AWARD WINNER***

***IPPY AWARDS BRONZE MEDAL, LGBT+ FICTION CATEGORY***

***SHORTLISTED FOR THE MIRAMICHI READER’S ‘THE VERY BEST!’ FIRST BOOK AWARD***

***AMERICAN BOOK FEST, LGBTQ FICTION AWARD WINNER***

Daisy’s job is to be as unobtrusive as possible. But when her father suddenly leaves and her mother breaks down, Daisy’s old life disappears, and she is set free in the rift created between her parents. Susie Taylor’s sharp, quick-witted prose carries Daisy through a family cataclysm, relationships with boys, and her increasingly confusing feelings towards girls, especially Wanda. A refreshingly perceptive and honest debut, Even Weirder Than Before explores the nature of family, friendships, and sexual awakenings—and introduces one of Newfoundland’s most exciting new writers.

Every Day She Rose

By: Andrea Scott, Nick Green

$18.95

After the Black Lives Matter protest at the 2016 Toronto Pride Parade, two friends find their racial and queer politics aren’t as aligned as they thought, and the playwrights behind them must figure out how to write about the fallout.

Cathy Ann, a straight Black woman, and her roommate Mark, a gay white man, came home from the parade with such differing views of what happened and how it affected their own communities. Cathy Ann agrees with the protest that the police presence at the parade doesn’t make her feel safe, while Mark felt safer with them there, especially in the wake of the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando. Frustrated he can’t see the bigger issue, Cathy Ann questions if she can continue living with Mark. Simultaneously, playwrights Andrea and Nick—who share the same identities as their characters—pause throughout the show to figure out how to work together to tell the story of a significant turning point in a friendship.

Through both sets of dialogue, Every Day She Rose is a powerful exploration of white supremacy, privilege, and patriarchy in supposed safe spaces.

Excitement Tax

By: John Emil Vincent

$18.95

Excitement Tax uses a series of tonally various prose sonnets to trace the deeply uneasy relationship of a grown-up person and his imaginary friend, Walter Weaselbird. The pair crash through thickets of erudition in search of candy. Often they find candy.

Exposure

By: Greg MacArthur

$18.95

Expose yourself to one of the most original new voices in theatre with this collection of two uncompromising plays by Greg MacArthur.

Snowman: After years of wandering, Denver and Marjorie find themselves in a remote northern community at the edge of a glacier, chopping wood, renting out stolen videos and doing cocaine with Jude, a young gay man whose parents have abandoned him. When Jude discovers the body of a prehistoric boyfrozen in the glacier, everyone finds their lives beginning to shift and thaw in unexpected ways.

girls! girls! girls!: Splitz deserved to win. Missy stole first place. Set in the cutthroat world of high school gymnastics, this play follows the Friday-night exploits of four teenage chums as they seek revenge for a loss on the vaulting horse. Told in a hypnotic, rap-meets-nursery-rhymes style, this play, which takes its cue from A Clockwork Orange and the Columbine massacre, is brutally violent as it explores what happens when emptiness becomes the norm.

Exposure includes an introduction by Peter Hinton.

‘For truly provocative theatre from a new voice, go see Snowman … it’s loopy, quirky and beautifully done.’

—CBC

‘[girls! girls! girls! is] wondrous, scary and heartbreaking.’

—Montreal Mirror

Falling for Myself

By: Dorothy Ellen Palmer

$20.00

In this searing and seriously funny memoir, Dorothy Ellen Palmer falls down, a lot, and spends a lifetime learning to appreciate her disability. Born with two very different, very tiny feet, she was adopted as a toddler by an already wounded 1950s family. From childhood surgeries to decades as a feminist teacher, mom, improv coach and unionist, she tried to hide being different. But now, standing proud with her walker, she’s sharing her journey. Navigating abandonment, abuse and ableism, she finds her birth parents and a new chosen family in the disability community.

Fate’s Instruments

By: H. Nigel Thomas

$25.00

In Fate’s Instruments, picking up the story from where Paul’s brother Jay left it in No Safeguards, Paul, an aspiring writer, marries Carlos, with whom he lived in Guatemala, and brings him to Montreal. Things go wrong from the beginning, and they break up. Then fate, in the form of a brain tumour, strikes Paul. He receives support from Jay, Lionel (himself a brain tumour survivor), friends, and the enigmatic Professor Bram. But it is Paul’s exploration of his Vincentian childhood and new-found love that restores his equilibrium.

All Books in this Collection