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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 49–64 of 178 results
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Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars
$16.95At once a love letter and challenge to the traditional transgender memoir, Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars is a playful, surrealist dance through queer coming of age.
A haunted young girl (who happens to be a kung-fu expert and pathological liar) runsaway from an oppressive city, where the sky is always grey, in search of love and sisterhood–and finds herself in a magical place known only as the Street of Miracles.There, she is quickly adopted into a vigilante gang of glamorous warrior femmes called the Lipstick Lacerators, whose mission is to scour the Street of violent men and avenge murdered trans women everywhere. But when disaster strikes, can our intrepid heroine find the truth within herself in order to protect her new family and heal her broken heart?
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Flesh, Tongue
$20.95In this brilliant and provocative first collection, Yaya Yao confronts her inherited fragmented self and her hunger for a home, using scraps of personal and communal memory to bridge languages, worldviews, and physical distance from her ancestral homeland. Bits of Cantonese, Mandarin, Hokkien, and Shanghainese are translated and altered to explore the dynamics between language and identity. In this collection, Yaya Yao has created a unique and authentic voice.
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Foxed
$18.95After a long series of professional and personal upheavals, Detective Lane begins his latest adventure happy, at peace, and enjoying life with his partner Arthur, their children Christine and Matt, and his able new co-worker, RCMP officer Keely Saliba.
But when the body of a young boy is unearthed ten years after he was reported missing, Lane’s investigation into the crime puts him in conflict with a powerful and charismatic Calgary real estate developer and restaurateur–a cunning sociopath whose desire to suppress any threat to his empire will endanger the safety of Lane’s own family.
The sixth book in Garry Ryan’s award-winning and Calgary Herald bestselling series of Detective Lane mysteries pits Lane against his most dangerous antagonist yet.
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Freda & Jem’s Best of the Week
$17.95Jem is a self-described butch dyke from Montreal who always imagined spending her life in bars and having multiple flings. When she meets Freda, a woman who exposes Jem’s vulnerabilities, her preconceived notions of who she is become moot as she finds herself partnered in a long-term relationship with kids. Which she surprisingly loves—most of the time. But that’s all changing as Jem and Freda’s marriage shifts from one of love and lust to one of gripes and grumbles. Freda & Jem’s Best of the Week is a love story that explores the struggle for identity as a couple reconciles a new way of loving one another while accepting their new familial reality.
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Free to a Good Home
$24.95The German word Zugunruhe translates as the ”stirring before moving.” It’s used to describe birds and herds of animals, like wildebeests, before the great migration. Though Jules Torti is neither German nor a wildebeest, she understands this marrow-deep anxiousness all too well; she is just someone looking for a home. Free to a Good Home is evidence of Torti’s life-long commitment to feeling at home where it mattered most: within herself. At eighteen, with one thousand dollars in her bank account, she moved to the West Coast from Ontario to find ”her people.” She headed specifically to Davie Street–that’s where all the gays were! Finding a girlfriend proved to be elusive, but she learned a lot of Pet Shop Boys lyrics and studied everything by Jane Rule and Chrystos for guidance. Torti continued searching. Whether prepping chimpanzees breakfast in the Congo, searching for her own breakfast in the dumpsters of Vancouver’s back alleys or seeking a permanent address in Ontario’s unforgiving real estate market–with many other worldly adventures in between–Torti found that homesickness took up its own residence in her identity. While she longed for a home of bricks and mortar (or log or stone), she knew her greatest sense of home was to be found in a person, the missing her. For many, the path to home is never linear. If Torti began her memoir in Amsterdam, you might not follow. If she began in Uganda, you might get it. If she started with her time spent in the soggy Costa Rican jungle, you’d have a better understanding. But, if she scrolled back to her tomboy self at age six, then you’d see. Logically, this is where she begins her memoir of emotional geography: on an unpaved country side road in Southwestern Ontario, among the corn and tobacco-fringed fields of Mount Pleasant, where she grew up. At turns poignant, hilarious and uncannily familiar, Free to a Good Home explores what it means to call a place home when life oddly mirrors a choose-your-own-adventure storybook.
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Fresh Pack of Smokes
$18.95“This night in Oppenheimer Park Dan asked me to shit-kick this chick in the face as she owed money and I said no because I didn’t know who she was and I wasn’t about to play with fire so he sat on the bench then stood up and did a flying kick twice to her chin and she convulsed and passed out he said he didn’t want to spill blood because she had HIV…”—“Tales”Dissecting herself and the life she once knew living a transient life that included time spent in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside as a bonafide drug addict, Blanchard writes plainly about violence, drug use and sex work in Fresh Pack of Smokes, offering insight into an often overlooked or misunderstood world.
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From Up River and for One Night Only
$21.95Meet
The Gorgons The Legionnaires Chicken Treblinka The Statistics. . . Meet Dee, Gordyn, Em, and Jay, indecisive members of the greatest New Wave band to ever spring from River Bend City. Before they graduate from high school and flee a mill town that’s seen better days, these ambitious friends (two sets of siblings) aim to make something from nothing as a test-run for planned careers of total glamour in New York City. Set between Labour Day 1980 and a Battle of the Bands contest in February 1981, From Up River and for One Night Only traces the unsure but determined steps of the gang’s hopeful act of creation. The darkly comic and autobiographical story memorably captures the detours, setbacks, compromises, ethical quandaries, and illicit opportunities encountered along the twisty highway to the band’s fifteen-and-a half minutes of fame. -
Funny Gyal
$15.99Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ+ Young Adult ? 2022 Finalist
?Instead of remaining silent, she chose to speak out ? That?s the power of one person.? ? Barack Obama
The inspiring story of Angeline Jackson, who stood up to Jamaica?s oppression of queer youth to demand recognition and justice.
When Angeline Jackson was a child, she wondered if there was something wrong with her for wanting to kiss the other girls. But as her sexuality blossomed in her teens, she knew she wouldn?t ?grow out of it? and that her attraction to girls wasn?t against God. In fact, she discovered that same-sex relationships were depicted in the Bible, which she read devoutly, even if the tight-knit evangelical Christian community she grew up in believed any sexual relationship outside of marriage between a man and woman was a sin, and her society, Jamaica, criminalized homosexual sex.
Angeline?s story begins with her traumatic experience of ?corrective rape? when she is lured by an online predator, then traces her childhood through her sexual and spiritual awakening as a teen ? falling in love, breaking up, coming out, and then being forced into conversion therapy.
Sometimes dark, always threadbare and honest, Funny Gyal chronicles how Angeline?s faith deepens as a teenager, despite her parents? conservative values and the strict Christian Jamaican society in which she lives, giving her the courage to challenge gender violence, rape culture, and oppression.
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Ga Ting
$15.95Ga Ting is a powerful and emotionally charged story about an immigrant Chinese couple trying to come to terms with the death of their son Kevin. When they invite Kevin’s Caucasian boyfriend for dinner after the funeral, the evening devolves into a fiery cultural and generational clash.
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Gertrude and Alice
$18.95Visiting the audience in the present day, Gertrude and Alice come to find out how history has treated them. The couple recounts stories of their forty-year relationship; of meetings with iconic artists and writers; and of Alice’s overwhelming, consuming devotion to Gertrude’s genius. Before they leave, they want to find out what has become of their artistic and cultural influence, and how their lives and work are—or are not—remembered.
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Ghost’s Journey
$21.99When Indonesia becomes a dangerous place for the LGBTQ+ community, Ghost and her family are forced to leave their home and escape to freedom in Canada.Ghost’s Journey: A Reugee Story is inspired by the true story of two gay refugees, Rainer and Eka, and written from the perspective of their cat Ghost, with illustrations created from Rainer’s photographs. Written by award-winning author, Robin Stevenson, Ghost’s Journey is a perfect fit to teach young audiences about family diversity, human rights, and social justice. Shortlisted for the 2021 Silver Birch Express Award and the 2021 Rocky Mountain Book Award.Teacher resources available on publisher website: rebelmountainpress.com/ghosts-journey-teacher-resources
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Glycerine
$18.95“
With the traumatic events of Foxed behind him, Detective Lane has been promoted to the head of the Calgary Major Crimes Unit, a position that brings new responsibilities, as well as a new partner in the form of headstrong rookie Nigel Li.
Lane and Li’s first case, an investigation into the death of a migrant worker, points them in the direction of Douglas Jones, the leader of a radical religious compound in northern Alberta, who has been suspected of bombing oil and gas pipelines. With the Calgary Stampede just days away, and anti-Muslim tension mounting in town in the wake of the “honour killing” of a young girl, Lane and Li must foil a potential terror attack.
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Going to New Orleans
$15.00Longlisted for the ReLit Award (2006)
Going to New Orleans is the story of Lewis King, a jazz trumpet player who lands a gig in the Big Easy. King is a genius on cornet, but his private life is emotionally, morally, and financially bankrupt. He’s a heavy drinker and compulsive sexual manipulator, prone to paranoid fits of violent rage. His girlfriend, Ms Sugarlicq, can’t keep her pants on. But as equally deviant sexual predators and jealous hypocrites, they’re perfect for each other…
Going to New Orleans is a fantastic and graphic first-person narrative that serves as a surreal-but-faithful guide to the music, food, history, and literature of New Orleans. A spiritual book, as well as a dirty one.
Praise for Going to New Orleans:
“Throughout the novel, Tidler makes liberal use of alliteration, interior rhyme, and complex sentence construction to produce rhythms that are compelling and addictive. Portions of the book almost demand to be read and reread aloud in order to savour the swish and clatter of the prose. There’s a swing to these sentences.” (Quill & Quire)
“To quote the Velvet Underground’s ‘Some Kinda Love,’ this book ‘Like a dirty French novel/the absurd courts the vulgar,’ offering us beauty contrasted with coarse, harsh, visceral passions, like the metallic tang of come and blood commingled.” (The Georgia Straight)“dialogue as spare and laconic as Hemingway, as poignant and telling as Carver” (The Danforth Review)
Praise for Charles Tidler:
“Tidler is the best goddamned poet in Canada!” (Charles Bukowski)
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Hard Candy / Pitch Roll Yaw
$25.00Hard Candy / Pitch Roll Yaw is a flip book of two poetry collections facing each other. It reads like a bare knuckle punch from beyond the grave. Hard Candy: Caregiving, Mourning, and Stage Light offers poems and prose on the eternal relationship of the poet and her mother. Pitch Roll Yaw is fourteen stations each beginning with a See, Saw poem — Lanzillotto’s one liners balanced by a fulcrum: comma, caesura, spondee, dash, or backslash, with quick shifts in weight and changes in meaning. Each station is unified by theme or form.
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Heroine
$19.95In a bathtub in a rooming house in Montreal in 1980, a woman tries to imagine a new life for herself: a life after a passionate affair with a man while falling for a woman, a life that makes sense after her deep involvement in far left politics during the turbulent seventies of Quebec, a life whose form she knows can only be grasped as she speaks it. A new, revised edition of a seminal work of edgy, experimental feminism. With a foreword by Eileen Myles.
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Hider/Seeker
$20.00The Globe 100 (The Globe & Mail’s favourite books of 2018). Silver IPPY Award (Independent Publisher Book Awards).
Hider/Seeker is the debut fiction collection from award-winning poet Jen Currin. These stories are about addiction and meditation, relationships and almost-relationships, solitude and sexuality. They take place in cafes, in snowy woods, on city street corners, and at Zen retreats – where conversations happen in the margins of books and filthy shoes are treated with reverence. Ex-wives reunite only to be confronted with their past; an aunt believes she has made a heart-breaking discovery about her niece; a seemingly never-ending hysterical pregnancy becomes the talk of a cafe. These stories are always unflinchingly honest in their portrayal of relationships – in particular the relationships of the book’s LGBTQ+ characters – as they navigate spirituality, monogamy, and sex. Currin invites the reader into the complicated lives of her characters and invites them to stay.