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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 81–96 of 175 results
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Lost Lagoon / Lost in Thought
$20.00After moving to Vancouver’s West End in 2014, The Human is drawn to a small body of water called Lost Lagoon in Stanley Park. Daytime visits, with a surprising array of wildlife, are quietly revelatory; but so is suddenly waking in the night when owl hoots, or geese startle in alarm at otter on the prowl. The Human savours this up-close relationship between wildlife and fast-paced urban living, questioning the interface between the urban and natural world.
Upon learning the lagoon was named by nineteenth century Canadian author E. Pauline Johnson, of Mohawk and English origin, Johnson then becomes a presence in the narrative. Pauline Johnson wrote evocatively about it: “Among the wild rice in the still lagoon/In monotone the lizard shrills his tune.”
During five years of intimate counterpoint between urban living and wildlife, The Human’s notions are challenged and altered. Questions of how significant the specificity of place is to story, how our relationship to nature is altered by urban living, and how we might return to the natural world. Reminiscent of Henry Thoreau’s Walden Pond, perceptions about nurturing, fear, inventiveness, delight, death, protection, humour, even tenderness change as the lagoon has exposed what being human in the twenty-first century actually means.
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Loudest Bark, The
$19.95Samuel knows that their real name is Simone, but things at their house are too quiet to think about how to tell their parents. When Chloe the costume designer moves in across the street with a dog about to have puppies, life becomes bigger, more colourful, and louder. And so does Simone.Teacher resources available on publisher website: rebelmountainpress.com/the-loudest-bark-quel-jappements-teacher-resources
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Love Cake
$20.95Winner of the Lambda Literary Award, Lesbian Poetry, 2012
Honourable Mention, San Francisco Book Festival, Poetry, 2012In Love Cake, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha explores how queer people of colour resist and transform violence through love and desire. Refusing to forget the traumas of post 9/11 Islamophobia, and Sri Lanka’s civil war, Love Cake documents the persistence of survival and beauty. It maps the complicated, luscious joy of reclaiming the body and sexuality after abuse, examines a family history of violence with compassion, and celebrates the beautiful resistance of queer people of colour in love and home-making.
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love, life
$19.95A hilarious romp through love, food, and Italy.
Do you love life? In this hilarious frolic through the hills of Italy, our heroine discovers the past is never really gone: it runs beside us our entire lives, just waiting to bite us in the arse. love, life is a made-up true fable about coming out, going back in, getting fat, Italian food, and stalking the Piazzo Bernardini. It’s a haunting love story, transcending decades, countries, and heartbreak. A Newfoundlander in Italy offers the humour, optimism, and romantic yearning the world needs now.
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Lucky Elephant Restaurant, The
$10.95When the young daughter of popular radio talk show host Bobbie Reddie disappears along with Bobbie’s ex-husband, Detectives Lane and Harper are on the case. Haunted by flashbacks from a previous missing child case, Lane once again takes to the streets of Calgary looking for answers.
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Lyric Sexology Vol. 1
$19.95Largely written before the current cultural visibility of trans lit, Lyric Sexology Vol. 1 is Salah’s prescient contribution to a canon of self-determined literature that explores transness. In this case, the author sidesteps the “I” in the text and instead draws on archives–sexological, anthropological, psychological, among others–to demonstrate the shifting and shifty nature of our identities, affiliations, and narratives.
This 2017 edition is the first to be published in Canada and features four new poems and a new cover design by Kai Yun Ching and Wai-Yant Li.
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Mad Long Emotion
$19.95Desire and dieffenbachias: new poems from the award-winning author of Otter .
Mad Long Emotion wants to talk flora to fauna like you. Loosestrife shoos away humans and green carnations flirt with handsome men. Numerous species, both spiny and spineless, prove as invasive as desire: from Great Lake lampreys to hydraulic triceratopses, we’re all just looking for love. -
Made Beautiful by Use
$14.95What should we believe in? Tough, gritty, innovative. In Made Beautiful by Use, Sean Horlor tackles issues of belief by questioning whether it’s possible for anyone to be conscious, compassionate, and ethical in a twenty-first-century world. Whether it is St. Joan before the walls of Orleans or St. George returning to the world as George W. Bush, here are some of the West’s greatest stories retold from a contemporary perspective. Here we have the dark-age St. Brendan in a series of poems that focus on a search for higher levels of consciousness acted out during St. Brendan’s legendary voyage across the Atlantic. Contrast these to the George W. Bush satires that explore societal ethics and avoidance of social responsibility in favour of ideology.
Horlor’s hagiographies, praises, and virtues are set in a milieu that is contemporary and streetwise, aware of homelessness, drug cultures, sexuality, and consumerism. Belief, therefore, is not set among the liturgical pieties of the Church, but in the grittiness of the world itself, where belief is breached, found, and confirmed. Can what we believe in be reduced to signs that prove existence? Mostly written at Queenswood Convent on southern Vancouver Island, Made Beautiful by Use questions what constitutes faith in a time when too many have stopped believing.
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Melting Queen, The
$20.95Shortlisted for the Sixth Annual Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize—Literary Fiction Category!
Shortlisted for Best Speculative Fiction at the 2020 Alberta Book Publishing Awards!
Shortlisted for Best Book Design at the 2020 Alberta Book Publishing Awards!
Second Place in the Prose Category at the 2019 Alcuin Society Awards for Excellence in Book Design in Canada!Every year since 1904, when the ice breaks up on the North Saskatchewan River, Edmonton has crowned a Melting Queen—a woman who presides over the Melting Day spring carnival and who must keep the city’s spirits up over the following winter. But this year, something has changed: a genderfluid ex-frat brother called River Runson is named as Melting Queen. As River’s reign upends the city’s century-old traditions, Edmonton tears itself in two, with progressive and reactionary factions fighting a war for Edmonton’s soul. Ultimately, River must uncover the hidden history of Melting Day, forcing Edmonton to confront the dark underbelly of its traditions and leading the city into a new chapter in its history.
Balancing satire with compassion, Bruce Cinnamon’s debut novel combines history and magic to weave a splendid future-looking tale.
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Moments of Glad Grace
$22.95“Beautifully written and perfectly executed from first to last sentence.” — Yann Martel, author of Life of Pi
“A richly layered journey, charmingly told.” — Plum Johnson, author of They Left Us Everything
A moving and witty memoir about a daughter’s evolving relationship with her aging father and their shared journey to belonging.
The story begins as a trip from Canada to Ireland in search of genealogical data and documents. Being 80 and in the early stages of Parkinson’s disease, Joe invites his daughter Alison to come along as his research assistant, which might have worked very well had she any interest — any at all — in genealogy.
Very quickly, the father-daughter pilgrimage becomes more comical than fruitful, more of a bittersweet adventure than a studious mission. And rather than rigorous genealogy, their explorations move into the realm of family and forgiveness, the primal search for identity and belonging, and questions about responsibility to our ancestors and the extent to which we are shaped by the people who came before us.
Though continually bursting with humor, Moments of Glad Grace is a story about identity, history, and ultimately becomes a song of appreciation for the precious and limited time we have with our parents.
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Monoceros
$20.95Winner of the W.O. Mitchell Book Prize
Winner of the 2012 Relit Award for Best Novel
Longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize
Shortlisted for the Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBT Fiction
Shortlisted for the Alberta Literary Award for Best Fiction
A Globe and Mail Best Novel of 2011A seventeen-year-old boy, bullied and heartbroken, hangs himself. And although he felt terribly alone, his suicide changes everyone around him.
His parents are devastated. His secret boyfriend’s girlfriend is relieved. His unicorn- and virginity-obsessed classmate, Faraday, is shattered; she wishes she had made friends with him that time she sold him an Iced Cappuccino at Tim Hortons. His English teacher, mid-divorce and mid-menopause, wishes she could remember the dead student’s name, that she could care more about her students than her ex’s new girlfriend. Who happens to be her cousin. The school guidance counsellor, Walter, feels guilty – maybe he should have made an effort when the kid asked for help. Max, the principal, is worried about how it will reflect on the very Catholic school. And Walter, who’s been secretly in a relationship with Max for years, thinks that’s a little callous. He’s also tired of Max’s obsession with some sci-fi show on TV. And Max wishes Walter would lose some weight and remember to use a coaster.
And then Max meets a drag queen named Crepe Suzette. And everything changes.
Monoceros is a masterpiece of the tragicomic; by exploring the effects of a suicide on characters outside the immediate circle, Mayr offers a dazzlingly original look at the ripple effects – both poignant and funny – of a tragedy. A tender, bold work.
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Most Precious Blood
$25.00Fans of Anne Tyler’s quirky characters and her attention to family life, or Pete Hamill’s depiction of diverse, ethnic, urban neighborhoods will connect to Most Precious Blood, set in the eleventh-hour of a declining Italian-American neighborhood where complex and often destructive loyalties have dire consequences. Hard Luck Lenny is the quintessential good son, brother, and father, and he fears a calamity will derail his son’s future the way his own dreams were derailed years ago, but Frankie is preoccupied with thoughts of Gennaro DiCico, the son of a small-time mobster. Lenny’s fears are realized when a cabdriver’s son avenges his father’s murder.
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My Sister’s Girlfriend
$13.95Fifth grader Talia Cohen-Sullivan isn’t sure how she feels about boys, crushes, and the love thing even though her best friend, Carmen, is already dreaming about kissing–and it’s only September. Losing her mom to cancer a few years ago made Talia afraid of change, though she still has her big sister, Jade, to help her through hard times. But when she sees Jade kissing a girl, Talia is suddenly thrust into a world she doesn’t understand and faces important decisions. With the help of her therapist, and Carmen, and Jade herself, Talia learns that love has many faces; love might even be something she’s interested in soon . . . for herself.
Teacher resources available on publisher website:https://www.rebelmountainpress.com/my-sisters-girlfriend–teacher-resources.html
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My Two-Faced Luck
$19.951990. Transferred to Horsetail Institution and mortally ill, an inmate devotes his remaining weeks to a project–recording his history on cassette tape. The account describes a curious queer journey that began in rural New England in 1927. Meditating on ruined family, illicit lovers, drunken parties, a tragic marriage, and strange terms of employment, the American inmate strives to wring sense–meaning–from a life now winding down in River Bend City, British Columbia… a few years after a jury found him guilty of murdering his boss, a geriatric San Francisco socialite. Decades later, the recipient of those forgotten cassettes faces the dissolution of her long marriage. Seeking respite from wintry thoughts, the former prison nurse listens to the inmate’s words, eventually shaping the jumbled reminiscences into a memoir.
Speculation based on a cruise ship murder in 1985 and the final volume of the River Bend Trilogy (The Age of Cities; From Up River and For One Night Only), My Two-Faced Luck captures a singular voice as it divulges startling facts behind a rough passage through the upheavals of the twentieth century.
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Mythical Man
$18.95In Mythical Man, David Ly builds, and then tears down, an army of men in a quest to explore personhood in the 21st century. Tenderness, toxic masculinity, nuances of queer love, and questions of race and identity mix in Ly?s poetry, casting a spell that enters like “a warm tongue on a first date.” Mythical Man is an authentic and accomplished debut.
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No Safeguards
$25.00No Safeguards, the first in a trilogy, follows Jay and his brother Paul from childhood to young adulthood. We witness the destructive impact of fundamentalist Christian beliefs on their mother and father, opposition to those beliefs by the boys’ grandmother and each boy’s very different response to their parents’ religiosity. This becomes even more poignant after they leave their grandmother’s comfortable home in St. Vincent to join their mother in Montreal. The revelation that both boys are gay adds to their sense of oppression and divides them from their mother, whose views are shaped by the church and the theology of the Torah.