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 97–112 of 175 results

  • Nothing Without Us Too

    Nothing Without Us Too

    $25.00

    Nothing Without Us Too follows the theme of Nothing Without Us (a 2020 Prix Aurora Award finalist), featuring more stories by authors who are disabled, d/Deaf or hard-of-hearing, Blind or visually impaired, neurodivergent, Spoonie, and/or who manage mental illness. The lived experiences of their protagonists are found across many demographics–such as race, culture, financial status, religion, gender, age, and/or sexual orientation. We want to present these stories because diversity is reality, and it belongs in literary and genre fiction.

    So, whether we’re being welcomed to Sensory Hell by hotel staff, witnessing a stare-down between a convenience store worker and an arrogant vampire, or unsure if our social media account is magic, these tales can teleport us elsewhere yet resonate deep within.

  • Nought

    Nought

    $20.00

    Finalist for the 2021 Nelson Ball Prize

    Nought, the new poetry collection by Governor General’s Literary Award finalist Julie Joosten, explores the intersections of body, identity, and love in poems that grapple with mysteries of neurology and metaphysics. Here the materiality of the body and experience have transformed into a language, a thought that resides in and between bodies. Throughout, Joosten masterfully engages with form and rhythm, crafting work that is intimage and perceptive, pulsing with life.

  • Oldness; Or the Last-Ditch Efforts of Marcus O

    Oldness; Or the Last-Ditch Efforts of Marcus O

    $19.95

    With the rapid approach of the end of his professional life, Marcus O is quietly wondering what’s next. Well first there’s a workplace nemesis he aspires to humiliate. And then there’s a style-conscious student whose shallow interests seem calculated to aggravate Marcus alone. And finally there are the nights scouring the web and composing attractive answers to profile questions generated by a seniors’ online dating site he’s recently joined. Set in a near future where everything is pretty much the same–or maybe a touch worse–Oldness; or The Last Ditch Efforts of Marcus O presents a satiric portrait of a contradictory man in a complicated place and time whose reality may be just over the horizon.

  • One Bead at a Time

    One Bead at a Time

    $22.95

    One Bead at a Timeis the oral memoir of Beverly Little Thunder, a two-spirit Lakota Elder from Standing Rock, who has lived most of her life in service to Indigenous and non-Indigenous women in vast areas of both the United States and Canada. Transcribed and edited by two-spirit Métis writer Sharron Proulx-Turner, Little Thunder’s narrative is told verbatim, her melodious voice and keen sense of humour almost audible overtop of the text on the page. Early in her story, Little Thunder recounts a dream from her early adulthood, “I stared at these lily pads for the longest time and I decided that there was one part of the pond that had lots of lily pads and no frogs. I said, ‘I want to go there because there’s lots of lily pads but no frogs and I like creating community.’” And create community she does. Little Thunder established the first and today, the only all-women’s Sundance in the world, securing a land base in the Green Mountains of Vermont for future generations of Indigenous women’s ceremony. She was active in the A.I.M. movement and she continues to practice and promote political and spiritual awareness for Indigenous women around the world. A truly remarkable visionary.

  • Our Work Is Everywhere

    Our Work Is Everywhere

    $23.95

    A visually stunning graphic non-fiction book on queer and trans resistance.

    Over the past ten years, we have witnessed the rise of queer and trans communities that have defied and challenged those who have historically opposed them. Through bold, symbolic imagery and surrealist, overlapping landscapes, queer illustrator and curator Syan Rose shines a light on the faces and voices of these diverse, amorphous, messy, real, and imagined queer and trans communities.

    In their own words, queer and trans organizers, artists, healers, comrades, and leaders speak honestly and authentically about their own experiences with power, love, pain, and magic to create a textured and nuanced portrait of queer and trans realities in America. The many themes include Black femme mental health, Pacific Islander authorship, fat queer performance art, disability and health care practice, sex worker activism, and much more. Accompanying the narratives are Rose’s startling and sinuous images that brings these leaders’ words to visual life.

    Our Work Is Everywhere is a graphic non-fiction book that underscores the brilliance and passion of queer and trans resistance.

    Includes a foreword by Lambda Literary Award-winning author and activist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, author of Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice.

    Full-colour throughout.

  • Out Proud

    Out Proud

    $19.95

    Produced in partnership with Egale Canada Human Rights Trust, Out Proud: Stories of Pride, Courage, and Social Justice is the second in a series of essay anthologies designed to give attention to issues that are sometimes ignored in the mainstream media—and a voice to those most closely affected by them. Expertly edited by sociologist Dr. Douglas Gosse, Out Proud features more than fifty short essays on the experience of LGBTTIQQ2SA (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transsexual, Transgendered, Intersexual, Queer, Questioning, 2-Spirited and Allies) and written by members of our diverse, Canadian community. Following the critical success of the first book in the series, Out Loud: Essays on Mental Illness, Stigma and Recovery, Out Proud aims to broaden the conversation around sexuality and social justice.

  • People Who Disappear

    People Who Disappear

    $21.95

    An oil spill on the West Coast coincides with a loved one’s death. An enigmatic young musician experiences the rise and fall of his career, as told through videos posted to YouTube.

    Sometimes romantic, sometimes elegiac, Alex Leslie’s coastal stories take place in ocean inlets and city streets. Haunted as much by technology as by their own ghosts, Leslie’s characters face the disappearance of sanity, love, and landscape. An electric, poetic debut.

  • Permission

    Permission

    $20.95

    A grieving young woman learns something new about love from a dominatrix in this haunting and erotic debut.

    Echo is a failing actress who prefers to lose herself in the lives of others rather than examine her own. When her father disappears in a seaside misstep, she and her mother are left grief-stricken, unsure of how to piece back together their family that, it turns out, had never been whole. But then Orly — a dominatrix — moves in across the street. And through her, Echo begins to find the pieces that will allow her to carry on. Set among the bright colours and harshly glittering lights of Los Angeles, this is a love story about people addled with dreams and expectations who turn to the erotic for answers.

  • Philistine, The

    Philistine, The

    $19.95

    Nadia Eid doesn’t know it yet, but she’s about to change her life. It’s the end of the ’80s and she hasn’t seen her Palestinian father since he left Montreal years ago to take a job in Egypt, promising to bring her with him. But now she’s twenty-five and he’s missing in action, so she takes matters into her own hands. Booking a short vacation from her boring job and Québecois boyfriend, she calls her father from the Nile Hilton in downtown Cairo. But nothing goes as planned and, stumbling around, Nadia wanders into an art gallery where she meets Manal, a young Egyptian artist who becomes first her guide and then her lover. Through this unexpected relationship, Nadia rediscovers her roots, her language, and her ambitions, as her father demonstrates the unavoidable destiny of becoming a Philistine – the Arabic word for Palestinian. With Manal’s career poised to take off and her father’s secret life revealed, the First Intifada erupts across the border. Nadia needs to decide what all this has to do with her.

  • Plenitude

    Plenitude

    $20.00

    A non-binary faun wishes their body had a variety of sex organs, interchangeable daily. A prison abolitionist scrutinizes Rothko paintings on the carceral state’s boardroom walls. The insurrectionary tactics of mass social movements spread, like a secret handshake, from Chile to Hong Kong to Toronto.

    Shaped by Daniel Sarah Karasik’s experience of grassroots social and political advocacy, these poems are an offering to those engaged in struggles for a better world—and an acknowledgement of the sometimes contradictory meanings of those struggles. How do individual erotic desires relate to collective desires for deliverance from alienation and exploitation? How might we dream of a more humane future, and work towards building it, without minimizing the challenges that stand in our way?

    Plenitude cartwheels towards a world that might be: a world without cops or bosses, without prisons, without oppressive regulation of gender and desire. It is a song for the excluded and forgotten and those who struggle alongside them.

  • Poetry is Queer

    Poetry is Queer

    $19.95

    Poetry is Queer is a kaleidoscope of sexual outlaws, gay icons, Sapphic poets, and great lovers?real and imagined?conjured like gateway drugs to a queer world. Claiming the word ?queer? for those  who self-proclaim the authority of their own bodies in defiance of church and state, Kirby pays tribute to gay touchstones while embodying both their work and joy. From gazing upon street boys with constant companion C.P. Cavafy, to end of day observances with Frank O Hara, to mowing Walt Whitman s grass, Poetry Is Queer is a hybrid-genre memoir like no other.

  • Polar Vortex

    Polar Vortex

    $23.00

    Finalist for the 2020 Scotiabank Giller Prize

    Some secrets never die…

    Priya and Alexandra have moved from the city to a picturesque countryside town. What Alex doesn’t know is that in moving, Priya is running from her past—from a fraught relationship with an old friend, Prakash, who pursued her for many years, both online and off. Time has passed, however, and Priya, confident that her ties to Prakash have been successfully severed, decides it’s once more safe to establish an online presence. In no time, Prakash discovers Priya online and contacts her. Impulsively, inexplicably, Priya invites him to visit her and Alex in the country, without ever having come clean with Alex about their relationship—or its tumultuous end. Prakash’s sudden arrival at their home reveals cracks in Priya and Alex’s relationship and brings into question Priya’s true intentions.

    Seductive and tension-filled, Polar Vortex is a story of secrets, deceptions, and revenge. It asks readers: Are we ever free from our pasts? Do we deserve to be?

  • Poor Super Man

    Poor Super Man

    $13.95

    Poor Super Man is &quotone of the top ten plays of the year&#44&quot according to Time magazine&#46 &quotAn unflaggingly witty and often moving slice of life &#46 &#46 &#46 Poor Super Man explodes on to the stage like a bold comic strip&#44 complete with snappy captions and hard&#44 bright&#44 witty dialogue&#44&quot writes the Edmonton Journal&#46

  • Queen’s Park

    Queen’s Park

    $10.95

    Detective Lane has a knack for discovering the whereabouts of missing persons&#46 But the city&#146s latest case has disappeared without a trace&#46 After a brutal attack on his young nephew&#44 ex&#45mayor Bob Swatsky has gone missing with 13 million dollars of tax&#45payers&#146 money&#46 Is he on the run with the cash&#44 or is it something more sinister&#63 A zany cast of characters&#44 including a love doll&#44 and a chain&#45smoking grandma with an oxygen tank&#44 lead Detective Lane on a thrilling romp through the streets of Calgary&#46

  • Queers Were Here

    Queers Were Here

    $19.95

    In the twenty-first century, Canada has a reputation for being one of the most gay friendly nations on earth, a pioneer in legalizing same-sex marriage and home to enormously popular Pride parades. Yet Canada was not always so hospitable to its gay and lesbian citizens. Homosexuality was only decriminalized in Canada in 1969 and remained socially stigmatized for many years.

    Queers Were Here will tell personal stories to illuminate the enormous social changes that have transformed sexuality in Canada. A celebration of queer identity, this book will look back in order to look forward. The book will appeal not only to GLBT audiences but also to anyone who wants to re-examine Canada?s history and culture with fresh eyes.

  • Quivering Land

    Quivering Land

    $19.95

    Roewan Crowe’s compelling and haunting literary debut, Quivering Land, is a rather queer Western, engaging with poetics and politics to reckon with the legacies of violence and colonization in the West.

    Written in a sparse style, this lonely, sometimes brutal book invites the reader on a powerful journey with Clem, Violet, and a dead girl in a red dress. Clem, a lone cowboy, caught in the inevitable violence of the Western, compulsively rides through ghost towns and Monument Valley. Violet is an artist who pulls dead bodies, guns, and memory into her studio, immersing herself in a creative process, seeking to understand the relationships among aggression, vulnerability and the imagination. Disrupting the story are the ghostly visitations of a dead child who travels the western landscape unsettling romanticized, filmic images of Monument Valley.

    Interspersed in the text are fragile, beautiful images painstakingly cut from paper, created by artist Paul Robles. This experimental long poem, a gritty feminist meditation on trauma, violence and the possibilities of art, is as powerful as a Smith and Wesson Schofield rifle.