Your cart is currently empty!
Important Shipping Notice: Due to the ongoing Canada Post strike, delivery times may be longer than usual. Where possible, we’ll use alternative shipping methods to help get your order to you sooner. We appreciate your patience and understanding as your order makes its way to you.
A note to US-based customers: All Lit Up is pausing print orders to the USA until further notice. Read more
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 167 results
-
Our Work Is Everywhere
$23.95A 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
$19.95Produced 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
$21.95An 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
$20.95A 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
$19.95Nadia 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
$20.00A 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
$19.95Poetry 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
$23.00Finalist 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
$13.95Poor Super Man is "one of the top ten plays of the year," according to Time magazine. "An unflaggingly witty and often moving slice of life . . . Poor Super Man explodes on to the stage like a bold comic strip, complete with snappy captions and hard, bright, witty dialogue," writes the Edmonton Journal.
-
Queen’s Park
$10.95Detective Lane has a knack for discovering the whereabouts of missing persons. But the city’s latest case has disappeared without a trace. After a brutal attack on his young nephew, ex-mayor Bob Swatsky has gone missing with 13 million dollars of tax-payers’ money. Is he on the run with the cash, or is it something more sinister? A zany cast of characters, including a love doll, and a chain-smoking grandma with an oxygen tank, lead Detective Lane on a thrilling romp through the streets of Calgary.
-
Queers Were Here
$19.95In 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
$19.95Roewan 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.
-
Rebent Sinner
$19.95Governor General’s Literary Award finalist; BC Book Prize winner (Jim Deva Prize for Writing that Provokes); Forest of Reading Evergreen Award finalist
Ivan Coyote is one of North America’s preeminent storytellers and performers, and the author, co-author, or co-editor of eleven previous books, all but one of which have been published by Arsenal Pulp Press. Their most recent book, Tomboy Survival Guide, was shortlisted for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, named an American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book, and longlisted for Canada Reads.
In their latest, Ivan takes on the patriarchy and the political, as well as the intimate and the personal in these beguiling and revealing stories of what it means to be trans and non-binary today, at a time in their life when they must carry the burden of heartbreaking history with them, while combatting those who would misgender them or deny their very existence. These stories span thirty years of tackling TERFs, legislators, and bathroom police, sure, but there is joy and pleasure and triumph to be found here too, as Ivan pays homage to personal heroes like the late Leslie Feinberg while gently guiding younger trans folk to prove to themselves that there is a way out of the darkness.
Rebent Sinner is the work of an accomplished artist whose plain truths about their experience will astound readers with their utter, breathtaking humanity.
-
Renaissance Normcore
$18.95Renaissance Normcore belts like a classically trained riot grrrl, composing catchy tunes in the key of fear and desire. Building on the dreamy emotional landscapes she plumbed in If I Were in a Cage I’d Reach Out for You, Barclay navigates even sharper peaks and valleys in her second collection to examine the links between intimacy and power. Tracking the paradoxical impulses of anguish and joy that underpin daily life in our hostile neoliberal climate, these poems are both abject and sweet as they repurpose loss into life and test the bounds of how much a poem can hold.
-
Return to Arcadia
$22.95When at age 51, Joshua Éclair–victim of a pygmalianism gone awry–emerges from amnesia in a hospital in Montreal, he must explore what makes him want to erase his identity, and must undertake the process of exorcising what has brought him to this pass. This is the gripping story of a man’s search for sanity set in the fictional Caribbean Isabella Island and the various places Joshua has fled to: Montreal, New York, Tallahassee, London, Paris and Madrid.
This is a finely accomplished novel about a very modern predicament: the malformed dysfunctional identity in the global village.
-
Reverend Jonah
$14.95To a conservative church in a south-western Ontario town comes Jonah Ariasa troubled, left-leaning, pill-popping United Church minister. Reverend Jonah is young and idealistic, with courage enough to challenge the power-brokers in his small community. When he starts an inappropriate relationship with a young woman in the congregation, and then decides to repatriate a former member of the church expelled for being in a lesbian relationship, the ensuing battle threatens to derail Jonah’s career and fracture the church. The play, like Reverend Jonah himself, is unafraid to ask the tough questions: Do we have the right to judge one another? What constitutes integrity? What is courage? Are we prepared to embrace rather than censure our fellow human beings? Thoughtful and powerful, Reverend Jonah challenges us to explore the meanings of community in the very broadest sense.