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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 113–128 of 175 results
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Run Riot
$18.00“This is a weird place to wake up / For someone who has woken up in some pretty strange places before.” Run Riot is a collection of ninety poems, one written each day during Ash Winters’ ninety day stay at a Vancouver rehab centre. A fiercely personal account of what it feels like to stop drinking after a decade of excess, Run Riot takes the reader through moments of determination, anger, hilarity, and heartbreak. Winter’s frank account of early sobriety offers companionship to those who know it well and insight for those that want to know it better. Weaving the past and the present together with ruthless vulnerability, Run Riot is a powerful portrait of one person’s struggle against addiction, laying bare an honest search to heal and better understand one’s self.
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She Is Sitting in the Night
$22.00A contemporary queer re-visioning of a beautiful feminist tarot deck from the 80s–documenting a conversation across generations and mediums–She Is Sitting in the Night emerges as both a tool for tarot reading and a celebration of queer and feminist cultural production, past and present.
By embracing an older deck and simultaneously developing current and re-visioned ways of interpreting its images and the cards’ meanings, She Is Sitting in the Night provides a much-needed informed, aesthetically strong, accessible queer tarot book for feminists, queers, and tarot readers new and old.
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She of the Mountains
$21.95A “Globe 100” Best Book of the Year (The Globe and Mail)
Lambda Literary Award finalist
In the beginning, there is no he. There is no she.
Two cells make up one cell. This is the mathematics behind creation. One plus one makes one. Life begets life. We are the period to a sentence, the effect to a cause, always belonging to someone. We are never our own.
This is why we are so lonely.
She of the Mountains is a beautifully rendered illustrated novel by Vivek Shraya, the author of the Lambda Literary Award finalist God Loves Hair. Shraya weaves a passionate, contemporary love story between a man and his body, with a re-imagining of Hindu mythology. Both narratives explore the complexities of embodiment and the damaging effects that policing gender and sexuality can have on the human heart.
The illustrations are by Raymond Biesinger, whose work has appeared in such publications as The New Yorker and the New York Times.
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Shut Up Slow Down Let Go Breathe
$16.95Half wisecracking tour guide and half flirtatious trick, the poems in Shut Up Slow Down Let Go Breathe examine how we respond to overwork and overstimulation. McCann’s third collection speaks to a world that is too busy and too anxious, delivering the material with zero reverence and with loads of self-deprecating, disarming, observational – and sometimes catty – humour. Inviting readers to be his “bandmates / on life’s slutty bus tour,” Shut Up Slow Down Let Go Breathe marks a fresh new direction in Marcus McCann’s poetics.
“McCann’s work is a must for any lover of poems.”—Northumberland Today
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Sideshow Concessions
$15.95Sideshow Concessions is the first book from queer performer and scholar Lucas Crawford. A collection populated by the circus-like bodies and experiences of a narrator navigating rural pasts and urban presents, Sideshow Concessions is the unofficial story of someone who is both a bearded lady and the fattest man in the world.
“Sideshow Confessions is an accessible glimpse at the absurd — a clever look at a trans narrative which explores its challenges without drowning in them… Crawford’s sense of humour is a breath of fresh air.”—Broken Pencil
“Sideshow Concessions is fresh, honest, heartbreaking, and funny, with turns of phrase equally intelligent and moving.”—Karen Solie
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Sister Seen, Sister Heard
$24.00Farah’s ready to move out of her parent’s house. It takes an hour to get to campus, and she has no freedom to be herself. Maiheen and Mostafa, first-generation Iranian immigrants in Toronto, find their younger daughter’s “Canadian” ways disappointing and embarrassing, and they wonder why Farah can’t be like her older sister Farzana — though Farah knows things about Farzana that her parents don’t. They begrudgingly agree to let Farah move, and she begins to explore her exciting new life as an independent university student. But when Farah gets assaulted on campus, everything changes. This beautiful coming-of-age story will be familiar to every immigrant in the diaspora who has struggled to find a way between cultures, every youth who has rebelled against their parents and every woman who has faced the world alone.
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small things
$20.00Small things is a book of mini-anti-essays, part of Sky Gilbert’s project to dismantle and challenge the rigid classifications of genre, thus challenging 21st century notions of truth. Inspired by Oscar Wilde, Foucault, and the post-structuralist project, the small writings in small things are story, essay, and memoir combined. They question the notion that an essay is necessarily fact, or fair opinion, or even informed opinion, while at the same time challenging the dictum that fiction might necessarily be free of didacticism, or at least, ideas.
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Somewhere Else: A Novel
$19.95After leaving the Russian homeland, Jess Klassen’s Mennonite forebearers carved out an existence in the Saskatchewan prairie, separate from wider society. Jess is sixteen and aware that, despite her father’s intellectual leanings, she is in an impossible position–being the homosexual daughter of the president of the Mennonite college. She hits the road in search of a language and the freedom to speak it. On the train to Winnipeg she is found by Freya, Icelandic princess of her dreams. Halfsteinn, reliable fisherman and expert in the fine art of handrolling cigarettes, enters Jess’ life, helping her escape emotional captivity. Jess runs further and faster, embracing pot-head, videogame-playing housemates in the world away from her Mennonite being. After visiting the bed of every available (or reasonably available) woman in her small university town, she meets Shea. Jess can barely utter the name–afraid of the word, the woman, the possibility, and her own past. Moving forward, Jess makes her move back.
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Sotto Voce
$20.00Poems that give full attention to a world in shambles, a world in which “mercy is failing.”
Maureen Hynes, in her fifth book of poetry, speaks tenderly yet vehemently about the threatened worlds that concern her. From Toronto, where she lives and walks the city’s afflicted watershed, she turns her attention to the near and far, shifting it from the First Nations’ stolen lands to Syria and the refugee crisis in the Mediterranean; from the deaths of family and friends to the newborns into whose care our endangered planet will pass; and from love’s transient regrets to the sustaining love two women share. Hynes’ is a gaze that grieves quietly, delights humbly, and, in the search for solace, never rests. Each poem in Sotto Voce is a recitative of healing. Hear the music in every word and, despite the damaged environments Hynes gives voice to, be restored.
This is a book that bears witness to the “dynamite stick of injustice,” one that balances fear and hope, misfortune and renewal, calamity and natural beauty. Sotto Voce carries the complexity and seriousness of its themes lightly–it’s important to know when to speak loudly, and when to whisper.
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Speed Dating for Sperm Donors
$17.95Can a lesbian couple find Mr. Right?
Helen and Paige really want a baby. Maybe even two. They’ve decided they want to use a sperm donor, but because of Paige’s own upbringing as an adopted child they want the donor to at least be known to the child. This challenge makes the normally anonymous favour even harder and more intimate than they expected. And then there are the options for donors. Through the fast-paced “dating” of several candidates, all of whom come with their own warning labels, Helen and Paige’s relationship is strained to a point where they must remember why they set out on this journey together in the first place.
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St. Francis of Millbrook
$16.95Being a teenager is hard, especially if you’re questioning your sexuality and growing up in rural Ontrio in the mid ’90s. Add to that a temperamental, homophobia father and a tenacious love for Madonna, and it’s almost unbearable. Despite it all, Luke loes working on the family farm, and at least he has the support of a group of local outsiders who invite him into their circle.
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Steel Animals
$22.95Hilarity and queer magic realism twist the throttle when Jackie, a loner with a secret bank-robbing persona, meets Vespa: sexy, sculpture-welding artist and collector of vintage motorbikes. Still planning elaborate revenge on a New York ex-lover, Jackie tests both her new relationship and the loyalties of her friends, a rag-tag gang of post-punk eccentrics, realizing how love changes hatred only after her scheme runs out of control. An innocent misstep and an encrypted mystery swings the romance into the dangerous orbit of a construction mogul intent on subverting corporate money at any cost.