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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 129–144 of 175 results
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Still Living the Edges: A Disabled Women’s Reader
$39.95<More than a decade after the publication of Living the Edges: A Disabled Woman’s Reader, the lives of women with disabilities have not changed much. Still Living the Edges provides a timely follow-up that traces the ways disabled women are still on the edges, whether that be on the cutting edge, being pushed to the edges of society, or challenging the edges?the barriers in their way. This collection brings together the diverse voices of women with various disabilities, both physical and mental, from nations such as Canada, the United States, Australia, Russia, the United Kingdom, and Zimbabwe. Through articles, poetry, essays, and visual art, disabled women share their experiences with employment, relationships, body image, sexuality and family life, society’s attitudes, and physical, sexual, and emotional abuse. In their own voices, they explore their identity as women with disabilities, showcasing how they continue to challenge the physical and attitudinal barriers that force them to the edges of society and instead place themselves at the centre of new and emerging narratives about disability.
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Still No Word
$16.95EGALE Canada Human Rights Trust OUT IN PRINT Literary Award Winner! Shannon Webb-Campbell’s Still No Word seeks the appearance of the self in others and the recognition of others within the self. Patient, searching, questioning, and at times heartbreaking—these poems reveal the deep past within the present tense and the interrelations that make our lives somehow both whole and unfinished. And though Webb-Campbell is political at times, this is not politics for the sake of politics: here, it’s a matter of the human heart. Ranging from reflective to angry, from sensual to humourous, her poetry inhabits that mercurial space between the public and the private, making Still No Word a remarkably accomplished debut collection.
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Such a Lonely, Lovely Road
$22.95Winner of the Pius Adesanmi Memorial Award for Excellence in African Writing, 2019
Coming out in South Africa … At what cost?
All his life Kabelo Mosala has been the perfect child to his doting absent parents, who show him off every chance they get. Both his parents and his small community look forward to him coming back after medical school and joining his father’s practice. They also plan to give him the perfect township wedding. But Kabelo’s one wish has always been to get as far away from the township as he possibly can and never come back. A few weeks before he leaves for university, however, he forms a close bond with Sediba, one of his childhood friends, confirming his long-held suspicion that he is gay. Their relationship is thrown into turmoil by social pressures and conflicting desires, and it starts to look as if they can’t be together. But against all odds the two young men make their way back to each other, risking scorn from the community that raised them.
In her characteristic, beautifully modulated voice, with razor-sharp clarity, Kagiso Lesego Molope tackles an urgent issue in her country of birth.
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Swelling With Pride
$24.95There’s no straightforward path to LGBTQ2 parenthood and just as every queer person has their own coming out story, every LGBTQ2 family has a unique conception or adoption story.
In Swelling With Pride: Queer Conception and Adoption Stories, creative non-fiction writers celebrate LGBTQ2 families and the myriad of ways we embark upon our parenting journeys. These honest, heartfelt, unabashedly queer stories cover a gamut of issues and experiences, including the varied paths to queer conception–from DIY methods at home with the so-called “turkey baster” to pricey medical interventions at the fertility clinic–and the daunting task of choosing a sperm donor. This groundbreaking anthology portrays the journeys to LGBTQ2 parenthood that start or end with adoption and the countless hurdles that go along with it: from surviving the home study process and dealing with systemic homophobia to transitioning an adopted child into a new home. There are tales of shared nursing, blended families, communal parenting and non-binary pregnancy. There are also stories of grief, all too often suffered in silence, such as coping with infertility, pregnancy loss, stillbirth and adoption breakdown. These are the journeys of the early mavericks that formed families under the radar when fertility clinics were not open to singles and lesbians, as well as the Gen X and Millennial queers who’ve become parents during the current “gayby” boom.
Editor and proud queer mom Sara Graefe has assembled more than twenty-five creative non-fiction LGBTQ2 authors from across North America, both well-known and up-and-coming, including Andrea Bennett, Marusya Bociurkiw, Jane Byers, Susan G. Cole, Caitlin Crawshaw, Rachel Epstein, Terrie Hamazaki, Nicola Harwood, Natalie Meisner and many more. Together, their candid, moving, thought-provoking stories celebrate what it is to be queer and give voice to both the challenges and joys of building a LGBTQ2 family in a predominantly straight, cis-gendered world.
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Swimmers in Winter
$19.95Shortlisted for the 2021 Toronto Book Award
Shortlisted for the 2021 ReLit AwardCertain Women meets The Mars Room in this debut collection featuring three pairs of stories.
Sharp and stylistic, the trifecta of diptychs that is Swimmers in Winter swirls between real and imagined pasts and futures to delve into our present cultural moment: conflicts between queer people and the police; the impact of homophobia, bullying, and PTSD; the dynamics of women’s friendships; life for queer women in Toronto during WWII and after; the intersections between class identities and queer identities; experiences of economic precarity and precarious living conditions; the work of being an artist; dystopian worlds; and the impact of gentrification on public space. These are soul-searching, plot-driven character studies equally influenced by James Baldwin, Christopher Isherwood, and Elena Ferrante.
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Swollening
$18.95A tender debut poetry collection that examines the queer, sick body as a reaction to an ill world and asks it how to move on toward hope.
Jason Purcell’s debut collection of poems rests at the intersection of queerness and illness, staking a place for the queer body that has been made sick through living in this world. Part poetic experiment and part memoir, Swollening attempts to diagnose what has been undiagnosable, tracing an uneven path from a lifetime of swallowing bad feelings – homophobia in its external and internalized manifestations, heteronormativity, anxiety surrounding desire, aversion to sex – to a body in revolt.
In poems that speak using the grammar and logics of sickness, Purcell offers a dizzying collision of word and image that is the language of pain alongside the banality of living on. Beginning by reading their own life and body closely and slowly zooming out to read illness in the world, Purcell comes to ask: how might a sick, queer body forgive itself for a natural reaction to living in a sick world and go on toward hope? In Swollening, Purcell coughs up their own poetics of illness, their own aesthetics of pain, to form a tender collection that lands straight in the gut.
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Tacones
$16.00Winner, 3-Day Novel Contest
Tacones is a hangout for a subculture of outlaws and rejects – crackhead murderers, transvestite prostitutes, biastogerontophiles, hustler boys, and addicts – all painfully beyond denial, searching for connection, solace, humour, thrills, sex, and the perfect high. A rollicking and caustic romp through the violent and ambivalent world of the Toronto after-hours scene. Descend, if you dare…
Tacones was first published in 1997 after winning the 19th annual 3-Day Novel Contest. It was immediately praised for its raw, unflinching portrait of an underclass and was compared to John Rechy’s City of Night.
Tacones feels as disturbingly fresh as it did ten years ago and it seemed a fitting time to reissue this scurrilous little novel, warts and all.
Praise for Tacones:
“Compulsively readable” (Evelyn Lau)
“Very short, very cheap, and . . . very, very sexy.” (Toronto Star)
“Refreshingly spare and unadorned . . . Tacones comes on like a mild heart attack.” (Bruce LaBruce)
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Tangles
$23.95What do you do when your outspoken, passionate, and quick-witted mother starts fading into a forgetful, fearful woman? In this powerful graphic memoir, Sarah Leavitt reveals how Alzheimer’s disease transformed her mother Midge—and her family—forever.
In spare black and white drawings and clear, candid prose, Sarah shares her family’s journey through a harrowing range of emotions—shock, denial, hope, anger, frustration—all the while learning to cope, and managing to find moments of happiness. Midge, a Harvard-educated intellectual, struggles to comprehend the simplest words; Sarah’s father Rob slowly adapts to his new role as full-time caretaker, but still finds time for word-play and poetry with his wife; Sarah and her sister Hannah argue, laugh, and grieve together as they join forces to help Midge get to sleep, rage about family friends who have disappeared, or collapse in tears at the end of a heartbreaking day.
Tangles provides a window on the complexity of Alzheimer’s disease, and ultimately opens a knot of moments, memories, and dreams to reveal a bond between a mother and a daughter that will never come apart.
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Tell It Slant
$17.95Tell It Slant is a bold, luscious first novel by Beth Follett, publisher of one of Canada’s most exciting and respected small presses, Pedlar Press.
Out of the pages of Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood and into a blustery Montreal weekend steps a modern-day Nora Flood, plundering vivid memories across three Canadian cities – Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal – to uncover the roots of a sexual obsession that has her trapped in its sterile heart.
But through the magical interventions of her literary creator, Djuna Barnes, this Nora begins to undress her romantic illusions, so that her obsession begins to expand, deepen and open out, pointing to a life she might claim as her own.
With language that is lush and startling and a shape that is disjointed and elliptical, Tell It Slant is a brave and beautiful book.
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The Bridge: Writing Across the Binary
$22.95One writer’s deeply compelling story of growing up nonbinary in the 1940s and ’50s.
“Most people know their gender identity by the time they are two or three. My memories don’t go back quite that far, but as far back as I do remember, I was never certain. I asked my mother and grandmother over and over again, ‘Am I a boy, or am I a girl?’—asked so many times they got sick of answering and started getting mad at me, and then I would hear, ‘I told you!’ They always told me that I was a boy, but I was never convinced. It would take me over sixty years to arrive at a clear understanding of my problem—I was trapped inside what we now would call ‘the gender binary,’ the notion that there are only two choices.”
So begins The Bridge, Keith Maillard’s fascinating memoir of growing up in West Virginia in the 1940s and ’50s: a time and place where the word “nonbinary” didn’t exist. This memoir from one of Canada’s most celebrated writers is an instant classic—timely, accessible, and wonderfully evocative. Maillard is a natural, gifted storyteller.
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The Clothesline Swing
$21.95The Clothesline Swing is a journey through the troublesome aftermath of the Arab Spring. A former Syrian refugee himself, Ramadan unveils an enthralling tale of courage that weaves through the mountains of Syria, the valleys of Lebanon, the encircling seas of Turkey, the heat of Egypt and finally, the hope of a new home in Canada.
Inspired by One Thousand and One Nights, The Clothesline Swing tells the epic story of two lovers anchored to the memory of a dying Syria. One is a Hakawati, a storyteller, keeping life in forward motion by relaying remembered fables to his dying partner. Each night he weaves stories of his childhood in Damascus, of the cruelty he has endured for his sexuality, of leaving home, of war, of his fated meeting with his lover. Meanwhile Death himself, in his dark cloak, shares the house with the two men, eavesdropping on their secrets as he awaits their final undoing.
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The Death Scene Artist
$20.00M_____ is dying of cancer. Only thirty-two, an extra with a meagre list of credits to their name and afraid of being forgotten, M_____ starts recounting the strange, fantastic and ultimately tragic path of their love affair with the world’s greatest living “redshirt” – a man who has died or appeared dead in nearly eight hundred film and television roles.
In a compelling narrative of blog entries interspersed with film script excerpts, The Death Scene Artist immerses readers in a three-act surrealist exploration of the obsessive fault-finding of body dysmorphia and the dangerous desires of a man who has lived several hundred half-minute lives without having ever experienced his own.
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The Drifts
$19.95Night is falling, and so is the snow. As the blizzard buries the ground, it uncovers the resentments, hopes, and aches of a small town in northeastern Arkansas, where, like in any Southern small town, there are unwanted pregnancies to agonize over, surgeries to be paid for and love to be made. Julie’s two daughters have just run off to Hollywood to be famous when she suddenly finds herself, at forty-six, unexpectedly expectant. She’s not sure she can bear to be a mother again. And her husband, Charlie, won’t come home to talk it over with her. Charlie wants another child more than anything, but he doesn’t know how to deal with Julie. His affair with Wilson, his best friend, is over, but he’s found a different and unusual kind of intimacy. Wilson works in the Singer factory that keeps the town alive. She wants more than anything to be loved, but she knows that Charlie wasn’t the way to get there. She’s in love with Dol. Dol is a transsexual, a divorced father of two children, who can’t afford the transition that would make his body make sense – although the doctors visiting from Atlanta might change that. Their very different voices converge as the blizzard gathers force, their stories violently mapping in the snow the ways that memory, gender, and history carve themselves upon our bodies. The Drifts is dexterously told, a cacophony of four affecting voices melding into one exquisite chord.
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The Gay Heritage Project
$22.95This isn’t your ordinary history project. In what has become an important piece of contemporary queer theatre, three of Canada’s most gifted performers—Damien Atkins, Paul Dunn, and Andrew Kushnir—go on a search way past Google in order to find the history of gay people.
The trio start their quest by looking back at their own lineages and move along to the library, the Yellow Brick Road, Ukraine, a game show, and a court. They discover handfuls of forgotten heroes and stories, but also visit some well-known names, compiling everything into one extraordinary history lesson that shines new light on contemporary gay culture.
Equal parts personal curiosity, answers to the past, and information for the future, The Gay Heritage Project is a hilarious, thought-provoking meta tale that inspires, comforts, challenges, and empowers.
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The Girls with Stone Faces
$20.00A long poem memorializing the art and lives of sculptors Frances Loring and Florence Wyle.
Arleen Paré, in her first book-length poem after her Governor General Literary Award-winning Lake of Two Mountains, turns her cool, benevolent eye to the shared lives of Florence Wyle and Frances Loring, two of Canada’s greatest artists, whose sculptures she comes face to face with at the National Gallery of Canada. In the guise of a curator, Paré takes us on a moving, carefully structured tour through the rooms where their work is displayed, the Gallery’s walls falling away to travel in time to Chicago (where they met at art school and fell in love in the 1910s), New York, and Toronto (where they lived and worked for the next six decades). Along the way, Paré looks at fashions in art, the politics of gender, and the love that longtime proximity calls forth in us. The Girls with Stone Faces is one of the finest collections of poetry about the lives of artists–and most importantly their work–to appear in Canada in many years.
Although Wyle and Loring were well known during their lifetimes, they have dropped out of common memory. Paré’s collection is art loving art, women loving women, words loving shape, poetry loving stone, the curve of jaw, the trajectory of days.
“… Like the sculpted female figures she describes as ‘tacking their bodies against the history of storm,’ Paré has positioned her own graceful, finely chiselled lines to recast the history of women in art, in society, in love.” –Anita Lahey
“… A distinctive and memorable book, sympathetic and gloriously questioning.” –Stephanie Bolster
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The Heart Begins Here
$22.95Finalist for the 2019 Golden Crown Literary Society Awards for General Fiction
The Heart Begins Here is the story of the ever-optimistic, earnest Sara Requier and her disintegrating seven-year relationship with the cynical Wanda Wysoka. Along with her relationship struggles, Sara must contend with the drastic changes in the book industry that threaten her feminist bookstore, as well as a mother who refuses to accept her daughter’s lesbianism. Then, just as Wanda decides to leave Sara, Wanda’s new young lover, Cindy, is murdered. The story takes place in a western Canadian city in 2001 — much of it in Sara’s bookstore, Common Reader Books — in the shadow of the disturbing political climate that followed the 9/11 attacks in the U.S. This is a transitional point in the Canadian book industry: the proliferation of big box stores, the expansion of the Internet — and Sara is caught up in the concomitant changes in her community. The book explores themes of love and loss, of the lingering effects of a dysfunctional childhood, of misogyny, of personal and societal homophobia, and especially the challenge of integrating the personal with the political.