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Welcome to your next indie book
With winter looming and pandemic life in full swing, staying at home is the new national hobby.
Luckily, we have good books to keep us company. Canadian Independent literary presses publish books that reflect the richness and diversity of Canadian stories. Whether your taste is fiction, memoir, poetry, plays, or graphic novels, indie presses gift us with inventive, edgy, award-winning, homegrown books that inspire, awaken, challenge, and provoke.Books on All Lit Up belong to some of Canada’s best independent presses—all of which are small businesses. And now, more than ever, we want our purchases to support local companies, not internet giants. Scroll down to discover, buy, and collect their new releases.
All Books in this Collection
Showing 17–32 of 97 results
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Democratically Applied Machine
$18.95Robert Colman’s third book of poetry, Democratically Applied Machine, is a back-to-basics approach to creation. In poems that inhabit both industrial and domestic landscapes, Colman traces his inheritance to determine how his life echoes that of his forebears, even as the past blurs with the onset of his father’s Alzheimer’s dementia. These are poems with working parts; poems of lineage and legacy; poems that engage the mechanical world while retaining nature’s imprint. Democratically Applied Machine is a defining collection from one of Canada’s finest poets.
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Disabled Voices Anthology
$18.95Written and illustrated by the Disabled community about the Disabled community in North America, Disabled Voices is an international anthology collection of short stories (both fiction and non-fiction), personal essay, poetry, and artwork. Featuring both new as well as established authors, Disabled Voices is comprised of submissions written by Canadian, American, and UK authors.
A first of its kind, Disabled Voices captures life as a Disabled person: from the bad and ugly, to the good and victorious, and anything in between. Likewise, some pieces may not fit the mainstream idea of what the Disabled community is. This is a must have book for members of the Disabled community, but it is also very necessary to bring awareness and understanding to readers of all kinds. -
Dragonfly
$15.95In this original and poetic new work, Lara Rae tells the raw and heartfelt story of her half-century long (and counting) gender odyssey. Dragonfly presents us with two actors, one male, one female, who illuminate the inner life of a trans woman from her Scottish childhood in the 1960s to the present day. Matching our inside to our outside is always hard, but for trans people it’s often a matter of life and death. Stripping away the visual cues that both define and imprison transgender people, Dragonfly is a call to all of us to forge creativity from chaos. So often, it is the external changes in trans lives that the world is exposed to and confronts. Here as Lara says, is the “inside voice” of a trans child, ever present, ever demanding to be heard, ever rising upward, to growth, peace, security and love.
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Emanations
$18.00In Prathna Lor’s first full-length collection we are introduced to a unique voice in Canadian poetry. Moving fluidly between prose poems and more fractured, open verse, Lor meditates on voice, on disaster and on identity, pushing always against commodification, against a consumable narrative.
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Endlings
$18.00Endlings takes us across continents and through the long expanse of aeons to give voice to the dead. In poems that are lyrical, exact, and deeply melancholic, Joanna Lilley demands audience for the final moments of animal extinction. From the zebra-horse quagga and chiding dodo, to the giant woolly mammoth and delicate Xerces Blue Butterfly, the haunting, urgent words of these “endlings” cut to the bone to expose the brutality of Nature and the devastating repercussions of human ignorance and intent, while giving hope that our humanity will help save what remains.
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Eskimo Pie: A Poetics of Inuit Identity
$16.95Eskimo Pie: A Poetics of Inuit Identity examines Dunning’s lived history as an Inuk who was born, raised and continues to live south of sixty. Her writing takes into account the many assimilative practices that Inuit continue to face and the expectations of mainstream as to what an Inuk person can and should be. Her words examine what it is like to feel the constant rejection of her work from non-Inuit people and how we must all in some way find the spirit to carry through with what we hold to be true demonstrating the importance of standing tall and close to our words as Indigenous Canadians. We are the guardians of our work regardless of the cost to ourselves as artists and as Inuit people, we matter.
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Fake It So Real
$21.95Fake it so Real takes on the fallout from a punk-rock lifestyle—the future of “no future”—and its effect on the subsequent generations of one family. In June of 1983, Gwen, a gnarly Nancy Spungen look-alike, meets Damian, the enigmatic leader of a punk band. Seven years and two unplanned pregnancies later, Damian abandons Gwen, leaving her to raise their two daughters, Sara and Meg, on her own.The voices of Gwen, Sara and Meg weave a raw and honest tapestry of family life told from the underbelly, focused on the grey area between right and wrong, the idea that we are all equally culpable and justified in our actions, and the pain and ecstasy that accompany a life lived authentically.
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Falling for Myself
$20.00In this searing and seriously funny memoir, Dorothy Ellen Palmer falls down, a lot, and spends a lifetime learning to appreciate her disability. Born with two very different, very tiny feet, she was adopted as a toddler by an already wounded 1950s family. From childhood surgeries to decades as a feminist teacher, mom, improv coach and unionist, she tried to hide being different. But now, standing proud with her walker, she’s sharing her journey. Navigating abandonment, abuse and ableism, she finds her birth parents and a new chosen family in the disability community.
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Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars
$16.95At once a love letter and challenge to the traditional transgender memoir, Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars is a playful, surrealist dance through queer coming of age.
A haunted young girl (who happens to be a kung-fu expert and pathological liar) runsaway from an oppressive city, where the sky is always grey, in search of love and sisterhood–and finds herself in a magical place known only as the Street of Miracles.There, she is quickly adopted into a vigilante gang of glamorous warrior femmes called the Lipstick Lacerators, whose mission is to scour the Street of violent men and avenge murdered trans women everywhere. But when disaster strikes, can our intrepid heroine find the truth within herself in order to protect her new family and heal her broken heart?
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Fontainebleau
$20.00The city of Fontainebleau, situated on the banks of the Detroit River, is undergoing growing pains and strange things are happening. There’s something poisonous in the water, something menacing in the sky, and the soil, laced with an ancient curse, is yielding up unidentified bones along with corn. In this collection of linked stories (part surreal picaresque, part dark comedy, and part murder mystery) magic meets the mundane as misfits and miscreants struggle to free themselves from untenable situations. A girl with mermaid syndrome disappears into a field, a fugitive boy dreams of finding anonymity in Toronto while his abandoned pregnant girlfriend hallucinates his second coming, and a nostalgic chambermaid finds her memories vanish when she puts on a stranger’s wig. There’s a rash of killings in the city that attract a lovesick police officer. No one knows who’s responsible for the crimes, but the city has plenty of candidates, like the crazy son of a judge who murdered a man in Disney World and the grieving vandal who’s obsessed with the idea of cutting a woman in half. Then there are the abusive husbands, snuff film producers, inconspicuous con women, and pederasts who live secret double lives. Are the characters in this oddly probable world masters or victims of their own fate? How do their lives intersect? Is it likely that destruction will ultimately prevail over this desolate land, or will consciousness, like a flaming firebird, lead at least some of the city’s inhabitants to self-acceptance, redemption, or escape?
Praise:
“A darkly engrossing and artfully composed sequence of stories from a contemporary master of the form – Sonik’s fearsome prose shines sublime light on the plain-sight secrets of modern life.” -Lee Henderson, author of The Man Game and The Road Narrows as You Go
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Ghost Face
$19.95‘Greg is clearly a poet of great vision and clarity. His voice is extremely confident and strong, with each poem well-crafted and lean… If you enjoy the work of Sarah Howe or Ocean Vuong, I would recommend this book with no hesitation.’ Stuart Buck, author of Become Something Frail
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Glint of Light, The
$32.95“This naturalistic novel follows a Black environmental scientist [Mark Smith]. The story is shaped by several cataclysmic events, which suit the novel’s backdrop, in which the Presidency of Barack Obama corresponds with a rise in white nationalism, though climate crisis and racially charged incidents.” – The New Yorker
Mark Smith, is a sensitive thirty-seven-year-old environmental scientist of mixed race. He tries to come to terms with his mother’s painful death as he goes through the stages of grief. Mark is also reassessing his relationship with his gay twin sister, Maria, a lawyer. After several failed relationships with women in college, Mark, while at his mother’s funeral in Chicago, reconnects with his high school girlfriend, Christy, an artist who paints self-portraits. He now believes he has finally found true and lasting love, but the country’s civil unrest and political division plague the opportunity at a second chance. Major has devised a powerful novel about the cumulative unease and random violence that grip American life and ask what we should do about it.
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Goth Girls of Banff
$19.95Shortlisted for a 2021 ReLit Award in the short fiction category!
Finalist for Trade Fiction Book of the Year at the 2021 Alberta Book Publishing Awards!John O’Neill’s gothic short stories, set in the Canadian Rockies, are haunted by the violence inherent in nature and humans. The mountains are majestic and impassive. The characters are surprising, bent, but also empathetic. Their survival is tenuous. A two-sister team of goth tour guides offers guided excursions up switchback mountain trails; a paroled convict thumbs his way into the life of a family driving west; and an animal pathologist, while performing a necropsy on a grizzly bear, has an unusual encounter with both technology and humanity.
Goth Girls of Banff is a superb collection, sharply written, with plot turns as consequence-laden as those on an iced-over mountain road.
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Honorarium
$19.95In Honorarium, Nathaniel G. Moore compiles twenty years worth of reading other people?s books, while also faithfully attempting to convey a sense of what it?s like to work behind-the-scenes in CanLit. Always breaking from convention, Moore?s non-fiction is imbued a sense of urgency, passion and intimacy with the community of creators that surround him; creators that include Derek McCormack, Sheila Heti, Camilla Gibb, Jen Sookfong Lee, Catullus and Chuck Palahniuk. Add the author?s backstory of growing up anxious, escaping through literature and giving back to the community he sought out at the century?s onset, as well as previously unpublished pieces on book publicity and Amazon, and Honorarium is a both a time capsule and a survey course into the ever-changing, mysterious world of Canadian publishing.
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Horrible Dance
$21.95A brilliant poetic debut about gender-based violence that dismantles received definitions of both gender and violence, Horrible Dance is an accomplished addition to transfeminist thought and theory.
By turns darkly comic, emotionally connected, playful, incisive, lyrical and irreverent, Lake’s poems navigate a harrowing personal and political terrain with understated, expansive wisdom. Lake persistently returns us to the search for love that lies at the core of relational trauma, even as she shows us how catastrophically such a search can be derailed.
This is a rare text able to hold the full velocity of a survivor’s hurt and rage alongside a clear-eyed understanding of the extent and complexity of harm. In their honest accounting of a wide array of bad encounters, these poems point us, again, toward compassion, tenderness, and solidarity.
can you forgive mefor how you hurt me so bad –“On Shame”
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Hotline
$21.95A 2023 Canada Reads FinalistLonglisted for the 2022 Scotiabank Giller PrizeA vivid love letter to the 1980s and one woman’s struggle to overcome the challenges of immigration.It’s 1986, and Muna Heddad is in a bind. She and her son have moved to Montreal, leaving behind a civil war filled with bad memories in Lebanon. She had plans to find work as a French teacher, but no one in Quebec trusts her to teach the language. She needs to start making money, and fast. The only work Muna can find is at a weight-loss center as a hotline operator.All day, she takes calls from people responding to ads seen in magazines or on TV. On the phone, she’s Mona, and she’s quite good at listening. These strangers all have so much to say once someone shows interest in their lives–marriages gone bad, parents dying, isolation, personal inadequacies. Even as her daily life in Canada is filled with invisible barriers at every turn, at the office Muna is privy to her clients’ deepest secrets.Following international acclaim for Niko (2011) and The Bleeds (2018), Dimitri Nasrallah has written a vivid elegy to the 1980s, the years he first moved to Canada, bringing the era’s systemic challenges into the current moment through this deeply endearing portrait of struggle, perseverance, and bonding.