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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 49–64 of 97 results
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Music at the Heart of Thinking
$24.95The music of thinking. The thinking of music. Music at the Heart of Thinking is a poetry that works through language as the true practice of thought and improvisation as the tool that listens to and notates thinking. From jazz, the unpredictable ad lib driving itself from itself. From a drunken Shaolin monk, the poem as imbalanced tai chi. From Keats’s negative capability, the half-closed eye, the estrangement of language. All intended to bump beyond the end of the word into focus. As a response to readings in contemporary texts, art, and ideas. Music at the Heart of Thinking relocates critical language and thinking to the poetic bavardage at the heart of such endeavours. The poetics that generates these texts arises out of a lifelong poem project that has its roots in the long poem genre of the ’80s and its interest in the resistance to closure and the containment of meaning characteristic of the lyric. This book continues the work of two previous out-of-print publications, Music at the Heart of Thinking (1987) and Alley, Alley Home Free (1990). The poems are generated as textual responses in the reading, looking, and listening of the poet’s attention to his cultural milieu. Thus the writing addresses contemporary texts and art over the past forty years. Within this poetry of estrangement lie possible coherences for some sense of writing as a notation for thinking as feeling. The difficulty of this writing is literal and intentional, wary of any attempt to make thinking simple, easy, or predictable.
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My Claustrophobic Happiness
$18.00Inspired by Athanasius’ The Temptations of St. Anthony in which the protagonist is repeatedly beset by desert demons, My Claustrophobic Happiness offers La Betty, a wealthy condo inhabitant whose cloistered consumer object worship provides her with fragile protection against supernatural visitations of representatives from a reality outside.
Psychoanalyst Jeanne Randolph approaches La Betty’s psyche with distinctively transcendental wit, unveiling an unstable and absurdly fragile existence of repetition in denial. Lush and playful descriptions of La Betty’s objects and her surreal psychological space enfold a series of complex conundrums around identity’s relationship to consumerism.
My Claustrophobic Happiness’ crafted vignettes present a satiric and prophetic depiction of the isolated mind and body that is hauntingly prescient.
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Never A Child
$14.95At its core, Never a Child is the culmination of a young woman’s experiences–both an open dialogue with, and a true reflection of, those individuals who have contributed to her understanding of her feminine identity. Through dealing with anxiety, reclaiming herself after trauma, and coming to terms with spirituality, the poet’s work matures with each page, allowing both the author and the reader to grow together. This outpouring of faith, self-acceptance and strength to overcome conflict never strays from the author’s own journey, yet never loses sight of the fact that her story is but one of many, each requiring its own calibration of vulnerability and strength.
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Nothing Without Us Too
$25.00Nothing 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.
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On Nostalgia
$19.95From Mad Men to MAGA: how nostalgia came to be and why we are so eager to indulge it.
From movies to politics, social media posts to the targeted ads between them, nostalgia is one of the most potent forces of our era. On Nostalgia is a panoramic cultural history of nostalgia, exploring how a force that started as a psychological diagnosis of soldiers fighting far from home has come become a quintessentially modern condition. Drawing on everything from the modern science of memory to the romantic ideals of advertising, and traversing cultural movements from futurism to fascism to Facebook, cultural critic David Berry examines how the relentless search for self and overwhelming presence of mass media stokes the fires of nostalgia, making it as inescapable as it is hard to pin down. Holding fast against the pull of the past while trying to understand what makes the fundamental impossibility of return so appealing, On Nostalgia explores what it means to remember, how the universal yearning is used by us and against us, and it considers a future where the past is more readily available and easier to lose track of than ever before.
“If nostalgia was a disease in the Good Old Days, then David Berry’s cogently argued, intelligent, and witty book should be prescribed reading for anyone wishing to understand what sometimes feels like a peculiarly virulent epidemic of our current times.” —Travis Elborough
“We’re so lucky to have a writer as thoughtful, funny, smart, and cutting as David Berry. Nostalgia dictates so much of our world, and there isn’t a better cataloger, critic, and guide through it than Berry.” —Scaachi Koul
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Perimeter’s Ridge
$21.95This collection of paintings and writings by Fred Spina is a much-awaited sequel to his Arctic Notes and Prairie Places published by Bayeux Arts.
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Pineapple Express
$18.00Pineapple Express is Evelyn Lau’s eighth collection of poetry. The collection is rooted in the mind and its disorders. Depression, anxiety, and obsessive thinking have been explored widely in fiction and non-fiction, much less so in poetry. “Pineapple Express” explores moods, medications and side effects, capturing the flatness of depression while making the language sing. It also explores the notion of mid-life, in all its manifestations: physical changes, psychological upheaval, the notion of becoming “invisible,” and mortality.
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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?
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Quick Bright Things
$17.95“Everyone hears voices. I’m treated like I’m broken for admitting it.”
Can a weekend trip to visit family ever be smooth?
Nick was hoping for a quick dinner at his brother Reid’s house when he stopped by with his seventeen-year-old adopted son, Gerome, on their way to meet Gerome’s birth mother. Gerome was recently diagnosed with schizophrenia, and he wants to know more about his family history. Though Reid and his family wreak havoc with their well-meaning but misguided ideas about Gerome’s diagnosis, they manage to convince Nick and his son to stay the night, even after they find Gerome on the roof ready to demonstrate backflips. The dinner pit stop becomes a tense weekend-long event full of claims and questions as the family attempts to “un-crazy” Gerome, leading them all to a dangerous breaking point.
With truth, humour, and pathos, Quick Bright Things explores a family’s struggle with understanding mental health, their ways of expressing love, and what it ultimately means to be “okay.”
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Rough
$19.95It is 2013 and Calgary’s Bow river is beginning to rise. Two homeless men stand by the bank and contemplate the death of another friend-an accident?
Taking cover downtown that night, Shermeto intervenes in the attack on a bar patron, and finds himself laid up in the hospital. Outside, as the city reels from an unthinkable disaster, Shermeto finds himself away from the swelling river and face-to-face with the a part of past he is trying to hide from: his daughter Kendra.
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Season of Fury and Wonder
$24.95Finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Award for Fiction
A much-praised collection of short stories about old women, from acclaimed writer Sharon Butala
Writing at the top of her game, Sharon Butala returns to the short story in this astounding new collection. In Butala’s world, the season of fury and wonder is the season of old age. The stories in this book are the stories of women who have had experiences; women who have seen much of life and have felt the joy of success and the sting of shortcomings; women who hold opinions and come to conclusions about the lives they’ve lived.
But Sharon Butala gives us more—not only is each story an observation on aging, each story in Season of Fury and Wonder pays tribute to a classic work of literature that has had an impact on Butala’s writing. Among these writers are Raymond Carver, Willa Cather, Flannery O’Connor, John Cheever, James Joyce, Shirley Jackson, Anton Chekhov, Alan Sillitoe, Ernest Hemingway and Edgar Allan Poe. The result of Butala’s effort is a series of deeply felt tributes to these writers, to the creativity and their power to inspire.
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Secrets in the Shadows
$14.95Secrets in the Shadows is the account of best friends Michael and Wolfie who are boys growing up in Nazi Germany. Both of them are delighted to join the Hitler Youth. But by the time the boys are twelve, a devastating event turns their world upside down. On a school trip to Berlin, the boys see a beautiful Jewish girl boarding the train with her mother. Shortly after, a horrified Michael witnesses their brutal murder – the result of ant-Semitism. As a result, Michael’s loyalty to Hitler begins to show cracks. In 1943 when Michael turns sixteen, his father orders him to volunteer with the 12th SS Hitler Youth Panzer unit. Wolfie joins as well. Boehm shows them on the grim battlefields fighting hand-to-hand in the villages and towns, sometimes against the Canadians. Seeing what is happening on the battlefield, they come to reject the Nazi regime and its propaganda. In the final showdown, Michael and Wolfie are ordered to travel to Berlin, and it is there they confront the secrets that lie in the shadows of the past.
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Sila
$17.95In Inuit mythology, “sila” means air, climate, or breath. Bilodeau’s play of the same name examines the competing interests shaping the future of the Canadian Arctic and local Inuit population. Equal parts Inuit myth and contemporary Arctic policy, the play Sila features puppetry, spoken word poetry, and three different languages (English, French, and Inuktitut).
There is more afoot in the Arctic than one might think. On Baffin Island in the territory of Nunavut, eight characters – including a climatologist, an Inuit activist and her son, and two polar bears – find their values challenged as they grapple with a rapidly changing environment and world. Sila captures the fragility of life and the interconnectedness of lives, both human and animal, and reveals in gleaming tones that telling the stories of everyday challenges – especially raising children and maintaining family ties – is always more powerful than reciting facts
and figures.Our changing climate will have a significant impact on how we organize ourselves. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Arctic, where warming temperatures are displacing entire ecosystems. The Arctic Cycle – eight plays that examine the impact of climate change on the eight countries of the Arctic – poignantly addresses this issue. Sila is the first play of The Arctic Cycle. With its large-as-life polar bear puppets, the play is evocative and mesmerizing, beautifully blurring the boundaries between folklore and science.
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Somewhere
$25.00An inspiring and timely collection of stories about migration, written from twenty women’s perspectives.
Somewhere is an inspiring collection of stories about migration. Written from twenty women’s perspectives, it brings a refreshing and uniting voice to this compelling and trending topic. More people are likely to be migrating now than at any other time in history, and this is set to increase as climate change and political unrest pushes even more people to relocate. The implications of migration, especially for women, are often unknown, unheard, unspoken. From the fleeing refugee to the political and economic migrant, a broad range of migration by people of many cultures, ethnicities, and beliefs is shared in this book. Identity, belonging, assimilation and alienation are some of the key topics in this sometimes sad but also joyful book. Treasures of wisdom and heartfelt honesty are found in the stories. The book will give the reader hope, encouragement, or insight into a globally relevant subject on a personal level rather than through distant, abstract news stories. Somewhere encourages open-mindedness and is filled with stories that will likely have a strong impact on the reader.
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Sound of the Beast
$17.95“Compassion is good, but it’s just motivation. Cars need engines. Movements need mobilization.”
Through spoken word, storytelling and hip hop, acclaimed wordsmith Donna-Michelle St. Bernard illuminates racial discrimination, the suppression of expression and the trials of activism. Her experience as a Canadian emcee is woven through with allusion to Tunisian emcee Weld El 15’s unjust imprisonment for rhymes against a regime. This story creates a space to reflect on how we are connected to the systems that oppress us, and how we can empower each other to rise up.
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Stella Atlantis
$22.00With the dead you can go anywhere.
When novelist Johnny Coma’s daughter comes back from the dead as a talking octopus, will he be finally be able to write her story? Will his estranged wife, renowned war photographer Vivienne Pink, even believe him? In Stella Atlantis, the stunning follow-up to her visionary desert novel Death Valley, Susan Perly returns to the lives of these troubled artists, haunted by the death of their young daughter, Stella, killed on the sidewalk outside their home, as they search for healing in separate cities and with new lovers.
Moving in and out of Toronto, Amsterdam and Barcelona, across the Mediterranean to Ibiza and out to the Canary Islands in the Atlantic Ocean, Perly’s prose enacts grieving itself in the twinned stories of Johnny and Vivienne. Playfully dark and filled with beautiful flights of imagery, this is a story of fathers and daughters, of love lost and love reborn, of the redemptive power of art, the transformative power of the sea and how we can dare to reach for radiance and redemption.