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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 65–80 of 97 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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Stoop City
$22.95WINNER OF THE 2021 RELIT AWARD FOR SHORT FICTION
A sea witch, a bossy Virgin Mary, and a lesbian widow’s wife—in ghost form—walk into a short story collection …
Welcome to Stoop City, where your neighbours include a condo-destroying cat, a teen queen beset by Catholic guilt, and an emergency clinic staffed entirely by lovelorn skeptics. Couples counseling with Marzana, her girlfriend’s ghost, might not be enough to resolve past indiscretions; our heroine could need a death goddess ritual or two. Plus, Hoofy’s not sure if his missing scam-artist boyfriend was picked up by the cops, or by that pretty blonde, their last mark. When Jan takes a room at Plague House, her first year of university takes an unexpected turn—into anarcho-politics and direct action, gender studies and late-night shenanigans with Saffy, her captivating yet cagey housemate.
From the lovelorn Mary Louise, who struggles with butch bachelorhood, to rural teens finding—and found by—adult sexualities, to Grimm’s “The Golden Goose” rendered as a jazz dance spectacle, Kristyn Dunnion’s freewheeling collection fosters a radical revisioning of community. Dunnion goes wherever there’s a story to tell—and then, out of whispers and shouts, echoes and snippets, gritty realism and speculative fiction, illuminates the delicate strands that hold us all together.
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Storying Violence
$15.00In August of 2016, Cree youth Colten Boushie was shot dead by Saskatchewan farmer Gerald Stanley. Using colonial and socio-political narratives that underlie white rural settler life, the authors position the death of Boushie and trial of Stanley in relation to Indigenous histories and experiences in Saskatchewan. They point to the Stanley case as just one instance of Indigenous peoples? presence being seen as a threat to settler colonial security, then used to sanction the exclusion, violent treatment, and death of Indigenous peoples and communities.
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Tatouine
$23.95Tatouine
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That Light Feeling Under Your Feet
$19.95Finalist for The Fiddlehead Poetry Book Prize at the New Brunswick Book Awards!
Shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Poetry at the 2019 Alberta Book Publishing Awards!That Light Feeling Under Your Feet plunges headfirst into the surreal and slogging world of cruise ship workers. These masterfully crafted poems challenge perpetuating colonial and class relations, as well as the hedonistic lifestyle attributed to the employees of these floating resorts. Kayla Geitzler’s debut collection interprets isolation, alienation, racism and assimilation into the margins as inevitable consequences for the seafaring workforce of the most profitable sector of the tourism industry.
Exploring the liminal space between labour and leisure, the poems in That Light Feeling Under Your Feet are at once buoyant and weighty, with language that cuts like a keel through the sea.
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The Adventures of Sgoobidoo
$19.95Follow Sgoobidoo, famed canine detective, to the corner store, bingo hall and amusement park in a series of feeble intrigues with disappointing endings. Listen to the deafening silence of the broken television set as the wretched Sammy sits waiting for the professor, the prospector or his mother to call with a mission. Accompany the pitiful pooch and his humble human through a series of sad adventures in this collection of stories gathered in the familiar format of an Archie digest, interspersed with ketchup-flavoured games and advertisements.
In The Adventures of Sgoobidoo, Cathon pays homage once again to the B-series movies and detective novels that inspiredi The Pineapples of Wrath, her popular tiki murder mystery set in the Hawaiian quarter of Trois-Rivières, Quebec. -
The Blue Moth of Morning
$16.95In The Blue Moth of Morning, P. C. Vandall by turns acknowledges, embraces and subverts clichés of female relationships, emotions and bodies, exposing the inner tumult women often try to conceal under a thin veneer of aplomb.
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The Bones Are There
$18.00Zigzagging across the globe, Kate Sutherland’s fourth book is poetry by way of collage: pieced-together excerpts from travellers’ journals, ships’ logs, textbooks and manuals, individual testimony, even fairy and folk tales that tell stories of extinction—of various species, and of our own understanding of, and culpability within, its process. Across its three sections, Sutherland draws identifiable connections between various animal extinctions and human legacies of imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, and misogyny, charting the ways in which they juxtapose one another while impacting the natural order of things.
As much as it is a critique of humanity’s disastrous effects on this world, The Bones Are There is also a celebration of such incredible creatures, all sadly lost to us. It honours their memory by demanding accountability and encouraging resistance, so that we might stave off future irrevocable loss and preserve what wonders that remain.
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The Crooked Thing
$22.95The English poet, William Blake said, “joy and woe are woven fine.” So it is in The Crooked Thing. A collection of intense and emotional stories, there are traumas and betrayals, loves and losses, missed opportunities and discoveries, and above all, hope. In tales delicate and steely, a troubled young ferryman finds himself with an unexpected passenger, a songbird finds its voice, a mother learns to let go of her son and, after a chance encounter, an aging ballerina dances again. In her debut story collection, Mary MacDonald brings each narrator to face their own existence, taking the reader into darkness, passing through fear and resistance, to seek redemption and freedom. At their core these are love stories; they move us, disturb us, and upend our beliefs, to show us characters not all that different from ourselves.
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The Cyborg Anthology
$20.00Poems written by Cyborgs in the future – this collection melds sci-fi and poetry, human and machine.
The Cyborg Anthology takes place in a future where there was a thriving world of Robots and Cyborgs living peacefully beside Humans, but a disaster destroyed all Robot and most Cyborg life.
The book is organized like a typical anthology of literature, split into sections that include a biography of each poet and a sample of their poetry. It covers early Cyborg poetry, political, celebrity, and pop culture poets, and ends with the next generation of Cyborg poets.
The narrative takes place in the time after a cataclysmic event, and the collection wrestles with this loss. Through the lives of the poets, the book chronicles the history of personhood for technological beings, their struggle for liberation, and demonstrates different ways a person can be Cyborg. The poems and biographies together tell the story of a complex and enthralling world-to-come, exploring topics that are important in the future, and also urgent right now.
“With mordant wit and a playful satiric touch, these Cyborg poems showcase a dazzling range of poetic forms and ideas: imaginative and charmingly subversive. Move over Norton Anthology of Poetry, there’s a new force in town, and they are a delight.” –Renée Sarojini Saklikar, author of Listening to the Bees and Children of Air India
“The premise of this collection alone is fabulous. The poems are potent and powerful. With echoes of Le Guin, Brunner and Monáe, Lindsay B-e’s debut is layered and smart, provocative, and deeply satisfying. I was moved and fascinated. Speculative poetry at its best.” –Hiromi Goto, author of Chorus of Mushrooms and Darkest Light
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The Goliath Run
$28.95When a deranged loner kills twenty-six people in a Pennsylvania schoolyard, the country is stunned and devastated. Among those catatonic with grief is Jo Matheson, an organic farmer who has lost her goddaughter in the shooting.
Sam Jackson, an egotistical right-wing TV talking head, has sliding ratings and faces imminent cancellation. He arrives in Pennsylvania and during a rant, he blames the parents of the dead children. He intends the tirade to be his last salvo but, incredibly, his ratings climb, while Jo watches from her farmhouse in upstate New York, incensed.
Sam rides the wave, shouting that it’s time to take the country back from the left-wing weaklings who don’t have the courage to protect their children. When he is asked to run for Congress, he accepts and amplifies his message. Watching these developments in horror, Jo finally decides that there actually is something she can do.
She kidnaps Sam’s ten-year-old daughter.
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The Haweaters
$18.95The Haweaters brings to life the violent, real-life double-murder of Charles and William Bryan by two members of the Amer family on Manitoulin Island in 1877. A murder case well known in its day, it featured a wealthy landowner determined to destroy his impoverished neighbour. It’s a tale of treachery, gossip, drunkenness, arson and the merciless deaths of two not-so-innocent victims.
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The Only Card in a Deck of Knives
$18.00The Only Card in a Deck of Knives is a groundbreaking new collection in the area of sickness poetry. Within these poems, Lauren Turner aims to reclaim the “hysterical” label given to sick women throughout history. Rather than shying away from the emotional urgency and raw vulnerability surrounding a terminal diagnosis, Turner shines an interrogative light upon it. These fierce poems are written from the perspective of a twentysomething female speaker with a terminal disease, a speaker who is preoccupied with maintaining the illusion of health, but then refers to herself as “dying” in the next line. Fascinated and repelled by the societal impulse to gussy up diseases that take violent, and sometimes deadly, tolls upon women’s bodies, Turner uses these lyric poems to juxtapose the violence of a gendered illness with the violence encountered by women in society. The Only Card in a Deck of Knives unpacks society’s impulse to pull away from sick women and examines why we discredit their professed pain, symptoms and emotions.
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The Outer Wards
$17.95The Outer Wards, Sadiqa de Meijer’s new collection, explores questions of maternal love and duty–and the powerlessness that comes with the disruption of that role through illness. “I was awake. / The hour was wrong,” de Meijer writes, and her poems track, in visceral and tender detail, the distraction, exhaustion, exhilaration, and fear of child-rearing through crisis. For de Meijer, the experience was also a crisis of language, and the struggle to find new terms for her state. Addressed, in part, to a child she calls “my grievous spectacle, / my dearest unpossessable,” The Outer Wards is everywhere marked by a joy in words–their quick-fire turns, sumptuous sounds, and nursery-rhyme seductions.
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The Pine Islands
$22.95SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE 2019
AN INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER
“Readers who like quiet, meditative works will enjoy this strangely affecting buddy story.” —Publishers Weekly
“Rather than tying up the loose ends, she leaves them beautifully fluttering in the wind, and you do not feel lost in that experience. The writing is poetic and it’s worth savouring.” —Angela Caravan, Shrapnel
A bad dream leads to a strange poetic pilgrimage through Japan in this playful and profound Booker International-shortlisted novel.
Gilbert Silvester, eminent scholar of beard fashions in film, wakes up one day from a dream that his wife has cheated on him. Certain the dream is a message, and unable to even look at her, he flees – immediately, irrationally, inexplicably – for Japan. In Tokyo he discovers the travel writings of the great Japanese poet Basho. Keen to cure his malaise, he decides to find solace in nature the way Basho did. Suddenly, from Gilbert’s directionless crisis there emerges a purpose: a pilgrimage in the footsteps of the poet to see the moon rise over the pine islands of Matsushima. Although, of course, unlike the great poet, he will take a train. Along the way he falls into step with another pilgrim: Yosa, a young Japanese student clutching a copy of The Complete Manual of Suicide . Together, Gilbert and Yosa travel across Basho’s disappearing Japan, one in search of his perfect ending and the other a new beginning. Serene, playful, and profound, The Pine Islands is a story of the transformations we seek and the ones we find along the way.
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The Subtweet
$21.952021 Dublin Literary Award Finalist
2021 Lambda Literary Awards Finalist for Transgender Fiction
2020 Toronto Book Awards Finalist“The Subtweet is affecting, unnerving, empowering, and often truly LOL.” — Foreword Reviews, starred review
“A beautifully crafted novel about race, music, and social media.” — Booklist
Includes an exclusive free soundtrack
Celebrated multidisciplinary artist Vivek Shraya’s second novel is a no-holds-barred examination of the music industry, social media, and making art in the modern era, shining a light on the promise and peril of being seen.
Indie musician Neela Devaki has built a career writing the songs she wants to hear but nobody else is singing. When one of Neela’s songs is covered by internet artist RUK-MINI and becomes a viral sensation, the two musicians meet and a transformative friendship begins. But before long, the systemic pressures that pit women against one another begin to bear down on Neela and RUK-MINI, stirring up self-doubt and jealousy. With a single tweet, their friendship implodes, a career is destroyed, and the two women find themselves at the centre of an internet firestorm.