Arsenal Pulp Press

A Queer Film Classic on the 1992 feature documentary on lesbian experience from the 1940s to the 1960s as seen through the lens of lesbian pulp fiction. This award-winning movie became the most popular ever produced by the National Film Board of Canada, and became emblematic of the bold new queer cinema of the early 1990s. In 2014, the NFB re-released the film in a digitally remastered version.

Jean Bruce and Gerda Cammaer are both associate professors in the School of Image Arts at Ryerson University in Toronto.

With an eye for style and appreciation for seasonal ingredients, the proprietors of Chowgirls Killer Catering, one of the Midwest's leading catering companies, share their inspired ideas for delicious appetizers, small plates, and cocktails that are perfect for home entertaining. Amy Lynn Brown and Heidi Andermack were early adopters of the local, organic, sustainable, and seasonal approach to cooking; their ethos is clearly reflected in this cookbook, which offers fun, elegant, and yet easy-to-prepare recipes arranged by season that will be the hit of your next social gathering.

For your party to welcome spring, impress your guests with Spring Pea Toasts with Gouda, Mint-Crusted Lamb Chops, and Wasabi Crab Cakes. For that backyard summer fest, try Flank Steak Skewers with Chimichurri, Sweet Corn Risotto with Grilled Shrimp, and Gazpacho Jars. On that chilly fall gathering, offer the Grilled Sirloin with Farro Tomato Salad, Bacon-Pecan Tartlets, and Roasted Fall Vegetables with Saffron Aioli. And for that festive winter blow-out, make the Italian Beef Sliders, Crab & Green Chile Gratin, and Artichoke Tapenade. Then to wash it all down, make sure there's plenty of Mint Julep Sweet Tea, White Sangria, and Strawberry Basil Daiquiris!

Andermack and Brown's shared passion for cooking and entertaining shines throughout this beautiful and inspiring cookbook. Their "righteous bites" will impress your guests with dazzling, organic, locally sourced recipes that show you care. Party on!

Michigan-born Heidi Andermack and Kentucky-born Amy Lynn Brown co-founded Chowgirls Killer Catering in 2004. They both live in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with their respective families.

Veganism—the animal-free diet—is here to stay. And Dreena Burton, author of the bestselling The Everyday Vegan, is here to tell you how the decision to “go green” doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice nutrition or flavor, and in fact will make you and your family feel healthier and more alive.

Dreena and her husband became parents three years ago, and their decision to raise their daughter as a vegan from birth has made the need for an animal-free diet that is fully nutritional all the more crucial. But as Dreena demonstrates in Vive le Vegan!, there’s no need to panic: there are simple methods and delectable ingredients you can use that will allow you—whether you’re single or have a family—to become vegan without having to be a rocket scientist. And who said that vegan meals lack pizzazz? Not when you can make:

Berry Hemp Smoothies
Fresh Jicama and Cucumber Slaw
Hearty Roasted Tomato Stew
Carrot-Shitake Spring Rolls
Chipotle Veggie Bean Burritos
Morrocan Chickpea Patties
Apple Cardomom Cake with Creamy Lemon Maple Frosting

The recipes in Vive le Vegan! also don’t over-rely on the use of soy, given recent concerns about over--consumption, and many feature whole grains and hemp. They’re also disarmingly easy to prepare. So it’s time to give up your qualms about the vegan lifestyle and celebrate its vivid possibilities. Vive le vegan!

Over the last one hundred years, the image of the muscular man has known no boundaries; it has been the object of envy and desire, and used to convey optimal health and fitness, product appeal, political power, and military might. Universal Hunks, David L. Chapman's follow-up to American Hunks, is a captivating collection of historical images of muscular men from around the world, beginning in the nineteenth century and continuing up until the 1970s, including photographs, posters, advertisements, magazine and comic book covers, and product packaging. The book considers the eroticized, politicized, and commercialized male image through history, and evaluates its fascinating cultural context by country and continent; culled from the author's personal collections, it includes materials never published before, including images of Asian bodybuilders, European comic-book superheroes, and muscleman posters from the Soviet Union. The book also includes a foreword by cultural and sports historian Douglas Brown.

Full-color throughout, Universal Hunks is a thought-provoking and sexy visual tour of musclemen from all parts of the globe.

David L. Chapman is the author of twelve books on male photography and bodybuilding, including American Hunks, Comin' at Ya!: The Homoerotic 3D Photographs of Denny Denfield, and Adonis: The Male Physique Pin-up, as well as the book Venus with Biceps: A Pictorial History of Muscular Women.

Once the lonely, unattractive kin of sexier, more popular produce, root vegetables (along with tubers and rhizomes) finally get the love and attention they deserve in this inventive and far-reaching vegan cookbook. Instead of heavy stews and soups—the most common uses for root vegetables, in which they play mild-mannered backup to meat-centric ingredients—author Carla Kelly lets roots, tubers, and rhizomes shine on their own in recipes that include lighter versions of those traditional stews and soups as well as juices, salads, desserts, and ethnically inspired entrees such as potato, sauerkraut, and dill pierogies and sweet potato and pinto bean enchiladas.

The book includes a great collection of raw bites and sides, as well as information on the wide variety of root vegetables available, including what to do with those mysterious specimens in the market such as kohlrabi, cassava, celeriac, and Jerusalem artichokes. There's also imaginative recipes that find new ways to use the more familiar parsnips, turnips, beets, and potatoes.

Be the cool cook on the block and jump on the root vegetable bandwagon before the rest of the neighborhood does with help from Carla's amazing cookbook. Full-color throughout.

Carla Kelly is a vegan blogger (Year of the Vegan) and home cook. She is the author of three previous books, the most recent of which was Vegan al Fresco.

On the heels of his bestselling and award-winning book Out/Lines: Underground Gay Graphics From Before Stonewall, Thomas Waugh offers more historic and erotically charged drawings, depicting aspects of gay male sexuality that were once hidden from public view.

The more than 200, never-before-published images in Lust Unearthed are from the private collection of Ambrose DuBek, a Hollywood costume and set designer (his work included George Cukor’s 1939 film The Women) who died in 2002 at the age of 87, and whose estate included a wealth of erotic materials, including books, periodicals, prints, and films. DuBek was a passionate advocate and patron of the arts who felt that life and the body were to be celebrated; he had no patience for other people’s attempts to make him feel guilty for his attractions and desires, nor any qualms about the different worlds in which he operated. The images from DuBek’s collection published here are remarkably frank and explicit depictions of gay men “in action” created by numerous artists both famous and unknown, and produced during a time when even nude images of men were illegal, and thus rare. Lust Unearthed brings these images out of the boxes in which they were carefully kept and into the light of present-day, where expressions of gay male sexuality can be validated and indeed, celebrated.

Waugh’s text is a remarkable history lesson that illuminates a once-furtive underground culture. Gay porn for the thinking man, Lust Unearthed will beguile and arouse.

Features an introduction by Willie Walker, the founding archivist at the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender History Society in San Francisco, where DuBek’s erotic materials were donated.

Thomas Waugh is the author of the Lambda Literary Award shortlisted Out/Lines and Hard to Imagine: Gay Male Eroticism in Photography and Film from their Beginnings to Stonewall. He is a professor of film studies and director of the Programme in Interdisciplinary Studies in Sexuality at Concordia University in Montreal.

This earnest, violent, yet utterly transfixing gay love story is set in the nineteenth-century American Midwest. Douglas Fortescue is a successful poet who flees England for America following a scandal; Joshua Jenkins is a feral young outlaw who was taught how to shoot a man at age six. The two men meet when Joshua robs Douglas’ carriage and takes him hostage; soon, a remarkable secret is revealed, and these two very different men grow closer, even as Douglas’ brother tries to “save” him from his uncivilized surroundings.

First published in Germany, Missouri is available in English for the first time.

Just days before her eighteenth birthday, Lila has resolved to end her life. The horror of becoming an adult, and leaving her childhood behind, has broken her heart.

Faerie, a novel for young people, is the fierce yet gently unfolding story of a hyper- imaginative girl who is on a collision course to womanhood. She likens herself to a half-human fairy creature who does not belong in the earthly world; but in the cold light of day she is a psychiatric patient at a hospital, where she is being treated for anorexia - her sickness driven by the irrational need to undo nature and thwart the passage of time.

Lila tells the story of how she ended up on the Four East wing: we flash back to her childhood in the eighties, growing up in a small town as the overweight brown kid of Punjabi immigrant parents: her father, a literary scholar whom she idolizes, and her mother, a housewife - "the most female of all females who found comfort in cooking." Faerie weaves these passages with Lila's downward spiral into life-threatening illness, her budding sexuality, and her complicated recovery in hospital that comes with a price. Written with candor and heartbreaking lyricism, Faerie is a plaintive yet ultimately life-affirming love letter to the bold, flawed splendor that is childhood.

Eisha Marjara has written and directed several award-winning films, including the critically acclaimed NFB docudrama Desperately Seeking Helen. Her latest, House for Sale, has won numerous film festival awards. Faerie is her first novel. She lives in Montreal, Quebec.

Crossings was Betty Lambert's only novel; published by Pulp Press in 1979, it was revolutionary for its frank and unsettling portrayal of Vicky, a female writer in Vancouver in the early 1960s, an educated and intelligent woman who struggles to come to terms with herself as she navigates an emotionally abusive relationship with Mik, a violent logger and ex-con. Their physical, often violent affair offers an honest and unflinching look at relationships and female suffering. The book caused a furor when it was first published, and in fact was banned from some feminist Canadian bookstores. At the same time, it was widely acclaimed by critics and writers, including Jane Rule, who wrote: "This portrait of an artist as a young woman should stand beside Alice Munro's Who Do You Think You Are and Margaret Laurence's The Diviners as a testimony of the courage and cost of being a woman and a writer."

Out of print for more than twenty years, this new edition of Crossings will introduce this Canadian classic—and remarkable writer—to a new generation of readers.

Includes an introduction by novelist Claudia Casper ( The Reconstruction and The Continuation of Love by Other Means).

This publication meets the EPUB Accessibility requirements and it also meets the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG-AA). It is screen-reader friendly and is accessible to persons with disabilities. A book with many images, which is defined with accessible structural markup. This book contains various accessibility features such as alternative text for images, table of contents, page-list, landmark, reading order and semantic structure.

Lambda Literary Award finalist

In 1996, poet Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha ran away from America with two backpacks and ended up in Canada, where she discovered queer anarchopunk love and revolution, yet remained haunted by the reasons she left home in the first place. This passionate and riveting memoir is a mixtape of dreams and nightmares, of immigration court lineups and queer South Asian dance nights; it reveals how a disabled queer woman of color and abuse survivor navigates the dirty river of the past and, as the subtitle suggests, "dreams her way home."

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha's poetry book Love Cake won a Lambda Literary Award.

This publication meets the EPUB Accessibility requirements and it also meets the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG-AA). It is screen-reader friendly and is accessible to persons with disabilities. A Simple book with few images, which is defined with accessible structural markup. This book contains various accessibility features such as alternative text for images, table of contents, page-list, landmark, reading order and semantic structure.

Zed is having a bad day. She’s 12 and there’s someone around who’s killing kids, which she doesn’t have time for. Already today, she’s knifed a rapist, traded with half the drunks and addicts in town, talked to the dead, bargained with a sociopath, and extracted crucial information from a mental patient, and she hasn’t even left the building. Welcome to The Tower, an urban development project no city wants to lay claim to; a place to steer clear of if at all possible, but if you can’t, you’ll fit right in. This vivid, claustrophobic novel is about madness, survival, and crumbling institutions, in the spirit of J.G. Ballard’s High Rise or Iain Banks’ The Wasp Factory.

City of Toronto Book Award finalist

Scarborough is a low-income, culturally diverse neighborhood east of Toronto, the fourth largest city in North America; like many inner city communities, it suffers under the weight of poverty, drugs, crime, and urban blight. Scarborough the novel employs a multitude of voices to tell the story of a tight-knit neighborhood under fire: among them, Victor, a black artist harassed by the police; Winsum, a West Indian restaurant owner struggling to keep it together; and Hina, a Muslim school worker who witnesses first-hand the impact of poverty on education.

And then there are the three kids who work to rise above a system that consistently fails them: Bing, a gay Filipino boy who lives under the shadow of his father's mental illness; Sylvie, Bing's best friend, a Native girl whose family struggles to find a permanent home to live in; and Laura, whose history of neglect by her mother is destined to repeat itself with her father.

Scarborough offers a raw yet empathetic glimpse into a troubled community that locates its dignity in unexpected places: a neighborhood that refuses to be undone.

Catherine Hernandez is a queer theatre practitioner and writer who has lived in Scarborough off and on for most of her life. Her plays Singkil and Kilt Pins were published by Playwrights Canada Press, and her children's book M is for Mustache: A Pride ABC Book was published by Flamingo Rampant. She is the Artistic Director of Sulong Theatre for women of color.

Sarah Kramer is a vegan cooking superstar. Her first two books, How It All Vegan! and The Garden of Vegan, co-authored with Tanya Barnard, have sold well over 100,000 copies; How It All Vegan! won the Veggie Award for favorite cookbook of 2004 by VegNews magazine, and Herbivore magazine, in a cover story on Sarah, called her “The World’s Coolest Vegan.”

Sarah returns with her first solo cookbook, featuring more of the delectable, easy-to-prepare recipes that vegans around the world have come to adore. For Sarah, vegan cooking—which eschews all animal products, including butter, milk, and cheese—can be an adventure in dining, without a lot of investment in time or money. In fact, most of the recipes in La Dolce Vegan! can be prepared in 20 to 30 minutes or less. From soups and salads to entrees and desserts, they are sure to inspire both committed and part-time vegans alike.

At the heart of the book is Sarah’s wholehearted commitment to the vegan lifestyle that has changed her life completely—from a childhood plagued with health problems to an adulthood filled with the pleasures and joys of living vegan. For Sarah, an animal-free diet will make you happier, healthier, and more content with the world around you.

In addition to the wonderful recipes, there is a fun do-it-yourself section of vegan tips and non-food items. Learn to live the sweet life of veganism and you’ll never look back!

Recipes include: Beauty and the Beet Borscht, Mocked Clam Chowder, Roasted Cherry Tomato Pasta, Sloppy Janes, Blessed Broccoli Stir-Fry, Apple Pie Pancakes, Carob Almond Truffles, and Tomato Soup Cake.

Sarah Kramer is the co-author of How It All Vegan! and The Garden of Vegan. She lives in Victoria, British Columbia, with her husband, where she manages a tattoo shop in addition to creating her vegan masterpieces and maintaining her popular website www.GoVegan.net.

Vivek Shraya is a multimedia artist, working in the mediums of music, performance, literature, and film. His most recent film, What I LOVE about Being QUEER, has been expanded to include an online project and book with contributions from around the world. He is also author of God Loves Hair.

This publication meets the EPUB Accessibility requirements and it also meets the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG-AA). It is screen-reader friendly and is accessible to persons with disabilities. A Simple book with few images, which is defined with accessible structural markup. This book contains various accessibility features such as alternative text for images, table of contents, page-list, landmark, reading order and semantic structure.

Joey Keithley, aka Joey Shithead, founded legendary punk pioneers D.O.A. in 1978. Punk kings who spread counterculture around the world, they’ve been cited as influences by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Green Day, Rancid and The Offspring; have toured with The Clash, The Ramones, The Dead Kennedys, Black Flag, Nirvana, PiL, Minor Threat and others; and are the subject of two tribute albums. They are the band that introduced the term “hardcore” into punk lexicon and may have turned Nirvana’s lead singer Kurt Cobain onto a career in music.

But punk is more than a style of music: it’s a political act, and D.O.A. have always had a social conscience, having performed in support of Greenpeace, women’s rape/crisis centres, prisoner’s rights, and antinuke and antiglobalization organizations. Twenty-five years later D.O.A. can claim sales of hundreds of thousands of copies of their 11 albums and tours in 30 different countries, and they are still going strong.

I, Shithead is Joey’s personal, no-bullshit recollections of a life in punk, starting with the burgeoning punk movement and traversing a generation disillusioned with the status quo, who believed they could change the world: stories of riots, drinking, travelling, playing and conquering all manner of obstacles through sheer determination.

Praise for D.O.A.:

“They rock out. They blow the roof off. Some of the best shows I’ve seen in my life were D.O.A. gigs. I’ve never seen D.O.A. not be amazing.”—Henry Rollins (Black Flag, Rollins Band)

“The proper medicine growing young minds needed.”—Jello Biafra (Dead Kennedys)

“Joey Shithead casts a long shadow.”—John Doe (X)

“They’ve changed a lot of people’s lives.”—Dave Grohl (Nirvana, Foo Fighters)

Joey “Shithead” Keithley has long been an activist, including as a candidate for the Green Party, and is the founder of Sudden Death Records (www.suddendeath.com). He lives in Vancouver with his wife and their three children.

For centuries, men have been growing and styling their facial hair, whether for the sake of vanity, religion, or cultural considerations, but most of us don’t give it a second thought. The Bearded Gentleman is an authoritative yet lighthearted guide that offers detailed information on some fifty specific facial hair styles: where they come from, how to grow them, and how to maintain them.

Among them are many well-known styles, such as the Handlebar, the Fu Manchu, the Goatee, the Van Dyck, and the more recent Soul Patch. But there are also those that are less familiar, including the Horseshoe, the Lampshade, the Painter’s Brush, the Landing Strip, the French Fork, and El Insecto (a.k.a. the Mighty). There’s also practical advice on choosing a facial hair style that’s right for you, as well as insight into how facial hair has figured in the history of masculinity, including its impact on politics, class, and sexuality.

The Bearded Gentleman is an entertaining, witty, and useful guide to facial hair styles and the men who wear them.

Allan Peterkin’s previous books include One Thousand Beards: A Cultural History of Facial Hair, featured in Time, Esquire, and The New Yorker.

Nick Burns is one of the leading writers on men’s grooming; he has covered skin care, fashion, and health for publications including The New York Times, GQ, Details, and Out, and he is author of the popular men’s style blog HommeGrooming.com.

In Dreena Burton’s first two best-selling vegan cookbooks, The Everyday Vegan and Vive le Vegan!, she offered a dazzling array of healthy, animal-free recipes, many of which were based on her experience as a mother of two young girls she and her husband are raising as vegans. Dreena also maintains an active website (www.everydayvegan.com) and blog (www.vivelevegan.blogspot.com) and has cultivated an enthusiastic audience for her family-oriented, nutritious recipes. In this, her third cookbook, Dreena turns her attention to celebratory food—imaginative, colorful, and delectable vegan fare perfect for all kinds of events, from romantic meals for two to dinner parties to full-on galas. Many of the recipes are kid-friendly, and all are appropriate for everyday meals as well.

The book includes 125 recipes and sixteen full-color photographs, as well as meal plans, cooking notes, and advice on vegan wines and beers. Recipes include Lentil & Veggie Chimichangas, Thai Chick-Un Pizza, White Bean Soup with Basil & Croutons, Tomato Dill Lentil Soup, Olive & Sundried Tomato Hummus, “Creamy” Cashew Dip with Fruit, Crêpes with Maple Butter Cream, 5-Star Ice “Cream” Sandwiches, and Hemp-anola (Dreena’s take on granola).

Come celebrate with Dreena and impress your guests with these tempting animal-free recipes.

City of Vancouver Book Award winner

Lambda Award winner Amber Dawn’s sophomore book reveals a poignant and personal landscape—the terrain of sex work, queer identity, and survivor pride. This memoir told in prose and poetry offers a frank, multifaceted portrait of the author’s experience, from hustling the streets of Vancouver in the mid-90s to her present life as an outspoken feminist storyteller.

This publication meets the EPUB Accessibility requirements and it also meets the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG-AA). It is screen-reader friendly and is accessible to persons with disabilities. A Simple book with few images, which is defined with accessible structural markup. This book contains various accessibility features such as alternative text for images, table of contents, page-list, landmark, reading order and semantic structure.

A lyrical gay coming-of-age story first published in 1951, acclaimed by Gore Vidal and The New York Times, about Matthew, a young American who moves to France with his mother following his parents’ divorce. As Matthew navigates his budding sexuality and complicated new relationships, he is forced to confront finistère—land’s end—where the brutal truths of the world can be found.

Includes an appendix of materials about the book and author, as well as an introduction by acclaimed author Michael Bronski. Part of the Little Sister’s Classics series, which resurrects out-of-print gay and lesbian books from the past.

Vancouver’s Granville Island Public Market, established in 1979, is one of Canada’s largest and most popular public markets. Featuring over fifty food retailers, day vendors, and crafts, the Public Market is the main draw at Granville Island. Galleries, retail shops, a live theatres, and a hotel, an art school as well as a functioning cement company make Granville Island one of the biggest tourist attractions in a city that is regularly ranked as one of the world’s top destinations by Condé Nast Traveler.

The New Granville Island Market Cookbook features a bounty of recipes using fresh produce, gourmet meats, wild seafood, artisanal cheeses, and other goods found at this or any public market offering quality, healthful food products. Full-color throughout, the book also includes lively food photos, market snapshots, and profiles of the market's dedicated vendors. Taking off from the original best-selling Granville Island Market Cookbook in 1985, this brand new book comments on changes to food culture since the first edition, and features such market-fresh recipes as barbecued leg of lamb, penne with spot prawns, Niçoise sandwich, orange and pomegranate salad, and roasted figs.

This beautiful cookbook offers readers delectable, fresh, and healthy recipes for every month of the year while providing vibrant and engaging portraits of life "at the market."

Judie Glick and Carol Jensson were among Granville Island's first merchants, Judie as co-owner of the Fraser Valley Juice and Salad Bar and Carol as owner of the Blue Parrot coffee bar. Carol is now a food stylist for Vancouver's film industry, while Judie (co-author of the original Granville Island Market Cookbook) has been writing about food since 1968.

Raw food diets have exploded in popularity in recent years; some believe that the cooking process destroys nutrients and even produces dangerous chemicals by the interaction of heat with fat, protein, and carbohydrates.

Enter Aaron Ash, a charismatic chef whose organic raw vegan restaurant Gorilla Food has taken Vancouver by storm for its inventive and delicious dishes, all prepared without use of animal products or a stove. Aaron is a conscientious raw vegan whose beliefs about food are tied to personal and social well-being. Gorilla Food strives to promote the idea that a sustainable, healthy culture depends on humankind living as "lightly" as possible, mitigating the damage wrought on the environment and ourselves.

Gorilla Food the book is both an innovative cooking manual and a raw vegan bible; recipes include a raw lasagna made with zucchini noodles, kale, and a "cheese" made from walnuts, and a raw soup made from seasonal greens, tomatoes, and avocado. There's also amazing raw pizzas, fruit pies, and chocolate desserts that will delight vegans and non-vegans alike with their complex flavors. The book also contains recipes for dehydrated and cultured foods, important for a raw food diet but surprisingly simple to prepare.

Gorilla Food will make you go ape for living life to the rawest!

In addition to running Gorilla Food, Aaron Ash was a former personal chef to Mike-D of the Beastie Boys. He is also an in-demand caterer for high-profile events around North America, and is making plans to open additional Gorilla Food locations.

In Close to Spider Man—which won a Danuta Gleed Literary Award—readers were introduced to the crystalline storytelling voice of Ivan Coyote. The talent evident in that first collection is confirmed with One Man’s Trash, a series of connected stories about being queer, searching out new frontiers, and being on the road.

The characters in One Man’s Trash make evident the child in all of us, when heroes and superheroes won the day.

Including the hilarious account of an attempted lesbian wedding in a Las Vegas chapel, and a touching tale of being beguiled by an uncle’s independent-minded girlfriend, these are stories about being on the road: to the northern tundra or the southern desert, through cities and towns, on horses, in trucks and vans, with friends, family, and lovers. In achingly personal tones, Ivan Coyote paints beautiful and honest portraits of life, the road, and the spirits within.

Praise for Close to Spider Man:

"Blissfully rich . . . [a] thoroughly entertaining . . . surefooted, humorous take on misfit love and familial solidarity."—Publishers Weekly

"Coyote’s debut short story collection is powerful. . . . These stories consistently detail the pain of being mis-understood, of living and trying to love where one doesn’t fit in, and doesn’t want to. Their beauty is in the sheer emotion they provoke."—Lambda Book Report

Ivan E. Coyote is a Vancouver writer and performer who first came to attention as a member of Taste This, who collaborated on the award-winning book Boys Like Her.

Set in the early 1990s, Ashley Little’s follow-up to her award-winning novel Anatomy of a Girl Gang introduces readers to eleven-year-old Tucker Malone—the only child of a narcoleptic touring stripper—who believes his father is Sam Malone, the Boston barkeep who regularly appears on Tucker’s TV screen. He and his mother move from motel to motel until, one night in Niagara Falls, his mother is hit by a car after falling asleep in the street.

Tucker is sent to live in a youth group home where he meets Meredith, a pregnant sixteen-year-old with hopes of her own; he convinces her to join him on a road trip across the border to America in order to find his father, which takes them from Boston to the west coast. Along the way they encounter some of the most notorious criminals of the 1990s, and arrive in Los Angeles just as the Rodney King riots are unfolding.

His cross-country search becomes an epic depiction of mid-90s America at a crossroads as seen through the eyes of a boy, for whom finding his father is the one thing that will make him whole. Told in spare, straightforward prose, Niagara Motel is a biting chronicle during the rise of mass-media in the decade that defined the MTV Generation, and the bittersweet story of a young boy who must learn hard lessons on his way to becoming a man.

Ashley Little is the author of Anatomy of a Girl Gang, winner of the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize and longlisted for the Dublin IMPAC Literary Award.