Arsenal Pulp Press

In this dystopian, eerily relevant novel, a civil war is brewing in America. Below ground, a cult led by the deluded and narcissistic Father Ernst is ensconced in an underground bunker, waiting out the conflict. When "The Family" runs out of food, Ruth, coming of age and terrified of serving as Ernst's next wife, must choose between obeying her faith and fighting for survival. In this unsettling modern Lilith tale, spirited women resist their violent, racist culture and, in so doing, become outlaws.

Kristyn Dunnion's previous novel The Dirt Chronicles was a Lambda Literary Award finalist for lesbian fiction.

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.

Greenpeace is known around the world for its activism and education surrounding environmental and biodiversity issues. With a presence in more than 40 countries across Europe, the Americas, Asia and the Pacific, Greenpeace is undoubtedly a dominant force in the realm of environmental activism.

This is the story of how Greenpeace came to be.

In September 1971, a small group of activists boarded a small fishing boat in Vancouver, Canada, and headed north towards Amchitka, a tiny island west of Alaska in the Aleutian Islands, where the US government was conducting underground nuclear tests.

At that time, protests against nuclear testing were not common, yet the US tests raised genuine concerns: Amchitka is not only the last refuge for endangered wildlife, but is also located in a geologically unstable region, one of the most earthquake-prone areas in the world. The threat of a nuclear-triggered earthquake or tsunami was real.

Among the people sardined in the fishing boat were Robert Hunter and Robert Keziere.

The boat, named the Greenpeace by the small group of men aboard, raced against time as it crashed through the Gulf of Alaska, braving the oncoming winter storms. Three weeks was all they had to reach Amchitka in an attempt to halt the nuclear test. Ultimately, the voyage—beset by bad weather, interpersonal tensions and conflicts with US officials—was doomed. And yet the legacy of that journey lives on.

In this visceral memoir, based on a manuscript originally written over 30 years ago, Robert Hunter vividly depicts the peculiar odyssey that led to the formation of the most powerful environmental organization in the world.

Features 40 black and white photographs taken during the voyage by Robert Keziere.

Billeh Nickerson is one of Canada's showiest poets; his work is colorful, witty, and wise, with undertones of sexy. Alternating between outlandish and poignant, Artificial Cherry heralds the return of Billeh's cheeky/sweet sensibilities. From Elvis Presley and glass eyes to phantom lovers and hockey haiku, you're never quite sure where Billeh will take you, but the outcomes are always worth the ride.

Billeh Nickerson is the author of three previous poetry collections, including Impact: The Titanic Poems, and co-editor of Seminal: The Anthology of Canada's Gay Male Poets. He teaches creative writing at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in British Columbia.

A defiant yet tender memoir about drag culture and bipolar disorder that reveals the hard-earned truths of being queer in the American Midwest

In Drag Thing, Gabe Montesanti recounts her immersive entrance into St. Louis drag culture performing as Fender Bender, a drag king who ultimately transforms into a "drag thing" (a performer who defies classification altogether).

Exploring the fluidity of gender and identity through parody and honest self-exposure, Montesanti learns about binding and the art of facial hair and contouring, and she designs and constructs her own elaborate costumes with minimal budget and maximal imagination. As she clambers for success on the stage with snowballing intensity and copes with estrangement from her family of origin, she fights for her sanity—for her life—in her battle with treatment-resistant bipolar disorder, until her drag persona and her rapid cycling mania become indistinguishable from each other.

Drag Thing is a raucous, invigorating story of breakdown and self-invention, delusion and authenticity, set against a backdrop of anti-queer, anti-trans violence in which drag becomes a symbol of endangerment, glamour, and rebellion. Punctuated throughout with the author's drawings that bring "thingness" to life, Drag Thing is an anthem to the hard-won survival of a singular spirit.

Randy Shore's father and grandfather grew up on farms, yet he didn't even know how to grow a radish. Author of "The Green Man" column in the Vancouver Sun, he spent five years teaching himself how to grow food for his family and then how to use the resulting bounty to create imaginative and nourishing meals the year round. In Grow What You Eat, Eat What You Grow, Randy reveals the secrets to creating and maintaining a fully functioning vegetable garden, from how to make your own fertilizer to precise instructions on how best to grow specific produce; he also offers advice for those with balcony or container gardens and others who live in small urban spaces. He then shows how to showcase your bounty with delicious, nutrient-packed recipes (both vegetarian and not), including instructions on canning, pickling, and curing, proving how easy and fulfilling it is to be a self-reliant expert in your garden and your kitchen.

Grow What You Eat is equal parts a cookbook, gardening book, personal journal, and passionate treatise on the art of eating and living sustainably. In his quest for self-sufficiency, improved health, and a better environment, Randy Shore resurrects an old-school way of cooking that is natural, nutritious, and delicious.

Randy Shore is a food and sustainability writer for the Vancouver Sun; he is also a former restaurant cook and an avid gardener.

A new edition of the acclaimed debut story collection by two-time Lambda Literary Award winner Casey Plett.

By the author of Little Fish and A Dream of a Woman: eleven unique short stories featuring young trans women stumbling through loss, sex, harassment, and love in settings ranging from a rural Mennonite town to a hipster gay bar in Brooklyn. These stories, shiny with whiskey and prairie sunsets, rattling subways and neglected cats, show that growing up as a trans girl can be charming, funny, frustrating, or sad, but will never be predictable. 

A Safe Girl to Love, winner of the Lambda Literary Award for transgender fiction, was first published in 2014. Now back in print after a long absence, this new edition includes an afterword by the author.

Ivan E. Coyote is one of North America’s most beguiling storytellers and the author of three story collections, including Loose End, which was shortlisted for the Ferro-Grumley Award for Fiction in 2006. Bow Grip, Coyote’s first novel, is a breathtaking story about love and loneliness; in it, a good-hearted, small-town mechanic struggles to deal with a wife who has left him for another woman until a used cello and an acquaintance’s suicide attempt compel him to make some changes in his life. With quiet authority, Bow Grip is about one man’s true rite of passage—trying to keep the ghosts of personal history at bay with a heart that’s as big as the endless prairie sky.

Futureways is a faux science fiction novel that dares to reinvent the future. The story of an art exhibition in the distant future, the book posits an otherworldly community of alien shape-shifters, robotic administrators and demon-conjuring Magi who inhabit spaceports, otherworldly archeological sites, gated utopias, courthouses and bars.

This beguiling “novel” features chapters written by different contributors—including artists, critics, curators, museum directors, journalists and writers—all of whom create fantastical landscapes that simultaneously work within and outside the convention of science fiction. At its heart, it depicts the “tangible marvels” of the imagination and the role of the artist as time-traveler, forward-thinking yet never forgetting the past.

Conceived by internationally acclaimed artist Rita McBride, Futureways is the second book in the Ways Books series (the first was Heartways), a unique collaboration between the Whitney Museum of American Art, Printed Matter, Inc. and Arsenal Pulp Press. Forthcoming titles include Crimeways and Myways. Books in the Ways Books series—which include more than 50 different contributions by artists, architects, writers, journalists, scientists, curators and critics—exploit and decipher genre writing with an entertaining and refreshing collective structure.

Contributors include Laura Cottingham, Nick Crowe, Aline Duriaud, Nalo Hopkinson, Nico Israel, Matthew Licht, Peter Maass, Rita McBride, Glen Rubsamen, David Schafer, Mark von Schlegell, Rutger Wolfson and Alexandre Melo, translated by Brad Cherry.

"A beautiful book, painting the dark side of Jean Genet: those moments that are the most fascinating about a writer."—Bernard-Henri Levy, Le Point

During the last eighteen years of his life (1968–86), Jean Genet was preoccupied with the struggles of the disenfranchised and displaced: among them the Black Panthers, the Baader-Meinhof, and the Palestinians. Hadrien Laroche's book is a careful philosophical and historical reading of acts and thoughts of various political movements in the seventies and the eighties all over the world, and of Genet's experiences and writings. It describes the adventures of a writer engaged with the "real world" as opposed to the world of letters or, as he called it, "the grammatical world."

This translation of Le Dernier Genet (Seuil) considers Genet's insights, failures, and critique of humanism, and examines the way in which his energetic prose forged a new political, aesthetic, and philosophical relation between literature and the world. This is also the first book to address the issues of Genet's relation to Israel, Jews, and anti-Semitism.

The Last Genet focuses on a critical moment in history, but also on questions of borders, language, and identity, offering an alternative to Jean-Paul Sartre's concept of engagement. As such, it will be critically relevant to readers interested in the questions surrounding ethical and political writing today.

Hadrien Laroche was born in Paris; he has written three French-language novels and completed his doctorate under Jacques Derrida, who considered him "one of the most talented and original thinkers of his generation."

Provocative, observant, and daring, this 1992 novel by one of America’s preeminent lesbian writers and thinkers is being reissued for the Little Sister’s Classics series. Anna O. is a loner in New York, an office temp obsessed with a mysterious woman in white leather; Doc is a post-Freudian psychiatrist who hands out business cards to likely neurotics on street corners, and is himself looking for personal fulfillment. They befriend each other in the netherworld of the Lower East Side, two unlikely people drawn together by their confusion about and empathy for the world around them, and each other. This beautifully written novel is about the fluidity of desire, and how those of us damaged by love can still be transformed by it. Features a new essay by the author and an introduction by Kevin Killian.

Forcibly removed from her Indigenous family as a child, Andrea Currie journeys back to her Nation and the truth of who she is

Otipemisiwak is a Plains Cree word describing the Métis, meaning "the people who own themselves."

Andrea Currie was born into a Métis family with a strong lineage of warriors, land protectors, writers, artists, and musicians—all of which was lost to her when she was adopted as an infant into a white family with no connection to her people. It was 1960, and the policy of removing children from their Indigenous families was firmly in place. Together with her younger adopted brother, also Métis, she struggled through her childhood, never feeling like she belonged in that world. When their adoptions fell apart during their teen years, the two siblings found themselves on different paths, yet they stayed connected. Currie takes us through her journey, from the harrowing time of bone-deep disconnection, to the years of searching and self-discovery, into the joys and sorrows of reuniting with her birth family.

Finding Otipemisiwak weaves lyrical prose, poetry, and essays into an incisive commentary on the vulnerability of Indigenous children in a white supremacist child welfare system, the devastation of cultural loss, and the rocky road some people must walk to get to the truth of who they are. Her triumph over the state's attempts to erase her as an Indigenous person is tempered by the often painful complexities of re-entering her cultural community while bearing the mark of the white world in which she was raised. Finding Otipemisiwak is the story of one woman's fight—first to survive, then to thrive as a fully present member of her Nation and of the human family.

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.

Adult coloring books (such as Secret Garden) have exploded in popularity in recent years, embraced for their calming, therapeutic effect. This elegant, imaginative coloring book explores the dynamic, fanciful creations of iconic fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent, who headed the House of Dior at the age of twenty-one before launching his own design house at age twenty-five. He became famous for the "beatnik" look in the sixties, as well as creating the tuxedo suit for women, and his colorful life was the subject of a recent feature film, Saint Laurent.

The book's line drawings for coloring are based on many of the designer's original sketches for dresses over the years, accompanied by full-color photos of original dresses for reference. In these pages, one can see the breadth and versatility of his creations; there are designs inspired by harlequins and the Carnival of Venice, Pop Art and Mondrian, and the cultures of Asia, Africa, and beyond. Colorists will in turn be inspired to match St. Laurent's vivid creations, or to create chic new color combinations of their own.

The Yves Saint Laurent Coloring Book is for fashionistas, coloring book enthusiasts, and others with an interest in the history of fashion and in the life of this extraordinary designer.

Full-color throughout.

This book is produced in conjunction with the Fondation Pierre Bergé-Yves Saint Laurent, dedicated to preserving and promoting the history of the House of Yves Saint Laurent.

Lambda Literary Award finalist

Alternately unsettling and affirming, devastating and delicious, The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You is a new collection of essays on gender and identity by S. Bear Bergman that is irrevocably honest and endlessly illuminating. With humor and grace, these essays deal with issues from women's spaces to the old boys' network, from gay male bathhouses to lesbian potlucks, from being a child to preparing to have one. Throughout, S. Bear Bergman shows us there are things you learn when you're visibly different from those around you—whether it's being transgressively gendered or readably queer. As a transmasculine person, Bergman keeps readers breathless and rapt in the freakshow tent long after the midway has gone dark, when the good hooch gets passed around and the best stories get told. Ze offers unique perspectives on issues that challenge, complicate, and confound the "official stories" about how gender and sexuality work.

S. Bear Bergman's first book was Butch is a Noun (Suspect Thoughts Press). Ze is an activist, gender-jammer, and author of two books and three award-winning solo stage shows. Bergman recently relocated to Burlington, Ontario, from New England.

Ivan E. Coyote is a master storyteller and performer; her beautiful, funny stories about growing up a lesbian butch in the Canadian north have attracted big audiences whether gay, straight, or otherwise. Missed Her is Ivan's fifth story collection, following 2008's Lambda-nominated The Slow Fix and Bow Grip, her novel that was named a Stonewall Honor Book by the American Library Association. Whether discussing the politics of being a butch with a pet lapdog or berating a gay newspaper for considering butches and trans people as "extreme," Ivan traverses issues of gender and identity with a wistful, perceptive eye.

Get tempted by an inspiring array of vegan recipes from the authors of How It All Vegan!

When How It All Vegan!: Irresistible Recipes for an Animal-Free Diet was published in 1999, authors Tanya Barnard and Sarah Kramer were hailed for their fun and outlandish approach to vegan cooking, taking it out of the realm of the staid and the boring to create truly original animal-free dishes. How It All Vegan! was a Book Sense 76 selection and has sold 50,000 copies to date.

The Garden of Vegan: How It All Vegan Again! picks up where the first book left off. Tanya and Sarah, vegan chefs extraordinaire, have created truly delectable, truly original new recipes that manage to leave the animal products (including butter, milk, cheese and honey) where they belong, with their natural owners. Where How It All Vegan! was, in many ways, a bible for the uninitiated vegan, The Garden of Vegan goes one step further, offering recipes for a more sophisticated palate that add funky twists to familiar dishes bursting with color and flavor. At the same time, they are fun and easy to prepare, even for those of us who find boiling water a challenge.

Whether you’re a full-time vegan or just interested in creating fabulous animal-free meals, The Garden of -Vegan will lead you into temptation with its inspiring -array of vegan goodies. So skip that steak and forget that fish. It’s time to discover how it all vegan, again!

Two-color throughout, including numerous pictures.

Praise for How It All Vegan!:

"Written with sass, style, and a sense of humor . . . more than just a cookbook."—Bust

"One of the most inviting cookbooks to come along in years."—Vegan.com

Tanya Barnard and Sarah Kramer appear to be mild mannered vegans, but when the two of them get together, they become mighty Vegan Warriors, writing cookbooks and kicking vegan ass! They live in Victoria, Canada.

A striking and ambitious collection of gay horror fiction, covering a wide range of creatures of the night and all manner of urban terrors.

François Cusset, author of the acclaimed book French Theory, investigates the queering of the French literary canon by American writers and scholars in this thought-provoking and free-minded journey across six centuries of literary classics and sexual polemics.

Cusset presents the foundations and rationale for American queer theory, the field of study established in the 1990s and promulgated by writers and scholars such as Judith Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Michael Warner (in the wake of Michel Foucault), which challenges a supposed "heteronormative" ideology in our culture. He provides an overview of their reinterpretation of the French literary canon from a queer perspective, then deliberately goes further, confronting that same canon with a lively form of general suspicion—seeking gender trouble and sexual ambiguities in the most unexpected corners of French literary classics, in which macho heroes turn out to be homosocial melancholics and the most seemingly submissive housewives are great vanguards of lesbian liberation.

Cusset's survey includes medieval and Renaissance literature, works from the Age of Enlightenment, nineteenth-century avant-gardists such as Charles Baudelaire and Honoré de Balzac, and twentieth-century modernists such as Marcel Proust and Jean Genet.

Bold in its themes and propositions, The Inverted Gaze (a translation of the book Queer Critics) is an extraordinary work about French literature and American queer politics by one of France's biggest intellectual stars.

François Cusset is a professor of American studies at the University of Paris. He is the author of numerous books including French Theory (2008).

David Homel is an award-winning translator and writer who lives in Montreal, Quebec.

Amber Dawn's latest poetry collection flaunts the chronically pained body as a source of lewd feminine power

As a novelist, memoirist, and poet, Amber Dawn regularly lays her heart bare in work that is fiery, raw, and intensely personal. In Buzzkill Clamshell, her third poetry collection, Amber Dawn circumvents the expectations of so-called confessional poetry, offering twisted mythmaking, extreme hyperbole, and lyrical gutter-mouthing that explore themes of sick and disabled queerness, aging, and desire.

With poems populated by severed heads, domme swan maidens, horny oracles, and other horrible purveyors of pleasure, Buzzkill Clamshell reads as if a leather dyke and a demonic goat had a baby―gleefully embracing the perverse while stomping its way through chronic pain and complex PTSD.

Already acclaimed for her candid and often kinky verse, Amber Dawn pushes further into trauma-informed eroticism with self-assured irreverence and uncomfortable abjectivity. Beneath her brilliant, carnivalesque imagery lies a prayer―not for the pain to end, but for finding fantastic new ways to cope with it.

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!

Dreena Burton is the author of The Everyday Vegan, now in its second printing. She lives in White Rock, British Columbia, with her husband, Paul, and their three year-old daughter, Charlotte.

In this unique book of correspondence, two men from different generations write to each other about the burdens, anxieties, and singular joys of parenthood. Thirtysomething Charles Demers and 80-year-old George Bowering are both celebrated authors and the best of friends, and soon both will be the fathers of daughters. The letters begin as Charles and his wife discover they will become parents; he expresses his hopes and fears of impending fatherhood, compounded by his OCD and his own father's illness, while George recalls his own experiences raising a daughter in the 1970s and his own anxieties about bringing a child into a troubled world.

Together, their thoughtful, funny, candid missives reveal what fathers know (or don't know) about raising daughters, as well as themselves and each other. Their combined observations make for a passionate, funny and moving portrait of fatherhood in all its imperfect, beautiful glory.

George Bowering is Canada's first poet laureate and an officer of the Order of Canada. He is the author of more than eighty books, the most recent of which include The Hockey Scribbler, Writing the Okanagan, and Pinboy. He lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Charles Demers is a comedian, performer, and writer. His previous books are The Horrors (Douglas & McIntyre) and Vancouver Special (Arsenal). He lives in Vancouver, where he teaches writing at the University of British Columbia.

Queer View Mirror is the first international assembly of lesbian and gay short short fiction including the work of 99 writers from all over the world, each offering fresh, once furtive glimpses of queer experience imbued with the rich possibilities of life, love, and language. 

Contributors include: Lucy Jane Bledsoe, Maureen Brady, Beth Brant, Michael Bronski, Dennis Denisoff, Nisa Donnelly, Michael Lowenthal, Lesléa Newman, Felice Picano, Michael Rowe, Kitty Tsui, David Watmough, and Paul Yee.

Winner, 2022 Atomium Comic Strip Prize
A comprehensive graphic biography of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the authoritarian president of Turkey.

One of the world’s most divisive and controversial leaders, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has ruled over Turkey as either prime minister or president since 2003. This graphic biography sheds light on the origins of Turkey’s most powerful man, from his youth as a budding soccer player to his years spent navigating Turkey’s political landscape, including the founding of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) in 2001. Author Can Dündar, a Turkish journalist and contributor to the Washington Post now living in exile in Germany, spent several years researching this book. 

Situated at the crossroads between Europe and Asia with a population of 84 million, Turkey is a growing economic powerhouse with a geopolitically strategic location. As its leader, the Islamic, conservative Erdoğan has had a polarizing effect on the country’s populace; some applaud his economic and political reforms, while others decry his autocratic, iron-fisted rule which has included the jailing of opponents, the crushing of free speech and the rights of LGBTQ+ people and others, and an ongoing war waged against the country’s Kurdish minority.

Featuring compelling illustrations by Egyptian-Sudanese comic artist Anwar, the book provides a critical and dramatic context for understanding Erdoğan’s convictions and contradictions as a demagogue for whom democracy has been merely a means to power. 

This extraordinary poetry collection journeys to the place where forgotten ancestors live and monstrous women roam—and where the distinctions between body, land, and language are lost. In these fierce yet tender narrative poems, Thom draws from both memory and mythology to create new maps of gender, race, sexuality, and violence. Descended from the traditions of oral storytelling, spoken word, and queer punk, Thom's debut collection is evocative and unforgettable.

Kai Cheng Thom is a trans writer and performance artist whose work has been published in Buzzfeed, Autostraddle, Asian American Literary Review, and xoJane. She writes regularly for Everyday Feminism.

There’s a Jamaican phrase, "Out of many, one people," that is reflected in the style of cooking from the Carib-bean: distinct, bold flavors coming together to create an electric experience. Such is the case with The Real Jerk. This is new Caribbean cuisine, cooking borne out of tradition, steeped in history, and brought into a new world where styles and tastes fuse to become something entirely different.

The Real Jerk: New Caribbean Cuisine includes such favorite recipes as jerk chicken, curry goat, oxtail, shrimp creole, and ackee and codfish (Jamaica’s national dish). There are also vegetarian dishes, a chapter with kids’ favorites, desserts, soups and salads, and all things Caribbean.

Alongside the recipes and menu suggestions are stories about the tales behind the traditions, the history of the hearth, and anecdotes about Caribbean living, whether in the islands, or on the mainland, all surrounded by black-and-white photographs and illustrations, and full-color images of the best Caribbean cooking to be had this side of the islands.

Let The Real Jerk transport you to new Caribbean cuisine: a blend of tastes and cultures unlike any you’ve visited before.

Lily and Ed Pottinger are the proprietors of The Real Jerk, Toronto’s premier Caribbean restaurant. They first opened the restaurant in 1984 and have since consistently topped "favorite" and "best of" lists.

This startling collection of five erotic stories are from seventeenth-century Ming dynasty China, a period char-acterized by increasing industrialization and urbanization, which led to a more material society, and to a desire in the population to pursue luxury and pleasure.

Ling Mengchu’s stories are pre-occupied with sexuality and include a host of characters, including bold, aggressive, cunning, and seductive men, and highly passionate, sensual, and sexually insatiable women. The publication of In the Inner Quarters, for the first time ever in English, gives new life to the sensual pleasures of that era.

Dr. Lenny Hu (Translator) has -translated Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus and numerous other literary works. He was born in China and has taught at universities both in China and Canada.

A staggering, unnerving story collection about the lost members of the Boomer Generation—chronic underachievers at work and love whose malaise is tempered by booze and cars. They seek solace in each other's company via weekend trips and wine-fuelled dinner parties when not conducting interventions or fixing their cars; through moments of seeming indifference, humor, and false bravado, their demeanors mask a disquieting rage at how they've lost their way and a burning, shattering desire to try to find it again.

Dennis E. Bolen is a former parole officer and the author of six previous works of fiction in Canada.

"Compton pushes us to look beneath the surface—past those comforting tales of nationhood and racial solidarity—to the more nebulous and ever-shifting truth. This is a brilliant and original work that should be mandatory reading for any student of race and history."—Danzy Senna, author of Caucasia

After Canaan, the first nonfiction book by acclaimed African Canadian poet Wayde Compton, repositions the North American discussion of race in the wake of the tumultuous twentieth century. Written from the perspective of someone who was born and lives outside of African American culture, it riffs on the concept of Canada as a promised land (or "Canaan") encoded in African American myth and song since the days of slavery. These varied essays, steeped in a kind of history rarely written about, explore the language of racial misrecognition (also known as "passing"), the failure of urban renewal, humor as a counterweight to "official" multiculturalism, the poetics of hip hop turntablism, and the impact of the Obama phenomenon on the way we speak about race itself. Compton marks the passing of old modes of antiracism and multiculturalism, and points toward what may or may not be a "post-racial" future, but will without doubt be a brave new world of cultural perception.

After Canaan is a brilliant and thoughtful consideration of African (North) American culture as it attempts to redefine itself in the Obama era.

Wayde Compton's previous books include the poetry collections 49th Parallel Psalm and Performance Bond. He teaches English in Vancouver, BC.

A funny, moving, coming-of-age novel about growing up black and gay. Johnnie Ray Rousseau is a high school student upset over losing the lead role in the school staging play, but he’s intrigued by Marshall MacNeill, whom he meets at an audition, surely the sexiest man to walk God’s green earth.

“Schulman crafts a piercing investigation into desire, mores, and the law.”—Publishers Weekly

“An important work of American literature. That this is probably not how the book will be handled, reviewed, shelved, sold and read makes the novel all the more necessary and true.”—Lambda Book Report

“Sarah Schulman is one our most articulate observers.”—The Advocate

“In true Schulman form, the book has a gleaming intelligence and chilled anger. It’s beautifully blunt and plainspoken.”—L.A. Weekly

“A thought-provoking story on a controversial subject. . . . To her credit, Schulman forces the reader to question common societal assumptions.”—Library Journal

The Child, a Lambda Literary Award finalist, is the eleventh and perhaps most controversial book by acclaimed lesbian writer Sarah Schulman, available for the first time in paperback. This novel explores the parameters of queer teen sexuality against a backdrop of hysteria and sanctioned homophobia, based on the 1997 sexual assault and murder of an eleven-year-old boy by a fifteen-year-old.

Stew is a lonely teen who discovers love on an adult website. But when his older boyfriend is arrested in an Internet pedophilia sting, his proclivities are revealed to his family and friends, to his horror. Devastated by these revelations and left to fend for himself, he ends up committing murder.

Brazen and daring in its themes, The Child is a powerful indictment of sex panic in America, and a plaintive meditation on isolation and desire.

A doll taped to the hood of a wedding car. A list of favorite cocktails from the eighties. Hide the drugs from your parents and your kids. Kevin Costner in Waterworld: hot or not? Smoke Show is a novel that will astound readers with its audacious, stripped-down narrative set in the mid-nineties about assorted losers, diehards, and lost souls, seen through a hazy filter of bus fumes and cigarette smoke. Told in “real time,” Smoke Show is raw, candid, and amorphous, told through jargon and petty dialogue commonly heard in the street or on public transit. Clint Burnham evokes William Gaddis, David Foster Wallace, and Irvine Welsh in this novel, a confounding period piece that takes no prisoners.

Lambda Literary Award finalist

A tattooed young man regains consciousness in the Don Jail, charged with his friend's murder. An anti-social office clerk falls for a handsome bike courier and abandons his former life. An Ojibwe teen hunts for her kidnapped girlfriend in an illegal sex trade ring and seeks revenge. This is the intense reality of The Dirt Chronicles, Kristyn Dunnion's stunning debut story collection. In these linked tales, urban outlaws in Toronto map out their plans to take over the world while living collectively in an abandoned chair factory, destined for demolition according to a real estate gentrification plan. Their community is infiltrated by the King, a dirty cop bent on obliterating the city's defiant underclass and exterminating the group's rogue members; in order to survive, they may have to betray what they value most: autonomy, friendship, and newly discovered concepts of freedom.

Audacious and loud, The Dirt Chronicles is a thrashing three-chord rejection of mainstream culture and the powers-that-be, and a combustible homage to class rebellion.

A riot at a Rolling Stones concert opens this compelling story of a year-long confrontation in 1972 between the Vancouver police and the Clark Park gang, a band of unruly characters who ruled the city's east side. Corrupt cops, hapless criminals, and murder figure in this raucous history with contemporary overtones that questions which gang was tougher: the petty criminals, or the police themselves.

Aaron Chapman is a writer, historian, and musician and the author of two Vancouver nightclub histories, Live at the Commodore and Liquor, Lust, and the Law.

Rajinderpal S. Pal’s first, acclaimed collection, pappaji wrote poetry in a language i cannot read, was an exploration, a search not only for a place in the world, but for a sense of one’s self.

Pulse is a collection of love poems, about the sharing of stories and the sharing of that discovered self. Pal writes about those moments in our lives that we first cling to, then draw from as “we strive for fabric and texture” in our lives. With echoes of Michael Ondaatje, Pal’s magical, ringing voice sings intimate. These are sensual poems, explorations of “the pulse in fingertips,” and Pulse, the book, is a mature, sophisticated collection of poetry from one of Canada’s truest writers.

From Pulse:
to begin to describe
every ridge of vertebra
the soft hair that lined them
shadow of window-blinds imposed on her body
the strain and the arch
the restrain the push
the skin and teeth
how we would braid and unbraid

About Pulse:

“The excellence in this book is how it deftly operates between the personal and the national, between how people live their day-to-day lives in the systems in which they live them.”—Calgary Herald

“Pal’s strengths come from the undercurrents going through the work, the tensions just under the surface. He writes smooth and evocative poems with the illusion of calm and the deceptive ease of one who knows very well what he is doing.”—The Globe & Mail

Rajinderpal S. Pal won the Henry Kreisel Award for pappaji wrote poetry in a language i cannot read and Pulse was shortlisted for both the Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry and the W.O. Mitchell Book Prize. He has participated in international arts festivals such as ArtWallah, has published in literary magazines throughout North America, and is in translation in Brazil and Portugal. He lives in Calgary.

"Tin's Dictionary of Homophobia is so sweeping in its scope that one can dip into it again and again and learn something, or confront an idea in which even the most well-read queer will find fresh intellectual nourishment and historical illumination."—Gay City News

Based on the work of seventy researchers in fifteen countries, The Dictionary of Homophobia is a mammoth, encyclopedic book that documents the history of homosexuality, and various cultural responses to it, in all regions of the world: a masterful, engaged, and wholly relevant study that traces the political and social emancipation of a culture.

The book is the first English translation of Dictionnaire de L’Homophobie, published in France in 2003 to worldwide acclaim; its editor, Louis-Georges Tin, launched the first International Day Against Homophobia in 2005, now celebrated in more than fifty countries around the world. The Dictionary of Homophobia includes over 175 essays on various aspects of gay rights and homophobia as experienced in all regions in Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, and the South Pacific, from the earliest epochs to present day.

Subjects include religious and ideological forces such as the Bible, Communism, Judaism, Hinduism, and Islam; historical subjects, events, and personalities such as AIDS, Stonewall, J. Edgar Hoover, Matthew Shepard, Oscar Wilde, Pat Buchanan, Joseph McCarthy, Pope John Paul II, and Anita Bryant; and other topics such as coming out, adoption, deportation, ex-gays, lesbiphobia, and bi-phobia. In a world where gay marriage remains a hot-button political issue, and where adults and even teens are still being executed by authorities for the “crime” of homosexuality, The Dictionary of Homophobia is a both a revealing and necessary history lesson for us all.

An engaging YA novel about a girl in treatment for obsessive compulsive disorder that combats the dehumanizing stigma around mental illness

Sixteen-year-old Mira Durand has just been checked into the secure unit of the Residency Adolescent Treatment Centre for obsessive compulsive and comorbid disorders. Four years of being passed around different psych wards like a hot potato have only worsened her OCD and anorexia. Her brutal, religious compulsions, which she believes keep her mom safe, make her less of a clean freak and more of a freak freak. No wonder her only friend is her journal.

At the Residency's Ward 2, Mira discovers that her shrink is a fellow fantasy nerd and that her wardmates have enough of their own high-risk behaviors to tolerate hers. The complex friendships she forms with them (including a first love), the slow trust she builds with her treatment team, and the outside and family visits she earns give her things to look forward to beyond the drudgery of her compulsions. But it takes visiting Gung Gung, her dying maternal grandfather, for her to realize that to truly live, she must fight the cognitive distortions at the heart of her compulsions.

Based on the author's personal experience, A Drop in the Ocean is a gritty, humanizing portrait of living with mental illness.

A blind date blooms in a grocery store parking lot. Lake Erie forms the backdrop to a botched assisted suicide. A neurotic, dog-loving caretaker writes a complaint letter after an unfortunate leg-waxing incident. A coming-of-age road trip leads to encounters with a gang of costumed lesbian arm wrestlers and a man with a hoof. Equal parts insightful and heartbreaking, Moving Parts is an evocative and playful story collection that pulls back the curtain on what it means to be truly human.

Lana Pesch is an alumna of the Banff Wired Writing Studio. This is her first book.

A frustrated geologist studying global warming becomes obsessed with eating rocks after embarking on his first same-sex relationship in Europe. Back home, his young sister is a high-school girl who suddenly starts to ooze honey through her pores, an affliction that attracts hordes of bees as well as her male classmates but ultimately turns her into a social pariah. Meanwhile, their obsessive Pentecostal mother repeatedly calls on the Holy Spirit to rid her family of demons. The siblings are reunited on a ship bound for Europe where they hope to start a new life, but are unaware that their disguised mother is also on board and plotting to win back their souls, with the help of the Virgin Mary.

Told in a lush baroque prose, this intense, extravagant magic-realist novel combines elements of fairy tales, horror movies, and romances to create a comic, hallucinatory celebration of excess and sensuality.

Barry Webster's first book, The Sound of All Flesh, won the ReLit Award for story collections.

Grey is a baby. Grey is a bad date. Grey battles a tornado, flies past giant monkeys, and pauses to watch an old woman with her lists.

Judy MacDonald is a modern-day Jane Bowles, and from her comes this startling collection of stories called Grey.

These stories toy with fact and fiction, autobiography and invention, memory and make believe. Grey proves that a misunderstood color can be far from dull. Read about a girl falling in love with a giraffe. Learn about one young boy’s favorite breastfeeding scenarios. Observe several kinds of relationships. Join the author for an afterlife visit with Stanley Kubrick.

Grey—with delicious and McSweeney-esque observation, sharp dialogue, colorful characters—ages well.

Praise for Grey:

"MacDonald demonstrates her skill with voice, nailing character . . . there is a wealth of intriguing, original ideas in this collection."—Quill & Quire

"MacDonald’s characters are an impressively varied cast . . . she writes with delicacy, humour, and sympathy."—Globe & Mail

Judy MacDonald is a writer and journalist in Toronto. She’s the winner of a Rogers Communications/Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize.

Ottawa is Canada’s capital city, home to numerous historic sites, museums, and galleries, and the birthplace of such diverse lights as Alanis Morissette, Rich Little, and Paul Anka; it also has a small-town charm lurking beneath its frozen tundra. This witty and urbane Unknown City book—one of only a handful guides available on Ottawa—charts a course through the city’s hidden landmarks, shopping and dining hotspots, and secret histories.

The remarkable history of Vancouver's Powell Street Festival and the proud Japanese Canadian community behind it

Paueru Gai, the Powell Street neighbourhood in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, was a place of early settlement and forced removal for Japanese Canadians during the shameful years of internment in World War II. But Paueru Gai is also a site of regeneration: Since 1977, a diverse array of people gathers every August in Vancouver's Oppenheimer Park and the surrounding neighborhood to honor and celebrate Japanese Canadian history, art, and culture. The Powell Street Festival is an act of empowerment that defines and redefines Japanese Canadian identity.

In Return to Paueru Gai: Fifty Years of Vancouver's Powell Street Festival, essays, photographs, archival images, and a chronology articulate the festival's crucial role in uplifting Vancouver's Japanese Canadian community and affirming its place in the history of the city. From taiko drumming and sumo wrestling to community food vendors and human rights advocacy, the festival and the people who make it happen come brilliantly alive in this wide-ranging, vibrant book.

Essay writers include Musqueam Elder Mary Point, the seniors of Tonari Gumi (the Japanese Community Volunteers Association), cultural worker Julia Aoki, journalist Charlie Smith, writer Angela May, and members of the Japanese Canadian Art and Activism Project.

Full color throughout.

Vancouver is one of the world’s top tourist destinations, acclaimed for its natural beauty and cosmopolitan demeanor. This second edition of Vancouver: Secrets of the City is full of fun and offbeat factoids, anecdotes, and statistics about Vancouver, as well as great places to shop, dine, and sightsee.

This cookbook leaves no doubt that a vegan diet is a delicious choice. Recipes for soups, salads, appetizers, mains, and desserts demonstrate that vegan food is flavorful, -elegant, easy to prepare, and nothing to be afraid of. The extensive introduction outlines the ethical reasons for becoming vegan, and how such choices are both good for the environment and good for you.

Imagine a picnic of Tabbouleh, Stuffed Grapevine Leaves, and Carrot-Tahini Sandwiches, with Banana Surprise Tea Cake for dessert. Picture throwing a party and serving Hungarian Mushroom Soup, Red and White Onion Tart, and Chocolate-Orange Pudding as a finale. All these recipes and more can be found in this collection of delicious and easy vegan dishes.

Whether you want to add a few new items to your repertoire or transform your eating habits to cut out animal products completely, Sue Donaldson shows you how. She has suggestions for adapting favorite recipes, ideas for breakfast and lunch as well as tips about how to detect hidden animal ingredients. And she provides a wide range of recipes with creative variations to suit all tastes. So go ahead and treat yourself to something delicious, satisfying, and guilt-free.

Praise for Foods That Don’t Bite Back:

"I recommend Sue Donaldson’s new book, Foods That Don’t Bite Back. . . . It’s an excellent source of both information and recipes for those, like me, who are falling out of love with meat."—Christine Overall, Whig-Standard

Sue Donaldson’s inspiration to write a cookbook came during the six months she spent living in a guest house on an estate in Tuscany. Energized and inspired by the beauty of Italian food, she strove to recreate its aesthetic sensibility in her own vegan cuisine, with delicious results.

In The Future Is Disabled, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha asks some provocative questions: What if, in the near future, the majority of people will be disabled—and what if that's not a bad thing? And what if disability justice and disabled wisdom are crucial to creating a future in which it's possible to survive fascism, climate change, and pandemics and to bring about liberation?

Building on the work of her game changing book Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, Piepzna-Samarasinha writes about disability justice at the end of the world, documenting the many ways disabled people kept and are keeping each other—and the rest of the world—alive during Trump, fascism and the COVID-19 pandemic. Other subjects include crip interdependence, care and mutual aid in real life, disabled community building, and disabled art practice as survival and joy.

Written over the course of two years of disabled isolation during the pandemic, this is a book of love letters to other disabled QTBIPOC (and those concerned about disability justice, the care crisis, and surviving the apocalypse); honor songs for kin who are gone; recipes for survival; questions and real talk about care, organizing, disabled families, and kin networks and communities; and wild brown disabled femme joy in the face of death. With passion and power, The Future Is Disabled remembers our dead and insists on our future.

This updated edition includes a new chapter and afterword by the author.

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 series will be a significant, valuable contribution to the history and literature of gay cinema. Each of these works will be valuable additions for academic and popular students of film and gay culture.”—Library Journal

Trash, one of three inaugural titles in Arsenal Pulp Press' new film book series Queer Film Classics, delves into the legendary 1970 film that was arguably the greatest collaboration between director Paul Morrissey and producer Andy Warhol.

The film Trash is a down-and-out domestic melodrama about a decidedly eccentric couple: Joe, an impotent junkie (played by Warhol film regular Joe Dallesandro), and Holly, Joe's feisty and sexually frustrated girlfriend (played by trans Warhol superstar Holly Woodlawn). Joe is the hunky yet passive center around whom proud Holly orbits; while Morrissey intended to show that "there's no difference between a person using drugs and a piece of refuse," Woodlawn's incredible turn reverses his logic: she makes trash as precious as human beings.

The book examines the film in the context of Morrissey and Warhol's legendary partnership, with a special focus on Woodlawn's acclaimed performance: a glorious embodiment of "trash" and glamour that was so stunning, director George Cukor led a campaign (albeit unsuccessful) to win her an Oscar nomination.

Jon Davies is a curator and critic based in Toronto. He is the assistant curator of public programs at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery.

The Queer Film Classics series, starting this fall, consists of critical yet populist monographs on classic films of interest to LGBT audiences written by esteemed film scholars and critics.

Traditional North American Native peoples' cuisine has existed for centuries, but its central tenet of respecting nature and its bounty have never been as timely as they are now. Andrew George Jr. of the Wet'suwet'en Nation in Canada is a well-respected aboriginal chef and instructor who has spent the last twenty-five years promoting the traditions of First Nations food. In A Feast for All Seasons, written with Robert Gairns, he has compiled aboriginal recipes that feature ingredients from the land, sea, and sky, elements of an enduring cuisine that illustrate respect for the environment and its creatures and an acknowledgment of the spiritual power that food can have in our lives.

The 120 recipes include delectable, make-at-home dishes such as Salmon and Fiddlehead Stirfry, Stuffed Wild Duck, Barbecued Oysters, Pan-fried Rabbit with Wild Cranberry Glaze, Clam Fritters, and Wild Blueberry Cookies. The book also features recipes with exotic ingredients that provide a fascinating glimpse into the history of Native cuisine: Moose Chili, Boiled Porcupine, Smoked Beaver Meat, and Braised Bear.

This unique cookbook pays homage to an enduring food culture—grounded in tradition and the power of nature—that transcends the test of time.

Andrew George Jr. was most recently head chef at the Four Host First Nations pavilion at the 2010 Winter Olympics (the first games in which Indigenous peoples were recognized as official host partners by the International Olympic Committee). He also participated at the World Culinary Olympics as part of the first all-Native team in the competition's history.

This is a vivid graphic history of the Chinese experience in North America over the last 150 years, beginning with the immigration of Chinese to "Gold Mountain" (the Chinese colloquialism for North America) in the 1800s that resulted in decades of discrimination, subjugation, and separation from loved ones. Based on historical documents and interviews with elders, the book is also the epic story of the Wong family as they traverse these challenges with hope and determination, creating an immigrant's legacy in their new home of North America.

David H.T. Wong is an architect and historian.

A woman in a red dress conjures particular images, emotions and stereotypes. Eroticism. Lust. Passion. With I Am a Red Dress, acclaimed writer and performer Anna Camilleri confronts these images and stereotypes in essays, stories, and poetry.

Combining the political with the intensely personal, Camilleri’s intimate writings are premised on a search for selfhood—strong, queer, female—within and outside of her bonds to other women in her family. She says, “My work is motivated by a deep desire to understand, and in the words of Dorothy Allison, to ‘remake the world.’”

Despite the perception that we live in a progressive society, Camilleri is not convinced that we live in a world that is necessarily better for women, indigenous people and people of color, queer people, or the poor and the working class. But she recognizes that the imagination is a powerful force that can lead to better lives, and a better world.

I Am A Red Dress is Camilleri conjuring her imagination, as she seeks to find her rightful place in the world. Like a flashing red light, this collection of stories and essays signal a changing of consciousness. It’s also Camilleri attempting to unravel memory, a trace that is inextricably tied to her culture and class, and the imaginations of women in her family.

Her voice is the sound the status quo makes as it crashes to the ground.

Anna Camilleri is a Toronto-based writer and performance poet. She was co-editor of Brazen Femme, shortlisted for a Lambda Award, and co-founded Taste This, with whom she collaborated to publish Boys Like Her, winner of a ForeWord Magazine Literary Award.

In this powerful suite of stories set in Spain, Africa, and North America, populated by wild dogs, tattoo artists, and lost boys, Patrick Roscoe's characters?lonely, damaged, nomadic?are outsiders in an often brutal and punishing world. In Roscoe's beguiling laboratory, science meets emotion in experiments that attempt to decipher the forces of love, loss, and longing.

Patrick Roscoe was born on the Spanish island of Formentera. He is the author of many acclaimed novels and story collections published in Canada. The Laboratory of Love, his first new book in thirteen years, is his first to be published in the United States.

Produced in conjunction with the website Vancouver Is Awesome, this book collects stories and photos about the people, places, events, and phenomena that collectively have infused Vancouver with a distinct flavor and flair and which laid the foundation for the eclectic city that is consistently named one of the world's top tourist destinations. From vaudeville to beatniks, Rudyard Kipling to Hunter S. Thompson, violent squirrels to train-hopping dogs, Vancouver Was Awesome is an entertaining, informative, and at times jaw-dropping tour of one city's awesome past.

Lani Russwurm is an historian who runs the blog Past Tense Vancouver.

From intimate relationships to global politics, Sarah Schulman observes a continuum: that inflated accusations of harm are used to avoid accountability. Illuminating the difference between Conflict and Abuse, Schulman directly addresses our contemporary culture of scapegoating. This deep, brave, and bold work reveals how punishment replaces personal and collective self-criticism, and shows why difference is so often used to justify cruelty and shunning. Rooting the problem of escalation in negative group relationships, Schulman illuminates the ways cliques, communities, families, and religious, racial, and national groups bond through the refusal to change their self-concept. She illustrates how Supremacy behavior and Traumatized behavior resemble each other, through a shared inability to tolerate difference.

This important and sure to be controversial book illuminates such contemporary and historical issues of personal, racial, and geo-political difference as tools of escalation towards injustice, exclusion, and punishment, whether the objects of dehumanization are other individuals in our families or communities, people with HIV, African Americans, or Palestinians. Conflict Is Not Abuse is a searing rejection of the cultural phenomenon of blame, cruelty, and scapegoating, and how those in positions of power exacerbate and manipulate fear of the "other" to achieve their goals.

Sarah Schulman is a novelist, nonfiction writer, playwright, screenwriter, journalist and AIDS historian, and the author of eighteen books. A Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellow, Sarah is a Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at the City University of New York, College of Staten Island. Her novels published by Arsenal include Rat Bohemia, Empathy, After Delores, and The Mere Future. She lives in New York.

A boisterous collection of surreal, darkly humorous short stories that will delight fans of George Saunders and Alice Munro

From John Elizabeth Stintzi, the mind that created the daringly bizarre novel My Volcano, comes an electrifying collection of strange and dark tales.

In the surreal, often precarious realities of Bad Houses, a doctor discovers a double-edged cure for the Ebola virus, a college student loses a different body part each time they return home for the summer, Midas's hairdresser strives to keep his secrets, and a young girl develops a fascination with the trolls who harvest her father's pumpkin patch. At once humorous and horrifying, these stories will inevitably take residence in your mind.

Present throughout Bad Houses is a deep and abiding sense of humanity sprinkled with a dash of alienation, guilt, and instability. Filtered through a fabulist lens, these stories contemplate the struggles of modern existence. Each character lives their own haunted life, trying to navigate the path from bad houses to good homes.

Featuring Stintzi's own expressive ink illustrations, Bad Houses is a book that feels like it was penned by a trans Alice Munro mixed with a bubblier Franz Kafka. Enter if you dare.

A poignant graphic memoir about the power of art to transform and heal after the death of a loved one

In April 2020, cartoonist Sarah Leavitt's partner of twenty-two years, Donimo, died with medical assistance after years of severe chronic pain and a rapid decline at the end of her life. About a month after Donimo's death, Sarah began making comics again as a way to deal with her profound sense of grief and loss. The comics started as small sketches but quickly transformed into something totally unfamiliar to her. Abstract images, textures, poetic text, layers of watercolor, ink, and colored pencil—for Sarah, the journey through grief was impossible to convey without bold formal experimentation. She spent two years creating these comics.

The result is Something, Not Nothing, an extraordinary book that delicately articulates the vagaries of grief and the sweet remembrances of enduring love. Moving and impressionistic, Something, Not Nothing shows that alongside grief, there is room for peace, joy, and new beginnings.

The stories of Vancouver and its communities as experienced on various strolls through the city, by bestselling BC author Bill Arnott

Vancouver, one of the world's top travel destinations, is a diverse and complex city renowned for its proximity to nature, from Stanley Park and English Bay to the forests and mountains that surround it. Much has been written of Vancouver's many nature trails and paths for dedicated hikers, but what does the city have to offer to the casual urban stroller?

Join bestselling author Bill Arnott (A Season on Vancouver Island and the Gone Viking travelogues) for a revelatory journey through Vancouver—on foot—to uncover its hidden gems and best-kept secrets. A Perfect Day for a Walk details a series of strolls through Kitsilano, Granville Island, False Creek, the West End, Coal Harbour, Yaletown, Gastown, Chinatown, the Downtown Eastside, and more, accompanied by the stories and histories that make these neighborhoods unique. Engaging and sensory in style, this book is both an examination and a celebration of Vancouver, a city of remarkable beauty and undeniable challenges. Using only his feet and his unfailing sense of curiosity, Bill Arnott offers a fresh new perspective on Vancouver, from its glorious, incorrigible past to its spectacular, complicated present.

With black-and-white maps and photos.

When X Equals Marylou collects stories about photographers, balding men, ghost chasers, doppelgangers, bibliophiles and dystopian subversives, to name but a few. It’s a mix not only of characters, but of time, and of worlds—moving from Russia to Hungary to Canada, from small towns to big cities to the interior of dreams, from suburbia to welfare offices to interrogations to Alcoholics Anonymous to the Library of Alexandria.

This new collection, evocative of Jonathan Lethem and Paul Auster, is a kind of beguiling miscellany, with each story opening another door, offering another glimpse, all in the hope that readers come away not so much with the experience of having read one book, but many. Threading through these stories, however, is a foreboding sense of the incongruities of life, and our desire to mathematize our responses to the bittersweet world around us.

Praise for When X Equals Marylou:

"I was absolutely floored by the quality of stories such as Tamas Dobozy’s When X Equals Marylou . . . easily equal to any story I’ve read."—PopMatters

"A brilliant collection. His sentences move like snakes—fluid, jabbing, biting."—Michael Turner, author of Hard Core Logo

Tamas Dobozy has lived in Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, Budapest, and now teaches English at Memorial University in Newfoundland. One of the stories from When X Equals Marylou is to be published in The Chicago Review.

What Right? and its adult-themed companion What’s Wrong? are graphic interpretations of what it means to live in a society where we presumably enjoy the right to free speech, and what happens when that right is -challenged.

What Right? collects comic art that confronts the serious issues around the denial of civil rights and freedom of speech in particular, and includes work by such familiar artists as Dan -Piraro (Bizarro), Bill Griffith (Zippy the Pinhead) and many others.

A fundraising project for the Little Sister’s Defence Fund (to assist the Vancouver gay and lesbian bookstore’s legal challenge to the customs seizures they’ve been plagued by for the last 15 years), Arsenal Pulp Press is donating all proceeds over and above its production costs, and all individuals involved have donated their time, energy, and creative talents to create two marvelous collections of engaging comic art.

With an introduction by author Mark Macdonald, buyer for Little Sister’s Book & Art Emporium.

Robin Fisher is a comic activist in Vancouver.

Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize finalist

Award-winning novelist and memoirist Amber Dawn reveals a gutsy lyrical sensibility in her debut poetry collection: a collection of glosa poems written as an homage to and an interaction with queer poets such as Gertrude Stein, Christina Rossetti, and Adrienne Rich. By doing so, Dawn delves deeper into the themes of trauma, memory, and unblushing sexuality that define her work.

Amber Dawn is the author of the Lambda Award-winning novel Sub Rosa and the memoir How Poetry Saved My Life (winner of the Vancouver Book Award). Her other awards include the Writers' Trust of Canada Dayne Ogilvie Prize.

Two friends are inexplicably drawn to a carnival-like -orchid garden. A man works obsessively on restoring a mansion he has inherited. An urban dweller is haunted by the echo of cries in the night. A traveler is lured by highway signs directing him to a place that he has always known.

The stories in Home, the follow-up to Mark Macdonald’s acclaimed novel Flat, feature characters searching for truth and clarity in a world that is sometimes deceptive, usually miraculous, and often inescapable. Full of dark compulsions and seemingly irrational tendencies, Home is a place where all is not as it seems: authority figures defy reality, and fate takes charge as life and death become mere observances.

Informed by terminal illness and a trust in the wonders of the world, these stories are about anxiety, foreboding, and a sense of calm resignation and peace with matters beyond our control.

"An inventive, sometimes startling, work of fiction from a writer of formidable ability."—Globe & Mail

"These stories have the power to slip in and engrave lingering afterimages in the mind."—Quill & Quire

Praise for Flat:

"Uncanny. . . . With a deadpan worthy of Kafka, and the eye of a satellite camera."—Lambda Book Report

"It’s wonderful to read a novel and get such piercing insights from little things, described concisely."—Toronto Star

Mark Macdonald is the book buyer for Little Sister’s, Vancouver’s legendary gay and lesbian bookstore. His work has appeared in numerous anthologies and publications, including Quickies 2 and Carnal Nation.

Alfred Hitchcock's 1951 thriller based on the novel of the same name by Patricia Highsmith (author of The Talented Mr. Ripley) is about two men who meet on a train: one is a man of high social standing who wishes to divorce his unfaithful wife; the other is an enigmatic bachelor with an overbearing father. Together they enter into a murder plot that binds them to one another, with fatal consequences.

This Queer Film Classic delves into the homoerotic energy of the film, especially between the two male characters (played by Farley Granger and Robert Walker). It builds on the question of the sexuality the film puts on view, not to ask whether either character is gay so much as to explore the queer relations between sexuality and murder and the strong antisocial impulses those relations represent. The book also includes a look at the making of the film and the critical controversies over Hitchcock's representations of male homosexuality.

QUEER FILM CLASSICS is a critically acclaimed film book series that launched in 2009. It features twenty-one of the most important and influential films about and/or by LGBTQ people, made in eight different countries between 1950 and 2005, and written by leading LGBTQ film scholars and critics.

Jonathan Goldberg is a professor at Emory University, where he directs the Studies in Sexualities program. He is the author of many books and editor of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's posthumous 2012 book The Weather in Proust.

First Person Queer, an anthology of nonfiction essays written in the first person by a variety of gay and lesbian authors, was a snapshot of GLBT life and experience in the modern age. Published in 2007, it received wide acclaim and won the Lambda Literary Award for Anthologies and the Independent Publisher Award (Gold) for gay/lesbian books.

Second Person Queer is an unusual companion book: it is an anthology of essays on GLBT life written in the second person. The essays take the form of letters to family and friends, missives to homophobes, confessions to lovers, and words of advice for the next generation; they deal with subjects as large and looming as violence, coming out, gay marriage, and raising children. They are as intimate and engaging as How to Become a Visible Femme, How Not to Be Offended by Everything, and How to Become a Country Leather Bear. Powerful, funny, poignant: these are the stories of who you are as a GLBT person, or the person you would most like to be.

Contributors include S. Bear Bergman, Sky Gilbert, Matt Bernstein Sycamore (a.k.a. Mattilda), Achy Obejas, Andy Quan, Michael Rowe, Stacey May Fowles, and Amber Dawn. 

Co-editors Richard Labonté and Lawrence Schimel have written or edited over one hundred books between them; Labonté edits the annual Best Gay Erotica anthologies from Cleis Press, and Schimel’s books include PoMoSexuals and The Mammoth Book of Gay Erotica.

A mother’s beautiful elegy to her son lost to overdose.

Holden After and Before is a moving meditation on grief: a stunning book that traces Tara McGuire’s excavation and documentation of the life path of her son Holden, a graffiti artist who died of an accidental opioid overdose at the age of twenty-one. Beginning with Holden’s death and leaping through time and space, McGuire employs fact, investigation, memory, fantasy, and even fabrication in her search for understanding not only of her son’s tragic death, but also his beautiful life. She navigates and writes across the many blank spaces to form a story of discovery and humanity, examining themes of grief, pain, mental illness, trauma, creative expression, identity, and deep, unending love inside just one of the thousands of deaths that have occurred as a result of the opioid crisis. 

With poignant honesty and a heart laid bare, Holden After and Before is a beautiful and moving elegy to a son lost to overdose.

LONGLISTED FOR THE GILLER PRIZE

The slow-burning, deeply felt story of a social outcast reckoning with the wounds of her past

Regina is a socially awkward loner who is content to live a life withdrawn from everyone except her cherished pet bunny. But after seven years of silence, Regina's brother, Ricky, shows up unannounced on her doorstep, along with his daughter, Jez—a peculiar six-year-old with an unnerving vicious streak—upending Regina's quiet life.

It's clear to Regina that something terrible has happened, though the truth won't come to the surface easily. After all, Regina and Ricky lived a childhood fraught with secrets buried as deep as the fossils in the desolate landscape around them. But this secret is one that cannot stay buried for long, and its exposure sets off a calamitous journey through plains and mountains that forces Regina to confront the brutality of family love and to question how far she is willing to go to preserve it.

Rife with gothic tension and carried by fervent compassion, Bad Land is a story about the toxic nature of guilt, the fragility of memory, and the ways we shape our own versions of the truth in order to survive.

Ferocious and vulnerable poems about redefining acts of creation, destruction, deconstruction, and recreation, from a singular Indigiqueer point of view

a body more tolerable is a collection of powerful and haunting poems combining faerie tales, mythology, and a self-divinized female rage. Divided into three parts, the book examines Indigenous grief, trans identity, and frustrated desires in ways that reject perception. Gone is the soft, kind, gentle girl that author jaye simpson once thought she would become. Instead, she unravels the sticky threads of colonialism with poems that exact lyrical acts of self-surgery.

In these visceral poems, teeth gleam, graze skin, and sink into flesh, becoming bloodied and exposing the animalistic hunger that lies within. Pulsating with yearning and possibility, a body more tolerable is a book that resists typical notions of physicality and sex to dream of a world more divine. It is a call-out into the canon for a new age, one filled with retribution and recompense.

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.

First published to acclaim in Australia, Look Who's Morphing by Asian Australian writer Tom Cho is a funny, fantastical, often outlandish collection of stories firmly grounded in popular culture. Often with his family, the book's central character undergoes a series of startling physical transformations, shape-shifting through figures drawn from film and television, music and books, porn flicks and comics. He is Godzilla, a Muppet, a gay white male stud, and Whitney Houston's bodyguard; the Fonz, a robot, the von Trapp family's caretaker, a Ford Bronco 4x4—and in the book's lavish climax, a one-hundred-foot-tall guitar-wielding rock star performing for an adoring troupe of fans in Tokyo.

Throughout the stories, there is a pervasive questioning of the nature of identity, whether cultural, racial, sexual, gender, or all of the above, and the way it is constructed in a world filled with the white noise of pop culture. Look Who's Morphing is a stylish, highly entertaining literary debut in which nothing—not even one's body—can be taken for granted.

Tom Cho is a trans writer who began writing fiction in his mid teens in Australia, where he was influenced by the YA series Sweet Valley High. His stories have appeared in publications in Australia and elsewhere, and he has performed at events and festivals around the world, including in the award-winning show Hello Kitty, which combines literature with power ballads. Look Who's Morphing is his first book.

The Uncanny: Experiments in Cyborg Culture is a dazzling and provocative examination of the cyborg—the concept of man-as-machine—in popular culture. The title is from a 1919 essay by Sigmund Freud (and included in the book), which deals with the sensation of "uncanniness" as being strange and familiar at the same time.

The idea of the cyborg has been in existence for decades, and is one of the most persistent cultural images of the past century. The cyborg is a cypher—an enigmatic image of figure that is human but not human, a machine but not a machine, existing at the intersection of science, technology, and culture.

The Uncanny offers essays that examine the representation of the cyborg from a contemporary perspective, as well as reprinted historical texts that discuss the representation of the uncanny cyborg body. It also suggests a significant link between the visual arts and popular culture in the evolving representation of the cyborg, beginning as early as the 19th-century, presenting the cyborg as an "uncanny" image that reflects our shared fascination and dread of the machine and its presence in our daily lives.

A copublication with the Vancouver Art Gallery, The Uncanny is a thoughtful and beautifully presented examination of cyborg culture that will help to define our sense of self as we forge ahead into the uncertain future.

Includes essays by Sigmund Freud, William Gibson, Donna Haraway, and Toshiya Ueno, and artwork by Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Jacob Epstein, Eadweard Muybridge, Takashi Murakami, Mariko Mori, Gary Hill, and Tony Oursler.

Includes 32 full-color photographs and more than 60 black-and-white images.

"Brilliant . . . in its ability to match gripping popular culture with first-rate intellectual enquiry."—Vancouver Sun

"Immensely ambitious."—Georgia Straight

Bruce Grenville is a senior curator with the Vancouver Art Gallery.

In May 2021, the world was shocked by the news of the detection of 215 unmarked graves on the grounds of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School (KIRS) in British Columbia, Canada. Ground-penetrating radar established the deaths of students as young as three in the infamous residential school system, where children were systematically removed from their families and brought to the schools. At these Christian-run and government-supported institutions, they were subjected to physical, mental and sexual abuse while their Indigenous languages and traditions were stifled and denounced. The egregious abuses suffered at residential schools everywhere created a multi-generational legacy of trauma for those who survived and, as the 2021 discoveries confirmed, death for too many.

“Tsquelmucwílc” (pronounced cha-CAL-mux-weel) is a Secwepemc phrase loosely translated as “We return to being human again.” Tsqelmucwílc is the story of those who survived the Kamloops Indian Residential School, based on the book Resistance and Renewal, a groundbreaking history of the school published in 1988―the first book on residential schools ever published in Canada. Tsqelmucwílc includes the original text as well as new material by the original book’s author, Celia Haig-Brown; essays by Secwepemc poet and KIRS survivor Garry Gottfriedson and Nuu-Chah-Nulth elder and residential school survivor Randy Fred; and first-hand reminiscences by other survivors of KIRS as well as their children on their experience of KIRS and the impact of their residential school trauma throughout their lives.

Read both within and outside the context of the grim 2021 discoveries, Tsqelmucwílc is a tragic story in the history of Indigenous peoples of the indignities suffered at the hands of their colonizers, but it is equally a remarkable tale of Indigenous survival, resilience, and courage.

Wayde Compton's debut story collection is imbued with the color of speculative fiction; one strand of stories follows the emergence of a volcanic island, which alternatively becomes the site of a radical Native peoples' occupation, a real-estate development, and finally a detention center for illegal immigrants. Moving from 2001 through to 2025, The Outer Harbour is at once a history book and a cautionary tale of the future, condensing and confounding our preconceived ideas around race, migration, gentrification, and home.

Wayde Compton is the author of three poetry collections. He is director of the Writer's Studio at Simon Fraser University.

Eli and his parents have returned to their ancestral home in a small mountain town to escape their hectic city lives, where young Eli finds himself answering for the mistakes of the house’s first owner, his great-great grandfather Elijah Mountain. Both Eli and Amy, the enigmatic Ktunaxa girl next door, have a foot in multiple worlds, and they relive and account for their past lives of seduction and betrayal. A new kind of ghost story, In Case I Go is about the many ways we’re haunted by the misdeeds of our ancestors.

Angie Abdou’s previous novels include Between and The Bone Cage.

A remarkably frank memoir about interdependence, grieving, and parenting as a queer femme that doesn't leave out the messy or the erotic

Staying Power, Zena Sharman's memoir in essays, is a beautiful and honest journey of care work, grief, parenting, and chosen family in the wake of intergenerational trauma. Exploring the lessons and inheritances of being raised by survivors of complex traumas, the book challenges the notion that one must be healed in order to parent well and celebrates the transformative power of queer family-making beyond gay marriage and assimilation into the nuclear family.

The book, which recounts the author's experiences of raising three children in a four-parent queer family, asks, "If leaving has helped you survive, how do you learn to stay?" Sharman finds answers in queer kinship, femme erotics, leatherdyke lineages, and the radical possibilities inherent in doing motherwork outside of motherhood, recognizing that sometimes you fight the thing you want most.

Staying Power is a moving, deeply personal account of one person's journey of unlearning independence through an experiment in queer collective care.

The first English translation of an erotic novel published in China in the 17th century, regarded as a notorious classic in Chinese literature, long banned in China. Shockingly explicit, it’s a story of betrayal, lust, revenge, and intrigue.

In this stunning, Lambda Literary Award-winning debut novel, Amber Dawn subverts the classic hero's quest adventure to create a dark post-feminist vision. Sub Rosa's reluctant heroine is a teenaged runaway named "Little"; she stumbles upon an underground society of ghosts and magicians, missing girls and would-be johns: a place called Sub Rosa. Not long after she is initiated into this family of magical prostitutes, Little is called upon to lead them through a maze of feral darkness: a calling burdened with grotesque enemies, strange allies, and memories from a foggy past. Sub Rosa is a beautiful, gutsy, fantastical allegory of our times.

“Tough yet sensitive, Franny is a tribute to those who have helped so many in the current generation of gay men and women escape the prison of individual isolation.”—Library Journal

In Franny, the Queen of Provincetown, John Preston created one of his most memorable characters from among the more than 30 books he authored or edited over his storied career. Franny is a proud, protective friend to the gay men of Provincetown, Massachusetts, as they fight their battles against self-hatred and ostracism. Haunted by the loss of his first love, Franny vows never to let fear and anger consume those who are treated differently for who they are. It’s Franny’s goal to ensure that there is a place in the world for everyone who feels they do not belong.

First published to wide acclaim in 1983, Franny was a book of gay heroism and camaraderie in the shadow of the burgeoning AIDS crisis. Today, one can read Franny with a sense of nostalgia and with the knowledge that Franny’s dreams of a society that accepts gays and lesbians without question is closer to fruition, but far from complete.

This edition features an appendix of supplementary materials about Franny and the author, as well as an introduction by Michael Lowenthal, the novelist and anthologist and author of two books, including the Lambda Award-nominated Avoidance.

Little Sister’s Classics is an Arsenal Pulp Press imprint dedicated to reviving lost and out-of-print gay and lesbian classic books, both fiction and nonfiction. The series is produced in conjunction with Little Sister’s Books, the heroic gay Vancouver bookstore well-known for its anti-censorship efforts.

John Preston was the author or editor of more than 30 books during his 20-year writing career. His books include Mr. Benson, The Big Gay Book, Hometown, and Flesh and the Word volumes 1, 2, and 3 (as editor). He died of AIDS-related complications in 1994.

In this taut, beautifully layered novel by Lambda Literary and Ferro-Grumley Award finalist Cox (Shuck, Krakow Melt), Michael-David is a paranoid actor who feels that fame has ruined him. When a film shoot with wolves for co-stars takes a troubling turn, he disappears shortly before the premiere and barricades himself in an L.A. hotel, convinced that he’s cursed and must ride it out in hiding. He begins to explore the hotel’s secret passageways with the help of a young skateboarder he befriends, away from the glare of the spotlight. Meanwhile, the film’s director, suspicious that Michael-David is having an affair with his ex, is trying to find him in time for the premiere. A long-dormant nicotine addiction leads him closer to the target and into the path of danger, while the olves also sniff out Michael-David for one final scene.

A work of dream logic, Basement of Wolves is a haunting and cinematic romp through the minefields of identity crisis.

A powerful, tragicomic novel about power, culture, and identity politics in contemporary America, as seen through the eyes of an African student. Jonah Ayot is a graduate student from a fictional central African nation, studying in a fictional American city some time after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003; the novel mirrors Jonah’s own struggle as a newcomer to American life, trying to organize his perceptions around an identity that is global rather than parochial.

But those perceptions become muddied in the reality of the new war zone—on American soil, where the foreign becomes familiar, and the familiar is no longer what it used to be.

David N. Odhiambo is a novelist, poet, and playwright and the author of two previous novels, Kipligat’s Chance and Diss/ed Banded Nation. Born in Nairobi, Kenya, he now resides in Honolulu, Hawaii.

Sarah Kramer is a vegan superstar; she was named “The World’s Coolest Vegan” by Herbivore Magazine, and her first three cookbooks have sold a combined total of over two hundred thousand copies. Vegan a Go-Go! represents a change of pace for Sarah: it is a cookbook and more for vegan travelers, many of whom are daunted by the idea of going on the road and being able to locate and/or prepare the kind of nutritious animal-free meals they enjoy at home.

The new book includes 150 recipes, many of them new, and others that have been adapted from her earlier books. All of the recipes are easy to prepare with a minimum of ingredients and are guaranteed to deliver energy, nutrition, and great flavor. The rest of the book contains information and advice pertinent to vegan travelers, from how to deconstruct a restaurant menu to what food items are best suited to carry around in your luggage or handbag. There’s even a section on “How to Say ‘I Am Vegan’” in numerous languages.

The book is also designed with the traveler in mind: it is small enough to slip into one’s pocket or purse, yet has a reinforced cover to ensure durability under the harshest conditions. Full of Sarah’s high-energy wit and verve, Vegan a Go-Go! makes life for vegan travelers a lot less stressful and a lot more fun.

A Queer Film Classic on cinematic camp icon John Waters' 1974 dark comedy, starring the legendary Divine as Dawn Davenport, a young troublemaker who embarks on a mind-bending journey in a world "where crime and beauty are the same." Chris Holmlund's book examines the film's camp aethestic and its position in the history of independent film that also includes Waters' infamous 1972 film Pink Flamingos.

Chris Holmlund is a Professor of Film, Women's Studies and French at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. Her previous books include American Cinema of the 1990s (Rutgers University Press) and Impossible Bodies (Routledge).

Shortlisted for the Lambda Literary Award and Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBT Fiction, this novel by Daniel Allen Cox (Shuck; Basement of Wolves) is an incendiary story about two pyromaniacs who fight homophobia in Krakow, one of the fronts of the Solidarnosc revolution. It's 2005 and Poland's moral crisis escalates as Pope John Paul II approaches death while the country's president makes homophobic declarations. Radek is a bisexual artist convinced that fire is the great stabilizer; he meets Dorota, literature student and budding pyromaniac. Driven by rage and sexual curiosity, they buck Church, government, and the LGBT community to find sexual freedom, escaping their enemies by scaling the crumbling walls and ideas of the city.

Vivek Shraya's debut collection of poetry is a bold and timely interrogation of skin—its origins, functions, and limitations. Poems that range in style from starkly concrete to limber break down the barriers that prevent understanding of what it means to be racialized. Shraya paints the face of everyday racism with words, rendering it visible, tangible and undeniable.

Vivek Shraya is a writer, musician, and filmmaker whose previous books include God Loves Hair and She of the Mountains. She lives in Toronto.

In this amazing, wide-ranging anthology of nonfiction essays, contributors write intimate and honest first-person accounts of queer experience, from coming out to “passing” as straight to growing old to living proud. These are the stories of contemporary gay and lesbian life—and by definition, are funny, sad, hopeful, and truthful. Representing a diversity of genders, ages, races, and orientations, and edited by two acclaimed writers and anthologists (who between them have written or edited almost one hundred books), First Person Queer puts the “personal” back into “queer.”

At age nineteen, the queer narrator of Green Glass Ghosts steps off a bus in downtown Vancouver, a city where the faceless condo towers of the wealthy loom over the streets to the east where folks are just trying to get by, against the deceptively beautiful backdrop of snow-capped mountains and sparkling ocean. It’s the year 2000, and the world is still mostly analogue—pagers are the best way to get ahold of someone and resumés are printed out on paper and dropped off in person, and what’s this new fad called webmail?

Our hopeful hero arrives on the West Coast on the cusp of adulthood, fleeing a traumatic childhood in an unsafe family plagued by religious extremism, mental health crises, and abuse in a conservative town not known for accepting difference. They’re eager to build a new life among like-minded folks, and before they know it, they’ve got a job, an apartment, and a relationship, dancing, busking, and making out in bars, parks, art spaces, and apartments across the city. But their search for belonging and stability is buried in drinking, jealousy, and painful memories of the past, distracting the protagonist from their ultimate goal of playing live music and spurring them to an emotional crisis. If they can’t learn to care for themselves, how will they ever find true connection and community?

With haunting illustrations by Gem Hall that conjure the moody, misty urban landscape, Green Glass Ghosts is an evocation of that delicate, aching moment between youth and adulthood when we are trying, and often failing, to become the person we dream ourselves to be.

Ages 14 and up.

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).

"X" is one of the most provocative representations in contemporary culture: a symbol of capital, power, waste, and illicit desire. Based on the connection between language and lack, Sign after the X ______ investigates the letter "X" that is used in our culture as part of a complex sign system that encompasses the evolution of language back to its mythic origins.

Including many of her drawings, Marina Roy uses narrative—and the book conventions of the dedication, preface, introduction, postscript, errata, and index—to form a compendium of X words that is part philosophical treatise on the foundations of image and text, part illustration, part math lesson, and part language primer.

For the author, the combination of text and image arises from a desire to make words "flesh" as it were, a desire to treat text as a thing that, in its visual impact, and in its arbitrary association with everyday objects, creates new meaning, leading to revelations about "how myth is constructed in our culture."

Beguiling in its ambitions, Sign after the X ______ is a subjective, subversive dictionary of modern culture that forces readers to see the world in a new light.

"An original and a joy to read. . . . Sign after the X ______ is a buffet, a collage. . . ."—Globe & Mail

"Delightful in conception. . . . This is meaty, interesting stuff, and its eclecticism is lovely."—Georgia Straight

"Clever, insidious."—PopMatters.com

Marina Roy is an artist whose practice includes sculpture, printmaking, painting, photography, and bookworks. She teaches fine arts at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

Iron Goddess of Mercyby Lambda Literary Award winner Larissa Lai (for the novel The Tiger Flu) is a long poem that captures the vengeful yet hopeful movement of the Furies mid-whirl and dance with them through the horror of the long now. Inspired by the tumultuous history of Hong Kong, from the Japanese and British occupations to the ongoing pro-democracy protests, the poem interrogates the complicated notion of identity, offering a prism through which the term “Asian” can be understood to make sense of a complex set of relations. The self crystallizes in moments of solidity, only to dissolve and whirl away again. The poet is a windsock, catching all the affect that blows at her and ballooning to fullness, only to empty again when the wind changes direction. Iron Goddess of Mercy is a game of mah jong played deep into the night, an endless gamble.

Presented in sixty-four fragments to honor the sixty-four hexagrams of the I Ching, Iron Goddess of Mercy also borrows from haibun, a traditional Japanese form of travel writing in which each diary entry closes with a haiku. The poem dizzies, turns on itself. It rants, it curses, it writes love letters, but as the Iron Goddess is ever changing, so is the object of her address: a maenad, Kool-Aid, Chiang Kai-shek, the economy, a clown, freedom of speech, a brother, a bother, a typist, a monster, a machine, Iris Chang, Hannah Arendt, the Greek warrior Achilles, or a deer caught in the headlights.

Finally, a balm to the poem’s devastating passion and fury, Iron Goddess of Mercy is also a type of oolong tea, a most fragrant infusion said to have been a gift from the

compassionate bodhisattva Guan Yin.

Summoning the ghosts of history and politics, Iron Goddess of Mercy explores the complexities of identity through the lens of rage and empowerment.