Arsenal Pulp Press

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

City of Vancouver Book Award winner

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Praise for Close to Spider Man:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

International Latino Book Award winner, Best Cookbook

More than just a cookbook, Decolonize Your Diet redefines what is meant by "traditional" Mexican food by reaching back through hundreds of years of history to reclaim heritage crops as a source of protection from modern diseases of development. Authors Luz Calvo and Catriona Rueda Esquibel are life partners; when Luz was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2006, they both radically changed their diets and began seeking out recipes featuring healthy, vegetarian Mexican foods. They promote a diet that is rich in plants indigenous to the Americas (corn, beans, squash, greens, herbs, and seeds), and are passionate about the idea that Latinos in America, specifically Mexicans, need to ditch the fast food and return to their own culture's food roots for both physical health and spiritual fulfillment.

This vegetarian cookbook features over 100 colorful, recipes based on Mesoamerican cuisine and also includes contributions from indigenous cultures throughout the Americas, such as Kabocha Squash in Green Pipian, Aguachile de Quinoa, Mesquite Corn Tortillas, Tepary Bean Salad, and Amaranth Chocolate Cake. Steeped in history but very much rooted in the contemporary world, Decolonize Your Diet will introduce readers to the the energizing, healing properties of a plant-based Mexican American diet.

Full-color throughout.

Luz Calvo and Catriona Rueda Esquibel are professors at California State East Bay and San Francisco State University, respectively. They grow fruits, vegetables, and herbs on their small urban farm. This is their first book.

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.

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

A 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.

In this fast and furious crime novel set in 1983, a sex worker named Irina absconds with a shipment of drugs and $300,000 in dirty money, setting into motion a wild chain reaction involving bounty hunters, corrupt cops, low-brow scammers, and her bewildered, straight-laced ex-husband. Add to this devil's brew the intoxicating settings of sushi bars, nightclubs, and New Wave art galleries circa the mid-eighties, and you get Straight to the Head: a beguiling, funny novel that blows the roof off traditional crime fiction.

Fraser Nixon is the author of The Man Who Killed, shortlisted for the Amazon.ca Best First Novel Award.

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.

This is the first novel by Larry Duplechan in fifteen years, and the fourth to feature his alter ego protagonist Johnnie Ray Rousseau, a gay black man of Louisiana Creole stock. When we first met Johnnie Ray in the novel Blackbird, he was a gay teenager in love with the star of a high school play; now he’s forty-eight, still handsome and gym-built, but admittedly vain and looking down the short road to fifty. In the midst of a midlife crisis, he falls for a much younger man with some serious Daddy issues; throughout it all, Johnnie Ray tries to look at love (and his life) from both sides now (to borrow a phrase from his idol Joni Mitchell). Got ’Til It’s Gone is a queer romantic comedy for the ages.

Larry Duplechan is the author of four previous novels, including Blackbird, published in a new edition by Arsenal Pulp Press in 2006. He is a deacon at the Metropolitan Community Church in the Valley in North Hollywood, California.

Winner of the thirty-fourth annual 3-Day Novel Contest, the infamous literary marathon held every Labor Day weekend.

Music journalist Evan Strocker has almost finished a book about his time with Heidegger Stairwell, a legendary indie-rock band. But the band thinks he's left a little too much of himself on the page—letting his experiences as a transgender man and his complicated "romance" with the lead guitarist eclipse the story of the group's dramatic rise and fall. Through notes and marginalia, the musicians argue over their friend's version of the truth and fight to put their own testimony on record.

Kayt Burgess has an MA in creative writing from Bath Spa University (UK). This is her first novel.

We all look forward to spring and summer, when the sun returns, the blooms bud, and we feel the urge to reacquaint ourselves with the great outdoors. But camping and hiking trips, whether day treks or week-long journeys, beg an age-old question: what to bring along to eat? Chef in Your Backpack proves that camping and hiking meals don’t always have to be about stale sandwiches and bagged veggies. With a little ingenuity and know-how, and a bit of advance planning, you can be dining in high style around the campfire.

Nicole Bassett is an outdoors enthusiast who has been developing and preparing outdoor meal recipes for years. She believes in the notion that a great yet easy-to-make meal is not only more satisfying, but is more nutritious and energizing for your hikes and treks. She also offers great tips for keeping your food safe from spoilage and not-so-friendly creatures, as well as nifty ideas like using film canisters to store spices, and using your camping mug as a measuring cup.

Nicole offers a wide-range of meal ideas, from power breakfasts to soul-nurturing dinners, all of which can either be prepared in their entirety outdoors or with a -little preparation at home before you go.

With this Chef in Your Backpack, camping and hiking never tasted so good!

Nicole Bassett grew up in the wilds of northern British Columbia, Canada. After moving to Vancouver to attend school, she now lives in Toronto where, among other things, she is developing a television series based on Chef in Your Backpack.

Winner, Lambda Literary Award (LGBT Anthology)

The Remedy invites writers and readers to imagine what we need to create healthy, resilient, and thriving LGBTQ communities. This anthology is a diverse collection of real-life stories from queer and trans people on their own health-care experiences and challenges, from gay men living with HIV who remember the systemic resistance to their health-care needs, to a lesbian couple dealing with the experience of cancer, to young trans people who struggle to find health-care providers who treat them with dignity and respect. The book also includes essays by health-care providers, activists and leaders with something to say about the challenges, politics, and opportunities surrounding LGBTQ health issues.

Both exceptionally moving and an incendiary call-to-arms, The Remedy is a must-read for anyone—gay, straight, trans, and otherwise—passionately concerned about the right to proper health care for all.

Contributors include Amber Dawn, Sinclair Sexsmith, Francisco Ibanez-Carrasco, Cooper Lee Bombardier, Kara Sievewright, and Kelli Dunham.

Zena Sharman is a passionate advocate for queer and trans health. She has over a decade's experience in health research; currently she is Director of Strategy at the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research. Zena is also co-editor of Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme. She lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.

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

Native American cuisine comes of age in this elegant, contemporary collection that reinterprets and updates traditional Native recipes with modern, healthy twists. Andrew George Jr. was head chef for aboriginal foods at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver; his imaginative menus reflect the diverse new culinary landscape while being mindful of an ages-old reverence for the land and sea, reflecting the growing interest in a niche cuisine that is rapidly moving into the mainstream to become the "next big thing" among food trends. Andrew also works actively at making Native foods healthier and more nutritious, given that Native peoples suffer from diabetes at twice the rates of non-Natives; his recipes are lighter, less caloric, and include Asian touches, such as bison ribs with Thai spices, and a sushi roll with various cooked fish wrapped in nori. Other dishes include venison barley soup, wild berry crumble, seas asparagus salad, and buffalo tourtière.

Full of healthy, delicious, and thoroughly North American fare, Modern Native Feasts is the first Native American foods cookbook to go beyond the traditional and take a step into the twenty-first century.

Andrew George Jr. is a member of the Wet'suwet'en Nation in British Columbia. He participated on the first all-Native team at the Culinary Olympics in Frankfurt, Germany, and in 2012 was part of a group of chefs from twenty-five countries on a US State Department initiative called "Culinary Diplomacy: Promoting Cultural Understanding Through Food." His first book, A Feast for All Seasons, was published in 2010.

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

Cold Case Vancouver delves into fifty years of some of Vancouver's most baffling unsolved murders. In 1953, two little boys were found murdered in the city's storied Stanley Park, and who remain unidentified to this day. In 1975, a country singer was murdered just as she was on the verge of an amazing career. And in 1994, Nick Masee, a retired banker with connections to the renegade Vancouver Stock Exchange, disappeared along with his wife Lisa, their bodies never found. Cold Case Vancouver is an intriguing whodunit for true-crime aficionados and armchair detectives.

Eve Lazarus's previous books include Sensational Vancouver.

Since it was first published in 1999, How It All Vegan! has become a bible for vegan cooks, both diehard and newly converted; its basic introduction to the tenets of vegan living and eating, combined with Sarah Kramer's and Tanya Barnard's winning charm, made it an essential cookbook for anyone considering eschewing animal products from their diet. It won VegNews' Veggie Award for Best Cookbook twice, has been reprinted fourteen times, and spawned several successful sequels (including The Garden of Vegan, La Dolce Vegan!, and last year's Vegan à Go-Go!).

In the ten years since How It All Vegan! was first published, however, veganism has "come out of the closet," and is now considered a legitimate diet and lifestyle not only for those wishing to improve their health, but also for those who care deeply about the welfare of animals. This tenth-anniversary edition includes a new color photo section and new recipes; it also includes a new introduction by co-author Sarah Kramer, who speaks personally and passionately about the impact of veganism on her life over the past decade.

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.

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

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.

The stories in Skids are the stories of street kids; they are harrowing yet moving confessionals about young kids on their own, many of them runaways or addicts, eking out existences in shelters, treatment centers, or dysfunctional families. Told in the vernacular of the street, Skids reverberates with a sense of urgency and desperation, but with compassion and optimism as well. The book, based on the author’s personal experiences, pays homage to the street kids she knew by honoring their stories and making them matter.

This is Cathleen With’s first story collection.

The 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 story that questions which gang was tougher: the petty criminals, or the police themselves.

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

“Bloodknots is a truly singular and remarkable book of stories. Lyrical and disturbing, this is the work of a writer of unmistakable talent.”—Joan Silber, author of Ideas of Heaven, a National Book Award nominee

“Bloodknots is a marvelous collection peopled by unforgettable characters.”—Nalini Warriar, author of Blues from the Malabar Coast and a McAuslan Book Award winner

A collection of beguiling stories from an American writer who excels at depicting the family ties that bind: fathers, mothers, sons, and daughters whose connections to one another are as fragile as they are irrevocable. Stubbornly honest, and imbued with a sensibility that speaks to the author’s Jewish heritage, Ami Sands Brodoff writes with authority, passion, and razor-sharp detail about identity and the longing for human connections in the face of loss and exclusion. Her stories evoke the delicate familial weaves of Alice Munro, exposing the raw nerves of shattered lives redeemed by the willingness to forgive. Written close to the senses, Bloodknots penetrates to the core.

Ami Sands Brodoff is from New York and also lived in Princeton, New Jersey, before relocating with her husband to Montreal, where she writes and teaches creative writing. Her work has received a Pushcart Prize nomination and has been anthologized in numerous journals and book collections. Her first book, Can You See Me?, received wide acclaim, including a rave from Publishers Weekly.

“More persuasively than any other contemporary novelist, Sarah Schulman traces the ways in which the disenfranchisement that begins as a political evil pervades every aspect of life, from the metaphysical and spiritual to the most intimate moments of two people together.”—Tony Kushner

“My surrender to Rat Bohemia is a testimonial to its gimlet-eyed accuracy, its zero-degree honesty. . . . [It blows] the traditional novel off its hinges.”—Edmund White, The New York Times Book Review

First published in 1995, this award-winning novel is a bold, achingly honest story set in the “rat bohemia” of New York City, whose huddled masses include gay men and lesbians abandoned by their families and forced to find new bonds with one another in the wake of this loss. Navigating the currents of the city are three friends: Rita Mae, a rat exterminator; Killer, a career plant-waterer; and David, an HIV-positive writer. Together, they seek new ways to be truthful and honest about their lives as others around them avert their glances. Alternately elegiac, defiant, and funny, Rat Bohemia is an expansive novel about how one can cope with loss and heal the wounds of the past by reinventing oneself in the city.

Rat Bohemia won the Ferro-Grumley Award for Lesbian Fiction and was named one of the “100 Best Gay and Lesbian Novels of All Time” by the Publishing Triangle.

For more than thirty years, Paul Yee has written about his Chinese-Canadian heritage in award-winning books for young readers as well as adult non-fiction. Here, in his first work of fiction for adults, he takes us on a harrowing journey into a milestone event of Canadian history: the use of Chinese coolies to help build the Canadian Pacific Railway in British Columbia in hazardous conditions.

After the CPR is built in 1885, Yang Hok, a former coolie, treks along the railway to return his half-Chinese/half-Native son to the boy's mother where he confronts the conflicts arising from road-building among the Chinese and Native peoples. Hok's guide on the often perilous trip, Sam Bing Lew, also of mixed Chinese-Native blood, urges Hok to take his son to China, while Hok has dreams of finding fortune in America. The two men agree on little, as many issues fester between Chinese and Natives at a time when both races were disdained as inferior by whites ("redbeards").

This far-reaching novel crackles with the brutal, visceral energy of the time—a period marked by contraband, illegal gambling, disfigurement, and death. It also depicts the bawdy world of Chinese "bachelors," whose families remained in China while they worked in Canada, and who enjoyed more freedom to live their lives without restraint. Yang Hok is not an easy man to like; but through the blood and sweat of his experience, he aspires to become the "superior man" he knows he should be. Boldly frank and steeped in history, A Superior Man paints a vivid portrait of the experience of the Chinese in North America in the 19th century.

Paul Yee's twenty-seven books for young people include the Governor General's Award-winning Ghost Train. This is his first novel for adults.

Get It Ripe is a vegan cookbook for the twenty-first century with an emphasis on holistic living and whole food (i.e. unprocessed and unrefined) ingredients. Jae Steele is a registered holistic nutritionist; she has also been a professional vegan baker and has worked on an East Coast organic farm. Her life experiences and her love of vegan whole foods are at the heart of Get It Ripe, which not only includes uncomplicated yet delicious animal-free recipes, but advice and information on various aspects of holistic vegan living, including cleansing and detox programs, yoga and meditation, ethical consumerism, and the connections among mind, body, and spirit.

The two hundred recipes include Butternut Risotto, Chipotle Black-Eyed Peas with Maple Mashed Sweet Potatoes, Cauliflower Chickpea Curry, Pad Thai, Fettuccini No-Fredo, Cinnamon Pumpkin Soup, Banana Creem Pie, and Cowgrrrl Cookies. Two-color throughout, the book also includes sixteen full-color recipe photographs.

Get healthy and energetic with Get It Ripe.

In addition to being a registered holistic nutritionist, Jae Steele has authored numerous vegan cookzines and runs the blog Domestic Affair. She lives in Montreal.