A fictionalized, meditative chronicle of life among the Innu in rural northeastern Quebec.

Kuessipan ("to you" in the Innu language) is an extraordinary, meditative novel about life among the Native Innu people in the wilds of northeastern Quebec. Naomi Fontaine, herself an Innu, wrote this novel (in French) at the age of twenty-three; with grace an …

Winner, Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize (BC Book Prizes)
Finalist, Vancouver Book Award

A sharply observed novel told in six voices, Anatomy of a Girl Gang is the powerful exploration of a young girl gang in Vancouver called the Black Roses: Mac, the self-appointed leader and mastermind; Mercy, the Punjabi princess with a skill for theft; Kayos, their fo …

On February 28, 2013, Benedict XVI became the first pope in nearly 600 years to resign. In abandoning a role that nearly every one of his predecessors had seen as a calling from God to be heeded until death, Joseph Ratzinger, the man who became Benedict, also relinquished a controversial religious career in which he was largely responsible for the …

Rent boys, aristocrats, artists, and criminals populate this sweeping novel in which author Jonathan Kemp skillfully interweaves the lives and loves of three very different men in gay London across the decades.

In the 1890s, a young man named Jack apprentices as a rent boy and discovers a life of pleasure and excess that leads to new friendships, mo …

The art of the convivial, joyful meal shared with friends and family has evolved in recent years. The growing popularity of dinner clubs and themed potlucks attests to our desire for get-togethers at home that are out of the ordinary; as well, temporary pop-ups and secret supper locales (where the address is often kept under wraps) are redefining t …

Vancouver Book Award winner; Lambda Literary Award finalist

A memoir about sex work and sexuality, and how writing became the author's lifeline.

Amber Dawn's acclaimed first novel Sub Rosa, a darkly intoxicating fantasy about a group of magical prostitutes who band together to fend off bad johns in a fantastical underworld, won a Lambda Literary Awar …

On January 12, 2010, novelist Dany Laferriere had just ordered dinner at a Port-au-Prince restaurant with a friend when the earthquake struck. He survived; some 300,000 others did not. The quake caused widespread destruction and left over 1 million homeless; it also revealed flaws in the impoverished nation's infrastructure that will take a generat …

BC Book Prize finalist

Few Vancouver nightspots evoke such a fabled history as the Penthouse Nightclub. The after-hours watering hole for the famous and infamous, the Penthouse was opened in 1947 by brothers Joe, Ross, Mickey, and Jimmy Filippone and soon became the place to see and be seen in Vancouver in the 1950s and '60s. Acts like Sammy Davis J …

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 tha …

Winner, Chinese American Library Association Best Book Award winner (Fiction)

The history of Chinese immigration to Canada and the US over the past 100-plus years has been fraught with sadness and indignity; newcomers to North America encountered discrimination, subjugation, and separation from loved ones. As well, in Canada the Chinese head tax was …

Raw food diets have exploded in popularity in recent years; some believe that the cooking process destroys nutrients and even produces dangerous chemicals through 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 inven …

A doe-eyed doll, a smiley-faced cupcake, a sweet plush kitten: they're cute--and cute is at the heart of a growing legion of adult collectors and enthusiasts who live and breathe all things cuddly and adorable.

Pamela Klaffke, author of Spree: A Cultural History of Shopping and herself an avid collector of cute since she was a child, takes readers o …

Lambda Literary Award Finalist

Transgender indie electronica singer-songwriter Rae Spoon has six albums to their credit, including 2012's I Can't Keep All of Our Secrets. This first book by Rae (who uses "they" as a pronoun) is a candid, powerful story about a young person growing up queer in a strict Pentecostal family in Alberta.

The narrator atten …

Lambda Literary Award and Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBT Fiction Finalist

A frustrated Canadian 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 attr …

The 'stache is back! After decades of being much maligned in Western culture, the mustache is enjoying a cultural renaissance, thanks to the annual phenomenon of Movember (the international campaign in which men grow facial hair during the month of November to raise funds for prostate cancer research; in 2011, 1.8 million men in fourteen countries …

Danuta Gleed Literary Award runnerup

A line-dancing aficionado visits his brother in jail in hopes of mending their relationship, and instead discovers his own unwitting role in his brother's failed life. After the death of his wife and children, a logger tries to survive the Thanksgiving weekend on his own. A delinquent teen's life is changed fore …

Ayurveda, the 5,000-year-old healing tradition from India linked to the development of yoga, is based on the concept that one's physical, mental, and spiritual well-being comes from a number of sources, including a healthful diet based on one's individual constitution.

In this all-vegetarian cookbook, Amrita Sondhi, author of The Modern Ayurvedic Co …

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 and day vendors, the Public Market is the main draw at Granville Island, which also features art galleries, retail shops, a live theatre, a hotel, and an art school as well as a functioning …

Billeh Nickerson is a Vancouver-based poet well-known across Canada for his playful, witty observations on sex and culture. In Impact, his third poetry collection from Arsenal, Billeh turns his attention to a more serious subject that has fascinated him ever since he was a child: the sinking of the Titanic.

Published on the 100th anniversary of the …

Finalist, City of Vancouver Book Award

"V6A" is the postal prefix for what is often described as "the poorest neighbourhood in Canada"--Vancouver's Downtown Eastside (DTES). Statistics about the area depict conditions related to crime, drugs, sex work, and poverty that overshadow another reality based on self determination.

The anthology V6A refracts …

In this taut, beautifully layered novel by Lambda Literary, ReLit, 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, conv …

Ivan E. Coyote is one of Canada's best-loved storytellers; their honest, wry, plain-spoken tales of growing up in the Yukon and living out loud on the west coast have attracted readers and live audiences around the world. For many years, Ivan has performed in high schools, where their talks have inspired and galvanized many young people to embrace …

This fantastical historical novel, narrated by a child yet to be born, traces the lives of three generations of a Parsi family in India from the late 1800s to present day. The narrative follows the family from the intricacies of village life in the jungles of central India to the complications of urban life in turbulent pre- and post-independence s …

Shoot It! is a revealing history of how Hollywood, with its eye on the bottom line, lost its ability to support the work of creative filmmakers; it is also a passionate portrait of the independent filmmakers who have risen up to fill the void.

The book examines the Hollywood studio system over several decades, from the period when it produced more …

Stan Douglas: Abbott & Cordova, 7 August 1971, an art book on the politics of urban conflict, is based on the work of Stan Douglas, one of Canada's most revered contemporary artists. His film and video installations, photographs, and other works use the conventions of cinema, music, and literature to construct historical and cultural narratives, ma …

A Queer Film Classic on Luchino Visconti's lyrical and controversial 1971 film based on Thomas Mann's novel, about a middle-aged heterosexual artist (played by Dirk Bogarde) vacationing in Venice who becomes obsessed with a youth staying at the same hotel as a wave of cholera descends upon the city. The book analyzes the film's cultural impact and …

A Queer Film Classic on John Greyson's controversial 1993 film musical about the AIDS crisis which combines experimental, camp musical, and documentary aesthetics while refuting the legend of Patient Zero, the male flight attendant accused in Randy Shilts' book And the Band Played On of bringing the AIDS crisis to North America. The film features t …

A Queer Film Classic on the groundbreaking 1977 documentary that profiles the lives of ordinary gay men and lesbians of different ages, races, and backgrounds. Word Is Out found a wide audience theatrically and, perhaps more importantly, had a national public-television broadcast. The film provided an intimate portrait of gay men and lesbians, and …

First published in 1992, The Imaginary Indian is a revealing history of the "Indian" image mythologized by popular Canadian culture since 1850, propagating stereotypes that exist to this day.

Images of First Nations people have always been fundamental to Canadian culture. From the paintings and photographs of the 19th century to the Mounted Police s …

In The Only Poetry That Matters, novelist and poet Clint Burnham offers the first book-length examination of the Kootenay School of Writing, the notorious group of poets who came to international attention in Vancouver during the 1980s. Founded in 1984 after the closure of David Thompson University Centre in Nelson, the KSW offered writing and publ …

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 logge …

At the time of his death in 1992, Jon Furberg was one of the most disciplined and exciting poets writing in Vancouver. Ten years in the making, Anhaga was Furberg's masterly crafted retelling of the Anglo-Saxon poem "The Wanderer." Reading into the old text with courage and imagination, letting individual lines and words resonate and build associat …

D.M. Fraser, one of Canada's best unknown writers, was born in Stellarton, Nova Scotia, the son of a Presbyterian minister and an English teacher. He moved on his own to the west coast at the age of twenty and become part of Vancouver's nascent literary community, specifically the motley beer-and-anarchy collection of writers, poets, and misfits as …

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 st …

PAPERBACK EDITION

Sarah Schulman's acclaimed dystopian satire about urban mores is set in New York sometime in the future, when the city has morphed into an idealized version of itself: rent is cheap, homelessness is nonexistent, and the only job left is in marketing. But all is not as it seems, when a murder is committed by a prominent New York …

A raucously funny Asian-American novel that won the most recent International 3-Day Novel Contest. It's three months until the wedding, and Samantha's Taiwanese parents still disapprove of her hopelessly white fiance. Meanwhile, Sam's food-obsessed sister, Daisy, is on the hunt for a mysterious take-out truck whose dishes are to die for. Terroryaki …

Beauty plus pity--that is the closest we can get to a definition of art." -Vladimir Nabokov

In this tragicomic modern immigrant's tale, Malcolm Kwan is a slacker twentysomething Asian-Canadian living in Vancouver who is about to embark on a modelling career when his life is suddenly derailed by two near-simultaneous events: the death of his filmmake …

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 D …

Taste Canada Award Finalist

We Sure Can! celebrates the ongoing "Canvolution," in which urban "preservationists," local-food aficionados, rural picklers and jammers, and food bloggers are rediscovering the vanishing art of home canning jams, pickles, and other preserves. And we're not talking your standard strawberry jam here; passionate canners are …

The punk band D.O.A., established in 1978, is considered one of the founders of hardcore punk, alongside such other seminal groups as Black Flag and Minor Threat. Their raw, melodic sound, which drew comparisons to the Clash and the Ramones, has always been matched by the band's acute political sensibility; known for its uncompromising and outspok …

In this extraordinary debut poetry collection, Proma Tagore's language is not the only thing that breaks explores the junctions between migration, race, the body, and desire. The poems in this book offer spaces to reflect on a variety of interlinking issues: the routes and brutal legacies of European colonization and imperialism; the interrelations …

Named a Stonewall Honor Book by the American Library Association

Lambda Literary Award finalist
In the summer of 2009, butch writer and storyteller Ivan Coyote and gender researcher and femme dynamo Zena Sharman wrote down a wish-list of their favourite queer authors; they wanted to continue and expand the butch-femme conversation. The result is Pe …

Here are some lost members of the Boomer Generation-chronic underachievers at work and love-recurring characters in Dennis E. Bolen's Anticipated Results, his first story collection with Arsenal Pulp Press. Seeking solace in each other's dysfunctional company; conducting ill-organized interventions; throwing disastrous dinner parties; trying to fix …

As seen in People and The New Yorker

Over the last 100 years, the image of the physically strong, confident, muscular woman has been the object of derision, fascination, and erotic fantasy; she is often portrayed, in both photography and illustration, as a sexy dominatrix, sexless mannequin, or sideshow freak. In this fascinating collection of rare …

Fire: A Queer Film Classic delves into the controversial 1996 lesbian love story by Indian-born director Deepa Mehta. Set in a contemporary middle-class Hindu household in the heart of Delhi, Fire is the story of Radha and Sita, the wives of two brothers, who fall in love with one another. Crisis overtakes the extended family when a servant discove …

Farewell My Concubine: A Queer Film Classic is a thought-provoking consideration of Chen Kaige's acclaimed 1992 Chinese film set in the mid-20th century abouttwo male Peking opera stars and the woman who comes between them, set against the political turmoil of a China in transition. The film's treatment of gender performance and homosexuality was a …

Montreal Main: A Queer Film Classic considers the brilliant yet neglected 1974 Canadian film set in Montreal's bohemian neighborhood "The Main" and hailed at its premiere at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The movie, directed and starring Frank Vitale, is both a great indie film and a great queer film; a fascinating cinema vérité take on Nort …

Attila Richard Lukacs is one of Canada's most talented and controversial contemporary artists. He is best known for his epic paintings that depict masculine, homoerotic imagery, featuring figures such as gay skinheads and military cadets. His work has been exhibited at documenta in Kassel, Germany, as well as in New York, Paris, London, Berlin, Col …

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, 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 o …