The healthful virtues of olive oil, a key component of the Mediterranean diet, have become well-known in recent years; its monounsaturated fats and antioxidants are beneficial in preventing heart disease by controlling LDL ("bad") cholesterol levels while simultaneously raising HDL ("good") cholesterol levels.

Helen Koutalianos has preached the gosp …

Excerpted in Geist magazine
At the end of World War I, Canada was poised on the brink of social revolution. At least that is what many Canadians, inspired by the success of the Russian Revolution in 1917, hoped and others dreaded. Seeing Reds tells the story of this turbulent period in Canadian history during the winter of 1918-19, when a fearful g …

Finalist, City of Vancouver Book Award

After Canaan, the first nonfiction book by acclaimed Vancouver poet Wayde Compton, repositions the North American discussion of race in the wake of the tumultuous twentieth century. It riffs on the concept of Canada as a promised land (or "Canaan") encoded in African American myth and song since the days of sl …

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 (though fascinating as a political thriller) of the acts and thou …

Lambda Literary Award Finalist

Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBT Fiction Finalist

Shortlisted for a ReLit Award Shortlisted for an Independent Literary Award

This second novel by Lambda Literary Award finalist Daniel Allen Cox (Shuck) is an incendiary story about two pyromaniacs who fight homophobia in Krakow, Poland, one of the fronts of the Solidarnosc …

Butch is a Noun, the first book by activist, gender-jammer, and performer S. Bear Bergman,won wide acclaim when published by Suspect Thoughts in 2006: a funny, insightful, and purposely unsettling manifesto on what it means to be butch (and not). In thirty-four deeply personal essays, Bear makes butchness accessible to those who are new to the conc …

Ivan E. Coyote is a master storyteller and performer; their beautiful, funny stories about growing up queer in the Canadian north and living out loud on Canada's west coast have attracted big audiences, whether gay, straight, trans, or otherwise. In their passionate and humorous new collection, Ivan takes readers on an intimate journey, both litera …

Winner, Ottawa Book Award for Fiction

A powerful tale of the burdens and blessings of history, the divided self, and the quest to be whole, Girl Unwrapped is a coming-of-age story set in 1960s Montreal. Toni Goldblatt's awakening to taboo desire conflicts with the expectations of her Holocaust-scarred parents and with the conservative mores of her …

Get It Ripe, jae steele's 2008 cookbook, established her as a credible and charismatic authority on veganism; her holistic nutritionist background and sassy cowpunk sensibility encouraged countless others to "get it ripe." Her new cookbook underscores the importance of local, sustainable eating and living by helping readers deepen their understandi …

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, ho …

The 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book is a powerful and historically accurate graphic portrayal of Indigenous resistance to the European colonization of the Americas, beginning with the Spanish invasion under Christopher Columbus and ending with the Six Nations land reclamation in Ontario in 2006. Gord Hill spent two years unearthing images and re …

Written in the language of the period, this vivid and utterly transfixing love story between two men is set in the nineteenth-century American Midwest. Douglas Fortescue is a successful poet in England who flees the country for America following an Oscar Wilde-like scandal insinuating sexual impropriety; Joshua Jenkyns is a feral young outlaw who w …

Lambda Literary Award Winner

In this stunning debut novel, Amber Dawn subverts and transgresses the classic hero's quest adventure to create a dark post-feminist vision not for the faint of heart. Sub Rosa's reluctant heroine is known as "Little," a teenaged runaway unable to remember her real name; in her struggle to get by in the world, she stumbl …

Law of Desire, one of three inaugural titles in Arsenal's film book series Queer Film Classics, focuses on the 1987 homoerotic melodrama by Pedro Almodovar, Spain's most successful contemporary film director.

The film Law of Desire is a grand tale of love, lust, and amnesia featuring three main characters: a gay film director (played by Eusebio Ponc …

Trash, one of three inaugural titles in Arsenal's 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 …

Gods and Monsters, one of three inaugural titles in Arsenal's film book series Queer Film Classics, deals with the acclaimed 1998 film about openly gay film director James Whale, best known for the Frankenstein films of the 1930s.
Written and directed by Bill Condon (Dreamgirls), the film focuses on the final days of Whale's life in the 1950s. Mo …

Lambda Literary Award Finalist

Now in its second printing

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 humour and grace, these essays deal with issues from women's …

Shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize

Automaton Biographies is the first full-length solo poetry book by novelist Larissa Lai (When Fox is a Thousand, Salt Fish Girl).

With an ear to the white noise of advertising, pop music, CNN, biotechnology, the Norton Anthology of English Literature, cereal packaging, and MuchMusic, Lai explores the …

ORIGINAL CLOTH EDITION

From the nation that elected Barack Obama in the flames of economic disaster comes the first novel of the New Era, The Mere Future, by award-winning novelist, activist, and playwright Sarah Schulman. In this dystopian vision, New York City has morphed into an idealized version of itself, the result of what the newly elected m …

Hard Core Logo is an epistolary novel that portrays a punk rock band reunited for one last shot at glory.
Adapting a scrapbook approach, consisting of monologues, conversations, letters, interviews, photographs, and related paraphernalia (including posters, invoices and contracts), Hard Core Logo tells the story of Joe Dick, an unrepentant, true- …

Lambda Literary Award Finalist

Shortlisted for a TLA Gaybie Award (Best Gay Erotica)

From the editors of the Lambda Award-winning First Person Queer come these intelligent, sexy, true-life tales of gay men's desire. The stories push at the parameters of queer erotic life, featuring contributors both novice and well-known; subject matter ranges from s …

Featured in Geist magazine and The Globe and Mail

A new and daring voice, Rhonda Waterfall writes with clarity about the simple, utter truths of human relationships: the small yet essential things that could change our lives if only we let them. She introduces us to two contrasting worlds, one with the startling realism of everyday life and one wher …

When it was first published in 1988, Pat Califia's Macho Sluts, a collection of S/M stories set in San Francisco's dyke bathhouses, sex parties, and S/M gay bars, shocked the lesbian community and caused an upheaval in the field of queer publishing. Nobody had ever written so frankly about the kinky potential of woman-to-woman sex (and nobody has e …

A New York film school dropout falls into a job setting up spycams, porn shoots, and street fights for a shady underground video producer. His plans to escape the low-brow underbelly of the webcast world go awry, however, when a young runaway claiming to be his daughter arrives at his door, triggering a series of events eerily similar to a movie sc …

As seen on "Canada A.M."

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 and Tanya's winning charm, made it an essential cookbook for anyone considering eschewing animal products from thei …

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 …

The modern world is a toxic place, and we've all become less healthy because of it, whether it is from the air that we breathe or the foods that we eat. Natasha Kyssa is a raw foods chef and lifestyle coach, and her company SimplyRaw helps people improve their health and well-being by integrating simple, natural-based guidelines into their current …

First Person Queer, an anthology of non-fiction essays written in the first person by a variety of gay and lesbian authors, was a snapshot of LGBT 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.

Se …

Lambda Literary Award Finalist

Traditional horror has often portrayed female characters in direct relation to their sexual role according to men, such as the lascivious victim or innocent heroine; even vampy, powerful female villains, such as the classic noir "spider women," use their sexual prowess to seduce and overwhelm married men. Fist of the S …

The Reverend's Apprentice, the third novel by David N. Odhiambo, is 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 i …

In boomtown Western Canada, a quirky young woman grows up amid a family dynamic that leaves her feeling misunderstood and left out. She's a child of immigrants from war-torn Germany and Croatia, parents who cling to vestiges of a traumatic past that never seem real enough for their daughter. To leave her stifling family behind and to forge a "new n …

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 …

Shortlisted for a Lambda Literary Award (lesbian fiction)

Ivan E. Coyote is one of Canada's most acclaimed storytellers; their first three collections were insightful, deeply personal stories about gender, identity, and community. Ivan's most recent book, Bow Grip (2006), was their first novel; it won the ReLit Award, was shortlisted for the Ferro-G …

Peter Flinsch, who passed away in March 2010 at the age of eighty-nine, was one of the art world's unsung heroes; for more than 60 years, he produced hundreds of paintings, drawings, and sculptures which depict the eroticized male body. In 2006, he won the first Lifetime Achievement Award from the Leslie/Lohman Gay Art Foundation in New York, and n …

Shortlisted for the Lambda Literary Award and the Ferro-Grumley Women's Fiction Award

The Child 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. …

Winner of a Lambda Literary Award (gay romance)

As funny, warm, and sexy as its protagonist, Got 'til it's Gone is the first novel by Larry Duplechan in fifteen years, and the fourth to feature his alter-ego Johnnie Ray Rousseau, a gay black man of Louisiana Creole stock. When we first met Johnnie Ray in the 1986 novel Blackbird?the first gay black …

Shortlisted for a Lambda Literary Award (gay debut fiction)

Shortlisted for a ReLit Award (best novel)

SHUCK (noun): the outer covering of a nut or of an ear of corn; the shell of an oyster or clam; something of little value
SHUCK (verb): to peel off (as in clothing)

Shuck is the intense, dazzling diary of Jaeven Marshall, a quasi-homeless hustler w …

2008 Veggie Award Winner: "Comeback of the Year"

2009 Libby Award Winner (PETA): Best Cookbook

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 150,000 copies. Vegan à Go-Go! represents a change of pace for Sarah: a cookbook and more f …

Winner, Gourmand World Cookbook Award, Best Vegetarian Cookbook (Canada)

Get It Ripe is a vegan cookbook for the 21st 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 worked on organic farms on …

Evocative of writers Patrick Califia-Rice and Kate Bornstein, whose best works explore gender and sexuality through personal memoir, queersexlife is a frank and intimate collection of responses to theories of queer sexuality and identity as viewed through the author's own experiences. By turns insightful and elegant, Terry Goldie delves into contem …

First published in 1995, this award-winning novel, written from the epicentre of the AIDS crisis, is a bold, achingly honest story set in the "rat bohemia" of New York City, whose huddled masses include gay men and lesbians who bond with one another in the wake of loss. Navigating the currents of the city is Rita Mae, a rat exterminator who holds t …

The Angels of Light were more than a seminal performance troupe in the 1970s; growing out of the equally legendary Cockettes in San Francisco (led by the charismatic Hibiscus, and subject of the award-winning documentary The Cockettes), the Angels were a way of life, putting on trashy, fantastical fairy tales come to life in a city and an era that …

UPDATE: NOW AVAILABLE

Ottawa may be our capital city but it's also a place of contradictions--the official version offers numerous, beneficent historic sites, institutions, museums, and galleries, but there are other stories to be told. In this latest edition of Arsenal's Unknown City series of alternativecity guides for both locals and tourists, Ot …

The latest in the Little Sister's Classics series resurrecting gay and lesbian literary gems: a viciously funny, shocking yet ultimately moving 1975 novel, an allegory of Franco's Spain, about a young gay man coming of age with a mother who despises him, a father who ignores him, and a brother who loves him.

The novel is set in the 1950s, narrated …

Finalist for ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award in the Cooking category.

French cuisine is considered among the world's best, but its traditional ingredients like butter and cream aren't always appropriate for today's heart-healthy diets. New World Provence, by the proprietor-chefs of the esteemed restaurants Provence Mediterranean Grill and …

Finalist for the ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award in the Photography category

In this stunning book, photographer Brian Howell takes us into the world of celebrity impersonators--the faux famous people who make a living at pretending to be someone else. Taken at various impersonator conventions and stage shows throughout North America, the …

Finalist for ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award in the Cooking category.

In Dreena Burton's first two bestselling vegan cookbooks, The Everyday Vegan and Vive le Vegan!, she offered a dazzling array of healthy, animal-free recipes, many of which are based ont her experience as a mother of two young girls she and her husband are raising as veg …

Kuroshio, meaning "black current," is the name given to the Pacific Ocean current that Japanese immigrants believe brought them safely to a new life in North America. In this vividly imagined novel based on a true story that spans decades and continents, Terry Watada explores the dark reaches of Issei, or Japanese immigrant, life in Vancouver prior …