Heartways, a collaboration between the Whitney Museum of American Art, Printed Matter Inc, and Arsenal Pulp Press, is an extraordinary faux romance compilation that deconstructs art, literature, sex, and desire in one fell swoop. Constructed as a "novel," each chapter is written by a different contributor, all of whom create romantic tableaux that …

The unbearable voices of mythic manatees, the cry of the phoenix, the whispers of kappa lovers beside a gurgling stream. The voice of the moon that is ever turned away from our gaze, the song of suns colliding. The sounds which permeate from my skin on such a level of intensity that mortal senses recoil, deflect beauty into ugliness as a way of co …

American Whiskey Bar is a remarkable faux memoir about the un-making of a film--a film which Michael Turner was commissioned to write. However, whether or not this film was ever made is debatable. And only one print is said to exist. Nevertheless, American Whiskey Bar, a film seen by only a handful of people, is well on its way to becoming a curiou …

Joe Keithley, aka Joey Shithead, founded legendary punk pioneers D.O.A. in 1978. Punk kings who spread counterculture around the world, they've been cited as influences by Red Hot Chili Peppers, Green Day, Rancid, and The Offspring, and have toured with The Clash, The Ramones, The Dead Kennedys, Black Flag, Nirvana, PiL, Minor Threat, and others, a …

Erotic slang words from Great Britain, Canada, the United States, Australia, and other English-speaking nations number well into the tens of thousands. But the history of terms used to describe the sexual activities of gays and lesbians have opposing sources: one, the discreet networks of gay men and lesbians who sought to come up with a new termin …

Toronto, named by UNESCO as the world's most multicultural city, attracts thousands of tourists annually to its fascinating neighbourhoods and thriving cultural scene. But in its 250-year history, Toronto has also become a place of many intriguing secrets.

Toronto: The Unknown City delves into the lesser-known spaces and stories of the city that's n …

Ten years ago, Faith Popcorn declared "the end of shopping" in her bestselling book The Popcorn Report. But from the looks of things, shopping is as pervasive as ever; we are a culture obsessed and beguiled by the desire for consumer goods.

Journalist and shopping pundit Pamela Klaffke documents the history of shopping, from a time when cattle were …

"Desi" is a Hindi term referring to "of one's own people". Desilicious is a wide-ranging compilation of erotic literature by writers of South Asian descent--a medley of arousing and thematically innovative fiction, poetry, and essays, spiced for mature appetites only. The flavours of these works, by both men and women, run deep, and vary from sugge …

They were falling through time together. Moth was being clubbed by Travis in perpetual night, in foreign landscapes. It was Day One. The sky was blue and Moth was dead. He fought Travis in the ring, in a palace, on a barge. He could see every fight imposed on the fight before, the past getting smaller the closer it got to the bottom of the tunnel. …

The third installment of the bestselling international gay men's erotica series, consisting of stories of 1,000 words or less that articulate desire between men.

Previous books in the series have made bestseller lists, and feature many award-winning writers and anthologists among their contributors. Quickies 3 features 69+ stories by writers living …

This is the fourth installment of the bestselling international lesbian erotica series, Hot & Bothered, that consist of stories of 1,000 words or less that articulate desire between women.

Hot & Bothered 4 includes stories by many award-winning writers, including Lesléa Newman, Lucy Jane Bledsoe, Carol Queen, Nisa Donnelly, Barrie Jean Borich, Gabr …

The boy sleeps and dreams and wakes and feels the same. Different, but the same. The core of his body burns bright, hazy but strong. He's never felt so strong as he does now, on the verge of something he's not sure about, and terribly excited.
-from "The Boy Who Stopped"

In these raw, uncompromising stories, author George K. Ilsley explores the thi …

Step into a world of dream, of fantasy, of erotic tales spiked with poetic imagery. Step into Quixotic Erotic, the new collection of lesbian erotica from Tamai Kobayashi.

Like being awakened from a dream by a soft, sensuous caress, the stories in Quixotic Erotic stimulate the senses. From a birthday surprise to a torrid office dalliance, these tales …

The fearless monsters we think are our kind
The changes we take, the evil we love
The insane things we have all done
No one has won.
-Megan

Teen suicide has long been considered one of society's darkest secrets; the idea of troubled young people driven to take their own lives was a tragedy too horrible to contemplate, let alone talk about openly. B …

"In Japan, a person's blood type is as important as their horoscope. My type, like my grandmother's, is ab. This makes us universal recipients, able to receive blood from anyone, but give only to each other. A person with ab blood has no immunity to other types. No matter what blood they're given, it becomes a part of them, and they never resist."

U …

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 …

Little Sister's Book & Art Emporium, Vancouver's legendary gay and lesbian bookstore, has long fought for freedom of expression, to the point of taking Canada Customs to court, charging that, by regularly seizing materials destined for the store (branding them "obscene"), the federal agency was guilty of harrassment and infringement of free speech. …

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. Fifteen printings and 125,000 copies later, How It …

Billeh Nickerson tells it like it is: a wry and at times outrageous chronicler of contemporary gay life, written for those who can take it like a man, or at least read about it without squirming. In these charming and very funny essays, Billeh writes with disarming sweetness about love, sex, relationships, and subjects that might even make the wom …

Queer Fear II builds on the successes of its predecessor, Queer Fear, the groundbreaking gay-themed horror anthology that Gothic.net called "the best horror anthology of [the year]," which won the Queer Horror Award, and was a finalist for a Spectrum Award and two Lambda Literary Awards.
This second volume includes among its stories new work by s …

Twenty years ago, Vancouver didn't exist on any map of the film world. Today, Vancouver is at the heart of two film worlds. The city's American-based film industry is powerful enough to inspire loathing and threats from Hollywood, and its Canadian-based film scene is among the most acclaimed, provocative independent filmmaking communities anywhere. …

Disco Fury. Wrathchild. Bam-Bam Bambi. Ladies Choice. Backyard Billy. Cheerleader Melissa. Backwoods Militia. Gorgeous Michelle Starr. Welcome to the world of minor-league professional wrestling.
For the past two decades, wrestling has enjoyed a huge following that has grown from cult status to one of the entertainment world's most lucrative indu …

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 …

Little Sister's Book & Art Emporium, Vancouver's legendary gay and lesbian bookstore, has long fought for freedom of expression, to the point of taking Canada Customs to court, charging that, by regularly seizing materials destined for the store (branding them "obscene"), the federal agency was guilty of harrassment and infringement of free speech …

On the wild river that divides Namibia from Angola, members of the Himba tribe herd cattle as they have done for hundreds of years. The women wear thick coils of jewelry and skirts of animal skin; there are monkeys in the palm trees and love birds breed nearby. Where Fire Speaks documents the lives of the Himba, and time spent around the fire, whe …

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 …

From translator Lenny Hu, who brought the acclaimed erotic Chinese novel The Embroidered Couch back into print, is this collection of five erotic stories, also from Ming dynasty China.
Ling Mengchu (1580-1644) was a prolific writer, producing more than thirty works in various genres during his lifetime. A Confucian scholar, described as having be …

Facing History: Portraits from Vancouver examines the inhabitants of a city through the camera-art of its greatest artists. Featuring a wide range of material, from historical images to documentary depictions to contemporary visual artists' work, the book provides an intimate glimpse into Vancouver's sense of itself, and how representations of the …

There's a Jamaican phrase, "Out of many, one people," that is reflected in the style of cooking from the Caribbean: distinct, bold flavours 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 styl …

All Amazed celebrates the life and work of the late Roy Kiyooka (1926-1994), one of Canada's first multi-disciplinary artists whose work transcended categorical and cultural exclusivity.
At various periods of his life, Kiyooka was a painter, sculptor, teacher, poet, musician, filmmaker, and photographer. When Kiyooka arrived in Vancouver in 1959, …

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 searching out new frontiers, and being on the road.

The characters in One Man's Trash make ev …

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 book collects essays and images, in colour and black-and-white, presenting the image of the cyborg in all its imaginative guises. The title is from a 1919 essay by Sigmund Freud (and included in …

In the spring and summer of 1858, 600 blacks moved from San Francisco to the colonies that would eventually become British Columbia. The move was in part initiated by an invitation penned by the governor of the British colonies, James Douglas, who is commonly believed to have had African ancestry, a rumour he neither confirmed nor denied. His appe …

A magnificent anthology of blues poems/songs by some of Canada's best poets; on the accompanying CD, the poems are masterfully interpreted by Canadian west coast blues artists.
Writing contributors include Ken Babstock, bill bissett, George Elliott Clarke, Lynn Coady, Lorna Crozier, Barry Dempster, Patrick Friesen, Mark Jarman, Ryan Knighton, Rob …

From Judy MacDonald--author of the novel Jane--is a startling collection of stories called Grey.
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.
These stories toy with fact and fiction, autobiography and invention, memory and make believe. Grey proves that a m …

Since the release of our first, bestselling Calgary cityguide, many things in the city have changed: it's gotten bigger, faster, and richer. Still filled with strange secrets, this revised and expanded edition of the earlier Calgary: Secrets of the City reveals the whole truth.
With stories of notorious figures like the jazz impresario who has ha …

As seen in Time Magazine, Esquire, and The New Yorker!

Every man has the capacity to grow facial hair, but the decision to do so has always come with layers of meaning. Facial hair has traditionally marked a passage into manhood, but its various manifestations have been determined by class, religious belief, historical precedent, and occupational …

"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 the lack thereof, 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 t …

Ashok Mathur's debut novel, Once Upon an Elephant, was a hilarious murder mystery steeped in Hindu mythology and starring elephant-headed Hindu deity Ganesh.
The Short, Happy Life of Harry Kumar continues Mathur's playful jaunt through mythology, this time blending the Hindu epic, the Ramayana, with the geography of Canada and Australia. Harry Ku …

In terms of rights and freedoms for queers, Canada holds an international reputation as among the most liberal of nations. Yet this picture of harmonious gay and lesbian assimilation is nothing if not fractured and fraught with the contradictions of place, privilege, race, and gender. In a Queer Country is a groundbreaking collection of fourteen e …

Veganism--the diet that eliminates all animal products from one's diet--might be a scary prospect to some people, who may believe that obtaining protein will become a problem, or that food just won't taste the same. But Dreena Burton demonstrates that anyone can prepare and enjoy an array of delectable vegan dishes without having to compromise one …

A book that is guaranteed to raise eyebrows, The Embroidered Couch is the first English translation of an erotic novel originally published in the early 17th century, attributed to Lu Tiancheng (b. 1580), a well-known playwright of the Ming dynasty.
Regarded as a notorious classic in Chinese literature, it has long been banned in China, and never …

Welcome to the Very Lonely Planet: the kingdom of single guydom, a place for men to discuss women problems--the problem being, there aren't any women. It's a place where doggy-style sex means drooling and begging and not much else. It's a halfway house for teenage boys, weepy twentysomething indie-rock sad sacks; the divorced, the widowed, the wre …

The first two collections of Hot & Bothered have appeared on numerous bestseller lists in the US and Canada and gone into multiple printings, becoming a standard for hot lesbian fiction from around the world. This third installment of Hot & Bothered brings together another 69 sensuous tales of love and lust between women, from wistful fantasies to …

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 traveller 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 acclaim …

When people talk about the joys of gardening, they're usually referring to the flora rather than the fauna. But the pleasures of the garden are often accompanied by creatures who likely have not been invited: slugs, aphids, spiders, beetles. But they're nothing to be afraid of: they're all part of a fascinating natural world right beneath your feet …

An extravagant, tragicomic novel, Flesh Wounds & Purple Flowers takes us into the world of Latino machos and cha-cha divas of Santiago's gay underground, full of dreamers and schemers looking for salvation abroad. One of them is Camilo, a strong-willed queen who makes it out of Chile in the early eighties, but en route to New York lands in Vancouv …

Our planet's oceans have provided us with an enormous array of edible delectables. But recent experiences, such as declining stocks of specific fish species, have taught us the need for responsible fishing that will enable the oceans to continue to feed us for generations to come.
The Living Oceans Society is committed to increasing public awaren …

Other Conundrums, copublished with Vancouver's Artspeak Gallery and the Kamloops Art Gallery, is an extraordinary collection of essays on Canadian artists of colour by Monika Kin Gagnon, one of Canada's most respected art writers and curators. The essays explore the history of cultural production in this country with an emphasis on race, cultural …