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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Winner, Lambda Literary Award, LGBT Arts/Culture

One of Quill & Quire's Books of the Year, 2007

The history of gay and lesbian cinema is a storied one, and one that became much larger with the recent success of Brokeback Mountain, Capote, and Transamerica. But the history of gay and lesbian filmmakers is its own story. In The View from Here, queer d …

Since the mid-1980s, the once marginal city of Vancouver has developed within a globalized economy and become an internationally recognized centre for contemporary visual art. Vancouver's status is due not only to a thriving worldwide cultural community that has turned to examine the so-called periphery, but to the city's growth, its artists, expan …

Mechanically, watching the land disappear into the sea, the word Finstère came to mind. Finis-terre. Land's End. From here it really looked it . . . it was the end of Brittany, the end of France. The end of the earth. . . .

A lyrical gay coming-of-age story first published in 1951, acclaimed by many including Gore Vidal and The New York Times, abo …

Oh, Canada: a nation of hockey players, trailer park boys, and doughnut shop habitues; a nation that can claim Marshall McLuhan, Pamela Anderson, and Mr Dressup as among their own. Canada is one complex country all right, and what better way to document its character than an atlas of Canadian place names as compiled by Geist, the magazine of Canadi …

Bronze Winner, Independent Publisher Book Award, Best Cookbook

Received an Honourable Mention from the 2007 Cuisine Canada Award in the category of Canadian Food Culture

Named one of the best cookbooks of the year, by The Montreal Gazette

Today, increasing emphasis is being placed on the integrity of the way the food we eat is grown. We all dream a …

Finalist for the Ferro-Grumley Award (Publishing Triangle)

Ivan E. Coyote has developed a reputation as one of North America's most disarming storytellers; their tales of life on the roads and trails of the North as well as rural America are rich in their plainspoken, honest truths. In Loose End, their third story collection, Ivan focuses attention …

The female as represented in western popular culture has been a timeless yet culturally unstable image, construed and contested by men and women alike. Red Light is an anthology of essays, stories, and visual materials that identifies and deconstructs female icons, past and present, and re-imagines them for the twenty-first century.

For Anna, the re …

In this moving autobiography, Daniel Gawthrop writes about the politics and pleasures of being a self-identified "rice queen": a gay man who is attracted to Asians. Navigating through the urban jungles of Western cities like Vancouver and London, as well as the humid streets of Bangkok and Saigon, Daniel explores the multicultural minefields of sex …

In I Am a Red Dress, acclaimed writer and performer Anna Camilleri confronts the ghosts of her past as she seeks to find her rightful place in the world. Part memoir, part storytelling, Anna writes with passion and conviction about family and identity, and how the wounds of personal history can be healed through the imagination.

These eloquent stori …

On the heels of his bestselling and award-winning book Out/Lines: Underground Gay Graphics From Before Stonewall, Thomas Waugh offers more historical and erotically charged drawings, depicting aspects of gay male sexuality that were once hidden from public view.

The over 200, never-before-published images in Lust Unearthed are from the private colle …

In Performance Bond, Wayde Compton, among the most progressive and experimental poets in Canada, defiantly and eloquently confronts the globalization and commodification of Black culture.

With poetry inspired by the insistent cadences of hip-hop and jazz, Compton fuses language, history, and contemporary Black politics. He deals with Black diaspora …

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 …

"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 …

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 …

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 …

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, …

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 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 …

"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 …

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 …

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 …