Paris Is Burning
A Queer Film Classic on the stunning 1991 documentary about the drag subculture in 1980s New York.
This latest addition to the Queer Film Classics series is an homage to Paris Is Burning, Jennie Livingston's brilliant and award-winning 1991 documentary that captures the energy, ambition, wit, and struggle of African-American and Latino participants …
Universal Hunks
A lively, wide-ranging visual history of muscular men from around the world.
Over the last 100 years, the image of the muscular man has known no boundaries; it has been the object of envy, admiration, and desire, and used to convey optimal health and fitness, product appeal, political power, and military might. Universal Hunks, David L. Chapman's fo …
After Delores
Sarah Schulman's surprising novel about a brokenhearted waitress looking for love in New York's Lower East Side.
In this new edition of Sarah Schulman's acclaimed 1988 novel, the unnamed narrator is a no-nonsense coffee-shop waitress in New York's bohemian Lower East Side who is nursing a broken heart after her girlfriend Dolores leaves her for anot …
Blood, Marriage, Wine & Glitter
Lambda Literary Award finalist
The celebrated essayist sheds necessary (and humorous) light on gender, sexuality, and family.
S. Bear Bergman is an acclaimed writer and lecturer who travels regularly across North America to speak on trans issues. Bear's first two books, Butch Is a Noun and The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You, are considered essential …
The Laboratory of Love
A beautiful suite of stories set in Spain, Africa, and North America: an elegy to love, longing, and the eternal outsider.
The truth I seek lies beneath the skin, under flesh, below bone, beyond scalpel's reach.
In the 1990s, Patrick Roscoe was known as the great iconoclast of Canadian fiction. As author of such acclaimed short-story collections as …
The Other Side of Youth
Kelli Deeth's first book since her acclaimed 2001 debut The Girl without Anyone (a Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year) is a collection of stories about missed connections and unrequited desire. Deeth's female protagonists confront the emotional complexities of marriage, childlessness, adoption, adolescent longing, friendship, and death; they mour …
The Trial of Pope Benedict
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 …
London Triptych
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 …
How Poetry Saved My Life
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 …
Strangers on a Train
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 …
Hello, Cutie!
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 …
Bull Head
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 …
The Tastes of Ayurveda
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 …
Impact
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 …
A Little Distillery in Nowgong
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 …
Stan Douglas: Abbott & Cordova, 7 August 1971
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 …
The Imaginary Indian
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 …
Class Warfare
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 …
The Inverted Gaze
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 …
The Dirt Chronicles
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 …
We Sure Can!
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 …
Persistence
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 …
Anticipated Results
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 …
Venus with Biceps
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
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
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
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 …
Polaroids
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 …
Seeing Reds
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 …
Butch Is a Noun
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 …
Ripe from Around Here
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 …
Trash
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 …
I Like It Like That
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 Only Thing I Have
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 …
Macho Sluts
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 …
How It All Vegan! 10th Anniversary Edition
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 …
The SimplyRaw Living Foods Detox Manual
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 …
Second Person Queer
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 …
The Dictionary of Homophobia
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 …
The Slow Fix
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 …
queersexlife
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 …
Rat Bohemia
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 …
Flights of Angels
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 …
The Carnivorous Lamb
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 …
New World Provence
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 …
Soucouyant
By the award-winning author of Brother
Finalist, Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction
Longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize
Longlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
Winner, ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award (GOLD), Literary Fiction
Shortlisted for Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize (BC Book Prizes)
Shortlisted for the Comm …
Seminal
A groundbreaking, comprehensive anthology of Canadian gay male poetry, the first of its kind, that reveals a national queer poetic that is equal parts eloquent, subversive, and moving. The material, from the 1890s to present-day, includes work by fifty-seven poets from every region of the country, including some from Quebec who have been translated …
Comfort Food for Breakups
Finalist,The Golden Crown Literary Award, Lesbian Short Story Essay Collection
Winner, Independent Publisher Award (SILVER), Autobiography/Memoir
Winner, ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award (GOLD), Autobiography/Memoir
Finalist, Lambda Literary Award, Women's Memoir/Biography
Shortlisted for the Kobzar Literary Award
One of Quill & Quire's …
The Future is Queer
Silver Winner, ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award (Science Fiction)
Silver winner, Independent Publisher Book Award (Fantasy/Science Fiction)
Winner, 2 Gaylactic Spectrum Awards, Best Book and Best Short Fiction ("Instinct" by Joy Parks)
In a world increasingly complicated by questionable technologies and factional politics, what does the fu …