Sketchtasy takes place in that late-night moment when everything comes together, and everything falls apart: it's an urgent, glittering, devastating novel about the perils of queer world-making in the mid-'90s.

This is Boston in 1995, a city defined by a rabid fear of difference. Alexa, an incisive twenty-one-year-old queen, faces everyday brutality …

2021 CANADA READS WINNER

WINNER, Lambda Literary Award; Georges Bugnet Award for Fiction

Finalist, Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction; Amazon Canada First Novel Award; Indigenous Voices Award; Carol Shields Winnipeg Book Award; Firecracker Award for Fiction

Longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize

A Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year

A to …

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

A YouTube star becomes famous after he documents his breakup online. An anxious, lactose-intolerant office worker obsesses over a stranger who says "Nice shorts, bro" to him in passing. A couple wants to open up their relationship to a ghost. A monster just wants to find lo …

Arthur is a young gay man in Montreal at a crossroads. He gets lost in a blizzard of boys and endless possibilitiesâ??looking to fall in love and to experience devotionâ??but finds himself increasingly immersed in a world of hedonism and deception, especially as he deals with the messy remains of his relationship with Jeremy, his chimerical ex-bo …

A Globe 100 Best Book of the Year

Lambda Literary Award winner

The debut book by Hasan Namir is a revelatory novel about being queer and Muslim, set in war-torn Iraq in 2003. Ramy is a closeted university student whose parents have died, and who lives under the close scrutiny of his strict brother and sister-in-law. They exert pressure on him to fin …

A novel about a boy with a stutter, and the tangled barbs of repressed memory.

Montreal, 1979. A boy's speech starts to fracture along with the cement of le Stade olympique. Do they share a fault line? Daniel Allen Cox's unconventional fourth novel tells the story of a boy with a stutter who grows up and uses sound to remember the past. A coming-of- …

New edition of this important YA novel coinciding with the new film starring Mo'Nique.

First published in 1986, Blackbird is a funny, moving, coming-of-age novel about growing up black and gay. Johnnie Ray Rousseau is a high school student upset over losing the lead role in the school staging of Romeo and Juliet. As if that weren't enough, his best …

A bold and beautiful retelling of the Peter Pan story.

Sassafras Lowrey's gorgeously subversive queer punk novel reimagines the classic Peter Pan story. Prepare to be swept overboard into a world of orphaned, abandoned, and runaway bois who have sworn allegiance and service to Pan, the fearless leader of Neverland, and to the newly corrupted Mommy …

Sharp-eyed tales about outsiders, non-conformists, and iconoclasts.

In Nothing Looks Familiar, Shawn Syms' debut story collection, characters from a wide swath of society chart paths from places of danger or unhappiness into the great unknown, each grappling with a central and sometimes unanswerable question: if you fight to change your circumstance …

A "Globe 100" Best Book of the Year (The Globe and Mail)

Lambda Literary Award finalist

In the beginning, there is no he. There is no she.

Two cells make up one cell. This is the mathematics behind creation. One plus one makes one. Life begets life. We are the period to a sentence, the effect to a cause, always belonging to someone. We are never our o …

First published to acclaim in Australia, Look Who's Morphing by Asian-Australian writer Tom Cho is a funny, fantastical, often outlandish collection of stories firmly grounded in pop culture. The book's central character undergoes a series of startling transformations, shape-shifting through figures drawn from film, television, music, books, porn f …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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, City of Vancouver Book Award
"Winston closed his eyes with relief. He heard muffled pulses of party noise, but still felt damp and uncomfortable. His brain had turned haywire. At the mirror over the sink he was relieved to find his everyday face and no tell-tale outward sign--febrile flush, scarlet ears, Mr. Hyde eyes. He bent to the si …

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 …

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 …

Roy & Al is the first English-language book by Europe's most popular gay cartoonist, Germany's Ralf König, whose collections have sold over a million copies and been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, Norwegian, and Danish.

Ralf's enormous popularity can be attributed to his skill at combining classic comedic situations with good old-fashion …

First published by St. Martin's Press in 1986, Blackbird is a funny, moving, coming-of-age novel about growing up black and gay in southern California. The lead character, Johnnie Ray Rousseau, is a high school student upset over losing the lead role in the school staging of Romeo and Juliet. As if that weren't enough, his best friend has been beat …

Finalist for the ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award (Gay/Lesbian Fiction)
Shortlisted for the ReLit Award for Best Novel
The first novel by George K. Ilsley, whose first story collection, Random Acts of Hatred, was published to acclaim in 2003. Told in dreamlike fragments, ManBug unfolds as a love story between Sebastian, an entomologist wit …

In Franny, The Queen of Provincetown, John Preston created one of his most memorable characters from the more than 30 books he authored or edited over his storied career. Franny is a proud, protective friend to the gay men of Provincetown, Massachusetts, as they fight their battles against self-hatred and ostracism. Haunted by the loss of his first …

Published well ahead of its time, in 1966 by Greenleaf Classics, Song of the Loon is a lusty gay frontier romance that tells the story of Ephraim MacIver, a 19th-century outdoorsman, and his travels through the American wilderness, where he meets a number of characters who share with him stories, wisdom and homosexual encounters. The most popular …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

The genre of horror has in the past been the exclusive province of heterosexual writers and themes, stereotypically involving a male antagonist and a female victim. Although the incursions into the field by such writers as Anne Rich and Poppy Z. Brite have largely blurred sexual orientation boundaries, there has never been an anthology of horror s …

Contra/Diction is an anthology of gay men's fiction to re-establish the queer in queer.
The book is a gay men's fiction anthology that represents the plurality of gay identity; an attempt to show that not all gay men "drive to Ikea, go to the gym, and buy new ties for their management-level positions before taking in the latest stage hit," as sug …

Quickies, together with Hot & Bothered, are hot his-and-her follow-ups to the highly successful Queer View Mirror 1 and 2 books of queer "short short" fiction. Quickies includes work by 69 writers (67 men and 2 women) from the US, Canada, Great Britain, Australia, Germany, South Africa, and Ireland, on aspects of gay male desire, from first kisses …

Queer View Mirror 2 is a second volume of lesbian and gay short short fiction: snapshots of queer life that articulate, in one thousand words or less, different ways of the world. One hundred and one stories from writers in eight different countries make up Queer View Mirror 2. Their subject matter ranges the wide spectrum of gay experience, from …

Spare and incisive, these stories present a voyeuristic glimpse into imperfect lives rooted in philosophies and deities, imbued with love, humour, and irony. Davey Bryant is an aging gay man who, while his lover sleeps, embarks on electronic odysseys with strangers surfing the Internet--from a lonely widow, to a cross-dressing naval officer, to a t …

Queer View Mirror is the first international assembly of lesbian and gay short short fiction including the work of 99 writers from all over the world, each offering fresh, once furtive glimpses of queer experience imbued with the rich possibilities of life, love, and language.
Contributors include: Lucy Jane Bledsoe, Maureen Brady, Beth Brant, Mic …

A rich, elegiac novel about family, friendship, and loyalty featuring Watmough's protagonist Davey Bryant. As the compassionate and witty narrator, Davey leads the reader through various upheavals in the life he shares with Ken, his companion, and their friends. At the heart of their journeys is Davey's own plaintive recollections of a past we all …

The first anthology of gay male prose ever published in Canada, acknowledging the dynamic growth of innovative and politically concerned writing from Canada's gay male community. The AIDS crisis and its devastating effects on the gay community have politicized and invigorated gay culture beyond the spectre of sexuality. The gay community has respon …

A remarkable novel that tests the relationship between free will and moral responsibility within the context of the AIDS crisis. An HIV-positive man seeks to come to terms with a life not fully lived through his encounters with a beautiful young man and his sister in the Ukraine.