Our Work Is Everywhere
A visually stunning graphic non-fiction book on queer and trans resistance.
Over the past ten years, we have witnessed the rise of queer and trans communities that have defied and challenged those who have historically opposed them. Through bold, symbolic imagery and surrealist, overlapping landscapes, queer illustrator and curator Syan Rose shines …
Like a Boy but Not a Boy
A revelatory book about gender, mental illness, parenting, mortality, bike mechanics, work, class, and the task of living in a body.
Inquisitive and expansive, Like a Boy but Not a Boy explores author andrea bennett's experiences with gender expectations, being a non-binary parent, and the sometimes funny and sometimes difficult task of living in a …
We Had No Rules
A defiant, beautifully realized story collection about the messy complications of contemporary queer life.
A young teenager runs from her family's conservative home to her sister's NY apartment to learn a very different set of rules. A woman grieves the loss of a sister, a "gay divorce," and the pain of unacknowledged abuse with the help of a lone w …
Rebent Sinner
Governor General's Literary Award finalist; BC Book Prize winner (Jim Deva Prize for Writing that Provokes); Forest of Reading Evergreen Award finalist
Ivan Coyote is one of North America's preeminent storytellers and performers, and the author, co-author, or co-editor of eleven previous books, all but one of which have been published by Arsenal Pul …
I Hope We Choose Love
American Library Association Stonewall Book Awards Honor Book; Winner, Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature
What can we hope for at the end of the world? What can we trust in when community has broken our hearts? What would it mean to pursue justice without violence? How can we love in the absence of faith?
In a heartbrea …
Scorpio Rising
The final book in the Queer Film Classics series is R.L. Cagle's take on Scorpio Rising (1963), Kenneth Anger's avant-garde short film that about gay Nazi bikers preparing for a race. The film marked Anger's spectacular return to the US underground cinema scene after an absence of nearly ten years. Scorpio Rising resonates with the thrill and energ …
Double Melancholy
According to Didier Eribon, melancholy is where it all starts and where it also ends: the lifelong process of mourning that each homosexual experiences, and through which they construct their own identity. In this beguiling book, an introverted, anxious, ambitious, artistically gifted queer Filipino-Canadian boy finds solace, inspiration, and a "sy …
Dear Scarlet
Longlisted for Canada Reads; Finalist, City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book Prize
In this intimate and moving graphic memoir, Teresa Wong writes and illustrates the story of her struggle with postpartum depression in the form of a letter to her daughter Scarlet. Equal parts heartbreaking and funny, Dear Scarlet perfectly captures the quiet desperation …
The Great NDN Paradox
In an era when talks of reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples strive to atone for past wrongs (and tragic injustices that persist to this day), Ryan McMahon's debut story collection takes a sharp, unwavering, and yes, hilarious look at the paradoxical state of Aboriginal-settler relations, and the ironies, pitfalls, and sweet …
The Woo-Woo
2019 CANADA READS FINALIST
Shortlisted for the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust of Canada Prize for Nonfiction; Winner, Hubert Evans Nonfiction Prize; Longlisted for the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour
In this jaw-dropping, darkly comedic memoir, a young woman comes of age in a dysfunctional Asian family who blame their woes on ghosts and demons when t …
Care Work
Finalist, Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction
In their new, long-awaited collection of essays, Lambda Literary Award-winning writer and longtime disability justice activist and performance artist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha explores the politics and realities of disability justice, a movement that centres the lives and leadership of sick an …
Manila by Night
A Queer Film Classic on a controversial 1980 film by queer Filipino filmmaker Ishmael Bernal.
A Queer Film Classic on Ishmael Bernal's 1980 film that follows a dozen characters, all denizens of Manila's sordid yet exuberant underworld, as they pursue life, love, and pleasure. Bernal cited Robert Altman's Nashville as one of the influences on his epi …
What I Think Happened
A wickedly funny book in which the author recasts historical events and personalities from her own feminist perspective.
What I Think Happened, the debut book by comedian Evany Rosen, is really two books: a savvy, no-holds-barred romp through the history of the western world, and the personal story of a self-described "failed academic" who recasts …
Female Trouble
A Queer Film Classic on John Waters' 1974 dark comedy.
The first title in the Queer Film Classic series to focus on the work of legendary director and cinematic camp icon John Waters, best known for the underground classic Pink Flamingos and his later more commercial works such as Crybaby, starring Johnny Depp, and Hairspray, which was also made int …
Arabian Nights
A Queer Film Classic on 1974's Arabian Nights by Pier Paolo Pasolini, the controversial Italian director who was murdered under mysterious circumstances in 1975.
Already internationally distinguished as a poet, novelist, and outspoken social critic of the postwar period, Pasolini turned to filmmaking around 1960. In little more than a decade, he pro …
Conflict Is Not Abuse
From intimate relationships to global politics, Sarah Schulman observes a continuum: that inflated accusations of harm are used to avoid accountability. Illuminating the difference between Conflict and Abuse, Schulman directly addresses our contemporary culture of scapegoating. This deep, brave, and bold work reveals how punishment replaces persona …
The Dad Dialogues
Charles Demers is a thirtysomething comedian and the author of three books; George Bowering is eighty, Canada's first poet laureate, and the author of more than eighty books. Charlie and George are also the best of friends. And the fathers of daughters.
In this unique book of correspondence, these two men from different generations write to each oth …
Such a Lovely Little War
This riveting, beautifully produced graphic memoir tells the story of the early years of the Vietnam War as seen through the eyes of a young boy named Marco, the son of a Vietnamese diplomat and his French wife. The book opens in America, where the boy's father works for the South Vietnamese embassy; there the boy is made to feel self-conscious abo …
The Remedy
Lambda Literary Award winner
To remedy means to heal, to cure, to set right, to make reparations.
The Remedy invites writers and readers to imagine what we need to create healthy, resilient, and thriving LGBTQ communities. This anthology is a diverse collection of real-life stories from queer and trans people on their own health-care experiences and …
Tomboy Survival Guide
Shortlisted for the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust of Canada Prize for Nonfiction; Longlisted for the BC National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction; Stonewall Book Award Honor Book winner; Longlisted for Canada Reads
Ivan Coyote is a celebrated storyteller and the author of ten previous books, including Gender Failure (with Rae Spoon) and One in Every C …
Becoming Unbecoming
This extraordinary graphic novel is a powerful denunciation of sexual violence against women. As seen through the eyes of a twelve-year-old girl named Una, it takes place in northern England in 1977, as the Yorkshire Ripper, a serial killer of prostitutes, is on the loose and creating panic among the townspeople. As the police struggle in their clu …
C.R.A.Z.Y.
QUEER FILM CLASSICS is a critically acclaimed series that launched in 2009, edited by Thomas Waugh and Matthew Hays, covering some of the most important and influential films about and/or by LGBT people made between 1950 and 2005, and written by leading LGBT film scholars and critics.
A Queer Film Classic on the 2005 film by French-Canadian director …
Forbidden Love
QUEER FILM CLASSICS is a critically acclaimed series that launched in 2009, edited by Thomas Waugh and Matthew Hays, covering some of the most important and influential films about and/or by LGBT people made between 1950 and 2005, and written by leading LGBT film scholars and critics.
A Queer Film Classic on the 1992 Canadian feature documentary sub …
God in Pink
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 …
Foucault against Himself
A thought-provoking collection of essays on Michel Foucault that reframes his legacy.
In his private life, as well as in his work and political attitudes, Michel Foucault often stood in contradiction to himself, especially when his expansive ideas collided with the institutions in which he worked. In Francois Caillat's provocative collection of essa …
Dirty River
A transformative memoir by a queer disabled person of colour and abuse survivor.
Lambda Literary Award and Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction finalist
In 1996, poet Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, carrying only two backpacks, caught a Greyhound bus in America and ran away to Canada. They ended up in Toronto, where they were welcomed by a comm …
A Superior Man
Paul Yee's first novel for adults: an historical account of a Chinese man on a journey to find the mother of his son.
For more than thirty years, Paul Yee has written about his Chinese-Canadian heritage in award-winning books for young readers as well as adult non-fiction. Here, in his first work of fiction for adults, he takes us on a harrowing jou …
My Body Is Yours
A memoir about fathers and sons, breaking out of gender norms, and reconciling with a dangerous childhood.
Lambda Literary Award finalist
Michael V. Smith is a multihyphenate force of nature: a novelist, poet, improv comic, filmmaker, drag queen, performance artist, and occasional clown. In this, his first work of nonfiction, Michael traces his ear …
L.A. Plays Itself/Boys in the Sand
A Queer Film Classic on two groundbreaking gay films from the early 1970s, both of which exemplify the growing liberalization of social attitudes toward sex and homosexuality in post-Stonewall America. L.A. Plays Itself and Boys in the Sand were both gay art house porn films released within months of each other at a theatre in New York in 1972. L …
I've Heard the Mermaids Singing
A Queer Film Classic on Canadian director Patricia Rozema's I've Heard the Mermaids Singing, her quirky and hopeful first feature film which made its premiere at Cannes and won its Prix de la jeunesse. Presented as a "videotaped confession," it tells the story of Polly Vandersma, an unpretentious and introverted young woman who takes photographs as …
Gender Failure
Being a girl was something that never really happened for me. -Rae Spoon
Ivan E. Coyote and Rae Spoon are accomplished, award-winning writers, musicians, and performers; they are also both admitted "gender failures." In their first collaborative book, Ivan and Rae explore and expose their failed attempts at fitting into the gender binary, and how u …
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 …
Modern Native Feasts
Contemporary, imaginative interpretations of First Nations cuisine, including lighter, healthier, and more nutritious versions of traditional recipes.
Native American cuisine comes of age in this elegant, contemporary collection that reinterprets and updates traditional Native recipes with modern, healthy twists. Andrew George Jr. was head chef for …
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 …
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 …
The Lava in My Bones
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
After Canaan
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 …
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 …
Law of Desire
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
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
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 …
The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You
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 …