Travesia
A poignant bilingual YA graphic novel about a teenage girl's harrowing experience crossing the Mexico-US border.
This compelling young adult graphic memoir, based on real events, tells the story of Gricelda, a fifteen-year-old Mexican girl who attempts to cross the border into America with her mother and younger brother in search of a better life. T …
Float Like a Butterfly, Drink Mint Tea
A wildly disarming memoir by comedian Alex Wood on how he overcame his multiple addictions.
As an alcoholic, drug-addicted comedian with tendencies to over-indulge and under-achieve since he was a teenager, Alex Wood was on track for to achieve his greatest goals: to die young and drunk. At the age of twenty-eight, feeling desperate in the face of a …
Kimiko Does Cancer
A moving and honest graphic memoir about the unexpected cancer journey of a young, queer, mixed-race woman.
At the age of twenty-five, Kimiko Tobimatsu was a young, queer, mixed-race woman with no history of health problems whose world was turned upside down when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. In an instant, she became immersed in a new and c …
Render
Governor General's Literary Award finalist
Searing, intimate poems that render a history of trauma, addiction, and recovery through dreams and waking experience.
Render (v.tr.): to submit, as for consideration; to give or make available; to give what is due or owed; to give in return, or retribution; to surrender; to yield. To represent; to perform a …
The Home Stretch
A moving, honest memoir about a man who returns to his rural hometown to take care of his cranky elderly father.
George K. Ilsley explores his complex relationship with his aging father in this candid memoir full of sharp emotion and disarming humour. George's father is ninety-one years old, a widower, and fiercely independent; an avid gardener, he' …
You Suck, Sir
By the creator/co-creator of the podcasts The Black Tapes and The Big Loop: reading between the lines of the hilarious conversations between a teacher and his students.
Before he became a famous stand-up comedian and podcast creator, Paul Bae taught English in Vancouver's largest public school. One day during his student-teaching practicum, he assig …
My Art Is Killing Me and Other Poems
Finalist, Jim Deva Prize for Writing that Provokes
In her novels, poetry, and prose, Amber Dawn has written eloquently on queer femme sexuality, individual and systemic trauma, and sex work justice, themes drawn from her own lived experience and revealed most notably in her award-winning memoir How Poetry Saved My Life.
In this, her second poetry col …
The Cure for Hate
How does an affluent, middle-class, private-school-attending son of a doctor end up at the Aryan Nations compound in Idaho, falling in with and then recruiting for some of the most notorious neo-Nazi groups in Canada and the United States?
The Cure for Hate paints a very human picture of a young man who craved attention, acceptance, and approval and …
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 …
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 …
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 …
Saigon Calling
A sequel to the acclaimed Such a Lovely Little War: growing up Vietnamese in swinging London as the Vietnam war intensifies.
Marcelino Truong's first book about the early years of the Vietnam war, the graphic memoir Such a Lovely Little War (2016), received starred reviews in Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews and was named "one the season's best …
Dead Reckoning
Finalist, Governor General's Literary Award for Non-Fiction
A Globe 100 Best Book of the Year
Finalist, Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize (BC Book Prizes)
When Carys Cragg was eleven, her father, a respected doctor, was brutally murdered in his own home by an intruder. Twenty years later, and despite the reservations of her family and friends, she decid …
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 …
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 …
AlliterAsian
A wide-ranging anthology of Asian Canadian literature to celebrate 20 years of Ricepaper.
2015 marks the 20th anniversary of Ricepaper magazine, a pioneering periodical devoted to Asian-Canadian writing. Over the years, Ricepaper's focus has shifted from predominantly arts and culture reporting to the publication of original literature; as such, it …
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 …
Mouthquake
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- …
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 …
Strange Material
The art of storytelling through textiles, exploring the many ways in which narrative can be expressed through cloth and needle.
Strange Material explores the relationship between handmade textiles and storytelling. Through text, the act of weaving a tale or dropping a thread takes on new meaning for those who previously have seen textiles--quilts, b …
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 …
The World Is Moving around Me
On January 12, 2010, novelist Dany Laferriere had just ordered dinner at a Port-au-Prince restaurant with a friend when the earthquake struck. He survived; some 300,000 others did not. The quake caused widespread destruction and left over 1 million homeless; it also revealed flaws in the impoverished nation's infrastructure that will take a generat …
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 …
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 …
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 Rice Queen Diaries
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 …
I am a Red Dress
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 …
The Greenpeace to Amchitka
Greenpeace is known around the world for its activism and education surrounding environmental and biodiversity issues. With a presence in more than forty countries across Europe, the Americas, Asia, and the Pacific, Greenpeace is undoubtedly a dominant force in the realm of environmental activism. This is the story of how Greenpeace came to be.
In S …
American Whiskey Bar
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 …
Death Writes
A publishing oddity, Death Writes: A Curious Notebook is both what you might expect--a handwritten notebook with doodles in the margins and clippings in the back; and what you might not expect--the perspective of Death him/herself, ruminating about the land of the living.
This unusual, stylish book is Death's personal notebook, which has been une …