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We have always been here: a queer Muslim memoir /
By Samra Habib. 2019
Growing up in Pakistan, Samra Habib lacks a blueprint for the life she wants. She has a mother who gave…
up everything to be a pious, dutiful wife and an overprotective father who seems to conspire against a life of any adventure. Plus, she has to hide the fact that she's Ahmadi to avoid persecution from religious extremists. As the threats against her family increase, they seek refuge in Canada, where new financial and cultural obstacles await them. When Samra discovers that her mother has arranged her marriage, she must again hide a part of herself--the fun-loving, feminist teenager that has begun to bloom--until she simply can't any longer. So begins a journey of self-discovery that takes her to Tokyo, where she comes to terms with her sexuality, and to a queer-friendly mosque in Toronto, where she returns to her faith in the same neighbourhood where she attended her first drag show. Along the way, she learns that the facets of her identity aren't as incompatible as she was led to believe, and that her people had always been there--the world just wasn't ready for them yet. 2019.Dead Mom Walking: A Memoir of Miracle Cures and Other Disasters
By Rachel Matlow. 2020
"A hilarious memoir of effervescent misadventures." --Toronto Star"How am I laughing at someone's mother's cancer? How? We think we can't…
laugh about death, about cancer, about our mothers and their suffering . . . and we can't, but we can. And there's so much relief in that. I laughed, I cried, I laughed and laughed and laughed." --Carolyn Taylor, BARONESS VON SKETCH SHOWA traumedy about life and death (and every cosmic joke in between)When her mother is diagnosed with cancer, Rachel Matlow is concerned but hopeful. It's Stage 1, so her mom will get surgery and everything will go back to normal. But growing up in Rachel's family, there was no normal. Elaine, an alternative school teacher and self-help junkie, was never a capital M "Mommy"--she spent more time meditating than packing lunches--and Rachel, who played hockey with the boys and refused to ever wear a dress, was no ordinary daughter.When Elaine decides to forgo conventional treatment and heal herself naturally, Rachel is forced to ponder whether the very things that made her mom so special--her independent spirit, her belief in being the author of her own story--are what will ultimately kill her. As the cancer progresses, so does Elaine's conviction in doing things her way. She assembles a dream team of alternative healers, gulps down herbal tinctures with every meal, and talks (with respect) to her cancer cells. Anxious and confused, Rachel is torn between indulging her pie-in-the-sky pursuits (ayahuasca and all) and pleading with the person who's taking her mother away.With irreverence and honesty--and a little help from Elaine's journals and self-published dating guide, plus hours of conversations recorded in her dying days--Matlow brings her inimitable mother to life on the page. Dead Mom Walking is the hilarious and heartfelt story of what happens when two people who've always written their own script go head to head with each other, and with life's least forgiving plot device.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 body. The book's fourteen essays also delve incisively into the interconnected themes of mental illness, mortality, creative work, class, and bike mechanics (apparently you can learn a lot about yourself through trueing a wheel). In "Tomboy," andrea articulates what it means to live in a gender in-between space, and why one might be necessary; "37 Jobs 21 Houses" interrogates the notion that the key to a better life is working hard and moving house. And interspersed throughout the book is "Everyone Is Sober and No One Can Drive," sixteen stories about queer millennials who grew up and came of age in small Canadian communities. With the same poignant spirit as Ivan Coyote's Tomboy Survival Guide, Like a Boy addresses the struggle to find acceptance, and to accept oneself; and how one can find one's place while learning to make space for others. The book also wonders what it means to be an atheist and search for faith that everything will be okay; what it means to learn how to love life even as you obsess over its brevity; and how to give birth, to bring new life, at what feels like the end of the world. With thoughtfulness and acute observation, andrea bennett reveals intimate truths about the human experience, whether one is outside the gender binary or not.Rebent Sinner
By Ivan Coyote. 2019
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 Pulp Press. Their most recent book, Tomboy Survival Guide, was shortlisted for the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction, named an American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book, and longlisted for Canada Reads. In their latest, Ivan takes on the patriarchy and the political, as well as the intimate and the personal in these beguiling and revealing stories of what it means to be trans and non-binary today, at a time in their life when they must carry the burden of heartbreaking history with them, while combatting those who would misgender them or deny their very existence. These stories span thirty years of tackling TERFs, legislators, and bathroom police, sure, but there is joy and pleasure and triumph to be found here too, as Ivan pays homage to personal heroes like the late Leslie Feinberg while gently guiding younger trans folk to prove to themselves that there is a way out of the darkness. Rebent Sinner is the work of an accomplished artist whose plain truths about their experience will astound readers with their utter, breathtaking humanity.This Red Line Goes Straight to Your Heart: A Memoir in Halves
By Madhur Anand. 2020
“Wondrously and elegantly written in language that astonishes and moves the reader…This is an important book: an emotional and intellectual…
tour de force.” —Jane Urquhart An experimental memoir about Partition, immigration, and generational storytelling, This Red Line Goes Straight to Your Heart weaves together the poetry of memory with the science of embodied trauma, using the imagined voices of the past and the vital authority of the present. We begin with a man off balance: one in one thousand, the only child in town whose polio leads to partial paralysis. We meet his future wife, chanting Hai Rams for Gandhiji and choosing education over marriage. On one side of the line that divides this book, we follow them as their homeland splits in two and they are drawn together, moving to Canada and raising their children in mining towns and in crowded city apartments. And when we turn the book over, we find the daughter's tale—we see how the rupture of Partition, the asymmetry of a father's leg, the virus of a mother's rage, makes its way to the next generation. Told through the lenses of biology, physics, history and poetry, this is a memoir that defies form and convention to immerse the reader in the feeling of what remains when we've heard as much of the truth as our families will allow, and we're left to search for ourselves among the pieces they've carried with them.A History of My Brief Body
By Billy-Ray Belcourt. 2020
FINALIST FOR THE 2021 LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD FOR GAY MEMOIR/BIOGRAPHYFINALIST FOR THE BC AND YUKON BOOK PRIZE, FOR BOTH THE…
HUBERT EVANS NON-FICTION PRIZE AND JIM DEVA PRIZE FOR WRITING THAT PROVOKESNATIONAL BESTSELLERThe youngest ever winner of the Griffin Prize mines his own personal history to reconcile the world he was born into with the world that could be.Billy-Ray Belcourt's debut memoir opens with a tender letter to his kokum and memories of his early life in the hamlet of Joussard, Alberta, and on the Driftpile First Nation. From there, it expands to encompass the big and broken world around him, in all its complexity and contradictions: a legacy of colonial violence and the joy that flourishes in spite of it, first loves and first loves lost, sexual exploration and intimacy, and the act of writing as a survival instinct and a way to grieve. What emerges is not only a profound meditation on memory, gender, anger, shame, and ecstasy, but also the outline of a way forward. With startling honesty, and in a voice distinctly and assuredly his own, Belcourt situates his life experiences within a constellation of seminal queer texts, among which this book is sure to earn its place. Eye-opening, intensely emotional, and excessively quotable, A History of My Brief Body demonstrates over and over again the power of words to both devastate and console us.The Queer Evangelist: A Socialist Clergy's Radically Honest Tale
By Cheri DiNovo. 2021
Cheri DiNovo went from living on the streets as a teenager to performing the first legalized same-sex marriage in Canada…
in 2001. This story of one queer kid will hopefully inspire other young people (queer and not) to resist the system and change it.A Gay Man's Guide to Life: Get Real, Stand Tall, and Take Your Place
By Britt East. 2020
Many gay men find ourselves trapped in a series of no-win situations. If we don't live honestly and openly, we…
won't have the skills, wisdom, or relationships necessary to manifest our dreams. But when we do come out, we must confront the full force of societal homophobia, and consider a variety of questions: Can we create family without mimicking the norms of straight society? How do we cultivate sustainable gay friendships amidst our internalized homophobia? In a world of hook-up apps and disposable relationships, how do we find lasting love? A Gay Man's Guide to Life answers these questions. Britt East presents an approachable, no-nonsense path for gay men, to set down the excuses and get to the business of improving their lives. No new-age mumbo jumbo or wishy washy self-help jargon. Just real work focused on real results to unleash our true selves and unlock our best lives.The Diary of Dukesang Wong: A Voice from Gold Mountain
By Dukesang Wong, Wanda Joy Hoe, David McIlwraith. 2020
Here is the only known first-person account from a Chinese worker on the famously treacherous parts of transcontinental railways that…
spanned the North American continent in the nineteenth century. The story of those Chinese workers has been told before, but never in a voice from among their number, never in a voice that lived through the experience. Here is that missing voice, a voice that changes our understanding of the history it tells and that so many believed was lost forever. Dukesang Wong’s written account of life working on the Canadian Pacific Railway, a Gold Mountain life, tells of the punishing work, the comradery, the sickness and starvation, the encounters with Indigenous Peoples, and the dark and shameful history of racism and exploitation that prevailed up and down the North American continent. The Diary of Dukesang Wong includes all the selected entries translated in the mid-1960s by his granddaughter, Wanda Joy Hoe, for an undergraduate sociology paper. Background history and explanations for the diary’s unexplained references are provided by David McIlwraith, the book’s editor, who also considers why the diarist’s voice and other Chinese voices have been silenced for so long.Care Of: Letters, Connections, and Cures
By Ivan Coyote. 2021
Beloved storyteller Ivan Coyote returns with their most intimate and moving book yet. Writer and performer Ivan Coyote has spent…
decades on the road, telling stories around the world. For years, Ivan has kept a file of the most special communications received from readers and audience members—letters, Facebook messages, emails, soggy handwritten notes tucked under the windshield wiper of their truck after a gig. Then came Spring, 2020, and, like artists everywhere, Coyote was grounded by the pandemic, all their planned events cancelled. The energy of a live audience, a performer’s lifeblood, was suddenly gone. But with this loss came an opportunity for a different kind of connection. Those letters that had long piled up could finally begin to be answered. Care Of combines the most powerful of these letters with Ivan’s responses, creating a body of correspondence of startling intimacy, breathtaking beauty, and heartbreaking honesty and openness. Taken together, they become an affirming and joyous reflection on many of the themes central to Coyote’s celebrated work—compassion and empathy, family fragility, non-binary and Trans identity, and the unending beauty of simply being alive, a giant love letter to the idea of human connection, and the power of truly listening to each other.The Future Is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes and Mourning Songs
By Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. 2022
In The Future Is Disabled, Leah Laksmi Piepzna-Samarasinha asks some provocative questions: What if, in the near future, the majority…
of people will be disabled - and what if that's not a bad thing? And what if disability justice and disabled wisdom are crucial to creating a future in which it's possible to survive fascism, climate change, and pandemics and to bring about liberation? Building on the work of their game-changing book Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, Piepzna-Samarasinha writes about disability justice at the end of the world, documenting the many ways disabled people kept and are keeping each other - and the rest of the world - alive during Trump, fascism and the COVID-19 pandemic. Other subjects include crip interdependence, care and mutual aid in real life, disabled community building, and disabled art practice as survival and joy. Written over the course of two years of disabled isolation during the pandemic, this is a book of love letters to other disabled QTBIPOC (and those concerned about disability justice, the care crisis, and surviving the apocalypse); honour songs for kin who are gone; recipes for survival; questions and real talk about care, organizing, disabled families, and kin networks and communities; and wild brown disabled femme joy in the face of death. With passion and power, The Future Is Disabled remembers our dead and insists on our future.Bloodroot: Tracing the Untelling of Motherloss
By Betsy Warland. 2021
In Bloodroot, Betsy Warland traces how a mother and daughter's shared gender can shape the very anatomy of narrative itself.…
In her mother's final year,Warland quietly discovered how to disentangle a crucial, concealed story that had rendered their relationship disconnected and fraught. Warland weaves a common ground that moves beyond duty and despair, providing both questions and guideposts for readers, particularly those faced with ageing and ill parents and their loss.The 2000 edition of Bloodroot broke new ground in memoir form and uncharted storytelling. The 2021 edition, reprinted by Inanna for the launch of its InannaSignature Feminist Publications series, includes a new foreword by Susan Olding and a new essay by Warland that explores subsequent questions, insights and tenderness only the passage of time can enable.Pride and Persistence: Stories of Queer Activism (Do You Know My Name? #4)
By Mary Fairhurst Breen. 2023
The activists between these pages have stood up for the queer community, whether on their own behalf or in support…
of people they love. Some made a difference by confronting injustice; others dared to be fully themselves.Ninjutsu The Art of Invisibility
By Donn F. Draeger. 1989
Ninja-the very word inspires awe and terror in equal measure. Master of espionage and assassination, stealth and concealment, the ninja's…
ability to move swiftly and silently gave rise to popular legends of amazing exploits, invincibility and supernatural powers.In Ninjutsu: The Art of Invisibility, Donn Draeger draws back the veil of mystery shrouding the arcane practices of feudal Japan's shadow warriors. Stripping away myth and exaggeration, Draeger reveals the secret tactics, exotic weapons, tricks and disguises that earned the ninja a reputation as history's most feared secret agents.Vanished Years
By Rupert Everett. 2012
'[An] instant classic' IndependentRupert Everett's first memoir - Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins - was an international bestseller and…
an instant classic on publication in 2006. Reviewers compared him to Evelyn Waugh, David Niven, Noel Coward and Lord Byron. But Rupert Everett is - of course - one of a kind.Mischievous, touching and nothing less than brilliant, this new memoir is filled with stories, from childhood to the present. Astonishing encounters; tragedy and comedy; vivid portraits of friends and rivals; razor-sharp observations of the celebrity circus from LA to London and beyond... there is something extraordinary on every page. A pilgrimage to Lourdes with his father is both hilarious and moving. A misguided step into reality TV goes horribly wrong. From New York to Moscow to Berlin to Phnom Penh, Vanished Years takes the reader on a wild and wonderful new journey with a charming (and rather disreputable) companion.War, Denial and Nation-Building in Sri Lanka
By Rachel Seoighe. 2017
This book begins from a critical account of the final months of the Sri Lankan civil war, tracing themes of…
nationalism, discourse and conflict memory through this period of immense violence and into its aftermath. Using these themes to explore state crime, atrocity and its denial and representation, Seoighe offers an analysis of how stories of conflict are authored and constructed. This book examines the political discourse of the former Rajapaksa government, highlighting how fluency in international discourses of counter-terrorism, humanitarianism and the 'reconciliation' expected of states transitioning from conflict can be used to conceal and deny state violence. Drawing on extensive interviews with activists, academics, politicians, state representatives and international agency staff, and three months of observation in Sri Lanka in 2012, Seoighe demonstrates how the Rajapaksa government re-narrativised violence through orchestrated techniques of denial and mass ritual discourse. It drew on and perpetuated a heightened majoritarian Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism which consolidated power under Sinhalese political elites, generated minority grievances and, in turn, sustained the repression and dispossession of the Tamil community of the Northeast. A detailed and evocative study, this book will be of special interest to scholars of conflict studies, political violence and critical criminology.Letters to Palestine
By Vijay Prashad. 2015
Operation Protective Edge, Israel's seven-week bombing campaign and ground invasion of Gaza in the summer of 2014, resulted in half…
a million displaced Gazans, tens of thousands of destroyed homes, and more than 2,000 deaths--and, yet, it was only the latest in a long series of assaults endured by Palestinians isolated in Gaza. But, following the conflict, polls revealed a startling fact: for the first time, a majority of Americans under thirty found Israel's actions unjustified. Jon Stewart aired a blistering attack on Israeli violence, and a video of a UN spokesperson weeping as he was interviewed in Gaza went viral, appearing on Vanity Fair and Buzzfeed, among other sites. This book traces this swelling American recognition of Palestinian suffering, struggle, and hope, in writing that is personal, lyrical, anguished, and inspiring. Some of the leading writers of our time, such as Junot Díaz and Teju Cole, poets and essayists, novelists and scholars, Palestinian American activists like Huwaida Arraf, Noura Erakat, and Remi Kanazi, give voice to feelings of empathy and solidarity--as well as anger at US support for Israeli policy--in intimate letters, beautiful essays, and furious poems. This is a landmark work of controversial, committed literary writing.From the Trade Paperback edition.Remnants of the Sikh Empire: Historical Sikh Monuments in India & Pakistan
By Bobby Singh Bansal. 2015
A fascinating chronicle that focuses on architectural gems of the Sikh Empire. Remnants of the Sikh Empire is a unique…
guide to the many important Sikh monuments located both in India and Pakistan. It catalogues numerous structures historically associated with the reign of Maharaja Ranjit Singh during the early nineteenth century. From Mughal to Sikh edifices, this book shines a spotlight on undiscovered masterpieces including forts, havelis (mansions), memorials and palaces across these countries, pictures of which have never been published before. The author travelled extensively across remote regions along the Afghan?Pakistan border with the assistance of the Pakistan Army in order to compile rare footage that documents these habitations. Some of the structures include strategic forts built in the tribal areas of Pakistan by the legendary Sikh hero Hari Singh Nalwa, the existence of which is completely unknown to the general public. Not only does this volume narrate the aesthetic and strategic history behind these structures but it also sheds light on the rich cultural traditions associated with the powerful nobles and courtiers of the Lahore Durbar who reshaped the architectural landscape of Punjab and Kashmir in the nineteenth century. Remnants of the Sikh Empire catapults the reader into an unforgettable journey, retracing the rich heritage of the Punjab in these countries where numerous iconic monuments still stand testament to the power and influence of the Sikh Empire.Dean Worcester’s Fantasy Islands brings to life one of the most significant (but under examined) figures in the history of U.…
S. colonialism in the Philippines. Upon the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, Worcester, a scientist who had traveled twice to the Philippines on zoological expeditions, established himself as one of America’s leading experts on the Philippines. Over a fourteen-year career as a member of the U. S. colonial regime, Worcester devoted much of his time and energy to traveling among and photographing non-Christian minority groups in the Philippines. He amassed an archive of several thousand photographs taken by him or by government photographers. Worcester deployed those photographs in books, magazine articles, and lectures to promote his belief that the United States should maintain control of the Philippines for decades to come. While many historians have examined American colonial photography in the Philippines, this book is the first lengthy treatment of Worcester’s role in shaping American perceptions of the Philippines in the early twentieth century.