The Long Hallway – memoir delves into how life’s fears and desires intertwine and isolate when growing up gay in suburbia

posted Sunday, June 16, 2024

by: Bryen Dunn in Books

The Long Hallway is about growing up queer, closeted, and afraid. Richard Scott Larson found expression for his interior life in horror films, especially John Carpenter’s 1978 classic, Halloween. He developed an intense childhood identification with Michael Myers, Carpenter’s inscrutable masked villain, as well as Michael’s potential victims. Larson scrutinizes this identification, meditating on horror […]

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Pride – commemorating 50 years of protests and parties in Toronto through words and images

posted Saturday, June 1, 2024

by: Bryen Dunn in Books

Toronto’s inaugural Gay Pride March took place in 1974 when a hundred people gathered to march from Allan Gardens to Queen’s Park, calling on lawmakers to include sexual orientation in the Ontario Human Rights Code. The march helped lay the groundwork for what has become one of the largest gay pride festivals in the world. […]

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Mean Boys: A Personal History – a ferocious inquiry into art and desire, style and politics, madness and salvation, and coming of age

posted Thursday, May 30, 2024

by: Bryen Dunn in Books

You know them when you see them: mean boys take up space, wielding cruelty to claim their place in the pecking order. Some mean boys make art or music or fashion; others make memes. Mean boys stomp the runways in Milan and Paris; mean boys marched at Charlottesville. And in the eyes of critic and […]

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Crooked Teeth: A Queer Syrian Refugee Memoir – one man’s story of a life spent out of place

posted Tuesday, May 28, 2024

by: Bryen Dunn in Books

“Writing this memoir is a betrayal.” So begins this electrifying personal account from Danny Ramadan, a celebrated novelist who has long enjoyed the shield his fiction provides. Now, to tell the story of his life, he must revisit dark corners of his past he’d rather forget and unearth memories of a city he can no […]

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I’m a Fool to Want You: Stories – gritty, dystopian tales on how we perceive gender, sexuality, identity and belonging within everyday life

posted Tuesday, May 28, 2024

by: Bryen Dunn in Books

I’m a Fool to Want You: Stories is a collection of tales that are both gritty and unflinching, exuding tenderness and humour, blurring the fine line between fantasy and reality. These 9 stories are inhabited by extravagant and profoundly human characters who face an ominous reality in ways as strange as themselves, questioning assumptions about […]

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An Evening with Birdy O’Day – a story of first love, two lives lived apart, and reconnecting years later

posted Wednesday, May 22, 2024

by: Bryen Dunn in Books

An Evening with Birdy O’Day is a funny, boisterous, and deeply moving novel about an aging hairstylist’s first love, whose fevered quest for pop music glory drove them apart, until a chance meeting years later. Roland Keener has lived and worked in Winnipeg all his life. He’s more or less content with the quiet and […]

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Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk – Kathleen Hanna’s memoir recounts the 90s Riot Grrrl movement, and other musings

posted Tuesday, May 14, 2024

by: Bryen Dunn in Books

Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk is an electric, searing memoir from Kathleen Hanna, the original rebel girl and legendary front woman of Bikini Kill and Le Tigre. Hanna takes us from her tumultuous childhood home to her formative college years in Olympia, Washington, and on to her first years on tour, fighting […]

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Pity – multi-generational Northern England family saga depicts both a celebration of resilience, and a possibility for change

posted Monday, May 13, 2024

by: Bryen Dunn in Books

Pity is the debut novel from award-winning poet Andrew McMillan, that explores community, masculinity and post-industrialization in Northern England. The town was once a hub of industry. A place where men toiled underground in darkness, picking and shoveling in the dust and the sleck. It was dangerous and back-breaking work but it meant something. It […]

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A Good Happy Girl – female deals with past family trauma by hooking up with lesbian couples

posted Saturday, April 27, 2024

by: Bryen Dunn in Books

A Good Happy Girl is a poignant, surprising, and immersive read about a young professional woman pursuing an emotionally intense relationship with a married lesbian couple. Helen, a jittery attorney with a self-destructive streak, is secretly reeling from a disturbing crime of neglect that her parents recently committed. Historically happy to compartmentalize—distracting herself by hooking […]

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Pride: A Seek-and-Find Celebration

posted Tuesday, April 16, 2024

by: Bryen Dunn in Books

Explore the ever-evolving culture of the queer community with this beautifully illustrated, 64-page seek-and-find book. Pride: A Seek-and-Find Celebration is a fun-filled tribute to LGBTQ+ history and culture from icons to allies, milestones to marches. The seek-and-find illustrations are packed with the faces and places that have graced a story of progress and strength. The detailed […]

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