Arbeiter Ring Publishing

28/10/2024

All writers and cultural workers in book publishing, libraries, archives, periodicals, etc can sign on.

tinyurl.com/refusingcomplicityletter

24/10/2024

Also this winter, we’re incredibly honoured to be publishing a second book developed through the work of : Bebías Into Ǫhndaa Ke: Q***r Indigenous Knowledge for Land and Community, edited by Kleo P. Skavinski and Sydney Rae Krill.

Bebías Into Ǫhndaa Ke: Q***r Indigenous Knowledge for Land and Community
Kleo P. Skavinski, Sydney Rae Krill, eds.

A powerful collection of essays, stories and conversations that provide us with a diverse roadmap for navigating and overcoming hate, supporting q***r Indigenous kin, and revitalizing radical ethics of care for building healthy, inclusive, and self-determining lands and communities. A celebration of trans, q***r, and Two-Spirit Indigenous brilliance, with an intentional inclusion of voices from the North (the Yukon, Northwest Territories, Inuvialuit and Nunatsiavut), the essays in this collection offer a wealth of q***r Indigenous theory, experience, and practices, with a unique emphasis on the critical role of land in these conversations.

The contributors, who range from young activists, artists, families, and both emerging and established scholars, provide insightful and transformative q***r perspectives on a number of pertinent topics, including: knowledge reclamation, resurgence, nation-building, community life and governance, cultural revitalization, belonging, family relationships, creative practice, environmental degradation, mental health and wellbeing, youth empowerment, and Indigenous pedagogy. Amidst the ongoing violence of settler colonization, and its legacies of exclusion and erasure that continue to target q***r, gender-diverse and Two-Spirit Indigenous people, this collection is an invaluable gift and resource for our communities, showing us that a different world is possible, and reminding us that q***r Indigenous people have always belonged on the land and in community.

22/10/2024

We are thrilled to announce the publication of the next instalment of ARP’s Semaphore Series: Wages for Schoolwork by Shiv Raveendrabose.

Wages for School Work
Shiv Raveendrabose

This book presents a radical proposal: paying students to attend school. Part polemic, part movement history, and part political strategy, Wages for Schoolwork is a rousing manifesto and call to action for disillusioned high school students fed up with cruel teachers, excessive workloads, and onerous adult expectations. Drawing on the rich history of student resistance and school strikes, it charts a new course for education—one that recognizes the immense energy students devote to studying for what it actually is: labour, arguing that like all forms of labour, schoolwork should be compensated. Informed by the victories of organized labour, feminist, and anti-racist movements, Wages for Schoolwork brings class struggle to the classroom by placing students at the center of the fight for a more just world.

The latest in ARP Books’ Semaphore Series of short polemical texts, Wages for Schoolwork addresses disillusioned high school students, critiquing the devaluation of their labour in schools, despite their crucial role in reproducing capitalist accumulation. Raveendrabose encourages high school students to recognize that they have the power to fight not only for wages, but for structural changes to the school system.


Shiv Raveendrabose is a schoolteacher, writer, and radical theorist born and raised in Winnipeg, Manitoba. He earned his Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Education degrees from the University of Winnipeg, followed by a Master of Education from the University of Manitoba. Shiv currently resides in Chilliwack, British Columbia and teaches at an alternative high school tailored for students who do not fit the traditional school system; there he encourages his students to think beyond established conventions of ‘teaching’ and ‘learning.’

21/09/2024

An excerpt from James Wilt’s new book Dogged and Destructive: Essays on the Winnipeg Police is up at the Walrus today. Check it out and come to the Winnipeg launch this Tuesday 6pm at the Millennium Library Carol Shields Auditorium!

https://shorturl.at/CU1bd

17/09/2024

“As Is serves as a historical reckoning. Taking an unvarnished look at how settler activity formed the city currently known as Hamilton, Ontario, Ben Robinson blurs neglected public records with personal lyrics, by turns interrogating the region’s placedness and its colonial legacy. This is an unflinching, necessary debut.”
—Jim Johnstone, author of The King of Terrors

Two events coming up later this month in Toronto and Hamilton to celebrate the emergence of Ben Robinson’s poetry collection As Is:

September 23rd at Flying Books (Toronto, College St.) with Fawn Parker
6:30PM

September 27th at The Printed Word (Hamilton) with Steacy Easton & Fawn Parker
7:00PM

13/09/2024

Come find us this weekend at the Prairie Art Book Fair!
Today from 5-8
Sat/Sun from 11-5
At Plugin ICA

10/09/2024

Join us on September 24th for the official book launch of Dogged and Destructive: Essays on the Winnipeg Police!

A new instalment into the ARP Semaphore Series, Dogged and Destructive provides a critical and comprehensive analysis of the WPS, its enormous police budgets, and its role in Winnipeg’s dynamic of settler-colonialism.

The launch will be hosted at the Carol Shields Auditorium at the Millennium Library, situated in downtown Winnipeg. The event will feature a discussion by author James Wilt and Dr. Bronwyn Dobchuk-Land.

This is an indoor event! Please wear a mask to keep yourself and others safe. See second slide for important information about the venue.

Image IDs to follow in the comments.

28/08/2024

25% off all books for Labour Day Weekend ⚙️
August 31st - September 2nd
Only at arpbooks.org 📚

We’ve been running our webshop now for almost exactly one year now, and we are very thankful for the continued direct support of ARP Books.

Please enjoy the long weekend courtesy of the labour movement with a 25% discount on all orders, and $10 flat rate shipping across Canada 📦!

Check out the slides for a small sample of our titles, and the wide variety of books we love to publish.

In perpetual solidarity, ARP Books 🤝

19/08/2024

Just landed in the office! Brand new to the Semaphore Series, Dogged and Destructive: Essays on the Winnipeg Police by James Wilt! Keep an eye out and mark your calendars for the book launch coming on September 24th!

“Part history, part manifesto, Dogged and Destructive exposes the brutality, corruption, and racism at the heart of the policing enterprise and offers us a vision of what we could do instead to create a safe, healthy, and just future.”
—Alex S. Vitale, author of The End of Policing

Visit arpbooks.org to order your copy today!

07/08/2024

“This seems like a fruitful place for a writer to be working from—ambitious in scope, experimental in approach, and aimed at an audience of other people who want to transform things. Toews is leading by weird, refreshing example.“

—Gabrielle Willms, Public Parking

A fantastic in-depth conversation with Owen Toews by Gabrielle Willms about his debut novel Island Falls, as well as his first book Stolen City: Racial Capitalism and the Making of Winnipeg, settler colonialism, organizing for change, and much more up at

https://shorturl.at/MuPMT

15/07/2024

“This volume sits at the intersection of Indigenous scholarship, artistic resistance, cultural reclamation and healing. … Jack Horne’s TOL, NEW̱ SEN TŦE SOȽ: I KNOW THE ROAD chronicles the author’s journey as he confronts the pervasive normalizing of Eurocentric/white-centric cultural supremacy in academia and examines how academia continues to use supremacist ideologies to obstruct Indigenous scholarship in its institutions. He contrasts how this conflicts vastly with his W̱SÁNEĆ ways of knowing/being and doing and how knowledge transfer is enacted in his family, community and nation.”

—Monique Mojica, Guna and Rappahannock actor /playwright / dramaturg / artist-scholar, Chocolate Woman Collective

06/06/2024

We’re very happy to announce the forthcoming publication of As Is, a collection of poetry by Ben Robinson, this fall!

Poetry collection As Is is a study in place, the town of Hamilton Ontario, considering what it means to be connected to or attempt a connection to place as a settler. Many of the poems function as counter-histories, reading the local history and extracting details that get glossed over elsewhere: the first public building being a prison, the public hangings, the botched first treaty. Other poems are situated in the present, the personal, and look at how these founding errors ring through into the present, for both the individual and the community. As Is searches for alternative frames for defining a local identity: expanding the sense of time to include the prehistoric, the fossil record of mammoth and wapiti in the area, and expanding the sense of place to consider the treaty boundary as a possible framework for understanding the region. Unusually for a book of poetry, it attempts reckoning with actual historical record.

Ben Robinson is a musician and librarian living in Hamilton Ontario. He holds a B.A. in English at McMaster University and worked as the music director of the campus radio station. His first book, The Book of Benjamin, published by Palimpsest (2023), is an essay on names/naming.

Cover design by Bret Parenteau.

04/06/2024

We are so excited to announce the return of our Semaphore series of short polemical books on urgent contemporary issues, with a book by James Wilt!
Dogged & Destructive: Essays on the Winnipeg Police, will be released this fall:

Published on the centennial of the city and its police force, Dogged and Destructive is a short collection of critical and deeply researched essays about the history, violence, and costs of the Winnipeg Police Service (WPS). It argues that policing in Winnipeg should be studied and understood regardless of where one lives due to the city’s particular dynamics of settler-colonialism, enormous police budgets, and concerns about violence. The book provides a comprehensive yet accessible introduction to the WPS and advocates for the imagining and pushing for alternatives to police power in Winnipeg and Canada.

“In the context of severe underfunding and total collapse or non-existence of other public services, police have successfully positioned themselves—with government
facilitation—as ultra-generalists in order to monopolize emergency response to the countless conflicts of a deeply unequal society, including interpersonal conflicts, traffic
offences, property theft or damage, mental health and substance use issues, and a huge assortment of other community issues, despite having no specific expertise or ability to deal with them.”

— James Wilt, from forthcoming book,
Dogged & Destructive

James Wilt is a writer and PhD candidate based in Winnipeg. He is the author of Do Androids Dream of Electric Cars? Public Transit in the Age of Google, Uber, and Elon Musk (Between the Lines, 2020) and Drinking Up the Revolution: How to Smash Big Alcohol and Reclaim Working-Class Joy (Repeater, 2022). His writing has appeared in many publications including The Walrus, The Guardian, Canadian Dimension, The Narwhal, and Briarpatch.

14/05/2024

We’re excited to be tabling at Critical Perspectives, Criminology & Social Justice National Conference at the University of Winnipeg, and are also dismayed by the University of Winnipeg’s attempt to restrict participants to this free conference, and the flow of knowledge between the conference and the student encampment. We look forward to dropping off a book bundle in order to contribute to the encampment’s Refaat Library.

08/05/2024

Several book publishers including ARP have signed on to this nation-wide call from organizations and unions for an arms embargo. Join us! https://armsembargonow.ca

12/01/2024

has launched a week-long global call for the reading of Palestinian poetry in public spaces, beginning on Monday with Read For Refaat. Refaat’s poem “If I Must Die” can be found on the Publishers For Palestine website translated into 39 languages.

https://publishersforpalestine.org/refaat/

27/12/2023

Big thank yous to and anyone who voted for us, and to for the interview: https://rb.gy/ar439q
link also in story.

Search the landfills without further delay. Permanent ceasefire now, free Palestine, free Gaza. We are still encouraging fellow publishers who haven’t yet to join the growing solidarity collective

https://publishersforpalestine.org/2023/11/15/statement-of-solidarity/

10/12/2023

04/12/2023

We are now offering $10 flat rate shipping across Canada when you order directly from our webstore! We're very grateful for the direct support many of you have shown us, and we will continue to provide links to local booksellers as well on our website.

We will ship orders weekly up until Dec 18th, and resume shipping orders in the new year.

Please note, for orders of 10 or more books, we ask that you reach out to us directly to arrange the order. For more information, please visit arpbooks.org/individual-orders.

04/12/2023

“My father recited and read many Persian poems to me as a child, so it definitely wasn't a form I was unfamiliar with. But overall, poetry came to me secondary in the trajectory of my life. I initially thought myself a fiction writer, and had been slowly working up to full length novels by writing tons of short stories in my highschool years. During my time there, a teacher had told me that poetry wasn't my strong suit, and to stick to fiction instead - as a very serious, sensitive, and insecure kid, I took that sentiment to heart and didn't doubt it for a second. It wasn't until my time in university that I felt permission to experiment and explore where my gut told me to go. That's when I got serious about poetry.”

Read the full interview with linked in story.

29/11/2023

Day One of Read Palestine Week. Publishers around the world from have collaborated to provide access to 30+ free ebooks, available through December 5 at publishersforpalestine.org in the categories of Poetry | Fiction | Literary Nonfiction | Literary Anthologies | History of Palestine | Palestinian Lives | Palestinian Arts & Culture | Palestine & Global Politics | Organizing, Resistance, and Solidarity for a Free Palestine.

(The great poster is from !)

28/11/2023

We are very excited to be releasing Nic Wilson’s debut book, Colossal Equine Statue this winter ❄️🐴🌒

Colossal Equine Statue (CES) is made up of a trilogy of constellation essays that track a number of recurring themes such as historical relation, mourning, and viewership. Many of these pieces have been conceived as part of Wilson’s visual art practice, and draw on a wide variety of source material and inspiration, from encyclopedias and reference books to poetry, philosophy, and recipes. The overall shape of the book is intended to represent points in a constellation and imagine how one might look at a sky filled with stars and find a world of meaning with many intricate odes of possibility for navigation. Unlike many works of historical non-fiction, CES uses a constantly shifting voice which swings between reporting, personal anecdote, enumeration, criticism, ekphrasis, and poetry to create unexpected encounters between different times and conceptions of reality.

Nic Wilson (he/they) is an artist and writer who was born in the Wolastoqiyik territory known as Fredericton, NB in 1988. He graduated with a BFA from Mount Allison University, Mi’kmaq territory, in 2012, and an MFA from the University of Regina, Treaty 4 Territory, in 2019 where he was a SSHRC graduate fellow. In 2021 they were long listed for the Sobey Art Award as a representative of the Prairies and the North. Fluent across media, Wilson creates videos, performances and artist books, and writes essays and art criticism. Their work often engages time, q***r lineage, decay, and the distance between art practice and literature. They were the 2022 writer in residence for G44 Centre for Contemporary Photography. Their writing has appeared in publications such as BlackFlash Magazine, Peripheral Review, NORK, C Magazine, and Border Crossings.

25/11/2023

Repost from :

Announcing Read Palestine Week!
Nov. 29-Dec. 5. Read free books by Palestinian authors and books about Palestine all week, starting on the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People.

We're adding more to our Free Palestine Books list every day.
Thanks to participating publishers, we now have ebooks in 6 languages, and in the categories of: Palestinian fiction, poetry, memoir, politics, culture, history, solidarity & more.

Find out more about Week at our website, publishersforpalestine.org.

23/11/2023

Drop all charges. No more political arrests and detainments for speaking the truth about genocide. Today is the last day to sign, at
http://bit.ly/CanLitResponds

17/11/2023

Ceasefire now! Publishers for Palestine members, with staff from and join protestors outside of the St Boniface office of MP Dan Vandal, who continues to refuse to call for a ceasefire. No business as usual!