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August 2018

Friday August 31, 2018
Bev Sellars at the Ryga Festival

September 2018

Saturday September 8, 2018
Tiziana La Melia Exhibit at Franz Kaka Gallery in Toronto, ON

Wednesday September 19, 2018
Play: “Mom's the Word” in Saskatoon

November 2018

Thursday November 1, 2018
Joshua Whitehead at Wordstock Sudbury

Tuesday November 20, 2018
Play: “Cottagers and Indians” in Kingston

Thursday November 22, 2018
Drew Hayden Taylor at the 24th Annual Aboriginal Education Conference in Vancouver, BC

February 2019

Wednesday February 27, 2019
Play: “Gracie” in Regina

March 2019

Friday March 8, 2019
Play: “King Richard and His Women” in Vancouver

Tuesday March 19, 2019
Play: “The Shoplifters” in Montreal

Wednesday March 27, 2019
Play: “Empire of the Son” in Saskatoon

April 2019

Friday April 5, 2019
Play: “Girl in the Goldfish Bowl” in Windsor

Thursday April 25, 2019
Play: “Empire of the Son” in Kamloops

The Eyelash and the Monochrome – now IRL and in full colour!

The Eyelash and the Monochrome by Tiziana La Melia arrived in-house today!

Combining visuals and text, this collection of poems travels through territories as varied as daily and domestic activities; social relationships; literature, cinema, and art; as well as dreams, as it moves between the page and the exhibition.

The Eyelash and the Monochrome and Other Poems asks: what happens when material becomes thought and thought becomes object? At once a book of poetry and an artist’s book, it gathers together poems, performance scripts, and parallel texts, illustrating the hybrid nature of these texts and trespassing upon the boundaries of genre. It is a book about enmeshment, about the potentiality of interplay. It is a conversation. It is not linear, but it interrogates and explores the line: lines of text, lines of dialogue, socio-economic lines drawn or crossed, lines that were the trails of snails … Everything is a signifier, meaning is elastic, and references are multifaceted. La Melia’s multivalent and generative practice lives in process; it thinks through materials (paint, objects, non-human forms) with violent sentimentality, excessive desire, naiveté, narrative construction, and an awareness of the body and memory.

Order your copy today!

Talonbooks authors win Jessie Awards

The 36th annual Jessie Awards took place last night, and we are excited to announce that four Talonbooks authors have won awards!

Tetsuro Shigematsu, alongside Jamie Nesbitt and Susan Miyagishima, won Outstanding technical design and execution for the purpose of historical storytelling for 1 Hour Photo, which is coming out with Talon this fall.

Niall McNeil and Marcus Youssef, alongside several other castmates, won Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble – Large Theatre for King Arthur’s Night, which is out now with Talon.

Last but not least, Jovanni Sy received the nod for Outstanding Original Script for Nine Dragons, also out now with Talon.

Congratulations to all the winners and nominees!

Pride Month Reading!

Happy Pride Month! Talonbooks’ catalogue has a plethora of great LGBTQ2S+ books to choose from.

Today, we’d like to highlight three of our reader favourite titles: recently published, Joshua Whitehead’s full-metal indigiqueer, and from our backlist, Jane Rule’s landmark novel Desert of the Heart and Michel Marc Bouchard’s (trans. Linda Gaboriau) moving play Tom at the Farm.

Happy National Indigenous Peoples Day!

Today is the summer solstice, and it’s also the day we celebrate Indigenous Peoples! At Talonbooks, the cultural production of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis Peoples – writing by, for, and about Indigenous Peoples – is a central part of what we do every day of the year.

We have many recent and forthcoming titles we’d like to share with you today. Kuei, My Friend: A Conversation on Race and Reconciliation, full-metal indigiqueer, Safety Sand, and Talker’s Town and The Girl Who Swam Forever, out recently, and Sir John A: Acts of a Gentrified Ojibway Rebellion., Seven Sacred Truths, From Oral to Written: A Celebration of Indigenous Literature in Canada, 1980–2010 (second printing!), and Thanks for Giving, out soon, include Indigenous authors, and beholden and Treaty 6 Deixis, both forthcoming this fall, centre themes of how non-Indigenous people in Canada engage with Indigenous Peoples, our treaties, and the land on which we all live.

Last but not least, Talonbooks will soon be rolling out the 2018 edition of our Indigenous catalogue!

Find Finding Mr. Wong on a shelf near you!

Finding Mr. Wong by Susan Crean is hot off the presses!

Finding Mr. Wong chronicles the author’s effort to piece together the life of the man she knew as Mr. Wong, cook and housekeeper to her Irish Canadian family for two generations. A Chinese Head Tax payer hired by Crean’s grandfather in Toronto in 1928, Wong Dong Wong remained on the job following Gordon Crean’s death in 1947. Crean’s homage weaves the various strands of her memories of and discoveries about Mr. Wong during the last twenty-five years of his life; she travels the streets and histories of Chinatowns in Vancouver and Toronto, Canada, and twice she visits Guangdong, China, where she locates Wong Dong Wong’s home village, finds descendants of his father’s brother, and learns the beginning of his story: orphaned as a newborn, then brought to Canada by his uncle, Wong YeeWoen.

Finding Mr. Wong is an important contribution to a growing body of writings that illuminate the lives of people silenced or otherwise negated by myopic history.

Order your copy today!

New Plays in Town: Talker’s Town and The Girl Who Swam Forever

Talker’s Town and The Girl Who Swam Forever, by Marie Clements and Nelson Gray, has arrived!

The two one-act plays in Talker’s Town and The Girl Who Swam Forever are set in a small B.C. mill town in the 1960s. They portray identical characters and action from entirely different gender and cultural perspectives. In many ways, the two separate works are inter-related coming-of-age stories, with transformation as a key theme.

The central action in both plays involves an Aboriginal girl, Roberta Bob, who escapes from a residential school and hides out by the river. In Nelson Gray’s Talker’s Town, the story is conveyed by a teenage non-Indigenous boy whose friend has had a relationship with the girl and whose attempts to hush up the affair lead to disastrous consequences. In Marie Clements’s The Girl Who Swam Forever, the action unfolds from the perspective of the girl, who – to claim her past and secure her future – must undergo a shape-shifting transformation and meet her grandmother’s ancestral spirit in the form of a hundred-year-old sturgeon.

Employing a single setting and working with the same set of characters, the playwrights have created two radically different fictional worlds, one Aboriginal and one non-Aboriginal. Published together, the plays form a fascinating diptych that reveals rifts between Indigenous and colonial/settler histories and provides a vehicle for cultural exchange.

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David McFadden (1940–2018)

It is with great sadness that we report the death of David McFadden, a well-renowned and beloved Canadian poet who published over three dozen volumes of poetry, fiction and non-fiction. David passed away on Wednesday, June 6, aged 77. We offer condolences to his family and his many friends and admirers.

David was deeply involved with publishers and magazines across Canada during his decades-long career. He published four books with Talonbooks between 1987 and 2002, including Five Star Planet, Great Lakes Suite, There’ll Be Another, and Gypsy Guitar. David was a three-time Governor General’s Award nominee: Gypsy Guitar received a 1988 nomination, alongside The Art of Darkness (McClelland & Stewart) in 1984, and Be Calm, Honey (Mansfield Press) in 2009. David won the Griffin Prize for Poetry for What’s the Score? (Mansfield Press) in 2013 and was shortlisted in 2008 for Why Are You So Sad? (Insomniac Press).

King Arthur’s Night and Peter Panties has arrived!

King Arthur’s Night and Peter Panties, a two-play book by Marcus Youssef and Niall McNiel, has arrived!

King Arthur’s Night is a musical extravaganza in which King Arthur banters with Merlin and romances Guinevere. An upside-down world … a betrayed love … an unwanted child … a revolt by the subjugated masses … a kingdom come undone … It leaves one pondering mysteries both absurd (how did the Round Table get to Harrison Hot Springs, British Columbia?) and profound (what is the link between the soul and
intelligence?).

Peter Panties is a radical re-imagining of the Peter Pan story in which Peter Pan and Captain Hook (or is he Macbeth?) drink lattes, the Lost Boys hang with detectives from CSI, and Tinkerbell and Wendy duke it out at Skull Rock. Peter is conflicted about growing up – “Fuck that! No mustache!” – but he also desperately wants to have sex with Wendy and make a baby. The situation is funny, but aching; sexual exclusion and the denial of full adulthood are no laughing matters for people whose lives include Down syndrome.

Order your copy today!

Prison Industrial Complex Explodes wins the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize!

A heartfelt congratulations to Mercedes Eng, whose Prison Industrial Complex Explodes received the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize on Friday, May 4. The impetus for Prison Industrial Complex Explodes was the discovery of a cache of Eng’s father’s prison correspondence: letters from the federal government stating their intention to deport him because of his criminal record; letters from prison justice advocate Michael Jackson advising her father on deportation; letters from the RCMP regarding the theft of her father’s property, a gold necklace, while in transport to prison; letters from family members and friends; letters from Eng and her brother. rob mclennan calls Eng’s book “incredibly powerful and intimate” and we tend to agree.

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Check it out: Checking In!

Adeena Karasick’s latest collection of poems is hot off the press!

Checking In comprises a long poem and a series of other post-conceptual pieces – concrete poems, homolinguistic translations, Yiddish aphorisms – that offer exuberant commentary on the timelessness of digital information and our ravenous appetite for data and connection. Karasick’s words luxuriate in the materiality of language and the production of meaning. She checks in with pop culture, media studies, semiotics, critical theory, feminist theory, and contemporary Canadian and American literature. The lover of language play, the poetry reader, and the academic alike will drink in this poet-performer’s concoctions; as ever, they’re fun, smart, and topical.

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2018 Buy a Québec Book Day! August 12

August 12, 2018, is Buy a Quebec Book Day. Celebrate by purchasing a recent Talonbooks book in translation!

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How is a door Got Its Name

Next year marks the tenth anniversary of Fred Wah’s is a door : to celebrate, Talon takes a look back at how the book got its name.

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Book Recs for International Women’s Day 2018

To celebrate International Women’s Day, we asked our staff to recommend favourite Talon books that they felt contributed to the advancement of women and to the feminist literary canon.

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“Argument is to me the air I breathe”

By Carl Peters

On Meta-Talon today, please enjoy the full text of the presentation given by Carl Peters at the Modern Languages Association convention in New York City on January 7, 2018. This talk responds to the question posed in the MLA convention session Rhetoric in Post-Factual Times: how to perform textual analysis in a time when facts are no longer the marker of good argumentation. (Peters’s talk is also related to his work on Stein; Peters is recently the author of Studies in Description: Reading Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons.)

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