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April 2018

Sunday April 22, 2018
Poetry reading: Adeena Karasick at the Zinc Bar in NYC

Tuesday April 24, 2018
Play: “Gracie” in Ottawa, ON

Wednesday April 25, 2018
Game of Thrones vs Lord of the Rings (hosted by Dr. Christopher Morrissey (Vancouver, BC)

Sunday April 29, 2018
Play: "Gracie" in London, UK

May 2018

Tuesday May 1, 2018
Play: “A Taste of Empire” in Toronto

Wednesday May 2, 2018
Poetry reading: Garry Thomas Morse at McNally Robin

Friday May 4, 2018
Music for a Night in May, with Colin Browne (Vancouver)

Wednesday May 9, 2018
Poetry reading: Jordan Abel, Amaranth Borsuk, and Sarah Dowling

Friday May 11, 2018
Drew Hayden Taylor performing and emceeing at Gord Downie & Chanie Wenjack Fund Benefit Concert in Peterborough

Thursday May 24, 2018
Adeena Karasick speaks at the International Communication Association conference, Prague

June 2018

Friday June 1, 2018
Adeena Karasick tours Europe with “Salomé” and “Checking In”

Friday June 15, 2018
Play: “Hosanna” at the Centaur Theatre, Montreal

Thursday June 28, 2018
Adeena Karasick performs in Westmount, QC

Thursday June 28, 2018
bill bissett and Adeena Karasick read at the Atwater Poetry Project in Montreal

Saturday June 30, 2018
Poetry reading: Adeena Karasick in New Brunswick

September 2018

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

March 2019

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

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

April 2019

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

Byrne’s Duets grace us during Poetry Month

National Poetry Month continues, and the poetry continues to arrive! Vancouver poet Edward (Ted) Byrne’s latest collection is now available. Order your copy today!

Duets consists of interpretative translations of sonnets by Louise Labé, who lived and wrote in sixteenth-century Lyon, and those by thirteenth-century Florentine Guido Cavalcanti. The reader will find herein ninety poems, equally “translations” of Labé and Cavalcanti and “versions” authored by Byrne. Each sonnet is made up of nine lines, each line, in turn, made up of nine syllables. The work’s main body is written in the manner of the serial poem, a practice whereby the composing mind passes from room to room – and from stanza to stanza – in a kind of trance, forgetting and remembering.

Gracie has arrived!

Joan MacLeod’s latest play is hot off the press!

Gracie is a dramatic monologue telling the story of a girl raised in a fundamentalist community that transports child brides between polygamist communities in both Canada and the United States. Gracie loves her family, and her strong faith is a source of comfort to her. Although the play examines practices that are abhorrent, it does so without judgement (as critics have noted). The play is a work of fiction but is inspired by the history of polygamist communities in both Canada and the U.S. – and its timeliness is uncanny; two days after the play premiered (in January 2017), three persons from Canada’s largest polygamist community went to trial for transporting child brides. Gracie is window into a complex and secretive world. While it takes place in a sheltered community, it also resonates with issues at the fore right now: fundamentalism, basic human and religious rights.

Order your copy today!

Same Diff is a finalist for the Griffin!

We are thrilled to announce that Same Diff, the latest collection of poetry by Donato Mancini, is a finalist for the 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize!

Mancini is in stellar company with the other two Canadian nominees: Billy-Ray Belcourt, author of This Wound is a World (Frontenac House), and Aisha Sasha John, author of I have to live (McClelland & Stewart). Read more about each title and about the international nominees on the official shortlist.

The winners – one Canadian and one international – will be announced on June 7.

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Four Talon titles nominated for ReLit Awards!

We are very excited to announce that four Talon titles have been nominated for the ReLit Awards for books published in the year 2017! One novel and three collections of poetry have been nominated:

• Running on Fumes by Christian Guay-Poliquin
• The Days by M.A.C. Farrant
• Pound @ Guantánamo by Clint Burnham
• Injun by Jordan Abel

Find the full 2017 “long shortlists” here.

The ReLit Awards are given to books in three categories – novels, short fiction, and poetry – that have been written by Canadian authors while living in Canada and have been published by an independent Canadian press. Winners receive unique and custom-made rings.

Congratulations to all the nominated authors and their wonderful books! We look forward to finding out which books will be the winners!

Give another cheer for Indigiqueer!

We heartily congratulate Joshua Whitehead, whose collection of poetry, full-metal indigiqueer, has just been short-listed for the 2018 Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry in the Alberta Literary Awards!

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“This play is dangerously cool.”

1920s Hong Kong. A killer on the loose. Chinese detective Tommy Lam, the city’s most brilliant sleuth, is called in to investigate. Battling racism and his own reputation, Tommy follows clues to the glamorous Nine Dragons nightclub and into the haze of the opium trade … Nine Dragons is a hard-boiled mystery with a twist: a cross-cultural thriller and “a smart exploration of colonialism, racism, assimilation, and the clash of cultures” (Joff Schmidt, CBC). In the words of Donna-Michelle St. Bernard (artistic director at New Harlem Productions), “This play is dangerously cool.”

Jovanni Sy’s new play has arrived! And it’s right on time: the book is available in print just as the play is being mounted at Richmond’s Gateway Theatre from April 12 through 21. Books will be available for sale at the theatre; if you’re planning to attend the play, why not pick up a copy during intermission? Or, if you won’t be at the theatre, order your copy from Talon.

Dead by lightning? We have the cure!

Gail Anderson-Dargatz’s 1996 novel The Cure for Death by Lightning was nominated for the Giller Prize, was awarded the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, and became a bestseller in Canada and Great Britain. A charming and somewhat disturbing coming-of-age story, it has become a perennial Canadian favourite.

And now it’s a play, too! Adapted for the stage by Daryl Cloran, The Cure for Death by Lightning first premiered in Kamloops, British Columbia, at the Western Canadian Theatre in the spring of 2017. Cloran’s adaptation – hailed by Anderson-Dargatz herself as a “magical vision … brought vividly to life in a wholly new form” – is now available in print. Order your copy today!

Montreal Gothic in the house

Our latest arrival is The Green Chamber, a Montreal Gothic novel by the brilliant Martine Desjardins and translated by Fred A. Reed and David Homel. Luxe, eerie, and wryly amusing, The Green Chamber is not to be missed; in the words of author M.A.C. Farrant, “Desjardins has created a comic novel worthy of the word ‘great’”!

Set between 1913 and 1963 in one of Montreal’s upper-middle-class, suburban neighbourhoods, Martine Desjardins’s The Green Chamber is a riveting, fast-paced, highly atmospheric novel that chronicles the decline of a wealthy French-Canadian family over the course of three generations. Desjardins’s humorous gothic saga – with its gallery of eccentric characters who play the races in secret and guzzle vanilla extract – reveals and revels in the fate of family fortunes: the first generation makes the money, the second generation lives on the interest, and the third blows it …

Order your copy today!

[Updated] Job opportunity: Talonbooks needs a Production Editor

[UPDATE: Thank you to all applicants! As of the end of March, the position has now been filled.]

Do you have book production experience, communications skills, and a passion for avant-garde Canadian literature? If so, we need you! Talonbooks seeks a Production Editor for a full-time, one-year contract position between April 2018 and April 2019 to cover a maternity leave.

As Production Editor, you’ll work closely with Talon’s editors and designer to design and typeset our Fall 2018 and Spring 2019 titles. You’ll be responsible for shepherding frontlist and backlist titles (reprints) through production to press. You’ll also work with our ebook publisher to produce and distribute ebooks.

Download this job posting as a PDF.

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Kuei, My Friend has arrived!

Kuei, My Friend: A Conversation on Racism and Reconciliation has arrived!

This is an engaging book of letters between Innu poet Natasha Kanapé Fontaine and Québécois-American novelist Deni Ellis Béchard. A book for everyone, but with particular relevance to high-school-age readers, Kuei, My Friend is accompanied by a chronology of events, a glossary of relevant terms in the Innu-aimun language, and a detailed teacher’s guide that includes topics of discussion, questions, and suggested reflections for examination in a classroom setting.

Order your copy of Kuei, My Friend today!

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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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Our Spiritual Lives

Our little end-of-year present to you is a miniature from M.A.C. Farrant’s delightful collection of very short stories, The World Afloat. Happy Holidays from Talonbooks!

Our Spiritual Lives

We’ve seen stains on tea towels that look like Jesus Christ’s face so we know he exists. And we know that dried seaweed can save the Douglas fir from extinction so we hang dried seaweed from the tree’s branches.

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A new cover for Drew Hayden Taylor’s play, In a World Created by a Drunken God

A finalist for the 2006 Governor General’s Literary Award for Drama, In a World Created by a Drunken God has been in steady demand since it was first published 11 years ago. From 2006 until the end of 2017, In a World Created by a Drunken God was in print with its original cover, which showed moving boxes and a flip phone. Now, Talonbooks has reprinted In a World Created by a Drunken God for the fourth time, and it wears a dynamic, new cover …

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