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July 2014

Thursday July 31, 2014
bill bissett at the ArtsWells Festival Of All Things Art in Wells, BC

August 2014

Friday August 1, 2014
Adeena Karasick at the Boog City Festival in NYC

Monday August 18, 2014
Adeena Karasick at the KlezKanada Poetry Retreat in Quebec

September 2014

Friday September 5, 2014
Play: The Shoplifters by Morris Panych in Washington, DC

October 2014

Friday October 3, 2014
Reading: Adeena Karasick in Brooklyn

Monday October 6, 2014
Un/inhabited: Jordan Abel at the Vancouver Art/Book Fair

Thursday October 9, 2014
Play: Carmen Aguirre’s Blue Box in Vancouver

Sunday October 12, 2014
Adeena Karasick Reads in NYC

Thursday October 23, 2014
Play: Another Home Invasion by Joan MacLeod in Sudbury, ON

Saturday October 25, 2014
Adeena Karasick Lectures in NYC

November 2014

Friday November 7, 2014
Carl Peters Speaks at bpNichol Symposium – Brock U, St. Catharines, ON

Friday November 7, 2014
Adeena Karasick Speaks at Brock University, ON

December 2014

Saturday December 6, 2014
Adeena Karasick at the AB Series Solstice Party in Ottawa

April 2015

Thursday April 23, 2015
Play: In Piazza San Domenico by Steve Galluccio in Sudbury, ON

Watch the Trailer: Michel and Ti-Jean

Mathieu Bourassa and Duval Lang portrayed playwright Michel Tremblay and novelist Jack Kerouac in Michel & Ti-Jean at the Sage Theatre in Calgary, AB.

Calgary’s Sage Theatre created this trailer for Michel and Ti-Jean, a play by George Rideout. The play imagines a meeting in 1969 between an aging Jack Kerouac and a young, newly successful Michel Tremblay. Both men are wrestling with the highs and lows of fame in their own ways and eventually find common ground. (Read more about the play here.)

Talon will publish Michel and Ti-Jean in Fall 2014.

Our Fall 2014 Lineup!

Summer is in full swing, but autumn will come eventually. Let us not dwell on the unpleasant things of life – but let us get excited about great new books!

The Fall 2014 Talonbooks catalogue is now online for your browsing pleasure, and forthcoming books are listed in the right-hand column of this website. See a cover that intrigues you? Click through to the book page to read all about each title or author. See, the end of summer won’t be all bad; every season is reading season.

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Photos: Phinder Dulai at the Indian Summer Festival

At the Museum of Vancouver on July 6, 2014, poet Phinder Dulai read from his forthcoming book of poetry, dream / arteries. The reading was part of Passages, a cross-media storytelling event that brought together jazz, poetry, and the visual arts. Inspired by the Komagata Maru Episode and other narratives of the South Asian Canadian experience, eight brilliant artists took to the stage to produce a collaborative work.

Dulai is in the top photo, reading. The bottom photo shows Chris Gestrin, a pianist from the Neelamjit Dhillon Quartet, who played to Dulai’s reading.

Photo by Tom Delamere, courtesy of the Indian Summer Festival

Photo by Tom Delamere, courtesy of the Indian Summer Festival

Photo by Tom Delamere, courtesy of the Indian Summer Festival

Fall 2014 Catalogue

New books are on their way! Talonbooks will publish new fiction, poetry, drama, and non-fiction throughout Fall 2014, including the collected poetry of Phyllis Webb, the latest novel by France’s favourite novelist, a play in which Jack Kerouac and Michel Tremblay meet, the second in Tremblay’s latest novel series, a play about the life of Queen Christina of Sweden, and a book of poetry commemorating the Komagata Maru. Sneak all the previews you like in our latest catalogue! Check it out:

Book Review: PRISM International on Coping with Emotions and Otters

Michelle Barker for PRISM International has reviewed Dina Del Bucchia’s 2013 collection of poetry, Coping with Emotions and Otters, calling it “a delightful and poignant satire of our celebrity-obsessed culture.”

Del Bucchia has a radar for the ridiculous: our propensity to deify celebrities (even if they’re otters), our love of navel-gazing, our desire for transformation in ten easy steps. … Del Bucchia’s approach is playful on many levels. She experiments with structure, and is not afraid to incorporate sidebars and YouTube commentaries. She also plays with the reader. Many of the poems are funny. … If this book was only funny though, it would become tiresome. It isn’t. There is beautiful and moving writing in these pages.

Read the full review from July 10, 2014 online.

For Your Reading Pleasure: Artists and Climate Change (Website)

“I’m willing to bet that Cordal’s photo of a group of his clay businessmen submerged in a Berlin puddle will re-appear and re-appear on Twitter for years if not decades to come. It is a perfect example of the subversive nature of art: how artists must first create friction in order to generate new ways of seeing, understanding. To me, this is climate change art at its finest.” (Joan Sullivan, for ArtistsandClimateChange.com)

At Talon, we care deeply about our world and work hard to publish words that matter. We have published many titles that speak to environmental issues (recently, for example, Seeds by Annabel Soutar. Also see Soutar’s Watershed staging project on Kickstarter). In the daily workings of our office, we reuse and recycle as much as possible. Most of our books are printed on 100% post-consumer recycled paper, and most are designed and printed in western Canada because we feel strongly about contributing to and participating in local economies.

So, naturally, we were delighted to learn that one of Talon’s excellent literary translators, Chantal Bilodeau, publishes a website that gathers artworks addressing climate change and environmental issues.

Artists and Climate Change highlights works such as the sorrowful yet picturesque photographic history entitled “Vanishing Ice” and Isaac Cordal’s now-famous “Waiting for climate change,” in which faceless politicians continue to debate the existence of climate change despite water rising up to their necks. There are also proposed practical works, such as the design of warning labels for consumers. There is just so much to explore!

Check out the site! It may change your future: http://artistsandclimatechange.com/

“Lawrence & Holloman,” the Feel-Bad Comedy of the Year

Right-click to enlarge.

Having swept North America with “must-see” reviews and 11 awards in 11 festivals, this darkly twisted buddy comedy – currently nominated for 4 Canadian Comedy Awards – has now signed with distributor Search Engine Films and is making its theatrical premiere in indie theatres throughout Canada.

Based on a play of the same name by Morris Panych, Lawrence & Holloman is the “feel-bad comedy of the year.” Lawrence is an ever-optimistic suit salesman for whom everything goes right. That is until he meets Holloman, a cynical and suicidal credit collector, and everything starts to go wrong – very wrong. Is happiness determined by our outlook on life? Or can our destiny be changed … by another.

Lawrence & Holloman will be shown in at least three Canadian cities, starting in the film’s hometown of Vancouver:

VANCITY THEATRE
1181 Seymour St
PREMIERE: JULY 18 (Reception 6:45 p.m., Screening 7:45)
July 19 6:30 | July 21 6:30
July 22 8:30 | July 23 6:30
Tickets and info: www.viff.org | 604-683-3456

RIO THEATRE
1660 E Broadway Commercial Friday July 24 7pm | Friday July 25 @ 7pm
Tickets & Info: www.riotheatre.ca | 604-878-3456

We encourage you to get tickets, and invite your friends!

Motherhouse Has Arrived!

Hot off the presses is the latest play by David Fennario, one of Canada’s most renowned playwrights. This is the last of Talon’s new books for the Spring 2014 season. Order yours today!

Motherhouse gives a voice to the disillusioned working-class women employed at the British Munitions Factory in Verdun, Quebec, during the First World War. Verdun’s munitions manufacturer employed more than four thousand women during the war, including Fennario’s mother. (Learn more about the history of this real munitions factory on Meta-Talon.)

Following in the trudging footsteps of Fennario’s anti-war protest play Bolsheviki (Talonbooks, 2012), Motherhouse similarly debunks the sentimental notions of duty, heroism, and nationhood that figured so prominently in Canadian war effort campaigns and that persist in Canadian history textbooks today.

Motherhouse
David Fennario
Drama
ISBN 13: 9780889228481 | ISBN 10: 0889228485
5.5” W x 8.5” H | 128 pages
$17.95 CAN / $17.95 US

Long-Time Talonbooks Owner and Publisher Karl Siegler Made Member of Order of Canada

Karl Siegler, long-time publisher of Talonbooks, has been made a member of the Order of Canada for his “tireless promotion of Canada’s small publishing houses and for his efforts to safeguard their interests and welfare.” We at Talonbooks couldn’t be more pleased at this appointment. Congratulations to Karl!

Siegler joined Talonbooks as business manager in 1974. He assumed editorial responsibilities in 1979 and was publisher from 1984 to 2011, when he retired with his wife, Christy, Talon’s long-standing production manager and administrator. Together they developed the diverse list that brought Talon to the forefront of Canadian literary publishing. Throughout his career, Karl served numerous times as president of the Association of Book Publishers of British Columbia, the Literary Press Group, and the Association of Canadian Publishers. Karl and Christy Siegler now live in Powell River, British Columbia.

Established in 1967, the Order of Canada is the cornerstone of the Canadian Honours System, and recognizes outstanding achievement, dedication to the community and service to Canada. The Order recognizes people in all sectors of Canadian society and 6,000 people in total have been invested in the Order. All Canadians, except for federal and provincial politicians and judges still in office, are eligible. Levels of appointment are member, officer and companion.

For more on this year’s Order of Canada appointees, see the Vancouver Sun, cbc.ca, or the Governor General’s news release itself.

Happy Canada Day! Read an Aboriginal Book

What better way for a Canadian book lover to spend this particular anniversary than to browse a catalogue full of thought-provoking, imagination-inspiring books that were written by and about the early peoples of this beautiful country?

How convenient, then, that Talon’s aboriginal titles are now listed in one catalogue! The Talonbooks First Nations Catalogue profiles Talonbooks titles that are written by Aboriginal people or are about or for Aboriginals or address Aboriginal subjects, including First Nations history, sociology, and ethnography. (Books are also listed according to First Nations language group!) Talon has a long history of publishing in these subject areas – in fact, a few date back to our centenary, 1967 – and we felt it was high time that these books were gathered in one place for your reference.

Click on the cover to read the catalogue.

Character Sketch: Michel Tremblay’s “Nana”

The character known as Nana appears in multiple works by Michel Tremblay. This formidable woman is beloved by all of Tremblay’s readers. But where did Nana come from? What was she like as a child? What are the experiences that shaped her? In his recent novel series, we come to know the answers to these questions. And we come to know Nana as she once was known – as Rhéauna.

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Kafka-Related Books for Kafka’s Birthday

Happy 141st birthday to Franz Kafka! Kafka came into the world on July 3, 1883. On Meta-Talon today we present the two Talon titles that most directly trace their lineage to the work of Franz Kafka: one that post-modernizes The Castle and another that feminizes The Trial.

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Clergymen as Characters: So Hot Right Now in CanLit

by Chloë Filson

Is it just me, or are men of the cloth all over CanLit right now?

Two of the five novels selected for CBC Canada Reads 2014 featured major characters who were majorly priestly (The Orenda and The Year of the Flood). This year’s Giller winner, Hellgoing by Lynn Coady, included a short story about a nun, which also featured a priest. Browsing our list, I found at least five Talon book in which priests were prominent characters.

What does it mean? And what are we coming to understand with the help of such books?

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Excerpt from After Completion: The Later Letters of Charles Olson and Frances Boldereff

By Sharon Thesen

Charles Olson had many correspondents over the years, but Frances Boldereff embodied a dynamic complexity of interlocutor, muse, Sybil, lover, critic, and amanuensis.

In this Meta-Talon post, Sharon Thesen, co-editor of After Completion, offers the following commentary on one of Charles Olson’s letters to Frances Boldereff. The letter – a small taste of this dynamic collection – is also reproduced.

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