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September 2010

Wednesday September 8, 2010
Pivot Readings - Jesse Huisken, rob mclennan and Meaghan Strimas

Thursday September 9, 2010
Tear the Curtain! - Jonathon Young and Kevin Kerr

Thursday September 9, 2010
Vigil - Morris Panych

Tuesday September 14, 2010
The Trespassers by Morris Panych - Belfry Theatre

Tuesday September 14, 2010
The Olive Reading Series presents a night with Robert Kroetsch

Friday September 17, 2010
The Refugee Hotel - Passe Muraille

Friday September 24, 2010
David Homel at the Kingston WritersFest

Friday September 24, 2010
Adeena Karasick at the Kingston WritersFest

Sunday September 26, 2010
Carmen Aguirre - Word on the Street

Tuesday September 28, 2010
Ali & Ali: The Deportation Hearings

About Us

Mandate
To publish work of the highest literary merit by world class authors from the mainstream and the margins of Canada’s three founding nations, as well as from both visible and invisible minorities within Canada’s cultural mosaic, and to work with all of our authors to build their national and international literary careers throughout their active writing lives.

Principal Accomplishments
We have close to 500 titles that have received well over 300 awards. We have built and continue to keep in print one of the finest and most diverse literary lists in Canada.

Role in Canadian Publishing
Talon’s dedication to the publication of over four decades of excellent Canadian literary work, created through an unbroken line of internal mentorship and succession of ownership in the company, has earned our publishing house the privilege of being one of the pre-eminent independent Anglophone literary presses in Canada. We are the only one of the pioneering “first generation” of Canadian literary publishers of the 1960s to have consistently maintained our success and independence over the past 45 years. We are Canada’s largest independent publisher of drama; do more translations from Québec than anyone else; and publish more Native voices than any other Canadian publisher with the exception of First Nations publisher Theytus Books.

Brief History
Talon was first established as a poetry magazine with an editorial collective based at Magee High School in Vancouver in 1963, which moved to UBC in 1965. By 1967, the magazine had published so many young writers, Talon decided to become a book publisher for its authors.

Starting out with poetry, including the first books (Sticks & Stones) of Canada’s first Parliamentary Poet Laureate, George Bowering, and Ken Belford’s Post Electric Cave Man respectively; the press diversified into drama with Beverley Simons’ Crabdance, George Ryga’s The Ecstasy of Rita Joe and James Reaney’s Colours in the Dark in 1969; into fiction with Jane Rule’s Desert of the Heart and Audrey Thomas’ Songs My Mother Taught Me in 1973; into Québec literature in translation with Robert Gurik’s The Trial of Jean Baptiste M. and Michel Tremblay’s Les Belles Soeurs in 1975; and into non-fiction with the collected works of ethnographer Charles Hill-Tout, The Salish People, Volumes I-IV, in 1979.

In the early 1980s, the press experimented with publishing highly successful commercial titles. However, we found that these not only took too much time away from our new literary work but also threatened, by putting at too great a risk, the company’s solid literary backlist. For these reasons, the press returned to its original, exclusively literary mandate in 1985.

Over the past decade, Talon has diversified its literary non-fiction list to include works on global flash-points in the Middle East and the Balkans, and on Canadian issues and politics.

Talon is a member of the following organizations:
The Literary Press Group
The Association of Book Publishers of B.C.
Canadian Booksellers Association
The Canadian Conference of the Arts
The Association of Canadian Publishers

If Nothing Was to Happen in Autumn: Something on The Collected Books of Artie Gold

Garry Thomas Morse discovers Gold:

He imbues this particular book with a wonderful nonchalance that tempers the sense of desperation about—what else but the difficulty and often failure of language to serve as a vehicle for our thoughts and emotions, at least not without a great deal of tinkering. Artie Gold leaves behind one poem after another for us, “like a cake placed in a two hour oven / in a building with a bomb, not caring.”

> Go to story...

Terrorism: Today’s ‘Yellow Peril’?

Author Roy Miki studied the official language that stripped his Japanese Canadian family of rights. He sees lessons for today.

> Go to story...

Rational Babblerap with BABA Brinkman

Creator of the first peer-reviewed hip-hop show, Darwin devotee and science celebrant Baba Brinkman is intent on spreading the word, discovers Roger Cox

> Go to story...

Artie Gold - from The Collected Books of Artie Gold

Preview a poem from The Collected Books of Artie Gold (coming this fall).

> Go to story...

For The Pleasure of Seeing Her Again, and Again

It is a rare thing to make a love letter both dramatic and moving. There are plenty of mothers on the stage who get their moment of love and recognition at the end – even Mama Rose gets hers – but only after two and a half hours of battle.

> Go to story...

George Bowering - from My Darling Nellie Grey

Those / flimsy shoes / would never get / anyone through hell

- from the month of August (According to Brueghel)

> Go to story...

A View of The Madonna Painter

In his introductory note, Michel Marc Bouchard, ably assisted by Linda Gaboriau’s translation, warns us that his play “is writ in scarlet pigments, in holy wine and haemoglobin, all the shades of red that flow through us, from our sex to our souls. It is a collision of ecstasies, a bouquet of lies disguised as a fable.”

> Go to story...

The Seminal Transmission of Orphic Ghosts: A Review of Garry Thomas Morse's After Jack

Before Morse was a mote, Spicer delivered a series of lectures in Vancouver (Morse’s stomping grounds) in which he revealed the poet as medium more than artist, and inferring a certain talent—nay, absolutism—to receptivity as priority over composition. Far too clever for its own good, After Jack is a large rabbit-eared radio, indeed.

> Go to story...

Looking Back at They Write Their Dreams on the Rock Forever

York’s voice is never far from anywhere in this text. She explains how these rock writings were the records of people who recorded the results of their spirit quests, dreams and visions on the rock walls of the Stein Valley, and how they could be read and interpreted by any one who was properly trained to “read” them.

> Go to story...

Artie Gold - from The Collected Books of Artie Gold

Preview a poem from The Collected Books of Artie Gold (coming this fall).

> Go to story...