Since the death of her parents in 1791, Lily McEvoy has lived as a recluse in her isolated Armagh County manor with her two maidservants and Titus, the farmhand who has become her whipping boy. But tonight, the heiress is expecting company. Her guest is Master Anselm, the legendary stone…

A Crossing of Hearts continues Michel Tremblay’s Desrosiers Diaspora series of novels, a family saga set in Montreal during World War I. August 1915. Montreal is stifled by a heat wave while war rages in Europe. The three Desrosiers sisters – Tititte, Teena, and Maria – had been planning a…

First collection of visual work by renowed Canadian poet Phyllis Webb *A Dream in the Eye presents colour reproductions of the paintings and photocollages of renowned poet Phyllis Webb. A Governor General's Award–winning poet and a member of the Order of Canada, Webb was a major Canadian cultural figure from…

First collection of visual work by renowed Canadian poet Phyllis Webb *A Dream in the Eye presents colour reproductions of the paintings and photocollages of renowned poet Phyllis Webb. A Governor General's Award–winning poet and a member of the Order of Canada, Webb was a major Canadian cultural figure from…

Short-listed for Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize 2024In this debut poetry collection, Samantha Nock redefines where and what “home” is. A Family of Dreamers delves into the complexities of growing up in rural northeast British Columbia and the love and grief that blooms there. In this debut collection, Samantha Nock weaves…

These brief but concentrated pieces of literary work seem at first simple in their approach and straightforward in their intent: designed to be read easily and then to be carried away in our memories. As if they were ours. But when one person writes “this is what happened, this is…

The constraint-based poems in this debut collection are written in the future-perfect tense, used as a way of bending time and playing with non-linearity. They challenge the “self” imagined as a unified monolith by pulling language apart, dissecting idioms and speech, then reassembling it in new and unconventional ways, using…

Survive! Survive! transports readers to September 1935, to glorious, tragic times in the company of Ti-Lou and “la Duchesse” Édouard, whose sparkling exchanges hide indissoluble pain; to sombre, twilight times with Victoire and Télesphore and between Josaphat and his ill-fated daughter. “How to survive?” they all ask, inextricably caught in…

Boas, Teit, Hill-Tout, Barbeau, Swanton, Jenness, the luminaries of field research in British Columbia, are discussed here in A Guide to B.C. Indian Myth and Legend, and their work in Indian folklore evaluated. Other scholars, amateurs and Native informants of the past and present are given ample consideration, making this…

A History of the Theories of Rain explores the strange effect our current sense of impending doom has on our relation to time, approaching the unfolding climate catastrophe through its dissolution of the categories of “man-made” and “natural.” How do we go on with our daily lives while a disastrous…

In the autumn of 1990, during Operation Desert Storm, two young men, one a troubled Canadian soldier, the other a teenage Palestinian black-marketeer, meet in the scorched Qatari desert. Breaching the divide of a profound cultural misunderstanding and against a backdrop of massive global conflict, these two become unlikely and…

A Matter of Gravity is about the forces that draw two men together. Hermann, an embalmer and doctor’s son, devotes himself to the dead to mask his disappointment that, unlike his father, he cannot cure the ­living. Hu is an ailing pianist who dwells in memories of past glory. Hermann…

A kaleidoscopic net woven of words A Net of Momentary Sapphire offers three closely related poetic sequences, random rearrangements of a poignant but obsessively recurrent source text – streams of consciousness in which no stable self can be elucidated. A broken long poem, this singular net is an interrogation of…

Canada’s first poet laureate George Bowering is one of the best known writers and literary personalities in the nation. Poet, novelist, essayist, historian, critic and teacher, he is a prolific, irrepressible writer whose works have been published and produced in an extraordinary variety of forms. A Record of Writing traces…

At age 41, Eddy is in existential extremis. He once had an enviable life—a wife he adored, a young son, a cozy suburban house surrounded by carefully planted and sculpted gardens, the luxury to pursue his passion and become a professional horticulturalist. Now he’s separated from his wife, estranged from…

Everything we eat tells a story. In A Taste of Empire, delectable samples from a real-time cooking demonstration offer food for thought about colonialism and the ethics of modern-day food systems. “Food and Wine named him Chef of the Decade. In 2016 he was inducted into the Culinary Hall of…

March, 1963. Winter has launched its final assault on Montreal. The Fat Woman, Thérèse, Édouard, Pierrette, Marcel, all the star-crossed characters of Tremblay’s Chronicles of Plateau-Mont-Royal are here again, 20 years later. Marcel, now 23, learns that his Auntie Nana—The Fat Woman who is here finally named—is gravely ill and…

ABC of Reading TRG examines the writings of Steve McCaffery and bpNichol, with a special focus on their collaborative work as the Toronto Research Group (TRG). The book expands what little criticism there is on the Group’s collaborations by exploring their engagements with literary theory, by differentiating between each writer’s…

John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C. Inside that theatre today, Ranger Powell of the U.S. Parks Service takes crowds of tourists, the curious and the ghoulish through a step-by-step description of the assassination. Underneath the box where Lincoln was shot, he describes the plot…

A group of almost-over-the-hill urban Egyptian hipsters gathers every night on a Cairo houseboat where they smoke weed, gab on their cell phones, and rag on everything they think is messing up their lives. Led by their master of ceremonies, a near catatonic petty bureaucrat named Anis, they get baked…

A group of almost-over-the-hill urban Egyptian hipsters gathers every night on a Cairo houseboat where they smoke weed, gab on their cell phones, and rag on everything they think is messing up their lives. Led by their master of ceremonies, a near catatonic petty bureaucrat named Anis, they get baked…

In this elaborate agitprop theatrical collaboration, the internal contradictions and duplicitous double-speak of the “war on terror” are exposed as the propaganda vehicles for the neo-colonialism of the West that they are. “Ali Hakim” and “Ali Ababwa,” refugees from the imaginary country “Agraba,” attempt to seduce their audience into providing…

Sit your butt down and learn your three Rs: ranting, resisting, and respect.In two new plays, Canada‘s king of black comedy takes on the failing education system. Both Parents Night and The Bigger Issue are set in public-school classrooms after hours and involve confrontations between stressed-out teachers and ticked-off parents.…

Charles Olson had many correspondents over the years, but Frances Boldereff, a book designer and typographer, Joyce scholar, and single working mother, embodied a dynamic complexity of interlocutor, muse, Sybil, lover, critic, and amanuensis.After Completion: The Later Letters of Charles Olson and Frances Boldereff follows on from an earlier edition,…

Jack Spicer, the barroom soothsayer of the “Berkeley Renaissance,” forged a new kind of poetry with Robert Duncan and Robin Blaser in the decade 1945–1955, grounded in their “queer genealogy” of Arthur Rimbaud, Federico García Lorca and other gay writers. Beginning his famous serial poem, After Lorca, in 1956, Spicer…

Is an artist born, or rather, created by experience? From the moment in childhood when he is forced to take drastic action to defend his adoptive mother from a violent assault – the only maternal figure that he has ever known – it is evident that the life of Joseph…

Michel Tremblay’s well-loved and award-winning play presents the story of one woman, Albertine, at five different times in her life. The older Albertines warn the younger ones of what is to come—“Our fate depends on you,” Albertine at 70 says to Albertine at 30. Together, these five Albertines provide a…

In this sequel to the hilarious and hard-hitting The Adventures of Ali & Ali and the aXes of Evil, the agitprop collaborative team of Camyar Chai, Guillermo Verdecchia, and Marcus Youssef turns its idiosyncratic brand of political satire to new global realities.Following the election of U.S. president Barack Obama in…

A “crucible-inspired” drama surrounding an inquiry into a doubtful molestation incident in a small town daycare, All Fall Down is a play about witch-hunting in the late 20th century.The rumours and whispers in the community—every suspicion of the unusual, the eccentric, the unexplained—are added to the growing body of evidence…

All Is Flesh collects in one volume Hugh Hazelton’s English translations of Yannick Renaud’s brilliant first two books of poems, Taxidermy and The Disappearance of Ideas, first published by Éditions Les Herbes rouges in Montreal.Taxidermy is a discourse on time consisting of prose poems stretched to the very limits of…

In 1914, Simon Dulac enrolls in a Canadian contingent of military police, a perfect cover for his real ambition—to comb the battlefields of Europe unhindered in his search for the legendary Templar treasure said to have been buried in Flanders in 1307. An inveterate and uncannily lucky gambler, Dulac encounters…

All great art has the ability to move people collectively, to create within it some essential, participatory expression of their humanity, their culture, their heritage. But who creates this art? What is it that gives some individuals the power or the gift to create such works? Who are these works…

allostatic load navigates the racialized interplay of chronic wear and tear during tumultuous years marked by global racial tensions, the commodification of care, and the burden of systemic injustice. Moving between diaristic intimacy and the remove of news reportage, Junie Désil’s second poetry collection invites readers to hold the vulnerability…

Almost Islands is a powerfully introspective memoir of the author’s friendship with legendary Canadian poet Phyllis Webb – now in her nineties and long enveloped in silence – and his regular trips to see her. It is an extended meditation on literary ambition and failure, poetry and politics, choice and…

A very liberal contemporary couple—Angel, an urban Native science fiction writer, and Colleen, a “non-practising” Jewish intellectual who teaches Native literature—hosts a dinner party. The guests at this little “sitcom” soirée are couples that represent what by now have become the clichéd extremes of both societies: Angel’s former radical Native…

It is the spring of 1963. The young Quebec author Marie-Claire Blais, bursting with energy and talent, has just won a coveted Guggenheim fellowship. She chooses Cambridge, Massachusetts, as the place where she will begin her writer’s apprenticeship with her mentor, Edmund Wilson.American Notebooks is much more than a fascinating…

A college student’s life is given meaning when he chooses to sponsor Elias, a Salvadoran refugee, as a class project. When Elias arrives, his hosts Sander and his family learn what it means and feels to be a refugee and how to relate to someone who has endured such intense…

Adeena Karasick’s startling and arresting work constantly de-contextualizes and re-contextualizes language: its signs, signifiers, images, ideograms, pictograms, lexicography and syntax. In doing so, it leads us into the subliminal, where it foregrounds memories, associations, archetypes, metaphors and other elements of the subconscious usually well and deeply suppressed in the communications…

This collection of 37 essays by Canada’s Confederation Poets is the first in a series of volumes intended to collect all the significant essays on poetic theory written in English by Canadian poets from the late nineteenth century to the first decades of the twenty-first. These essays follow a long…

On January 22, 1979, an eleven-year-old Native girl died of a ruptured appendix in an Alert Bay, B.C. hospital. The events that followed are chronicled here by Dara Culhane Speck, a member by marriage of the Nimpkish Indian Band in Alert Bay. She has relied mainly on interviews, anecdotes and…

An Honest Woman by Jónína Kirton confronts us with beauty and ugliness in the wholesome riot that is sex, love, and marriage. From the perspective of a mixed-race woman, Kirton engages with Simone de Beauvoir and Donald Trump to unravel the norms of femininity and sexuality that continue to adhere…

This volume is a collection of thirty-eight pieces unified by a combination of the playful, primitive aesthetic of literary modernism with the anti-authoritarian, anarchist praxis of radical democratic politics. This bipolar sensibility permeates the work of Jerry Zaslove, to whom the book is dedicated.Yet even if this sensibility pervades the…

This book stands at the point where actuality and legend converge in a land as old as time. From it extends an arid landscape upon which are inscribed the stories of peoples, civilizations, ideas that enslave and beliefs that liberate. Anatolia Junction weaves together three narratives: that of Fred A.…

About 10 years ago, George Bowering and Linda Hutcheon came up with the idea for a short fiction collection called Likely Stories: A Postmodern Sampler. It was a great idea at a time when a lot of people were still trying to figure out what “postmodern” actually meant.That fine collection…

Everything changes on what begins as a typical day in the life of the aptly named Mr. Mann, a forty-eight-year-old, buttoned-down, middle-management type in a pinstriped grey suit, who feels himself losing touch with his job, his wife, his children, and the rest of his urban life. He wins tickets…

Newly unemployed baby boomers Gwen and Ned appear to be ­completely different people: Gwen, a practical, down-to-earth Latin teacher; Ned, an impractical investment advisor constantly dreaming up new ventures for making money. But appearances can be deceiving, as their son Alex, who left home years ago, and their daughter Karen,…

This award-winning novel by playwright Wadji Mouawad is a thriller and a road novel – written in the North African storytelling tradition in which events unfold from an animal point of view. The novel opens with a brutal murder: the protagonist arrives home to find his wife lying in a…

Reading against the grain of global ideological flows, Derksen demonstrates how borders, identities, national literatures, urban territories, built space and the spaces of culture and politics have not simply been eroded by globalization, but how the traditional identity-determined scales of culture are being re-imagined as contested spaces for dynamic communities…

Guillermo Verdecchia’s first play, Another Country (originally Final Decisions [War] ), was his response to his home country Argentina’s Dirty War in 1976–83, when leaders of the military junta held that their campaign against “leftist subversives and terrorists” was the beginning of the Third World War. The scale of their…

We, each of us in the civilized Western world, live in a space inviolate. “Our home is our castle,” as the saying goes: our shelter from the intrusion of the weather and other “outside influences;” our defence against physical and mental threats, real and imagined, to our private space; vault…

Another Order gathers the dynamic and previously inaccessible works of Judith Copithorne, the boundary-pushing writer, artist, community worker, and outspoken feminist who has been a key figure in Vancouver’s literary scene since the 1960s. Including poetry, fiction, visual art, comics, and life writing, Another Order captures Copithorne’s “embodied approach to…

Inspired by the classic play by Sophocles, Antigone in Spring takes us to a fictional Québec where dead birds fall from the sky, covering highways, rooftops, and parks. The citizens demand an explanation, but the answer never comes; the government, led by the autocratic Creon, refuses to tell the truth.…

Anywhere but Here is an external representation of the inner turmoil of exile. Using magic realism tropes, it follows a family on a journey back toward Chile from Canada. They drive in a convertible along the desert border between the U.S. and Mexico, each with different emotions about the North…

Heartily sincere, human, and compassionate, Around Her is a multifaceted novel that explores, through the words and reflections of a large community of characters, the bonds that unite us, and love in all of its manifestations – the love that one finds, that one loses, destroys, desires, or recovers.In the…

One of Canada’s greatest literary figures reflects on life at the centre of Quebec literary arts. Re-examining the influences of her early life in a large, rural Catholic family, Madeleine Gagnon not only explores her rejection of unexamined values as part of her intellectual development but also her refusal to…

Asian Skies is the final book of Ken Norris’s travel trilogy. With Dante as his guide, he has previously left behind the predominantly European terrain of the first book, Limbo Road, only to find himself in the terra incognita of the new world of the second, Dominican Moon.Now guideless, Norris…

Two plays from rising Canadian theatre star Ellie Moon. Asking For It looks at gender roles and sexual consent in the wake of the Ghomeshi scandal, and considers the various ways in which sexual consent is understood personally, culturally, and legally. In this documentary play, Moon speaks with people of…

Even though we spend a third of our lives asleep, the behaviour remains largely a mystery. Sandra Huber’s first book, Assembling the Morrow: A Poetics of Sleep, assumes that any attempt to solve this mystery requires new modes of experimentation. What happens when the line of a Berger’s wave (an…

Assorted Candies for the Theatre is a stage adaptation of Michel Tremblay’s fourth book of autobiographical sketches, Bonbons Assortis / Assorted Candies, offering a rich and colourful cast of characters in this exquisite remembrance of childhood past in Montreal’s Plateau Mont-Royal neighbourhood. Much more than a mere adaptation of a…

Loved and admired by readers for the grace of her language and the humanity of her vision, Sharon Thesen is one of Canada’s finest and most respected poets. Thesen’s poems express the pleasure and magic of a language fully transformed into visions of grace.

We are pleased to announce our 2022 Autumn Launch Special! Buy all six books for $68.50 (Retail $114.70) or take a discount on individual titles. #postdildo by Danielle LaFrance HARROWINGS by Cecily Nicholson Slow Scrape by Tanya Lukin Linklater Some People Fall in the Lodge and then Eat Berries All…

We are pleased to announce our 2023 Autumn Launch Special! Buy all four books for $46.50 (Retail $73.80) or take a discount on individual titles. "*andrea bennett*":https://talonbooks.com/authors/andrea-bennett ("_the berry takes the shape of the bloom_":https://talonbooks.com/authors/andrea-bennett) "*M.A.C. Farrant*":https://talonbooks.com/authors/mac-farrant ("_Jigsaw_":https://talonbooks.com/books/jigsaw) "*Samantha Nock*":https://talonbooks.com/authors/samantha-nock ("_A Family of Dreamers_":https://talonbooks.com/books/a-family-of-dreamers), and "*Nikki Reimer*":https://talonbooks.com/authors/nikki-reimer ("_No Town Called…