An insider account by Iran’s first female vice-president, Massoumeh Ebtekar, of the 1979 takeover of the American Embassy in Tehran.

Taking Measures collects the major serial poems of Canada’s inaugural Poet Laureate, George Bowering, including work from each of the last six decades. Here is Bowering at his experimental and irreverent best.

Taking Measures collects the major serial poems of Canada’s inaugural Poet Laureate, George Bowering, including work from each of the last six decades. Here is Bowering at his experimental and irreverent best.

With an afterword by Linda M. MorraDiscovered in her papers in 2008, Jane Rule’s autobiography is a rich and culturally significant document that follows the first twenty-one years of her life: the complexities of her relationships with family, friends, and early lovers, and how her sensibilities were fashioned by mentors…

Tales of the Emperor is based on the life of Qin Shi Huang (circa 260–210 BCE), the “First Emperor” – he who unified China, gave it his name, built the Great Wall, entombed an army of terra cotta soldiers, authored legalism, erased history, insinuated governance, and established paranoia as a…

The two one-act plays in Talker’s Town and The Girl Who Swam Forever are set in a small northern 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…

Talking Bodies collects Larry Tremblay’s four stunning and memorable solo performances for the stage. Thematically related, each deals with the reconstruction of an identity which, through trauma, illusion, accident or destiny, has been threatened, destabilized, broken or dispersed.It is the body in which any identity finds its origin, but it…

In this psychological thriller set in a fictionalized 1930s Vancouver, Alex Braithewaite, a troubled but passionate theatre critic, believes he has found the legendary Stanley Lee, director of the infamous avant-garde theatre The Empty Space. Alex becomes convinced that this man’s radically subversive ideas are what the city’s arts community…

Seminal collection by one of Canada’s pioneering figures in racial, feminist, and queer politics.

Although internationally recognized as a pioneer of visual, concrete, sound and performance poetry, few people recognize bill bissett’s work in the visual arts to be of equal aesthetic importance. While his drawings, paintings, collages and three-dimensional assemblages were the subject of a 1984 Vancouver Art Gallery solo exhibition, Fires in…

New poems from Canada’s shaman of sound and performance poetry, bill bissett.bissett’s innovations in sound poetry, have shaped poetry, music, painting, and publishing and stimulated, provoked, influenced, shocked, and delighted audiences for half a century. In this new collection of concrete poems, bissett writes “poemes uv greef transisyun n sumtimes…

What is logic? Isn’t it a sickness we create? Useful for certain things, but not paramount in helping us be & share & change. Angels are rising in spirit places, helping us through & set against a back-drop of deaths, tortures, imprisonments, AIDS, big religious right-wing power control grabs, unroyal…

bissett has remained on a permanent world tour for more than thirty years, writing this book while on a European reading circuit that included performances in London, Manchester, Cardiff, Dublin, Paris, Mainz, Trier and Berlin.

Nan’s family is home for Thanksgiving, but some unsolicited truths are about to be dropped at the dinner table. Old wounds and new realities collide, and sibling rivalry is stoked, but the enduring spirit that guides this family charges on, ever fierce. Thanks for Giving offers plenty to chew on.…

It's Memorial Day, 1990, and Margaret Ryan has returned from Vermont to the Ontario cottage country where, thirty-two years before, she had vacationed with her disintegrating family at a lakeside resort. For herself and her sister Daisy, it was a time of awakening, a time of discovery.Both of the girls…

The story of a woman (her name is never given), sent away from her family by her brother, the Bishop, after she is found exploring her sexuality at age seventeen. In a series of twenty-four “snapshots,” That Woman is a devastating Judeo-Christian allegory where voyeurism, fantasy, masturbation, seduction, violence and…

Canada’s most famous Indigenous playwright, Tomson Highway, sets his latest theatrical achievement, The (Post) Mistress, in a not-so-distant past, when sending letters through the mail was still vital to communicating with friends and loved ones, and the small-town post office was often the only connection to faraway places longed-for or…

The Angel of Solitude presides over the lives of eight young lesbian women who strive to achieve an all-female utopia within which homophobia, their pasts and their differences are abolished. As the narrative unfolds, we realize that none of the women are present directly—they come into being, and live their…

The Art of Building a Bunker is a dark, viciously funny story recounting a week in the life of your average Elvis as he endures mandatory workplace sensitivity training. Elvis struggles to meet the demands of Camerson, the sensitivity traning leader, and to work with the group that surrounds him…

The Athabasca Ryga presents essays, short stories, plays, and selections from a novel that George Ryga wrote in Athabasca and in Edmonton before his move to British Columbia in the early 1960s. Very little of this work has ever been published before. Almost all these early writings evoke and portray…

The Baby Blues is Drew Hayden Taylor’s highly wrought farce of patrimony in a stifling, politically correct, post-colonial milieu of “fancy dancers” of every stripe on the powwow trail. In juxtaposing three generations of careless wandering hedonists, progenitors of a string of offspring from their six-night stands, with their erstwhile…

In the post-apocalyptic future, 50 years after the last government of turbo-liberals and its president-for-life have been elected, a group of researchers convenes a Congress to address the curious cultural phenomenon of the Baldwins, whose stories have been gathered and archived by the chroniclers since the end of history. “Who…

Three timely and provocative plays by the award-winning, internationally produced Portuguese Canadian playwright Elaine Ávila.

The Battle of Batoche is the best-known confrontation between Métis and British soldiers in the Northwest Resistance of 1885. It remains one of Canada’s most emotion-laden memories, eloquently revisited in this revised and expanded edition.The strategies of both sides are thoroughly examined, and numerous maps and photographs offer detailed description…

A consortium of German developers shows up on the fictional Otter Lake Reserve with a seemingly irresistible offer to improve the local economy: the creation of “Ojibway World,” a Native theme park designed to attract European tourists, causing hilarious personal and political divisions within the local community.The Berlin Blues concludes…

the berry takes the shape of the bloom originated as a gesture towards optimism after loss and pain, difficulty and fear. It began as a linear narrative, offering a window into one trans person’s life after they felt contented and secure. But in the end these poems, which capture particular…

Singularly obsessed with his all-consuming passion for Anna, the object of his adolescent desire, the photographer Christophe Langelier is beside himself. Ten years ago, he failed the test of eating a bicycle for her as proof of his love and devotion. Since then, he has created a photographic catalogue of…

In the heart of the Latin Quarter, meeting place of marginal characters of all sorts, Céline Poulin works the night shift at a cheap and popular restaurant, Le Sélect, serving hamburger platters and spaghetti and meatballs to student misfits, transvestites, hookers and queens from the Main—Montreal’s disreputable Boulevard Saint-Laurent. Hanging…

When Fine Dumas’s notorious transvestite Boudoir is shut down after Expo 67, Céline is condemned to go back to working as a waitress at Le Sélect, attending to the frustrated appetites and exquisite pathos of its exotic clientele. Then a newcomer appears, the gorgeous Gilbert Forget, a musician who is…

It is June 1981: the farm debt crisis. Pride Toronto’s first parade. Everything is changing, including fifteen-year-old Esther, who runs away to the city to escape the family farm. With the help of a brash young hustler and a gay activist who shelters street kids, she confronts her conservative Christian…

The box closet was a real closet in the attic of the family house in Washington, D.C. in which Mary Meigs grew up. Bags and boxes of letters and diaries were found there after her mother’s death in 1958, and when Meigs read them she decided that they were the…

In this collection of two plays about the process of children becoming adults, Drew Hayden Taylor works his delightfully comic and bitter-sweet magic on the denials, misunderstandings and preconceptions which persist between Native and Colonial culture in North America.In “The Boy in the Treehouse,” Simon, the son of an Ojibway…

Acclaimed Québec feminist Martine Delvaux turns her sharp eye and even sharper pen on the history of gentlemen's clubs and male fraternity in this wide-reaching study of patriarchy. Delvaux lays bare the brazen misogyny of boys’ clubs across many fields, including politics, entertainment, technology, law enforcement, architecture, and the military.…

The Jonathan Swift of the bingo hall and elder-care, the Alexander Pope of pet-care and the dinner parties of the liberal intelligentsia, Marion Farrant continues her assault on the unaccountably disaffected and disillusioned of the Western world with The Breakdown So Far, her eighth volume of extremely short stories for…

Joseph Tussman’s The Burden of Office is a book about the nature of political authority. Consider the symptoms of our present dilemma: leadership reduced to media “sound bites,” legitimate public power sold off to the marketplace in the name of “privatization,” citizens transformed into dubiously literate consumers in a Global…

The Buz’Gem Blues is the third play in Drew Hayden Taylor’s ongoing zany, outrageous, often farcical examination of both Native and non-Native stereotypes in what is to become what he calls his “Blues Quartet.”Marianne has talked her mother, Martha, into attending an Elders conference with her, where she is to…

In 1956, Silvio Rosato, a decorated World War II veteran, shows up at the house of his bigamist father, Eduardo Rosato, who had abandoned him and his mother in Italy in 1920, starting a second life and family for himself in Chicago. Handsome, assured and accomplished, there is something sinister…

Before moving to Prince George in 1969, Barry McKinnon was writing single narrative poems that, in terms of form, began to seem outworn and inadequate in his new environment. The emotional range of the lyric had become too personal and limiting. Starting with a poem based on a discarded fragment…

Oliver Wells, naturalist, writer, ethnographer, farmer, and stock breeder, was born in 1907 at the pioneer farm established by his family three generations before in the valley of the Chilliwack River. The name of this farm, Edenbank, echoes the rich heritage and idealist aspirations of the pioneer family who came…

The Circus Performers’ Bar is a second collection of finely crafted stories by David Arnason, written in every conceivable style: the urbane New Yorker story, the fireside chat, the war correspondent’s report, the poignant personal memoir and the hysterical small-town gossip. Hilarious role reversals and role substitutions provide the context…

The City That Is Leaving Forever is a unique twenty-first-century time capsule: an instant-message exchange between Kashmir and British Columbia spanning more than five years in the lives of two Muslim Kashmiri women poets. In 2016, as India’s military carries out extrajudicial killings and imposes a lengthy curfew in Srinagar,…

Artie Gold wrote. And although he published only eight books, they were just the tip of the tip of the iceberg. Artie was always writing on his manual Underwood, on the back of cigarette packs, on napkins, on the wall, on postcards to himself and to the rest of the…

Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, most of the English common lands were enclosed—taken, by force, out of the hands of local collective use and privatized. The resistance to capitalism’s “primitive accumulation,” registered in recurring peasant revolts, failed to stem this tide of what we now call “privatization”—but it spilt…

The Concise Köchel cannot be substituted for the “Complete” catalogue. Published in response to the many requests from musicologists and musicians received by the publishers Breitkopf and Hartel, this abridged, less costly and easier to handle edition is designed to meet the most frequent needs of those interested in the…

May 1953. The Empress of France sets sail from Montreal. On the pretext of attending the celebrations marking the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, an important mafioso leaves for England where he secretly plans to live in exile with his two sons. Aboard this floating palace in the middle of…

The fifteenth summer of Beth Weeks’s life is full of strange happenings: a classmate is mauled to death, children go missing on the nearby reserve, and an unseen predator pursues Beth. Not to mention Beth is becoming aware that there is darkness in her own home: her mother’s relationship with…

It’s hard to worry about the future when you’re laughing at the hilarious absurdity of daily life. The days we live go by like slugs eating their way through leaves; everything changes, yet nothing changes, and the years soon accumulate. Who doesn’t read their daily horoscope, searching for guidance about…

In taking on “The Matter of Québec,” David Fennario provides audiences and readers with an abiding critique of the notion that history is created around “great causes” by “great men.” Given the recent reversal of fortune delivered to the tempestuous sound and fury of the Québec separatist movement, The Death…

The Hollywood empire was built over the course of a century through hard-nosed business practices such as block booking, dumping and buying up the competition, turning the silver screen into a goldmine in the process. The business logic that has driven the industry since its beginnings has gone into hyperdrive…

Here is the only known first-person account from a Chinese worker on the famously treacherous parts of transcontinental railways that spanned the North American continent in the nineteenth century. The story of those Chinese workers has been told before, but never in a voice from among their number, never in…

Of all our contemporary urban myths none is more absurd than the fiction of the “classless society,” and Morris Panych’s latest comedy penetrates ruthlessly to the shock and horror of the residue of hardened pesto soiling its porcelain heart.Haplessly determined to have his own miserable authority vindicated, chief dishwasher Dressler…

Quebec City, 1908. Two priests-to-be are ordered to deliver a letter to a controversial visitor to their city: the legendary French actress, Sarah Bernhardt.As part of her long career, Bernhardt – known to her loyal fans as “The Divine” – visited Canada several times between 1880 and 1917, most often…

In Act 1, Claude, 55, visits his father Alex, 77, in an Alzheimer’s ward, intimately tending to his bodily functions and needs while hopelessly trying to reach his silent, vacant father with a series of monologues—to settle old scores and misunderstandings between them.In an astonishing and eerie reversal of roles,…

(This third volume in the Chronicles of the Plateau Mont-Royal—an epic series of novels which imagines the lives of the characters of Tremblay’s plays—deals with an explicitly gay thematic: Tremblay’s metaphor for the Québécois desire for a more glamorous identity on the world stage.)This is the third volume in Michel…

The Dunsmuirs: A Promise Kept is the second of three plays chronicling the saga of one of Canada’s wealthiest, most ruthless and ill fated families.While Robbie and Joan’s two sons, Alex and Robert, heirs apparent to the family fortune, are groomed to hold the reins of power, Robbie Dunsmuir cuts…

The first of three plays in this saga of one of Canada’s wealthiest and most ruthless families, The Dunsmuirs: Alone at the Edge chronicles the disgrace and exile of Robbie Dunsmuir from Scotland, the settlement of his family as indentured labourers to the Hudson’s Bay Company in the Nanaimo coalfields…

By the time he was writing Gossip in 1977, George Walker had already begun to shift his settings from, on the one hand, North America’s colonial roots in Europe, and on the other, its fascination with other, exotically foreign locales. Yet, even in The Power Plays, Walker is still exploring…

Where is the East End? It’s where the sun comes up and where you bury the dead. It’s where George Walker set six of his plays. It’s the East End of Toronto; the Lower East Side of New York; down by the East River; East L.A.; East Vancouver. It’s where…

Rita Joe is a Native girl who leaves the reservation for the city, only to die on skid row as a victim of white men’s violence and paternalistic attitudes towards First Nations peoples. As perhaps the best-known contemporary Canadian play and a poetic drama of enormous theatrical power, The Ecstasy…

Edward Curtis saw his job as that of creating a photographic record of “the vanishing race of the North American Indian.” His work therefore became as much a projection of colonial attitudes upon aboriginal peoples as it was an authentic record of their lives.The Edward Curtis Project began when the…

The Empress Has No Closure contains, as a centre-piece, the “Alefbet Transfers,” a meditative, spacial explication of the 22 figures of the Hebrew alphabet.

Frank, having dedicated his life to the unremarkable, and Walker, paranoid since being struck by lighting at age three, attempt to flee from each other and end up following each other instead. They find themselves in a run-down hotel operated by deaf and misdirected Willy and blind Alice, who has…

This comedy-drama skewers the film world when a veteran playwright must decide between accepting government funds to turn his new play into a Canadian-made feature film with a multi-million dollar contract. Or accept an American producer’s offer of total artistic control but far less money. Will Moretti stand firm in…

The Execution is Marie-Claire Blais’s only play for the stage. Set in a boarding school, it tells the story of two schoolboys who plot the murder of one of their classmates and enact the crime. As a play, it is a study of innocence, evil and complicity, themes well-known to…

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 asks: what happens when material becomes thought and…

According to the 19th-century historian Michelet, “Les fées” were women who would rather sing than pray. For this crime, they were punished by being imprisoned in containers that would be opened only at the end of time. In Les fées ont soif (The Fairies Are Thirsty) Denise Bocher takes this…

The enigmatic American artist Georgia O’Keeffe flourished in the desert solitude where her creativity and vision thrived and was challenged by its dangerous energies, its desolate and hard beauty. In John Murrell’s The Faraway Nearby, Georgia O’Keeffe resigns herself to an old age spent in the auburn and tawny light…

It is the glorious second day of May, 1942. The sun is drawing the damp from earth still heavy with the end of a long Quebec winter, the budding branches of the trees along rue Fabre and in Parc Lafontaine of the Plateau Mont Royal ache to release their leaves…

The Fighting Days is set in Winnipeg during 1910-1917. The play focuses on the life and work of Francis Marion Beynon, a Manitoba journalist and political activist. When the play opens, Francis is on her way to Winnipeg, leaving behind a sheltered and religious rural childhood. Soon after she arrives…

It is June 20, 1952, a decade after the events described in The Fat Woman Next Door Is Pregnant, the first volume of Michel Tremblay’s series of autobiographical fiction. The mystic, yet palpable instant of summer’s arrival is experienced simultaneously by the fat woman’s son (who is never named) and…

In 2003, a mild-mannered historian named Moses Lapinsky jots down notes for a biography. It is to tell the tale of his father Sonny, a famous Jewish- Canadian boxer. As Moses buries himself in his research, he is transported back in time to the pivotal events of his father’s life.…

Daniel Brooks’s The Full Light of Day is a modern epic tragedy, a timely exploration of crumbling privilege and power, beautifully told and innovative in form. Mary’s family finds itself in serious difficulty, and some bad decisions lead to disaster. Mary soon falls ill, and as she is dying wrestles…

A story of the ill-fated romance between a wandering musician-social-idealist and a Cape Breton coal miner’s daughter, whose dreams are reawakened by their passion. The Glace Bay Miners’ Museum is a play in which the all-consuming brightness of dreams and memory are overshadowed by absentee greed, callousness and exploitation. It…

Nancy Shaw was an award-winning poet, scholar, and critic who was formative in shifting the ground of Canadian literature and poetics. She was co-director of the influential Kootenay School of Writing (KSW) and Writing magazine, was an artist-in-residence at the Western Front in the 1980s, and served as a chair…

It’s May 1922, wedding preparations are in full swing, and old memories, past desires, and big regrets threaten to turn the big celebration into a big melee.

A delightful collection of seventy miniature fictions and comics riffing on the theme of happiness, The Great Happiness offers a series of lively antidotes to the current climate of doom.

The Great Wave of Civilization is Herschel Hardin’s play about the destruction of the people of the Blackfoot Confederacy by the liquor trade in Montana and Alberta in the 19th century. Little Dog of the Northern Blackfoot tribe vs. Snookum Jim, free trader, I.G. Baker, merchant-prince of Fort Benton and…

Set between 1913 and 1963 in one of Montreal’s well-known, upper-middle-class suburban neighbourhoods, Martine Desjardins’s The Green Chamber is a fast-paced, highly atmospheric, riveting novel that chronicles the decline of a wealthy French-Canadian family over the course of three generations.Every house has its secrets, but none hides them better than…

Winner of the prestigious 2008 Uchimura Naoya Prize, The Gull is the first Canadian play staged in the ancient, ritualized tradition of Japanese Noh. Produced by Vancouver’s Pangaea Arts, and written by award-winning poet and novelist Daphne Marlatt, the play is set in 1950: wartime restrictions on interned Japanese Canadians…

The Happiest Man in the World looks under the carpet of post-modernism to search for competence and humour in a world of habitual assumptions about social, political, and sexual awareness. The characters, and the author, in these stories discover that their roles, and their role models are not as clear…

Colin Browne’s new collection, The Hatch, extends his formal engagement with the margins of the new documentary. Myth, history, and the present are contemporaneous in these poems; nothing is ever one thing, and nothing is itself for very long. Figuratively speaking each poem is caught in mid-air, as if delivered…

Talonbooks is pleased to announce a new edition of one of Michel Tremblay’s most unusual novels. First published in English translation by M&S in 1989 under the title The Heart Laid Bare [Le coeur découvert, Leméac, 1986], British and American rights to this novel were sold to Serpent’s Tail, who…

The Heretic began with a rhetorical question the author posed to himself for a comedy show: “If there is a God, why would He create us? If He’s perfect, all knowing, there’s nothing he can gain from us. He must have been so incredibly bored and lonely, that He created…

Two plays by award-winning playwright Joan MacLeod. Little Sister was first performed at Theatre Direct in Toronto in 1994 and won the Chalmers Canadian Play Award, Theatre for Young Audiences in 1995. The Hope Slide was first performed at the Tarragon Theatre in Toronto in 1992 and won the Floyd…

The House That Hijack Built explores the possibilities of meaning production when language is pushed to its limits of “logical” or normative semantic patterns. If “to hijack” is “to steal in transit,” this text focuses on how language, with its idioms and ideologies, is appropriated—hijacked and transported—to unknown destinations in…

A northern Canadian village, one of many remote settlements dotting the Quebec landscape, is in transition. Originally dependent on subsistence farming and logging, supplemented by winter hunting, its economy has gradually changed over the years: first increasingly dependent on guiding southern urbanites on hunting trips; then on providing a habitat…

Each year, the Beaugrand sisters meet for their sister Yvette’s birthday party—and to have a little “impromptu”—at which they lash out at each other’s personal failures and at the failure of society to support them in their opinions about the world. The four sisters represent the French-Canadian intelligentsia of the…

Set in a school facing the real-life challenges of immigration, income inequality, and fears of violence in our schools, The In-Between is a realistic, relatable exploration of the complex social circumstances students must navigate in contemporary schools.

These poems were written in the political and emotional wake of the “Missing Women” of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Although women had been going missing from the neighbourhood since the late 1970s, police efforts were not coordinated into a full-scale investigation until the issue was given widespread public visibility by Lori…

Camus’s The Just is based on the true story of a group of Russian revolutionaries who assassinated Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich in 1905. This new translation by Bobby Theodore comes at a time when the play is more relevant than ever and provokes a troubling yet vital question: Do the…

As a way to draw visitors to their isolated fishing village on Quebec’s North Shore, the tourist bureau commissions a documentary film recreating life as it was lived there in the 1940s and 50s. To gather material for the project, the filmmaker is sent in search of Rose Brouillard, now…

What happens when the “other woman” becomes your roommate? What happens when she starts to confide in you about her affair?From the playwright of “A Common Man’s Guide to Loving Women,” comes a claustrophobic drama, set in the Black community of Toronto’s Bloor and Bathurst neighbourhood, which challenges the distance…

Peter and Mary are unhappy. But they don’t know it yet. They work long hours. They invest their money for a retirement they will probably never enjoy. They buy things that are supposed to make them happy but that they never use. They obsess about the nightmare engines of Western…

Early in their ethnographic work, Randy Bouchard and Dorothy Kennedy were privileged to meet Charlie Mack. Born on the Mount Currie Reserve in 1899, he was a fascinating character and a font of wisdom, exemplifying by his way of life, his skills in trapping and canoe-making, and his knowledge of…

The Living is a documentary play inspired by the actual stories of women and girls who survived trauma in post-conflict zones. It examines the lives of victims and perpetrators, post-genocide, who live side-by-side in government-issued housing, as well as the role of NGO-funded campaigns.

At the end of the First World War, to protect his village from the spanish ?u epidemic brought home by returning soldiers, a young priest recently arrived in the Parish of Lac St-Jean commissions a wandering Italian painter to decorate the walls of the local church with a fresco dedicated…

Emily Carr lived in a magical place that she had christened The House of All Sorts. In this House which is open to all that is vital on Earth, Emily Carr, with all her greatness and her imperfections, receives visitors from her planet: Lizzie, her sister, is greeted with war…

For one year in her life, Mary Meigs and her long-term lover and friend, Marie-Claire Blais, lived in a ménage à trois with the beautiful and powerful “Andrée.” After the end of their stormy three-way relationship, both Marie-Claire and Andrée, who are fiction writers, embodied their memories in novels. The…

Written amid wildfires and atmospheric rivers, The Middle extends Stephen Collis’s investigation of threatened climate futures into a poetics of displacement and wandering. The fulcrum of a trilogy begun with A History of the Theories of Rain, The Middle hikes the shifting treelines of our warming world to reflect on…

The Monument Cycles investigates our relation to monuments and works of public art, ranging from memorials to cenotaphs, expressing our desire to capture the fleeting and intangible. Speaking specifically to the city of Vancouver, these poems focus explicitly on the impoverished Downtown Eastside, exploring the narrator’s experiences working in the…

George Bowering and Greg Curnoe became friends in London, Ontario, in 1966. Bowering was a 30-year-old poet and university student and Curnoe was a 29-year-old painter who had dropped out of art school in Toronto to return to his place of birth. Their art was in its youth, their eyes…

The Mystery Play is a detective story, a ghost story, and a memory play: a theatrical blending of Wit and The Woman In Black. Though fully self-contained, The Mystery Play is also the second in a trilogy about crime-solving Sister Vivian Salter, a flinty, fifty-ish Catholic nun forced into the…

The long poem, nowadays, is the talk of various discourses with each other: “A poem is a small painting, a long poem is a mural.”The second edition of The New Long Poem Anthology is an irreplaceable roadmap of a vital and powerful poetic form, a record of the most seductive…

’Ordinarily, theatre relies on illusion in order to reveal truths; The Noam Chomsky Lectures relies on truths in order to reveal illusions. Following the impetus of Chomsky himself, Brooks and Verdecchia have recognized that mass media, mass spectacle, have trivialized and severed consciousness and conscience, separating both from a communal…

Edgar, a timid, asocial thirty-something, witnesses the brutal rape of a young woman and subsequently bears the unconscious victim home. Haunted by the death of his overbearing mother, he pledges to act as the mysterious woman’s saviour. Gothic and darkly humorous, The Obese Christ explores the nebulous divide between Good…

Two epigraphs that frame The Occupation of Heather Rose, one from Alice in Wonderland and the other from Heart of Darkness, prepare the audience for the nightmare of dislocation and alienation this one-woman show evokes.Young, naïve, and inadequately trained, urban health care/social worker Heather Rose flirts with the pilot as…

The published version of George Ryga’s hit play The Ecstasy of Rita Joe is widely available as a best-seller. Yet the work of one of Canada’s best known playwrights, canonized by critics and studied by students world-wide, remains largely absent from the Canadian stage; Ryga’s very reputation as a dramatist…

Written in the tradition of Umberto Eco and Manuel Puig, The Pagan Wall is a first novel by a master storyteller. What appears on the surface as a murder mystery set in Alsatia and the Rhineland, involving international arms dealers, dangerous liaisons, and every other known mystery novel archetype, The…

Evelyn is an extraordinary product of a childhood tyrannized by her emotionally frigid and abusive mother, whose life centres on her pretentiously formal weekly bridge games and her banner-bearing role in the local Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire, even though her ancestors fought on the side of the American…

Winner of 2022 Governor General’s Literary Award for Drama

Dorothy Dittrich’s The Piano Teacher is a play about loss, love, friendship, and the healing power of music. When Erin, a classical pianist, experiences the loss of the life she knew, she meets an unconventional piano teacher who gives her new hope for the future.

George Ryga Award for Social Award: Jordan Abel, The Place of Scraps (Finalist)BC Book Prize, Poetry: Jordan Abel, The Place of Scraps (Winner)The Place of Scraps revolves around Marius Barbeau, an early-twentieth-century ethnographer, who studied many of the First Nations cultures in the Pacific Northwest, including Jordan Abel’s ancestral Nisga’a…

Anthropologists have traditionally studied Europe’s “others” and the marginalized and excluded within Europe’s and North America’s boundaries. This book turns the anthropologist’s spyglass in the opposite direction: on the law, the institution that quintessentially embodies and reproduces Western power.The Pleasure of the Crown offers a comprehensive look at how Canadian,…

Henry W. Tate (d. 1914) was a Tsimshian informant to ethnographer Franz Boas. Tate first wrote these stories in English before giving Boas the Tsimshian equivalent during the decade of 1903-1913. Boas published the stories in the much-consulted classic of ethnology, Tsimshian Mythology, in 1916. Through Ralph Maud’s selection of…

First published as a trilogy in 1986, The Power Plays contain Gossip (1977), Filthy Rich (1979), and The Art of War (1983). Completely revised and updated for this new Talonbooks edition, these three plays showcase both the development and the culmination of Walker’s engagement with the film noir style.

James Hoffman, George Ryga’s biographer, provides a brilliant guide to the reader of this collection, with a compelling reappraisal of Ryga’s fiction as far ahead of its time. The three short novels included here—Hungry Hills, Ballad of a Stonepicker and Night Desk—draw from the same large canvas of rural, depression-era…

Poetry begins when the properties of things — and the correspondences among them — reveal themselves through language. Language is the veil that can pierce itself. The poems in The Properties record encounters between desire and the repressed or suppressed interstices of social, economic, political and unconscious forces. They’re alert…

London, 1483. From the aged Duchess of York, who is 99 years old and will never sit on the throne, to the young Lady Anne who will marry Richard III in order to reign, Chaurette traces the shifting passions and ambitions of six women drawn from Shakespeare’s theatre and portray…

Here are twenty-one user-friendly tales, set in the Okanagan Valley, Austria, Washington, Nanaimo, the Yukon, Iceland, Germany, the future — and Daphne’s Lunch Diner. The Rain Barrel is George Bowering’s first collection of short stories since 1983. Ten years in the making, these stories display Bowering’s meticulous attention to the…

The ambition that inspired rapper and MC Baba Brinkman to transpose his performance piece “The Rap Canterbury Tales” to the printed page was his desire to resurrect Chaucer’s brilliant stories from their vellum mausoleum into visible and audible contemporary forms that would once again delight and edify both live listening…

A play within a play. A young playwright draws on his family as the raw material for his first work. Cast of four women and three men.

The Recovery of the Public World is a collection of texts and talks which address the work of poet Robin Blaser and the field inhabited by his work. It is a field in which the private and the public are grounded in a poetic thinking that operates within the problematics…

From the theatre of Euripides to the theatre of Montreal’s Main, Michel Tremblay casts some of his most famous and exotic personae, The Duchess, Fine Dumas, Jean-le-Décollé and Babalu, in a whole new light in his new Notebooks. Unlike his Plateau Mount Royal novels, wherein these flamboyant transvestites and their…

Two events gave birth to this play: the 1998 arrest of Augusto Pinochet by the spanish courts and the 1995 death of Aguirre’s uncle, who drank himself to death on Vancouver’s skid row, never living to make a victorious return to his country. It has taken decades of silence for…

The Richard Brautigan Ahhhhhhhhhhh covers the range of love, loss and learning that have made rob mclennan one of the most exciting young poets in Canada. The language of the poems, though thoroughly grounded in the media culture of television and film, casts a deceptively familiar veil over the breadth…

Published for the first time, David French’s The Riddle of the World remains a classic of the Canadian stage.Stockbroker Ron and ex-priest Steve are two new singles who get together to console themselves after having been abandoned by their mates. Through a comic series of false starts, disastrous one-night stands,…

Charles Hill-Tout was born in England in 1858 and came to British Columbia in 1891. A pioneer settler at Abbotsford in the Fraser Valley, he devoted many years of fieldwork to his studies of the Salish and published in the scholarly periodicals of the day. He was honoured as president…

Charles Hill-Tout was born in England in 1858 and came to British Columbia in 1891. A pioneer settler at Abbotsford in the Fraser Valley, he devoted many years studying the Salish and publishing in the scholarly periodicals of the day. He was honoured as president of the Anthropological Section of…

Charles Hill-Tout was born in England in 1858 and came to British Columbia in 1891. A pioneer settler at Abbotsford in the Fraser Valley, he devoted many years of fieldwork to his studies of the Salish and published in the scholarly periodicals of the day. He was honoured as president…

Charles Hill-Tout was born in England in 1858 and came to British Columbia in 1891. He was a pioneer settler at Abbotsford in the Fraser Valley, where he raised his family in a log cabin. He devoted many years of field work to his studies of the Salish and published…

Hubert Clements is a black cellist on tour with a symphony orchestra. Their guest soloist is injured and the conductor asks Clements to stand in. After wrestling with an extremely dif?cult passage in the performance piece, Bach’s Six Suites for Solo Cello, Clements ?nally resorts to improvising his way through…

In 1919, Howard O’Hagan went east to study law at McGill University. There, Stephen Leacock was one of his professors, and, with A.J.M. Smith, he edited the McGill Daily. Graduating in 1925 with a B.A. and a L.L.B., he came back west where, without being called to the bar, he…

David French’s brilliant translation of The Seagull, in collaboration with Russian scholar, Donna Orwin, is at one and the same time a revitalization of a Russian theatre classic, and French’s personal tribute to one of the greatest playwrights of all time.Cast of 5 women and 8 men.

An industrial biography that investigates personal myths and the great “machines” that drive the world to the abyss of development.

In an imaginary letter to an absent older brother, Braidie struggles to understand the torture and killing of a teenage girl by a group of her school-mates. MacLeod’s young protagonist enters all the bright open avenues of peer-group play and the dark blind alleys of individual and collective terror, as…

Edgerton Foundation New Play Award: Morris Panych, The Shoplifters (Winner)In this riotously funny new comedy from Morris Panych, we meet Alma, a seasoned career shoplifter who prefers the five-finger discount over some lousy seniors’ day deal. But it’s not just an empty wallet that leads Alma to a life of…

Everything Colin Browne has made up or invented in The Shovel seems written in prose; everything in it he has “unearthed”—from research, the stories of others and source texts—appears as poetry. In this extraordinary book, he has inverted the way we have been defining and privileging forms of language in…

The Singer’s Broken Throat is a collection of poems that trace a path through both physical and emotional landscapes; each step of the narrative way is marked by an event of the heart; each image is a map of person and place. Des Walsh’s fourth book of poetry echoes his…

From the award-winning author of stage hits Mambo Italiano and In Piazza San Domenico comes a delicious, saucy new comedy about Terry and Robert, a young couple with roots in the Italian neighbourhood of St. Leonard in Montreal. The couple’s newly renovated duplex has barely a hint of gilded rococo…

“Anthropologist of the absurd” and “brave iconoclast,” M.A.C. Farrant positively bristles in this three-part novel-length work of prose fragments, snippets, questions, speculations, and meditations, by turns philosophical, dark, comedic, and lyrical in its attempts to imagine a multitude of possible futures for our accelerated age. It offers her readers nothing…

Rural Quebec in the fifties. A battered child, Maurice, has taken refuge in a fantasy world. Alone on the farm one afternoon, he invites his pet goose, Teeka, into the house where his bedroom and the bathroom become the scene of some of Tarzan’s most terrifying adventures. His parents unexpected…

On April 20, 1863, the British naval gunboat Forward attacked a Native village on Kuper Island. The naval officers believed that the village harboured individuals involved in two recent assaults against European transients in the Gulf Islands. The gunboat fired on the village and was repulsed with casualties after a…

From Mary Meigs, the celebrated author of In the Company of Strangers, comes an autobiographical novel, The Time Being. An affair born of a correspondence with a distant admirer leads the lovers to an arranged meeting in Australia. With a lifetime of relationships already behind them, the two women approach…

The Trespassers unfolds over the course of a few weeks in a town in the middle of nowhere—not small enough to be a quaint place or large enough to be in any way an interesting one. They once had a sawmill here, which was a going concern before it was…

Roughly based on The Trial by Franz Kafka, this black comedy changes the lead character to a modern business woman who finds herself accused of an unknown crime. The more she delves into the bureaucratic nightmare the more her ordered, little world unravels and the more she is entangled in…

“When I was thirteen I was raped by the Paper Bag Rapist. I was with my younger cousin at the time, and neither one of us ever saw him—he used a paper bag to cover his own head or those of his victims. Not that we would have seen him…

Raise the windsock. Read the compass. Ride where the wind wills it.Late 2010. From the end of fall to the beginning of winter, Daniel Canty becomes a wind seeker. Aboard the Blue Rider, a venerable midnight-blue Ford Ranger crested with a weathervane and a retractable windsock, he surrenders himself to…

The Unnatural and Accidental Women is a surrealist dramatization of a thirty-year murder case involving many mysterious deaths in the “Skid Row” area of Vancouver. All the victims were found dead with a blood-alcohol reading far beyond safe levels, and all were last seen in the company of Gilbert Paul…

Eighteen-year-old Connor, an aspiring author whose fantastical stories foretell his growing struggle with depression, can’t wait to be free of his adverb-wielding, solve-it-all mother, Sharon. But six weeks after leaving for university, he drops out and returns home.Dan Mulano is an infatuated new dad and well-meaning police officer whose selfishness…

In The Ventriloquist, Larry Tremblay directs his celebrated mastery of the dramatic monologue to an interrogation of the process of characterization itself. Alone on the stage with his puppet, the ventriloquist introduces his “self ” as a construct of characters, along with his “other” imagined characters, to an audience which…

Based on the experience of city life, The Vestiges moves across the uneven geography of the present, linking historical moments when quarters of cities were squatted, when social change boiled and the future was up for grabs. In the context of our precarious present, the poem “The Vestiges,” around which…

A young woman has disappeared at the edge of the city. Four women are drawn into the race to find her. As we watch them grid-search the fields for traces of her passing, we move through the shattering events of their recent lives that have left them as lost as…

For more than three decades, Robert Lepage’s dynamic multimedia performance works have been produced on stages worldwide. Celebrated for his bold, visionary aesthetic, Lepage has received several high-profile commissions in recent years, including two Peter Gabriel world tours, Cirque du Soleil’s KÁ in Las Vegas, a dramatic staging of Wagner’s…

How much do we value clean water? Enough to stop our industrialized way of life from degrading it? The documentary play The Watershed follows an artist and her family in the struggle to chart a sustainable course between economic prosperity and environmental stewardship.Largely constructed from original interviews conducted by the…

On a Friday morning in a “frighteningly well-groomed living room” in Scarborough, Lindalou, 31, is packing up to return to Cape Breton after visiting her mother, Betina, for the first time in five years. Mother and daughter have a turbulent relationship, exchanging refrains of put-downs as a way of avoiding…

After surviving a major accident, a man is trapped in a village buried in the snow and cut off from the world by a nationwide power failure. He is entrusted to Matthias, a taciturn old man who agrees to heal his wounds in exchange for wood, food, and eventual escape from the village. Will they manage to stand up against external threats and intimate pitfalls

City of Victoria Butler Book Prize: M.A.C. Farrant, The World Afloat (Winner)In The World Afloat, a series of seventy-five “miniatures” that melds narrative with elements of prose poem and farce, master of the absurd and expert observer M.A.C. Farrant peers into the complexities of human experience – through the rear…

That both autobiography and biography have acquired a position of unprecedented importance over the past 30 years is now obvious. Less obvious are the reasons for this phenomenon. Theorists and students of AutoBiography, a research subject now viewed as respectable in academic circles, have recently mapped the contours and shifting…

Jane Rule’s first collection of short stories, some of which were first published in The Ladder, the first nationally distributed lesbian publication in the United States. Jane Rule is also the author of Desert of the Heart and Memory Board.In the sensual and tender “Middle Children,” two closeted young lesbians…

From one of Canada’s most influential poets, poems written in response to the discovery of letters by her father. These poems explore a sense of place and home on Canada’s West Coast now on the brink of global climate change. “There Then” permeates any “Here Now” of immigrant consciousness and highlights the impermanent quality of “home.”

Shocked by his brother's death from psychological trauma sustained in the Vietnam War, Fred A. Reed sets out on a journey of personal discovery. By way of Greece, the Balkans, and the mystical Anatolian highlands, in pursuit of iconoclasts in Syria and Lebanon, he comes under the spell of Islam.…

C.S. Morrissey’s brilliant translations bring a modern, lyrical sensibility to Theogony and Works and Days, Hesiod’s two great poems that paved the way for subsequent achievements in Greek philosophy. Theogony tells of the first generations of the gods and recollects how Zeus established his cosmic reign of justice. Works and…

There’ll Be Another delivers on the promise of the title: It is actually three books of poems in one, each offering the reader the unique new opening of an entirely different language.The first, Heavy-Hearted in Havana, is made up of a series of poems written during McFadden’s sojourn in Cuba…

This is the second of five novels in Michel Tremblay’s Plateau Mont-Royal series, an evocative, magical retelling of the author’s own birth, childhood, and adolescence in a working-class Montreal neighbourhood populated by eccentrics, dreamers and imaginary characters of mythic proportions.Three schoolgirls, “Thérèse ’n’ Pierrette” and their friend Simone, are caught…

BC Book Prize, Non-Fiction, Bev Sellars, They Called Me Number One (Finalist) Burt Award for First Nations, Métis, and Inuit Literature: Bev Sellars, They Called Me Number One (Third Prize winner)Like thousands of Aboriginal children in Canada, and elsewhere in the colonized world, Xatsu'll chief Bev Sellars spent part of…

In They Write Their Dreams on the Rock Forever, ‘Nlaka’pamux elder Annie York explains the red-ochre inscriptions written on the rocks and cliffs of the lower Stein Valley in British Columbia. This is perhaps the first time that a Native elder has presented a detailed and comprehensive explanation of rock-art…

In They Write Their Dreams on the Rock Forever, ‘Nlaka’pamux elder Annie York explains the red-ochre inscriptions written on the rocks and cliffs of the lower Stein Valley in British Columbia. This is perhaps the first time that a Native elder has presented a detailed and comprehensive explanation of rock-art…

This Is My Own: Letters to Wes and Other Writings on Japanese Canadians, 1941–1948 is a collection of letters written by Muriel Kitagawa during this period, as well as statements, essays and manuscripts which arose from Kitagawa’s commitment to write about the injustices of the government’s policies and to educate…

This Poem is an ironic investigation of contemporary culture and the technomediatic-saturated world we are enmeshed in. Composed in the style of Facebook updates and extended tweets, each section infuses itself with continuously shifting tones, styles, and commentary which in turn are provocative, emotive, and deeply satiric. Mashing up lexicons…

Daphne Marlatt’s latest book of poems is a memory book—an album of love poems spanning twenty-five years, from her first writing of what was to become the opening section, “A Lost Book,” to later, most recent sequences.These are love poems in the sense that in the meeting of our minds…

“To get at turn away.” In Thrum, her second collection of poetry, Natalie Simpson reveals how making sense is not always the same as making meaning. Her supple and agile poems seduce the weary reader away from representation and toward sound, texture, and absence. Here, a sentence is no longer…

The quest in this latest fusion of song, sound, performance and visual poetry from bill bissett is for a human condition outside the perpetual terror of the twenty-first century—a terror based in an irrational fear that the loss of our ideologies, our homemade gods and bombs will leave us impoverished…

Three short plays by Michael Cook: Tiln, Quiller and Therese’s Creed.In Tiln, two old men are caught in a personal power struggle. Using a lighthouse setting, Cook explores the modern man's dilemma in an uncaring world. Cast of 2 men.In contrast, Quiller is a one-person play set in a Newfoundland…

bill bissett, who recently celebrated his seventieth birthday, remains even in his “biblical years” Canada’s most exciting, innovative pioneer in the field of the written, spoken, performed, illustrated and sculpted word. No one over the past half century comes close to what bissett has accomplished in pushing the boundaries of…

Timothy Findley and the Aesthetics of Fascism: Intertextual Collaboration and Resistance investigates the troubling relationship between narrative meaning and representations of violence within Timothy Findley’s novels, throughout which writing and reading literature are portrayed as dangerous and political acts.Findley’s novels often expose the ideological underpinnings of the cultures in which…

In To the Barricades we move back and forth between historical and contemporary scenes of revolt, from nineteenth-century Parisian street barricades to twenty-first-century occupations and street marches, shifting along the active seam between poetry and revolution. At once elegy (poems dedicated “to” past revolutionary figures and scenes) and a call…

Lambda Literary Award, Drama: Michel Marc Bouchard, Tom at the Farm, translated by Linda Gaboriau (Winner)Following the accidental death of his lover, and in the throes of his grief, urban ad executive Tom travels to the country to attend the funeral and to meet his mother-in-law, Agatha, and her son,…

Three Young Native American sisters and their mother board a bus bound for Los Angeles, leaving home as part of a 1950s government mandate to relocate reserve Indians to urban centres. This assimilationist policy was one focus of Métis playwright Marie Clements’s research when she was commissioned to create a…

On January 23, 1995, British Columbia’s then premier announced that he was cancelling Alcan’s Kemano Completion Project. But is such a simple political announcement all it will take to cancel this $1.4 billion hydro megaproject? Many tough questions remain: about who will pay for the cost of cancelling this megaproject,…

Jhana, is a beautiful eighteen-year-old who lives with her mother Maddie and their boarder Bill, a sometime poet. Jhana’s father, King, shows up partway through the first act and it is his presence for the first time in a long time in this unusual family that really galvanizes all four…

The poems in Tracery enact a lyric condensation. Many of them were written in transit: on the bus, on a bicycle, on foot, in the endless to and fro of work life. Their lyric brevity allowed composition directly in the brain, or quick jottings in a pocket notebook, primarily governed…

Passionate critic, principled citizen, attentive reader and editor, and energizing teacher – Roy Miki is all these and more, a poet whose writing articulates a moving body of work. The two main areas of his passionate research and writing – social critique and poetics – inform each other in these…

bpNichol’s The Martyrology is one of the most outrageous, challenging, intriguing and accomplished long poems written in Canada. No other poem of its length has raised the major concerns of our time with such urgency and brilliance. Initially recognized by only a few, this luminous continuing work has attracted more…

It has been well known since Marius Barbeau’s review of the first edition of Franz Boas’s Tsimshian Mythology in 1917, that something was seriously amiss with Boas’s alleged “translations” of the stories gathered by his chief Tsimshian informant, Henry Tate. But what, exactly, was it that Boas was doing with…

Transnational Muscle Cars provides a withering critique of how it is that consumption, buying (into) something, buying anything, has become the prime mover in a transient global urbanism that now defines our everyday lives.Written over the past ten years in a quartet of cities—Calgary, Toronto, New York and Vienna—Transnational Muscle…

How might poetic practices undermine racist ideologies and colonialism, engendering ecological attentiveness, and anomalous and compassionate communities? Christine Stewart’s Treaty 6 Deixis takes up these timely and pressing questions as it investigates what it means to be a non-Indigenous inhabitant of Canada’s Treaty 6 territory, “in this city, on this…

Available for the first time in one volume, Trees Are Lonely Company is a collection of Howard O’Hagan’s short stories previously published to critical acclaim in The Woman Who Got on at Jasper Station & Other Stories and Wilderness Men.spanning decades of O’Hagan’s experience—as mountain guide, gentleman adventurer and storyteller—this…

In a world where the corporate iron fist clad in the velvet glove of the state has appropriated all that is authentic and authoritative in language, there seems little left for us to say to each other. Yet against the determination of borders, capital, criminalization and violence, stigmatized bodies also…

In the tradition of James Frazer, Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell, Thierry Hentsch retells, with new urgency and a keen critical eye, “the story of the West” that shapes our perception of the world. Yet, “the story of the West” does not exist. Only a reading of its most seminal…

In this contemplative novel-poem, Jean-François Beauchemin invites us to share in the inner world of the grieving Mr. Bartolomé, who, following the mysterious disappearance of his young son, wanders and wonders, seeking to transcend his pain by encountering something larger than himself. Continuously occupied by the memory of his lost…

Alongside his dozens of fascinating and award-winning plays, and in addition to this great Chronicles of the Plateau Mont-Royal series of six epic novels, his translations, adaptations, librettos, and acute portrayals of human emotions in a state of both crisis and redemption, Michel Tremblay has left his readers with three…

Vancouver’s New Play Centre led the way in developing and producing the work of playwrights from Western Canada for the emergent Canadian theatre in the 1970s. The New Play Centre has been a major force in Canadian cultural life for two decades; it retains its dual role as playwrighting workshop…

Michel Tremblay’s Twists of Fate gathers volumes 6 and 7 of the critically acclaimed Desrosiers Diaspora series of novels, If by Chance and Destination Paradise. In If by Chance, set in 1925, the great Ti-Lou, the famous She-Wolf of Ottawa, returns to Montréal. After a fruitful career at the Château…

A vital collection of writings about First Nations people and culture as it existed on the island coasts of the Depression-era Pacific Northwest and originally published in the pages of Victoria’s oldest newspaper, the Daily Colonist, the sixty stories included here are the result of a unique collaboration between a…

This volume contains two uniquely Canadian stories of exile. Whether portraying the romantic lovers in The Island of Demons, or the political revolutionary Gabriel Dumont in Six Dry Cakes for the Hunted, the plays are related by their underlying themes. From the earliest days of settlement in Canada, those who…