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- June 2013
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Thursday June 20, 2013
More on the Bell of Batoche in Honour of National Aboriginal Day -
Thursday June 20, 2013
Adeena Karasick - 14th Annual Convention of The Media Ecology Association -
Thursday June 20, 2013
Garry Thomas Morse Reads for the Teslin Tlingit Council, Yukon -
Thursday June 20, 2013
The 2013 Whitehorse Poetry Festival -
Sunday June 23, 2013
Songs and Stories from Tomson Highway’s The (Post) Mistress in Toronto -
Monday June 24, 2013
Lilies by Michel Marc Bouchard in NYC -
Thursday June 27, 2013
Dramaturges Conference (L.M.D.A.) in Vancouver, with Carmen Aguirre - July 2013
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Thursday July 18, 2013
The 11th Annual Denman Island Readers and Writers Festival -
Tuesday July 30, 2013
Taking Shakespeare - John Murrell - Stratford Festival -
Tuesday July 30, 2013
Taking Shakespeare - John Murrell - Stratford Festival - August 2013
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Monday August 19, 2013
KlezKanada 2013 - KlezKanada’s Poetry Retreat - Adeena Karasick and Jake Marmer -
Tuesday August 20, 2013
A Brief Review of Jordan Abel’s The Place of Scraps -
Wednesday August 21, 2013
Marcus Youssef’s Winners and Losers at Noorderzon Festival, Netherlands - October 2013
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Tuesday October 1, 2013
James Bacque – Barton Lecture – Upper Canada College, Toronto -
Tuesday October 1, 2013
The St. Leonard Chronicles - Steve Galluccio - Centaur Theatre -
Friday October 4, 2013
Sidney Literary Festival, British Columbia – with M.A.C. Farrant -
Wednesday October 16, 2013
James Bacque Addresses Senior Faculty, University of Toronto -
Friday October 18, 2013
Victoria Writers Festival, British Columbia – with M.A.C. Farrant -
Tuesday October 29, 2013
Seeds - Annabel Soutar - Centaur Theatre - November 2013
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Sunday November 10, 2013
Marcus Youssef’s Winners and Losers in Toronto -
Thursday November 21, 2013
Adeena Karasick - National Communication Association 99th Annual Convention: in the Applied Semantics and Practical Communication Across the Disciplines Session -
Tuesday November 26, 2013
Adeena Karasick - Art Bar Series - December 2013
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Saturday December 14, 2013
Adeena Karasick - Annual Christmas Party AB Series -
Saturday December 14, 2013
Adeena Karasick - Annual Christmas Party AB Series - January 2014
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Wednesday January 22, 2014
Seeds – Annabel Soutar – PuSh Festival, UBC
A Covenant of Salt
Drawing from the history of Quebec and Irish legend, this exquisitely exotic novel explores the snares of individual and collective memory as they are used to justify and preserve ancestral grudges.
A Slight Case of Fatigue
At forty-one, Eddy is in existential crisis. While once he had an enviable life, now he’s separated from his wife, estranged from his son, and his garden’s grown wild—like the rest of his life. Written in multiple voices, with keen psychological insight, Bourguignon’s examination of relationships, past wounds and present possibilities is filled with raucous warmth and humanity—and dark humour.
A Thing of Beauty
A coda to his great Chronicles of the Plateau Mont-Royal cycle of novels. Tremblay creates, with grace and tenderness, a fictionalized account of the death of his own mother.
Against the Wind
In spare, lucid prose, and in a style reminiscent of André Gide, Madeleine Gagnon invites the reader to experience the creation and development of an artist “in his own words” – Joseph’s gelid journal entries that are to become emphatic poetic laments – in a novel that chronicles the extreme destitution of Quebec in the years before World War Two and in abstract developing forms of artistic expression after years of uncertainty and loss.
All That Glitters
Haunted by the iron jealousy of their commanding officer, Dulac and Nell must risk everything to pursue their desires.
And Other Stories
Taking the theme of postmodernity one step further with 23 short stories edited by Canada’s first poet laureate: Alexis, Arnason, Atwood, Blaise, Bowering, Burnham, Cohen, Dorsey, Elliot, Farrant, Fawcett, Findley, Goto, Fraser, King, Laferrière, Mayr, Rooke, Schoemperlen, Thomas, Verdecchia and Watson.
Baseball Love
Bowering’s life in love and the game unfolds in a picaresque memoir of a road trip taken through the storied ballparks of the poet’s youthful dreams.
Cambodia
Investigative fictions that examine the intentions of the information revolution.
Capital Tales
A collection of stories that form tough, uncompromising portraits of people discovering the illusions they live by.
Chameleon & Other Stories
A collection of short stories from the point of view of a young man growing up in Kenya during the time of Mau Mau.
Citizen Suárez
Short stories about people travelling, wandering, or lost between countries and languages—people caught between the impulse to flee and the desire to belong.
Crossing the Continent
It is 1913, at a time of industry and adventure, when crossing the continent was an enterprise undertaken by so many, young and old, from myriads of cultures, unimpeded by the abstractly constructed borders and identities that have so fractured our world of today.
Darwin Alone in the Universe
A brilliant collection of satirical short stories.
Death in Vancouver
This brilliant collection of avant-garde fiction reveals edgy new voices that reflect the cultural simultaneity of our cosmopolitan everyday.
Death of the Spider
A solitary woman’s interior journey of self-discovery.
Desert of the Heart
By Jane Rule
Two women meet and fall in love in Reno, Nevada. Set in the late fifties, this classic of lesbian eroticism is Jane Rule’s first novel.
Dog Attempts to Drown Man in Saskatoon
Stylish and slightly off-beat stories that involve the lives of a wide variety of people.
Down the Road to Eternity
Down the Road to Eternity: New & Selected Fiction is a collection of M.A.C. Farrant’s work dating from 1985 to 2009. Satiric and philosophical in approach, indelibly marked by wit, humour, irony, playfulness, a blend of parody and science fiction, irreverent analysis and comic existentialism, these stories celebrate the literary imagination as an antidote to the stranglehold of popular media on the public’s imagination. This collection includes Farrant’s complete new suite of eighteen stories, The North Pole.
Dürer's Angel
A novel of Pauline Archange’s desire to translate the events of her life into words.
Fairy Ring
A compulsively readable, beautiful and dark novel of stormy relationships and all-consuming desires.
Fearless Warriors
By degrees dramatic, shocking, tender, affirmative and tragic, each of these stories takes on a different cliché of inter-racial and inter-cultural relations, all of them suffused with the incomparable wit, generous humour, critical edge and profound emotional empathy of a master story-teller.
Get on Top
By David Homel
In this startlingly original and penetrating novel, the Messiah appears as a woman who shows up in rural America instead of Jerusalem, preaching moral license, not repentance.
Go Figure
A hauntingly beautiful tale of a Montreal couple alienated from each other after suffering the miscarriage of twins.
Harry's Fragments
In a parody of a thriller novel, Harry the Hack, newly recruited literary spy, follows a mystery woman seeking wisdom and sanity.
Hell & Other Novels
In these haunting, often chilling short stories, Daurio maps the sub-atomic space of contemporary alienation.
hungree throat
By bill bissett
Written in his non-hierarchic, phonetic orthography, bill bissett’s second novel-poem, hungree throat, recounts the relationship of two men – one bold and unafraid, the other burdened by terrible memories and unable to trust. In this uplifting “novel in meditaysyun” about love, in which we witness ten years of a shared life, we are reminded of the overlapping, sometimes conflicting multitude of “hungers” common to us all.
In the Shadow of the Vulture
By George Ryga
Set in the desert at the Mexico-U.S.A. border, this novel deals with the hope and despair of immigrant labourers.
Judith's Sister
In this coming-of-age novel, Lise Tremblay paints a picture of rural Quebec in the years following the Quiet Revolution in her signature style so refreshingly free of artifice and literary hyperbole.
Kafka's Hat
In Patrice Martin’s ticklish tip of the hat to the writing of Franz Kafka, we follow the misadventures of a bureaucrat – aptly named “P.” (pun intended) – as he embarks on the illustrious task of collecting the titular headgear. “P.” expects that the accomplishment of this seemingly simple task will grant him both a professional and a personal promotion. But Martin’s eager protagonist has overlooked the systematic difficulty in modern bureaucracies – as well as in some of twentieth-century’s best
fiction – of getting things done.
Latakia
A brilliant and intense journey through a relationship, and through language and myth—as well as a literary journey spanning three continents.
Like a Child of the Earth
The first volume of Jovette Marchessault’s autobiographical trilogy.
Main Brides
By Gail Scott
The portrait of a woman who is facing the end of the century and creating a history of the present that lifts her out of fear.
Maleficium
As these men penetrate deep into the exotic Orient, each falls victim to his own secret vice. One treks through Ethiopia in search of wingless locusts. Another hunts for fly-whisks among the clove plantations of Zanzibar. Yet others bargain for saffron in a Srinagar bazaar, search for the rarest frankincense and pursue the coveted hawksbill turtle in the Sea of Oman. Two more seek the formula for sabon Nablus in Palestine or haggle over Persian carpets in the royal gardens of Shiraz. The men’s individual forms of punishment, revealed through the agency of the young woman, are wrought upon their bodies.
Mile End
Mile End is a chilling and masterful look at the interior landscapes of psychosis which mirror so perfectly the emptiness of the exterior surfaces they reflect.
Mimosa
An authentic re-creation of an extraordinary life set against the turbulent backdrop of colonial Africa.
Minor Episodes / Major Ruckus
In tribute to surrealist narrative and film technique, Minor Episodes documents the serial adventures of Minor, ubiquitous “everymogul” who embodies the economic 1% and keeps musically erotic quixotics on tap. Major Ruckus follows a struggle for a time travel component involving psychic “dicks,” universal call-center operators, aboriginal eroticists, lubricant heiresses, rogue advertisements, pornography censors, and alien sperm-bank clones.
Miss Take
To escape the boredom that history seems to have decreed shall be re-enacted endlessly by all grown-ups, teenagers Miles and Chateaugué enter into a suicide pact to preserve their childhood freedom and purity from the debasement of the adult roles pre-ordained for them. But will their “plans” work out?
Mother of the Grass
The second volume of Marchessault’s turbulent autobiographical trilogy.
Motortherapy
A frank and intensely personal book about human relationships.
Mrs. Blood
Audrey Thomas’ first novel—a woman from the inside. Of the writing of this novel Thomas has said, “Women are at last beginning to talk about their bodies, not only among themselves, but also in print. When I began writing Mrs. Blood… this was not the case.
My Career with the Leafs & Other Stories
Fawcett’s first book of stories examines growing up, and living, under the rules.
My Father Took a Cake to France
This collection reaffirms Flood as one of the guiding lights in feminist literature today.
My Name Is Bosnia
A young woman embarks upon an emotionally resonant journey in search of a peaceful new life.
News from Édouard
This fourth novel in the Chronicles of the Plateau Mont-Royal follows Édouard, the fat woman’s brother-in-law, as he explores Paris.
novel
By bill bissett
Famous and celebrated since the 1960s for pushing the boundaries of language and representation in the creation of image as a site of both content and context, the world’s leading sound, visual, concrete and performance poet, bill bissett, describes this book as “a novel with connekting pomes n essays.”
Nuri Does Not Exist
By Sadru Jetha
In this collection of beautifully crafted, spare, concise and refreshingly understated stories, we accompany Nuri on his quest to understand how servitude transcends slavery; fealty transcends servitude; and community transcends fealty. Amid a sea of dystopian world literatures haunted by the fractious claims of identity politics, Nuri Does Not Exist is an astonishingly charming collection of linked short stories that engages us with the utterly believable innocence of its Utopian vision.
Piercing
Three tales spin a web of suspense, impending violence, and tragedy that haunt the sleek façade of a city. In “The Axe” a teacher of literature in drunken despair awakens and confronts one of his students with the term assignment he has submitted—an axe. In “Piercing” a teenage runaway seeks to escape the mediocrity of her small-town family life, only to end up in a very different kind of urban “family,” a cult of dominance and body piercing presided over by the maimed and orphaned son of a millionaire. In “Anna on the letter C” a lonely, virginal typist transcribing the “c” words for a dictionary project, takes pity on a middle-aged stalker and invites him to her apartment for tea and nasty surprises.
Real Mothers
Short stories about mothers and the politics of the family.
Rogue Cells / Carbon Harbour
In Rogue Cells, Oober Mann emerges from his cryobed on high alert in New Haudenosaunee, a nation at war with the mysterious territory Nutella during a critical election year. And it is the Age of Aquarium in the speculative “green” dystopia of Carbon Harbour, in which omni-magnate Cornelius Quartz is overseeing the merger between Bildung Endustries and Foreign Objects. Rogue Cells / Carbon Harbour resumes The Chaos! Quincunx novel series.
Scattered in a Rising Wind
The rush of events in a small town apocalypse is recorded barely at the edge of syntax, with a participatory narrator scrambling to keep up with the unfolding perceptions within the others.
Shinny's Girls and Other Stories
By Mary Burns
These stories all re-examine the myths of mother-daughter relationships, both in the classical sense of “myth” and in the modern sense of “myth” (lies about relationships).
Some Night My Prince Will Come
This urban epic of love and desire brings us a burlesque world of transgression and madness, where pleasures are far from simple, and love is somewhat less than pure. An evocative account of romantic adventure stamped with Tremblay’s signature wit and ironic humour.
Songs My Mother Taught Me
Republished with a new introduction, this is Audrey Thomas’s classic coming-of-age novel about madness, loneliness, despair and escape.
Summerland
By George Ryga
Summerland presents largely unpublished selections from essays, short stories, plays, novels and poems that George Ryga wrote in Summerland, BC, from 1963 until his untimely death in 1987.
Tchipayuk
A sweeping historical novel about the collision of Native and colonial cultures.
The Angel of Solitude
Eight lesbian women strive to achieve an all-female utopia within which homophobia and their own pasts and differences are abolished.
The Athabasca Ryga
By George Ryga
From his farm boy childhood to his struggles as a class-conscious wage labourer. Ryga’s early work is offered in a collection of essays, short stories, plays and novels.
The Baldwins
Set in the post-apocalyptic future, this is a novel of fragments that represents contemporary prose at its most daring and experimental.
The Bicycle Eater
Singularly obsessed with Anna, the object of his adolescent desire, photographer Christophe Langelier embarks on an extraordinary journey—which takes him from the streets of Montreal to the Island of Women off the coast of Mexico—to escape the all-consuming flames of his unrequited passion. The Bicycle Eater is a comic, surrealist novel of metamorphosis unleashed by hopeless desire, a riotous, colourful burlesque where nothing and no one remain what they seem.
The Black Notebook
A young waitress recounts her trials and surprising allies in a lifelong battle against social stigma.
The Blue Notebook
In this third installment of Tremblay’s Notebook trilogy, Fine Dumas’ notorious transvestite Boudoir is shut down and Céline must return to waitressing at the Sélect. Then a newcomer appears, the gorgeous Gilbert Forget, a musician who is not insensitive to her charms. Céline, a midget who until now has always felt unworthy, throws herself into a passionate affair, discovering the body’s thrills for the first time. As she has done twice before, Céline records the adventures of her life into a notebook, but now she steps outside of herself, using a narrator to tell her story. Will her tempestuous relationship with Gilbert endure?
The Breakdown So Far
Farrant continues her assault on the unaccountably disaffected and disillusioned of the Western world with her eighth volume of extremely short stories.
The Circus Performers' Bar
Witty and formally innovative stories that examine social, political and sexual assumptions with an ironic eye.
The Duchess and the Commoner
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.
The Fat Woman Next Door Is Pregnant
Tremblay’s first novel is an affectionate and funny chronicle of the lives of a family in its community.
The First Quarter Of The Moon
The fifth novel in the Chronicles of the Plateau Mont-Royal juxtaposes the childhood experiences of the fat woman’s son and his gifted cousin.
The Five Books of Moses Lapinsky
August 1933: after weeks of tension, on a sweltering night at Christie Pitts field, four youths unfurl a white sheet emblazoned with a large black Swastika, lift their arms and shout, “Heil Hitler!” during a softball game. Within seconds, a group of Jewish youths charge in a struggle to capture the flag, setting off the largest race riot ever to occur in Toronto, involving fifteen thousand people and injuring hundreds.
Tulchinsky takes us inside the life of one immigrant Jewish family, from this pivotal moment, through the war years and into the early 1950s, creating a stunning fictional statement of a defining moment for a family, a city, and a continent struggling with ideas of freedom, tolerance, and identity in a world broken by war.
The Happiest Man in the World and Other Stories
A hilarious yet compassionate look at the new male consciousness taking shape in a “post-feminist” world by a witty, articulate raconteur.
The Heart Laid Bare
A fusty academic has fallen in love with a young actor who works as a salesman while waiting for his big break; however, the academic must learn to make room in his life for the actor’s four-year-old son.
The Hunting Ground
Remarkably engaging stories recounted by different residents of a northern Canadian village facing a gradual but devastating transformation.
The Pagan Wall
Written in the tradition of Umberto Eco and Manuel Puig, The Pagan Wall is a first novel by one of Canada’s master storytellers.
The Painter’s Wife
An extraordinary novel about art and passion inspired by the lives of two great artists, Evelyn Rowat and René Marcil.
The Rain Barrel
Ten years in the making, these stories display Bowering’s meticulous attention to the details of his craft.
The Red Notebook
The second in the Notebook trilogy follows Céline Poulin as she becomes hostess in a transvestite bordello. Tremblay celebrates how it is possible for Céline to embrace her difference and to flourish in solidarity with a community of others with transcendent eloquence and compassion.
The School-Marm Tree
A novel about mountains by one of Canada’s greatest writers on nature, depicting the “presence” in mountains and the heart’s desire to go beyond mountains.
The Secret Journal of Alexander Mackenzie
An industrial biography that investigates personal myths and the great “machines” that drive the world to the abyss of development.
The Strange Truth About Us
This tell-all book by M.A.C. Farrant is a three-part novel-length work of prose fragments, snippets, questions, speculations and meditations, by turns philosophical, dark, comedic and lyrical, it attempts to imagine a multitude of possible futures for our garrisoned world.
The Time Being
By Mary Meigs
An affair born of a correspondence with a distant admirer leads the lovers to an arranged meeting in Australia.
Theme for Diverse Instruments
By Jane Rule
Jane Rule’s first collection of short stories.
Thérèse and Pierrette and the Little Hanging Angel
In this second Plateau Mont-Royal novel, three schoolgirls live the mysteries of their rites of passage.
Trees are Lonely Company
This collection of O’Hagan’s short fiction includes stories spanning the decades of his experience as mountain guide, gentleman adventurer and storyteller.
Tsubaki
A story of betrayal and vengeance set against the nuclear blast that destroyed Nagasaki in 1945.
Turkana Boy
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 son, Bartolomé’s quest leads him from the city to the countryside and then to the edge of the ocean, where he marvels at the beauty of nature but cannot penetrate its mysteries.
White Pebbles in the Dark Forests
Volume three of her autobiographical trilogy: a reconciliation between women and men, children and parents, animals and humans.
Wigrum
By Daniel Canty
It’s October 1944. During a brief respite from the aerial bombardment of London, Sebastian Wigrum absconds from his small flat and disappears into the fog for a walk in the Unreal City. This is our first and only encounter with the enigmatic man we come to discover decades later through more than one hundred everyday objects he has left behind. Wigrum’s bequest is a meticulously catalogued collection of the profoundly ordinary: a camera, some loose teeth, candies and keys, soap, bits of string, hazelnuts, and a handkerchief. Moving through the inventory artifact to artifact, story to story, we become immersed in a dreamlike narrative bricolage determined as much by the objects’ museological presentation as by the tender and idiosyncratic mania of Wigrum’s impulse to collect them.
Canada: Home to a Dangerous Industry
By Fred A. Reed & Robin Philpot
Alain Deneault and William Sacher wrote Imperial Canada Inc.: Legal Haven of Choice for the World’s Mining Companies (2012) to provide Canadian and international public opinion with tools to help ask critical questions about Canadian activities in the South and in Eastern Europe, as well as about the role of the Canadian government in relation to these activities. It is hoped that the evidence presented here will encourage Canadians to enter public debate about how the mining industry is regulated in Canada and to form an opinion on this topic independent from the one suggested by official agencies or media that belong to large Canadian financial conglomerates and tend to espouse their interests.
Monday June 10, 2013 in Meta-Talon
For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again, a play by Michel Tremblay, is currently being staged at the National Arts Centre (N.A.C.) in Ottawa, Ontario, as part of the Magnetic North Theatre Festival.
The following are excerpts from two reviews of the show, originally published in the Ottawa Citizen on June 3 and June 8, 2013, written by Patrick Langston.
Friday June 7, 2013 in Meta-TalonDrew Hayden Taylor’s Political Persuasions
Award-winning Ojibwa author and playwright Drew Hayden Taylor (Dead White Writer on the Floor, 2011) writes the occasional column for the Peterborough Examiner in Peterborough, Ontario. In his latest column, available in its original form here, he discusses his approach to storytelling and politics.
As a First Nations writer of fiction and non-fiction, and frequent lecturer on the university/college and conference circuit, I am commonly asked about my political persuasion. Do I swing left, right, or am I more ambidextrous?
Wednesday June 5, 2013 in Meta-Talon
The June 2013 issue of Quill & Quire includes a review of Daphne Marlatt’s latest book of poetry, Liquidities (Talonbooks, 2013). We republish this review here with permission from Quill & Quire.
Liquidities: Vancouver Poems Then and Now extends a project Daphne Marlatt began over 40 years ago with the 1972 publication of Vancouver Poems …
Fall 2013 Catalogue
CURRENT FRONT LIST
After Completion
Edited by Sharon Thesen & Ralph Maud
Non-Fiction
Ali & Ali
Camyar Chai & Guillermo Verdecchia & Marcus Youssef
Drama
And Slowly Beauty
Michel Nadeau
Translated by Maureen Labonté
Drama
Internodes
Ken Belford
Poetry
Kafka's Hat
Patrice Martin
Translated by Chantal Bilodeau
Fiction
Modern Canadian Plays, Vol. II – 5th Edition
Edited by Jerry Wasserman
Drama
My TWP Plays
Jack Winter
Drama
Rogue Cells / Carbon Harbour
Garry Thomas Morse
Fiction
Singed Wings
Lola Lemire Tostevin
Poetry
The (Post) Mistress
Tomson Highway
Drama
The Place of Scraps
Jordan Abel
Poetry
The Vestiges
Jeff Derksen
Poetry
The Visual Laboratory of Robert Lepage
Ludovic Fouquet
Translated by Rhonda Mullins
Non-Fiction
They Called Me Number One
Bev Sellars
Non-Fiction
Wigrum
Daniel Canty
Translated by Oana Avasilichioaei
Fiction
Copyright Talonbooks 1963-2013
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