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- September 2010
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Wednesday September 8, 2010
Pivot Readings - Jesse Huisken, rob mclennan and Meaghan Strimas -
Thursday September 9, 2010
Tear the Curtain! - Jonathon Young and Kevin Kerr -
Thursday September 9, 2010
Vigil - Morris Panych -
Tuesday September 14, 2010
The Trespassers by Morris Panych - Belfry Theatre -
Tuesday September 14, 2010
The Olive Reading Series presents a night with Robert Kroetsch -
Friday September 17, 2010
The Refugee Hotel - Passe Muraille -
Friday September 24, 2010
David Homel at the Kingston WritersFest -
Friday September 24, 2010
Adeena Karasick at the Kingston WritersFest -
Sunday September 26, 2010
Carmen Aguirre - Word on the Street -
Tuesday September 28, 2010
Ali & Ali: The Deportation Hearings
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Piercing
Three tales spin a web of suspense, impending violence, and tragedy that haunt the sleek façade of a city. In “The Hatchet” 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.
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.
Subject To Change
By Renee Rodin
Composed of stories that sketch the resonant heights and depths of an autobiography, Subject to Change is a series of self-portraits along the road of a life well-lived. Each story is an articulate, intelligent, passionate record of how an encounter with a significant “other,” be it a parent, a lover, a neighbor, a child, a grandchild, a politician, or a friend, has changed and shaped the humanity, character, and community—the “subject”—of the writer. What makes this book such a great read is Renee Rodin’s masterful ability to show the reader that things we usually think of as too ordinary to talk about or too extraordinary to be able to communicate to others are often the most formative elements of our social lives.
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 Animals in Their Elements
Fluidly written stories which reveal that at the heart of social thought and action, lie the small private choices made by every member of the community.
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 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 Pierette 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.
White Pebbles in the Dark Forests
Volume three of her autobiographical trilogy: a reconciliation between women and men, children and parents, animals and humans.
Wednesday September 1, 2010 in Meta-Talon
If Nothing Was to Happen in Autumn: Something on The Collected Books of Artie Gold
Garry Thomas Morse discovers Gold:
He imbues this particular book with a wonderful nonchalance that tempers the sense of desperation about—what else but the difficulty and often failure of language to serve as a vehicle for our thoughts and emotions, at least not without a great deal of tinkering. Artie Gold leaves behind one poem after another for us, “like a cake placed in a two hour oven / in a building with a bomb, not caring.”
Wednesday September 1, 2010 in Meta-Talon
Terrorism: Today’s ‘Yellow Peril’?
Author Roy Miki studied the official language that stripped his Japanese Canadian family of rights. He sees lessons for today.
Friday August 20, 2010 in Meta-Talon
Rational Babblerap with BABA Brinkman
Creator of the first peer-reviewed hip-hop show, Darwin devotee and science celebrant Baba Brinkman is intent on spreading the word, discovers Roger Cox
Tuesday August 17, 2010 in Meta-Talon
Artie Gold - from The Collected Books of Artie Gold
Preview a poem from The Collected Books of Artie Gold (coming this fall).
CURRENT FRONT LIST
Abraham Lincoln Goes to The Theatre
Larry Tremblay
Translated by Chantal Bilodeau
Drama
Beating the Bushes
Steven Bush
Drama
Imperial Canada Inc.
Alain Deneault
Translated by Fred A. Reed & Robin Philpot
Non-Fiction
Muthologos: Lectures and Interviews
Charles Olson
Edited by Ralph Maud
Non-Fiction
News: Postcards from Four Directions
Drew Hayden Taylor
Non-Fiction
Piercing
Larry Tremblay
Translated by Linda Gaboriau
Fiction
Subject To Change
Renee Rodin
Fiction
The Collected Books of Artie Gold
Artie Gold
Edited by Ken Norris & Endre Farkas
Poetry
The Edward Curtis Project
Marie Clements
Photographs by Rita Leistner
Drama
The Five Books of Moses Lapinsky
Karen X. Tulchinsky
Fiction
The Madonna Painter
Michel Marc Bouchard
Translated by Linda Gaboriau
Drama
The Refugee Hotel
Carmen Aguirre
Drama
The Satchmo' Suite
Hans Böggild & Doug Innis
Drama
time
bill bissett
Poetry
With Bated Breath
Bryden MacDonald
Drama
Copyright Talonbooks 1963-2010
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