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By Ralph Maud
Boas, Teit, Hill-Tout, Barbeau, Swanton, Jenness, the luminaries of field research in British Columbia, are discussed, and their work in Indian folklore evaluated in this comprehensive survey of myth-collecting in B.C.

By Roy Miki
Traces the development of Poet laureate Bowering’s many writings through four decades.

By Peter Jaeger
Examines the writings of Steve McCaffery and bpNichol, with a special focus on their collaborative work as the Toronto Research Group (TRG).

After Completion: The Later Letters of Charles Olson and Frances Boldereff follows on from an earlier edition, Charles Olson and Frances Boldereff: A Modern Correspondence, that spans three years and more than three hundred letters. Published in 1999 by Wesleyan University Press, that edition concludes with a crisis that amounted to a “completion” of one of the major phases of their relationship. Boldereff’s interventions, which provoked Olson to articulate a projectivist poetics, claims for Frances Boldereff an incalculable effect on twentieth-century poetry.

An album of finely drawn literary portraits of writers, musicians, artists and social activists who influenced the life and work of Blais in the 1960s.

By Robert Hogg
With an introduction by D.M.R. Bentley Essays on poetic theory written by Canadian poets from the late 19th century to 1918 that articulate the specific social, cultural and political circumstances under which their poetry was created.

By Dara Culhane
An analysis of the controversy surrounding the death of a Native child in Alert Bay, B.C.

By Ian Angus
Essays exploring key issues of politics and aesthetics in honour of the founding director of the Institute for the Humanities at Simon Fraser University.

By Fred A. Reed
As Fred A. Reed travels through the Middle East, the Balkans and Asia Minor, he concludes that Turkey’s Islamists are reappropriating the culture and beliefs that 70 years of secular fundamentalism have been unable to eradicate.

By Jeff Derksen
Essays that explore the ways in which poetry, visual art and critical practices encounter “the long present neoliberal moment” of the imperialist agenda of globalization.

Autobiographical pieces about how movies shaped the life of young Michel Tremblay.

By Mary Meigs
A beautiful memoir that reads like the most exquisitely crafted fiction.

A tour of books that inspired Tremblay’s imagination.

This delightful collection of eight autobiographical narratives inspired by Michel Tremblay’s childhood and youth offers the reader poignant and joyful childhood memories as varied as the assorted candies his mother hoarded under her bed, to be shared only on the most festive or dramatic of family occasions. Through the eyes of young Michel we see the lively, bustling household of Fabre Street and the events which profoundly shaped his view of the world in this exquisite remembrance of childhood past.

Scobie illuminates Nichol’s relationship to Dadaism, contemporary French literary theory and the writing of Gertrude Stein, positing a cogent argument for Nichol’s importance as a writer of fiction.

This illustrated biography of one of the last great black-and-white photographers of the Pacific Northwest is also an extraordinary photo art book. Printed on wood-free paper.

This award-winning second edition tells the stories, discovers the hopes and aspirations, and celebrates the successes and accomplishments of the early architects of British Columbia.

By L.W. Conolly
This lively, updated assortment of critical deliberations on contemporary Canadian drama is an ideal companion text to Modern Canadian Plays Volumes I and _II._

By Ralph Maud
A repudiation of Tom Clark’s carelessly biased Charles Olson: The Allegory of a Poet’s Life, this diligently researched biography by longtime Olson scholar, friend and correspondent Ralph Maud redeems the reputation of one of the greatest American poets of the 20th century.

On Friday, April 24, 1885, Captain James Peters took the world’s first battlefield photographs under fire at the battle of Fish Creek in the Canadian Northwest Territory of Saskatchewan. Neglected for over 120 years, these images literally shine new light on the War of 1885—particularly the second part of the campaign against the Indians under Big Bear, Poundmaker and Miserable Man. They are frankly astonishing in both their eerily haunting visual impact and as much by the mere fact that they even still exist.

A careful selection from the work of the greatest living ethnographer of the Pacific Northwest.

By Gil McElroy
When his father died, award-winning poet Gil McElroy was given a box of photographs that documented his father’s work on the Canadian military’s northern DEW Line in the 1950s. McElroy displays each image, then attempts to come to terms with the mysterious figure who took them, a man better understood by his military compatriots than by his own family.

Filmmaker Jean-Daniel Lafond and author Fred A. Reed document the fall of Mohammed Khatami’s reform movement through candid conversations with Iranian artists, journalists and political activists.

By James Bacque
More than 9 million Germans died from deliberate Allied starvation and expulsion policies after WWII. At the same time, a food-aid program saved an estimated 80 million.

Stephen Collis meditates on the idea of change as it moves through intellectual history, tracing its patterns and comparing its articulation across disciplines. He offers short “dispatches” from his involvement in the Occupy Movement, and a long prose-poem examining the philosophical trope of Rome, the “eternal city,” from its imperial past, through republicanism, to the era of modern social movements.

This second volume in Hentsch’s epic survey of the formative texts of the Western narrative tradition traces western civilization’s quest for immortality across a further four centuries through an examination of specific works by Moliére, Voltaire, Diderot, de Sade, Rousseau, Hegel, Melville, Flaubert, Joyce, Proust and others.

The first book-length examination of the work of Canada’s most-produced and internationally recognized playwright, George F. Walker, who has not only created a substantial body of work, but also impressed it all with his unique “Walkeresque” stamp.

By Patrick Caux & Bernard Gilbert
In 1993 when Robert Lepage suggested to his colleagues that a specific identity and image be found for his next working group, he imposed one condition. The word “theatre” was not to be part of the name of the new company.

In 1903, eighteen years after leading the Métis Army against the Northwest Expeditionary Force and the Northwest Mounted Police at Fish Creek, Duck Lake and Batoch, Louis Riel’s Adjuntant General, Gabrial Dumont, dictated his memoirs. The manuscript remained unpublished in the Manitoba Provincial Archives until its discovery there by Michael Barnholden in 1971. Translated here into English, it preserves a unique experience, offering us a rare opportunity to view one of the central events in the history of the Métis through the eyes of one of their key heros.

This first book-length study of Bowering explores the relationship between his work and the arts.

Specially revised and edited, and for the first time in one complete volume, Great Lakes Suite includes A Trip Around Lake Ontario, A Trip Around Lake Erie and A Trip Around Lake Huron.

By Carol Malyon & bill bissett
A series of literary conversations between Malyon, who writes within the objective bounds of standard English usage, and bissett, one of contemporary writing’s most exotic practitioners, working with the visual forms of language in his own non-hierarchic, phonetic orthography.

How to Write is a perverse Coles Notes: a paradigm of prosody where writing as sampling, borrowing, cutting-and-pasting and mash-up meets literature. This collection of conceptual short fiction takes inspiration from Lautréamont’s decree that “plagiarism is necessary. It is implied in the idea of progress. It clasps the author’s sentence tight, uses his expressions, eliminates a false idea, replaces it with the right idea.”

By Alain Deneault & William Sacher
Imperial Canada Inc. sets out to ask a simple question: why is Canada home to more than 70% of the world’s mining companies?

A remarkable collection of seven life stories from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, giving voice to women who are seldom heard on their own terms.

By Mary Meigs
Based on the NFB production of The Company of Strangers, Meigs’s account of the film unfolds in an intricate meditation on time, old age and bonding.

Warren Tallman was catalyst, shelter and anchor to a whole generation of writers and poets, from the beat generation poets to the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E school writers. In these pieces, Tallman introduces the reader to a world of literary companionship that shaped the language and thought of late 20th century North America.

By Franz Boas
This volume of First Nations myths and legends is an indispensable document in the history of North American anthropology.

By Roy Miki & Cassandra Kobayashi
How a community brought the issue of redress for the injustices of the 1940s to the forefront of public debate.

By Ronald Cross & Hélène Sèvigny
A biography of the most notorious of the 1990 Oka warriors.

By Dorothy Kennedy & Randy Bouchard
Early in their ethnographic work, Randy Bouchard and Dorothy Kennedy were privileged to meet Charlie Mack, 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 history of his people, the living world of the Lil’wat, which the young ethnologists were able to record on tape and in their notes and photographs. Most important among what Charlie Mack gave them was a wide corpus of stories; he was a master storyteller, holding his listeners spellbound with his animated and dramatic delivery in both Lil’wat and English. This book is a tribute to a long friendship; the result of the authors reflecting on a lifetime of listening to a man who had something to say.

By Mary Meigs
A compelling autobiography about the exercise of will, friendships and dreaming.

Like all great historic landmarks, the Lions Gate Bridge remains a source of powerful, sometimes illuminating, sometimes mysterious stories of the people and times which gave birth to it.

This third collection documents how the arrival of whites forever altered the Salish cultural landscape.

The story of Pollock’s life from her family roots in New Brunswick through her pioneering years as a Canadian playwright to the present as she continues to make theatre.

By Frank Davey
Davey reveals Atwood’s extraordinary facility with language as well as her mistrust of it, and offers a “glossary” of recurrent Atwood images and symbols that unveil the hidden level in her writing.

By bp Nichol
A thoughtful and provocative 30-year record of Nichol’s approaches to textual production.

Olson once defined “Muthologos” as “what is said about what is said,” which encompasses a breadth of discourse that would define the near and far range of where the poet’s mind went in a lifetime’s intent to go places. In this new compilation of Charles Olson’s transcribed lectures and interviews, we finally get all of what is preserved of a life of talk, allowing Muthologos to stand, along with The Maximus Poems, Collected Poems, Collected Prose and Selected Letters as one of the “standard texts” of this great poet’s oeuvre.

Features tales of the shoo-MISH, or “nature helpers.”

In this collection of short humorous essays originally written for the popular media, playwright, novelist and screenwriter Drew Hayden Taylor sends his readers fascinating and exotic postcards from his globetrotting adventures, always on the lookout for the NEWS about aboriginal peoples around the world.

A crusading socialist and an absolute pacifist, Mildred Osterhout Fahrni walked with J. S. Woodsworth, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. The extraordinary story of one of Canada’s pioneer peacemakers.

By James Bacque
Other Losses caused an international scandal when first published in 1989 by revealing that Allied Supreme Commander Dwight Eisenhower and Charles de Gaulle caused the death of some 1,000,000 German captives in American and French internment camps through disease, starvation and exposure from 1944 to 1949, as a direct result of the policies of the Western Allies, who, with the Soviets, ruled as the Military Occupation Government over partitioned Germany from May 1945 until 1949.
This updated third edition of Other Losses exists not to accuse, but to remind us that no country can claim an inherent innocence of or exemption from the cruelties of war.

Tough-minded reappraisals of canonicity, modernism, postmodernism, marginality and post-coloniality in Canadian writing.

A piercing look at what it means when a Canadian prime minister puts his own private interests first.

Informed and considered interviews with the most influential artists of our time. Enright takes us into the environments, both imaginative and actual, that have shaped their personal and artistic histories.

A collection of 18 original essays on contemporary Canadian theatre by scholars and drama specialists in Australia, Belgium, Canada, Finland, Germany, Great Britain, Hungary and Japan.

By Fred A. Reed
Persian Postcards, the fruit of Fred Reed’s travels to the Islamic Republic as both journalist and impassioned observer, is an attempt to suggest the depth and complexity, the tragedy and raw beauty of this ancient culture. Reed examines the Iranian reasons for The Iran-Iraq war, sheds new light on the Iran-Contra scandal, and looks at Iranian history, in its meeting with the peculiar traditions of Shi’ite Islam. Persian Postcards is more than a journalistic report, an academic treatise, or a travel book, although it enfolds elements of all three.

Documents Olson’s influence on The New American Poetry, Allen’s visionary and revolutionary anthology.

By Steve McCaffery & bpNichol
Reports on translation, the-book-as-machine and the search for non-narrative prose.

By Fred A. Reed
In his extensive travels in the Balkans, Reed encounters a landscape inscribed with a shocking testimony of ethno-racialist aspirations.

By Fred A. Reed
Discusses all of the major Islamic faiths in its search for the origins of contemporary fundamentalist movements.

The history of language as a made thing—a linguistic and structuralist primer.

Strange Comfort collects the best of Sherrill Grace’s many published essays on the novelist and writer Malcolm Lowry, along with new pieces that incorporate her contemporary approach to his work. Lowry was an intensely autobiographical writer, a quality not appreciated during his lifetime. Today, critical perspectives have changed considerably, and Lowry’s anxiety about writing elements of his own life into fiction invites critical reassessment. Many of these essays offer a fresh look at Lowry’s attempts to apprehend and portray the writer, writing.

By Renee Rodin
Composed of autobiographical stories that sketch the resonant heights and depths of a memoir, 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.

By Massoumeh Ebtekar & Fred A. Reed
A revealing first-hand insider account by Iran’s first female vice president, Massoumeh Ebtekar, of the 1979 revolutionary student movement which captured the American Embassy in Tehran.

By Jane Rule
Discovered 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 or impeded by the socio-cultural practices and educational politics of the day.

By Carl Peters
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 th tempul, despite bissett’s substantial and ongoing contributions to the practice of the avant-garde tradition in art, very little critical work exists on his poetry, and almost no theoretical discourse exists on his visual work.

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 historic, symbolic and emotion-laden memories, eloquently revisited in Walter Hildebrandt’s The Battle of Batoche. The strategies of both sides are thoroughly examined, and numerous maps and photographs offer detailed description of the fateful battle.

By Mary Meigs
A narrative woven of her parents’ diaries and letters that integrates Meigs’s discoveries as a daughter and granddaughter.

Lucid, original and ultimately wise, this book is as much a work of literature as it is of philosophy.

Active ethnography through conversations, legends, articles, and a naturalist’s guide of the Chilliwack Native people and their area.

Heralds an inevitable move from 35 mm to digital distribution which will level the creative playing field between the towering Hollywood empire and marginalized independent artists and producers.

By Mary Meigs
A sensitive psychological portrait of a stormy three-way lesbian relationship.

By Dara Culhane
An in-depth analysis of the 130-year history of the Aboriginal title issue in BC, focusing in particular on the Gitksan and Wet’suwet’en case.

By Henry Tate
Henry W. Tate, who died in 1914, was an important Tsimshian informant to ethnographer Franz Boas.

A collection of texts and talks which address the work of poet Robin Blaser.

The first volume of a four-volume set rich in stories and factual information on the Salish people of the Pacific Northwest.

Includes the Origin Myth as recounted by a storyteller whose mother saw Captain Vancouver sail into Howe Sound in 1792.

Stories of the people of the Fraser Valley from Vancouver to Chilliwack, with the earliest account of BC archaeological sites.

This volume deals with the Sechelt and the South-Eastern Tribes of Vancouver Island and includes a bio-bibliography of Charles Hill-Tout, as well as miscellaneous short pieces of special interest, such as letters and a review of Franz Boas’ book about Bella Coola.

By Chris Arnett
An extensively detailed reconstruction of the war between the First Nations and Vancouver Island’s colonial government.

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 Ring Cycle at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and Lorin Maazel’s 1984 at London’s Royal Opera House.
Despite Lepage’s prolificacy, and his status as one of the pioneers of new media performance, little critical writing about his work has been published, particularly in English. Ludovic Fouquet’s The Visual Laboratory of Robert Lepage, translated for the first time into English, thus presents much-needed in-depth analysis of Lepage’s strategies and practices.

This groundbreaking exploration of an increasingly prominent interdisciplinary realm draws on a wide range of contemporary theorists and playwrights. The breadth of styles and performances discussed here is extraordinary.

By Fred A. Reed
Shocked by the death of his younger brother, Fred Reed sets out on a series of journeys of discovery and understanding. By way of Iran in the aftermath of the Islamic Revolution; the Anatolian highlands of the mystic Bediuzzaman Said Nursi; in pursuit of ancient and modern iconoclasts in Syria and Lebanon; he comes under the spell of Islam. In its embrace he finds a renewed brotherhood; in its discipline, liberation.

By Bev Sellars
The first full-length memoir to be published out of St. Joseph’s Mission at Williams Lake, BC, Sellars tells of three generations of women who attended the school, interweaving the personal histories of her grandmother and her mother with her own. She tells of hunger, forced labour, and physical beatings, often with a leather strap, and also of the demand for conformity in a culturally alien institution where children were confined and denigrated for failure to be White and Roman Catholic.

By Annie York & Chris Arnett & Richard Daly
’Nlaka’pamux elder Annie York explains the red ochre inscriptions written on the rocks and cliffs of the lower Stein Valley. Readings of these inscriptions-the lasting written record of the dreams and visions experienced by both neophyte hunters and practiced shamans-open a discussion of some of the issues in rock art research that relate to ‘notating’ and ‘writing’ on the landscape, around the world and through the millenia. A landmark publication on the evolution of writing.

Letters written following the uprooting of the Japanese-Canadian community in late 1941.

Investigates the troubling relationship between narrative meaning and representations of violence within Timothy Findley’s novels.

Examines the question of who is to control North America’s vital water and power resources in the 21st century.

Gathers a wide range of community voices working in critical, poetic, visual, and hybrid forms to take the life and work of cultural activist, poet, and critic Roy Miki. These voices take Miki’s life and work as a starting point for analytical and creative reflections on key artistic, social and political movements of the second half of the 20th century.

By Roy Miki
A wide spectrum of readings of bpNichol’s challenging and innovative long poem.

By Ralph Maud
Ralph Maud delves into the mystery of Boas’s alleged “translations” of the stories gathered by his chief Tsimshian informant, Henry Tate.

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 texts—from Ulysses to Hamlet, from the Torah to the Gospels, from Plato to Descartes—can bring it alive.

An account of Tremblay’s discovery of the theatre, from his first recognition at the age of six of how the imagination is actually a public construct, to his winning of a drama competition with his first play.

By Chris Arnett & Beryl Mildred Cryer
A vital collection of writings collected during the Depression, first published in Victoria’s oldest newspaper.

This stunning full-colour historical atlas brings alive Vancouver’s first 14 decades.

By Stan Douglas
First published in 1991, this larger format, new edition coincides with a renewal of the Or Gallery’s mandate to incite and promote critical discourse both within and outside of the Vancouver art community.

Madeline Gagnon asks why women have not found a way to put an end to war, why they continue, from generation to generation, to raise sons who make war and oppress women, and what stake women themselves might have in war.

Write It on Your Heart features stories collected over a ten-year period: true stories about the origin of the world; the creation of human beings; the coming of the white man; and what really happened in the post contact world of North America. This critically acclaimed collection, newly reformatted as the first of an ongoing three-part series, stands as a monument to the epic world of Harry Robinson.

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 …
We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts; the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund; and the Province of British Columbia through the British Columbia Arts Council for our publishing activities.
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