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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 Guide to BC Indian Myth and Legend
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.
A Record of Writing
By Roy Miki
Traces the development of Poet laureate Bowering’s many writings through four decades.
ABC of Reading TRG
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).
American Notebooks
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.
An English Canadian Poetics, Vol. 1
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 specic social, cultural and political circumstances under which their poetry was created.
An Error In Judgement
By Dara Culhane
An analysis of the controversy surrounding the death of a Native child in Alert Bay, B.C.
Anarcho-Modernism
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.
Anatolia Junction
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.
Annihilated Time
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.
Bambi and Me
Autobiographical pieces about how movies shaped the life of young Michel Tremblay.
Beyond Recall
By Mary Meigs
A beautiful memoir that reads like the most exquisitely crafted fiction.
Birth of a Bookworm
A tour of books that inspired Tremblay’s imagination.
Bonbons Assortis / Assorted Candies
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.
bpNichol
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.
Bridges of Light
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.
Building the West
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.
Charles Olson at the Harbor
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.
Circumstances Alter Photographs
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.
Coast Salish Essays
A careful selection from the work of the greatest living ethnographer of the Pacific Northwest.
Conversations in Tehran
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.
Crimes and Mercies
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.
Empire of Desire
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.
Essays on George F. Walker
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.
EX MACHINA: Creating for the Stage
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.
Gabriel Dumont Speaks, Revised Edition
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.
George Bowering
This first book-length study of Bowering explores the relationship between his work and the arts.
Great Lakes Suite
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.
griddle talk
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.
Harry Robinson: Living by Stories
This third collection documents how the arrival of whites forever altered the Salish cultural landscape.
Harry Robinson: Nature Power
Features tales of the shoo-MISH, or “nature helpers.”
Imperial Canada Inc.
Imperial Canada Inc. sets out to ask a simple question: why is Canada home to more than 70% of the world’s mining companies?
In Plain Sight
A remarkable collection of seven life stories from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, giving voice to women who are seldom heard on their own terms.
In the Company of Strangers
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.
In the Midst
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.
Indian Myths & Legends from the North Pacific Coast of America
By Franz Boas
This volume of First Nations myths and legends is an indispensable document in the history of North American anthropology.
Justice In Our Time
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.
Lasagna
By Ronald Cross & Hélène Sèvigny
A biography of the most notorious of the 1990 Oka warriors.
Lil'wat World of Charlie Mack
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.
Lily Briscoe
By Mary Meigs
A compelling autobiography about the exercise of will, friendships and dreaming.
Lions Gate
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.
Lost in North America
By John Gray
A personal, idiosyncratic tour of the collective work of art we call Canada.
Making Theatre
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.
Margaret Atwood
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.
Meanwhile
By bp Nichol
A thoughtful and provocative 30-year record of Nichol’s approaches to textual production.
Muthologos: Lectures and Interviews
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.
News: Postcards from Four Directions
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.
No Plaster Saint
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.
Outsider Notes
Tough-minded reappraisals of canonicity, modernism, postmodernism, marginality and post-coloniality in Canadian writing.
Paul Martin & Companies
A piercing look at what it means when a Canadian prime minister puts his own private interests first.
Peregrinations
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.
Performing National Identities
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.
Persian Postcards
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.
Poet to Publisher
Documents Olson’s influence on The New American Poetry, Allen’s visionary and revolutionary anthology.
Rational Geomancy
By Steve McCaffery & bpNichol
Reports on translation, the-book-as-machine and the search for non-narrative prose.
Salonica Terminus
By Fred A. Reed
In his extensive travels in the Balkans, Reed encounters a landscape inscribed with a shocking testimony of ethno-racialist aspirations.
Shattered Images
By Fred A. Reed
Discusses all of the major Islamic faiths in its search for the origins of contemporary fundamentalist movements.
Signs of Literature
The history of language as a made thing—a linguistic and structuralist primer.
Spectacle of Empire
Arguably the first North American play, this edition includes the original French script, two English translations, Ben Jonson’s Masque of Blackness and an extensive historical and critical introduction.
Strange Comfort
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.
Takeover in Tehran
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.
The Box Closet
By Mary Meigs
A narrative woven of her parents’ diaries and letters that integrates Meigs’s discoveries as a daughter and granddaughter.
The Burden of Office
Lucid, original and ultimately wise, this book is as much a work of literature as it is of philosophy.
The Chilliwacks and Their Neighbors
Active ethnography through conversations, legends, articles, and a naturalist’s guide of the Chilliwack Native people and their area.
The Decline of the Hollywood Empire
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.
The Medusa Head
By Mary Meigs
A sensitive psychological portrait of a stormy three-way lesbian relationship.
The Pleasure of the Crown
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.
The Porcupine Hunter and Other Stories
By Henry Tate
Henry W. Tate, who died in 1914, was an important Tsimshian informant to ethnographer Franz Boas.
The Recovery of the Public World
A collection of texts and talks which address the work of poet Robin Blaser.
The Salish People: Volume I
The first volume of a four-volume set rich in stories and factual information on the Salish people of the Pacific Northwest.
The Salish People: Volume II
Includes the Origin Myth as recounted by a storyteller whose mother saw Captain Vancouver sail into Howe Sound in 1792.
The Salish People: Volume III
Stories of the people of the Fraser Valley from Vancouver to Chilliwack, with the earliest account of BC archaeological sites.
The Salish People: Volume IV
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.
The Terror of the Coast
By Chris Arnett
An extensively detailed reconstruction of the war between the First Nations and Vancouver Island’s colonial government.
Theatre and AutoBiography
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.
They Write Their Dreams on the Rock Forever
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.
This Is My Own (hardcover)
Letters written during the uprooting of the Japanese-Canadian community in late 1941.
Timothy Findley and the Aesthetics of Fascism
Investigates the troubling relationship between narrative meaning and representations of violence within Timothy Findley’s novels.
Too Good to Be True
Examines the question of who is to control North America’s vital water and power resources in the 21st century.
Tracing The Paths
By Roy Miki
A wide spectrum of readings of bpNichol’s challenging and innovative long poem.
Transmission Difficulties
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.
Truth or Death
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.
Twelve Opening Acts
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.
Two Houses Half-Buried in Sand
By Chris Arnett & Beryl Mildred Cryer
A vital collection of writings collected during the Depression, first published in Victoria’s oldest newspaper.
Vancouver
This stunning full-colour historical atlas brings alive Vancouver’s first 14 decades.
Women in a World at War
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
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.
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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