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June 2018

Wednesday June 27, 2018
Talonbooks author Marie Clements in conversation with Alanis Obomsawin

Thursday June 28, 2018
bill bissett and Adeena Karasick read at the Atwater Poetry Project in Montreal

July 2018

Saturday July 7, 2018
Bev Sellars Read and Talk with Michele Genest at Atlin Lit Up

Saturday July 7, 2018
Bev Sellars Read and Talk with Kate Harris at 2nd Annua Atlin Lit Up

September 2018

Wednesday September 19, 2018
Play: “Mom's the Word” in Saskatoon

November 2018

Thursday November 1, 2018
Joshua Whitehead at Wordstock Sudbury

Tuesday November 20, 2018
Play: “Cottagers and Indians” in Kingston

March 2019

Tuesday March 19, 2019
Play: “The Shoplifters” in Montreal

Wednesday March 27, 2019
Play: “Empire of the Son” in Saskatoon

April 2019

Thursday April 25, 2019
Play: “Empire of the Son” in Kamloops

Abel proves able: Jordan Abel wins the Griffin!

photo by Kirby from Knife, Fork, Book
Above (L–R): At the 2017 Griffin Poetry Prize dinner, Kevin Williams, Talonbooks publisher; Jordan Abel, winner of the Griffin; Chelsea Novak, reporter and wife of Abel

Well, this is just the greatest day. Injun by Jordan Abel is the Canadian winner of the 2017 Griffin Poetry Prize! Abel and Alice Oswald – winner in the International category, for her collection Falling Awake – each received $65,000 in prize money.

The Griffin Poetry Prize is the most lucrative prize for poetry in Canada, and one of the most monied literary prizes in the world. The Griffin was founded in 2000 to serve and encourage excellence in poetry. The prize is for first-edition books written in or translated into English and submitted from anywhere in the world. Each year the jury selects an international short list and a Canadian short list. On June 7 in Toronto, the short-listed poets read excerpts from their books to an audience of 1,000 people, and each poet was presented with a leather-bound edition of their book and $10,000 for their participation in the readings.

The awards ceremony was held last night in Toronto’s Distillery District and attended by some 320 guests. Scott Griffin, founder of the prize, and trustees (Mark Doty, Carolyn Forché, Marek Kazmierski, Michael Ondaatje, Jo Shapcott, Karen Solie, and David Young) hosted the event. Judges for this year’s Prize were Sue Goyette (Canada), Joan Naviyuk Kane (US), and George Szirtes (UK). These distinguished writers and poets each read 617 books of poetry, received from 39 countries around the globe, including 23 translations, if you can believe it!

Read the official Griffin announcement, and see coverage of Abel’s win by the Globe & Mail, CBC Books, CBC Radio q, the Ottawa Citizen (also syndicated in the Montreal Gazette, the Saskatoon StarPhoenix, and others), Global News, BC BookLook, and Castlegar News (a nice hometown shout-out; Abel currently resides in Castlegar, BC).

And get your hands on a copy of Injun for $16.95.

• Find Finding Mr. Wong on a shelf near you!
• New Plays in Town: Talker’s Town and The Girl Who Swam Forever
• David McFadden (1940–2018)
• King Arthur’s Night and Peter Panties has arrived!
• Prison Industrial Complex Explodes wins the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize!
• Check it out: Checking In!
• Byrne’s Duets grace us during Poetry Month
• Gracie has arrived!
• Same Diff is a finalist for the Griffin!
• Four Talon titles nominated for ReLit Awards!
• Give another cheer for Indigiqueer!
• “This play is dangerously cool.”
• Dead by lightning? We have the cure!
• Montreal Gothic in the house
• [Updated] Job opportunity: Talonbooks needs a Production Editor
• Kuei, My Friend has arrived!
• [Updated] Give a cheer for Indigiqueer!
• Kirton and Eng short-listed for BC Book Prizes!
• Poetry readings across Canada this week
• Poetry on the mountain this Thursday
• Talon plays on stage now in Sudbury, Halifax, Vancouver, Winnipeg, Belleville, New York state, Ottawa, Richmond, and Pennsylvania state!
• Oana Avasilichioaei performs in Vancouver on January 24
• Morse’s ideas of North
• Holiday greetings!
• Daphne Marlatt’s collected earlier poems have come ashore
• Join us for the launch of Daphne Marlatt’s Collected Earlier Poems
• Here’s to fifty more years of Talonbooks!
• Marcus Youssef wins the Siminovitch Prize!
• New poetry in the house!
• Marcus Youssef wins City of Vancouver Mayor’s Arts Award!
• A GG nomination for In Search of New Babylon!
• Marcus Youssef nominated for Siminovitch Prize!
• The Days is a finalist for the City of Victoria Butler Book Prize!
• Talonbooks needs a copy editor/proofreader! Perhaps it’s you?
• Fall fiction is in the house! New novels by Wajdi Mouawad and Philippe Arseneault
• Réjean Ducharme, a loss for Quebec and all of us
• Talon poets in Contemporary Verse 2: Convergence
• From Oral to Written is launched!
• Tonight! Tomson Highway launches From Oral to Written
• Cross your heart and hope to read
• From Oral to Written has gone from written to published!
• Abel proves able: Jordan Abel wins the Griffin!
• Home again, home again after the convention circuit
• Donato Mancini will be writer in residence at the University of Windsor this fall
• 50 years of Talonbooks, and a new catalogue that includes every title in print!
• 50 years since Expo 67, and a book bundle to celebrate!
• Bev Sellars books shortlisted for First Nation Communities READ 2017–2018 award
• Mend the Living wins Wellcome Book Prize!
• Save the date! Our Spring 2017 Poetry Launch is on April 27 in Vancouver
• Jordan Abel’s Injun short-listed for the Griffin!
• New poetry in house, right on time for National Poetry Month!
• Thank you, poetry lovers of the eastern US!
• New books for spring! Poetry, fiction, and drama
• March 25–31: Anahita Jamali Rad, Danielle LaFrance, and Donato Mancini on tour in California
• Adeena Karasick archive donated to Simon Fraser University
• Once in Blockadia is short-listed for the George Ryga Award!
• Mend the Living is short-listed for the Wellcome Book Prize!
• BC book publishers and members of parliament celebrate BC Book Day
• All-Star Talon poets on tour in the eastern U.S.
• Same Diff has arrived!
• Talon book design in the press
• Once in Blockadia long-listed for the George Ryga Award!
• Bev Sellars speaks to UBC’s business students
• Join Daphne Marlatt and M.A.C. Farrant in Calgary this Thursday
• Sachiko Murakami is the new writer in residence at U of T
• “Winners and Losers” opens in Calgary tomorrow!
• Tomorrow! Stephen Collis on Gabriola Island
• Cecily Nicholson is the new writer in residence at SFU
• Danielle LaFrance and Anahita Jamali Rad are in Calgary for the Flywheel Reading Series
• Enter Time with Colin Browne and Charles Edenshaw
• This weekend: Carl Peters at the MLA Convention in Pennsylvania
• Happy holidays from Talonbooks! What a year 2016 has been…
• All Fall 2016 plays are now available!
• Watch the trailer for the new movie based on Maylis de Kerangal’s novel, Mend the Living
• Save the date! False Starts launches in Montreal on November 8
• Opening tomorrow! Empire of the Son at the Cultch, Vancouver
• Read Local BC 2016
• Fred Wah and Colin Browne at the Vancouver Writers’ Fest this past weekend
• Our Fall 2016 books are launched!
• Tomorrow: Talon’s big fall launch!
• Thanks for a great reading, Victoria!
• Join M.A.C. Farrant at Munro’s in Victoria to launch The Days
• Phinder Dulai in NYC, Montreal, and Saint Catherines in early/mid-October
• Prairie Harbour is a finalist for the Governor General’s Awards!
• All the Fall 2016 poetry is in the house!
• Talonbooks at the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association trade show
• Karen X. Tulchinsky is Richmond’s Writer in Residence this fall
• Photos from WORD Vancouver 2016
• bill bissett wins Pandora Award!
• This Sunday: WORD Vancouver!
• Bev Sellars in Vancouver this week
• U Girl has arrived!
• George F. Walker’s new website is launched
• Talonbooks is British Columbia’s Publisher of the Year!
• Price Paid is already a BC bestseller!
• U Girl on the radio
• This fall, hear readings from Once in Blockadia along the Cascadia coast
• Price Paid has arrived!
• Reviews of The Days are in!
• Another great review of U Girl

Book Recs for International Women’s Day 2018

To celebrate International Women’s Day, we asked our staff to recommend favourite Talon books that they felt contributed to the advancement of women and to the feminist literary canon.

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“Argument is to me the air I breathe”

By Carl Peters

On Meta-Talon today, please enjoy the full text of the presentation given by Carl Peters at the Modern Languages Association convention in New York City on January 7, 2018. This talk responds to the question posed in the MLA convention session Rhetoric in Post-Factual Times: how to perform textual analysis in a time when facts are no longer the marker of good argumentation. (Peters’s talk is also related to his work on Stein; Peters is recently the author of Studies in Description: Reading Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons.)

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Our Spiritual Lives

Our little end-of-year present to you is a miniature from M.A.C. Farrant’s delightful collection of very short stories, The World Afloat. Happy Holidays from Talonbooks!

Our Spiritual Lives

We’ve seen stains on tea towels that look like Jesus Christ’s face so we know he exists. And we know that dried seaweed can save the Douglas fir from extinction so we hang dried seaweed from the tree’s branches.

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A new cover for Drew Hayden Taylor’s play, In a World Created by a Drunken God

A finalist for the 2006 Governor General’s Literary Award for Drama, In a World Created by a Drunken God has been in steady demand since it was first published 11 years ago. From 2006 until the end of 2017, In a World Created by a Drunken God was in print with its original cover, which showed moving boxes and a flip phone. Now, Talonbooks has reprinted In a World Created by a Drunken God for the fourth time, and it wears a dynamic, new cover …

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