A rich, emotional, sweeping drama of anger and sorrow spanning three generations. The family house in the country is the setting for the story of Victoire and her descendants through her husband and through her true love—who also happens to be her brother. It is Victoire’s anger at being forced…

The events at Oka in 1990 saw the might of the Canadian Armed Forces in the service of the governments of both Quebec and Canada confront some 40 armed Mohawk “Warriors” who were defending their local community’s resistance against a further colonial encroachment on their native lands. The events of…

In the Standard Model of Big Bang Cosmology, about 300,000 years after its birth the temperature of the universe had dropped to the point where the first simple elements were formed, matter became cool enough for light to at last move freely, and the universe itself became transparent to radiation.…

A brilliant and intense journey through a relationship, and through language and myth—as well as a literary journey spanning three continents.

Lawrence and Holloman, a hapless nerd and a loquacious salesman, meet by chance. From this fleetingly irritating and insignificant encounter, the viciously murderous and incredulously bizarre plot emerges into the full-blown twilight of what appear to be their insignificant and meaningless lives. And it is this very absence of significance…

The booming bedroom community outside a large Canadian city is blown apart when fifteen-year-old Blake challenges long-held views of spirituality and sexuality. A student at the local Catholic high school, Blake confides in her best friend, Tracy, that she feels sexually attracted to her. At first encouraged and then rebuffed,…

Penny and Ezra Lamb are home-schooled by their parents on a hippie colony near Uranium City until the police discover it also happens to be the largest marijuana grow-op in Saskatchewan. “Legoland” is how their pot-smoking elders always described the outside world, and the Lamb siblings are dying to get…

Germaine Lauzon has won a million trading stamps from a department store. Her head swimming with dreams of refurbishing and redecorating her working-class home from top to bottom with catalogue selections ranging from new kitchen appliances to “real Chinese paintings on velvet,” she invites fourteen of her friends and relatives…

Les Canadiens begins on the Plains of Abraham in 1759 when a French-Canadian soldier throws his rifle to his son and it becomes a hockey stick. It ends in the Montreal Forum on the night of November 15, 1976, when Montreal Canadien fans turn a hockey game into an election…

lettuce lettuce please go bad is an incantation and a plea for transformation. Using the idea of compost as composition – since the organic process of recycling leaves, words, or food scraps into valuable fertilizer enriches both soil and human life – the book draws on divination systems, herbal healing…

Eight years in the making, Lha yudit’ih We Always Find a Way is a community oral history of Tsilhqot’in Nation v. British Columbia, the first case in Canada to result in a declaration of Aboriginal Rights and Title to a specific piece of land. Told from the perspective of the…

Life Without Instruction is based on a true story and a real trial. Artemesia Gentileschi’s father, the late-Renaissance painter Orazio Gentileschi, takes the unusual step of having his daughter trained in the art of painting under the instruction of his friend, Agostino Tassi. Tassi rapes Artemesia, and is taken to…

Like a Child of the Earth, the first volume of Jovette Marchessault’s autobiographical trilogy, won the Prix France-Québec in 1976. In it, the largely self-taught artist and author, who left school at the age of fourteen to work in a factory, reflects upon her “years of wandering before encountering painting…

Taking as her alter-ego Lily Briscoe–the painter in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse–Mary Meigs paints a portrait of herself, her family and her friends in Lily Briscoe: A Self-Portrait, a book that is both autobiography and memoir. In it, she describes the three major decisions of her life: "not to…

Limbinal, as its hybrid title suggests, speaks in the porous space between a limb’s articulations and a liminal border. Formally diverse, the pieces in Limbinal intersect prose fragments with incantatory dialogues, poetic footnotes with photographic phrases, rebellious translations with liquid transpositions.Against a backdrop of globalization fantasies heralding the new utopia,…

Just as for Dante, for whom the image of the beloved gave entrance to a complete imagination of the world, an “imago mundi,” the betrayal of a beloved can also shatter the poet’s vision, no matter how elaborately conceived. Such a betrayal can turn the world upside down, where what…

Liquidities: Vancouver Poems Then and Now gathers many of the poems from Daphne Marlatt’s 1972 Vancouver Poems, somewhat revised or in some cases substantially revised, and follows them with “Liquidities,” a series of recent poems about Vancouver’s incessant deconstruction and reconstruction, its quick transformations both on the ground and in…

In a Perth County farmhouse some time during the 1930s, a boy named Owen decides to spend the summer putting on plays with the help of his cousins, his grown-up relatives and the neighbourhood children. One of the plays they put on is their adaptation of a Victorian novel, The…

Little Red Warrior is the last remaining member of the Little Red Warrior First Nation. One day, he discovers a development company has begun construction on his ancestral lands. In a fit of rage, Little Red attacks one of the engineers and is arrested for assault and trespassing on his…

Following on two previous collections— Write It on Your Heart: The Epic World of an Okanagan Storyteller (1989) and Nature Power: In the Spirit of an Okanagan Storyteller (2004)—Talonbooks is pleased to announce the release of this third volume of oral narratives by Okanagan storyteller Harry Robinson.Living by Stories includes…

This book does more than collect three of John Gray’s musical plays in one volume. In his preface to each play, and in his charming and wide-ranging introduction, Gray takes this opportunity to offer his readers some startling insights into the process by which his plays have come about; into…

Lost Souls and Missing Persons premiered at Theatre Passe Muraille in 1984. It is a comic, biting, surreal investigation of the question of self and identity in the North American middle-class—a trope of insulating banalities which trades the body’s physical and spiritual content for the artifice of a formalized security…

Poems that tell stories on many different levels: through sound, visual images, political insights, non-narrative fusion and linguistic music.accepting th radiant dances uv being4 kleerances uv ko dependenseez n helpth selvs being plural storeez soundvizual politikul non narrativ fuseynlinguisteek mewsik letting go uv thrashyunalizasyuns irrashyunalizaysyunsblaming games they made me putting…

La Litière (1994), Rappel (1995) and Ressusciter (1996), published together here in English translation as Embedded, Apocalypse, and Resurrection respectively, make up a trilogy of plays featuring Gen-Xers Ludwig and Mae. Ludwig, trained as an engineer, hasn’t been able to find work since graduating some time ago. The fact that…