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.

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.

Martine Desjardins delivers to readers of Maleficium the unexpurgated revelations of Vicar Jerome Savoie, a heretic priest in nineteenth-century Montreal. Braving threats from the Catholic Church, Savoie violates the sanctity of the confessional in a confession-within-a-confession, in which seven penitents, each afficted with a debilitating malady or struck with a…

Outrageous pathos and hilarity is unleashed when Nino informs his very traditionally Italian parents that he is gay. A perfect balance of fast-paced comedy and poignant drama that explores family dynamics and the vast spaces between the old world and the new. Cast of 4 women and 3 men.

How our “innocent” childhood games and fantasies come back to haunt us in adult life. Cast of 4 women and 1 adolescent male.

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.

Includes screenplay and stage play. Cast of 3 women.

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

In this exhaustively researched work of investigative journalism, Anne-Marie Saint-Cerny examines the causes and after-effects of the 2013 Lac-Mégantic rail disaster. When a driverless, out-of-control train carrying highly volatile crude oil decimated the downtown area of the picturesque town of Lac-Mégantic, it immediately killed forty-seven people and lead to the…

Mêmewars is a book writing against itself.

The life of Elizabeth Smart pivoted on a turbulent affair that produced four children and her one book. This is a portrayal of the book as a record of one great life lived. Cast of 4 women and 1 man.

Mend the Living is the story of a heart transplant, centred around Simon Limbeau, the boy whose heart is given, and his family. Taking place within exactly twenty-four hours, the novel traces the thrill of an early-morning winter surf session, the terrible accident that follows, and all the urgency and compassion of the hospital workers, and shock and grief of Simon’s family as they negotiate the question of organ donation. Weaving from hospital corridors to the wild waves of the Atlantic, from the narrow streets of Paris to the countryside in Algeria where goldfinches still sing, from the most intimate details of grief within a car in Le Havre to universal considerations of science, compassion, and humanity, Mend the Living is a powerful and vast-ranging book.

Mercenary English is a risky and profoundly unsettling work of “auto-cartography” that documents the struggles and politics of everyday life in Vancouver, with a particular focus on the Downtown Eastside neighbourhood. Talonbooks is pleased to publish this third edition, which includes the original long poem, the essay and interview from the second edition, and a new preface by the author.

As in Ibsen’s Enemy of the People, two brothers struggle for power and ideals each believes are right. Set in the late nineteenth century in a coastal town in Norway, Enemy charts the journey of an idealistic and naive doctor who believes people will behave responsibly if given the facts,…

In this probing character study, Rideout fashions a hypothetical 1969 meeting in a bar in St. Petersburg, Florida, between Quebec playwright Michel Tremblay and an individual whom he believes to be a truly great writer – beat generation author Jack Kerouac, whose Francophone mother affectionately called him Ti-Jean.

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.

An authentic re-creation of an extraordinary life set against the turbulent backdrop of colonial Africa.

In tribute to the surrealist narrative techniques of André Breton and Robert Desnos, Minor Episodes documents the serial adventures of Minor, the ubiquitous “everymogul” who embodies the economic 1% and keeps musically erotic quixotics on tap. Having entered a “rent in time” that gives each chapter an alternate reality, Minor…

In this prequel within a sequel, Diminuenda discovers that she stands to win a vast inheritance from her estranged father, the inimitable Minor, if she travels into the past and “collects” a number of objets d’art. Minor Expectations resumes The Chaos! Quincunx novel series.

A riveting adaptation of a theatre classic about an affair between the daughter of a count and the count’s man-servant. Cast of 2 women and 1 man.

To escape the boredom that history seems to have decreed shall be re-enacted endlessly by all grown-ups, teenagers Miles and Chateaugué enter into a suicide pact to preserve their childhood freedom and purity from the debasement of the adult roles pre-ordained for them. But will their “plans” work out?

This fourth edition of the “classic” Modern Canadian Plays sets out for us an even broader range of plays than previous editions, outlining a Canadian drama-scene that is far from colonial, inert, middle-class, or middle-aged. spanning the years from 1967 to 1997. This fourth edition contains The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, Fortune and Men’s Eyes, Les Belle Soeurs, Leaving Home and others.

The plays in the first volume date from 1967 to 1991, and outline an indigenous Canadian drama emerging from its colonial roots to celebrate a rising nationalism.

Continuing on from Volume I, this selection of plays not only takes us farther into the annals of the lives of the marginalized; it also provides a revealing cultural and philosophical cross-section of late-20th-century life in Canada. This fourth edition contains The Orphan Muses, Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing, Amigo’s Blue Guitar, Fronteras Americanas and others.

This second volume presents a range of exciting Canadian plays from the late 1980s through the first decade of the twenty-first ­century. These plays respond directly or indirectly to the events of our time; work effectively on the stage, on the page, and in the classroom; and are contextualized with accompanying history, biography, and criticism.

Humourous stories, bittersweet monologues, poetic reflections and revelatory anecdotes about motherhood.

When the feisty and rebellious Moragh (Moo) MacDowell meets the intriguing Harry Parker, she decides nothing will ever separate them … and Harry has been running ever since. Moo is an unconventionally comedy of love and obsession. Cast of 5 women and 3 men.

Canada’s top playwright takes on teen pregnancy in two comic dramas for young people. Moss Park It’s been twenty years since the debut of Tough!, but only two years have passed in the lives of Tina and Bobby, the main characters. Of course the poverty trap, which grips them both,…

The second volume of Marchessault’s turbulent autobiographical trilogy.

From the renowned author of Balconville, this powerful drama gives a voice to the disillusioned working-class women employed at the British Munitions Factory in Verdun, Quebec, during the First World War. Following in the trudging footsteps of Fennario’s anti-war protest play Bolsheviki (Talonbooks, 2012), Motherhouse similarly debunks the sentimental notions of duty, heroism, and nationhood that figured so prominently in Canadian war effort campaigns and that persist in Canadian history textbooks today.

A frank and intensely personal book about human relationships.

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.

The music of thinking. The thinking of music. Music at the Heart of Thinking is a poetry that works through language as the true practice of thought and improvisation as the tool that listens to and notates thinking. From jazz, the unpredictable ad lib driving itself from itself. From a…

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.

Fawcett’s first book of stories examines growing up, and living, under the rules.

Initially lacking a “subject,” the book’s metanarrative almost inevitably took the shape of an exquisite poetic autobiography that is at once both intensely personal and profoundly public. In it, among many other astonishments, we discover the deeply ambiguous roots of his father’s favourite folksong; we catch a fleeting childhood glimpse of Bowering’s young mother; a complete history of Cuba in the context of US foreign policy in Latin America that gives an entirely new, but older, meaning to the date September 11; and the roots of tragedy that led to the “Balkanization” of Yugoslavia.

A collection of essays that are at once personal and political, covering a variety of topics, ranging from the author‘s tumultuous relationship with his criminal father and the ways writing can help us transform our own understanding to long-form journalistic dispatches from around the globe.

My Heart Is a Rose Manhattan is a darkly humorous book about grief and isolation. Cutting yet tender, sorrowful yet angry, these poems touch on death and loss, architecture, alcohol, horse statues, and catalogues of life. Addicted to social media and simultaneously well-versed in feminist theory, My Heart Is a…

A young woman embarks upon an emotionally resonant journey in search of a peaceful new life.

My TWP Plays presents five important plays written by Jack Winter while he was resident playwright at Toronto Workshop Productions, one of the first great troupes of the experimental and alternative theatre movement. The carnivalesque style of the selected works in this anthology reflects the turbulence, contradictions, and subversion of the social revolution during which they were written and first produced, as well as the cultural politics at a time when Canadian artists were investigating new, noncolonial, and distinctly Canadian forms of expression that would define the nation and challenge received artistic styles and practices.

The follow up to Eng’s BC Book Prize-winning Prison Industrial Complex Explodes.