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.

Taking Measures collects the major serial poems of Canada’s inaugural Poet Laureate, George Bowering, including work from each of the last six decades. Here is Bowering at his experimental and irreverent best.

Tales of the Emperor is based on the life of Qin Shi Huang (circa 260–210 BCE), the “First Emperor” – he who unified China, gave it his name, built the Great Wall, entombed an army of terra cotta soldiers, authored legalism, erased history, insinuated governance, and established paranoia as a national characteristic. There’s only one principal theme: you find the antiquity you look for, or, in the language of the book: “history is the study of the paintings of great events.”

One town. Two playwrights. Two radically different worlds.

A collection of Larry Tremblay’s four memorable solo performances for the stage: A Trick of Fate, Anatomy Lesson, The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi and Ogre. With an introduction by Jane M. Moss.

A sweeping historical novel about the collision of Native and colonial cultures.

In this psychological thriller set in a fictionalized 1930s Vancouver, Alex Braithewaite, a troubled but passionate theatre critic, believes he has found the legendary Stanley Lee, director of the infamous avant-garde theatre The Empty Space. Alex becomes convinced that this man’s radically subversive ideas are what the city’s arts community…

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.

In this new collection of concrete poems, bissett writes “poemes uv greef transisyun n sumtimes joy byond binaree constraints if evreething goez what is aneething accepting nihilism lettr texting as an approach 2 heeling sorrow denial.”

Canada’s most linguistically innovative poet takes on the “linear binary traps” of conventional logic, history and politics.

bissett has remained on a permanent world tour for over thirty years, writing this book while on a European reading circuit that included performances in London, Manchester, Cardiff, Dublin, Paris, Mainz, Trier and Berlin.

Nan’s family is home for Thanksgiving, but some unsolicited truths are about to be dropped at the dinner table. Old wounds and new realities collide, and sibling rivalry is stoked, but the enduring spirit that guides this family charges on, ever fierce. Thanks for Giving offers plenty to chew on.…

A woman returns to the cottage country of Ontario where, 32 years before, she vacationed with her family. Cast of 5 women and 2 men.

The story of a woman sent away from her family by her brother the Bishop after she is found exploring her sexuality at age seventeen. Cast of 1 woman and 2 men.

Canada’s most famous Aboriginal playwright, Tomson Highway, sets his latest theatrical achievement, The (Post) Mistress, in a not-so-distant past, when sending letters through the mail was still vital to communicating with friends and loved ones, and the small-town post office was often the only connection to faraway places longed-for or imagined.

Eight lesbian women strive to achieve an all-female utopia within which homophobia and their own pasts and differences are abolished.

The Art of Building a Bunker is a dark, viciously funny story recounting a week in the life of your average Elvis as he endures mandatory workplace sensitivity training.

Collection of Ryga’s early work, from his farm-boy childhood to his struggles as a class-conscious wage labourer.

A highly wrought farce of patrimony in a stifling, politically correct, post-colonial milieu of “fancy dancers” of every stripe on the pow wow trail. Cast of 3 women and 3 men.

Set in the post-apocalyptic future, this is a novel of fragments that represents contemporary prose at its most daring and experimental.

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 emotion-laden memories, eloquently revisited in this revised and expanded edition.The strategies of both sides are thoroughly examined, and numerous maps and photographs offer detailed description…

Concluding Taylor’s Blues Quartet, German developers here show up on the “Otter Lake Reserve” proposing “OjibwayWorld,” a Native theme park designed to attract Europeans tourists to this destination resort. Cast of 3 women and 3 men.

Singularly obsessed with Anna, the object of his adolescent desire, photographer Christophe Langelier embarks on an extraordinary journey—which takes him from the streets of Montreal to the Island of Women off the coast of Mexico—to escape the all-consuming flames of his unrequited passion. The Bicycle Eater is a comic, surrealist novel of metamorphosis unleashed by hopeless desire, a riotous, colourful burlesque where nothing and no one remain what they seem.

A young waitress recounts her trials and surprising allies in a lifelong battle against social stigma.

In this third installment of Tremblay’s Notebook trilogy, Fine Dumas’ notorious transvestite Boudoir is shut down and Céline must return to waitressing at the Sélect. Then a newcomer appears, the gorgeous Gilbert Forget, a musician who is not insensitive to her charms. Céline, a midget who until now has always felt unworthy, throws herself into a passionate affair, discovering the body’s thrills for the first time. As she has done twice before, Céline records the adventures of her life into a notebook, but now she steps outside of herself, using a narrator to tell her story. Will her tempestuous relationship with Gilbert endure?

“ The Book of Esther examines the seemingly irreconcilable positions of two groups: conservative rural Christians and militantly anti-religious urban queer activists. But Brodie doesn’t take sides. Instead, it’s like she’s picked up a rock to discover what’s scurrying around underneath, pointed it out to us, and said, “Isn’t this interesting. Maybe we should all look at this for a while. Maybe we should talk about it, instead of just pretending that it isn’t there.”

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

Two plays about the process of children becoming adults and the nature of, and necessity for, rites of passage in all cultures.

Farrant continues her assault on the unaccountably disaffected and disillusioned of the Western world with her eighth volume of extremely short stories.

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

The third play in Taylor’s ongoing zany, often farcical examination of both Native and non-Native stereotypes in what is to become what he calls his “Blues Quartet.” Cast of 3 women and 3 men.

This heart-wrenching but beautifully cathartic story of a family coming to grips with itself unfolds with unmistakably poignant honesty. Cast of 4 women and 5 men.

The Centre: Poems 1970–2000 begins with a long poem sequence that initiates McKinnon’s engagement of and life in the north with new and unavoidably present recognitions. The “centre” in this sequence of ten long poems thus shifts from a nostalgic, idealized and elegiac rural singularity to a new relentless multiplicity of the urban, where the centre constantly threatens not to hold. The “centre” in these books becomes a multiplicity of urban attentions reproducing itself as an articulate awareness of a fractured and fragmented self in a wasteland where beauty appears only through glimpses of externalized objects of desire.

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

Witty and formally innovative stories that examine social, political and sexual assumptions with an ironic eye.

Collected works of Artie Gold, who appeared like a supernova within the constellation of Montreal Anglophone poets in the 1960s.

In The Commons we wander the English countryside with the so-called mad peasant poet John Clare, pick wild fruit with Henry David Thoreau, and comb the Lake District with a host of authors of Romantic guides and tours, undermining William Wordsworth’s proprietary claim to the region. Somewhere along the way Robert Frost’s wall falls down, the Zapatistas make their appearance, and Gerrard Winstanley reclaims the
earth as a “Common Treasury.”

A lifetime’s devotion to the music of Mozart conceals a gruesome secret. Cast of 4 women.

Will a Montreal Mafioso sacrifice his young son for safe conduct to England? Cast of 6 women and 8 men.

The fifteenth summer of Beth Weeks’s life is full of strange happenings: a classmate is mauled to death, children go missing on the nearby reserve, and an unseen predator pursues Beth. Not to mention Beth is becoming aware that there is darkness in her own home: her mother’s relationship…

Let yourself be excited and delighted. Farrant’s artfully spare stories – averaging a couple of paragraphs each – offer enough food for thought (and mood) to keep you going for months. Dip in occasionally to be reminded of the strangeness of us, or read from beginning to end and immerse yourself in a slightly skewed version of reality – one in which people are frank and the world is unforgiving as it shimmers like light on water, sometimes blinding, always dazzling.

An astonishingly profound and prophetic political drama that delivers the powerful and cathartic stillbirth of a nation, stripped of both pity and fear. Cast of 2 women and 4 men.

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.

Haplessly determined to have his own miserable authority vindicated, chief dishwasher Dressler presides over the steam-choked basement of an upscale restaurant, tyrannizing his co-workers with his rants of pride of craft and Marxist rhetoric. Cast of 3 men.

Quebec City, 1905. Two priests-to-be are ordered to deliver a cease-and-desist letter to a controversial visitor to their city: the legendary French actress, Sarah Bernhardt. The Divine was commissioned for the 2015 Shaw Festival in honour of George Bernard Shaw and everyone who loves the theatre, and in memory of Sarah Bernhardt, “the woman who dares to say everything that should be left unsaid.”

The stormy and angst-filled relationship between Claude and his father Alex is compellingly played out with a cruel and disconsolate irony in an Alzheimer’s ward. Cast of 2 men.

This third volume in the Chronicles of the Plateau Mont- Royal —an epic series of novels which imagines the lives of the characters of Tremblay’s plays—deals with an explicitly gay thematic: Tremblay’s metaphor for the Québécois desire for a more glamorous identity on the world stage.

The first of three plays in this saga of one of Canada’s wealthiest and most ruthless families. Cast of 2 women and 6 men.

A dark family secret emerges in this second play about the wealthy and ill-fated Dunsmuir family. Cast of 3 women and 6 men.

Contains the Governor General’s Award-winning Criminals in Love (1984), Chalmers Award-winning Better Living (1986) and Escape from Happiness (1987). With an introduction by Jerry Wasserman.

Contains Beautiful City, Love and Anger and Tough.

A lyric documentary about a young Indian girl who comes to the city only to die on Skid Row. Cast of 5 women and 15 men.

The Edward Curtis Project began when the Presentation House Theatre commissioned Marie Clements to write a play that would stage the issues raised by Curtis’ monumental but controversial achievement—to dramatize not only the creation of his photographic record of “the vanishing race of the North American Indian” and the enormous commitment, unwavering vision, sacrifice, poverty and ultimate disappointment it represented for the photographer, but also the devastating legacy that his often misrepresentative and imposed vision had on the lives of the people he touched.

The Empress Has No Closure contains, as a centre-piece, the “Alefbet Transfers,” a meditative, spacial explication of the 22 figures of the Hebrew alphabet.

Panych’s brilliant tale reminds us all that fear can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Cast of 2 women and 3 men.

Drawn from his own experiences, Vittorio Rossi’s new comedy-drama exposes the bureaucratic institution that is the Canadian film industry, and we follow the character Michael Moretti, a veteran playwright, as he struggles to get his new play, Romeo’s Rise, turned into a movie.

Two school boys plot and enact the murder of a classmate. Cast of 3 women and 17 men.

Tiziana La Melia’s writing moves between the page, the screen, and the exhibition. Her work engages with thinking through material and image hesitation, nonhuman forms of materiality, violent sentimentality, excessive desire, naiveté, narrative construction, the body and memory.

Three women – a housewife, a whore and the Virgin Mary – fight to break their stereotypes. Cast of 3 women.

Georgia O’Keeffe resigns herself to an old age spent alone in the auburn and tawny light of her beloved Faraway mountains, in the desert’s dangerous energies, its desolate beauty, until a stranger enters her life. Cast of 1 woman and 1 man.

Tremblay’s first novel is an affectionate and funny chronicle of the lives of a family in its community.

The polarities of public and private lives, and issues of racism and pacifism in the suffragette movement. Cast of 3 women and 1 man.

The fifth novel in the Chronicles of the Plateau Mont-Royal juxtaposes the childhood experiences of the fat woman’s son and his gifted cousin.

Explores the life of one immigrant Jewish family, from early 1933, through the war years and into the early 1950s.

A story of the ill-fated love between a wandering musician social-idealist and a Cape Breton coal miner’s daughter. Cast of 2 women and 3 men.

Nancy Shaw was an award-winning poet, scholar, and critic who was formative in shifting the ground of Canadian literature and poetics. She was a member of the influential Kootenay School of Writing (KSW) collective, co-director of Writing magazine, artist-in-residence at the Western Front in the 1980s, and served as a chair of the Vancouver New Music Society. Edited by Catriona Strang – who co-authored Busted, Cold Trip, and Light Sweet Crude with Shaw – The Gorge collects a range of Shaw’s prolific writing with a focus on her collaborations and poetry.

A delightful collection of seventy miniature fictions and comics riffing on the theme of happiness, The Great Happiness offers a series of lively antidotes to the current climate of doom. Some of the book’s miniatures are narratives with a twist, others are imaginative flights, such as the recently dead experimental…

The destruction of the people of the Blackfoot Confederacy by the liquor trade in Alberta and Montana. Cast of 5 women and 13 men.

Every house has its secrets, but none hides them better than the august home of Delorme family in Montreal.

Winner of the prestigious 2008 Uchimura Naoya Prize, The Gull is a play written in the classical Noh style. Set in 1950, when wartime restrictions on interned Japanese Canadians had finally been lifted, allowing them to return to the coast, it exquisitely dramatizes the historical link between the fishing town of Steveston, home to many Japanese Canadians, and Mio, the coastal village in Japan from which many of their ancestors originally emigrated. An international collaboration, The Gull featured: Noh master Akira Matsui, declared an Important Intangible Cultural Asset by Japan in 1998, as the main actor; music by American Noh expert Richard Emmert; masks by Wakayama artist Hakuzan Kubo; and a troupe of professional Noh musicians from Japan.

A hilarious yet compassionate look at the new male consciousness taking shape in a “post-feminist” world by a witty, articulate raconteur.

Colin Browne’s new collection, The Hatch, extends his formal engagement with the margins of the new documentary. Myth, history, and the present are contemporaneous in these poems; nothing is ever one thing, and nothing is itself for very long. Figuratively speaking each poem is caught in mid-air, as if delivered…

A fusty academic has fallen in love with a young actor who works as a salesman while waiting for his big break; however, the academic must learn to make room in his life for the actor’s four-year-old son.

“If there is a God, why would He create us? If He’s perfect, all-knowing, there’s nothing he can gain from us.” Murphy’s play, centred around the playwright’s assumed persona of “Jesus Murphy,” opens up a discourse where creation interrogates religion; atheists engage believers; and secularists confront theists. Cast of 1 man.

Two plays by Joan MacLeod: the Chalmers Award-winning The Hope Slide, and MacLeod’s first play for young audiences, Little Sister.

Explores the possibilities of meaning production when language is pushed to its limits of normative semantic patterns. Includes a homolinguistic “trans’elation” of the Sefer Yetzirah.

Remarkably engaging stories recounted by different residents of a northern Canadian village facing a gradual but devastating transformation.

Three sisters have an “impromptu” and re-examine their personal and social problems. Cast of 4 women.

Murakami’s first book of poetry, written in the political and emotional wake of Vancouver’s “Missing Women,” this project investigates the troubled relationship between a marginalized neighbourhood’s “invisible” populations and the city that surrounds them.

Camus’s The Just (Les Justes) is a five-act play based on the true story of a group of Russian revolutionaries who assassinated Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich in 1905. Bobby Theodore’s fresh, modern translation enhances the contemporaneity of the play.

Young Dorothea is appointed by the tourist bureau to direct a documentary film re-enacting life at a lighthouse off Quebec’s North Shore in the 1940s and 50s. The problem is that most of the memories of Rose Brouillard, the interview subject, are invented, not real. But, really, who cares whether it’s true? What matters here are the stories we tell.

Rather than confront her husband when she sees him with another woman, a blues singer follows the woman and insinuates herself into the other woman’s life. Cast of 3 women and 1 man.

A dark and thoroughly contemporary comedy. Cast of 2 women and 2 men.

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.

The Living is a powerful and unsettling documentary play by Colleen Wagner, author of the Governor General’s Literary Award–winning play The Monument. It is inspired by the actual stories of women and girls who survived trauma in post-conflict zones like Rwanda and Uganda. The Living examines the lives of victims…

At the end of the First World War, to protect his village from the Spanish flu epidemic brought home by returning soldiers, a young priest recently arrived in the Parish of Lac St-Jean commissions a wandering Italian painter to decorate the walls of the local church with a fresco dedicated to the Virgin Mary. The presence of the foreign artist, his choice of a local virgin to serve as a model, and the frighteningly strange nature of his work will upset the lives and change the fate of the entire community.

Marchessault evokes the doubts, the trials and the joys of this singular existence. Cast of 3 women and 1 man.

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

While many of the poems in The Monument Cycles speak to Vancouver as a whole, several focus specifically on the city’s Downtown Eastside (“the poorest postal code in Canada”); they explore the poet’s experiences working in this community and write toward possibility, remembrance, and the nature of truth and storytelling.

Bowering and Greg Curnoe became friends when their art was in its youth, and for 26 years they grew up parallel, inside each other’s work.

The Mystery Play is a detective story, a ghost story, and a memory play: a theatrical blending of Wit and The Woman In Black. Though fully self-contained, The Mystery Play is also the Second in a trilogy about crime-solving Sister Vivian Salter, a flinty, fifty-ish Catholic nun forced into the…

Features the work of Blaser, Bowering, Brand, Carson, Derksen, Dudek, Dewdney, Friesen, Hartog, Kiyooka, Kroetsch, Marlatt, McCaffery, McFadden, McKay, McKinnon, Mouré, Nichol, Ondaatje, Robertson, Stanley, Tostevin, Villemaire, Wah and Webb.

An innovative, multi-layered deconstruction of mass media and politics. Cast of 2 men.

Devastated by grief and loneliness, Edgar, an asocial thirty-seven-year-old, kneels in the cemetery where his recently deceased mother is buried. Turning away from her graveside for a moment, Edgar witnesses a terrifying and life-altering event: through the mist that sweeps overhead like the ghostly skirts of mothers passed, Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse brutally rape a young woman, leaving her for dead. Acting out of muddled instinct (and ingrained Catholic conviction), Edgar bears the unconscious victim home in the trunk of his mother’s sedan. Disgusted yet moved by the woman’s appearance, Edgar solemnly pledges to act as her saviour.

Young, naïve and inadequately trained nurse Heather Rose arrives in a remote Native community hoping to improve the lives of its residents, but ends up utterly disillusioned by the impotence of her interventions. Cast of 1 woman.

Written in the tradition of Umberto Eco and Manuel Puig, The Pagan Wall is a first novel by one of Canada’s master storytellers.

An extraordinary novel about art and passion inspired by the lives of two great artists, Evelyn Rowat and René Marcil.

George Ryga Award for Social Award: Jordan Abel, The Place of Scraps (Finalist) BC Book Prize, Poetry: Jordan Abel, The Place of Scraps (Winner) The Place of Scraps revolves around Marius Barbeau, an early-twentieth-century ethnographer, who studied many of the First Nations cultures in the Pacific Northwest, including Jordan Abel’s…

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.

Selection of the best original stories of Henry W. Tate (d. 1914), a Tsimshian informant to ethnographer Franz Boas.

First published as a trilogy in 1986, The Power Plays contains Gossip (1977), Filthy Rich (1979) and The Art of War (1983). These three plays showcase the development and the culmination of Walker’s film noir style.

Poetry begins when the properties of things—and the correspondences among them—reveal themselves through language. Language is the veil that can pierce itself.
The poems in The Properties are a record of encounters between desire and the repressed or suppressed interstices of social, economic, political and unconscious forces. They’re alert to correspondences, attentive to the lines of force to which the poet’s family quietly assented in the contested place that is the Northwest Coast of North America.

The shifting passions and ambitions of six women drawn from Shakespeare’s theatre. Cast of 6 women.

Ten years in the making, these stories display Bowering’s meticulous attention to the details of his craft.

Hip-hop artist Brinkman resurrects Chaucer’s brilliant stories into visible and audible contemporary forms.

In The Real World?, Michel Tremblay returns to the very source of creative work, that notorious first play which supposedly contains the scenes of everything yet to come. And ultimately, he finds “himself” confronted with the same fundamental question over time. Did he have the right? Does he still have the right?

Cast of 4 women and 3 men.

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

The second in the Notebook trilogy follows Céline Poulin as she becomes hostess in a transvestite bordello. Tremblay celebrates how it is possible for Céline to embrace her difference and to flourish in solidarity with a community of others with transcendent eloquence and compassion.

Laid bare in the fictionalized autobiographical details of The Refugee Hotel are the universal truths both the victims and the survivors of political oppression continue to experience everywhere: the terror of persecution, arrest, and torture; the exhausted elation of escape; the trauma of learning to live again with the losses, betrayals, and agonies of the past; the irrational guilt of the survivor—even the tragedy of surviving the nightmares of the past only to have them return to challenge any hope of a future free of fear. More than a dark comedy about a group of Chilean refugees who arrive in Vancouver in 1974 after Pinochet’s coup, this play is Carmen Aguirre’s attempt to give voice to refugee communities from all corners of the globe.

Thoroughly grounded in the media culture of television and film, mclennan’s language casts a deceptively familiar veil over the breadth and depth of reading which inform this
work.

A stockbroker and an ex-priest get together to console themselves after being abandoned by their mates and are forced to come to terms with their fragile natures as men. Cast of 3 women and 2 men.

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.

Deals with the Sechelt and South-Eastern Tribes of Vancouver Island and includes a bio-bibliography of Charles Hill-Tout and more.

A black cellist, on tour with a classical symphony orchestra, invokes the ghost of Louis Armstrong to help him with a difficult passage from Bach’s Six Suites for Solo Cello. The highly mythologized spirit of “the father of jazz himself” takes form in the cellist’s hotel room, where the lives of the characters intertwine and begin to play off each other, and issues of class, hope, courage, family, and race emerge in a lively and powerful struggle between head and heart, intellect and intuition. Ultimately, the drama resolves with the cellist’s beautiful rendition of the Bach piece. Full of great jazz and classical music, but using none of Satchmo’s own compositions, the play incorporates nine original jazz songs, co-written by the author-musicians, into the action.

A novel about mountains by one of Canada’s greatest writers on nature, depicting the heart’s desire to go beyond mountains.

A revitalization of a Russian theatre classic. Cast of 5 women and 8 men.

An industrial biography that investigates personal myths and the great “machines” that drive the world to the abyss of development.

The Shape of a Girl examines the code of silence and tacit complicity which surrounded the sensationalized murder of Reena Virk by school-aged bullies in 1997. Jewel is based on the real-life catastrophe of the sinking of the Ocean Ranger, an oil rig off the coast of Newfoundland, in 1982.

In this extraordinary book, Colin Browne inverts the traditional ways we define and privilege forms of the English language; self-expression becomes prosaic, the recording of history poetic.

The Singer’s Broken Throat is a collection of poems that trace a path through both physical and emotional landscapes. Each step of the narrative way is marked by an event of the heart, each image is a map of person and place. Des Walsh’s fourth book of poetry echoes his extensive film and theatre work: the voices here are always dramatic and present, not passive and absent, even when the poems are elegiac in form and substance, even when their subject is historic. These poems disclose the fragility and wonderment of relationships, as well as remind us that we are all alive to each other inextricable from our frames in both time and space.

This tell-all book by M.A.C. Farrant is a three-part novel-length work of prose fragments, snippets, questions, speculations and meditations, by turns philosophical, dark, comedic and lyrical, it attempts to imagine a multitude of possible futures for our garrisoned world.

A play set in rural Quebec in the ’50s in which a battered child, Maurice, seeks refuge in a fantasy world. Cast of 1 man and 1 male child.

An extensively detailed reconstruction of the war between the Northwest Coast Natives and Vancouver Island’s colonial government.

An affair born of a correspondence with a distant admirer leads the lovers to an arranged meeting in Australia.

When inspector Milton shows up in a town in the middle of nowhere to investigate a mysterious murder, fifteen year-old Lowell’s skills at shaping the truth to protect both himself and those he cares about are put to the ultimate test: shall he plea bargain, or stick to the truth as he understands it? As Hardy once pointed out to him, “There’s something in between lying and not lying. It’s called a story.”

Roughly based on The Trial by Franz Kafka, this black comedy changes the lead character to a modem business woman who finds herself accused of an unknown crime. The more she delves into the bureaucratic nightmare the more her ordered, little world unravels and the more she is entangled in the increasingly obscure process.

Based on the author’s own experience as a victim of the Paper Bag Rapist, The Trigger is a play written for anyone who has ever dealt with sexual violation and who continues to live with it at their core. Cast of 5 women.

Canty creates a gentle road book, a melancholy blue guide written in an airy, associative prose, where images coalesce and dissipate, carried away through the outer and inner American landscape. The book, mixing the tropes of road narrative, poetic fabulation, and philosophical memoir, reaches towards images on the horizon of memory, to find out where they come from, while coming to the foreordained realization that, wherever memory may lead us, its images will be long gone when we get there and most probably were never even there at all.

Surrealist dramatization of a notorious case involving mysterious deaths on Vancouver’s Skid Row. Cast of 11 women and 2 men.

Inspired by an event in British Columbia that shattered the public’s confidence in the police – the 2007 Tasering death of Robert Dziekanski during his arrest at the Vancouver airport – The Valley dramatizes the volatile relationship between law enforcement and people in the grip of mental illness. In addressing this fraught relationship, award-winning playwright Joan MacLeod empathizes with both parties, each of whom is guided by good intentions but equally challenged by their own
cultural biases and flawed humanity.

Theatre of innovation. Cast of 2 women and 2 men.

Based on the experience of city life, The Vestiges moves across the uneven geography of the present, linking historical moments when quarters of cities were squatted, when social change boiled and the future was up for grabs. In the context of our precarious present, the poem “The Vestiges,” around which the book is built, “sets out to explore / what happens / to humans when they are reduced / to things by other humans.”

The Vic creates an ensemble of eight ethnically diverse women ranging in age from their teens to their fifties, each of them eager to claim the entitlement they feel their status as victim has “naturally” conferred upon them. Cast of 8 women.

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…

Largely constructed from original interviews conducted by the playwright, The Watershed brings to the stage a multiplicity of ideological perspectives and conflicting visions for Canada’s natural resources, and its characters speak the words of real Canadians from all across the political spectrum. Policy is anything but dry in The Watershed; in fact, it holds startling implications for our national identity and future.

The disappearance of a young man acts as a catalyst for a drama that questions the nature of family and “traditional values.” Cast of 2 women and 1 man.

A badly injured man. A nationwide power failure. A village buried in snow. A desperate struggle for survival. These are the ingredients of The Weight of Snow, Christian Guay-Poliquin’s riveting new novel. After surviving a major accident, the book’s protagonist is entrusted to Matthias, a taciturn old man who agrees…

In The World Afloat, a collection of seventy-five irreverent and humorous “miniature” stories, M.A.C. Farrant coaxes her readers from their well-worn, earthbound narratives and into a world afloat on satire, absurdity, and, in her most brilliant moments, expansive joy.

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.

Jane Rule’s first collection of short stories.

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.

C.S. Morrissey’s brilliant translations bring a modern, lyrical sensibility to Theogony and Works and Days, Hesiod’s two great poems that paved the way for subsequent achievements in Greek philosophy. Theogony tells of the first generations of the gods and recollects how Zeus established his cosmic reign of justice. Works and…

Three books in one: Heavy-Hearted in Havana, Sex with a Sixteen Year Old and Anonymity Suite Part II.

In this second Plateau Mont-Royal novel, three schoolgirls live the mysteries of their rites of passage.

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.

In They Write Their Dreams on the Rock Forever, ‘Nlaka’pamux elder Annie York explains the red-ochre inscriptions written on the rocks and cliffs of the lower Stein Valley in British Columbia. This is perhaps the first time that a Native elder has presented a detailed and comprehensive explanation of rock-art…

’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: Letters to Wes and Other Writings on Japanese Canadians, 1941–1948 is a collection of letters written by Muriel Kitagawa during this period, as well as statements, essays and manuscripts which arose from Kitagawa’s commitment to write about the injustices of the government’s policies and to educate…

This Poem is an ironic investigation of contemporary culture and the technomediatic saturated world in which we’re enmeshed. Composed in the style of Facebook updates or extended Tweets, and mashing-up lexicons of Stein, Zukofsky, Shakespeare, Whitman, financial meltdown, semiotic theory, Lady Gaga, Derrida, and Flickr streams, This Poem is a self-reflexive romp through shards and fragments of post-consumerist culture.

This Tremor Love Is is a memory book—an album of love poems spanning twenty-five years, from Marlatt’s first writing of what was to become the opening section, A Lost Book, to its latest, most recent sequences.

“To get at turn away.” In Thrum, her second collection of poetry, Natalie Simpson reveals how making sense is not always the same as making meaning. Her supple and agile poems seduce the weary reader away from representation and toward sound, texture, and absence. Here, a sentence is no longer…

The quest in this latest fusion of song, sound, performance and visual poetry from bill bissett is for a human condition outside the perpetual terror of the 21st century.

Three short plays by Cook: Tiln, Quiller and Therese’s Creed.

time is reelee abt how evreething is fleeting n how we deel with that n how deeplee we undrstand that awareness  th jewels shine as our undrstandings  th layrs n openings  apertures n iris lens in  or not n how manee narrativs reveel our paradoxikul n continualee shifting minds … a storee is what time is it … 4 ourselvs  n our specees    n how timeless th breth uv th galaxee  n oftn ourselvs  tho agen fleeting  lyrik  song chant  philosophikal  theologikul  prsonal  propheseez vizual  n tanguld tangos … with th invisibul dansrs … n th 4tune tellrs shuffuling theyr decks  how we yern 4  n letting go uv our games finding love  n th chancs 4 savin th environment n our selvs [bill bissett]

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

To the Barricades continues Collis’s “life” poem, “The Barricades Project,” which also includes Anarchive (2005) and The Commons (2008). Both the anti-archive of the revolutionary record and the dream of a once and future “commons” upon which all can equally dwell continue to shape these poems where words are hurried bricks thrown up as “barricades” in language.

Following the accidental death of his lover, and in the throes of his grief, urban ad executive Tom travels to the country to attend the funeral and to meet his mother-in-law, Agatha, and her son, Francis – neither of whom know Tom even exists.

Three sisters and their mother are forced by the American government to relocate from Oklahoma to Los Angeles. As these four women try to re-establish connections to a new land, they each find themselves lost. Inspired by true events, Tombs of the Vanishing Indian is a poetic excavation of the lost stories of displaced Aboriginal people.

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

Drawing from MacLeod’s experience working with mentally handicapped adults and children, this play celebrates the personal challenges of both self-destruction and self-affirmation so vital to the process of identity creation. Cast of 2 women and 2 men.

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.

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

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

Written over the last ten years in a quartet of cities: Calgary, Toronto, New York and Vienna, Transnational Muscle Cars is the second book in Jeff Derksen’s trilogy addressing place, culture and capital, and draws on a wide array of North American post-war poetics—the declarative aspects of New American Poetry, the pop cultural details of the New York School, the reflexive politics of the Language Poets, the personal politics of the Kootenay School of Writing—and on contemporary cultural and political theory, critical geography, urban theory, and architectural concepts.

How might poetic practices undermine racist ideologies and colonialism, engendering ecological attentiveness, and anomalous and compassionate communities? Christine Stewart’s Treaty 6 Deixis takes up these timely and pressing questions as it investigates what it means to be a non-Indigenous inhabitant of Canada’s Treaty 6 territory, “in this city, on this…

This collection of short fiction includes stories spanning the decades of O’Hagan’s experience as mountain guide, gentleman adventurer and storyteller.

Triage attempts an ordered, critical response to the manufactured crises that perpetuate our public and private disentitlements.

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.

In this contemplative novel-poem, Jean-François Beauchemin invites us to share in the inner world of the grieving Mr. Bartolomé, who, following the mysterious disappearance of his young son, wanders and wonders, seeking to transcend his pain by encountering something larger than himself. Continuously occupied by the memory of his lost son, Bartolomé’s quest leads him from the city to the countryside and then to the edge of the ocean, where he marvels at the beauty of nature but cannot penetrate its mysteries.

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.

This collection of eight of the finest plays produced by Vancouver’s New Play Centre marks the company’s 20th year.

A vital collection of writings about First Nations people and culture as it existed in the Depression-era Pacific Northwest.

This volume contains two uniquely Canadian stories of exile: The Island of Demons and Six Dry Cakes for the Hunted.