1 Hour Photo
By Tetsuro Shigematsu

From the award-winning Canadian playwright, performer, and radio broadcaster Tetsuro Shigematsu comes 1 Hour Photo, the follow-up to his acclaimed one-man play Empire of the Son, which was nominated for six Jessie Richardson Theatre Awards. Shigematsu’s outstanding new play, another multifaceted portrayal of a singular figure, tells the story of…

Chile Con Carne and Other Early Works
By Carmen Aguirre

With perceptive, unflinching wit, these three early plays from award-winning Chilean Canadian writer Carmen Aguirre document the hardships, horrors, and heartache of exile, revealing the far-reaching effects of dictatorial violence and terror. Highlighting the fresh perspective refugees bring to North American society, Chile Con Carne and Other Early Works also…

Cottagers and Indians
By Drew Hayden Taylor

Cottagers and Indians explores the politics and issues surrounding a real-life event still occurring in the Kawartha Lakes region of Central Ontario. An Indigenous man, Arthur Copper, has taken it upon himself to repopulate the nearby lakes with wild rice, known amongst the Anishnawbe as Manoomin, much to the disapproval…

Flow
By Roy Miki
Edited by Michael Barnholden

Flow collects all of Governor General’s Award winner Roy Miki’s books of poetry – saving face, random access file, Surrender, There, and Mannequin Rising – with a substantial new, previously unpublished work, Cloudy and Clear, and numerous full-colour photographs and photocollages. This definitive edition of Miki’s poetic work includes a…

He Speaks Volumes
By Rebecca Wigod

This biography of George Bowering, first Canadian Parliamentary Poet Laureate, reveals the intimate, intellectual, and artistic life of one of Canada’s most prolific authors, offering an inside look at the people and events at the centre of the country’s literary and artistic avant-garde from the 1960s to the present. A…

It’s a Big Deal!
By Dina Del Bucchia

So many things seem like a BIG DEAL: fashionable clothes, food trends for healthfulness and coolness, personal turmoils, what someone else just said, the ever-charged political landscape, Instagram posts, extinct megafauna, avocado toast … the list could – and does – go on and on. Quirky, wry, sensitive, bitchy, and…

Mercenary English
By Mercedes Eng

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.

My Heart is a Rose Manhattan
By Nikki Reimer

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…

PERFACT
By Nicole Raziya Fong

“Part treatise on phenomenology, part theatrical score on ontology, part billet-doux to poetry itself” (Divya Victor), PEЯFACT is a three-part series of poems interrogating the nature of experience, language, trauma, and identity. This moving, philosophical debut, whose influences range from Antonin Artaud and Simone Weil to Gertrude Stein and George…

Redpatch
By Sean Harris Oliver & Raes Calvert

Private Jonathan Woodrow is a young Indigenous soldier fighting on the Western Front during World War I. Thanks to his experience in hunting and wilderness survival, he quickly becomes one of the 1st Canadian Division’s most feared trench raiders. But as the war and the fighting stretch on with no…

Sir John A
By Drew Hayden Taylor

Sir John A is an uproariously funny and sharply inquisitive new play from one of Canada’s leading Indigenous playwrights. Bobby Rabbit, the play’s Anishnawbe main character, convinces his friend Hugh to accompany him on a “sojourn of justice” to dig up the bones of Canada’s infamous first prime minister and…

Synapses
By Simon Brousseau
Translated by Pablo Strauss

Synapses depicts a vast society of differing psyches, all unique, idiosyncratic, and interconnected. Simon Brousseau’s beautifully crafted literary snapshots, each written in a single, stylistically accomplished sentence and featuring a different character, will linger with readers. Synapses will integrate into your own neural pathways, inviting you to join the network…

Thanks for Giving
By Kevin Loring

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.…

The Great Happiness
By M.A.C. Farrant

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 Living
By Colleen Wagner

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…

The Mystery Play
By Josh MacDonald

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…

The Weight of Snow
By Christian Guay-Poliquin
Translated by David Homel

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…

Treaty 6 Deixis
By Christine Stewart

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…

White
By Deni Ellis Béchard

From the author of Into the Sun and Vandal Love, acclaimed for “prose that’s both lyrical and gritty, able to evoke big emotions with exquisite intimacy” (O, The Oprah Magazine), White is a riveting novel that explores whiteness, modern humanitarianism, and the lies of American exceptionalism and white supremacy.Assigned to…