annie ross on CBC's North by Northwest
Talon author annie ross was on CBC’s North by Northwest this past Sunday, May 17, to talk about Pots and Other Living Beings.
Check it out – her segment begins at 1:44:54.
Posted: Tuesday May 19, 2020
"every miracle is a hidden (yet in plain-view) supernatural event."
Poet Rob Taylor interviewed annie ross about Pots and Other Living Beings for Read Local BC. Check it out!
Posted: Tuesday May 19, 2020
Daphne Marlatt reads for SpokenWeb
This month’s Spoken Web podcast minisode features Talon author Daphne Marlatt reading “Lagoon” from Vancouver Poems, published in 1972. Check it out!
Want to read more? Liquidities: Vancouver Poems Then and Now gathers many of the poems from 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 urban imagining.
Posted: Wednesday May 13, 2020
Curb-side pick-up at Talonbooks!
Talon is now doing curb-side pick-ups at our office in Vancouver, BC! We’re located next to the Fraser River, near the Oak Street bridge – if you’re in the Lower Mainland, give us a call at 604-444-4889 to order books and schedule a pick-up!
Posted: Monday May 4, 2020
Drew Hayden Taylor's Cottagers and Indians shortlisted for the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour
We are so pleased to share that Drew Hayden Taylor’s Cottagers and Indians has been shortlisted for the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour.
Congratulations, Drew!!
Posted: Thursday April 30, 2020
David Fennario's Banana Boots documentary is available on the NFB!
In search of something great to quaranscreen? David Fennario’s Banana Boots documentary is available on the National Film Board of Canada website.
Banana Boots is a one-man-show / memoir in which Fennario recounts, with astonishing insight and wit, the phenomenon of taking his famous bilingual play Balconville to Belfast on a British / Canadian cultural mission. Given the subject of Balconville, that the real problem in Quebec is not one of language or culture, but one of British imperialism and the class structure it imposes on its “colonials,” the ironies of such an event are, of course, both delicious and irresistible.
Pick up your copy of Banana Boots here, and screen the documentary here.
Posted: Wednesday April 22, 2020
“The Old Routine” by Lionel Kearns, is now up on the Poetry in Transit website
Poetry in Transit is sharing work from their archives for National Poetry Month 2020. We are pleased to see “The Old Routine” by Lionel Kearns, from his 2007 book A Few Words Will Do, shared today.
Posted: Monday April 13, 2020
Wanting Everything, the collected works of Gladys Hindmarch, has arrived!
We are so pleased that Wanting Everything, the collected works of Gladys Hindmarch, has arrived from the printer!
Gladys Hindmarch was a central figure in the Vancouver literary scene of the 1960s and 1970s. Wanting Everything, her first major publication in over thirty years, contains newly revised editions of The Peter Stories, A Birth Account, and The Watery Part of the World, as well as unpublished works of prose, correspondence, criticism, oral history interviews, and occasional writing. Spanning five decades, Wanting Everything recognizes Hindmarch’s significant contribution to Canada’s literary and cultural fields.
In their introduction, editors Deanna Fong and Karis Shearer contextualize this work through the unpacking of the volume’s title. “’[W]anting everything” refers to a kind of largeness, a desire to push against the constraints of language, time, and competing forms of labour to document, to connect, and to love, without sacrifice or hierarchy,” they write. “‘Wanting everything’ means wanting to be a writer and a professor; to be a lover and a mother; to be a critic and a confidante. In Hindmarch’s work there is an appetitiousness that wants to bring everything into its ambit without compromise, and it is from this sense of appetite that its feminist politics radiate – an additive ethos that invites solidarity, generosity, and openness.”
Check out a video of Gladys reading from A Birth Account, included in Wanting Everything.
And order your copy of Wanting Everything today!
Posted: Thursday April 9, 2020
Margaret Christakos reads – in stereo – from charger!
We are so pleased that charger has arrived in-house! A moving new collection from award-winning poet, novelist, and critic Margaret Christakos, charger considers our plugged-in selves, and the technologies that deliver us to each other. The book is particularly relevant as we practice physically distancing while socially connecting online.
Below, Margaret reads from “charger 12.”
Order your copy of charger today!
Posted: Wednesday April 8, 2020
Orwell in Cuba is hot off the presses!
We are so pleased that Orwell in Cuba has arrived in-house!
Orwell in Cuba, translated by Donald Winkler, chronicles journalist Frédérick Lavoie’s attempts to unravel the motives behind the mysterious appearance of a new translation of George Orwell’s 1984, formerly taboo in Cuba, just ahead of the country’s twenty-fifth International Book Fair. Lavoie works to make sense of how Cubans feel about the past, present, and future of their island – and how the political regime is adapting, or not, to life in the twenty-first century. His intertwined quests give readers the unique experience of following a suspenseful trail while at the same time becoming increasingly familiar with Cubans’ relationship to the regime and their strategies for coping with the island’s often challenging living conditions.
In its original French, the book won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction.
Check out a video of Frédérick reading from Orwell in Cuba.
And order your copy of Orwell in Cuba today!
Posted: Tuesday April 7, 2020
The 2nd edition of Jordan Abel's Un/inhabited has arrived!
The second edition of award-winning Nisga’a poet Jordan Abel’s second collection of poetry, Un/inhabited, has arrived from the printer!
Un/inhabited maps the terrain of the public domain to create a layered investigation of the interconnections between language and land.
Abel constructed the book’s source text by compiling ninety-one complete western novels found on Project Gutenberg, an online archive of public domain works. Using Ctrl+F, he searched the document for words that relate to the political and social aspects of land, territory, and ownership. Each search query represents a study in context (How was this word deployed? What surrounded it? What is left over once that word is removed?) that accumulates toward a representation of the public domain as a discoverable and inhabitable body of land.
Featuring essays by Project Space founder Tracy Stefanucci and independent curator Kathleen Ritter – the first pieces of scholarship on Abel’s work – Un/inhabited reminds us of the power of language as material and invites us to reflect on what is present when we see nothing.
The second edition of the book features a new cover, page 183, a 2019 artwork by Alanna Irene Edwards, who is an artist, curator, and writer of Mi’gmaq and settler descent.
Pick up your copy of Un/inhabited today!
Posted: Monday April 6, 2020
Impurity has arrived!
A playful and macabre narrative tour de force, structured like a matryoshka doll, Impurity – by Larry Tremblay and translated by Sheila Fischman – weaves a complex web of interlocking narratives in multiple voices and a variety of forms.
The bestselling author Alice Livingston is dead, leaving her philosopher husband, Antoine, dealing with a legacy towards which he has felt increasingly estranged. Confronted with his wife’s much reported disappearance, Antoine revisits their past relationship: open and liberated on the outside, but constrained and even deviant on the inside. The news of the day (the death of JFK Junior, the self-immolation of a Buddhist monk, etc.) announced by the television running in the novel’s background gradually becomes significant in the lives of the protagonists – as revealed in Alice’s last book. As narrators of the novel become less and less reliable, good intentions become corrupted, appearances prove to be deceiving, and Impurity’s multiple plots come to a gripping, asphyxiating conclusion.
Check out an excerpt from Impurity.
And order your copy of Impurity today!
Posted: Monday April 6, 2020
Gladys Hindmarch reads from A Birth Account, included in Wanting Everything
In today’s excerpt, Gladys Hindmarch reads from her 1976 book A Birth Account, in conversation with Deanna Fong. This work has recently been published in Wanting Everything, Hindmarch’s complete works, co-edited by Deanna Fong and Karis Shearer.
Gladys Hindmarch was a central figure in the Vancouver literary scene of the 1960s and 1970s. Wanting Everything, her first major publication in over thirty years, contains newly revised editions of The Peter Stories, A Birth Account, and The Watery Part of the World, unpublished works of prose, correspondence, criticism, oral history interviews, and occasional writing. Spanning five decades, Wanting Everything recognizes Hindmarch’s significant contribution to Canada’s literary and cultural fields.
Posted: Thursday April 2, 2020
Livestreamed reading of Kim Senklip Harvey's Kamloopa now available
Last Friday, March 27, Kim Senklip Harvey and the Fire Company – Yolanda Bonnell, Samantha Brown, Kaitlyn Yott, and Emily Soussana – did a live reading of Kamloopa: An Indigenous Matriarch Story, in partnership with the National Arts Centre.
Check out the archived version of the reading!
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Posted: Thursday April 2, 2020
Frédérick Lavoie reads from Orwell in Cuba, translated by Donald Winkler
Orwell in Cuba, translated by Donald Winkler, chronicles journalist Frédérick Lavoie’s attempts to unravel the motives behind the mysterious appearance of a new translation of George Orwell’s 1984, formerly taboo in Cuba, just ahead of the country’s twenty-fifth International Book Fair. Lavoie works to make sense of how Cubans feel about the past, present, and future of their island – and how the political regime is adapting, or not, to life in the twenty-first century. His intertwined quests give readers the unique experience of following a suspenseful trail while at the same time becoming increasingly familiar with Cubans’ relationship to the regime and their strategies for coping with the island’s often challenging living conditions.
Avant l’Après, the original French edition of the book, won the Governor General’s Award for French-Language Non-Fiction.
Today, we are sharing a video of Frédérick Lavoie reading an excerpt from the section of the book that he wrote to be read aloud at the twenty-sixth edition of the Havana International Book Fair, in 2017.
Order your copy of Orwell in Cuba today!
Posted: Wednesday April 1, 2020
An excerpt from annie ross's Pots and Other Living Beings
Pots and Other Living Beings is a literally and visually compelling first poetry collection by Indigenous artist annie ross. The text combines socially conscious poems with geographically grounded photographs, each describing an aspect of living in the postmodern, neoliberal age. All compositions emphasize in evocative ways our times’ disillusions and disenchantments, promised and failed utopias, material and cultural ruins, alienations and dispossessions.
Click “more” to read a poem from Pots and Other Living Beings.
Posted: Monday March 30, 2020
Danielle LaFrance reads from Just Like I Like It
In JUST LIKE I LIKE IT, Danielle LaFrance combines poetry and autotheory as a means of targeting ideological infatuation, spilling into an obsession with ideological abolishment. JUST LIKE I LIKE IT searches for ways to kill and abolish “it,” seeking means to get it done right, even when attempted slowly and stupidly, even if the only way out is death.
LaFrance reads an excerpt from “IT MAKES ME ILIAD,” the first section of JUST LIKE I LIKE IT, below – and keep scrolling to see the text of the poems, as well!
Posted: Friday March 27, 2020
An excerpt from Deni Ellis Béchard's My Favourite Crime
Deni Ellis Béchard is the author of Vandal Love (Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book); Of Bonobos and Men (Grand Prize winner of the Nautilus Book Award for investigative journalism); and Into the Sun (Midwest Book Award for literary fiction, selected by CBC Radio Canada as one of 2017’s Incontournables and one of the most important books of the year to be read by Canada’s political leaders).
His new non-fiction collection, My Favourite Crime, ranges across the world and over a wide array of contemporary issues. Divided into five sections, all united by a recurring consideration of how writing helps transform our understanding of our family, of ourselves, and of the world, the book addresses a range of disparate topics, including the author’s tumultuous relationship with his father, and the temptation to lapse back into crime when one has been raised with it.
Today, we are sharing the collection’s titular essay, “My Favourite Crime.”
My Favourite Crime
(2012)
There’s a story my father often told me. I imagine most boys hear stories from their fathers, but not this sort. It was about a bank heist in 1967, the burglary of half a million dollars in West Hollywood. He called it the Big Job, an elaborate crime he’d started plotting when he was first incarcerated. Prison, he liked to say, turned him into a professional. He went in a petty crook and left wanting to do the Big Job, not unlike the way I went to college to study writing and left dreaming of the great American novel.
Posted: Wednesday March 25, 2020
An excerpt from Mercedes Eng's new book, my yt mama
We are so pleased that BC and Yukon Book Prize–winner Mercedes Eng’s new book, my yt mama, has arrived in-house. my yt mama is a collection of poems that considers historic and contemporary colonial violence in the Canadian prairies, a settler geography and state of mind that irrevocably shaped Eng’s understanding of race as person of colour born and raised in Treaty 7 Territory in Medicine Hat, Alberta.
In a recent paper edition of the Globe and Mail, the Paper Hound bookstore recommended my yt mama, writing, “[h]er books Mercenary English and Prison Industrial Complex Explodes are sharply observed and incredibly poignant/personal long poems; her latest title my yt mama just came out and is, predictably, quite brilliant.” If you’re in Vancouver, call the Paper Hound at 604-428-1344 to order your copy; if you’re outside of Vancouver, order at talonbooks.com/books/my-yt-mama.
Here, we are sharing a three-poem sequence from my yt mama.
Posted: Wednesday March 25, 2020
An excerpt from Larry Tremblay's new book, Impurity, translated by Sheila Fischman
A playful and macabre narrative tour de force, structured like a matryoshka doll, Impurity weaves a complex web of interlocking narratives in multiple voices and a variety of forms. The bestselling author Alice Livingston is dead, leaving her philosopher husband, Antoine, dealing with a legacy towards which he has felt increasingly estranged. Confronted with his wife’s much reported disappearance, Antoine revisits their past relationship: open and liberated on the outside, but constrained and even deviant on the inside.
We are happy to share the excerpt, below, from Larry Tremblay’s new novel, Impurity, translated by Sheila Fischman.
Why does he work himself into such a state? Antoine waits nervously for the journalist’s arrival. He has vacuumed the living room and cleared up the dirty dishes in the kitchen. Claire Langlois arrives on time. He figures that she’s at most twenty-five. He shows her into the living room, offers coffee. She comments on the paintings on the walls. Finds them interesting. Whenever someone describes something as interesting he forms two conflicting hypotheses: either the thing in question is worthless or the person who drops the hollow remark knows nothing about the thing in question. Antoine grows tense. Still, he can’t help commenting on the young woman’s dress. Elegant. He’s just paid her a compliment. The journalist tackles the first question:
Posted: Tuesday March 24, 2020
An excerpt from Laiwan's new book, TENDER
Today, we’re excerpting “she who had scanned the flower of the world,” a poem from Laiwan’s TENDER, which just arrived in-house at Talon.
Pick up your copy of TENDER today!
a celebration of spring, the coming of light and longer days. a metaphor for a working psychic ecology. towards a sensual economy and its embodiment
in winter
we learn to name the oppressor and the name becomes oppressive
this is the logic of repression
she who had scanned the flower of the world
Posted: Monday March 23, 2020
Oana Avasilichioaei performs Operator, from Eight Track
Today, we are sharing a video performance of Oana Avasilichioaei’s “Operator,” from Eight Track.
Operator is a multimedia performance. The concept, text, images, and sound are by Oana Avasilichioaei, and the VFX and video editing are by Jessie Altura.
Operator explores the subject position(s) of military drone operators engaged in the act of tracking, identifying, and ultimately destroying. The performance deals with violence and may not be suitable for all audiences.
Pick up your copy of Eight Track today.
Posted: Thursday March 19, 2020
Margaret Christakos's charger has arrived!
We are so pleased that Margaret Christakos’s charger has arrived in-house!
A moving new collection from award-winning poet, novelist, critic, and creative-writing instructor Margaret Christakos, charger considers our plugged-in selves, and the technologies that deliver us to each other.
The book is particularly relevant as we practice physically distancing while socially connecting online!
Pick up your copy of charger today!
Posted: Thursday March 19, 2020
Christian Guay-Poliquin speaks with Seven Days Vermont
Christian Guay-Poliquin speaks with Seven Days Vermont about his about his (thematically relevant) post-apolocalyptic novel, The Weight of Snow.
If a post-apocalyptic novel piques your current interest, you can order online from talonbooks.com/books/the-weight-of-snow, or through Massy Books or Munro’s Books!
Posted: Tuesday March 17, 2020
A bit of good news: I Saw Three Ships adds a new bestseller list!
Most of Talonbooks’ staffers are now working from home, as the world is a little bit strange at the moment!
But we are happy to share yet another good piece of news about Bill Richardson’s I Saw Three Ships with you. In addition to being nominated, last week, for The BC and Yukon Book Prizes’ Bill Duthie Booksellers’ Choice Award, I Saw Three Ships is celebrating its eleventh consecutive week on the BC Bestseller list!
And, as of this week, I Saw Three Ships is now on the Alberta Fiction Bestseller list!
Our hearty congratulations to Bill!
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