news | Wednesday January 21, 2015

Announcement: New Books for Spring 2015!

Can you believe it? Spring is just a few months away. It’s true. No matter how cold or grey it is today, spring will come.

Along with spring, get your hopes up for new Talonbooks! Here they all are:

Poetry

• First book of the spring season, Un/inhabited by Jordan Abel (co-published with Project Space), is already here! Effectively the sequel to his award-winning first collection, The Place of Scraps, Un/inhabited maps the terrain of the public domain to create a layered investigation of the interconnections between language and land.
• We welcome the work of Jonina Kirton to the Talon list with the publication of her collection, page as bone – ink as blood, whose loosely autobiographical weavings tell truth with gentleness and patience, splitting the world open one line at a time.
• Sachiko Murakami is back with Get Me Out of Here, an experiment in crowd-sourcing content that asked people in airports across the globe to think about staying and going, and to contribute sentences on these subjects to a book that, as a whole, explores what poems need to do to stay when the mind is begging to leave.
• Colin Browne returns as well, with his latest collection, The Hatch, a book of transformations that extends Browne’s 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.
• Limbinal, by Oana Avasilichioaei, 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.

Drama

• Winners and Losers is a staged conversation that embraces the ruthless logic of capitalism, and tests its impact on our closest personal relationships as well as our most intimate experiences of self. This partly improvised two-man play, is the brainchild of Vancouver indie theatre giants Marcus Youssef and James Long.
• Dead Metaphor is a collection of three darkly comic plays by George F. Walker, Canada’s top playwright: Dead Metaphor, The Ravine, and The Burden of Self-Awareness. Each in its own way denounces political culture, individualism, and the accompanying moral depravity, and each is populated by characters trying to navigate the increasingly blurred lines of what’s right and wrong.
• In The Shoplifters, a riotously funny new comedy from Morris Panych, we meet Alma, a seasoned career shoplifter who prefers the five-finger discount over some lousy seniors’ day deal. But it’s not just an empty wallet that leads Alma to a life of petty crime – it’s also her strong convictions about social justice and economic inequality.
• Steve Galluccio’s St. Leonard Chronicles is a delicious, saucy new comedy about Terry and Robert, a young couple with roots in the Italian neighbourhood of St. Leonard in Montreal. Eager to break free of family ties that are bound too tight, Terry and Robert announce they’re moving to the affluent anglophone suburb of Beaconsfield – tantamount to committing a mortal sin in the eyes of their more traditional Italian relatives – and the floodgates open.
• Odd Ducks a light-hearted play by Bryden MacDonald, about four forty-somethings trying to sort out their lives and relationships, even as those lives and relationships become exaggerated and twisted before their very eyes – and by their own hands.

Fiction

• Talon is pleased to announce the publication of a book of short stories by Meredith Quartermain. Many of the characters in I, Bartleby are writers and thinkers, and these short stories – almost prose poems – cunningly challenge boundaries between fiction and reality.
• Jean-François Caron is a young, up-and-comer novelist from Quebec whose second novel Talon is pleased to publish in English. The Keeper’s Daughter is the story, beautifully and variously written, of one filmmaker and her curious subject, an old woman whose past unfolds unpredictably as her mercurial story is told and the places of her life explored for what they were – or weren’t.

Non-Fiction

• As Always: A Life in Writing by Madeleine Gagnon, one of Canada’s greatest literary figures. In this memoir, Gagnon reflects on life at the centre of Quebec literary arts, re-examines her familial and cultural influences, and explores her rejection of unexamined values as part of her intellectual development as well as her refusal to be categorized by her gender.
• Canada, a New Tax Haven: How the Country That Shaped Caribbean Tax Havens Is Becoming One Itself is the much anticipated translation and updated edition of Alain Deneault’s searing commentary on how Canada has, slowly but surely, positioned itself as a tax haven for multinational corporations, and the implications for Canadians.

The Spring 2015 Talonbooks catalogue is now online. Browse our upcoming titles and our full backlist. Also see forthcoming books in the right-hand column of this website.