news | Monday July 4, 2016

Fall 2016 previews!

What’s coming this fall from Talon? Today, we are thrilled to give you the details! Scroll down along the right-hand side of our website front page to view each forthcoming title.


In fiction, we are all excited about Meredith Quartermain’s new novel, U Girl, a coming-of-age story set in Vancouver in 1972, a city crossed between love-in hip and forest-corp square. In this sprawling and perceptive novel, Quartermain takes us through sexual experimentation, drugs, working at menial jobs, meditating on Wreck Beach, sailing up through Desolation Sound, and studying at the University of British Columbia. U Girl pays homage to local haunts and literary influences in equal measure.

Then let yourself be excited and delighted by M.A.C. Farrant’s artfully spare stories in The Days. Farrant deftly touches on mortality, fate, fame, history, and the mundanities of everyday life. Averaging a couple of paragraphs each, these stories offer enough food for thought (and mood) to keep you going for months.


In non-fiction, watch for Colin Browne’s new book of essays, Entering Time: The Fungus Man Platters of Charles Edenshaw. Every good story is an origin story — and a mystery story — and in Entering Time, Browne ranges through the fields of art history, literature, ethnology, and myth to discover a parallel history of modernism within one of the world’s most subtle and sophisticated artistic and literary cultures.


There is much to look forward to in poetry!

Reading Sveva is award-winning author Daphne Marlatt’s response to the life and paintings of Sveva Caetani, an Italian émigré who grew up in Vernon, British Columbia. Bringing her own perspective as an immigrant and as a woman, Marlatt illuminates the life of this forgotten female artist whose work is a testament to the struggle of the female artist, and the search for a sense of belonging.

Once in Blockadia is a new collection of long and serial poems by Stephen Collis, who returns to the commons, and to his ongoing argument with romantic poet William Wordsworth, to rethink the relationship between human beings and the natural world in the Anthropocene Era.

In the thoughtful, yet playful poems in Ken Belford’s new book, slick reckoning, Belford builds a poetry experience the curious reader can open anywhere, read, and read on. Although the phrasing of his lines is unusual, Belford’s poetry is not easily forgotten. It’s not necessary to begin at the beginning or to read to the end to get a good sense of what this poet is about. Read a little, or read a lot; he’s worth it.

We are pleased to introduce Danielle LaFrance to the Talon list. Comprising experimental poetry and prose, Friendly Fire interrogates the male subjective experience of war and the gendered implications of camaraderie or “brotherhood” while aligning the seriousness of a war target with the frivolities of gossip.

We are also pleased to publish the debut collection by Anahita Jamali Rad, entitled for love and autonomy. In in, Jamali Rad deals with the stuff of everyday life: work and sex, friendship and love. Her critical attention to the structure of these social relations creates a poetics of trial and failure, questioning the very “culture” responsible for its making as she forges a way for the possibility of radical resistance in language.

Finally, look for the softcover edition of Fred Wah’s collected poems, Scree.


Drama will be plentiful too! We’ve got a full roster of fine Canadian plays planned:

A new play by Louis Patrick Leroux, False Starts (translated by the author and Alexander St-Laurent with Katia Grubisic), presents a series of determining moments between two people stuck reliving the same scene over and over, but in unexpected ways and in different genres (from diary to dramatic dialogue, film script to sound installation).

In another play, Frankie’s dad dies and her mom, Ava, can’t afford to live in the city anymore. The only asset they’re left with is a farmhouse situated on twenty acres of land far outside of town. Ava decides to move there and start an Ayurveda clinic on the property, giving her precocious and grieving daughter a new start. One problem presents itself, though: a squatter who won’t leave. Find out what happens to this sweet family in Lucia Frangione’s latest play, In a Blue Moon

Memory – personal, familial, and societal – is the central theme of You Will Remember Me, the new play by Governor General’s Award-winning playwright François Archambault. Translated by Bobby Theodore, this work follows a family’s struggle with dementia.

Drawn from his own experiences, Vittorio Rossi’s new comedy-drama, The Envelope, 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.

In Linda Gaboriau’s new translation of Yours Forever, Marie-Lou, the classic Michel Tremblay play, two sisters confront the memory of their parents’ death – and other long-buried memories and points of tension.


We hope you enjoy your summer immensely – and we hope you return to us for new reading material soon!