news | Wednesday July 23, 2014
Summer is in full swing, but autumn will come eventually. Let us not dwell on the unpleasant things of life – but let us get excited about great new books! And there are some truly great ones coming. Here they all are:
Poetry
- Peacock Blue is the much-anticipated collected poems of Phyllis Webb whose work was called by Northrop Frye a “landmark of Canadian literature” and whose writing career has spanned fifty years. All of Webb’s published, unpublished, and uncollected works are now available to her readers and fans, established and new alike ($39.95).
- [OR] is Brian Henderson’s eleventh volume of poetry and first with Talon. In it Henderson explores language as it encodes/decodes and conceals/reveals.
- ryan fitzpatrick’s Fortified Castles starts with the lyric statement as a point of interrogation and asks what might cause a retreat into the walls of the self ($16.95).
- Assembling the Morrow (whose cover art is also used on the cover of our Fall catalogue) is a poetics of sleep by Sandra Huber, who spent nine months as a resident writer at a sleep laboratory via Artist-in-Labs Switzerland exploring the question: to be alive, must we be awake? ($19.95)
- Peace in Duress is the latest collection by Mohawk spoken-word artist Janet Rogers, and its poems pulse with the rhythms of the drum and are inflected with the vocality of activism ($16.95).
- dream/arteries by Phinder Dulai is an exploration of the Komagata Maru, its history and passengers, in memory of the centenary of this ship’s passage to Vancouver and the incident which both reinforced and redefined immigration policies in an increasingly multicultural Canada ($16.95).
Drama
- Christina, The Girl King by Michel Marc Bouchard explores the life of little-known historical figure Queen Christina of Sweden, a feminist before her time ($17.95).
- Tear the Curtain!, a psychological thriller set in 1930’s Vancouver, comes from collaborators Jonathon Young, Kevin Kerr, and Kim Collier ($18.95).
- Larry Tremblay returns to our list with a book containing two plays, War Cantata / Child Object, both of which deal in some way with the human impulse for violence and our propensity for instilling it in children ($16.95).
- Michel and Tí-Jean, a probing character study by George Rideout, imagines a meeting between an aging Jack Kerouac and an up-and-coming Michel Tremblay in St. Petersburg, Florida in 1969 – just months before Kerouac passes away ($17.95).
Fiction
Non-Fiction
The Fall 2014 Talonbooks catalogue is now online for your browsing pleasure, and forthcoming books are listed in the right-hand column of this website. See a cover that intrigues you? Click through to the book page to read all about each title or author.
See, the end of summer won’t be all bad; every season is reading season!