Talonbooks: 174 books

War Cantata translated by Keith Turnbull How far will humanity go in its quest for power? Why do we desire to eliminate each other through war? War Cantata looks at ways the impulse for violence is transmitted from one generation to the next; for example, when a father teaches his son hatred to transform...

A comprehensive look at how Canadian, particularly British Columbian, society “reveals itself” through its courtroom performances in Aboriginal title litigation. Focusing in particular on the Gitksan and Wet’suwet’en case, the book traces the trial of Delgamuukw. v. Regina from 1987 and 1991...

Bowering’s life in the game unfolds in a picaresque memoir of the storied ballparks of the poet’s youthful dreams.

Discovered in her papers as a handwritten manuscript in 2008, Jane Rule's autobiography is a rich and culturally significant document that follows the first twenty-one years of her life.In writing about her formative years, she is indeed "taking" the measure of her life, assessing its contours...

George Bowering was born in Penticton, where his great-grandfather Willis Brinson lived, and Bowering has never been all that far from the Okanagan Valley in his heart and imagination. Early in the twenty-first century, he was made a permanent citizen of Oliver. Bowering has family up and down the...

Three young Native American sisters and their mother board a bus bound for Los Angeles, leaving home as part of a 1950s government mandate to relocate reserve Indians to urban centres. This assimilationist policy was one focus of Métis playwright Marie Clements’s research when she was commissioned...

In 1979, a Native girl died of a ruptured appendix in an Alert Bay, B.C. hospital. Dara Culhane Speck uses interviews and public records to describe how this small, isolated community took on the local hospital, provincial and federal ministries of health, and national media, because the tragedy’s implications reached beyond one child, one physician, one town, even one century.

In compiling this collection of seven life stories from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, the editors set out to create a space for the voices of women who are seldom heard on their own terms – the words of people who are publicly visible yet who, due to the blur of preconceptions that surround the inner city, remain unseen.

Welcome to the small town of Tartan Cross, Nova Scotia, where skeletons rattle in closets and past histories are so intertwined that the lives of four fortysomething, eccentric characters have become so complicated that something needs to change. In the comedy, Odd Ducks, award-winning playwright...

A history of modern Iran, and a revealing first-hand account by Iran’s first female vice-president, Massoumeh Ebtekar, of the 1979 revolutionary students who captured the American embassy in Tehran. Ebtekar sets out to correct decades of misrepresentation by the Western media of what the aims of the Iranian students and the populist revolution they personified were, and have since remained.

From his plundering of elements from B-movies and melodrama in early plays like Zastrozzi and Beyond Mozambique to the uneasy satire and the class politics of the East End and the Power plays, and now most recently in the shape of “Suburban Motel,” a cycle of six new plays, George F. Walker has not...

Winner of the 2015 Jessie Richardson Award for Outstanding Original Script, Inside the Seed is a contemporary version of Oedipus Rex reimagined as a darkly comic political thriller.Mirroring controversial real-life scientific and corporate controversies, Inside the Seed concerns a once-brilliant scientist...

The events at Oka in 1990 saw the Canadian Armed Forces confront some 40 armed Mohawk “Warriors” who were defending their community’s resistance against a further colonial encroachment on their native lands. “Lasagna,” one of the Mohawk leaders, was “unmasked” as Ronald Cross. This is his story – and the story of the ongoing struggles of Native nations in land disputes.

In the seemingly endless small-town summer of 1968, a twelve-year-old girl contemplates with dread the social prospects of her fast-approaching enrollment in a class for gifted students at the local high school, arranged by her mother who “blows up” at the drop of a hat-she doesn’t intend to let...