Talonbooks: 174 books

In this probing character study, Rideout fashions a hypothetical 1969 meeting in a bar in St. Petersburg, Florida, between Quebec playwright Michel Tremblay and an individual whom he believes to be a truly great writer – beat generation author Jack Kerouac, whose Francophone mother affectionately...

Kenneth James Hughes explores the history of language as a made thing. Signs of Literature is a linguistic and structuralist primer – and an excellent companion to glossaries of literary terms and introductory critical texts. The surprise of the book for the lay reader is that it is so richly entertaining.

It’s October 1944. During a brief respite from the aerial bombardment of London, Sebastian Wigrum absconds from his small flat and disappears into the fog for a walk in the Unreal City. This is our first and only encounter with the enigmatic man we come to discover decades later through more than one...

Taking as her alter-ego Lily Briscoe – the painter in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse – Mary Meigs portrays herself, her family, and her friends in Lily Briscoe: A Self-Portrait, a book that is both autobiography and memoir. She describes the three major decisions of her life: “not to marry, to be an artist,” and to listen to her “own voices.”

In 1914, Simon Dulac enrolls in a Canadian contingent of military police, a perfect cover for his real ambition-to comb the battlefields of Europe unhindered, searching for legendary Templar treasure. There, Dulac encounters Nell, affecting and skilled, who has come to the trenches to practice suturing...

Artist and philosopher Hervé Fischer heralds an inevitable shift from 35mm to digital distribution, which will move what has until now existed only on the margins of the “entertainment industry”-independent film, amateur film, documentary and other genres-into starring roles, and explains how...