Talonbooks: 174 books

It is the glorious second day of May, 1942. Seven women in this raucous Francophone working-class Montreal neighbourhood are pregnant – only one of them, “the fat woman,” is bearing a child of true love and affection. In this first of six novels that became his Chronicles of the Plateau Mont Royal, Tremblay provides a “divine comedy” of triumphs and tragedies.

Eddy is in existential crisis. He once had an enviable life, but now he’s separated from his wife and estranged from his son. What’s more, his garden has grown wild – just like his life. Written in multiple voices, with keen psychological insight, this examination of relationships and past wounds is filled with raucous warmth and humanity – and dark humor.

When the electricity inexplicably goes out nationwide, the mundanities of life gradually shift to the rigours of survival. In this post-apocalyptic setting, an unnamed mechanic jumps into his beat-up car and drives east, journeying 4,736 kilometres to reach his dying father. As the narrator’s...

Part courtroom drama and part social satire, Seeds presents an intelligent portrait of farming and scientific communities in conflict and at the same time penetrates the complex science of genetically modified crops. The play documents the 2004 Supreme Court of Canada showdown between Saskatchewan farmer...

Burning Vision sears a dramatic swath through the reactionary identity politics of race, gender and class, using the penetrating yellow-white light, the false sun of uranium and radium, derived from a coal black rock known as pitchblende, as a metaphor for the invisible, malignant evils everywhere poisoning our relationship to the earth and to each other.

Rita Joe is a Native girl who leaves the reservation for the city, only to die on skid row as a victim of white men’s violence and paternalistic attitudes towards First Nations peoples. As perhaps the best-known contemporary Canadian play and a poetic drama of enormous theatrical power, The Ecstasy...

Set in a hotel bar in Montreal on Remembrance Day, Bolsheviki has World War I veteran Harry “Rosie” Rollins telling young reporter Jerry Nines about his experience in the trenches. Rollins recalls men pissing their pants, losing limbs, and planning a revolt against their officers. The character of...

Surrealist dramatization of a notorious case involving mysterious deaths on Vancouver’s Skid Row. Cast of 11 women and 2 men.

In Inuit mythology, “sila” means air, climate, or breath. Bilodeau’s play of the same name examines the competing interests shaping the future of the Canadian Arctic and local Inuit population. Equal parts Inuit myth and contemporary Arctic policy, the play Sila features puppetry, spoken word poetry,...

Fuelled by equal parts outrage, intelligence, and wit, Fronteras Americanas recreates one person’s struggle to construct a home between two cultures, while exploding the images and constructs built up around Latinos and Latin America. This one-person play works through bold juxtapositions and satiric...

A small prairie community is blown apart when an audacious teenaged girl challenges long-held views of spirituality and sexuality. Suspected of being gay, she is brutalized by her classmates. This searing drama of bigotry and transcendence challenges the fallout of the Catholic Church's response to...

Pocahontas, Tonto, Injun Joe, and other First Nations characters discover they are characters and attempt to rewrite their stereotyped roles.Dead White Writer on the Floor uses two literary conventions – theatre of the absurd and mystery novels – to create one of the funniest and most thought-provoking plays ever about identity politics.Cast of 5 men and 1 woman.

Six plays, united only by the fact that they take place in one and the same suburban motel room: Problem Child, Criminal Genius, Risk Everything, Adult Entertainment, Featuring Loretta, and The End of Civilization. Transients, lovers, the haunted, the hunted, the desperate, the dumb, each “strut and fret their hour upon the stage and then are heard of no more.

Music has long been considered beneficial in enhancing cognitive skills, and some have even suggested that music constitutes its own category of brain function; that it is, in fact, a separate and distinct type of thought. As is sex, which can produce, aside from children, complete dysfunction, confused...