Talonbooks: 174 books

In his latest collaboration with director Daniel Brooks, MacIvor plays the role of Leonard, who narrates the events leading up to his murder while trying to understand them himself. Through the course of the play, we peer behind the curtains of his neighbourhood as MacIvor transforms into the multiple characters who bear witness to Leonard’s life and death.

George F. Walker has been one of Canada’s most prolific and popular playwrights since his career in theatre began in the early 1970s. Since that time, he has written more than twenty plays and has created screenplays for several award-winning Canadian television series, including Due South, The...

Two grown sisters confront the memory of their parents’ tragic death. This revised edition of Forever Yours, Marie-Lou, which played at the 1990 Stratford Festival, is John Van Burek and Bill Glassco’s translation of Michel Tremblay’s original French text. Cast of 3 women and 1 man.

This compelling drama explores the ethical controversy and public policy surrounding reproductive technologies. Wendy Lill has lived almost all the roles the play dramatizes: NDP critic for both culture and persons with disabilities, she came to politics after a career in community health care and as a reporter for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Cast of 2 women and 5 men.

Drawing from MacLeod’s experience working with mentally handicapped adults and children, this play celebrates the personal challenges of both self-destruction and self-affirmation so vital to the process of identity creation. At the play’s heart is Jhana, whose character begs the question whether the other characters, in their own ways, are any less handicapped. Cast of 2 women and 2 men.

New York City, 1928. Master thief Mac must join an FBI sting operation against a cadre of corrupt bankers. Music, murder, and mayhem ensue, both at the speakeasy where criminals scheme and on Wall Street where financiers conspire. This satirical play with songs exposes the world of corporate crime...

Where the Blood Mixes is meant to expose the shadows below the surface of the author’s First Nations heritage, and to celebrate its survivors. Though torn down years ago, the memories of their Residential School still live deep inside the hearts of those who spent their childhoods there. For some,...

A woman returns to cottage country where, years before, she and her sister both fell in love with local boys, and their lives changed unalterably. Cinematic in its feel and pacing, recalling the 1950s genre of Dirty Dancing and My American Cousin, That Summer is a meditation on what endures of fleeting moments. Cast of 5 women and 3 men.

Tales of the Emperor is based on the life of Qin Shi Huang (circa 260–210 BCE), the “First Emperor” – he who unified China, gave it his name, built the Great Wall, entombed an army of terra cotta soldiers, authored legalism, erased history, insinuated governance, and established paranoia as a...

Raucous, reckless, and rude, the women of Les Belles Soeurs shamelessly share their most secret hopes and fears, complain stridently about their friends and relatives, and fantasize wistfully about escaping the misogynist drudgery of their lives. With the premiere of this play in 1968, Joual, the distinctive...

In these quirkily imaginative short stories about writing and writers, the scrivener Quartermain (our “Bartleby”) goes her stubborn way haunted by Pauline Johnson, Malcolm Lowry, Robin Blaser, Daphne Marlatt, and a host of other literary forebears. Who is writing whom, these stories ask in their...

A celebration of the late Harry Robinson, one of the great storytellers of the Interior Salish people of North America. This collection chronicles not only the treasure house of a vibrant First Nations culture, but also the sweeping changes which took place in that culture as it began to interact with new colonists. With his approval, Wickwire recorded his stories.

Margaret Atwood’s writing, according to Davey, reveals not only an extraordinary facility with language, but also a deep mistrust of it as something shaped by an instrumental and largely male culture. Her language directs its readers to a hidden level of itself – unspoken, symbolic, gestural – and away from denotative meaning.

Cosmophilia means “love of ornament.” These poems might be thought of as elaborations – deliberate acts of imagination – that ornament the objects or events that inspired their creation, by emphasizing their complexity.The central poems are drawn from the poet’s memories of time spent with her...