Talonbooks: 174 books

Southern California in the late 1950s has the look and feel of a midsummer morning-bright and still. For two young brothers, the wide world is full of promise. Together they set out to explore it as one, ever alert to the sound of their mother’s whistle calling them home. But by late afternoon,...

Boas, Teit, Hill-Tout, Barbeau, Swanton, Jenness, the luminaries of field research in British Columbia, are discussed herein, and their work in Indian folklore evaluated. Other scholars, amateurs, and Native informants of the past and present are given consideration, making this book a comprehensive...

In Birth of a Bookworm, Michel Tremblay takes the reader on a tour of the books that have had a formative influence on the birth and early development of his creative imagination; the physical and emotional world of his childhood is celebrated as the fertile ground on which his new, vivid way of seeing and imagining is built.

A fusty academic has fallen in love with a young actor who works as a salesman while waiting for his big break; however, the academic must learn to make room in his life for the actor’s four-year-old son. This is Tremblay’s first novel to be inspired by experiences from his own life.

The box closet was a real closet in the attic of the family house in Washington, D.C. in which Mary Meigs grew up. Letters and diaries were found there after her mother’s death in 1958, and when Meigs read them she decided that they were the material for a book. The result is a moving portrait of a family.

Many of the stories in Okanagan storyteller Harry Robinson’s second collection feature the shoo-MISH, or “nature helpers” that assist humans and sometimes provide them with special powers. Some tell of individuals who use these powers to heal themselves; others tell of Indian doctors with the power to heal others. Still others tell of power encounters of various kinds.

The story continues … The second in Michel Tremblay’s new series of novels presents two very different lives. We meet Maria as she leaves the city of Providence, Rhode Island, pregnant and alone. Two years later, we also meet Maria’s older daughter, Rhéauna, as she disembarks the train at Windsor...

As a way to draw visitors to their isolated fishing village on Quebec’s North Shore, the tourist bureau commissions a documentary film recreating life as it was lived there in the 1940s and 50s. To gather material for the project, the filmmaker is sent in search of Rose Brouillard, now an old woman...

In the heart of the Latin Quarter, meeting place of marginal characters of all sorts, Céline Poulin works the night shift at a cheap and popular restaurant, Le Sélect, serving hamburger platters and spaghetti and meatballs to student misfits, transvestites, hookers and queens from the Main-Montreal’s...

A vivid, contemporary travelogue by Fred A. Reed. From Bosnian actuality to Macedonian potentiality, Reed’s travels in this region lead him to encounter a landscape inscribed with a shocking testimony: ethno-racialist aspirations remain the only coin in which peoples feel they can express their belonging,...

Autobiographical pieces about how movies shaped the life of young Michel Tremblay, who later became Canada’s most important playwright. Among others, he talks about Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Cinderella, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Parade of the Wooden Soldiers, Orphée and The Night Visitors, and about how each led to his discovery of his emerging emotional sensibilities.

Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries the majority of the English common lands were enclosed, by decree and by force, depriving communities of their independence and self-sufficiency. The resistance to capitalism’s “primitive accumulation,” registered in recurring peasant revolts and nighttime...

Raise the windsock. Read the compass. Ride where the wind wills it. Late 2010. From the end of fall to the beginning of winter, Daniel Canty becomes a wind seeker. Aboard the Blue Rider, a venerable midnight-blue Ford Ranger crested with a weathervane and a retractable windsock, he surrenders...

Willy, a troubled but charismatic gay kid, flees Cape Breton Island for Montreal with hopes of forgetting a newly broken heart by starting a new life in the big city. There, he retreats into a world of fantasy and anonymity, and soon goes missing without a trace. As rumours fly, he is remembered and reinvented by the play’s characters.