Talonbooks: 174 books

The editor of this lively assortment of reviews, interviews and other critical deliberations on contemporary Canadian drama has gathered material from books, theatre and scholarly journals; from major daily newspapers in Canada and abroad; from critics, academics, journalists and playwrights. This...

Eighteen-year-old Connor, an aspiring author whose fantastical stories foretell his growing struggle with depression, can’t wait to be free of his adverb-wielding, solve-it-all mother, Sharon. But six weeks after leaving for university, he drops out and returns home. Dan Mulano is an infatuated...

Canada’s top playwright sears the page with three new darkly comic plays that denounce political culture, individualism, and the accompanying moral depravity. The title play, Dead Metaphor, examines the collision of a politician’s personal and professional lives, complicated by a son’s return...

At the end of the Great War, to protect his village from the Spanish flu epidemic, a priest commissions an Italian painter to decorate the local church with a fresco dedicated to the Virgin Mary. The painter is to choose, among four local women all named Mary, a model for his work. Superstition collides with desire, and lies are unmasked.

In Canada’s first bilingual play, an award-winning classic, the English and the French-Canadian working class take on the Establishment. Three families and the neighbourhood delivery boy sit on balconies in the heat of a Montreal summer, forced to listen to election promises in both languages from the broadcast truck of Gaétan Bolduc, who is running for re-election for the Liberals.

Arguably the first North American play, this edition includes the original French script of Marc Lescarbot’s Theatre of Neptune in New France, two twentieth-century English translations, Ben Jonson’s Masque of Blackness, and an extensive historical and critical introduction by Jerry Wasserman.

The first book-length, critical study of George Bowering explores the relationship between his work and the arts.

Previously ignored or misunderstood by historians, the war between the Hwulmuhw or “People of the Land” and the colonial government of British Columbia remains of utmost significance in today’s world of unsettled First Nations land claims. Chris Arnett reconstructs the fascinating account of the...

Volume IV of The Salish People deals with the Sechelt and the South-Eastern tribes of Vancouver Island. This four-volume series collects for the first time field reports (circa 1895) written by ethnographer Charles Hill-Tout, who studied the anthropology of British Columbia, in the Pacific Northwest.

Multiple plot lines interweave with twentieth-century literary allusions as hapless bureaucrat P. attempts to secure delivery of a valuable cultural relic. Patrice Martin's ticklish tip of the hat to the writing of Franz Kafka also evokes the literary techniques of Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino,...

In the post-apocalyptic future, 50 years after the last government of turbo-liberals and its president-for-life have been elected, a group of researchers convenes a Congress to address the curious cultural phenomenon of the Baldwins, whose stories have been gathered and archived by the chroniclers. This novel of fragments represents contemporary prose at its most daring and experimental.

Moving with nomadic grace across the terrain of his previous book, Decompositions, the poetic language of Ken Belford in Internodes shares similar roots, traversing decades at the speed of a search query – pressing onward through Hazelton, the Bulkley Valley, and the unroaded head-waters of the Nass...

Field reports from nineteenth-century ethnographer Charles Hill-Tout are collected in this four-volume series, The Salish People. Volume II deals with the people of the Squamish and the Lillooet. It includes an account of the Origin Myth as told by a 100-year-old blind storyteller whose mother saw Captain Cook sail into Howe Sound in 1792. Hill-Tout’s “asides,” too, are uniquely informative.

These four volumes, edited by Ralph Maud, are rich in stories and factual details about the old customs of the Pacific Coast and Interior Salish in British Columbia. Each volume covers a specific geographical area. Volume 1 deals with the people of the Thompson and Okanagan. It includes stories told to Charles Hill-Tout by Chief Mischelle of Lytton in 1896.