Talonbooks fall 2016 catalogue by Talonbooks

Talonbooks

Fall 2016 Catalogue

Talonbooks Awards and Prizes, Recent Highlights

Contents

2016

1 14 16

Alcuin Book Design Award: Dina Del Bucchia and Daniel Zomparelli, Rom Com (Honourable mention)

New Releases Recent Releases Sales Representation and Ordering Information

Man Booker International Prize: Maylis de Kerangal, Mend the Living, translated by Jessica Moore (Longlisted)

2015 BC Book Prize, Poetry: Cecily Nicholson, From the Poplars (Winner) Edgerton Foundation New Play Award: Morris Panych, The Shoplifters (Winner) Cole Foundation Prize for Translation: (Quebec Writers’ Federation Awards Madeleine Gagnon, As Always, translated by Phyllis Aronoff and Howard Scott (Finalist) Governor General’s Literary Award, Drama: Bryden MacDonald, Odd Ducks (Finalist) Governor General’s Literary Award, Drama: Marcus Youssef and James Long, Winners and Losers (Finalist)

Talonbooks 278 East 1st Avenue Vancouver, BC V5T 1A6 phone: (604) 444-4889 toll-free: (888) 445-4176 fax: (604) 444-4119 info@talonbooks.com www.talonbooks.com

GST is not included in Canadian prices quoted in this catalogue. GST # R88535-3235 All information in this catalogue is subject to change without notice.

2014 BC Book Prize, Poetry: Jordan Abel, The Place of Scraps (Winner) BC Book Prize, Non-Fiction: Bev Sellars, They Called Me Number One (Finalist)

Talonbooks

Burt Award for First Nations, Métis, and Inuit Literature: Bev Sellars, They Called Me Number One (Third Prize winner) City of Victoria Butler Book Prize: M.A.C. Farrant, The World Afloat (Winner) George Ryga Award for Social Awareness in Literature: Bev Sellars, They Called Me Number One (Winner) Gerald Lampert Memorial Award: Jordan Abel, The Place of Scraps (Finalist) Governor General’s Literary Award, Translation: Michel Marc Bouchard, Christina, The Girl King, translated by LInda Gaboriau (Finalist)

On the cover:

Governor General’s Literary Award, Translation: Michel Nadeau, And Slowly Beauty, translated by Maureen Labonté (Finalist)

Go Forth, 2011

Lambda Literary Award, Drama: Michel Marc Bouchard, Tom at the Farm, translated by Linda Gaboriau (Winner)

oil on linen

Susan Bee 20" x 16"

Sheri-D Wilson Golden Beret Award: bill bissett (Winner)

2013 BC Book Prize, Poetry: Colin Browne, The Properties (Finalist) ReLit Award, Fiction: Garry Thomas Morse, Minor Episodes / Major Ruckus (Finalist) Sunburst Award: Martine Desjardins, Maleficium, translated by Fred A. Reed and David Homel (Winner)

2012 BC Book Prize: Garry Thomas Morse, Discovery Passages (Finalist) Lambda Literary Award, Lesbian Memoir: Jane Rule, Taking My Life (Finalist)

Talonbooks gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund, and the Province of British Columbia through the British Columbia Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.

Talonbooks New Releases

U Girl meredith quartermain

Meredith Quartermain is known across Canada for her award-winning, cross-genre writing. Vancouver Walking won the new Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, Nightmarker was a finalist for the Vancouver Book Award, and Recipes from the Red Planet, her book of flash-fictions, was a finalist for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. In Rupert’s Land, her first novel, a town girl helps a residential-school runaway in Alberta in the 1930s. Quartermain was the 2012 writer-in-residence at the Vancouver Public Library, where she led workshops on songwriting and writing about neighbourhoods, and enjoyed doing manuscript consultations with many writers from the Greater Vancouver community. She’s now continuing these activities as Poetry Mentor in the Writer’s Studio Program at Simon Fraser University. She has taught English at the University of British Columbia and Capilano College and led workshops at the Naropa Summer Writing Program, the Kootenay School of Writing, and the Toronto New School of Writing.

ISBN 978-1-77201-040-4; ebook forthcoming Fiction: Literary 5 × 8.5; 272 pp; Trade paper $19.95 CAN / $19.95 US November

Award-winning author Meredith Quartermain’s second novel and seventh book, U Girl, is a coming-of-age story set in Vancouver in 1972, a city crossed between love-in hip and forest-corp square. Frances Nelson escapes her small-town background to attend first-year university in the big city. “You’ve got to find the great love,” her new friend Dagmar tells her. But what makes it love instead of sex? And what kind of love bonds friends? She gleans surprising answers from Jack, a construction worker; Dwight, a mechanic and dope peddler; Carla, a bar waitress who’s seen better days; and her English professor and sailing friend, Nigel. U Girl blurs the line between fiction and reality as Frances begins to write a novel about the people she comes to know. With seamless metafictional play and an engagement with place that has come to be Quartermain’s definitive style, U Girl tells the story of a woman’s struggle to be taken seriously – to be equal to men despite her sexual attraction to them, and to dislodge accepted narratives of gender and class in the institution of the university during the “free love” era. In this sprawling and perceptive novel, Quartermain takes us through sexual experimentation, drugs, working at menial jobs, meditating on Wreck Beach, sailing up through Desolation Sound, and studying at the University of British Columbia. U Girl pays homage to local haunts and literary influences in equal measure. Quartermain brings to Canadian literature a wholesome and vital female perspective in this long-awaited bildungsroman.

Praise for I, Bartleby “Wickedly smart and fun to read.”

– Malahat Review

Meredith Quartermain’s I, Bartleby is also available from Talonbooks.

2 Talonbooks New Releases

The Days Forecasts, Warnings, Advice

m.a.c. farrant

M.A.C. Farrant is the author of fourteen works of fiction, non-fiction, memoir, and over one hundred book reviews and essays for the Vancouver Sun and Globe and Mail. Her memoir, My Turquoise Years, which she adapted for the stage, premiered April 4 to May 4, 2013 at the Arts Club Theatre’s Granville Island Stage in Vancouver. Her novel, The Strange Truth About Us: A Novel of Absence, was chosen by the Globe and Mail as a Best Book of 2012. The World Afloat: Miniatures, a collection of very short fiction, won the City of Victoria Butler Book Prize for 2014. A full-time writer currently residing in North Saanich, British Columbia, Farrant’s work has been nominated for many awards, including the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, National Magazine Awards, Victoria Book Prize, and two Jessie Richardson Theatre Awards, among others. She has taught writing at the University of Victoria, Victoria School of Writing, and Banff Centre for the Arts, and was writer-in-residence at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.

ISBN 978-1-77201-007-7; ebook forthcoming Fiction: Literary 5 × 8.5; 128 pp; Trade paper $17.95 CAN / $17.95 US September

It’s hard to worry about the future when you’re laughing at the hilarious absurdity of daily life. The days we live go by like slugs eating their way through leaves; everything changes, yet nothing changes, and the years soon accumulate. Who doesn’t read their daily horoscope, searching for guidance about what’s to come, how to live? What is life, but ordinary and special days, time passing, humour, sex, death, and love (making it all bearable)? All these are repeated gestures that run through The Days, a kind of absurdist guidebook made up of ninety unconventional, very short stories collected in three tight sections. This is fiction that thinks, fiction that cuts to the chase, told with Farrant’s trademark humour and acerbic wit. Her miniatures gracefully articulate the contemporary zeitgeist: anxiety about the future coupled with absurd mundanity. Somehow, always, Farrant captures the moments that buoy us up, crystallizing the experiences keeping us from being overwhelmed while calling our attention to overwhelming truths. Let yourself be excited and delighted. Farrant’s artfully spare stories – averaging a couple of paragraphs each – offer enough food for thought (and mood) to keep you going for months. Dip in occasionally to be reminded of the strangeness of us, or read from beginning to end and immerse yourself in a slightly skewed version of reality – one in which people are frank and the world is unforgiving as it shimmers like light on water, sometimes blinding, always dazzling.

Praise for The World Afloat “The World Afloat is deftly captured with grace, humour, and enviable creativity. It is the book any writer wished she wrote, that inspires any reader to pick up her pen and give it a go.” – Victoria Book Prizes Jury, 2014 “Some pieces are complete stories, but short. Others are teasers or hints or scenes. And some are small works of genius – laugh out loud funny or thoughtful. She has perfected this technique – nay, it is an art.” – Coastal Spectator

Please visit talonbooks.com for a complete listing of M.A.C. Farrant’s available books.

Talonbooks New Releases

Reading Sveva daphne marlatt

Daphne Marlatt’s work in oral history (Opening Doors), in two novels (Ana Historic and Taken), and in earlier poetry (Steveston, in particular) has been concerned with the lives of immigrants to the West Coast. Marlatt arrived with her family as a child immigrant herself in 1951. Her early involvement with the TISH poets and their interest in Black Mountain poetics in the 1960s influenced the development of her poetics, further shaped by her subsequent interest in feminist poetry and theory, particularly the work of Nicole Brossard and Erin Moure. She was co-founding editor of the innovative prose magazine periodics and the bilingual feminist journal Tessera. In 2006, her contemporary Noh play, The Gull, was staged as the first full cross-cultural production of a Canadian Noh play in Canada and won the international Uchimura Naoya Prize. In 2005, Marlatt was appointed to the Order of Canada in recognition of a lifetime of service to Canadian culture. In 2009, her long poem The Given won the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, and in 2012 she received the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award.

ISBN 978-1-77201-016-9; ebook forthcoming Poetry: Literary 6 × 9.75; 112 pp; Trade paper $17.95 CAN / $17.95 US October

Reading Sveva is award-winning author Daphne Marlatt’s response to the life and paintings of Sveva Caetani, an Italian émigré who grew up in Vernon, British Columbia. Daughter of an Italian prince, leftist, and scholar of Islam, Sveva grew up with the multilingual and highly cultured European traditions of her parents who moved to Vernon in 1921, when Fascism was on the rise in Italy. At age eighteen, after her father’s death in 1939, Sveva was forced into home-seclusion for twenty-five years with her grieving mother. When her mother died, she entered the community of Vernon and flourished as a high school teacher and respected painter. Her life experiences took the form of an extensive series of dry-brush paintings modelled on the structure of Dante’s Divine Comedy, as well as poems and philosophical commentary. Marlatt’s lasting interest in the lives of immigrants to the West Coast continues in Reading Sveva, a thoughtful collection of ekphrastic and lyric poems that respond to Sveva’s insular life, the late beginnings of her artistic grown in 1960, and the meaning of home. Bringing her own perspective as an immigrant and as a woman, Marlatt illuminates the life of this forgotten female artist whose work is a testament to the struggle of the female artist, and the search for a sense of belonging.

“Everything that Marlatt has published is instinct with caring, intelligence and a feel for technical innovation.” – Toronto Star “Marlatt’s language conveys a rich sensuality, a sensibility honed to a fine edge.” – Judith Fitzgerald

Daphne Marlatt’s The Gull, Liquidities: Vancouver Poems Then and Now, Selected Writing: Wet Work, and This Tremor Love Is are also available from Talonbooks.

4 Talonbooks New Releases

Once in Blockadia stephen collis

Stephen Collis is a poet, editor, and professor. His many books of poetry include The Commons, On the Material, awarded the BC Book Prize for Poetry, To the Barricades, and (with Jordan Scott) DECOMP. He has also written two books of literary criticism, a book of essays on the Occupy Movement, and a novel. In 2014 he was sued by U.S. energy giant Kinder Morgan, whose lawyers read his writing in court as “evidence,” and in 2015 he was awarded the Nora and Ted Sterling Prize in Support of Controversy. He lives near Vancouver, on unceded Coast Salish Territory, and teaches at Simon Fraser University. His website is www. beatingthebounds.com.

ISBN 978-1-77201-015-2 Poetry 6 × 8.5; 144 pp; Trade paper $18.95 CAN / $18.95 US October

In this collection of long and serial poems, Stephen Collis returns to the commons, and to his ongoing argument with romantic poet William Wordsworth, to rethink the relationship between human beings and the natural world in the Anthropocene. Collis circumambulates Tar Sands tailings ponds and English lakes – and stands in the path of pipelines, where on Burnaby Mountain in 2014 he was sued for $5.6 million by energy giant Kinder Morgan, whose lawyers glossed Collis’s writing in court by noting that “underneath the poetry is a description of how the barricade was constructed.” Called by Eden Robinson “the most dangerous poet in Canada,” in Once in Blockadia Collis is in search of how we can continue to resist – as we only begin to understand the extent of our complicity and the depths of the predicament we are in. The bulk of Once in Blockadia is made up of two long sequences evolving from found texts, and two long poems that engage with Wordsworth. The two found texts relate to two blockades Collis was involved in: one blocking the flood of commodities into the Port of Vancouver, and the other blocking the potential flood of oil out of Vancouver. In both cases the poetry and “notes” that follow offer glimpses into the documentary “fact” of events, the resistance behind the blockade, the reasons for them, and the complex of resistant affects driving the events. The two Wordsworthian long poems involve two walks – one in the Alberta Tar Sands, and the other in Wordsworth’s beloved Grasmere. In the first instance Wordsworthian description is applied to the impossible to aestheticize Tar Sands; in the second, Wordsworth’s own beloved home is revealed not as an alternative to the destruction of extraction, but as conditioned, surrounded, and structured by it.

Please visit talonbooks.com for a complete listing of Stephen Collis’s available books.

Talonbooks New Releases

for love and autonomy anahita jamali rad

Anahita Jamali Rad was born in Shiraz, Iran, and now lives on unceded Coast Salish Territories a.k.a. Vancouver. Anahita Jamali Rad is the author and binder of handmade chapbooks such as Un In Uni Form, Y ou and Me Baby, Patterns, Heart/Felt/Poems, and say what you like about my glasses, but i never get drunk and drank confused when i’m out with the working classes. Alongside Danielle LaFrance, she co-organizes the women’s critical reading and discussion group, About a Bicycle, and co-edits a biannual journal of the same name. She studied Philosophy at the University of British Columbia and is currently doing a diploma in Publishing at Langara College.

ISBN 978-1-77201-017-6 Poetry 5.5 × 8.5; 96 pp; Trade paper $16.95 CAN; $16.95 US October

Anahita Jamali Rad’s debut book of poetry juxtaposes Marxist economics with pop culture lyrics, from FKA Twigs to Sonic Youth, tangling the “You & I” of relationships and social identification. She asks: How is it possible to communicate when the “I” speaks from the margins? Who is the “I” when Motown’s doo-wop and post-punk’s Telecaster jangles shake up the body’s rhythm? for love and autonomy speaks from a place of discomfort, where internalized pop songs mutate communication and meaning under the guises of individuality and romanticism. Jamali Rad’s “I” is highly textured, musical, and suspect. Her poems bring us together with their rebellious voices – only to push us away into alienation when mimicry falls flat, when the “I” loses its context, when we become oppressed, thingified, dependent, and belligerent. Jamali Rad deals with the stuff of everyday life: work and sex, friendship and love. Her critical attention to the structure of these social relations creates a poetics of trial and failure, questioning the very “culture” responsible for its making as she forges a way for the possibility of radical resistance in language.

6 Talonbooks New Releases

Friendly Fire danielle lafrance

Danielle LaFrance is an MA student, occasional librarian, and poet based in Vancouver. She is the author of Species Branding as well as the chapbook Pink Slip. She co-curates About a Bicycle, a self-identified women’s critical theory reading and journal series. A forthcoming poetry project, Susan Aged 32, follows Susan, an analyzed subject, in hopes of escaping her role in/as a case study.

ISBN 978-1-77201-018-3 Poetry 5.5 × 8.5; 112 pp; Trade paper $17.95 CAN / $17.95 US October

Comprising experimental poetry and prose, Friendly Fire interrogates the male subjective experience of war and the gendered implications of camaraderie or “brotherhood” while aligning the seriousness of a war target with the frivolities of gossip: “MILITARY LINGO SUBLIMATES SMACK TALK FROM HERE ON IN.” Friendly Fire employs a character named H.S. (also to be read as “his”) as a filter for engaging with and through real-life stories of friendly fire. In the first section, the Tarnak Farm Incident (where four Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan were killed by American Air Force pilot Harry Schmidt) is used as source material, intersecting with questions about receiving a “pink slip” from one’s employer and the mental and physical conditions endured by fighter pilots (suppressed appetite, prescribed sedatives and amphetamines to regulate sleep, and stress tolerance). Reductionist language is used to describe friendship in the 21st century (forced affect in the workplace and Facebook friends). Act I of LaFrance’s first book, Species Branding, ends with the line: “crippled on my last leg. where are our friends?” It is a question that has carried forward into Friendly Fire, acting as the connective tissue between these two texts.

Talonbooks New Releases

Entering Time The Fungus Man Platters of Charles Edenshaw

colin browne

Colin Browne is a poet studying the Surrealist fascination with the art of the Northwest Coast. He curated the 2016 Emily Carr-Wolfgang Paalen art exhibit at Vancouver Art Gallery titled I Had an Interesting French Artist to See Me This Summer. Poetry collections include the critically acclaimed Ground Water (2002), nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Award and Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize; The Shovel (2007), shortlisted for the 2008 ReLit Award; The Properties (2012), nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize; and The Hatch (2015). Browne’s films include Linton Garner: I Never Said Goodbye (2003), Father and Son (1992), and White Lake (1989), which was nominated for a Genie for Best Feature Length Documentary. Browne has recently retired from teaching production, screenwriting, and film history at Simon Fraser University’s School for the Contemporary Arts.

ISBN 978-1-77201-039-8 Non-fiction: Native American Art 6 × 9; 128 pp; Trade paper; Photos $17.95 CAN / $17.95 US October

During the groundbreaking Charles Edenshaw exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2013, poet Colin Browne found himself returning often to study three large argillite platters carved by the Haida master in the late 1800s. Produced several years apart, each depicts an identical scene at the same moment: two frightened figures in a canoe appear to be on a mission. One is the Raven, in supernatural form, brandishing a spear; the other, in the stern, is a human-like figure with a circular head. On one platter he holds a paddle; on the other, his arms are raised in a state of panic. He is the helmsman, known as Fungus, or Fungus Man, or Biscuit Man. The Raven and Fungus Man appear early on in the Haida epic poem “Raven Travelling,” not long after the Raven releases human men from a clamshell. Their mission is to enable men and women to go forth and multiply. The three platters, celebrated not only for their craftsmanship but also for their insight into the psyche, are rarely brought together in one place, and the fact that Edenshaw returned, with a sense of humour, to this primal scene, suggests that the theme was as important to him as it was to his contemporary, Sigmund Freud. Browne launches his unexpected journey of discovery with a simple question: “Who was Fungus, or Fungus Man, and why did he become the one responsible for the miracle of human procreation?” Every good story is an origin story — and a mystery story — and in Entering Time: The Fungus Man Platters of Charles Edenshaw, Browne ranges through the fields of art history, literature, ethnology, and myth to discover a parallel history of modernism within one of the world’s most subtle and sophisticated artistic and literary cultures. The text is supplemented by an interview with visual artist Neil Campbell, whose recent paintings speak to Fungus Man’s art-historical echoes and contemporary relevance.

Colin Browne’s Ground Water, The Hatch, The Properties, and The Shovel are also available from Talonbooks.

8 Talonbooks New Releases

Scree The Collected Earlier Poems, 1962–1991

fred wah Edited and introduced by Jeff Derksen

Fred Wah’s career has spanned six decades and a range of formal styles and preoccupations. Scree collects Wah’s concrete and sound poetry of the 1960s, his landscape-centric work of the 1970s, and his ethnicity-oriented poems of the 1980s. Wah was a founding member of the avant-garde TISH group, which helped turn Canadian poetry, in the West in particular, to a focus on language. He has said that his “writing has been sustained, primarily, by two interests: racial hybridity and the local.” Most of Wah’s early work is out of print. This collection allows readers to (re)discover this groundbreaking work. The volume contains: Fred Wah was born in Swift Current, Saskatchewan, in 1939 and grew up in the West Kootenay region of British Columbia. After graduate work with Robert Creeley and Charles Olson, he returned to the Kootenays in the late 1960s, founding the writing program at David Thompson University Centre (DTUC). A pioneer of online publishing, Wah has mentored a generation of some of the most exciting new voices in poetry today. Of his seventeen books of poetry, is a door received the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, Waiting for Saskatchewan received the Governor General’s Award, and So Far was awarded the Stephanson Award for Poetry. Diamond Grill, a bio-fiction about hybridity and growing up in a small-town Chinese-Canadian café, won the Howard O’Hagan Award for Short Fiction, and his collection of critical writing, Faking It: Poetics and Hybridity, received the Gabrielle Roy Prize. Wah was appointed to the Order of Canada in 2012. He served as Canada’s Parliamentary Poet Laureate from 2011 to 2013. Jeff Derksen is a founding member of Vancouver’s writerrun centre, the Kootenay School of Writing. His poetry and critical writing on art, urbanism, and text have been published in Europe and North America.

ISBN 978-0-88922-948-8 Poetry 6 × 9; 646 pp; Trade paper $29.95 CAN / $29.95 US November

Lardeau (1965) Mountain (1967) Among (1972) Tree (1972) Earth (1974) Pictograms from the Interior of B.C. (1975) Loki Is Buried at Smoky Creek (1980) Owner’s Manual (1981) Breathin’ My Name with a Sigh (1981) Grasp the Sparrow’s Tail (1982) Waiting for Saskatchewan (1985) Rooftops (1988) So Far (1991) The collection has been organized according to a chronology of composition (rather than a chronology of original publication): this reveals new connections and thematic trajectories in the body of work as a whole, and makes the book an eminently “teachable” volume. The book includes full-colour facsimiles of two early books, Earth and Tree, reproduced to show the “hands-on” object-based aspect of chapbook publishing.

Fred Wah’s Is a Door, Selected Poems: Loki Is Buried at Smoky Creek, Sentenced to Light, and the hardcover edition of Scree: The Collected Earlier Poems, 1962–1991 are also available from Talonbooks.

Talonbooks New Releases

The Envelope vittorio rossi

Born in Montreal in 1961, Italian-Canadian playwright Vittorio Rossi grew up in the district of Ville-Émard and graduated from Concordia University in 1985 with a BFA specializing in theatre performance. In 1987 he was playwright-in-residence at Montreal’s prestigious Centaur Theatre, where he completed his first full-length play, The Chain, which opened Centaur’s twentieth-anniversary season in October 1988. The show was then produced at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa. From 1990–91 Rossi was writer-in-residence at Concordia University, where he also taught playwriting. Rossi has also written several screenplays and directed a film version of his play Little Blood Brother. In 2003 he taught screenwriting at the University of Sherbrooke. His talent extends to acting as well, with screen credits in both television (Urban Angel ) and film (Le Sphinx, 1995; Canvas, 1992; Malarek, 1989).

ISBN 978-1-77201-031-2; ebook forthcoming Drama 5.5 × 8.5; 112 pp; Trade paper $17.95 CAN / $17.95 US November

How does the Canadian film industry measure up? Drawn from his own experiences, Vittorio Rossi’s new comedy-drama exposes the bureaucratic institution that is the Canadian film industry, and we follow the character Michael Moretti, a veteran playwright, as he struggles to get his new play, Romeo’s Rise, turned into a movie. Michael must decide between a multi-million dollar offer from his Canadian-friend-turned-movie-producer Jake Henry, or a low-budget offer from an independent producer in Los Angeles. Jake’s deal promises him generous financial support if he survives the editing process with a senior script writer from the Canadian Film Fund. The American deal isn’t so lucrative, but he’d retain complete artistic control. Or a low budget offer from an independent producer from Los Angeles that would let him retain total artistic control. In reference to the Charbonneau Commission, a public inquiry into the corruption of the management of public construction contracts, the envelope of the play’s title is the government’s unofficial agreement to see that Jake’s project would get funded. Rossi asks the question at the heart of artistic affairs: Will Moretti take the big bucks and compromise his work, or will he stand firm in his artistic and personal integrity? Cast of 5 men and 2 women. “The Envelope makes us laugh, gasp, and cheer all throughout the play. Right up until the dramatic conclusion when Michael makes his lifechanging decision, there’s never a dull moment, and the clever storyline always keeps us guessing.” – Gemma Cocomello, montrealites.ca “Hard-hitting on the one hand, sweet as sugar on the other, The Envelope left the impression of a well-baked, enjoyable piece of Italian pastry.” – Victor Swoboda, Montreal Gazzette

Vittorio Rossi’s The Carpenter, Carmela’s Table, Hellfire Pass, and Paradise by the River are also available from Talonbooks.

10 Talonbooks New Releases

False Starts A Subterfuge of Excellent Wit

louis patrick leroux Translated by Alexander St-Laurent, Louis Patrick Leroux, and Katia Grubisic Introductions by Jenn Stephenson and Nicole Nolette

Louis Patrick Leroux is an associate professor in both the English and French departments at Concordia University. A playwright and theatre director, he is also a scholar whose academic research focuses on cultural discourse, researchcreation, Quebec theatre, and contemporary circus. He was playwright in residence at Sudbury’s Théâtre du NouvelOntario (1993–94, 2005–06, and 2006–07), the Leighton Artists’ Studios at the Banff Centre for the Arts in 1994, and the CEAD International playwrights residency in 1999. He founded and managed Ottawa’s Théâtre la Catapulte in the 1990s and has since focused on impossible, improbable, necessary drama. Alexander St-Laurent completed a BA and an MA in Creative Writing at Concordia University. He is currently a PhD student in English Literature at the Université de Montréal. Katia Grubisic is a writer, editor, and translator. Her work has appeared in various Canadian and international publications, and her collection of poems What if red ran out won the Gerald Lampert award for best first book.

ISBN 978-0-88922-027-5; ebook forthcoming Drama 5.5 × 8.5; 128 pp; Trade paper $17.95 CAN / $17.95 US November

False Starts presents a series of determining moments between two people stuck reliving the same scene over and over, but in unexpected ways and in different genres (from diary to dramatic dialogue, film script to sound installation). Their interdependence and fundamental inability to say how they feel about one another over twenty years – in spite of their eloquence, in spite of their creativity – constitutes the background of the ongoing spectacle of their relationship. Made up of a series of short pieces originally published in French as Dialogues fantasques pour causeurs éperdus, this translation by the author and Alexandre St-Laurent with Katia Grubisic, also includes other previously unpublished texts. Originally staged for the stage, screen, and elevator at Montreal’s matralab. Like the dual perspectives in the play, two commentators – Jenn Stephenson and Nicole Nolette – each contribute an introduction exploring the piece from quite different points of view. Cast of 1 man and 1 woman. Excerpt from “DIALOGUE, TAKES 3 AND 4” SHE and HIM, having not seen each other for years, meet again by a department-store cosmetics counter and recognize each other. HIM: Is it really you? How now, my sworn enemy! SHE: My foil. HIM: My scapegoat. SHE: My waking nightmare. HIM: I’m glad to see you! SHE: Strangely enough, so am I.

Talonbooks New Releases

In a Blue Moon lucia frangione

Lucia Frangione is an award-winning actress, teacher, and the author of more than twenty-eight plays, several having gone on to become international productions. An esteemed playwright with a fresh, post-feminist voice, Frangione creates plays that tackle complex themes and relationships with wit and courage. She was the recipient of the 2006 and 1998 Gordon Armstrong Playwright Awards, won the Sydney Risk playwright award (Cariboo Magi), and was nominated for seven Jessie Richardson Theatre awards (Espresso). She lives in Vancouver.

When Frankie’s dad dies, her mom, Ava, can’t afford to live in the city anymore. The only asset they’re left with is a farmhouse situated on twenty acres of land far outside of town. Ava decides to move there and start an Ayurveda clinic on the property, giving her precocious and grieving daughter a new start. One problem presents itself, though: a squatter who won’t leave. Will, professional photographer, long-estranged brother-in-law to Ava, and uncle to Frankie, lives rent-free on the farm and isn’t eager to give up his space. While mother and daughter face the challenges of starting over and grieving, they also need to figure out how to weave a new man into the picture. Soon, though, Frankie finds in Will someone to look up to and trust during her time of emotional upheaval, and Ava discovers a companion who pushes her to grow and helps her to discover her potential. In their journey the group thread together a new understanding of family, and a tender love story unfolds. In a Blue Moon combines dance, recollection, photography, and heartfelt emotion to examine three characters who each grieve very differently. Love, compassion, and companionship are discovered and shared as each member of the trio finds peace in their new reality, in their own way. Cast of 1 man and 2 women.

“Poignant and touching, heartfelt and hilarious.” – Thousand Islands Playhouse “With strong writing and characters, In a Blue Moon is a complex, authentic story about three people learning how to live with each other after such a profound loss.” – Tessa Perkins, The Peak

ISBN 978-1-77201-035-0; ebook forthcoming Drama 5.5 × 8.5; 128 pp; Trade paper $17.95 CAN / $17.95 US November

Lucia Frangione’s Cariboo Magi, Espresso, Leave of Absence, and Paradise Garden are also available from Talonbooks.

12 Talonbooks New Releases

You Will Remember Me françois archambault Translated by Bobby Theodore

François Archambault graduated from the playwriting program at the National Theatre School of Canada in 1993 and has also completed a major in French Studies at the Université de Montréal. Between 1989 and 1998, he wrote twelve plays and his work appeared in seven anthologies. His 1992 play Le jour de la fête de Martin was among the thirteen finalists selected in the Concours Val’en Scène in Valenciennes, France, and received a special mention from the jury. Archambault secured his reputation as a sharp social satirist with his earlier plays Cul sec (Fast Lane) and Les gagnants (The Winners) and further established his importance on the Quebec theatre scene with the awardwinning 15 Seconds, a darkly humorous play about social alienation arising from superficial relationships. Bobby Theodore lives in Montreal and is a graduate of the National Theatre School of Canada’s playwriting program. His first translation, François Archambault’s 15 Seconds, was produced across Canada and earned him a nomination for the Governor General’s Award for Literary Translation in 2000.

ISBN 978-1-77201-019-0; ebook forthcoming Drama 5.5 × 8.5; 112 pp; Trade paper $17.95 CAN / $17.95 US November

Memory – personal, familial, and societal – is the central theme of this new play by Governor General’s Award-winning playwright François Archambault. Translated by Bobby Theodore, this work follows a family’s struggle with dementia. Edouard is a university professor and historian, a figure prominent in the public eye, and a long-time sovereignist. He has been proud throughout his life of his prodigious memory. As memory fails, Edouard tests the ability of family members to care for him. The play also examines collective memory and the current state of affairs in Quebec. Edouard has been appearing on talk shows since his retirement, railing against the dumbing down of society and the adverse effects of technology. Archambault uses personal memory as a foil and metaphor to explore social memory, particularly re-examining moments from the history of the Parti Québécois. Subtle, moving, and funny, You Will Remember Me shows that living completely in the present moment is a nightmare. Hearkening to the past, and memory, are essential for the human condition. You will Remember Me opened in French in 2014 and was produced in English in 2015 at the Tarragon Theatre in Toronto. Cast of 2 men and 3 women.

“Bobby Theodore’s adept English translation [of] François Archambault’s acclaimed 2014 play Tu te souviendras de moi, a big hit, [was first produced in Calgary and is now on stage in Toronto.] … Memory is a central preoccupation, of course, in Quebec, where the imperative to remember the province/nation’s ongoing fight for recognition is embossed on its licence plates: Je me souviens. … Part of the success of Archambault’s play is his lightness of touch with the national metaphor: this is principally an intergenerational family story exploring the painful effects of memory loss with sensitivity and wit. ” – Toronto Star

François Archambault’s 15 Seconds and The Leisure Society are also available from Talonbooks.

Talonbooks New Releases

Yours Forever, Marie-Lou michel tremblay Translated by Linda Gaboriau

Michel Tremblay is one of Quebec’s most important writers. Born in 1942 of mixed French, American, and Cree ancestry, he has been awarded the Governor General’s Award for the Arts, the Prix David from Quebec, and a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres in France. He divides his time between Montreal and Key West, producing at least one new play or novel every year; there are more than thirty of each, and all are beloved. He is perhaps most well known for his play Les Belles-Soeurs and his novel The Fat Woman Next Door Is Pregnant. Linda Gaboriau, an award-winning literary translator, provides a new translation of this well-loved play. Gaboriau’s translations of plays by Quebec’s most prominent playwrights have been published and produced across Canada and abroad, and she has twice won the Governor General’s Award for Translation. She lives in Montreal.

ISBN 978-1-77201-023-7; ebook forthcoming Drama 5.5 × 8.5; 96 pp; Trade paper $16.95 CAN / $16.95 US November

They say hindsight is 20/20. They’re not wrong. Ten years after their parents’ death in a car accident, now-grown sisters Carmen and Manon are together for one of their rare visits – and one of them is finally ready to confront their shared tragedy. Carmen is a boisterous country-and-western singer who has left her home, and all her past, in the dust. Manon lives a more sheltered life, closely aligned with the traditions of religious Quebec, which are now – in the mid-1970s – only beginning to come apart at the seams. Carmen is convinced it’s time for Manon to end the years of mourning, while Manon is insulted that Carmen seems to have responded so unfeelingly to such a horror. Each sister has kept the memory of their parents alive in her own way. In fact – here they are, in living memory: Marie-Louise and Lèopold, the girls’ parents, appear on stage simultaneously. Just beyond the ken of their daughters, they live out their final day. As the two daughters struggle to reconcile the events preceding the fatal crash, and as their parents play out the culmination of their sodden marriage, we discover there is more to the memory of that fatal day than meets the eye. And yet, can the blame really be laid at the feet of one person? Or can a whole socio-cultural paradigm, which twists its subjects into unbearable contortions and traps them in fear and submission, be at fault? Cast of 1 man and 3 women.

Please visit talonbooks.com for a complete listing of Michel Tremblay’s available books.

14 Talonbooks Recent Releases

Price Paid

Mend the Living

The Fight for First Nations Survival

maylis de kerangal

bev sellars

Canadian history told from an Indigenous point of view, documenting their lives by racist laws and the re-establishment of First Nations land and resource rights – a history of aboriginal rights in Canada. By the Author of They Called Me Number One: Secrets and Survival at an Indian Residential School.

Translated by Jessica Moore

Mend the Living is the story of a heart transplant, centred around Simon Limbeau, the boy whose heart is given, and his family. Taking place within exactly twenty-four hours, the novel is a powerful and vast-ranging book. In her characteristic masterful use of language, playing with pacing and tension and a vibrant vocabulary, de Kerangal gives us a metaphysical adventure. “An unusual and often-ravishing novel… The entire hospital in this book pounds with life.” – New York Times Book Reviews

ISBN 978-0-88922-972-3; ebook also available Non-fiction: Autobiography / Social Science; 144 pp; $24.95 CAN / $24.95 US

ISBN 978-0-88922-973-0; ebook also available Fiction: Literary; 216 pp; $19.95 CAN / $19.95 US

Running on Fumes

Injun

christian guay-poliquin

jordan abel

Translated by Jacob Homel

When the electricity inexplicably goes out nationwide, gradually shifting the banalities of life towards the rigour of survival, an unnamed mechanic jumps into his beat-up car and drives east, journeying 4,736 kilometers to reach his dying father. On his odyssey, he navigates the labyrinth that is the great road as disasters seem to precede him, echoing his failing state. “A lyrical blend of the contemporary and the classico-mythical, with a generous helping of road movie. – ambos ISBN 978-0-88922-975-4; ebook also available Fiction: Literary; 160 pp; $14.95 CAN / $14.95 US

Injun is a long poem about race, racism, and the representation of Indigenous peoples. Composed of text found in western novels published between 1840 and 1950 – the heyday of pulp publishing, and a period of unfettered colonialism in North America – Injun uses erasure, pastiche, and a focused poetics to create a visually striking response to the western genre. One of 12 Writers to Watch (CBC Books, 2015) ISBN 978-0-88922-977-8 Poetry; 96 pp; $16.95 CAN / $16.95 US

Pound @ Guantánamo

th book

clint burnham

bill bissett

Appropriating language from YouTube comments and neighbourhood signage, Clint Burnham swerves through the neoliberal and hyperlocal, gathering fragments and contexts. Pound @ Guantánamo draws an analogy between Ezra Pound imprisoned in Pisa after World War II, and the inhabitants of the military prisons at Guantánamo Bay, asking us to trek through a non-place both actual and virtual, where poetry is written under the conditions of wartime.

bill bissett’s innovations in sound poetry, shaped poetry, music, painting, and publishing have stimulated, provoked, influenced, shocked, and delighted audiences for half a century. In this new collection of concrete poems, bissett writes “poemes uv greef transisyun n sumtimes joy byond binaree constraints if evreething goez what is aneething accepting nihilism lettr texting as an approach 2 heeling sorrow denial.

ISBN 978-0-88922-979-2 Poetry; 96 pp; Trade paper; $17.95 CAN / $17.95 US

ISBN 978-0-88922-980-8 Poetry; 176 pp; Trade paper; $19.95 CAN / $19.95 US

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Talonbooks Recent Releases

Human Tissue a primer for Not Knowing

We the Family george f. walker

weyman chan Introduction by Christopher Johnson

Weyman Chan unravels the otherness of incongruous personal experience, forging paths with Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein, Alan Turing, and Donna Haraway. In his palimpsest of personal and borrowed language, Chan addresses our human condition as it is: mediated by technology, laden with fragmented history, and shot through with love.

Canada’s master playwright applies his hallmark black humour and incredibly crisp dialogue to the family and multiculturalism. We the Family follows the ripple effects within two culturally and racially divergent families when their children wed.

ISBN 978-0-88922-981-5 Poetry; 144 pp; $17.95 CAN / $17.95 US

ISBN 978-0-88922-982-2; ebook also available Drama; 128 pp; $17.95 CAN / $17.95 US

Cast of 3 men and 7 women.”

Sextet

Inside the Seed

morris panych

jason patrick rothery

When a blizzard strands a sextet in a cramped motel for an extra night, they have only their instruments, each other, and their secrets to keep them warm. Is it any surprise that music and sex complement one another so well in this play? After all, both take practice. Cast of 4 men and 2 women. “Sextet … is not only the best new play I’ve seen in this rapidly waning year, it also may be the best script that Morris Panych has ever written.” – Richard Ouzounian, Toronto Star

Mirroring controversial real-life scientific and corporate controversies, Inside the Seed concerns a once-brilliant scientist who made a startling discovery: a bio-engineered form of rice that could save an overpopulated world on the brink of catastrophic famine. The play examines how good, smart, well-intentioned people are drawn into, and corrupted by, complex institutional systems, be they corporate, military, or governmental. Cast of 5 men and 4 women.

ISBN 978-0-88922-984-6; ebook also available Drama; 152 pp; $18.95 CAN / $18.95 US

ISBN 978-0-88922-986-0; ebook also available Drama; 144 pp; $18.95 CAN / $18.95 US

The Watershed

Studies in Description

annabel soutar

Reading Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons

carl peters

How much do we value clean water? And our industrialized standard of living? And can we stop one from degrading the other? The documentary play The Watershed follows an artist and her family – and a country and its people – in the struggle to chart a sustainable course between economic prosperity and environmental stewardship. Cast of 8 actors.

In the early 20th century, Gertrude Stein’s Modernist work Tender Buttons helped us discover a different world in our midst. Peters offers a close reading that underlines reasons Stein’s work has long served as the wellspring for generations of experimental poets, including the Language movement.

ISBN 978-0-88922-988-4; ebook also available Drama; 144 pp; $18.95 CAN / $18.95 US

ISBN 978-0-88922-961-7 Poetry; 416 pp; $24.95 CAN / $24.95 US

16 Talonbooks Sales Representation and Ordering

North American Sales Representation

Ordering Information

CANADA

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Book Manager & Wordstock EDI Sales in Atlantic Canada Jessica Rattray Michael Martin & Associates 3 – 135 Dowling Avenue, Toronto, ON M6K3A9 tel: (416) 909-9266 · fax: (416) 769-5967 jessica@martinsalesagency.ca

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Canadian Trade Terms CANADIAN TRADE DISCOUNT Retail

CANADIAN RETURNS POLICY Discount

Under $150.00 ................................................................................. 20% Over $150.00 ................................................................................... 40% Note: Talon, BookExpress, Raincoast, and Publishers Group Canada can be combined to meet minimum requirements.

New & Recent Releases (single title discount) Retail

Discount

25–49 ............................................................................................... 50–249 ............................................................................................. 250–499 ........................................................................................... 500–999 ........................................................................................... 1000 + .............................................................................................

Backlist (single title discount) Quantity

42% 43% 44% 45% 46%

Discount

1–10 .................................................................. see trade discount above 11 + ................................................................................................. 25%

LIBRARY DISCOUNT Retail

Discount

SCHOOLS AND EDUCATIONAL SALES Retail

Discount

Under $150.00 ................................................................................. 10% Over $150.00 ................................................................................... 30%

CANADIAN FREIGHT Booksellers and wholesalers whose shipments are valued at $400 net or more will receive free freight on ground shipments within Canada, as will those whose net purchases from Raincoast, Publishers Group Canada and BookExpress combined total at least $100,000 per year. Otherwise, all terms are FOB our warehouse. Customers may opt for a minimum value on back-order shipments to avoid higher shipping costs for single items. Call customer service for more details on this and also on our expedited shipping options.

1. All books purchased from us may be returned to us for full credit, unless otherwise indicated, between 3 months (min.) to 1 year (max.) from date of invoice. If a publisher should change distributors, notices will be placed in the appropriate trade journals regarding the shortened return period. Permission to return books is not required. 2. Returns will be credited in full only if accompanied by an accurate packing slip which shows the following: invoice numbers and dates, ISBN and list price of title, discounts and quantities of each title returned. “Returns” must be marked on the outside of the box. Please number the boxes. 3. Books must be returned in re-saleable condition. We cannot accept books in unsaleable condition whether shop-worn, ink-priced, stickered or sticker-damaged. Outdated annuals, titles for which we no longer have Canadian rights and books not purchased from us will not be accepted. 4. Travel guides and annuals: old editions are full-cover strippable for credit for 3 months after the publication date of a new edition (send full front and back covers). Current editions are not strippable and must be returned whole-copy. 5. Other revised editions: Whole-copy returns will be accepted for 3 months after a new edition has been issued. 6. Books ineligible for credit will be returned at the customer’s expense. Unacceptable returns are shipped in the same manner as new books. 7. We cannot be responsible for goods either not received by us or damaged in transit. 8. BookExpress titles purchased from Raincoast are returnable up to 6 months from the invoice date and are subject to a 15% restocking fee. Invoice n umbers must be quoted: a 5% penalty of the net total will be applied if invoice numbers are not provided. BookExpress Calendars are sold at a 40% discount and are non-returnable (see BookExpress catalogue for more details). 9. We do not accept returns sent freight collect.

CLAIMS

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NEW ACCOUNTS

SPECIAL ORDERS Titles not regularly stocked may be special ordered under our usual terms. Please allow 6–8 weeks for delivery. The Canadian price is based on cost at time of delivery and cannot be guaranteed at time of order.

Talonbooks 278 East 1st Avenue Vancouver, BC Canada V5T 1A6 www.talonbooks.com Printed in Canada