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Talonbooks Fall 2014
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Talonbooks Awards and Prizes, Recent Highlights 2014 BC Book Prize: Jordan Abel, The Place of Scraps (Winner)
Contents 1 15 18
New Releases Recent Releases Sales Representation, Ordering, and Trade Terms
BC Book Prize: Bev Sellars, They Called Me Number One (Finalist) 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) Lambda Literary Award: Michel Marc Bouchard, Tom at the Farm, translated by Linda Gaboriau (Finalist) Sheri-D Wilson Golden Beret Award: bill bissett (Winner)
2013 BC Book Prize: 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)
Talonbooks 278 East First Avenue Vancouver, BC V5T 1A6 phone: (604) 444-4889 toll-free: (888) 445-4176 fax: (604) 444-4119 info@talonbooks.com www.talonbooks.com
2012
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.
Talonbooks
BC Book Prize: Garry Thomas Morse, Discovery Passages (Finalist) Lambda Literary Award: Jane Rule, Taking My Life (Finalist)
2011 Alcuin Book Design Award: Stan Douglas, ed., Vancouver Anthology (Honourable Mention) BC Book Prize: Ken Belford, Decompositions (Finalist) BC Book Prize: George Bowering, My Darling Nellie Grey (Finalist) BC Book Prize: Stephen Collis, On the Material (Winner) Governor General’s Award, Poetry: Garry Thomas Morse, Discovery Passages (Finalist) Lambda Literary Award: Bryden MacDonald, With Bated Breath (Finalist) Robert Merritt Legacy Award: Wendy Lill (Winner) Cover photos: Lee Wei Swee
W.O. Mitchell Literary Prize: derek beaulieu, How to Write (Finalist) W.O. Mitchell Literary Prize: Weyman Chan, hypoderm (Finalist)
2010 BC Book Prize: Fred Wah, is a door (Winner) Carol Bolt Award for Drama: Joan MacLeod, Another Home Invasion (Finalist) George Ryga Award for Social Awareness in Literature: Kevin Loring, Where the Blood Mixes (Finalist) Governor General’s Award, Translation: Michel Tremblay, The Blue Notebook, translated by Sheila Fischman (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.
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Talonbooks New Releases 1
Birth of a Bridge m ay l i s d e k e r a n g a l Translated by Jessica Moore
Maylis de Kerangal is the author of several novels in French: Je marche sous un ciel de traîne (2000), La vie voyageuse (2003), Corniche Kennedy (2008), and Naissance d’un pont (translated here as Birth of a Bridge, winner of the Franz Hessel Prize and the Médicis Prize in 2010). She has also published a collection of short stories, Ni fleurs ni couronnes (2006), and a novella, Tangente vers l’est (winner of the 2012 Landerneau Prize). In addition, she has published a fiction tribute to Kate Bush and Blondie titled Dans les rapides (2007). In 2014, her fifth novel, Réparer les vivants, was published to wide acclaim, winning the Grand Prix RTLLire and the Student Choice Novel of the Year from France Culture and Télérama. She lives in Paris, France. Jessica Moore is an author and a translator. She is a former Lannan writer-in-residence and winner of a PEN America Translation Award for her translation of Turkana Boy, the poetic novel by Jean-François Beauchemin. Moore’s first collection of poems, Everything, now, was published by Brick Books in 2012. She is also a songwriter – her debut album, Beautiful in Red, was released in 2013.
ISBN 978-0-88922-889-4 / E-ISBN 978-0-88922-890-0 Fiction: Literary 5 × 8.5; 256 pp; Trade paper $16.95 CAN / $16.95 US September
From one of the most exciting novelists writing in France today comes this literary saga of a dozen men and women – engineers, designers, machinery operators, cable riggers – all employees of the international consortium charged with building a bridge somewhere in a mythical and fantastic California. Told on a sweeping scale reminiscent of classic American adventure films, this Médicis Prize–winning novel chronicles the lives of these workers, who represent a microcosm of not just mythic California, but of humanity as a whole. Their collective effort to complete the megaproject recounts one of the oldest of human dramas, to domesticate – and to radically transform – our world through built form, with all the dramatic tension it brings: a threatened strike, an environmental dispute, sabotage, accidents, career moves, and love affairs … Here generations and social classes cease to exist, and everyone and everything converges toward the bridge as metaphor, a cross-cultural impression of America today. Kerangal’s writing has been widely praised for its scope, originality, and use of language. The style of her prose is rich and innovative, playing with different registers (from the most highly literary to the most colloquial slang), taking risks and inventing words, and playing with speed and tension through grammatical ellipsis and elision. She employs a huge vocabulary and, most strikingly, brings together words not often combined to evoke startling comparisons. Not since Vikram Seth’s Golden Gate has such a great Californian novel been told. Winner of the 2010 Médicis Prize and the 2010 Franz Hessel Prize
“Strong emotion carried by a lexically rich style.”
– Journal du Dimanche
“Maylis de Kerangal has a flair for describing the landscapes that are at the heart of her novel – landscapes of tremendous beauty, for the reader who wishes to travel through the act of reading.” – La Presse
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2 Talonbooks New Releases
Minor Expectations garry thomas morse
Garry Thomas Morse’s books of fiction include his collection Death in Vancouver, and the three books in The Chaos! Quincunx series: Minor Episodes / Major Ruckus (2013 ReLit Award finalist), Rogue Cells / Carbon Harbour, and Minor Expectations, all published by Talonbooks. Morse’s poetry books with LINEBooks include sonic riffs on Rilke’s sonnets in Transversals for Orpheus and a tribute to David McFadden’s poetic prose in Streams. His poetry books with Talonbooks include an homage to San Francisco Renaissance poet Jack Spicer in After Jack, and an exploration of his mother’s Kwakwaka’wakw First Nations ancestry in Discovery Passages, finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry and the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Discovery Passages was also voted One of the Top Ten Poetry Collections of 2011 by the Globe and Mail and One of the Ten Best Aboriginal Books from the past decade by CBC’s 8th Fire. Morse is a casual commentator for Jacket2. His work continues to appear in a variety of publications and is studied at several Canadian universities, including the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University. He currently resides in Regina, Saskatchewan.
ISBN 978-0-88922-891-7 / E-ISBN 978-0-88922-892-4 Fiction: Literary 5.5 × 8.5; 256 pp; Trade paper $16.95 CAN / $16.95 US September
In this prequel within a sequel, Diminuenda discovers that she stands to win a vast inheritance from her estranged father, the inimitable Minor, if she travels into the past and “collects” a number of objets d’art. The cheeky diva travels to classical Greece, becoming the subject of the very painting she must steal as well as the focus of a Platonic dialogue. In ancient Rome, she dines with Emperor Tiberius and several Latin poets at his notorious grotto in Capri before stirring up more unrest among feuding Icelanders and First Nations as Minordis, the mysterious woman who steals the heart of the troublesome poet Loki. She then appears as a goddess to Botticelli in Renaissance Florence, but is soon toying with the Neoplatonic leanings of Lorenzo de’ Medici as they wait out the aftermath of an assassination attempt, sharing a saucy round of Boccaccio-esque tales. In the realm of Louis XIV, Diminuenda lurks behind an unfinished play that explores the tension between Molière and the court composer Lulli, whose operatic innovations sound an ominous note for his cohort’s splenetic invectives and social critique. In the most popular era for the epistolary novel, Augusta Ada Byron (Lovelace) is trying to cut down on laudanum, convinced of visits from the enigmatic Enchantress who will not only help her explain Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, but also encourage her opium-fuelled hopes to bequeath to future generations a “Calculus of the Nervous System.” Then, in WWII Britain, Agent D MINOR moves through a murky nouveau roman seemingly ruled by Alan Turing’s theory of contradictions amid ill-fated schemes by MI5, including adaptations of Aleister Crowley’s occultism, falcons trained to hunt homing pigeons, and brilliant forgeries of works such as Vermeer’s The Art of Painting that will beguile the Third Reich. Minor Expectations continues The Chaos! Quincunx novel series. Praise for previous novels in the series, Rogue Cells and Carbon Harbour: “Morse’s jargon-laden prose pulls the reader in and overwhelms with its physicality and earthiness. Reading it is like reading poetry, a synaesthetic experience where technology and terrorism are as intimate and tangible as the smell of food or the texture of mud. Infused with Morse’s irrepressible humor, the books satisfy all the senses.” – Rain Taxi
Garry Thomas Morse’s After Jack, Death in Vancouver, Discovery Passages, Minor Episodes / Major Ruckus, and Rogue Cells / Carbon Harbour are also available from Talonbooks.
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Talonbooks New Releases 3
Crossing the City m i c h e l t r e m b l ay Translated by Sheila Fischman
Michel Tremblay is Quebec’s leading novelist and playwright. He has received multiple awards and accolades, including in 2011 the Quiet Revolution Medal for his profound influence on Quebec literature. Tremblay was raised in Montreal’s Plateau neighbourhood, often sharing apartments with relatives from outside his immediate family. Many of his plays and novels incorporate aspects of the lives of real relatives with whom he shared his roof, particularly his touching relationship with his mother, whose life is now fully chronicled in the Desrosiers Diaspora series. The charismatic originality and vibrancy of her character in these novels and the remarkable vision of Tremblay’s dramatic, literary, and autobiographic works have led to remarkable international popularity. Sheila Fischman has translated from French to English more than one hundred novels by prominent Quebec writers such as Michel Tremblay. She is a two-time Governor General’s Award winner, member of the Order of Canada, and officer of the Order of Arts and Letters of France. In 2008 she was awarded the prestigious Molson Prize for her outstanding contributions to Canadian literature.
ISBN 978-0-88922-893-1; E-ISBN 978-0-88922-894-8 Fiction: Literary 5.5 × 8.5; 216 pp; Trade paper $16.95 CAN / $16.95 US October
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 Station, having crossed the continent from her grandparents’ farm in Saskatchewan, called home to Montreal to care for her one-yearold baby brother, Théo, while Maria works. Along the way, Crossing the City affectionately and accurately depicts Montreal’s Plateau neighbourhood at the beginning of the last century. Readers will delight in the small details of description, and Tremblay fans will revel in the backstory to the characters of his great Chronicles of Plateau Mont-Royal, particularly of his mother, celebrated as Nana throughout his work, including as his famous Fat Woman next door. In this novel, Nana is the young Rhéauna, reunited with her mother, Maria, for better or for worse. Crossing the City continues the Desrosiers Diaspora novel series.
“The reader has the impression of actually walking along rue SainteCatherine, licking the windows at Dupuis Frères or Ogilvy, inside the skin of this young girl who sees her new city of Montreal as a land of fairytales filled with trams and horse-drawn carriages ... it is surprising to discover in this writer an impressive work that dazzles with freshness as young Rhéauna takes in the city on her first day there.” – Le Devoir “In this novel, Tremblay not only gives his fans the background they crave on their beloved Plateau characters, he also sets the groundwork for understanding that the world and the people in it are Janus-like. Good and bad, French and English, country and city, moral and immoral, brave and scared, everything is all rolled up into this thing called life.” – Globe and Mail
For a complete list of Michel Tremblay’s available titles, please see the Talonbooks website.
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4 Talonbooks New Releases
Studies in Description Reading Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons
carl peters
Difficult writing has its way of illuminating the part of the world that counts. One such difficult text is Gertrude Stein’s highly experimental Tender Buttons: objects, food, rooms – long considered the single most groundbreaking literary work of twentieth-century art, literary criticism, and art history. In the centennial year of its publication, Carl Peters offers a sustained reading of the 1914 edition, responding to the eccentric sounds and rhythms of this long prose-poem with annotations that bring understanding, in particular, to the composition’s syntax, which is noted for its defiance of conventional norms; for example: Carl Peters is a critical theorist and curator and the author of two previous literary analyses of poetics and avant-garde art. He edited a major collection of bpNichol’s comics from 1960 to 1980, published as bpNichol Comics (2002). textual vishyuns (2011), his critical study of bill bissett’s poetry and visual art, analyzes this Canadian poet’s contributions to modernist thought and vision. Peters is currently embarked on a study of modernist cinema, specifically the works and praxis of French New Wave film director Jean-Luc Godard.
ISBN 978-0-88922-895-5 Non-fiction: Literary criticism 5.5 × 8.5; 160 pp; Trade paper $18.95 CAN / $18.95 US November
ROAST POTATOES. Roast potatoes for. [Annotation] Grounded. Such annotations demonstrate that an apprehension of Stein’s whole art comes from the project and praxis of reading the work literally, actually. “Read her with her for less,” she asserts. Translate “more than translate the authority.” In Studies in Description: Reading Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, Peters demonstrates the ways in which Stein’s thought questions everything, underlining reasons that her work has long served as the wellspring for generations of experimental writers, inspiring language movement poets such as bill bissett, bpNichol, and George Bowering, and novelists such as William Gass, Sherwood Anderson, and Ernest Hemingway. Modern works such as Tender Buttons can be used to show how in the early twentieth century Stein and others helped us discover a different world in our midst, a moment of the modern.
Carl Peters’s bpNichol Comics and textual vishyuns are also available from Talonbooks.
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Talonbooks New Releases 5
Christina, The Girl King michel marc bouchard Translated by Linda Gaboriau
Quebec playwright Michel Marc Bouchard emerged on the professional theatre scene in 1985. Since then he has written twenty-five plays and has been the recipient of numerous awards, including, in June 2012, the prestigious National Order of Quebec for his contribution to Quebec culture, and, in 2005, the Order of Canada. He has also received le Prix Littéraires du Journal de Montréal, le Prix du Cercle de critiques de l’Outaouais, the Governor General’s Award, the Dora Mavor Moore Award, and the Chalmers Award for Outstanding New Play. Translated into nine languages, Bouchard’s bold and visionary works have represented Canada in major festivals around the world. Linda Gaboriau is an award-winning literary translator based in Montreal. Her translations of plays by Quebec’s most prominent playwrights have been published and produced across Canada and abroad. In her work as a literary manager and dramaturge, she has directed numerous translation residencies and international exchange projects. She was the founding director of the Banff International Literary Translation Centre. She won the 2010 Governor General’s Award for Forests, her English translation of Wajdi Mouawad’s play Forêts.
ISBN 978-0-88922-898-6 / E-ISBN 978-0-88922-899-6 Drama 5.5 × 8.5; 96 pp; Trade paper $16.95 CAN / $16.95 US August
Michel Marc Bouchard’s latest play tells the story of Queen Christina of Sweden, who wreaked havoc throughout northern Europe in the middle of the seventeenth century. An enigmatic monarch, a flamboyant and unpredictable intellectual, a woman eager for knowledge, and a feminist before her time, Christina reigned over an empire she hoped to make the most sophisticated in all of Europe. In 1649, Christina summoned René Descartes to her court in Uppsala to share with her the radical new ideas emerging from science and philosophy at the time – ideas that contradicted long-held, faith-based views about the world. Astronomer Johannes Kepler had recently proposed the elliptical trajectory of planets – including Earth – around the sun, and Descartes himself contended, despite condemnation from the Church, that individuals, not God, determined their own destiny. Descartes’s ideas about free will and reason appealed to Christina, who was struggling to reconcile tensions between her rational, thinking self and emotions she dared not name – including her love for a woman. Rather than bow to pressure to conform to the expectations of a nation that demanded she give it an heir, the twenty-six-year-old queen abdicated her throne to convert to Catholicism – rendering her ineligible to rule, according to Swedish law. Was this an act of madness? Or a bold gesture of autonomy by a modern woman born out of her time – one whom the seventeenth century simply could not contain? Christina, The Girl King premieres at the 2014 Stratford Festival. Cast of 4 women and 6 men. Governor General’s Literary Award Finalist, 2013 (French drama)
“Christina, The Girl King is a regal romance. Bouchard once again proves himself a master of wild fantasy and the florid language to go with it, always deftly peppered with biting wit.” – Montreal Gazette
Michel Marc Bouchard’s The Coronation Voyage, Down Dangerous Passes Road, The Madonna Painter, The Tale of Teeka, Tom at the Farm, and Written on Water are also available from Talonbooks.
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6 Talonbooks New Releases
Tear the Curtain! jonathon young & kevin kerr with kim collier
Jonathon Young’s previous collaborative plays include Brilliant! The Blinding Enlightenment of Nikola Tesla, The Score, and Palace Grand. Kevin Kerr is a four-time recipient of the Jessie Richardson Theatre Award for Outstanding Original Script and he received the 2002 Governor General’s Literary Award for Drama for Unity (1918 ). Other plays include Studies in Motion: The Hauntings of Eadweard Muybridge, Skydive, The Remittance Man, Secret World of Og, and Spine. Kerr currently teaches creative writing at the University of Victoria. Kim Collier has co-authored seven original plays with Electric Company Theatre. In 2010 she was awarded the prestigious Siminovitch Prize in Theatre for directing. She is currently resident artist at Canadian Stage in Toronto.
In this psychological thriller set in a fictionalized 1930s Vancouver, Alex Braithwaite, a troubled but passionate theatre critic, believes he has found the legendary Stanley Lee, director of the infamous avant-garde theatre “The Empty Space.” Alex becomes convinced that this man’s radically subversive ideas are what the artistic community of the city needs to shatter audience complacency. In his pursuit of the truth behind Stanley Lee’s mysterious disappearance and his artistic ideas, Alex becomes caught between the warring factions of two prominent mob families – one controlling the city’s playhouses, the other its cinemas, but both ensnared by the Empty Space Society. At the dawn of the Talkies, can Alex tear through the artifice of these art forms in time to save the city’s art community from ripping itself apart? The play’s collaborators found inspiration within the walls of Vancouver’s Stanley Theatre, a space that has a dual history as a cinema and vaudeville house. Fittingly, this gritty film-noir production became an exploration of the two kinds of art and how they affect the audience. Tear the Curtain! explores global issues that consider what we want from art: to be shocked and surprised or for order to be restored. Cast of 2 women and 8 men.
“stylish” “a rich pastiche” “a fascinating puzzle of a production” “prophetic” “stunning”
Young, Kerr, and Collier are co-founders, with David Hudgins, of Electric Company Theatre. Originally formed as a theatre collective in 1996, Electric Company Theatre is now a leading force in the Vancouver theatre scene, creating original work that is rich in spectacle, adventurous in form, and strong in narrative.
ISBN 978-0-88922-904-4 / E-ISBN 978-0-88922-905-1 Drama 5.5 × 8.5; 160 pp; Trade paper $18.95 CAN / $18.95 US November
“brilliant fusion of two enduring art forms”
– Toronto Sun – NOW Magazine – National Post – Globe and Mail
Kevin Kerr’s Skydive, Studies in Motion, and Unity (1918) are also available from Talonbooks.
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Talonbooks New Releases 7
War Cantata l a r r y t r e m b l ay Translated by Keith Turnbull
Larry Tremblay has published more than twenty books as a playwright, poet, novelist, and essayist. Thanks to an uninterrupted succession of new plays (Anatomy Lesson, Ogre, The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi, Les mains bleues, and Téléroman, among others) in production during the 1990s, Tremblay’s work continues to achieve international recognition. One of Quebec’s most versatile writers, Tremblay currently teaches acting at l’École supérieure de théâtre de l’Université du Québec à Montréal. Keith Turnbull’s career as a director, producer, designer, and dramaturge is highlighted by a commitment to contemporary and new work in both theatre and opera. He has directed more than seventy plays at theatres throughout the world. He was the founding co-artistic director of the Toronto Theatre Festival, the president of the Toronto Theatre Alliance, as well as a board member of the Canadian Actors’ Equity Association. He has taught at the University of Manitoba, the National Theatre School, the University of Calgary, and the Banff Centre for the Arts, where he served as artistic director of theatre arts programs, as co-director of the Banff playRites Colony, and as director of the Contemporary Opera and Song Training Program.
ISBN 978-0-88922-906-8 / E-ISBN 978-0-88922-907-5 Drama 5.5 × 8.5; 64 pp; Trade paper $16.95 CAN / $16.95 US October
How far will humanity go in its quest for power? Why do we desire to eliminate each other through war? Larry Tremblay’s latest play, War Cantata, looks at ways the impulse for violence is transmitted from one generation to the next; for example, when a father teaches his son hatred to transform him into a soldier impervious to pity. Without focusing on a particular battle or soldier, this harsh, intense, choral text builds the rhythmic power of words to expose war’s spiral toward hatred. In 2012, SACD (Société des auteurs et compositeurs dramatiques), in partnership with France Culture, awarded War Cantata the Prix SADC for best world play written in French, and CEAD (Centre des auteurs dramatiques) awarded it the Prix Michel-Tremblay for the best play written in Quebec in 2012. Cast of 7 actors, including 2 men. Excerpt: “THE FATHER: My rifle’s eye stares at you. | You stand in front of your house | as if your skeleton | Could protect it from my shadow. | Go back. | Look at your house. | It is falling into ruins, | riddled with our bullets. | Your door is a lie | All of which fools no one. | What are you thinking? | That you can stop me from going in? | What are you protecting with your carcass? | Who are you hiding behind your door? | Get out. Get out of my way! | I want to talk to your son. | Because you do have one.”
“A great theatrical text that speaks to the mechanics of hatred: hard, visceral, and uncompromising.” – Yves Rousseau, LeQuatrième.com “With a vocabulary that does not fear ugliness and vulgarity, Larry Tremblay … digs into pain while providing relevant reflection [and] traces the contours between commitment and poetry ... [between] the weight of savagery and the hardness of a crippled civilization.” – Olivier Dumas, Montheatre.qc.ca
Larry Tremblay’s Abraham Lincoln Goes to the Theatre, The Bicycle Eater, The Obese Christ, Piercing, Talking Bodies, and The Ventriloquist are also available from Talonbooks.
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8 Talonbooks New Releases
Michel and Ti-Jean g e o rg e r i d e o u t
George Rideout was raised in Texas and moved to Canada in his teens. He now teaches theatre at Bishop’s University in Lennoxville, Quebec, where the annual New Plays Festival presents one-act plays written in his playwriting class. His own work as a playwright is more widely celebrated, winning numerous regional and national playwriting awards. His plays often reflect on cross-cultural relationships, particularly as they exist in times of great social change. They include Texas Boy (which has had more than thirty different productions), The Longstreth Line, Walking on the Moon, 689 Spadina Ave., The Austin Texas Twist Championship, The Tall Girl, and An Anglophone Is Coming to Dinner.
In this probing character study, Rideout fashions a hypothetical 1969 meeting in a bar in St. Petersburg, Florida, between Quebec playwright Michel Tremblay and an individual whom he believes to be a truly great writer – beat generation author Jack Kerouac, whose Francophone mother affectionately called him Ti-Jean. At the time of their meeting, Kerouac is forty-seven years old and only months away from death, destroyed by drink in an attempt to live up to the wild image of the “beatnik” stereotype he coined in his novel On the Road. Michel Tremblay is twenty-seven and his first widely produced play, Les Belles Soeurs, has premiered a year before. As he encounters his writing idol, the younger man must break through the older man’s emotional barriers to establish common ground. Ultimately, Kerouac’s Québécois background helps Tremblay understand his work, recognize the role religion takes, and the place women play in his psyche, as stated metaphorically in the various female characters who populate Les Belles Soeurs. Cast of 2 men. Excerpt: “KEROUAC: You were brought up in the company of women, you’re all fucked up about religion, some days you’d like to blow up the world, and when you’ve had a few drinks you think about putting on a slinky black dress and strutting around like Pierrette, but you never do it.”
“The imagined collision of two formidable personalities and egos.” – Globe and Mail
ISBN 978-0-88922-902-0 / E-ISBN 978-0-88922-903-7 Drama 5.5 × 8.5; 128 pp; Trade paper $17.95 CAN / $17.95 US September
“The real meat of the play … is the way it takes a new look at the two men’s artistic outputs, especially when viewed through the context of the other. Kerouac’s work becomes more French Canadian than Americana: through Tremblay’s eyes, he becomes a writer concerned with family and relationships, small stories about the people he loves instead of the ‘great American novel’ that On the Road is credited as. Tremblay, too, is put through the wringer: his play ... Les Belles Soeurs is reinterpreted through Kerouac’s own bebop-influenced prose style.” – VUE Weekly
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Talonbooks New Releases 9
[OR] brian henderson
Brian Henderson is the author of ten volumes of poetry, the most recent of which, Sharawadji (Brick Books, 2011), was nominated for the Canadian Authors Association Award for Poetry. His 2007 book Nerve Language (Pedlar Press) was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award. Henderson’s work, both critical and poetic, has appeared in a number of literary journals. He holds a PhD in Canadian literature, is the director of WLU Press, and lives in Markdale, Ontario, with his wife, Charlene Winger.
[OR] might be a book of steganography. Or not. The tension of appearance inheres in it, and ciphertexts seem to abound. As the poems take up their concealing/revealing, coded/decoded, intelligence/counter-intelligence themes, borders and borderlands appear, are crossed, or are closed. Many of the borderlands turn out to be their own interiors – “secret” workings of the codes ghosting through them. Are they abject castoffs, lost possibilities, proscribed mutations, or future events? Codes are hidden everywhere, sliding through the atmosphere, slipping into microwave towers, handheld devices, nervous systems, brains, retinas, bar codes, antimissile systems, the antennae of DNA, the traces of virtual particles, the Chauvet Cave drawings, your Twitter account. Each broaches a transformative version of its own transduction. The buck never stops. And since it’s been documented that perception happens before we know it (Benjamin Libet), and the future might already have happened, these poems ask what this might mean – especially in an accelerated, “semio-inflated” world of signs, words, and information. Maybe it’s no wonder that the poems use tropes from spy thrillers and code breakers. In them a character may have been murdered, or moved to another dimension. Along the way strange perturbations occur to narrative and its others: memory, (prosthetic memory), dream, reportage, code, a little history of the future, déjà vu, paramnesia, the virtual – versions, evasions, and alternatives. Each poem gets read a few times, its code deciphered or ciphered back up. Some of the poems decay. Each reader reads his or her own poem and encodes it for another. What communication crosses out, these poems try to find. They might ask “What is reading?” while at the same time “Who are you?” In asking they acknowledge fragility, and in fragility, suggests William E. Connolly, lies the beginning of freedom.
Praise for Henderson’s Nerve Language: “Terrifying and beautiful, the language in this book is an incendiary crossing of wires. These poems are as likely to break you open as they are to explode.” – Governor General’s Literary Award Jury, 2007
ISBN 978-0-88922-908-2 Poetry 5 × 8.5; 128 pp; Trade paper $16.95 CAN / $16.95 US November
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10 Talonbooks New Releases
Fortified Castles r ya n f i t z pa t r i c k
ryan fitzpatrick is a poet and critic living in Vancouver. He is the author of Fake Math (Snare Books, 2007) as well as a dozen chapbooks, including the recent 21st Century Monsters (Red Nettle Press, 2012), which was shortlisted for the bpNichol Chapbook Award. While living in Calgary, he was an editor of filling Station and an organizer of the Flywheel Reading Series. With Jonathan Ball, he is a co-editor of Why Poetry Sucks: An Anthology of Humorous Experimental Canadian Poetry in English (Insomniac Press, 2014). With Janey Dodd, he is in the early stages of organizing a comprehensive digital archive of Calgary small presses operating between 1990 and 2010. He is currently pursuing a PhD at Simon Fraser University, where he works on contemporary poetics and the social production of space.
Starting with the lyric statement as a point of interrogation, Fortified Castles asks what might cause a retreat into the comforting walls of the self. North American culture is saturated with discourses of selfimprovement and self-awareness at the same time it is full of anxiety over the things that separate us. Moving from a stock-ticker tableau of economic and environmental crisis to the difficulty of finding one another in the streets, the poems in Fortified Castles stage impasse after impasse, locating the Western subject between the ramparts it walks and the barricades it throws up. Composed in three sections, Fortified Castles constructs a complex web of interpersonal disconnection from the anonymous detritus of our self-obsessed neoliberal moment. Written contemporaneously with the 2008 economic crisis, the first section, “21st Century Monsters,” imagines a number of world-ending scenarios from the collapse of the environment to the collapse of capitalism to the collapse of culture, forming a questioning and questionable primer on the things that terrify us. The second section, “Fortified Castles,” heavily recombines found material in a lengthy serial collage composed of multiplied and impersonal personal statements that add up in unanticipated ways, cascading in knee-jerk patterns of anxious hand-wringing and stubborn unreasonableness. Written during the 2011 Occupy protests, the final section, “Friendship Is Magic,” positions the hopeful connections of that moment beside the privilege rippling through it, interrogating the very real tension between working collectively and living comfortably. Praise for fitzpatrick’s 21st Century Monsters: “fitzpatrick clocks the monster face of levity with fistfuls of pointy couplets. He ponies up voices of caustic warmth in spaces of sad excess – where false economies choke on rainbow sentiment. Tagging prophets of vapidity with heart, home, and suspect weather like a scarecrow surveys his landscape, 21st Century Monsters brings hopeless tension and helpful smiles to unlikely moments – sharply suggesting we never catch enough breath to reflect or reject our culture, or even our inner vampire.” – Chris Ewart, author of Miss Lamp
ISBN 978-0-88922-909-9 Poetry 5 × 8.5; 112 pp; Trade paper $16.95 CAN / $16.95 US September
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Talonbooks New Releases 11
Assembling the Morrow A Poetics of Sleep
sandra huber
Sandra Huber is a Swiss-Canadian writer of poetry and fiction. She holds an M.A. in creative writing from the University of Toronto, a B.A. in literature from Simon Fraser University, and is the founder of Dear Sir, an online journal. In 2010, Huber spent nine months as resident writer at a sleep laboratory via Artist-in-Labs Switzerland; her resulting book of poetry, Assembling the Morrow: A Poetics of Sleep, is her first.
ISBN 978-0-88922-910-5 Poetry 5.5 × 9; 128 pp; Trade paper $19.95 CAN / $19.95 US October
Even though we spend a third of our lives asleep, the behaviour remains largely a mystery. Sandra Huber’s first book, Assembling the Morrow: A Poetics of Sleep, assumes that any attempt to solve this mystery requires new modes of experimentation. What happens when the line of a Berger’s wave (an electroencephalography recording of brainwaves in sleep) turns into a line of poetry, an act of focused consciousness? The earliest readings of the sleeping brain, captured by EEGs in the 1930s, revealed that sleep is as active and lively as its daytime counterpart, not simply a passive state that naturally ensues when wakefulness ceases. Sleep not only assimilates the day that’s passed, but also looks forward, assembling what’s to come. To engage this concept, Huber sculpts a long poem onto the neural oscillations of sleep, in order to explore what is beneath them both: the conscious organism, the writer, and the written. In the field of the poem, where sleep is traditionally a metaphor for death, the idea that to be awake is to be alive is put to the test in a new kind of writing that invites a new kind of being. Prefaced by a discussion on poetry, the science of sleep, and those who have sought a language of consciousness – from Hans Berger to Gertrude Stein – Assembling the Morrow proposes that entering the mystery of sleep requires a radical reframing of our biases on what it means to be conscious.
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12 Talonbooks New Releases
Peacock Blue The Collected Poems
phyllis webb Edited by John F. Hulcoop
Phyllis Webb was born in 1927 in Victoria, British Columbia. She was educated at the University of British Columbia and McGill. The first major publication of her poetry was in Trio (Contact Press, 1954), which included poetry by Eli Mandel and Gael Turnbull. For many years she worked as a writer and broadcaster for the CBC, where she created the radio program Ideas in 1965 and was its executive producer from 1967 to 1969. Webb served as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta from 1980 to 1981 and taught at the University of British Columbia, the University of Victoria, and the Banff Centre. She is a lifetime member of the League of Canadian Poets and currently resides on Salt Spring Island, British Columbia. John F. Hulcoop received a B.A. and a PhD from University College London. He emigrated to Canada in 1956 and taught in the English department at the University of British Columbia. Initially a nineteenth-century scholar, Hulcoop has published works on Robert Browning, Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf. A long-time critic of Phyllis Webb’s work, he edited and wrote the introduction to her Selected Poems 1954–65 (Talonbooks, 1971); he also wrote Phyllis Webb and Her Works (ECW Press, 1990).
ISBN 978-0-88922-912-9 Poetry 6 × 9; 416 pp; Cloth $39.95 CAN / $39.95 US October
When Phyllis Webb published Wilson’s Bowl in 1980, Northrop Frye hailed it as “a landmark in Canadian literature”: landmark, an event that marks a turning point in something (in this case, Canadian literature); and an instantly recognized feature of a landscape (in this case, the landscape of Canadian poetry). Wilson’s Bowl was Webb’s fifth volume of poetry. Three more followed and then she fell silent, turning from literature to abstract painting. Peacock Blue compiles in a single volume all of Webb’s published, unpublished, and uncollected works from a writing career that spanned fifty years. It offers readers the opportunity to relish the arc of Webb’s entire poetic oeuvre, from the modernist lyricism of her early works, to the groundbreaking volume Naked Poems (1965), in which Webb created for herself a new minimalist language; from Wilson’s Bowl to what Douglas Barbour calls “Webb’s loving and subversive engagement with the ghazal” in Water and Light (1984); and finally to the postmodernist prose poems of Hanging Fire (1990). The concluding section of Peacock Blue contains almost fifty poems previously uncollected, some of which have never been published before. It is full of brilliant but forgotten poems and poetic surprises. Brenda Carr has suggested that one of Webb’s later essays, “Message Machine” (1990), “initiates a re-reading of her poetics and practice … Against her anxiety that she is a passive ‘message machine’ for masculinist culture … Webb posits another possibility – ‘cross-dressing.’ She theorizes her mimicry of the male persona as analogous to a ‘masquerade’ or ‘street theatre’ and in so doing reconstructs even her earlier poems as a performative space in which agency is possible.” The truth of Carr’s insight becomes increasingly apparent to anyone who undertakes to read through Webb’s entire poetic output, gathered together, at last, in Peacock Blue.
Praise for Webb’s Hanging Fire: “Seductive drift, critical cavorting, fine lines, and prose tempered to the rhythmic mettle of a remarkable poet’s mind.” – Daphne Marlatt
Phyllis Webb’s Hanging Fire and Selected Poems: The Vision Tree are also available from Talonbooks.
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Talonbooks New Releases 13
Peace in Duress janet rogers
Mohawk spoken-word artist Janet Marie Rogers’s newest collection pulses with the rhythms of the drum and the beat of the heart. Poems drawing on the language of the earth and inflected with the outspoken vocality of activism address the crises of modern “land wars” – environmental destruction, territorial disputes, and resource depletion. This collection is confessional love, learned survival, ardent resistance, and unique poetry that wants to be spoken (aloud). If poetry is medicine, Peace in Duress is a cabinet full.
A Mohawk writer from the Six Nations band in southern Ontario, Janet Rogers was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, and has resided in Victoria since 1994. An award-winning poet, she has worked and studied in the genres of poetry, short fiction, spoken-word performance poetry, video poetry, and recorded poems with music and scriptwriting. Rogers hosts Native Waves Radio on CFUV (Victoria) and Tribal Clefs on CBC Radio One. Her video poem What Did You Do Boy, created in support of a spoken-word track from her CD Firewater, earned nominations at the Canadian Aboriginal Music Awards in 2009 and the Native American Music Awards in 2010. Rogers’s radio documentary Bring Your Drum (50 Years of Indigenous Protest Music), aired in July 2011 on the CBC’s Inside the Music and won the Best Radio award at the imagineNATIVE Film and Media Festival in 2011. Roger’s previous books include Unearthed (Leaf Press, 2011), Red Erotic (Ojistah, 2010), and Splitting the Heart (Ekstasis Editions, 2007). In 2014, Rogers concludes her three-year tenure as Poet Laureate of Victoria.
ISBN 978-0-88922-911-2 Poetry 5 × 8.5; 128 pp; Trade paper $16.95 CAN / $16.95 US September
ice water now the temperature of tea sustains until the next rez stop, re stop, re start life elevated in Utah, gawd hours honoured in Arizona tumbleweeds and raw earth, looks like open battle wounds gorges burnt earth sagebrush holy land hot souls long roads ash-fault bill-borders built on the backs of black hispanics descent warnings foreshadowing rocks falling sun blocked bright rays make way for end-of-day rain don’t drink the poison, don’t you dare sigh with boredom hot winds die pulling down cloud poetry faces, places, displaces, wide-open Red horses of courses [from “3 Day Road”] Praise for Rogers’s Unearthed: “It’s evident Janet Rogers is a spiritual descendant of the Mohawk poet Pauline Johnson, very much working aesthetically in the now. Rogers’s poems, personal or philosophical, outraged or satirical, are burgeoning lyrics, alive to her and our place in this Native land on this spinning planet, and, thankfully, her ‘ancestral GPS’ is working.” – Daniel David Moses “Rogers demonstrates in her collection Unearthed her ability to combine spoken-word protest with more formalistic page poetry, and also her catalytic role when sharing her gutsy, realistic, and inspirational voice for First Nations people on either side of the 49th Parallel (for those who believe in such a thing).” – Garry Thomas Morse
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14 Talonbooks New Releases
dream / arteries phinder dulai
Phinder Dulai is a Vancouver-based author of two previous books of poetry: Ragas from the Periphery (Arsenal Pulp, 1995) and Basmati Brown (Nightwood Editions, 2000). His most recent work has been published in Canadian Literature and Cue Books Anthology. Earlier work appeared in Ankur, Matrix, Memewar Magazine, Rungh, Capilano Review, Canadian Ethnic Studies, Toronto South Asian Review, subTerrain, and West Coast LINE. Dulai is a co-founder of the Surrey-based interdisciplinary contemporary arts group South of Fraser Inter Arts Collective (SOFIA/c).
A hundred years ago this year, the Japanese steamship Komagata Maru set sail for Canada with 376 Sikh, Muslim, and Hindu migrants travelling from Punjab, India. They were refused entry at Vancouver, even though all passengers were British subjects. The Komagata Maru sat moored in Vancouver’s harbour for two months while courts decided the passengers’ right to access – and while the city’s white citizens lined the pier taunting those onboard. Eventually, Canada’s racist exclusion laws were upheld and the ship was forced to return to India. In his third poetry collection, dream / arteries, Phinder Dulai connects these 376 passengers with other New World settler migrants who travelled on the same ship throughout its thirty-six-year history, including to ports of call in Hong Kong, Japan, India, Turkey, Halifax, Montreal, and Ellis Island. By drawing on ship records, nautical maps, passenger manifests, and the rich, detailed record of the Komagata Maru, Dulai demonstrates how the 1914 incident encapsulates a broader narrative of migration throughout the New World. Phinder Dulai’s hybrid poetics fuse historical fact with the fictive. He interweaves words of loss and silence with the cacophonous sound bites of TV news culture, war coverage, and the manifestations of contemporary ennui. Framing the “I” in the provisional realm of the observer and “subjectless” space, Dulai draws out the poetic line to explore hope, possibility, and regeneration.
Praise for Dulai’s Basmati Brown: “Here is a real made book … performance poetry, rich nouns, a montage of material for a world you probably haven’t seen yet. With puns and jabs, Dulai memorializes his heritage – and wrestles it to the ground.” – George Bowering
ISBN 978-0-88922-913-6 Poetry 5 × 8.5; 112 pp; Trade paper $16.95 CAN / $16.95 US October
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Talonbooks Recent Releases 15
The World Afloat
A Matter of Gravity
m . a . c . fa r ra n t
h é l è n e va c h o n Translated by Phyllis Aronoff & Howard Scott
In The World Afloat, a collection of seventy-five irreverent and humorous “miniature” stories, M.A.C. Farrant coaxes readers from their well-worn, earthbound narratives and into a world afloat on satire, absurdity, and, in her most brilliant moments, expansive joy. “Farrant has a lightness of touch, and her writing is not too charmed by its own cleverness … at her best, it feels as if she is getting at the heart of something that takes other writers much longer to lead us to.” – Canadian Literature
ISBN 978-0-88922-838-2 / E-ISBN 978-0-88922-839-9 Fiction: Short Stories 5 × 8.5; 112 pp; Trade paper $12.95 CAN / $12.95 US
This charming intrigue starts with an enigmatic manuscript that brings together two disparate characters. The first is an embalmer who, unable to look after the living, devotes himself to the dead. The other is an ailing concert pianist consorting with the ghosts of his past. Their tragic encounter is brilliantly illuminated by black humour and compassion. “A beautiful, surprising novel that speaks with tenderness and dark humour.” – La Semaine
ISBN 978-0-88922-840-5 / E-ISBN 978-0-88922-841-2 Fiction: Literary 5 × 8.5; 256 pp; Trade paper $16.95 CAN / $16.95 US
The Obese Christ
Motherhouse
l a r r y t r e m b l ay
d av i d f e n n a r i o
Translated by Sheila Fischman
Edgar, a timid, asocial thirty-something, witnesses the brutal rape of a young woman and subsequently bears the unconscious victim home. Haunted by the death of his overbearing mother, he pledges to act as the mysterious woman’s saviour. Gothic and darkly humorous, The Obese Christ explores the nebulous divide between Good and Evil, while demonstrating a powerful mastery of suspense.
This powerful drama gives a voice to the disillusioned workingclass women employed at the British Munitions Factory in Verdun, Quebec, during the First World War. Following in the trudging footsteps of Fennario’s anti-war protest play Bolsheviki (Talonbooks, 2012), Motherhouse similarly debunks the sentimental notions of duty, heroism, and nationhood that figured so prominently in Canadian war effort campaigns and that persist in Canadian history textbooks today. Cast of 1 woman.
“Larry Tremblay has concocted an amazing psycho-religious thriller.” – Voir
ISBN 978-0-88922-842-9 / E-ISBN 978-0-88922-843-6 Fiction: Literary 5 × 8.5; 144 pp; Trade paper $14.95 CAN / $14.95 US
ISBN 978-0-88922-848-1 / E-ISBN 978-0-88922-849-8 Drama 5.5 × 8.5; 128 pp; Trade paper $17.95 CAN / $17.95 US
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16 Talonbooks Recent Releases
The Valley
God and the Indian
joan macleod
d r e w h ay d e n t ay l o r
Inspired by the 2007 tasering death of Robert Dziekanski at Vancouver International Airport, The Valley dramatizes the often volatile relationship between law enforcement and people in the grip of mental illness. Cast of 2 women and 2 men. “With her new play The Valley, playwright Joan MacLeod peers behind the headlines in a subtle work that avoids all the romantic traps that typically ensnare those who write about mental illness. Focusing on two families, she takes a close, clear-eyed look at our society – one where individual rights and freedoms are constantly clashing with the desire to protect, at home and on the streets.” – Globe and Mail ISBN 978-0-88922-846-7 / E-ISBN 978-0-88922-847-4 Drama 5.5 × 8.5; 96 pp; Trade paper $16.95 CAN / $16.95 US
“A respectful treatment of one of the most painful chapters in Canadian history.” – Georgia Straight ISBN 978-0-88922-844-3 / E-ISBN 978-0-88922-845-0 Drama 5.5 × 8.5; 96 pp; Trade paper $16.95 CAN / $16.95 US
Corked
DOWNVERSE
catriona strang
nikki reimer
Catriona Strang expertly “fabricates her own reality” in poems that explore the female condition and respond to Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. In a powerful display of poetic ingenuity, Strang situates classical themes of existentialism, memory, time, and the role of women in two clarifying contexts: the metaphorical mailbox of Proust and the speaker’s own body, as understood in geographical and geological terms. “Corked turns domestic space into a foreign planetary body, and language into a Curiosity rover. Corked touches down through vast internal distances to find a spring of our condition – as seen from here, ‘the Strang terrain’ – in Marcel Proust.” – Louis Cabri ISBN 978-0-88922-852-8 Poetry 5.5 × 9; 96 pp; Trade paper $16.95 CAN / $16.95 US
While panhandling outside a coffee shop, Johnny, a Cree woman, is shocked to see a face she recognizes from her childhood at residential school. Desperate to hear him acknowledge what happened to her and other children at the school, Johnny follows George King, now an Anglican assistant bishop, to his office to confront him. Against the backdrop of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the play explores what is possible when the abused meets the abuser and is given a forum for free expression. Cast of 1 woman and 1 man.
In this quick-witted collection of poems, Nikki Reimer mines the language of new media – hashtags, YouTube comments, Twitter updates – to defamiliarize the very substance of modern life: the constellation of media-enforced ideals that barrage our newsfeeds, daily commutes to #work, and (mostly online) excursions to the (Apple) store. #nuffsaid Praise for Nikki Reimer’s [sic]: “[sic] is a giddy, whimsical, and expertly timed series of fake-outs and sucker punches. Corporatism, sexism, and intellectual sloth all get brought out for questioning in a series of wild, gesticulating poems … Reimer’s voice is both dexterous and savvy.” – Globe and Mail ISBN 978-0-88922-854-2 Poetry 5 × 8.5; 128 pp; Trade paper $16.95 CAN / $16.95 US
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Talonbooks Recent Releases 17
From the Poplars
Thrum
cecily nicholson
natalie simpson
In the North Arm of the Fraser River lies Poplar Island, uninhabited, lush, and unspoken – but storied. From the Poplars is the poetic outcome of archival research and of listening to these stories – both old and new. Present in efforts of decolonization, reconciliation, and land protection, these poems temper a silence that inevitably will be heard. “From the Poplars is a work of great conviction and poetic attention that activates what T.J. Demos calls ‘the force of the political in art’.” – Jeff Derksen
ISBN 978-0-88922-856-6 Poetry 5.25 × 8.75; 104 pp; Trade paper $16.95 CAN / $16.95 US
“To get at turn away.” In Thrum, her second collection of poetry, Natalie Simpson reveals how making sense is not always the same as making meaning. Her supple and agile poems seduce the weary reader away from representation and toward sound, texture, and absence. “In Thrum, Simpson deftly tugs at the ‘ragged edge of nuance,’ unravels language into a gorgeous heap. Though it is undone, it isn’t a mess: she finds the scraps that make elegant sense, holds all the slippery bits together with loose, precise stitches.” – Sachiko Murakami ISBN 978-0-88922-850-4 Poetry 6 × 8.5; 128 pp; Trade paper $16.95 CAN / $16.95 US
The Visual Laboratory of Robert Lepage
After Completion The Later Letters of Charles Olson and Frances Boldereff
ludovic fouquet Translated by Rhonda Mullins
Edited by Sharon Thesen & Ralph Maud
For more than three decades, Robert Lepage’s dynamic multimedia performance works have been produced on stages worldwide and have broken barriers in theatre, expanding the genre into other forms of expression, such as photography, cinema, and video. Despite Lepage’s prolificacy, and his status as one of the pioneers of new-media performance, little critical writing about his work has been published, particularly in English. In The Visual Laboratory of Robert Lepage, Ludovic Fouquet investigates Lepage’s body of work, from 1979 to the present, identifying themes and exploring practices that mark him as one of the most highly original creators today.
After Completion opens in September 1950, the point at which Charles Olson and Frances Boldereff’s earlier letters, collected in A Modern Correspondence, left off. In the 150 letters of this volume, which spans the years 1950 to 1969, we witness the intensity of the correspondence flare intermittently, sometimes explosively, as Olson and Boldereff try to maintain some continuity in their separateness. In these later letters, we also experience their magnificent mutual embracing of Arthur Rimbaud. The correspondence taken as a whole presents a passionate relationship realized mostly in letters – letters that were to become essential to Olson’s working out of his poetics.
ISBN 978-0-88922-774-3 / E-ISBN 978-0-88922-775-0 Non-fiction: Theatre; Stagecraft 6 × 9.5; 416 pp; Trade paper; Photos $29.95 CAN / $29.95 US
ISBN 978-0-88922-706-4 Non-fiction: Biography / Autobiography 6 × 9; 304 pp; Trade paper; Photos $24.95 CAN / $24.95 US
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18 Talonbooks Sales Representation, Ordering, and Trade Terms
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Talonbooks Sales Representation, Ordering, and Trade Terms 19
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20 Talonbooks Sales Representation, Ordering, and Trade Terms
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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 backorder shipments to avoid higher shipping costs for single items. Call customer service for more details on this and also on our expedited shipping options.
NEW ACCOUNTS Customers who qualify may apply for prepaid or net following terms upon completing a credit application. New accounts will be opened on approval of credit. If you have any questions, contact the credit department.
CREDIT TERMS Payment is due at the end of the month following date of invoice (e.g., all June invoices are due on July 31). Overdue accounts are subject to an interest charge of 1.5% per month, 18% per annum.
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.
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 stickerdamaged. 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 numbers 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 Damaged books, short shipments or errors must be reported in writing to customer service within 20 days of receipt of shipment. Raincoast will not arrange to pick up damaged claims. Damaged books must be returned in full via a traceable method to ensure proof of delivery. Whole book returns only, no cover returns. Include a copy of the invoice with a description of the damage and a claim to credit the return shipping. For additional assistance, please contact customer service at 1-800-663-5714.
ELECTRONIC AND ONLINE ORDERING If your store is using a system that can order electronically or if you would like to order online or check your orders online at our B2B website http:// services.raincoast.com, or to obtain information on electronic ordering, please call our customer service department at 1-800-663-5714.
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TALONBOOKS talonbooks.com
278 East First Avenue Vancouver, BC Canada V5T 1A6