Talonbooks: 174 books

There’s no way we shoulda been arrested for sabotaging the war effort … trying to organize a strike … But if you really wanted to arrest somebody, you could go down to the British Munitions Factory and charge them with murder … cuz that’s what it was. Making us work all these long, crazy hours...

Cerulean Blue is a comedic play about a struggling blues band invited to participate in a benefit concert for a First Nation community in conflict with governmental authorities. Upon arriving, the band discovers the entire lineup of musical acts has cancelled and they’re left trapped behind barricades....

To the Barricades moves back and forth between historical and contemporary scenes of revolt, from nineteenth-century Parisian street barricades to twenty-first-century occupations and street marches, shifting along the active seam between poetry and revolution. Avant-garde technique is donated to...

Inspired by the lives of two great artists – Evelyn Rowat, fashion illustrator, and René Marcil, painter – The Painter’s Wife, a novel about art and passion, is written in a language as brilliant and intense as the mercurial lives of its completely contradictory characters.

Set in a run-down Vancouver hotel in 1974, only months after the start of the infamous Pinochet regime, eight Chilean refugees struggle, at times haplessly, at times profoundly, to decide if fleeing their homeland means they have abandoned their friends and responsibilities or not. More than a dark comedy, this play gives voice to refugee communities from all corners.

Internationally acclaimed as a playwright, screen-writer, comic and sardonic commentator on the endless gaffs, absurdities and the profound and painful misunderstandings that continue to characterize social interactions between aboriginal and non-aboriginal peoples, Taylor’s stories in Fearless Warriors...

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...

My TWP Plays presents five important plays written by Jack Winter while he was resident playwright at Toronto Workshop Productions, one of the first great troupes of the experimental and alternative theatre movement. The carnivalesque style of the selected works in this anthology reflects the turbulence,...

In general terms, auto/biographical performances have become hugely popular forms in Europe and North America because we live in a culture of me or I at a time when access to cultural production is easy. This collection brings theatre practitioners together with academics from three continents in a groundbreaking exploration of the interdisciplinary realm of Theatre and AutoBiography.

Quebec City, 1908. Two priests-to-be are ordered to deliver a letter to a controversial visitor to their city: the legendary French actress, Sarah Bernhardt.']As part of her long career, Bernhardt – known to her loyal fans as “The Divine” – visited Canada several times between 1880 and 1917,...

By analyzing publicity materials, photos, programs, reviews, and box office and theater records, D.A. Hadfield traces the process of creating a theatrical “success” and investigates how the politics involved influences what we perceive as “good” play-writing.

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...

This tell-all book by M.A.C. Farrant, whom Publishers Weekly has celebrated as “a brave iconoclast” and whose work the Globe & Mail has said “bristles with moral fury … at the absurdities of our accelerated age and a great dose of laugh-out-loud humour,” offers her readers nothing less...

In Act 1, Claude, 55, visits his father Alex, 77, in an Alzheimer’s ward, intimately tending to his silent, vacant father’s bodily needs while hopelessly trying to reach him with monologues and settle misunderstandings. In Act 2, in an eerie reversal of roles, Alex visits Claude in the same ward, similarly finding disconsolate irony where he had looked for forgiveness.