Talonbooks: 174 books

More than 9 million Germans died as a result of deliberate Allied starvation and expulsion policies after World War II-one quarter of the country was annexed, and about 15 million people expelled in the largest act of ethnic cleansing the world has ever known. Over 2 million of these alone, including...

Like thousands of Aboriginal children in the United States, Canada, and elsewhere in the colonized world, Xatsu'll chief Bev Sellars spent part of her childhood as a student in a church-run residential school.These institutions endeavored to "civilize" Native children through Christian teachings;...

Having grown apart after a traumatic and defining moment in their youth, two brothers reconnect to fulfill a life-long ambition to go skydiving. Skydive explores the world of dreams and imagination: the universal human desire to push beyond our physical limitations and to fly.

Volume III of The Salish People deals with the Mainland Halkomelem, the people of the Fraser River from Vancouver to Chilliwack, and includes the earliest account of B.C. archaeological sites. The Salish People collects for the first time field reports (circa 1895) written by ethnographer Charles Hill-Tout.

Composed of autobiographical stories that sketch the resonant heights and depths of a memoir, Subject to Change is a series of portraits along the road of a life well-lived. These stories are articulate, intelligent, passionate records of how encounters with others have changed and shaped the humanity, character and community – the “subject” – of the writer.

Interweaving recollections of her revolutionary life in Chile under Augusto Pinochet's regime with her fleeting attempts to realize a "vision" of love in Los Angeles, Carmen Aguirre's one-woman show Blue Box is a fiery proclamation of carnal yearning and social conviction. As ever, Aguirre is assertive,...

Martine Desjardins delivers to readers of Maleficium the unexpurgated revelations of Vicar Jerome Savoie, a heretic priest in nineteenth century Montreal. Braving threats from the Catholic Church, Savoie dares to violate the sanctity of the confessional in this confession-within-a-confession, in which...

Living by Stories includes a number of classic stories set in the “mythological age” about the trickster/transformer, Coyote, and his efforts to rid the world of bad people – spatla or “monsters,” but this volume also presents historical narratives set in the more recent past, which involve the arrival of new quasi-monsters – “SHAmas” (Whites).

One of Canada’s greatest literary figures reflects on life at the centre of Quebec literary arts. Re-examining the influences of her early life in a large, rural Catholic family, Madeleine Gagnon not only explores her rejection of unexamined values as part of her intellectual development but also...

Down the Road to Eternity: New & Selected Fiction is a collection of M.A.C. Farrant’s work dating from 1985 to 2009, including the complete suite of eighteen stories, The North Pole, in which our individual existences are bludgeoned by the threat of “end times”-climate change, species extinction, pandemics, and really bad politics.

Born in Providence, Rhode Island, to a Cree mother and a French father, Réauna, affectionately known throughout Tremblay’s work as “Nana,” was sent with her two younger sisters, Béa and Alice, to be raised on her maternal grandparents’ farm in Sainte-Maria-de-Saskatchewan, a francophone Catholic...

At precisely the cultural moment you were hoping for, a dream team of smart, sexy, brunette, West Coast poets of Italian descent has passionately co-authored an intelligent collection of poetry that both celebrates and capsizes the romantic comedy.From the origin of the genre (It Happened One Night)...

Phyllis Webb is a poet around whom archetypes tend to cluster: the reclusive artist; the distraught, borderline suicidal Sapphic woman poet. While on the surface she seems supremely disinterested in the public sphere, argues Stephen Collis in this celebration of her work, Webb is no domestic, as a creator or a critic. Her work sweeps across politics, philosophy, and economics.

David French’s adaptation of August Strindberg’s disturbing and enduring drama of the transgressive affair between the daughter of a count and the count’s man-servant has an eerie contemporary feel about it. French has sharpened the psychodramas of the original – scenes of desire, anger, jealousy,...