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Amber Teething Necklaces for the Gullible

William Holt

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Amber Teething Necklaces for the Gullible

Peddling Snakeoil for the Modern Age

By William Holt

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Amber Teething Necklaces for the Gullible

Peddling Snakeoil for the Modern Age

By William Holt

as a Loan Stars Smarchvember 2019 Adult top pick

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You recommended this title on September 12 2019

Amber Teething Necklaces for the Gullible

Peddling Snakeoil for the Modern Age

By William Holt

as a Loan Stars Smarchvember 2019 Adult top pick

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You recommended this title on September 12 2019

Amber Teething Necklaces for the Gullible

Peddling Snakeoil for the Modern Age

By William Holt

as a Loan Stars Smarchvember 2019 Adult top pick

This is a really great book that really opens your eyes to the use of hokey-pokey snakeoil based teething pain treatments that aren't Tylenol or Motrin based. Or then something else entirely that has nothing to do

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Talon Books Ltd Complete Catalogue

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301.
Series: The Dishwashers Paperback Morris Panych 9780889225244 $17.95 DRAMA Sep 15, 2005

Of all our contemporary urban myths none is more absurd than the fiction of the ?classless society,” and Morris Panych’s latest comedy penetrates ruthlessly to the shock and horror of the residue of hardened pesto soiling its porcelain heart.Haplessly determined to have his own miserable authority vindicated, chief dishwasher Dressler presides over the steam-choked basement of an up-scale restaurant, a place of seamless existential drudgery so utterly remote from the light of day that its wage-slaves have no contact with anyone outside. Spoutin... + Read More
302.
Series: Paradise by the River Paperback Vittorio Rossi 9780889223936 $17.95 DRAMA Jan 01, 1998

Canada. 1940. In a time and country fraught with the uncertainties of war, Prime Minister MacKenzie King calls for the destruction of any ?subversive elements” on the nation’s soil. The Act is supported by the majority of Canadians: anxious, patriotic and ?intolerant” of fascism. After Canada officially declares war with Italy, Romano, a recent immigrant, is arrested without charge in his own home. Torn from the arms of his terrified and pregnant wife Maria, Romano is held against his will with hundreds of men of Italian descent at a prisoner-o... + Read More
303.
Series: Ernestine Shuswap Gets Her Trout Paperback Tomson Highway 9780889225251 $16.95 DRAMA Sep 15, 2005

Based on a deposition signed by 14 Chiefs of the Thompson River basin on the occasion of a visit to their lands by Canadian Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier in 1910, Ernestine Shuswap Gets Her Trout is a ritualized retelling of how the Native Peoples of British Columbia lost their fishing, hunting and grazing rights, their lands, and finally their language without their agreement or consent, and without any treaties ever having been signed. It is one of the most compellingly tragic cases of cultural genocide to emerge from the history of colo... + Read More
304.
Series: Corker Paperback Wendy Lill 9780889223943 $16.95 DRAMA Jan 01, 1998

Corker uses the familiar but difficult and treacherous nineteenth-century device of representing the family as a microcosm of the nation state. Opening with the extended family’s awkward attendance at the funeral of Serena, aging flower child of the sixties, the symbolic conflicts build quickly. Serena’s sister Merit, the hard-driving, social-program-budget-slashing female political aparatchik and her husband Leonard, a lion of free enterprise, are hell bent on dismantling their government’s social services by replacing them with a privatized h... + Read More
305.
Series: Dominican Moon Paperback Ken Norris 9780889225268 $17.95 POETRY Sep 15, 2005

Composed like a dark novel-in-verse, Dominican Moon is the second book in Ken Norris’s travel trilogy. With Dante as his guide, he leaves behind the predominantly European terrain of the first book in this series, Limbo Road, and finds himself in the ?terra incognita” of the Caribbean Sea.On his own contemporary voyage of discovery of the island of Hispaniola, the ?new world” Columbus discovered in 1492, Norris encounters seductive lovers and moon-haunted tropical nights, dark Dominican rum and winter baseball, sugar cane fields and ?the city o... + Read More
306.
Series: Banana Boots Paperback David Fennario 9780889223967 $15.95 DRAMA Jan 01, 1998

Banana Boots is a one-man-show / memoir in which Fennario recounts, with astonishing insight and wit, the phenomenon of taking his famous bilingual play Balconville to Belfast on a British / Canadian cultural mission. Given the subject of Balconville, that the real problem in Quebec is not one of language or culture, but one of British imperialism and the class structure it imposes on its ?colonials,” the ironies of such an event are, of course, both delicious and irresistible.Though first mystified by the dismissive and disinterested response ... + Read More
307.
Series: Cariboo Magi Paperback Lucia Frangione 9780889225275 $15.95 DRAMA Sep 15, 2005

A drunken Anglican minister who has failed to convert anyone in ten years, an avaricious saloon keeper with a murder in her past, a pregnant child star who has become too old for her roles and a man who claims to be the last of the Mohicans all need a new lease on life. They intercept a contract meant for a San Diego theatre company, form a bedraggled troupe of players and head north, through the wilds of the Cariboo gold rush to perform a Christmas Pageant for the Theatre Royal in Barkerville, BC.On their way, they rehearse a hilarious pastich... + Read More
308.
Series: Lost Souls and Missing Persons Paperback Sally Clark 9780889223974 $16.95 DRAMA Jan 01, 1998

Lost Souls and Missing Persons premiered at Theatre Passe Muraille in 1984. It is a comic, biting, surreal investigation of the question of self and identity in the North American middle-class?a trope of insulating banalities which trades the body’s physical and spiritual content for the artifice of a formalized security and predictability. Hannah, wife and mother of two teenagers, vacationing with her husband Lyle in New York, wakes up in the middle of the night and looks at the man sleeping in the bed next to her and screams. She does not rem... + Read More
309.
Series: The Bicycle Eater Paperback Larry Tremblay 9780889225282 $19.95 FICTION Sep 15, 2005

Singularly obsessed with his all-consuming passion for Anna, the object of his adolescent desire, the photographer Christophe Langelier is beside himself. Ten years ago, he failed the test of eating a bicycle for her as proof of his love and devotion. Since then, he has created a photographic catalogue of his only model, complete with a glossary, an ?Anna-lexique,” in which the darkness and the light of her idealized being have shaded his language, even as her ubiquitous image has crowded out his own identity.Desperate to escape his unrequited ... + Read More
310.
Series: WASPs Paperback Sally Clark 9780889223981 $16.95 DRAMA Jan 01, 1998

WASPs is one of those plays where the whole is quite literally much greater than the sum of its parts?so much so that it becomes, in retrospect, the subject of the play, ?what the play is about,” and that doesn’t hit you until you are half-way home after a fun evening of bizarre, exotic, and hilarious entertainment. Although signified only by one minor character in the play, described by the head librarian as ?one of our multicultural patrons” (and, of course, by the rather more obvious acronym of the title itself), this is a play about the ele... + Read More
311.
Series: Baseball Love Paperback George Bowering 9780889225299 $19.95 BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY Apr 01, 2006

Having written books in practically every genre, George Bowering is often introduced as someone who adores baseball, yet ironically he did not begin this book about the game until he was appointed Canada’s first Poet Laureate for 2002?04. This picaresque memoir of a road trip with his fiancée through the storied ballparks of a poet’s youthful dreams is built on the bargain of fiction?that the narration of someone else’s life requires the listener or reader to fill in the blanks of what we know is out there, somewhere in the world, but which tak... + Read More
312.
Series: That Woman Paperback Daniel Danis 9780889223998 $15.95 DRAMA Jan 01, 1998

The story of a woman (her name is never given), sent away from her family by her brother, the Bishop, after she is found exploring her sexuality at age seventeen. In a series of twenty-four “snapshots,” That Woman is a devastating Judeo-Christian allegory where voyeurism, fantasy, masturbation, seduction, violence and loss are revealed in fugue-like monologues by the three characters present on stage: a woman who was thirsty, her son who liked to laugh, and an old man who watched them. It is a play which makes the literal “patriarchal gaze” ema... + Read More
313.
Series: The Driving Force Paperback Michel Tremblay 9780889225305 $15.95 DRAMA Nov 01, 2005

In Act 1, Claude, 55, visits his father Alex, 77, in an Alzheimer’s ward, intimately tending to his bodily functions and needs while hopelessly trying to reach his silent, vacant father with a series of monologues?to settle old scores and misunderstandings between them.In an astonishing and eerie reversal of roles, in Act 2 it is Alex who visits his son Claude in the same Alzheimer’s ward and it is Alex’s turn to rant and rail at what he perceives to be his mute son’s contempt for his own working class life.With a cruel and disconsolate irony, ... + Read More
314.
Series: Fragments of a Farewell Letter Read by Geologists Paperback Normand Chaurette 9780889224001 $15.95 DRAMA Jan 01, 1998

Fragments of a Farewell Letter Read by Geologists is a dramatized inquiry in which five geologists are interrogated about the death of one of their colleagues in the Mekong Delta, Cambodia.It is a play about the beginnings and endings of all things. It is a ritualized drama in which meaning is stripped first from reason, then from authority, then from language, then from geography, and finally from the body. Washed away by the rain, both deafening and silent. It is an investigation into the mystery of the wound of life opened up by a bolt of li... + Read More
315.
Series: The Leisure Society Paperback François Archambault 9780889225312 $15.95 DRAMA Sep 15, 2005

Peter and Mary are unhappy. But they don’t know it yet. They work long hours. They invest their money for a retirement they will probably never enjoy. They buy things that are supposed to make them happy but that they never use. They obsess about the nightmare engines of Western economic growth: make more, earn more, have more.Bringing a child into this frightening world fuelled by instant gratification; wanting to have some time and space for themselves so they can continue to grow and develop; or dedicating time to deepen the bonds between th... + Read More
316.
Series: Limbo Road Paperback Ken Norris 9780889224018 $34.95 POETRY Jan 01, 1998

Just as for Dante, for whom the image of the beloved gave entrance to a complete imagination of the world, an ?imago mundi,” the betrayal of a beloved can also shatter the poet’s vision, no matter how elaborately conceived. Such a betrayal can turn the world upside down, where what was loved is now hated, what was benign becomes threatening, what was dangerous is embraced, what was worshipped is murdered, what was past is future. The author is cast adrift, to wander the earth from Tahiti to Prague, from Morocco to Miami, ?in limbo” in a newly u... + Read More
317.
Series: northern wild roses / deth interrupts th dansing Paperback bill bissett 9780889225329 $17.95 POETRY Sep 15, 2005

A pioneer of sound, visual and performance poetry?eschewing the artificial hierarchies of meaning and the privileging of things (?proper” nouns) over actions imposed on language by capital letters; the metric limitations imposed on the possibilities of expression by punctuation; and the illusion of formal transparency imposed on the written word by standard (rather than phonetic) spelling?bissett composes his poems as scripts for pure performance.His primal rejection of all the limiting conventions of written language has allowed him to both ma... + Read More
318.
Series: Somewhere Else Paperback George F. Walker 9780889224025 $24.95 DRAMA Jan 01, 1999

Somewhere Else contains George F. Walker’s own selection of his early plays which matter; which for him have stood the test of time; which represent, as he once said, his ?classical veneer.” In them he honed his considerable and unique dramatic talent along ?that fine line between the serious and the comic,” in settings outside the North American locales of his work since the 1980s.Walker’s earliest plays, absurdist dramas reminiscent of Ionesco and Beckett, climaxed with Beyond Mozambique (1974), featuring a B-movie jungle locale populated by ... + Read More
319.
Series: Dancock's Dance Paperback Guy Vanderhaeghe 9780889225336 $16.95 DRAMA Oct 31, 2005

Shell-shocked, judged un?t for society and haunted by the sins of war, Lieutenant John Carlyle Dancock ?nds himself committed to an insane asylum where he cannot escape the con?nes of righteous authority or his own conscience, which visits him in the ghostly apparition of a soldier he once tormented. Dancock’s Dance is an emotionally haunting play in which one broken man clings breathlessly to a hope for redemption. Vanderhaeghe’s stark, vivid portrayal of internal and worldly chaos rings with hope and shimmers in the craft of his language.
320.
Series: The Queens Paperback Normand Chaurette 9780889224032 $15.95 DRAMA Jan 01, 1998

London, 1483. From the aged Duchess of York, who is 99 years old and will never sit on the throne, to the young Lady Anne who will marry Richard III in order to reign, Chaurette traces the shifting passions and ambitions of six women drawn from Shakespeare’s theatre and portray them here in the timelessness of their quest. As Ernst Kantorowicz has said so clearly in The King’s Two Bodies, all royal personae exist in two worlds: the private world of their needs and desires; and the public world where they become the emblematic icon of the realm.... + Read More
321.
Series: The Hunting Ground Paperback Lise Tremblay 9780889225343 $15.95 FICTION Mar 01, 2006

A northern Canadian village, one of many remote settlements dotting the Quebec landscape, is in transition. Originally dependent on subsistence farming and logging, supplemented by winter hunting, its economy has gradually changed over the years: first increasingly dependent on guiding southern urbanites on hunting trips; then on providing a habitat for birdwatchers, nature tourists and collectors of antiques and local crafts; now primarily dependent on income flows from cottagers and retirees.Each of these remarkably engaging stories is recoun... + Read More
322.
Series: The East End Plays: Part 2 Paperback George F. Walker 9780889224049 $19.95 DRAMA Mar 01, 1999

Where is the East End? It’s where the sun comes up and where you bury the dead. It’s where George Walker set six of his plays. It’s the East End of Toronto; the Lower East Side of New York; down by the East River; East L.A.; East Vancouver. It’s where you get down to the basics of beginnings and endings, and how you get from each of those ends to the other. It’s where Walker’s settings have ?come home.” From his offer of tenuous hope to the denizens of a city salvaged from the powerful and the greedy in Beautiful City (1987); to his championing... + Read More
323.
Series: The Painter's Wife Paperback Monique Durand 9780889225350 $18.95 FICTION Apr 01, 2006

Evelyn is an extraordinary product of a childhood tyrannized by her emotionally frigid and abusive mother, whose life centres on her pretentiously formal weekly bridge games and her banner-bearing role in the local Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire, even though her ancestors fought on the side of the American Revolution against England.Enraptured by a deep affinity for the arts, the young Evelyn is determined to escape her oppressive and dysfunctional family in the Town of Mount Royal near Montreal through her work in the fashion industry.... + Read More
324.
Series: The Noam Chomsky Lectures Paperback Daniel Brooks 9780889224056 $16.95 DRAMA Jan 01, 1997

’Ordinarily, theatre relies on illusion in order to reveal truths; The Noam Chomsky Lectures relies on truths in order to reveal illusions. Following the impetus of Chomsky himself, Brooks and Verdecchia have recognized that mass media, mass spectacle, have trivialized and severed consciousness and conscience, separating both from a communal base. We collectively know little about what is done in our name by our elected governments and the business interests they serve. The Noam Chomsky Lectures assumes not only that we do want to know, that ou... + Read More
325.
Series: The Ventriloquist Paperback Larry Tremblay 9780889225367 $15.95 DRAMA Apr 01, 2006

In The Ventriloquist, Larry Tremblay directs his celebrated mastery of the dramatic monologue to an interrogation of the process of characterization itself. Alone on the stage with his puppet, the ventriloquist introduces his ?self ” as a construct of characters, along with his ?other” imagined characters, to an audience which bears witness to the enormous psychological risks an author must take in the creative process. Constantly walking the dangerously thin edge separating the creation of voice from its appropriation, the ventriloquist strugg... + Read More
326.
Series: The Baby Blues Paperback Drew Hayden Taylor 9780889224063 $16.95 DRAMA Jan 01, 1999

The Baby Blues is Drew Hayden Taylor’s highly wrought farce of patrimony in a stifling, politically correct, post-colonial milieu of ?fancy dancers? of every stripe on the powwow trail. In juxtaposing three generations of careless wandering hedonists, progenitors of a string of offspring from their six-night stands, with their erstwhile naïve women partners who are always left holding the bag, the ?big questions? of heritage, family, cultural context and personal identity are ruthlessly stripped of their conventional meanings and become so much... + Read More
327.
Series: In a World Created by a Drunken God Paperback Drew Hayden Taylor 9780889225374 $17.95 DRAMA Mar 01, 2006

Jason Pierce, a 31 year old Canadian half-Native man, is packing up his urban apartment to leave it all behind for his romanticized vision of a return to life on the reserve where he grew up. As he’s leaving, he is paid an unexpected visit by a 34 year old American man, Harry Deiter, who awkwardly introduces himself as Jason’s half-brother. What Harry wants from Jason is bizarre: to be compatibility-tested for a possible kidney donation to their dying non-Native father, a man Jason has no memory of ever meeting and who, after a brief and secret... + Read More
328.
Series: Divinity Bash / nine lives Paperback Bryden MacDonald 9780889224087 $16.95 DRAMA Jan 01, 1999

Bryden MacDonald’s most extreme venture into the world of the theatre to date, Divinity Bash, creates a play informed by Ionesco’s arid visions, Dali’s baroque excesses and Jim Morrison’s amateur nihilisms. As the main character, Albert’s secure and straight world begins to unravel, so does the structure of the language, leaving words and images to fly away from and into each other like Escher’s black birds. It is a play which proposes that of all the possible fantasies one could have indulged in, the neo-con vision of the ’90s emerged victorio... + Read More
329.
Series: Paul Martin & Companies Sixty Theses on the Nature of Alegal Nature of Tax Paperback Alain Deneault 9780889225381 $15.95 POLITICAL SCIENCE Jan 02, 2006

The more one reads about Paul Martin’s business affairs, the more troubling they appear. In Paul Martin & Companies, Alain Deneault offers a piercing look at what it means when a Canadian prime minister puts his private interests outside the laws he has been elected to apply. Using Martin’s business dealings as an example, Deneault sheds light on the shadowy world of tax havens, offering insight into the functioning of these government-free fiscal zones and their relation to the growing world problems of capital flight, foreign debt, accountabi... + Read More
330.
Series: The Tale of Teeka Paperback Michel Marc Bouchard 9780889224100 $15.95 DRAMA Jan 01, 1999

Rural Quebec in the fifties. A battered child, Maurice, has taken refuge in a fantasy world. Alone on the farm one afternoon, he invites his pet goose, Teeka, into the house where his bedroom and the bathroom become the scene of some of Tarzan’s most terrifying adventures. His parents unexpected return forces Maurice to commit a desperate and cruel act of violence.The original production of L’Histoire de l’Oie, toured by Théâtre des Deux Mondes in French, English, German and spanish, represented Canada at numerous international festivals and ga... + Read More
331.
Series: fractal economies Paperback derek beaulieu 9780889225398 $15.95 POETRY Feb 01, 2006

In fractal economies, derek beaulieu pushes the limits of poetry and poetics by grinding language through the mill of photocopiers, found material, collage, printmaking, frottage and Letraset?creating a new language for the genre. These ?fractal economies,” or series of increasingly complex replications of forms through the repeated application of a fixed set of rules, challenge the status quo of poetry and of the politics of language itself, which is, with respect to any human script yet deciphered, capitalist in its very origin. Letters are f... + Read More
332.
Series: The Hope Slide / Little Sister Paperback Joan MacLeod 9780889224117 $16.95 DRAMA Jan 01, 1999

Two plays by award-winning playwright Joan MacLeod. Little Sister was first performed at Theatre Direct in Toronto in 1994 and won the Chalmers Canadian Play Award, Theatre for Young Audiences in 1995. The Hope Slide was first performed at the Tarragon Theatre in Toronto in 1992 and won the Floyd S. Chalmers Canadian Play Award in 1993.
333.
Series: Theatre and AutoBiography Writing and Performing Lives in Theory and Practice Paperback Sherrill Grace 9780889225404 $29.95 PERFORMING ARTS Feb 01, 2006

That both autobiography and biography have acquired a position of unprecedented importance over the past 30 years is now obvious. Less obvious are the reasons for this phenomenon. Theorists and students of AutoBiography, a research subject now viewed as respectable in academic circles, have recently mapped the contours and shifting parameters of the autobiographical and the biographical processes, thereby contributing to the profile and stature of both.This collection brings theatre practitioners together with academics from three continents in... + Read More
334.
Series: Suburban Motel Paperback George F. Walker 9780889224124 $29.95 DRAMA Jan 01, 1999

Something completely different from George Walker! Six plays, united only by the fact that they each take place in one and the same suburban motel room. Transients, lovers, the haunted and the hunted, the desperate and the dumb, each “strut and fret their hour upon the stage and then are heard of no more.” Real, funny and heartbreaking. With an introduction by Daniel De Raey.Suburban Motel contains six plays: Problem Child, Criminal Genius, Risk Everything, Adult Entertainment, Featuring Loretta and The End of Civilization.
335.
Series: Bonbons Assortis / Assorted Candies Paperback Michel Tremblay 9780889225411 $17.95 BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY Sep 01, 2006

Bonbons Assortis / Assorted Candies is Michel Tremblay’s fourth (and he says last) book of autobiographical narratives inspired by his childhood and youth. Like the previous three volumes, which celebrate the books, plays and films that shaped his imagination and writing life, this collection of eight delightful stories takes us back to Tremblay’s formative years in Montreal’s Plateau Mont-Royal, offering the reader poignant and joyful childhood memories as varied as the assorted candies his mother hoarded under her bed, to be shared only on th... + Read More
336.
Series: The East End Plays: Part 1 Paperback George F. Walker 9780889224131 $24.95 DRAMA Dec 01, 1999

By the time he was writing Gossip in 1977, George Walker had already begun to shift his settings from, on the one hand, North America’s colonial roots in Europe, and on the other, its fascination with other, exotically foreign locales. Yet, even in The Power Plays, Walker is still exploring the ironic and dramatic possibilities of the stereotypes (albeit, by this time, home-grown ones) that continue to provide the fertile ground of contemporary North American sensibilities.With his creation of the Governor General’s Award winning Criminals in L... + Read More
337.
Series: My Name Is Bosnia Paperback Madeleine Gagnon 9780889225428 $19.95 FICTION Sep 01, 2006

Sabaheta is a literature student at the University of Sarajevo when war breaks out in Bosnia-Herzegovina. After her brother is taken from the family by armed thugs and her mother descends into madness, she goes into the forest with her father to join the guerrillas, where she dresses like a boy and fights side-by-side with the men.When her father is killed in combat, Sabaheta gives him a makeshift funeral and vows one day to leave her homeland and seek a country where she can pursue her studies and live in peace. Although she is not an observan... + Read More
338.
Series: The Power Plays Paperback George F. Walker 9780889224148 $19.95 DRAMA Jan 01, 1999

First published as a trilogy in 1986, The Power Plays contain Gossip (1977), Filthy Rich (1979), and The Art of War (1983). Completely revised and updated for this new Talonbooks edition, these three plays showcase both the development and the culmination of Walker’s engagement with the film noir style.
339.
Series: Desrosiers Diaspora series The Black Notebook Paperback Michel Tremblay 9780889225435 $19.95 FICTION Sep 01, 2006

In the heart of the Latin Quarter, meeting place of marginal characters of all sorts, Céline Poulin works the night shift at a cheap and popular restaurant, Le Sélect, serving hamburger platters and spaghetti and meatballs to student misfits, transvestites, hookers and queens from the Main?Montreal’s disreputable Boulevard Saint-Laurent. Hanging out with a theatre company in her off hours, Céline sees opening before her a world where it is not only possible, but even desirable to pretend. When the director offers her a role in The Trojan Women,... + Read More
340.
Series: Lions Gate Hardcover Lilia D'Acres 9780889224162 $34.95 ARCHITECTURE Jan 01, 1999

Arching over the entrance to Vancouver’s harbour is a beautiful web of intricately suspended steel. It is at once a gateway, landmark, symbol and emblem of a Western city, poised at the edge of a continent gazing westward over the wide Pacific Ocean, to the East. Day and night, its taut steel strings sing the original hymn to progress, hope and riches first composed in the hearts and minds of its builders. Celebrated in Douglas Coupland’s paean as a ?bridge to heaven,” the Lions Gate Bridge has become an icon of the city, not only to heritage c... + Read More
341.
Series: The Baldwins Paperback Serge Lamothe 9780889225442 $15.95 FICTION Aug 01, 2006

In the post-apocalyptic future, 50 years after the last government of turbo-liberals and its president-for-life have been elected, a group of researchers convenes a Congress to address the curious cultural phenomenon of the Baldwins, whose stories have been gathered and archived by the chroniclers since the end of history. ?Who are the Baldwins?” the Congress asks. ?Do they actually exist, and if so, what is their history and their fate?” Only one thing seems certain to these Baldwinologists: ?The Baldwins resemble us: they knew nothing of thei... + Read More
342.
Series: News & Smoke Paperback Sharon Thesen 9780889224179 $17.95 POETRY Jan 01, 1999

News & Smoke includes selections from all six of Thesen’s previous books (of which only Aurora remains in print); unpublished poems from the fifteen year period of the late 70s to the mid 90s; as well as some work previously published only in magazines. All of the work is imbued with a spare, meticulous rigour, creating lines of a clear, pale light, punctuated by bursts of intense, flowering, staining colour-?odd graces of beauty, in whatever form, that make things real again.”
343.
Series: The Decline of the Hollywood Empire Paperback Hervé Fischer 9780889225459 $17.95 PERFORMING ARTS Sep 01, 2006

The Hollywood empire was built over the course of a century through hard-nosed business practices such as block booking, dumping and buying up the competition, turning the silver screen into a goldmine in the process. The business logic that has driven the industry since its beginnings has gone into hyperdrive in recent years, with astronomical sums invested in productions and promotion. Ironically that massive outlay has gone toward churning out a flat, made-in-Hollywood universalism that can be exported planet-wide, but which is simultaneousl... + Read More
344.
Series: The Duchess and the Commoner Paperback Michel Tremblay 9780889224186 $19.95 FICTION Sep 15, 1999

(This third volume in the Chronicles of the Plateau Mont-Royal?an epic series of novels which imagines the lives of the characters of Tremblay’s plays?deals with an explicitly gay thematic: Tremblay’s metaphor for the Québécois desire for a more glamorous identity on the world stage.)This is the third volume in Michel Tremblay’s six-volume Chronicles of the Plateau Mont Royal, an epic series of novels which imagines, in prose, the lives of the characters of Tremblay’s plays, in which each of them acts out their own personal drama: their loves, ... + Read More
345.
Series: Spectacle of Empire Marc Lescarbot's Theatre of Neptune in New France Paperback Jerry Wasserman 9780889225473 $21.95 DRAMA Sep 01, 2006

2006 marked the 400th anniversary of a major theatrical event in the history of North American drama. The Theatre of Neptune in New France by lawyer, poet and historian Marc Lescarbot was a masque of welcome performed on the Bay of Fundy by members of the tiny French colony of Port Royal on November 14, 1606. It celebrated the return of the ship bearing the Sieur de Poutrincourt and navigator-explorer Samuel de Champlain from their travels along the coastline as far south as Cape Cod in search of a more temperate site for the colony.It is a pae... + Read More
346.
Series: Song of the Say-Sayer Paperback Daniel Danis 9780889224193 $15.95 DRAMA Jan 01, 1999

During a thunderstorm, lightning strikes the home of the Lastings, killing the parents and forever bonding the children, even though Rock, William, Fred-James and Naomi are not blood-related. Years later, still haunted by their terrible childhood memory, the three older brothers await the return of their beloved sister who has been singing in faraway places. But the redhead who returns is horribly sick. Now the Lasting clan must join forces again, because the ?municipals’ are threatening to turn away their sister.
347.
Series: The Rap Canterbury Tales Paperback Baba Brinkman 9780889225480 $24.95 POETRY Sep 01, 2006

The ambition that inspired rapper and MC Baba Brinkman to transpose his performance piece ?The Rap Canterbury Tales” to the printed page was his desire to resurrect Chaucer’s brilliant stories from their vellum mausoleum into visible and audible contemporary forms that would once again delight and edify both live listening audiences and readers?a rebirth of what poetry should be in its essence, and once was. Since Chaucer has become an unassailable icon of print culture, and hip-hop is an unassailable icon of contemporary digital cool, he saw t... + Read More
348.
Series: The Coronation Voyage Paperback Michel Marc Bouchard 9780889224223 $17.95 DRAMA Jan 01, 1999

May 1953. The Empress of France sets sail from Montreal. On the pretext of attending the celebrations marking the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, an important mafioso leaves for England where he secretly plans to live in exile with his two sons. Aboard this floating palace in the middle of the ocean, the petty lord of the Montreal underworld must face the most important decision of his dubious career: will he sacrifice his youngest son for a safe-conduct?Le Voyage du couronnement, co-produced by Theatre du Nouveau Monde in Montreal and Théatr... + Read More
349.
Series: Miss Julie Paperback August Stringberg 9780889225497 $16.95 DRAMA Sep 01, 2006

As all the great dramatists since the Greek tragedians have known, class and gender roles continue to remain the two fundamental determinants of the social fabric of any culture?even one, like our own, in which the boundaries of those identities have become fluid, situational and transitory.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 feel of the contemporary about it. In this adaptation of Miss Julie, French ha... + Read More
350.
Series: The New Canadian Criticism Series ABC of Reading TRG Paperback Peter Jaeger 9780889224230 $17.95 LITERARY CRITICISM Jan 01, 1999

ABC of Reading TRG examines the writings of Steve McCaffery and bpNichol, with a special focus on their collaborative work as the Toronto Research Group (TRG). The book expands what little criticism there is on the Group’s collaborations by exploring their engagements with literary theory, by differentiating between each writer’s personal concerns, and by reading their reports in conjunction with their individually authored writings.On the one hand, it reads TRG’s reports ?against the grain”: it attempts to uncover the unconscious links among r... + Read More
351.
Series: Conversations in Tehran Paperback Jean-Daniel LaFond 9780889225503 $19.95 POLITICAL SCIENCE Sep 01, 2006

In early 2004, filmmaker Jean-Daniel Lafond (Salam Iran, a Persian Letter) and author Fred A. Reed (Persian Postcards: Iran after Khomeini) returned to Iran after a two-year absence?on the eve of the parliamentary elections that were to seal the political defeat of the Reform movement. They had come to interview several of the men and women who had propelled Mohammad Khatami to the presidency in 1997, with a mission to rebuild a civil society in Iran under the banner of human rights, democracy, free speech and a renewed dialogue of civilization... + Read More
352.
Series: The Richard Brautigan Ahhhhhhhhhhh Paperback rob mclennan 9780889224247 $15.95 POETRY Jan 01, 1999

The Richard Brautigan Ahhhhhhhhhhh covers the range of love, loss and learning that have made rob mclennan one of the most exciting young poets in Canada. The language of the poems, though thoroughly grounded in the media culture of television and film, casts a deceptively familiar veil over the breadth and depth of reading which inform this work?from the seventeenth century platonist mystics to what his companions on the poetry trail were writing at last night’s soirée, a crowd of voices, asides, references, allusions and whispers is constantl... + Read More
353.
Series: Marion Bridge Second Edition Paperback Daniel MacIvor 9780889225527 $18.95 DRAMA Oct 01, 2006

This fascinating version of Daniel MacIvor’s most successful play to date lets the reader in on a secret: it was never primarily written as a work for live theatrical performance, but as a vehicle for his development of a screenplay, also included in this new edition. In his surprisingly revealing introduction, MacIvor talks about the genesis of both the play and the movie; the lessons he learned about the differences between the two media; and their radically different stylistic, technical and practical demands on both their authors and their ... + Read More
354.
Series: The Heart Laid Bare Paperback Michel Tremblay 9780889224254 $19.95 FICTION Mar 15, 2002

Talonbooks is pleased to announce a new edition of one of Michel Tremblay’s most unusual novels. First published in English translation by M&S in 1989 under the title The Heart Laid Bare [Le coeur découvert, Leméac, 1986], British and American rights to this novel were sold to Serpent’s Tail, who published this same book under a different title, Making Room, which is now out of print.This new Talonbooks edition proudly restores this novel to its rightful place in Tremblay’s sweeping and compassionate imagination of human sensibility and passion... + Read More
355.
Series: Indian Myths & Legends from the North Pacific Coast of America A Translation of Franz Boas' 1895 Edition of Indianische Sagen von der Nord-Pacifischen Kuste Amerikas Paperback Franz Boas 9780889225534 $39.95 SOCIAL SCIENCE Oct 01, 2006

Franz Boas (1858-1942), geographer, linguist, physical anthropologist and ethnologist, is considered the father of modern North American anthropology.The 1895 German publication of Indianische Sagen von der Nord-Pacifischen Küste Amerikas gathered together in a single volume his earliest research in British Columbia, consisting of 250 B.C. First Nations myths and legends which had been previously serialized in German periodicals between 1891 and 1895.In 1973, the B.C. Indian Language Project first commissioned this peer-reviewed translation fro... + Read More
356.
Series: Anatolia Junction A Journey into Hidden Turkey Paperback Fred A. Reed 9780889224261 $18.95 TRAVEL Jan 01, 1999

This book stands at the point where actuality and legend converge in a land as old as time. From it extends an arid landscape upon which are inscribed the stories of peoples, civilizations, ideas that enslave and beliefs that liberate. Anatolia Junction weaves together three narratives: that of Fred A. Reed’s early winter journey through high Anatolia following in the footsteps of Said Nursi, the Kurdish mystic; that of the life and times of this enigmatic holy man who served in the Ottoman intelligence service, and paid for his refusal to bow ... + Read More
357.
Series: Two Houses Half-Buried in Sand Oral Traditions of the Hul'q'umi'num' Coast Salish of Kuper Island and Vancouver Island Paperback Chris Arnett 9780889225558 $29.95 HISTORY Dec 15, 2008

A vital collection of writings about First Nations people and culture as it existed on the island coasts of the Depression-era Pacific Northwest and originally published in the pages of Victoria’s oldest newspaper, the Daily Colonist, the sixty stories included here are the result of a unique collaboration between a middle-aged woman, Beryl Cryer, of upper-class British ancestry, and well-known Hul’q’umi’num’-speaking cultural elders, keenly aware of the punitive anti-land claims legislation passed by the Canadian Parliament in 1927, and theref... + Read More
358.
Series: 15 Seconds Paperback François Archambault 9780889224278 $15.95 DRAMA Mar 15, 2000

Brimming with a dark and brittle humor, 15 Seconds is a play about a young female advertising copy writer, her pro-sports-fan ex-boyfriend, a Gen-X welfare-bum loser and his brother handicapped by cerebral palsy. These four characters are constantly making choices about reality and illusion; imagination and fantasy; the hale and the handicapped; about the way things are and the way they might be. The play’s characters each exist in their own worlds utterly without context: objectified to the point where their fantasies about who they might have... + Read More
359.
Series: The Breakdown So Far Paperback M.A.C. Farrant 9780889225565 $17.95 FICTION Feb 23, 2007

The Jonathan Swift of the bingo hall and elder-care, the Alexander Pope of pet-care and the dinner parties of the liberal intelligentsia, Marion Farrant continues her assault on the unaccountably disaffected and disillusioned of the Western world with The Breakdown So Far, her eighth volume of extremely short stories for those of us who seem to have lost both our way and our attention span. Unsparing in her critique of the New Age syncretism the mall culture has substituted for authentic emotion and belief, our adoption of Buddhism appears in h... + Read More
360.
Series: alterNatives Paperback Drew Hayden Taylor 9780889224285 $18.95 DRAMA Sep 15, 2000

A very liberal contemporary couple?Angel, an urban Native science fiction writer, and Colleen, a ?non-practising” Jewish intellectual who teaches Native literature?hosts a dinner party. The guests at this little ?sitcom” soirée are couples that represent what by now have become the clichéd extremes of both societies: Angel’s former radical Native activist buddies and Colleen’s environmentally concerned vegetarian / veterinarian friends. The menu is, of course, the hosts’ respectful attempt at shorthand for the irreconcilable cultural difference... + Read More