40 Talonbooks Fiction Backlist
Citizen Suárez
Death in Vancouver
Guillermo Verdecchia
Garry Thomas Morse
Short stories about people travelling, wandering or lost between countries and languages – people caught between the impulse to flee and the desire to belong.
This brilliant collection of avant-garde fiction reveals edgy new voices that reflect the cultural simultaneity of our cosmopolitan everyday.
“At times hilarious, at times moving. A great read!” —Ariel Dorfman
“Morse’s particular genius is his ability to deliver pitchperfect equivalences of whatever he touches or touches him … not mere impressions or impersonations but rather powerful transversals that combine with but do not displace.” —LINE Magazine
“Humorous and strongly political.” —Vancouver Magazine ISBN 978-0-88922-391-2 © 1998; 160 pp; $17.95 CAN / $13.95 US
ISBN 978-0-88922-607-4; E-ISBN 978-0-88922-796-5 © 2009; 320 pp; $19.95 CAN / $19.95 US
A Covenant of Salt
Death of the Spider
Martine Desjardins
Michèle Mailhot
Translated by Fred A. Reed & David Homel
Translated by Neil B. Bishop Introduction by Marie-Claire Blais
“Mining from the past, Desjardins extracts treasures without ‘getting caught,’ and surfaces like a breath of fresh air. A Covenant of Salt marries literary traditions in a sleek gothic ceremony, silvery salt sprinkled like confetti and the Saint Lawrence coursing through.” —Montreal Review of Books ISBN 978-0-88922-566-4; ebook also available © 2007; 160 pp; $17.95 CAN / $17.95 US
ISBN 978-0-88922-298-4 © 1991; 64 pp; $15.95 CAN / $11.95 US
Crossing the City
Desert of the Heart
A solitary woman’s interior journey of self-discovery. Governor General’s French Fiction Award Winner for Le Passé Composé, 1990 Governor General’s Translation Award Finalist, 1992
Michel Tremblay
Jane Rule
Translated by Sheila Fischman
Two women meet and fall in love in Reno, Nevada. Set in the late 1950s, this classic of lesbian eroticism is Jane Rule’s first novel.
In the second novel in Tremblay’s Desrosiers Diaspora series, we meet Maria, the mother of Rheauna, as she leaves the city of Providence, Rhode Island, pregnant and without a husband, to join her brother and two sisters in Montreal. Crossing the City takes place a year before but also a year after that of the previous novel, Crossing the Continent. “The empathy and tenderness that Tremblay has for his characters is evident on every page.” —Le Devoir ISBN 978-0-88922-893-1; E-ISBN 978-0-88922-894-8 © 2011; 272 pp; $18.95 CAN / $18.95 US
Crossing the Continent
“Cool, clear-eyed, compassionate, and unsentimental.” —Margaret Laurence, Globe and Mail “An intelligent and utterly believable novel.” —Joyce Carol Oates ISBN 978-0-88922-301-1 © 1964, 1991; 224 pp; 6th printing $19.95 CAN / $19.95 US
Dog Attempts to Drown Man in Saskatoon
Michel Tremblay
Douglas Glover
Translated by Sheila Fischman
Urbane, stylish, and slightly offbeat stories that touch on the myth-making many of us call reality.
In this, the first of the Desrosiers Diaspora novels, which give the backstory to the characters of Tremblay’s Chronicles series, young Nana embarks on an epic train journey from her grandparents’ prairie farm to Montreal, when the mother who left her five years before calls her “home.”
“Glover is preoccupied with the complicated interweavings of good and evil, and he juggles language superbly.” —Globe and Mail
“The empathy and tenderness that Tremblay has for his characters is evident on every page.” —Le Devoir
“Glover … seeks to combine a metaphysical approach and style with the nitty-gritty details of daily life. It works.” —Books in Canada
ISBN 978-0-88922-676-0; E-ISBN 978-0-88922-730-9 © 2011; 272 pp; $18.95 CAN / $18.95 US
ISBN 978-0-88922-228-1 © 1985; 128 pp; $16.95 CAN / $12.95 US
Darwin Alone in the Universe
Down the Road to Eternity
M.A.C. Farrant
M.A.C. Farrant
A brilliant collection of satirical short stories.
Indelibly marked by wit, humour, irony, playfulness, and a blend of parody and science fiction, these stories celebrate the literary imagination as an antidote to the popular media.
“Farrant is better at startling us with unnerving, often misanthropic, visions of everyday life than perhaps any other Canadian writer.” —Globe and Mail “M.A.C. Farrant is a wonderful writer of domestic comedy.” —Bill Richardson, CBC “A brave iconoclast.”
—Publishers Weekly
ISBN 978-0-88922-471-1; E-ISBN 978-0-88922-799-6 © 2003; 160 pp; Illustrations; $17.95 CAN / $13.95 US
“Short and sharp, wacky and wonderful.” —Globe and Mail “M.A.C. Farrant is a trapeze artist of the imagination, swinging over the existential void.” —BC Bookworld ISBN 978-0-88922-615-9; E-ISBN 978-0-88922-804-7 © 2009; 288 pp; Illustrations; $19.95 CAN / $19.95 US