From the author’s note from the original production: Colours in the Dark might best be called a play box. Why?
I happen to have a play box and it’s filled with not only toys and school relics, but also deedboxes, ancestral coffin plates—in short, a whole life. When you sort through the play box you eventually see your whole life—as well as …

“Anthropologist of the absurd” and “brave iconoclast,” M.A.C. Farrant positively bristles in this three-part novel-length work of prose fragments, snippets, questions, speculations, and meditations, by turns philosophical, dark, comedic, and lyrical in its attempts to imagine a multitude of possible futures for our accelerated age. It offer …

Sixteen-year-old Miles has run away from home, inviting his childhood companion, the fourteen-year-old Inuit orphan Chateaugué, to join him in a rented flat opposite Notre-Dame-de-Bonsecours in Montreal. There they construct a chaste life for themselves, living as brother and sister. They spend their days riding bicycles wildly through the streets …

Other Losses caused an international scandal when first published in 1989 by revealing that Allied Supreme Commander Dwight Eisenhower’s policies caused the death of some 1,000,000 German captives in American and French internment camps through disease, starvation and exposure from 1944 to 1949, as a direct result of the policies of the western A …

This fifth edition of the classic Modern Canadian Plays sets out an even broader range of plays than previous editions. The plays in the first volume date from 1967 to 1991, and outline an indigenous Canadian drama emerging from its colonial roots to celebrate a rising nationalism. But more to the point, the plays in this edition carry with them a …

With breathtaking virtuosity, Garry Thomas Morse sets out to recover the appropriated, stolen and scattered world of his ancestral people from Alert Bay to Quadra Island to Vancouver, retracing Captain Vancouver’s original sailing route. These poems draw upon both written history and oral tradition to reflect all of the respective stories of the …

Newly unemployed baby boomers Gwen and Ned appear to be ­completely different people: Gwen, a practical, down-to-earth Latin teacher; Ned, an impractical investment advisor constantly dreaming up new ventures for making money. But appearances can be deceiving, as their son Alex, who left home years ago, and their daughter Karen, recently diagnose …

Imperial Canada Inc. sets out to ask a simple question: why is Canada home to more than 70% of the world’s mining companies?
Created by the British North America Act of 1867, Canada, rather than turning away from its colonial past, actively embraced, appropriated, and perpetuated the imperial ambitions of its mother country. Two years later, it …

Hubert Clements is a black cellist on tour with a symphony orchestra. Their guest soloist is injured and the conductor asks Clements to stand in. After wrestling with an extremely dif?cult passage in the performance piece, Bach’s Six Suites for Solo Cello, Clements “nally resorts to improvising his way through the score, which earns him a sting …

Structured in three parts, On the Material is a meditation on language, geography, socio-economics and the body, moving from the glut of fossil-fuelled consumer excess to the materiality of a single book.

Composed almost entirely of quatrains (each page being comprised of four four-line stanzas) and written while travelling through North America in …

How to Write is a perverse Coles Notes: a paradigm of prosody where writing as sampling, borrowing, cutting-and-pasting and mash-up meets literature. This collection of conceptual short “ction takes inspiration from Lautréamont’s decree that “plagiarism is necessary. It is implied in the idea of progress. It clasps the author’s sentence t …

At the end of the First World War, to protect his village from the spanish “u epidemic brought home by returning soldiers, a young priest recently arrived in the Parish of Lac St-Jean commissions a wandering Italian painter to decorate the walls of the local church with a fresco dedicated to the Virgin Mary. The painter is to choose, among four l …

Early in their ethnographic work, Randy Bouchard and Dorothy Kennedy were privileged to meet Charlie Mack. Born on the Mount Currie Reserve in 1899, he was a fascinating character and a font of wisdom, exemplifying by his way of life, his skills in trapping and canoe-making, and his knowledge of the history of his people, the living world of the Li …

The universal mark of good satire is still to make audiences laugh at the worst traits in human nature. Here, in his own words, is how Morris Panych updated these three great comedy classics from a century ago: The Government Inspector is peopled with the most duplicitous, under-handed and shifty characters ever to appear in literature; yet, they a …

Including poetry projects, a chapbook and incidental poems previously published in magazines and by small presses, is a door makes use of the poem’s ability for “suddenness” to subvert closure: the sudden question, the sudden turn, the sudden opening—writing that is generated from linguistic mindfulness, improvisation, compositional proble …

Down the Road to Eternity: New & Selected Fiction is a collection of M.A.C. Farrant’s work dating from 1985 to 2009. Compiled of selected fiction from Sick Pigeon (1991), Raw Material (1993), Altered Statements (1995), Word of Mouth (1996), What’s True, Darling (1997), Darwin Alone in the Universe (2003) and The Breakdown So Far (2007), it inc …

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

are a full frontal assault on stereotypes o …

Garry Thomas Morse deploys his prodigious classical repertoire to compose the edgy new voices that reflect the cultural simultaneity of our everyday—a transnational, ahistoric cosmopolitanism: an idealized Helen is confounded by Molly Bloom’s monologue from Joyce’s Ulysses; a Dostoyevskian character parodies the libidinal excesses of William …

Where the Blood Mixes is meant to expose the shadows below the surface of the author’s First Nations heritage, and to celebrate its survivors. Though torn down years ago, the memories of their Residential School still live deep inside the hearts of those who spent their childhoods there. For some, like Floyd, the legacy of that trauma has been pa …

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 …

Jhana, is a beautiful eighteen-year-old who lives with her mother Maddie and their boarder Bill, a sometime poet. Jhana’s father, King, shows up partway through the first act and it is his presence for the first time in a long time in this unusual family that really galvanizes all four of the characters into action.

King is an Elvis impersonator, …

It is extraordinary that one can take the measure of how radically cultural sensibilities can change throughout a century by a careful reading of only two texts—in this case Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies, written in the midst of the First World War, and George Bowering’s brilliant response to Rilke’s call, the Kerrisdale Elegies, comp …

Two epigraphs that frame The Occupation of Heather Rose, one from Alice in Wonderland and the other from Heart of Darkness, prepare the audience for the nightmare of dislocation and alienation this one-woman show evokes.

Young, naïve, and inadequately trained, urban health care/social worker Heather Rose flirts with the pilot as she wings her way n …

The Heretic began with a rhetorical question the author posed to himself for a comedy show: “If there is a God, why would He create us? If He’s perfect, all knowing, there’s nothing he can gain from us. He must have been so incredibly bored and lonely, that He created us for his own entertainment.”

Not exactly a new idea, it works well as th …

A consortium of German developers shows up on the fictional Otter Lake Reserve with a seemingly irresistible offer to improve the local economy: the creation of “Ojibway World,” a Native theme park designed to attract European tourists, causing hilarious personal and political divisions within the local community.

The Berlin Blues concludes Drew …

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 someone supremely disinterested in the public sphere, argues Stephen Collis in this brilliant and revealing new celebration of her work, Webb is no domestic, as a creator or a cr …

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 hav …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 habita …

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 th …

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 applicati …

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 p …

“Prairie poetry,” as it came to be known in the 20th century, has found no more eloquent and accomplished a practitioner than Robert Kroetsch. Yet the North American prairie his work has made so recognizably visible in all of its characteristic particularities is changing profoundly in the 21st century. This change is marked by the transition o …

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 preside …

Donald M. Allen’s anthology The New American Poetry, published by Grove Press / Evergreen in the U.S.A. and the U.K., burst onto the literary scene in 1960 to become the single most important and influential book of poetry in the English language published in the second half of the 20th century.

Conceived originally as a collection intended to aug …

The Unnatural and Accidental Women is a surrealist dramatization of a thirty-year murder case involving many mysterious deaths in the “Skid Row” area of Vancouver. All the victims were found dead with a blood-alcohol reading far beyond safe levels, and all were last seen in the company of Gilbert Paul Jordan, who frequented the city’s bars pr …

Before moving to Prince George in 1969, Barry McKinnon was writing single narrative poems that, in terms of form, began to seem outworn and inadequate in his new environment. The emotional range of the lyric had become too personal and limiting. Starting with a poem based on a discarded fragment and a shoebox of photos his prairie grandfather had t …

Sexy, provocative and challenging, Espresso is a rich, dark, bitter hit of comedy and sensuality. One of Lucia Frangione’s blasphemy plays,’ it inverts the Catholic stereotypes of feminine sexuality to boldly examine their corresponding masculine sexual emblems of Father, Son and Holy Ghost. In an erotic world where men are traditionally cast …

Torrential rains have descended upon a small isolated village, and the overflowing river has washed away everything in its path. The mudslide has gutted the writing room, the place where a group of senior citizens used to meet to record their memories. It was after the exodus of their children that they began to commit to paper the events, large an …

Published for the first time, David French’s The Riddle of the World remains a classic of the Canadian stage.

Stockbroker Ron and ex-priest Steve are two new singles who get together to console themselves after having been abandoned by their mates. Through a comic series of false starts, disastrous one-night stands, dead-end blind dates and absurd …

In taking on “The Matter of Québec,” David Fennario provides audiences and readers with an abiding critique of the notion that history is created around “great causes” by “great men.” Given the recent reversal of fortune delivered to the tempestuous sound and fury of the Québec separatist movement, The Death of René Lévesque is, in …