" 'The Sound of Whales' is a lyric-comedy about language, our obsessive reliance upon it, and how linear thought can inhibit understanding. David MacLean's play has its roots in his personal experience in dealing with governmental, educational, and medical bureaucracies. The frustration the playwright expresses toward these institutions is balanced …

W.H. New's Poems, variations on the sonnet form, explore growing up in British Columbia, from the coast to the Kootenays, Through the Metaphysics of science. In this his first book of poems, New contemplates a world in which chaos and order, growth and tradition, imagination and empiricism, placement and displacement coexist. He writes about his na …

Morris Panych’s brilliant new black comedy is structured around what happens when an extremely self-centred and shallow person finds himself, through his own errors and inattentiveness, in a life-and-death situation with profound and far-reaching consequences. A play of twisted circumstance, mistaken identity and surprising turns, it is delicious …

Merging autobiography, criticism, feminist theory and poetry in an economy of desire, Mêmewars puts a poetics of rupture, displacement, obsession and exile into praxis. This text writes against a sexist, imperialist discourse of mastery and idealization. It challenges the mythologies of cohesion, autonomy and stable identity—the capitalist visio …

The events at Oka in 1990 saw the might of the Canadian Armed Forces in the service of the governments of both Quebec and Canada confront some 40 armed Mohawk “Warriors” who were defending their local community’s resistance against a further colonial encroachment on their native lands. The events of that summer have etched themselves indelib …

How did Pizarro subjugate the Inca Empire with less than 500 men? How did debates in 16th century Spain between de Sepulveda and de Las Casas lay the basis for the legal concept of Aboriginal title? Providing a broad comparison of historical, social, and cultural aspects of Indigenous groups around the world, this slim volume answers these question …

One of the world's most beautiful and famous city parks, is Stanley Park located in Vancouver. This year round playground offers the ocean, the mountains, wildlife, freshwater lakes, cedar trees, totem poles, woodland trails and a unique Seawall Promenade. Vancouver's famous Stanley Park, by Mike Steele is a complete guide to this outdoor marvel. I …

Frank, having dedicated his life to the unremarkable, and Walker, paranoid since being struck by lighting at age three, attempt to flee from each other and end up following each other instead. They find themselves in a run-down hotel operated by deaf and misdirected Willy and blind Alice, who has a murderous dislike for visitors. Morris Panych’s …

in 1984, when Sharon Brown's mother Betty became terminally ill with bone cancer, Sharon and her husband (writer Andreas Schroeder) brought Betty home to live her last weeks with them and their two young daughters. With the help of her family, trusted professionals and close-knit community of friends, Brown helped her mother die with dignity, surro …

Summerland completes the publication project Talonbooks began in 1990, with the publication of The Athabasca Ryga, a collection of Ryga’s early writings from his Alberta years until 1963. The 1960s, after the Rygas moved to Summerland, British Columbia, were a period of growing artistic strength and commercial success for Ryga, culminating the cr …

Germaine Lauzon has won a million trading stamps from a department store. Her head swimming with dreams of refurbishing and redecorating her working-class home from top to bottom with catalogue selections ranging from new kitchen appliances to “real Chinese paintings on velvet,” she invites fourteen of her friends and relatives in the neighbou …

Residents of the Northwest Territories today face a number of difficult political issues: land claims, division of the territories, constitutional development, self-government, an accord for sharing resource revenues, and the establishment of their place within the Canadian federation. Whose North? provides the context for a better understanding of …

Sixty stunning duotone photographs by Wakayama, documenting the history of the Powell Street Festival, are interwoven here with the voices of some eighty people involved with the Festival - people of Japanese descent and many other ethnic backgrounds.

The Festival is an annual Vancouver event celebrating the history and culture of Japanese people in …

In his introduction to this provocative collection of essays, George Woodcock describes his response to a recent question about national unity. "I remarked impatiently that what interested me was not the achievement of 'national unity, but the accomplishment of creative anti-national disunity."

Woodcock argues that if Canadians are angry about their …

This is the second of three volumes of educational activities for use in First Nations and multicultural classrooms. The activities stress the importance of culture in students' lives, and teaches them basic personal and community-related skills so they may become more self-reliant and culturally responsible.
The Native Education Services Associat …

Mary Meigs is one of the eight women who portray themselves in the film The Company of Strangers, a “semi-documentary” National Film Board production, released in 1990 to overwhelming critical and popular acclaim. Meigs spent two years writing this extraordinary narrative, which begins as her story of being in the film and unfolds into a gentle …

This is the third of three volumes of educational activities for use in First Nations and multicultural classrooms. The activities stress the importance of culture in students' lives, and teaches them basic personal and community-related skills so they may become more self-reliant and culturally responsible.
The Native Education Services Associate …

Down Time proposes a social self that is able to recognize the ironies and restrictions we live in without returning to a garrison mentality.

Born at the end of the first volume in this autobiographical trilogy, the little Jovette sets off on her journey across the Land of Permanent Sacrifice in Mother of the Grass. Wrenched from her childhood paradise on the banks of the St. Lawrence, she is plunged into the child-battering hell of working-class Montreal, then later into the despairing …

Like a Child of the Earth, the first volume of Jovette Marchessault’s autobiographical trilogy, won the Prix France-Québec in 1976. In it, the largely self-taught artist and author, who left school at the age of fourteen to work in a factory, reflects upon her “years of wandering before encountering painting and writing.” Though a first nove …

It has been some time since Luc, a 32-year-old actor and Jean-Marc, a 38-year-old French teacher, have seen each other, but the wounds from their seven year love affair are only partially healed. Each of them has current worries as well: Jean-Marc, apparently secure and well off, is tired of the endless procession of insensitive and seductive stude …

The scope, innovation and depth (down to the heart) of bpNichol’s writing makes him one of the most important writers in English of the 20th century. He is widely known for his research into genres as diverse as the lyric, the long poem, sound poetry, concrete poetry, critical theory and now, with the publication of bpNichol Comics, we can even …

Peter Trower is a poet known for what he writes about: the lives of west coast loggers, the rural culture of the B.C. Coast, skidroad life in Vancouver, and his personal love of the western landscape. He has established himself as a unique voice, lyircal and regional, a Canadian original. Goosequill Snags is the first major collection of poems sinc …

Spurred on by reports of gold in the Cariboo, adventurers from all over the world descended on British Columbia in the mid-1800s. Among them were ambitious easterners who accepted the challenge of the shorter but more arduous overland route across the prairies and the Rockies. One such man determined to find his fortune in the West was Thomas McMic …

Taking as her alter-ego Lily Briscoe–the painter in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse–Mary Meigs paints a portrait of herself, her family and her friends in Lily Briscoe: A Self-Portrait, a book that is both autobiography and memoir. In it, she describes the three major decisions of her life: "not to marry, to be an artist" and to listen to he …

Charles Hill-Tout was born in England in 1858 and came to British Columbia in 1891. A pioneer settler at Abbotsford in the Fraser Valley, he devoted many years of fieldwork to his studies of the Salish and published in the scholarly periodicals of the day. He was honoured as president of the Anthropological Section of the Royal Society of Canada an …