This feat represents the first and only shared prize of publication for the 3-Day Novel Contest. One, a nightmarish vision of a land in decline, the other, a finely crafted tale of family history and the effects of the past on the present, rich in mood and evocative in its language.

Joint winners of the 1993 3-Day Novel-Writing Contest

It is June 20, 1952, a decade after the events described in The Fat Woman Next Door Is Pregnant, the first volume of Michel Tremblay’s series of autobiographical fiction. The mystic, yet palpable instant of summer’s arrival is experienced simultaneously by the fat woman’s son (who is never named) and Marcel. These moving, profoundly different …

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 …

As a child, Askik Mercredi, a Métis, attends the French-Canadian Catholic school in St. Boniface—an education that conflicts with the Native ways and beliefs that shape his home life. Later, in the world of colonial Montreal, where he hopes to fulfill his dream of becoming “a great man,” he finds he is not welcomed by the white society he wi …

In this posthumous work, Robert Zend bends and often breaks every rule of layout and poetic convention. His text takes us into a time warp across two continents as his obsessive love for Nicolette, the unconquered muse, defies fate and gives birth to Nicolette, the book.. Zend was a prolific writer in both English and Hungarian. His collections of …

A need for place. A search for peace. a ceaseless quest, balanced by occasional respite -- physical,psychological or metaphysical. These are the preoccupations of our time, and they are fertile ground for the taut incisive prose of an accomplished writer. With Means of Escape, internationally acclaimed anthropologist, filmmaker and writer Hugh Brod …

Sometimes funny, sometimes scandalous, always riveting, this extraordinary first novel traces the lives and passionate loves of the women of the Wong family through four generations. As past sins and inborn strengths are passed on from mother to daughter to granddaughter, each generation confronts, in its own way, the same problems -- isolation, ra …

'A Circle of Birds' is an impressionistic, finely wrought tale of lost memory, tangled history, despair and discovery. It is a journey through much Canadian and world history; a mind-melting descent into mental illness, a sordid yarn of death and twisted love.

"This is a surprising tour-de-force, and its author should be praised for it; his vision i …

“Always carry a bar of soap!” his father advises, as Allstair sets off to drive from Nairobi halfway across Africa in a secondhand Austin in the 1950s. “It wasn’t clear to me how you could fix a leak in the gas tank with soap,” Allstair reports, “but I never doubted that sort of instruction coming from him.” So begins the first tale i …

Republished with a new introduction, this is Audrey Thomas’s classic coming-of-age novel about madness, loneliness, despair and escape.

The Angel of Solitude presides over the lives of eight young lesbian women who strive to achieve an all-female utopia within which homophobia, their pasts and their differences are abolished. As the narrative unfolds, we realize that none of the women are present directly—they come into being, and live their lives, only in and through the memorie …

It is a hot June day. A woman sits in a bar in Montreal’s Main, waiting. Pushing down the disturbing scene (the police, a blanket) she saw that morning in the park. To focus herself, she tries to guess the stories of other women who come and go as the day darkens into night: the teenager Nanette; Adele of Halifax, who’s constantly on a train; a …

Long known to insiders as one of the most unique personalities in Canadian letters, the celebrated poet Al Purdy begins this story of his life by noting that just as he was about to be born his hometown of Trenton was flattened by a historic explosion as the local munitions factory, "no doubt accounting for any oddity and eccentricity in my charact …

“Women are at last beginning to talk about their bodies, not only among themselves, but also in print. When I began writing Mrs. Blood … this was not the case. So many women have come up to me and said, ‘Yes, I’ve been through that too—a messy miscarriage, a still birth, a bad abortion—but I never really talked about it—the pain, the …

This first book-length study of Bowering explores the relationship between his work and the arts.

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 …

Written in the tradition of Umberto Eco and Manuel Puig, The Pagan Wall is a first novel by a master storyteller. What appears on the surface as a murder mystery set in Alsatia and the Rhineland, involving international arms dealers, dangerous liaisons, and every other known mystery novel archetype, The Pagan Wall unfolds into layer upon layer of m …

This is a love story; an unlikely convergence of two people from different worlds who were able to make a rich and tender life together, and not only endure each other's company in alarmingly close quarters but revel in it.

Edith Iglauer was born in Cleveland and lived an urban, sophisticated life in New York until she met and married John Daly, a …

In this collection of witty and trenchant aphorisms, Robin Skelton draws on the cynicism of La Rochefoucauld, the Aufklärung insights of Lichtenberg and the devillish wiles of Ambrose Bierce to provide Canada with its own Devious Dictionary. Once again, Skelton proves himself to be a wizard of language. Illustrated with Ludwig Zeller's art collage …

“Neil Bishop has … revived this novel, Death of the Spider, in the true light of its prophecy (be it but dreamed), in the bright light too of its modernism, for this novel is both a poetic indictment of our contemporary society and a forerunner of the feminist novel—while admirably avoiding the traps of theory and rigidity. The author draws u …

Edith Iglauer has been a journalist for four decades, working for The New Yorker, Harper's, The Atlantic Monthly and other publications. This book is a lively retrospective of her writings, from the 1940s when she covered Eleanor Roosevelt's press conferences, through the 1960s when she was present at the founding of Canada's first Inuit co-operati …

In a parody of a thriller novel, Harry the Hack, newly recruited literary spy, follows a mystery woman seeking wisdom and sanity.

The Athabasca Ryga presents essays, short stories, plays, and selections from a novel that George Ryga wrote in Athabasca and in Edmonton before his move to British Columbia in the early 1960s. Very little of this work has ever been published before. Almost all these early writings evoke and portray the sights, sounds and people of Deep Creek, Atha …

The third volume in Marchessault’s autobiographically based trilogy. White Pebbles in the Dark Forests traces a reconciliation between men and women, children and parents, animals and humans, and the past and future as it looks at the connections between the visible and the invisible. Following Like a Child of the Earth and Mother of the Grass, t …

Canada’s first poet laureate George Bowering is one of the best known writers and literary personalities in the nation. Poet, novelist, essayist, historian, critic and teacher, he is a prolific, irrepressible writer whose works have been published and produced in an extraordinary variety of forms. A Record of Writing traces the development of Bo …

"... perfect. Marion Johnson has created a whimsical and provocative fictional mosaic ... a compassionately wicked satire."
--The Globe and Mail

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 …

The Happiest Man in the World looks under the carpet of post-modernism to search for competence and humour in a world of habitual assumptions about social, political, and sexual awareness. The characters, and the author, in these stories discover that their roles, and their role models are not as clear as they seem to be — husbands and wives, fat …

The two prose pieces that constitute The Black Debt deploy rhythms, cadences and repeated motifs to create an overall structure that is pre-eminently musical. This is a Large Print edition.

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 …

An authentic recreation of an extraordinary life set against the turbulent background of colonial Africa. Schermbrucker’s enigmatic prose creates a sweeping historical saga from Cairo to the Cape.

Mimosa is Bill Schermbrucker’s second published work of fiction. His first book Chameleon was published by Talonbooks to high critical acclaim.

Reactions to Alan Twigg's first book of interviews with Canadian authors, For Openers:

"For Openers is much the best thing of its kind I've ever read, and much more difficult to achieve than the casual reader would guess. "
-Hugh MacLennan

"One can appreciate the zest, the engaging lack of stuffiness, with which Twigg confronts his authors."
-Ken Ada …

Ethel Wilson has delighted readers with her art, her humour, and her extraordinarily perceptive eye. She turned out six novels and a book of short stories - all highly acclaimed by famous critics and writers and all written after she reached the age of 49.

Mary McAlpine, a close friend of Wilson, has produced a biography that is very personal, humou …

The box closet was a real closet in the attic of the family house in Washington, D.C. in which Mary Meigs grew up. Bags and boxes of letters and diaries were found there after her mother’s death in 1958, and when Meigs read them she decided that they were the material for a book. In the course of reading her family’s letters and her mother’s …

From 1939 to 1954, Malcolm Lowry lived and wrote in a shack near Dollarton, in North Vancouver. It was here that he revised and polished Under the Volcano until it was almost ready for publication, and here that he experienced his happiest and most productive years. His posthumously published works are filled with references to the landscape and l …

Vancouver and its Writers introduces over 100 Vancouver related fiction authors, summarizes over 100 Vancouver novels, and locates 100 literary sites throughout the Lower Mainland.

For both the curious tourist and the serious scholar, this unprecedented study also includes provocative assessments of Vancouver (pro and con) in its 100th year from con …

Set in the desert on either side of the Mexico-U.S. border, this harrowing novel was inspired by an actual event: the abandonment to starvation and death of a “shipment” of Mexican immigrant workers. The sinister shadow of the vulture falls over every character in Ryga’s story—Ramon, the flesh-merchant; Juan, the bandito; Anastasio, the def …

An industrial biography that investigates personal myths and the great “machines” that drive the world to the abyss of development.

Vancouver journalist-broadcaster Alan Twigg examines Evans' earliest, out-of-print novels and magazine serials, as well as his masterpieces Mist on the River and 0 Time In Your Flight, and his poetry. The plot synopses and criticism make this an important reference guide for students of Canadian literature, and Evans' own comments on his craft prov …

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 …

“The leopard may not be able to change its spots, but the chameleon sure can.” In Chameleon & Other Stories, Bill Schermbrucker takes as his central metaphor a creature who changes its colour to reflect and blend in with the environment, just as human beings are sometimes asked to change their colour to reflect and blend in, to protect themselv …

It is the glorious second day of May, 1942. The sun is drawing the damp from earth still heavy with the end of a long Quebec winter, the budding branches of the trees along rue Fabre and in Parc Lafontaine of the Plateau Mont Royal ache to release their leaves into the warm, clear air heralding the approach of summer.

Seven women in this raucous Fra …

A brilliant and intense journey through a relationship, and through language and myth—as well as a literary journey spanning three continents.

In 1919, Howard O’Hagan went east to study law at McGill University. There, Stephen Leacock was one of his professors, and, with A.J.M. Smith, he edited the McGill Daily. Graduating in 1925 with a B.A. and a L.L.B., he came back west where, without being called to the bar, he practised law long enough to have one man thrown in jail and another re …

This is Marie-Claire Blais’s third novel in the trilogy of Pauline Archange.