Imprecations: The Art of Swearing

Reaney, James

Literature & Fiction

Black Moss Pr

A collection of plays by three time Governor General Award winner, James Reaney.

Reaney Days In The West Room

Dramas & Plays

Playwrights Canada Press

Poems

Poetry

New Press

Based on the true story of an Irish family with seven sons and one daughter immigrating to Biddulph Township near London, Ontario, in 1844, The Donnellys tells the tale of mystery and truths stranger than fiction. It is the story of a secret society and a massacre that shocked the Canadian public, a story overlooked by the artistic community until Reaney’s play elevated the events to the level of legend. First published in 1975, this script takes its place among other true Canadian classics on university and college course listings and in the hearts of drama lovers everywhere. The Donnellys is a trilogy comprised of Sticks &amp; Stones, St. Nicholas Hotel and Handcuffs, three tense and mythic tragedies that garnered critical praise at the 1973 Tarragon Theatre opening and continue to acquire accolades from professors, actors and artistic directors across the country. As with the drama of Yeats, Eliot, O’Neill, Brecht and Beckett, this rendering of a generation of Irish settlers and their brutal murder at the hands of more than thirty vigilante killers is controversial and exciting to this day. Foreword, Afterword and Chronology by James Noonan.

The Donnellys (Voyageur Classics)

Dundurn Press

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 platesin short, a whole life. When you sort through the play box you eventually see your whole lifeas well as all of lifethings like Sunday School albums which show Elijah being fed by ravens, St. Stephen being stoned. The theatrical experience in front of you now is designed to give you that mosaicthat all-things-happening-at-the-same-time-galaxy-higgledy-piggledy feeling that rummaging through a play box can give you. But underneath the juxtaposition of coffin plate with baby rattle with Royal Family Scrapbook with Big Little Book with pictures of King Billy and Hitler, there is the backbone of a person growing up, leaving home, going to big cities, getting rather mixed up and then not coming home again, but making home and identity come to him wherever he is. The kids at the very end of the play manage to get their lightning rod up and attract the thunder that alone can wake the dead. Or, on the other six hands, as Buddha says, there are any number of other interpretations that fit the mosaic we’re (director, writer, actors, kids, designers, composer) giving you

Colours in the Dark

Humor & Entertainment

Talonbooks

Baldoon is a two-act play written by Governor-General's award winning author James Reaney in collaboration with Windsor area poet and journalist C.H. Gervais. This is the original edition of this title, which was honoured with an Award of Merit in the 1977 Design Canada / Look of Books competition.Baldoon is one of only two Porcupine's Quill publications from the 1970s that are still available in the original edition, at the original price.

Baldoon

Porcupine's Quill

Alice Through the Looking-Glass was originally commissioned by Stratford Festival Foundation under the artistic directorship of David William. The play opened July 10, 1994 at the Avon Theatre.
This edition also contains illustrations by Sir John Tenniel as they appeared in the original (1872) Macmillan edition of Through the Looking-Glass and what Alice found there. When Alice passes through into the Looking Glass World, she suddenly finds herself in a bizarre and chaotic chess game that leads her on an unforgettable adventure. She encounters a dizzying array of extraordinary characters that include talking flowers, Kings and Queens, Tweedledee and Tweedledum and Humpty Dumpty himself. This brand new stage adaptation by one of Canada's most beloved authors and playwrights was a feature production of the 1994 Stratford Festival season. In addition to the text of the play, James Reaney provides the reader with background information and notes as well as useful suggestions for those wishing to stage their own production of Lewis Carroll's classic tale.

Alice Through the Looking Glass

The Box Social &amp; Other Stories gathers together nine of James Reaney's short fictions written in the 40s and early 50s and never previously collected in book form.
The collection takes its title from a short piece the author originally published in the University College Undergrad and which provoked a firestorm of eight hundred angry letters from subscribers when it was republished nationally in the New Liberty in the late 40s. It also thwarted the young author's designs on the editorship of the Undergrad because of his clear moral unsuitability for such an august position. (This is doubtful, because the Undergrad eventually came to be edited, thirty years later, by PQL publisher Tim Inkster.) `The Box Social' is remarkable, not only that it introduced the theme of date rape to Canadian literature some thirty years before the phrase was coined, but also that it is told from Sylvia's point of view, and yet again that it ends with one of the quietest lines of literary vitriol imaginable ... ` ``I hated you so much,'' she said softly.'
If Alice Munro has put the sexually awakening female under glass in Lives of Girls and Women, then The Box Social could just as easily have been titled Lives of Boys and Men. In `The Bully', the brutality of what passes for etiquette in secondary school is contrasted with the simpler life of the farm personified in Noreen who drops grain in the shape of letters to feed her chickens -- `so that when the hens ate the grain they were forced to spell out Noreen's initials or to form a cross and circle. There were just enough hens to make this rather an interesting game. Sometimes, I know, Noreen spelled out whole sentences in this way, a letter or two each night, and I often wondered to whom she was writing up in the sky.' `The Bully' was included in The New Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories edited by Margaret Atwood and Robert Weaver.
The young Margaret Atwood first encountered `The Bully' as an undergraduate. She read the story, oddly enough, in an anthology edited by Robert Weaver, and the experience was apparently seminal to her own development as a writer of fiction ...

The Box Social & Other Stories

Contemporary

Despite his amply deserved reputation as the father of Southwestern Ontario Gothic, James Reaney was one of the most playful and buoyant Canadian poets publishing in the 1940s and '50s. The Essential James Reaney presents an affordable, pocket-sized selection of the poet's very best work.

The Essential James Reaney (Essential Poets (Ecco))

The Donnellys (Voyageur Classics, 9)

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