Canadian novelist and playwright George Ryga combines the experiences of his journey with his impressions of Chinese society and his subsequent reevaluation of Western values.

Beyond the crimson morning: Reflections from a journey through contemporary China

Ryga, George

DOUBLEDAY

The ecstasy of Rita Joe and other plays

New Press

The plays Paracelsus and Prometheus Bound engage readers on and pon boht an epic and a personal scale.

Two Plays

Turnstone Press

Rita Joe is a Native girl who leaves the reservation for the city, only to die on skid row as a victim of white men’s violence and paternalistic attitudes towards First Nations peoples. As perhaps the best-known contemporary Canadian play and a poetic drama of enormous theatrical power, The Ecstasy of Rita Joe had a major influence in awakening consciousness to the Indian problem” both in whites and Natives themselves. Cast of five women and 15 men. With a preface by Chief Dan George. The Ecstasy of Rita Joe premiered November 23, 1967 at the Vancouver Playhouse.

The Ecstasy of Rita Joe

Literature & Fiction

Dramas & Plays

Talonbooks

A gritty, realistic novel about Prairie dirt farmers in the 1940s and early 1950s.Other books by George Ryga available from Talonbooks:The Athabasca Ryga (1990) The Ecstasy of Rita Joe (1970) Hungry Hills (1974) In the Shadow of a Vulture (1985) Night Desk (1976) Ploughmen of the Glacier (1977) Summerland (1992) --------------------------------------------------------------------------------b004 0-88922-110-3; 9.95 Canada / 5.95 U.S.A.© 1976; 144 pp; Pocketbook format--------------------------------------------------------------------------------""A moving story, told by an author whose concern for others is no mere affectation.""óGlobe & Mail--------------------------------------------------------------------------------To order Talonbod104

Ballad of a Stonepicker

Literary

A novel of a young man revisiting the stony landscape of the Alberta foothills where he grew up.Other books by George Ryga available from Talonbooks:The Athabasca Ryga (1990) Ballad of a Stonepicker (1976) The Ecstasy of Rita Joe (1970) In the Shadow of a Vulture (1985) Night Desk (1976) Ploughmen of the Glacier (1977) Summerland (1992) --------------------------------------------------------------------------------b004 0-88922-134-0; 9.95 Canada / 5.95 U.S.A.© 1974; 168 pp; Pocketbook format; 2nd printing--------------------------------------------------------------------------------""A stimulating truthful and extremely readable work of fiction from a major Canadian writer.""óGeorgia StraightFilm option sold.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------To order Talonbod104

Hungry Hills

Talonbooks, Ltd.

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, Athabasca, and Edmonton. They reveal to us Ryga’s ethnic roots, his childhood as a farm boy, his struggle to learn in a one-room school, his desperate search for off-farm employment in meat-packing plants and lumber camps, and his flight to an alien, hostile city where he became both a class-conscious wage-labourer and a visionary poet. Among the manuscripts included in The Athabasca Ryga are two early television dramas (Storm,’ and Village Crossroad,”), excerpts from the unpublished autobiographical novel, The Bridge (1960), and a set of five short stories collectively titled Poor People.” The Athabasca Ryga also reprints two essays from Ryga’s later years  Notes from a Silent Boyhood,” and Essay on A Letter to My Son  both reflections on what it was like growing up as an intelligent, creative but lonely youth with a love for literature in an isolated and poverty-stricken Ukrainian farming community.

The Athabasca Ryga

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

The published version of George Ryga’s hit play The Ecstasy of Rita Joe is widely available as a best-seller. Yet the work of one of Canada’s best known playwrights, canonized by critics and studied by students world-wide, remains largely absent from the Canadian stage; Ryga’s very reputation as a dramatist is an anomaly. This anthology, then, is a challenge, even a provocation, to examine Ryga in light of the other plays that constitute his substantial dramatic oeuvre. How was it that one of Canada’s pioneering playwrights became an outsider to the very theatre he had been instrumental in creating?As a self-proclaimed figure of exile, as an artist in resistance,” Ryga criticized issues of Canadian culture in numerous instancesparticularly its colonized nature, even turning on the very theatre that had earlier nourished him. Employing disruptive elements such as flashbacks/forwards, poetic speeches, songs, sound motifs and changes of setting and weather, Ryga gives his plays a sense of restless movement, even a loss of control. His characters may be physically and spiritually trapped by their colonial uncertainties, but they have great capacity to envision a different tomorrow. It was a vision of tomorrow that, with the sole exception of The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, the theatre of Ryga’s day had no wish to share.

The Other Plays

James Hoffman, George Ryga’s biographer, provides a brilliant guide to the reader of this collection, with a compelling reappraisal of Ryga’s fiction as far ahead of its time. The three short novels included hereHungry Hills, Ballad of a Stonepicker and Night Deskdraw from the same large canvas of rural, depression-era Alberta. They have similar stark prairie settings and a recognizable array of colourful, cantankerous homesteader and dirt farmer characters, all of whom take us in many pleasurable, disturbing and revealing directions, both historical and mythopoetic. This was a period of obstinate survival farming and boisterous, ethnically diverse community building, redolent with the more questionable aspects of colonial settling’ and breaking’ of the land, in a place that was never unsettled or unclaimed to begin with.Told in a homey vernacular, each of these three tales evokes a time and place that is as ironically as it is emphatically post-colonial. Ryga offers the reader (and re-reader) characters with a rough-hewn energy for survival and self-determination, and finds in them the beginnings of an authentic prairie culture defined by the anti-colonial struggle that so powerfully marks his work.

The Prairie Novels

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Books by Ryga, George