A story of magic, family, a mysterious stranger . . . and a band of marauding raccoons. Otter Lake is a sleepy Anishnawbe community where little happens. Until the day a handsome stranger pulls up astride a 1953 Indian Chief motorcycle – and turns Otter Lake completely upside down. Maggie, the Reserve’s chief, is swept off her feet, but Virgil, her teenage son, is less than enchanted. Suspicious of the stranger’s intentions, he teams up with his uncle Wayne – a master of aboriginal martial arts – to drive the stranger from the Reserve. And it turns out that the raccoons are willing to lend a hand.

Motorcycles & Sweetgrass

Literature & Fiction

Taylor, Drew Hayden

United States

Knopf Canada

Vintage Canada

Cold: A Novel

Humor & Entertainment

Humor

MCCLELLAND STEWART

Only Drunks and Children Tell the Truth is the emotional story of a woman’s struggle to acknowledge her birth family. Grace, a Native girl adopted by a White family, is asked by her birth sister to return to the Reserve for their mother’s funeral. Afraid of opening old wounds, Grace must find a place where the culture of her past can feed the truth of her present.

Only Drunks and Children Tell the Truth

Dramas & Plays

Talonbooks

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 of all kinds and an edifying affirmation of humanity unlike anything else in fiction. Each of these stories is as remarkably different in terms of its unique narrative tone, origin and direction, as are the characters of his plays, making Taylor’s singular collection of fictions quite intentionally much more than the sum of their parts. By degrees dramatic, shocking, tender, chilling, affirmative and tragic, each story takes on a different cliché or common sense understanding” of inter-racial and inter-cultural relations, all of them suffused with the incomparable wit, gentle and generous humour, mercilessly critical edge and profound emotional empathy of a master story-teller. No quarter is given, nor is it takenNative stereotypes of White culture are as fair a species of game for this writer as any other. Ultimately, each of these narratives becomes a bridge of understanding between cultures, giving its readers access to the seemingly inexplicable actions of characters at the distant edges of our imaginationseven just one of these stories, The Boy in the Ditch,” does more to illuminate the tragedy of the pre-teen gasoline sniffing culture of Davis Inlet than any number of Royal Commissions will ever do. Carefully re-edited, with its concluding story replaced, we are proud to release this new edition of unforgettable stories Talonbooks first published in 1998.

Fearless Warriors

Contemporary

The Baby Blues is Drew Hayden Taylor’s highly wrought farce of patrimony in a stifling, politically correct, post-colonial milieu of "fancy dancers" of every stripe on the powwow trail. In juxtaposing three generations of careless wandering hedonists, progenitors of a string of offspring from their six-night stands, with their erstwhile naïve women partners who are always left holding the bag, the "big questions" of heritage, family, cultural context and personal identity are ruthlessly stripped of their conventional meanings and become so much useless, embarrassing roadkill on the highway of life. Cast of 3 women and 3 men.

The Baby Blues

A very liberal contemporary coupleAngel, an urban Native science fiction writer, and Colleen, a non-practising” Jewish intellectual who teaches Native literaturehosts a dinner party. The guests at this little sitcom” soirée are couples that represent what by now have become the clichéd extremes of both societies: Angel’s former radical Native activist buddies and Colleen’s environmentally concerned vegetarian / veterinarian friends. The menu is, of course, the hosts’ respectful attempt at shorthand for the irreconcilable cultural differences about to come to a head during the evening: moose roast and vegetarian lasagna. Like all of Drew Hayden Taylor’s work, alterNatives manages to say things about Whites and Indians” that one is not supposed to talk aboutit digs up the carefully buried, raw and pulsing nerve-endings of the unspeakable and exposes them to the hot bright lights of the stage. That he does so with a humour that the politically correct among his audiences continue to miss entirely beneath the sound and fury of their own self-righteous indignation is a measure of his immense talent as a dramatist. In the end, the play is not about cultural differences at all, but instead constitutes a full frontal attack on the personal qualities the sitcom holds most dear and pushes hardest at its audiences: Taylor actually has the temerity to suggest that neither attitude” nor sincerity” are enough to address basic human issues, no matter which side of the cultural fence the characters are on. And that’s hard for the pushers of what is considered a globally enlightened culture to take. Cast of 3 women and 3 men.

alterNatives

In this collection of two plays about the process of children becoming adults, Drew Hayden Taylor works his delightfully comic and bitter-sweet magic on the denials, misunderstandings and preconceptions which persist between Native and Colonial culture in North America. In The Boy in the Treehouse, Simon, the son of an Ojibway mother and a British father, climbs into his half-finished tree house on the vision-quest his books say is necessary for him to reclaim his mother’s culture. It’s a Native thing,” he informs his incredulous father (who tells him he’d never heard of such a thing from his wife): Only boys do it. It’s part of becoming a man.” Of course, what with the threats of the police, the temptation of the barbeque next door, and the distractions of a persistent neighbourhood girl, Simon probably wouldn’t recognize a vision if he fell over it. Girl Who Loved Her Horses is the Native name for the strange and quiet Danielle from the non-status community across the tracks, imbued with the mysterious power to draw the horse every human being on the planet wanted but could never have.” She is and remains an enigma to the people of the reservation, but the power of her spirit remains strong. Years later, a huge image of her horse reappears, covering an entire side of a building in a blighted urban landscape of beggars and broken dreams. The eyes of her stallion, which once gleamed exhilaration and freedom, now glare with defiance and anger. Danielle has clearly been forced to grow up. With these two plays, Taylor rediscovers an issue long forgotten in our post-historical” age: the nature of, and the necessity for, these rites of passage in all cultures.

The Boy in the Treehouse / The Girl Who Loved Her Horses

Teen & Young Adult

The Buz’Gem Blues is the third play in Drew Hayden Taylor’s ongoing zany, outrageous, often farcical examination of both Native and non-Native stereotypes in what is to become what he calls his Blues Quartet.” Marianne has talked her mother, Martha, into attending an Elders conference with her, where she is to be used as a resource person, even though Martha doesn’t believe she has anything to offer anyone. Held in a college setting, the keynote paper of the conference is a dissertation on the courting, love, and sexual habits of contemporary First Nations people as perceived by Western Society,” delivered by none other than a Professor Savage.” Just to keep the caricatures in balance, Savage’s nemesis throughout the action is a young Native man, replete with dark sunglasses and a Mountie coat, who goes by the name The Warrior Who Never Sleeps.” The Buz’Gem Blues is not a play about clichés with which we have become so familiar that we recognize them as stereotypes instantly, but rather about how our ritualized and institutionalized systems of maintaining and policing those clichés prevent us from recognizing our common humanity within each other.

The Buz'Gem Blues

400 Kilometres is the third play in Drew Hayden Taylor’s hilarious and heart-wrenching identity-politics trilogy. Janice Wirth, a thirty-something urban professional, having discovered her roots as the Ojibway orphan Grace Wabung in Someday, and having visited her birth family on the Otter Lake Reserve in Only Drunks and Children Tell the Truth, is pregnant, and must now come to grips with the question of her true identity.” Her adoptive parents have just retired, and are about to sell their house to embark on a quest for their own identity by returning” to England. Meanwhile, the Native father of her child-to-be is attempting to convince Janice/Grace that their new generation’s future lies with their own people” at Otter Lake. Which path for the future is Janice/Grace to choose, for herself, her families and her child, having spent a lifetime caught between the questions of what I am” and who I am”? Cast of 3 women and 2 men.

400 Kilometres

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Taylor, Drew Hayden. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Taylor, Drew Hayden

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Taylor, Drew Hayden. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Motorcycles & Sweetgrass

Motorcycles & Sweetgrass

Cold: A Novel

Only Drunks and Children Tell the Truth

Fearless Warriors

The Baby Blues

alterNatives

The Boy in the Treehouse / The Girl Who Loved Her Horses

The Buz'Gem Blues

400 Kilometres