AConcord Floral is a one-million-square-foot abandoned greenhouse and a refuge for neighbourhood kids; a place all to themselves in which to dream, dare, and come of age. But hidden there is a secret no one wants to confront, and when two friends stumble upon it they set off an unstoppable chain of events, from shadows in parking lots to phone calls from the grave. It's time for the teens of Concord Floral to start talking.
This is a pressed bruise. This is Greta Garbo's smile. This is the smell of Windex. Declarations is an imperfect chronicle of a life lived; a body pulled through time, encountering meteorological phenomenon, mythology, political calamity, pop culture, and everyday happenstance along the way. Written in the wake of his mother's terminal cancer diagnosis, Tannahill's Declarations is a staggering archive of sensations, memories, and voices asserting that here lived, for a time, a woman. Jordan Tannahill is an Ottawa-born, London UK–based playwright and filmmaker. His work has been presented at major theaters and festivals across Canada and internationally.
When you wake up in a cold sweat at night and you think someone is watching you, well it's me. I'm watching you. And that cold sweat on your body, those are my tears. When the Shaun-Hastings sit down to dinner with the Dermots, closure is on the menu but recrimination becomes the main course. As their good intentions are stripped away, both couples' culpability in a tragedy is laid bare. At a dinner party where grief is the loudest guest, Late Company asks the question: How well can a parent ever know their child? Jordan Tannahill's Late Company received its European premiere at the Finborough Theatre, London, in April 2017 and transferred to the Trafalgar Studios, London, in August of the same year.
Unlike most flower-arrangement books, which rely on expensive and often nonseasonal flowers from florists, this book presents an alternative that is in line with the “back to nature” movement. This is the first volume to showcase how to be inspired by nature’s seasonal bounty and bring that nature into the home through floral arrangements. From the well-known lifestyle photographer Ngoc Minh Ngo and Nicolette Owen of Brooklyn’s Little Flower School, Bringing Nature Home presents a portfolio of unique and original floral arrangements directly inspired by the seasons and the local environment, with sources ranging from farmers’ market offerings to the backyard garden. Presented through lush photography that also showcases the beautiful interiors the arrangements are created for, this is as much a decorating tome as it is a floral-arrangement guide. A how-to section offers advice on the selection, trimming, and care of the arrangements and on repurposed and unique containers, making this book practical as well as inspiring.
How dull plays are killing theatre and what we can do about it. Had I become disenchanted with the form I had once fallen so madly in love with as a pubescent, pimple-faced suburban homo with braces? Maybe theatre was like an all-consuming high school infatuation that now, ten years later, I saw as the closeted balding guy with a beer gut he’d become. There were of course those rare moments of transcendencethat kept me coming back. But why did they come so few and far between? A lot of plays are dull. And one dull play, it seems, can turn us off theatre for good. Playwright and theatre director Jordan Tannahill takes in the spectrum of English-language drama – from the flashiest of Broadway spectacles to productions mounted in scrappy storefront theatres – to consider where lifeless plays come from and why they persist. Having travelled the globe talking to theatre artists, critics, passionate patrons and the theatrically disillusioned, Tannahill addresses what he considers the culture of ‘risk aversion’ paralyzing the form. Theatre of the Unimpressed is Tannahill’s wry and revelatory personal reckoning with the discipline he’s dedicated his life to, and a roadmap for a vital twenty-first-century theatre – one that apprehends the value of ‘liveness’ in our mediated age and the necessity for artistic risk and its attendant failures. In considering dramaturgy, programming and alternative models for producing, Tannahill aims to turn theatre from an obligation to a destination. ‘[Tannahill is] the poster child of a new generation of (theatre? film? dance?) artists for whom "interdisciplinary" is not a buzzword, but a way of life.’ —J. Kelly Nestruck, Globe and Mail ‘Jordan is one of the most talented and exciting playwrights in the country, and he will be a force to be reckoned with for years to come.’ —Nicolas Billon, Governor General's Award–winning playwright (Fault Lines)
NATIONAL BESTSELLER SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE FINALIST A propulsive literary page-turner about a family torn apart by a mother’s obsession with a sound that no one else can hear One night, while lying in bed next to her husband, Claire Devon suddenly hears a low hum. This innocuous sound, which no one else in the house can hear, has no obvious source or medical cause, but it begins to upset the balance of Claire’s life. When she discovers that one of her students can also hear the hum, the two strike up an unlikely and intimate friendship. Finding themselves increasingly isolated from their families and colleagues, they fall in with a disparate group of people who also perceive the sound. What starts out as a kind of neighbourhood self-help group gradually transforms into something much more extreme, with far-reaching, devastating consequences. The Listeners is an electrifying novel that treads the thresholds of faith, conspiracy and mania. Compelling and exhilarating, it forces us to consider how strongly we hold on to what we perceive, and the way different views can tear a family apart.
From award-winning playwright and filmmaker Jordan Tannahill comes a masterful and moving novel in the tradition of Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station and Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be. At 11:04 a.m. on January 21st, 2017, Jordan opens the door to his mother’s bedroom. As his eyes adjust to the half-light, he finds her lying in bed, eyes closed and mouth agape. In that instant he cannot tell whether she is asleep or dead. The sight of his mother's body, caught between these two possibilities, causes Jordan to plunge headlong into the uncertain depths of consciousness itself. From androids to cannibals to sex clubs, an unforgettable personal odyssey emerges, populated by a cast of sublime outsiders in search for the ever-elusive nature of self. Part ontological thriller, part millennial saga, Liminal is a riotous and moving portrait of a young man in volatile times, a generation caught in suspended animation, and a son’s enduring love for his mother.
Botticelli in the Fire imagines the famed painter of The Birth of Venus, Sandro Botticelli, as an irrepressible seeker of love and pleasure caught between the powerful Medici family, the firebrand teachings of a zealot friar, and his young lover, Leonardo da Vinci. Entangled in sexual and political brinkmanship, Botticelli must choose between art and survival. In Sunday in Sodom, Lot's wife Edith tells of the Biblical destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, but set in the present day. American troops obliterate her surroundings with drone strikes and villagers turn against each other, but Edith's still focused on protecting her family, finally giving an answer as to why, when told to run and never look back, she looked back.
