New Releases by Michel Tremblay

It's May 1922, wedding preparations are in full swing, and old memories, past desires, and big regrets threaten to turn the big celebration into a big melee.

"Louise Tétrault, jeune waitress de Saint-Eustache, veut tenter sa chance à Montréal après avoir gagné le trophée Lucille Dumont. Mais sa soeur Lola Lee, de son vrai nom Rita Tétrault, ne l'entend pas ainsi. Métamorphosée par son expérience de chanteuse sur la Main, elle craint de perdre une gloire durement acquise et entraîne Louise dans l'arrière-scène des clubs montréalais pour la décourager. Cette virée devient un voyage initiatique dans les coulisses du monde des paillettes et de l'extravagance, où chaque protagoniste semble se brûler les ailes en se rapprochant d'une vérité inaccessible. Quarante-cinq ans après sa création, cette oeuvre est plus actuelle que jamais. Quel prix faut-il payer - de son corps, de son sang, de sa liberté - pour grimper l'échelle de la gloire, cette côte qui «s'monte à pied, mais si se r'descend en bicyble» ?"--Quatrième de couverture.

Voyage dans lunivers intérieur dun homme qui tente de recoller les morceaux dune vie quil nest plus certain davoir choisie. Chroniqueur dhumeurs pour Le Journal, Daniel Martin est plongé dans un coma à la suite dun accident. Ce moment de suspension entre la réalité et le rêve, entre tous les hommes quil a été et tous ceux quil veut devenir, devient loccasion dun véritable bilan qui le mènera sans doute à rompre avec le cynisme inhérent à son époque. (CEAD).

A 30ans, Albertine sait déjà que la grandeur du ciel n'arrivera jamais à contenir sa rage de vivre. A mesure qu'avance l'horloge de son destin, le moteur du monde se met à tourner à vide et ses enfants chavirent : Thérèse n'a jamais valu une larme et Marcel sombre dans la folie. Ainsi Albertine survit-elle à 70 ans, en ayant abandonné la vie, préférant entretenir, dans la polyphonie de ses âges et loin du danger des hommes, un grand malheur tragique au lieu d'un petit bonheur médiocre comme celui de sa sœur Madeleine. " Les signes du Ciel viennent rarement d'en haut ", disait leur mère Victoire.

Michel Tremblay's fourth book of autobiographical narratives inspired by his childhood and youth.

A young waitress recounts her trials and surprising allies in a lifelong battle against social stigma.

The stormy relationship between Claude and his father Alex displays cruel irony on an Alzheimer's ward. Cast of 2 men.

In Albertine in Five Times, Michel Tremblay portrayed one of his most unforgettable characters during five decades of her life, beginning in her thirties. Now, in Past Perfect, we meet Albertine at twenty and discover the dark secret of her being. Still reeling from the heartbreak that plunged her into a nervous breakdown, Albertine sets out to re-conquer the beau she has lost to her younger sister. On this fated Thursday evening, will she find the strength to survive the crisis that grips her very essence in this dark night of her soul? Or will she spend the rest of her days foundering in an endless rage that could extinguish all hope of love ever lighting up her life? In the eyes of her mother, Victoire, her brother, Édouard, and her sister, Madeleine, Albertine is a soul on fire that devours everything she touches. But in her own eyes, Albertine is sensitive, selfless, and devoted to the objects of her desires. In this extremity of contradiction between the way we see ourselves and the way others see us, Tremblay stages the agony of the imagination in chains, the tragedy of an understanding of the imagination as a way to the "truth," rather than as a path to understanding. Caught in this dilemma, Albertine, who has cast herself as a sacrificial lamb, a victim of destiny, the queen of unhappiness, descends into a hell of lucidity as she confronts Alex, the great hope and passion of her youth. Cast of three women and two men.

An account of Michel Tremblay's discovery of theatre, from his first recognition of the imagination to his first drama-competition win.

This fourth novel in the Chronicles of the Plateau Mont-Royal follows Édouard, the fat woman's brother-in-law, as he explores Paris.

This classic play has been translated before, but only into a pallid approximation of the original joual. Scots, however, is an energetic and earthy vernacular with a distinctive sound system equal to joual. The play, a landmark in Canadian theatre, can now be truly appreciated in this superb translation, just as audiences in Glasgow and Moscow have learned to laugh with these ladies.

A love-play from the author of The Guid Sisters.

Une soirée d'opéra - au programme, Roméo et Juliette - qui se transforme en odyssée nocturne au coeur de Montréal, et voilà Jean-Marc, le narrateur de cette histoire, cynique Candide, courant à la perte ... de sa virginité. Du café El Cortijo au cabaret des Quatre Coins du Monde, Michel Tremblay nous propose le parcours initiatique d'un jeune beatnik qui découvre un monde burlesque de folie et de transgression, où les passions se déchaînent, où partout éclatent le mensonge et la vérité dans l'urgence du désir.

(This third volume in the Chronicles of the Plateau-Mont-Royal--an epic series of novels which imagines the lives of the characters of Tremblay's plays--deals with an explicitly gay thematic: Tremblay's metaphor for the Québécois desire for a more glamorous identity on the world stage.) This is the third volume in Michel Tremblay's six-volume Chronicles of the Plateau-Mont-Royal, an epic series of novels which imagines, in prose, the lives of the characters of Tremblay's plays, in which each of them acts out their own personal drama: their loves, their disappointments, their travails, their agony and their ecstasy. It is in the novels, however, that these characters are seen in their context of time and space: the neighbourhood in which Tremblay and his extended family lived and grew up. The Duchess and the Commoner focuses on Albertine's brother, Édouard, brother-in-law to 'the fat woman' and uncle to Marcel, and to the 'fat woman's' son. In ths volume, Édouard launches his forays into the 1940's world of Montréal show-business and creates his own astonishing role within it. As with all the novels in this series, a certain sense of wonder, even magic, emanates from the grandmother, Victoire, which in this episode is seen flowing through Édouard to his nephew, the brilliant and disturbed Marcel.

As an innovative chronicler of the "little people" of Quebec, Michel Tremblay has no peer. Yet few Anglophone readers realize that Tremblay began as a writer of works of fantasy. Now, however, Michael Bullock, who won the Canada Council translation award for his translation of Tremblay's first collection of stories - Contes pour buveurs attardés (Stories for Late Night Drinkers) - has worked his magic upon Tremblay's first novel, La Cité dans l'oeuf (1969).

With humour and poignancy, Tremblay offers glimpses of himself and his mother at five different stages of their lives together.

Autobiographical pieces about how movies shaped the life of young Michel Tremblay.

March, 1963. Winter has launched its final assault on Montreal. The Fat Woman, Thérèse, Édouard, Pierrette, Marcel, all the star-crossed characters of Tremblay's Chronicles of Plateau-Mont-Royal are here again, 20 years later. Marcel, now 23, learns that his Auntie Nana--The Fat Woman who is here finally named--is gravely ill and her days are numbered. How will he, with his exaggerated sensitivity, his visions, his ongoing struggle with "reality" pit his fertile imagination against this inexorable march of death? In five epiphanic visions that take us from a nineteenth-century London pub to a reworking of Michelangelo's Last Judgement, Marcel uses his gift of the creative imagination to break the eternal spiral of new beginnings, and to thumb his nose at despair and resignation. Presented here, side by side, is Tremblay's fictionalized account of the death of his own mother, so lovingly enacted in his new play, For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again. In what becomes a coda to his great Chronicles of the Plateau-Mont-Royal cycle of novels, Tremblay creates, with grace and tenderness, a redemption and transcendent grandeur for these familiar and beloved characters: A Thing of Beauty.

Edouard, dit la duchesse, quitte Montréal vers Paris pour une dizaine de jours et écrit son journal. Ce voyage est l'occasion de découvrir la solitude, de fuir et de poursuivre la vérité de son double visage, de sa double vie. En mourant, il dit à sa belle-soeur que son journal l'a aidé à traverser les pires moments de sa vie.

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 epiphanies of a transforming world, seen through the memories of the characters, set the stage for the action of the novel which takes place in the space of this single, evocative day. The fat woman's son experiences this moment as an episode of profound personal objectification--he sees himself as in a photo of that larger, inclusive moment. Marcel, on the other hand, literally seizes the moment, and stores it in his school bag as a physical thing. It is also the day of final exams at the École Saint-Stanislas where the fat woman's son, a boy who lives inside the books he loves, is in the "gifted" class, and his cousin Marcel, the "mad" family terror, is in the class for "slow learners." Racked by envy at what he sees as Marcel's genius--his ability to create and function in another dimension of reality--the gifted child blanks out during the French exam. The first quarter of the moon--which rises over the final scenes of the novel in which the fat woman's son recognizes and acknowledges his cousin Marcel's genius--is an exquisitely crafted and resonant metaphor for the symbiotic relation between the imaginary and the real, the privileged "educated elite" and the "great unwashed," innocence and experience, sanity and madness.

"A virtuoso piece of writing by a master craftsman". -- Toronto Star

A beloved brother returns to his family. Cast of 6 women and 2 men.

The powerful story of one woman, Albertine, at five times in her life. Cast of 6 women.

Les débuts littéraires [après une pièce intitulée «Le train» (1964)] de l'auteur des «Belles-soeurs». Pour mesurer le chemin parcouru... Adrien Thério avait aimablement, à l'occasion de la parution des «Contes», parlé d'une certaine parenté entre Michel Tremblay et Edgar Allan Poe. [SDM].