One day a Swiss couple stopped in at the carpet shop, just as they had each year for the last ten years. Every spring they loaded up a cargo van with nets and jars and drove from their home in Switzerland to east Turkey, where they collected ­butterflies together. The man, Walter, had caught snakes in Africa and South America all his life and sold them to universities and private collectors, but that day he was turning seventy-five and, he said, it is not so wise at my age to play with snakes.

Randy Fred thought that life after residential school would be drinking, watching TV and dying. Instead, he became the "greatest blind Indian publisher in the world."

From Jean Talon to Lenin’s Tomb

How do you have a good time in Warsaw? Sing Neil Diamond songs in a karaoke bar.

Michal Kozlowski reports on the state of publishing: s'mores, Titantic metaphors, Celtic jigs, steak canapés and mechanical bull riding.

Notes from the Governor General’s Literary Awards.

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L.B. Foote fled Newfoundland to avoid life as a cod fisherman and became Winnipeg's best-known photographer, chronicling Boomtown's growth, energy and struggles.

Michal Kozlowski on From the Heart of It All: Ten Years of Writing from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.

"Nathan Sellyn’s debut fiction collection, Indigenous Beasts, may alienate readers who are not interested in tales of men and boys learning to deal with their egos and the world around them." Review by Michal Kozlowski.

Cees Nooteboom begins his collection of essays, Nomad’s Hotel: Travels in Time and Space (Douglas & McIntyre), by quoting the twelfth-century philosopher Ibn al-Arabi: “The origin of existence is movement.” The next piece, “Forever Venice,” is filled

Michal Kozlowski reviews Andy Brown's debut novel The Mole Chronicles, which charts a sibling relationship involving moles, comic books, swimming pools, kidnapping, culture jamming and more.

“Adopt a reading pseudonym” is but one piece of advice offered in The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara & Lenin Play Chess by Andrei Codrescu, reviewed by Michal Kozlowski.

Michal Kozlowski reviews Sidewalk, an ethnographic study of the lives of magazine and book vendors on Sixth Avenue in New York, written by Mitchell Duneier.

In Stickboy, Shane Koyczan asks: what happens when the bullied begins to bully back? Reviewed by Michal Kozlowski.

Evan Jenkins collected and expanded material from his column in the Columbia Journalism Review to create That or Which, and Why (Routledge), a clear and succinct guide to English language, grammar and usage.

The Wigmaker, C.E. Coughlan’s new book (Smart Cookie Publishing, webspotter.com/smartcookie), is a collection of fourteen short stories, some of which have previously appeared in Geist and other literary magazines.

For u2 fanatics, this may be the most intimate moment they will ever have with Bono; for everyone else, it’s a little awkward.

Pansy shoes and power suits on parliament hill.

With Outcast (McClelland & Stewart), Jose Latour, former vice-president of the Latin American branch of the International Association of Crime Writers, shows why many consider him a master of crime and noir writing in this stylish thriller. It has pa

"The tour guide said: every hour you spend down in the mine adds three minutes to your life." Michal Kozlowski reports from 300 feet below ground.

The Western Front, Canada’s longest running artist-run centre, recently hosted a public screening of two dozen or so films from their archive of readings by poets from the 1970s, 80s and 90s.

An intrepid Geist correspondent narrowly avoids being stabbed by a moose-antler letter opener in Whitehorse.

Michał Kozłowski on the ineffable Beverly Glenn-Copeland.

Michal Kozlowski reviews Joseph Howe and the Battle for Freedom of Speech by John Ralston Saul.

Brian Mulroney’s Memoirs: 1939—1993 (McClelland & Stewart) is longer than The Brothers Karamazov, the index is longer than the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the book costs more than a five-year membership in the Progressive Conservative Pa

Michal Kozlowski reviews Stardust, Bruce Serafin's essay collection: "punchy narrative, little exposition, unburdened by political correctness."

The restaurant had white concrete walls and chrome lights dangling from the ceiling that gave the place an operating theatre vibe.

“This mental mucus is driving me mad. The Japanese blow their noses on paper too.” Thus begins The Diary of Andrés Fava (Archipelago), Julio Cortá

Stephen Henighan’s new book, A Grave in the Air (Thistledown), is a collection of short stories set in Canada, England, Germany, Poland, Romania and Bosnia-Herzegovina, which deal with themes of migration, immigration, foreignness, love, lust, adulte

Was it fever or was it the heat that made Antonia perspire so heavily?

Bacacay (Archipelago Books), a collection of some of the strangest, funniest and most wondrous stories ever published, introduces the early work Witold Gombrowicz, one of Poland’s greatest literary figures and one of the twentieth century’s most impo

Another elegant Archipelago production is Posthumous Papers of a Living Author by the Austrian modernist Robert Musil.

The zine scene—comics, wrestling, skateboarding and music.

Outlet Malls, Janis Joplin, The Godfather and Taco Bell—on the scent of Ameryka.

Michal Kozlowski reviews Sarajevo Marlboro by Miljenko Jergovic, twenty-nine (very) short stories set in Sarajevo during the Bosnian war of the early 1990s.