The log jam is tall and wide and choosing wrong means we don’t make it home

‍

The fish is a suspended phantom, its magenta skeleton an exquisite, vibrant exhibit of what lies beneath

‍

A wildland fighter witnesses an old burn's second act

Memories sneak up, tiptoe quiet as a cat. Boom like a slapshot

The unmistakable buzz of an approaching aircraft is enough to send my family onto the lawn

‍

This invertebrate does not go looking for prey

‍

For the sake of the large romantic gesture

‍

Hit everything dead on, even if it’s big

The names we learn in childhood smell the sweetest to us

Maybe my doctor has two patients named Ian Roy, and I’ve been sent the other Ian’s file

‍

No Skylab buzz in East Germany.

‍

Nature’s sanctity is the only portal to the future.

PRESS 1 IF YOU THINK YOU MAY HAVE HEARD THE BIG BANG.

Playing against the fastest chess player in the world.

"You have bruises / There was time / You spent trying to / Heal them. / As in, time wasted."

That’s one for the rice bag!

The maple leaf no longer feels like a symbol of national pride.

"my point that / i is but a : colon grown / too long"

If marriage was a television show, it might look something like this.

"The following resume / arrived by fax: One ex-military / man, 52, applying / for duty ..."

Scrape every last bit of English out of your throat.

Who puts those little stickers on the apples in the grocery store?

Destroying books for the greater good.

Remembering Norbert Ruebsaat.

Losers: you have a lifetime to hunt.

Violence could not reach them only when they were distant as the moon, not of this world

“The first time I met him, he caused me to float to the ceiling"

Sebastian and I enjoy making fun of le mythomane. We compare him to characters in novels. Maybe he can’t return home because he’s wanted for a crime.

What does it mean to love a band? A friend? A nation?

The postcard presents a series of absences—the nameless photographer,

the unknown writer and recipient; it is constituted by what is unknown

‍

I always longed to be the falling woman—impelled by unruly passion, driven by beauty and desire, turned into stone, drowned in flowers.

‍

New bylaws for civic spaces.

It is racism, not race, that is a risk factor for dying of COVID-19.

Doing time is not a blank, suspended existence.

It was as though a magic potion had brought him back to life.

Going unnoticed must be the root sorrow for the broken.

On the curve of the contagion and on the measure of Montreality.

It took me a million miles to get here and half the time I was doing it in high heels.

‍

I am the only woman in the water. The rest of the swimmers are men or boys. One of them bobs his head near me, a surprising vision in green goggles, like an undocumented sea creature. I imagine us having sex, briefly, him rocking over me like a wave.

The chain-link fence along boulevard de l’Acadie— two metres high, with “appropriate hedge”—separates one of the wealthiest neighbourhoods in Montreal from one of the poorest.

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."

"I want to buy a house. And build a secret room in it. And not tell the kids about it."

I wasn’t certain whether I was in Winnipeg because of the Weakerthans, or whether I cared about the Weakerthans because I care about Winnipeg.

Spiritual landscapes and unknowable people captured on film, used to convey a message.

After Paul Muldoon and Raymond Williams.

A seance to contact a dead miner at Port Arthur, Ontario, in 1923—conducted by Conan Doyle himself.

He has been called the greatest Bulgarian poet of his generation. Can one literary scandal bury his whole career?

A basement shrine in her 1920s home inspires Caroline Adderson to discover the past lives of her house and its inhabitants.

Mastery of the self

Review of "Rearrangements" by Natan Last, published in The New Yorker December 2023.

Review of "Cabin Fever" by Anik See.

Review of "Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Motherhood" by Lucy Jones.

Review of "Edible and Medicinal Flora of the West Coast: British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest" by Collin Varner.

Review of "Big Mall: Shopping for Meaning" by Kate Black.

Review of "The Adversary" by Michael Crummey.

Review of "Galore" by Michael Crummey.

Review of "Jo Cook and Perro Verlag Books by Artists: The Unreadable Sacred," organized by the Simon Fraser University Art Gallery.

Review of "Gertrude and Alice" produced by United Players of Vancouver.

Review of "Censorettes" by Elizabeth Bales Frank.

Review of "Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea" by Teffi (trans. Robert Chandler).

Review of "Our Flag Means Death" created by David Jenkins on HBO Max.

Review of No Fun (the band) and reissued music by Atomic Werewolf Records.

Review of "Godzilla Minus One" directed by Takashi Yamazaki.

Review of "Canzone di Guerra: New Battle Songs" by Daša Drndić, trans. by Celia Hawkesworth.

Review of "The Midnight Bargain" by C.L. Polk

Review of "The Invention of the Other" directed by Bruno Jorge (2022).

Review of "A Primer for Forgetting: Getting Past the Past" by Lewis Hyde.

Review of "Orwell: The New Life" by D.J. Taylor.

Review of "Iron Curtain Journals," "South American Journals" and "Fall of America Journals" by Allen Ginsberg.

Review of "Antkind" by Charlie Kaufman.

Review of "A Guest in the House" by Emily Carroll.

Review of "The Last Grain Race" by Eric Newby.

Review of "The Man in the Red Coat" by Julian Barnes.

Daniel Francis on John Franklin, John Rae and the Globe and Mail's enthusiasm for cannibalism.

Prince Edward Island gothic.

Kaiju are the heroes we deserve.

Kafka’s writing allows us intuitions and half-dreams but never total comprehension.

Progressives are far less likely to be nationalists than ever before.

There is no way to step back from the orgy of kisses without offending.

Revolutions need popular heroes, and unpopularvillains, and the Acadians of New Brunswick had both.

To build a city on land flooded by the tides isn’t just a mistake—it’s utopic.

We think of the Arctic as pristine and untouched—but nowhere on the planet is as harshly impacted by climate change.

Reading is a subversive activity and does not believe in the convention of borders.

In Hungary, goulash socialism becomes difficult to swallow

Airport security assures Alberto Manguel that he has been randomly picked.

To teach us how to read Don Quixote, a text so contrary to conventional literary tradition, the prologue itself needed to break from all traditions

Unravelling the mysteries of Alejo Carpentier

We insist The Devil whispers horrible things in our ear and inspires our worst deeds.

While status registration under the Indian Act is a construct, claiming status identity isan important factor in Indigenous identity and cultural transmission.

Anti-communism, retired by most Western governments,receives monumental status in Canada

Mary Schendlinger challenges a review of a biography of Blanche Knopf, the underrecognized co-founder of Alfred A. Knopf Inc.

Stephen Henighan discusses the crude first steps to finding a new way to talk about racial reality.

The craft of untruth has been perfected.

Romantic notions that equate Indigenous peoples with nature are not going to cut it.

Rob Kovitz compiles the pressing questions of the day—"How are they gonna beat ISIS?" And, "On Twitter, who cares?"

Like most advice given to writers, the injunction to “write what you know” is misleading.

The idea of Europe is incarnated nowhere as much as in St. Petersburg—Stephen Henighan on Europe's greatest city.