Sex, Drugs, Rock ’n’ Roll and the National Identity
In this essay, Daniel Francis discusses how Gerda Munsinger—a woman with ties to the criminal underworld—shaped Canadian politics in the 1960s.
EVELYN LAU
Love Song to America
Reflections on John Updike's death.
Alberto Manguel
The Other Side of the Ice
Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner is a film about community and the north.
Sheila Heti
American Soul
Slot machines sing their astral music. The tape recorder turns off. “Do you talk to friends about sex?” he asks.
Michelle Fost
Long Distance
Shared family memories of burnt baked goods.
Alberto Manguel
Geist’s Literary Precursors
The Geist map has a venerable ancestor that goes back four centuries and halfway around the world.
Jill Boettger
City Under Water
The Calgary floods left behind a stew of knee-deep mud, and waterlogged piles of couches, fridges, books, toys, artworks, chairs, carpet, drywall...
Edith Iglauer
Mad About Harry
A new pet kitten becomes part of the family.
Annabel Lyon
Irony-Free Reality TV
There may be more to reality TV than meets the eye.
Stephen Osborne
Scandal Season
Headlines featuring crack-smoking mayors and election fraudsters.
Alberto Manguel
Cooking by the Book
I'm always looking for the moment in which a character must stop to eat because, for me, the very mention of food humanizes a story.
Stephen Osborne
The Coincidence Problem
That dreamlike quality causes rational minds to dismiss the moment as “only a coincidence.”
Sheila Heti
Off the Pedestal
Rick laughed. I walked away. I was irritated at Henry, at Lee for getting stoned and being paranoid and leaving without saying goodbye, at Rick, at everyone.
Stephen Henighan
How They Don’t See Us
During the 1980s the literary critic Edward Said organized occasional research seminars at Columbia University in New York.
Alberto Manguel
My Friendship With Rat And Mole
The books we love become our cartography.
Daniel Francis
Afghanistan
One thing Canadians have learned from our armed incursion into Afghanistan is that we do not have a vocabulary for discussing war or warlike events.
Stephen Osborne
Road King
Two women on motorcycles: one in the dead zone of Chernobyl, and the other in the cactus country of Kamloops.
Daniel Francis
African Gulag
The atrocities were carried out in the name of some version of “civilization” that the Queen represented.
Florence Grandview
Eleventh-Hour Spook Show
"You look like you've seen a ghost": a story about the death of a relationship and a trip to the Spook Show.
Stephen Osborne
First Time, Last Time
The first time losing a game of Scrabble and the last time taking a train cross-country.
Ivan Coyote
If I Was a Girl
Femme girls get free Slurpees, but boyish ladies get free cavity searches at the border.
Stephen Osborne
Writing Life
"One way or another we all write out of this place,” comments Patricia Young in Writing Life (McClelland & Stewart), edited by Constance Rooke, a collection of essays by fifty writers, most of them Canadian, about the process and perils of authorship
Alberto Manguel
Neighbourhood of Letters
There are imaginary cities for scientists, vampires, lechers and even bad students—but what about writers?
Devon Code
My Prizes: A Memoir
An account of the circumstances surrounding seven literary honours bestowed on a writer.
Phrase books are tools of cultural globalization—but they are also among its casualties.
Stephen Henighan
Collateral Damage
When building a nation, cultural riches can be lost.
Stephen Henighan
Transatlantic Fictions
Coming to harbour in a new world.
Alberto Manguel
Arms and Letters
Science and the arts fulfil their functions to help us survive through the imagination.
Stephen Henighan
Reheated Races
Dividing and conquering local populations confines them to manageable administrative units.
CHERYL THOMPSON
Dismantling the Myth of the Hero
In a world dominated by heroes, difference is not tolerated.
Alberto Manguel
Achilles and the Lusitan Tortoise
“Have patience” and “Tomorrow” are two inseparable locutions in the Portuguese tongue.
Stephen Henighan
All in the Same CANO
For a brief period the band CANO gave shape to the dream of a bilingual Canadian culture.
Stephen Henighan
Residential Roots
"The hemispheric context reveals the roots of the residential school system...Destroying Indigenous cultures was a positivist policy from Patagonia to Dawson City."
LISA BIRD-WILSON
Occupation Anxiety
Lisa Bird-Wilson on UNDRIP, reconciliation, and the anxiety felt by Indigenous people in Canada.
Stephen Henighan
Not Reading
What we do when we absorb words from a screen—and we haven’t yet evolved a verb for it—is not reading.
Alberto Manguel
Library as Wishful Thinking
Libraries are not only essential in educating the soul, but in forming the identity of a society.
Stephen Henighan
Lethal Evolutions
Our society is formed on the assumption of a healthy immune system.
Stephen Henighan
Confidence Woman
The woman who called herself Tatiana Aarons gave me an address that led to a vacant lot.
Alberto Manguel
Léon Bloy and His Monogamous Reader
Dogged dedication grants a reader vicarious immortality.
Stephen Henighan
Plague
What we can—and can’t—learn from the plague
Stephen Henighan
A Pen Too Far
On March 5, 2006, a group of people gathered in a small Ontario city in the expectation of having books signed by an author who was not present.
George Fetherling
The Daily Apocalypse
The newspaper wars aren’t what they used to be.
Stephen Henighan
Taíno Tales
A package-deal paradise reputation curtails gringo knowledge of Dominican life.
Alberto Manguel
Art and Blasphemy
Faith seems to shiver when confronted by art.
Alberto Manguel
A Fairy Tale for Our Time
What can the Brothers Grimm teach us about the state of our economic system? Everything.
Alberto Manguel
Literature & Morality
Must artists declare their moral integrity?
Stephen Henighan
Flight Shame
Without air travel, family networks might have dissolved long ago.
Alberto Manguel
The Defeat of Sherlock Holmes
There’s something not quite right about the grid on which the game is played.
Mary Schendlinger on Fay Weldon's 48th or 53rd book, After the Peace.
MICHEL HUNEAULT
Memory of Winter
Only after the waters recede do marks of the disaster appear.
Michael Hayward
No One Knows
Unreliable narrator, post-modernist self-reference and contemporary literary references—Michael Hayward on the nature of the autobiography.
Alberto Manguel
Reach Out and Touch (Somebody's Hand)
There is no way to step back from the orgy of kisses without offending.
Finn Wylie
Road Trip with Cupid
“Want to marry me? My wife she burned me. She just burned me, you know. Now I’m going to court to burn her back.”
Daniel Francis
Acadia's Quiet Revolution
Revolutions need popular heroes, and unpopularvillains, and the Acadians of New Brunswick had both.
Stephen Henighan
Vanished Shore
To build a city on land flooded by the tides isn’t just a mistake—it’s utopic.
RICHARD VAN CAMP
In Memoriam: Edith Iglauer, 1917 - 2019
Respected journalist, Geist contributor and maker of olive sandwiches.
Edith Iglauer
The Prime Minister Accepts
Edith Iglauer invites Pierre Trudeau over for dinner and gets Barbra Streisand as a bonus.
JILL MANDRAKE
Ice Cream Dude
Compassionate, good truck driver, likes kids, likes ice cream—the makings of a no-fail ice cream dude.
Randy Fred
Religion or Culture?
Nuu-chah-nulth elder Randy Fred explores whether it is possible to introduce one culture to another without any hint of religious beliefs or practices.
Randy Fred
Six String Nation
Randy Fred lauds the success of Robbie Robertson, Candido "Lolly" Vegas and other influential Aboriginal musicians who rose to the top of the rock 'n' roll world.
LISA BIRD-WILSON
Distant Early Warning
We think of the Arctic as pristine and untouched—but nowhere on the planet is as harshly impacted by climate change.
Stephen Osborne
Exotic World
In 1989, when Harold and Barbara Morgan opened the Museum of Exotic World in the front rooms of Harold’s commercial painting business in Vancouver, they had been travelling the world every winter for forty-five years and had accumulated many souvenir
Randy Fred
Blind Man Dance
Randy Fred receives his first traditional Nuu-chah-nulth name.
Michael Hayward
Japanese Beatniks and Revised Boy Scouts
Michael Hayward on a selection of work from the writing collective known as "the Beats"
Patty Osborne
Queerspawn
Patty Osborne on twenty-four essays of "rants and reflections on growing up with LGBTQ+ parents."
Thad McIlroy
The Smile Test
Thad McIlroy on Jan Morris's "Smile Test" throughout Canadian cities.
Michał Kozłowski
After the Money
Notes from the Governor General’s Literary Awards.
roni-simunovic
Express Recycling Depot
Roni Simunovic reviews the Yaletown Return-It Express Depot.
KELSEA O'CONNOR
Coming of Age in Winteridge
Kelsea O'Connor on Our Animal Hearts by Dania Tomlinson.
Michael Hayward
Cast Out of Eden
Michael Hayward on Packing My Library: An Elegy and Ten Digressions by Alberto Manguel.
RICHARD VAN CAMP
News in a Nutshell
Mary Schendlinger on Vox.com's podcast Today Explained.