fact

All
dispatches
essays
reviews
columns
Thad McIlroy
Death and the Economist

The art of the obituary lives on: Obituaries of note from The Economist magazine, including those of the "gunrunner of CIA front companies" and "last interesting Marxist."

Daniel Francis
Double Life

The poet John Glassco lived in disguise, masquerading as a member of the gentry while writing pornography and reinventing his past.

HAL NIEDZVIECKI
The Secret Market

When Frank Warren began collecting the secret thoughts of strangers at PostSecret.com, he inadvertently created a new genre.

Alberto Manguel
Hospital Reading

When you find yourself laid up in a sterile hospital room, which books do you want to have with you?

Stephen Osborne
The Tall Women of Toronto

In this city of tall buildings, the most imposing shadows are cast by women.

Stephen Henighan
Latinocanadá

Military coups, civil wars, and NAFTA are the cause of trilingual labels in Canadian big box stores.

Veronica Gaylie
Blue Cheese

A decadent feast of poetry; but what will it do to your heart?

Edith Iglauer
Aquafun

Plumb the depths of the Aquafit subculture with our embedded nonagenarian.

Alberto Manguel
Yehuda Elberg: In Memoriam

A writer whose work is among the most important contributions to the literature of the Holocaust is forgotten by almost all.

Jeff Shucard
Hurricane

Four days after Sandy, Shucard's parents are in good humour, very brave and very glad to see him—and unsure if he's taking them to Bolivia, Azerbaijan or Canada.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Terribly Human

"Awkwardness comes with loving someone too much or not enough." A review of Other People We Married by Emma Straub.

Daniel Francis
It's a Free Country, Isn't It?

During the 1950s the RCMP used a machine to identify federal employees who were homosexuals. The name of this bogus device? The "fruit machine," of course.

RICHARD VAN CAMP
Rookie Yearbook One

The Senior Editor of Geist learns to "Wear Knee Socks with Everything" from an exceptional blog turned print book by Tavi Gevinson.

Thad McIlroy
Hernia Heaven, Part 2

Thad McIlroy undergoes a hernia operation—and with Neil Diamond and the right kind of drugs, it might only take ten minutes.

Sheila Heti
Stakeout

Sheila Heti spends a day in a diner in Toronto observing the enormous EUCAN electrified garbage can at the corner of College and Bathurst.

Stephen Osborne
Women of Kali

A feminist writer/publisher sought out stories of the partition of India: atrocity and hardship, looting, rape and murder committed by and upon Hindu, Muslim and Sikh.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Grief-in-Progress

Kelsea O'Connor reviews Nox by Anne Carson (New Directions).

Michael Hayward
Writing in Blue

Michael Hayward reviews Blue Nights by Joan Didion (Knopf).

Mandelbrot
Zero Drag and Genius

Mandelbrot reviews The Wage Slave's Glossary written by Joshua Glenn and Mark Kingwell and illustrated by Seth.

Chelsea Novak
National Boyfriend

At a taping of George Stroumboulopoulos Tonight, Chelsea Novak meets Canada's boyfriend.

Michael Turner
Oh, Canada

Michael Turner questions a US-curated exhibit of Canadian art that exoticizes Canadian artists while suggesting they are un-exotic.

Daniel Francis
Boob Tube

Richard Stursberg’s memoir of his years in CBC programming raises the question: How did someone with no sympathy for public broadcasting get the job in the first place?

Eve Corbel
Collier Cornucopia

Eve Corbel reviews Collier’s Popular Press: 30 Years on the Newsstand.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Cut-Out Lit

Kelsea O'Connor reviews Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer (Visual Editions).

Eimear Laffan
Fact
The Trap Door

This invertebrate does not go looking for prey

rob mclennan
Fact
Elizabeth Smart’s Rockcliffe Park

For the sake of the large romantic gesture

Sara de Waal
Fact
Little Women, Two Raccoons

Hit everything dead on, even if it’s big

Margaret Nowaczyk
Fact
Metanoias

The names we learn in childhood smell the sweetest to us

Ian Roy
Fact
My Body Is a Wonderland

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

Sara Graefe
Fact
My Summer Behind the Iron Curtain

No Skylab buzz in East Germany.

Sara Cassidy
Fact
The Lowest Tide

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

David Sheskin
Fact
PRESS 1 IF

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

CB Campbell
Joe and Me

Playing against the fastest chess player in the world.

Mazzy Sleep
Heart Medicine

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

Jennilee Austria
Scavengers

That’s one for the rice bag!

David M. Wallace
Red Flags

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

Jeremy Colangelo
i is another

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

Danielle Hubbard
The muse hunt

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

CONNIE KUHNS
Marriage on the Download

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

Deborah Ostrovsky
Saint Joseph, Patron Saint of Bad Pronunciation

Scrape every last bit of English out of your throat.

Debra Rooney
Comics
Weird Jobs

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

Stephen Osborne
Waiting for Language

Remembering Norbert Ruebsaat.

Grant Buday
Reduce, Reuse, Reincarnate

Destroying books for the greater good.

Natasha Greenblatt
Scavenger Hunt for Losers

Losers: you have a lifetime to hunt.

Finn Wylie
Shelter in Place

"I never went looking for them."

Tara McGuire
Short Term

Tell me again how long the trip is?

Jill Boettger
Do You Remotely Care?

Fill the room with a flock of moths.

Stephen Smith
The Acknowledgements

Any resemblances to persons living or dead are purely vindictive.

Robyn Ludwig
Black Velvet, If You Please

The secret is in the velvet.

Christine Lai
Fact
Now Must Say Goodbye

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

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

Gabrielle Marceau
Fact
Main Character

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

Mia + Eric
Future Perfect

New bylaws for civic spaces.

JUDY LEBLANC
Walking in the Wound

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

SADIQA DE MEIJER
Do No Harm

Doing time is not a blank, suspended existence.

Kristen den Hartog
The Insulin Soldiers

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

Steven Heighton
Everything Turns Away

Going unnoticed must be the root sorrow for the broken.

DANIEL CANTY
The Sum of Lost Steps

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

Brad Cran
Fact
Potluck Café

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

Carellin Brooks
Ripple Effect

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.

MARCELLO DI CINTIO
The Great Wall of Montreal

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.

Michał Kozłowski
New World Publisher

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."

BRAD YUNG
Lessons I’m Going To Teach My Kids Too Late

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

Paul Tough
City Still Breathing: Listening to the Weakerthans

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.

Stephen Osborne
This Postcard Life

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

Hilary M. V. Leathem
To Coronavirus, C: An Anthropological Abecedary

After Paul Muldoon and Raymond Williams.

Bill MacDonald
The Ghost of James Cawdor

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

Ann Diamond
The Second Life of Kiril Kadiiski

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

Caroline Adderson
Lives of the House

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

Ivan Coyote
Shouldn’t I Feel Pretty?

Somewhere in the sweat and ache and muscle I carved a new shape for myself that made more sense.

David L. Chapman
Postcolonial Bodies

Mastery of the self

CONNIE KUHNS
There is a Wind that Never Dies

"If you are still alive, you must have had the experience of surrendering."

Sarah Leavitt
Small Dogs

Emily’s mother had unusually large eyes that bulged slightly and often turned red, and she stared at people in restaurants and stores. Sometimes Emily’s mother commented on these people’s conversations, or laughed at their jokes, as if she were part

Ola Szczecinska
Symbiosis in Warsaw

Ola Szczecinska returns to Warsaw to visit her grandmother, and to keep from losing her memories.

Michael Hayward
Is It Edible?

Review of "Mushrooms of British Columbia" by Andy MacKinnon and Kem Luther.

Anson Ching
The Geist of Turkey

Review of "Ethos" directed by Berkun Oya.

Michael Hayward
Seventy-Two Hours to Animal

Review of "Bunker: Building for the End Times" by Bradley Garrett.

Kathleen Murdock
Juice Worth the Squeeze

Review of "Shadow of Doubt: The Trials of Dennis Oland, Revised and Expanded Edition" by Bobbi-Jean MacKinnon.

Kris Rothstein
Decolonizing Canada

Review of "Before I Was a Critic I Was a Human Being" Amy Fung.

Kathleen Murdock
Doing It Special

Review of "nedi nezu (Good Medicine)" by Tenille K. Campbell.

Anson Ching
Recipe for a Harlequin Romance

Review of "Ring" by André Alexis.

CONNIE KUHNS
Rise Up

Review of "Rise Up: Songs of the Women's Movement" Co-Produced by Jim Brown, Heather A. Smith, and Donna Korones.

Patty Osborne
Middle Sister

Review of "Milkman" by Anna Burns.

Michael Hayward
Purveyors of Electric Fans

Review of "Clyde Fans" by Seth.

Michael Hayward
Tree Lit

Review of "The Overstory" by Richard Powers.

Anson Ching
Voyeur Galore

Review of "Captains of the Sands" by Jorge Amado.

Patty Osborne
Why White People Are Funny

Review of "Qallunaat! Why White People Are Funny" Zebedee Nungak and Mark Sandiford.

Jonathan Heggen
Korean Supper

Review of "Crying in H Mart: A Memoir " by Michelle Zauner.

Michael Hayward
Dancing About Architecture

Review of "Utopia Avenue" by David Mitchell.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Eaten to Extinction

Review of "Lost Feast: Culinary Extinction and the Future of Food" by Lenore Newman.

Michael Hayward
A Longing to Be Far Away

Review of "Fernweh" by Teju Cole.

Shyla Seller
Postal Lit

Review of "Long Live the Post Horn!" by Vigdis Hjorth.

SYLVIA TRAN
Poutine Pilgrimage

Review of poutine at Robson Fries in Tokyo.

JILL MANDRAKE
Older and Better

Review of "The Old Man in the Mirror Isn’t Me" by Ray Robertson.

Stephen Osborne
The Becoming of Vancouver

Review of "Becoming Vancouver: A History" by Daniel Francis.

Michael Hayward
Known to be Strange

Known and Strange Things (Random House) is a collection of Teju Cole’s essays and other short pieces, many of which have previously appeared in The New Yorker and elsewhere online.

Michael Hayward
A Blindness at the Centre of Seeing

Cole’s most recent book, Blind Spot (Random House), a generous hardcover printed on glossy stock, presents Cole’s photographs on recto pages, with brief, allusive essays on the facing verso page.

Patty Osborne
B for Beatrice

Patty Osborne on wacky kid tales and the joy of animated storytelling.

Stephen Henighan
In Search of a Phrase

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.

CHERYL THOMPSON
Dismantling the Myth of the Hero

In a world dominated by heroes, difference is not tolerated.

Stephen Henighan
Reheated Races

Dividing and conquering local populations confines them to manageable administrative units.

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.

LISA BIRD-WILSON
Occupation Anxiety

Lisa Bird-Wilson on UNDRIP, reconciliation, and the anxiety felt by Indigenous people in Canada.

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."

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
Plague

What we can—and can’t—learn from the plague

Alberto Manguel
Léon Bloy and His Monogamous Reader

Dogged dedication grants a reader vicarious immortality.

Stephen Henighan
Confidence Woman

The woman who called herself Tatiana Aarons gave me an address that led to a vacant lot.

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
A Fairy Tale for Our Time

What can the Brothers Grimm teach us about the state of our economic system? Everything.

Alberto Manguel
Art and Blasphemy

Faith seems to shiver when confronted by art.

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.

Stephen Henighan
Happy Barracks

In Hungary, goulash socialism becomes difficult to swallow

Marcus Youssef
Happy Shiny People

The Museum of Communism is easy to find thanks to the museum’s adver­tis­ing slo­gan: We’re above McDonald’s.

Steven Heighton
Jogging with Joyce

Before I opened for Joyce Carol Oates at her reading at Harbourfront in Toronto, we had dinner: Oates and her husband, Raymond Smith; the organizer, Greg Gatenby; and me.

Alberto Manguel
How I Became a Writer of Colour

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

RICHARD VAN CAMP
World's Most Wanted

Who knew my dad's old pen was a famous Parker 51 Vacumatic?

Patty Osborne
Tomato, Potahto

An amusing anecdote on pens and the North.

Norbert Ruebsaat
Media Studies

These stories and conversations took place in a Media and Communications Studies class at a Canadian college. Students come to the college from many countries, in the hope of enrolling eventually in a North American university.

Véronique Darwin
K to 7

Veronique Darwin revisits her childhood journal, from hearing ghosts in kindergarten to staring at hotties in grade seven.

Ann Diamond
An Awful Thing

“Never write a line you don’t mean,” said Carver. “And don’t ever imag

Michael Hayward
Mythos-Maker

Michael Hayward drove across the country to see Stephen Fry's Mythos.

Kristen Lawson
Cake Fails

Kristen Lawson on Nailed It!, a Netflix Original

CONNIE KUHNS
Fifty Years in Review

A new anthology of reviews, interviews and commentary on Joni Mitchell's music reveals the star-making machinery.

THE EDITORS
In Memoriam: Priscila Singh Uppal

Remembering Priscila Singh Uppal.

Michael Hayward
Women at War

Michael Hayward on the newly translated The Unwomanly Face of War by Svetlana Alexievich.

Stephen Osborne
Preoccupied

Stephen Osborne reflects on the Vancouver Poetry Conference, the Occupy movement, and a brunch with NaNoWriMo novelists.

Andrea King
Great Historical Curiosity

The facts (and fictions) surrounding the tale of Quebec's most famous murderess, La Corriveau.

Stephen Osborne
Remember David McFadden

Stephen Osborne remembers the genius of David McFadden.

Joe Bongiorno
The Shī Fu

Joe Bongiorno goes in search of enlightenment and finds the Shī Fu.

Michał Kozłowski
From the Heart

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

JILL MANDRAKE
Ignored or Unknown Worlds

Jill Mandrake on City Poems by Joe Fiorito.

Alberto Manguel
Beginning at the Beginning

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

Carmen Tiampo
What Survives

My great-grandfather exists now only in memory, unacknowledged even by his tombstone

Stephen Osborne
Capitalism Lurches into Expressionism

Stephen Osborne on The Hotel Years, a collection of short pieces by Joseph Roth.

Stephen Henighan
Caribbean Enigma

Unravelling the mysteries of Alejo Carpentier

Michael Hayward
Delightful, etc.

Michael Hayward on Gathie Falk's memoir Apples, etc.