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Geist Staff
I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional: The Recovery Movement and Other Self-Help Fashions

Wendy Kaminer's I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional: The Recovery Movement and Other Self-Help Fashions (Random House-Vintage) took a lot of heat when it first came out. No wonder!

Kris Rothstein
I’m Special: How Individuality Became the New Conformity

In between films I read Hal Niedzviecki’s new book, Hello I’m Special: How Individuality Became the New Conformity (Penguin). It was inspired by the author’s crisis of faith in underground culture, precipitated by a Hallmark card reading “Happy Birth

Patty Osborne
In Her Own Words: Women's Memoirs from Australia, New Zealand, Canada & the United States

In Her Own Words: Women's Memoirs from Australia, New Zealand, Canada & the United States (Vintage), edited by Jill Ker Conway, is a book that invites browsing. All twelve of the memoirs here are excerpts of longer works, so many of the paragraphs en

Geist Staff
In a Glass House

The critics have not been kind to Nino Ricci's new novel, In A Glass House (M&S), and we had hoped to be in disagreement with them. But generally the critics are right: there is a flatness in this book not to be found in The Lives of the Saints, desp

Sewid-Smith Daisy
In Beautiful Disguises

A few weeks ago when I was knocked flat with the flu and afflicted with squinty, puffy eyes and a foggy brain, I looked for light, fun books that wouldn’t put too much of a strain on my system, and I found them in a far-east drama, a tale of reincarn

Daniel Francis
In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War

David Reynolds, a historian, explains how Churchill did it in his own book, In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War (Allen Lane).

Kris Rothstein
In Praise of Slow: How a Worldwide Movement is Challenging the Cult of Speed

Carl Honoré isn’t the first author to investigate the phenomenon of slow living, but his book In Praise of Slow: How a Worldwide Movement is Challenging the Cult of Speed (Vintage Canada) is the most comprehensive explanation of recent attention to s

Patty Osborne
In Season

When a friend gave me a copy of the CD In Season by Freddie Stone (Unity Records) she warned me that it was a bit odd. The main instrument on this CD is a flugelhorn—which looks to be what you would get if you heated up a trumpet, stretched it out, a

Patty Osborne
In Search of Paradise

I took one look at the cover of In Search of Paradise by Susan Gabori (McGill-Queen's) and put it right back on the shelf. The abstract landscape on the cover looks static and barren so I thought this would be a book without people.

Stephen Osborne
In My Brother’s Shadow

Timm was two years old when his big brother Karl-Heinz, who was eighteen, joined the Death’s Head Division and went to the front in Ukraine. His only memory of Karl-Heinz appears on the first page of In My Brother’s Shadow, translated by Anthea Bell

Patty Osborne
In Plain Sight: Reflections on Life in Downtown Eastside Vancouver

In Plain Sight: Reflections on Life in Downtown Eastside Vancouver (Talonbooks), edited by Leslie Robertson and Dara Culhane, is a book of interviews that have been shaped into stories by seven women who tell us about their everyday lives. Once you g

Geist Staff
In the Company of Strangers

In The Company of Strangers (Talonbooks) by Mary Meigs remains one of the best, if not the very best, book(s) of the decade. If you read nothing else this year, read this one.

J.M. Bridgeman
Into Thin Air

I am not a fan of action adventure travel tales or extremes of physical exertion: everything I know about mountain climbing I learned from Earle Birney's long narrative poem "David," about two boys' summer around Banff. But once I had started Jon Kra

T.Adams
Inside Out: Reflections on A Life So Far

My favourite thing about Evelyn Lau’s new book, Inside Out: Reflections on A Life So Far (Doubleday), is the smart slipcover (design by Kevin Hoch/Pylon), which is made out of a thick, translucent onion-skin paper. It wouldn’t fit in my bag after I l

Stephen Osborne
Interview with Eleanor Wachtel

The current issue of Brick contains a transcript of Eleanor Wachtel's interview with John Berger made last year for CBC Radio, and is by itself sufficient reason to buy the magazine. Especially for what he has to say about using the words "and" and "

Blaine Kyllo
Intacto

I saw Intacto (Lions Gate) at the Vancouver International Film Festival in 2002 and loved it. The film is about an underground ring of gamblers who bet on people’s luck.

Barry Kirsh
Intimacy

I remember laughing a lot when I saw the films My Beautiful Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, both written by Hanif Kureishi, and I also laughed when I read his novel The Buddha of Suburbia, so I was hungry for more comic vision in his latest

S. K. Page
Into the Looking-Glass Wood: Essays on Words and the World

Alberto Manguel, this country's man of letters par excellence, has a new collection: Into the Looking-Glass Wood: Essays on Words and the World (Knopf), consisting of twenty-two essays cast in the assured voice of a man who knows the world and is kno

Patty Osborne
Into the Sun

Speaking of characters, for me there is no better way to understand history than to read about it in a good story that shows you what it was like to be alive back then. Lately I’ve read several children’s books that fill the bill.

Kevin Barefoot
Lynx

Attention, Joyce Nelson fans: we no longer need to scan the contents pages of Canadian Forum and the Georgia Straight for her astute essays on culture. In June 1996, Nelson started publishing Lynx, a Monthly Newsletter in the Public Interest from Jam

Michael Hayward
La Jetée

A hardcover “ciné roman” version of La Jetée has just been republished by Zone Books. The pair—film and book—make a fascinating combination: the duration of each static image in the film highlights the time dimension, while in the book version the im

Cassandra MacLeane
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell

Until Susanna Clarke wrote Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (Bloomsbury), I thought all adult fantasy novels were full of strange kingdoms and warrior princesses, but this delightful 782-page doorstop explores a complex rivalry between an autocratic ma

Michael Hayward
Fair Play

Fair Play, a brief novel by Tove Jansson, is available for the first time in an English translation by Thomas Teale. To quote from the original cover copy, Fair Play is about “two women who share a life of work, delight and consternation,” a relation

Sam Macklin
Fair Weather

Joe Matt’s Fair Weather (Drawn and Quarterly) compiles four recent issues of his autobiographical comic book Peep Show.

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.

Eve Corbel
Weirdo

Remember Robert Crumb, the American comics artist who created Mr. Natural some twenty-five years ago, and got a whole generation to Keep On Truckin'? In the 1980s Crumb edited a comics anthology called Weirdo, which published work by Gilbert Shelton,

Sarah Leavitt
We Are On Our Own

Miriam Katin was a small child when she and her mother escaped Nazi-occupied Budapest by faking their deaths and walking into the Hungarian countryside. At sixty-three, Katin has finally told her story, in straightforward, unsentimental prose and lov

Cassia Streb
White Jade Tiger

Junior reviewer Cassia Streb (grade seven) sends the following note on White Jade Tiger (Orca Books) by Julie Lawson: "White Jade Tiger is about a girl who goes back in time to 1881 when the Chinese were brought over to Victoria to build the CPR rail

GILLIAN JEROME
When We Were Orphans

When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro (Knopf Canada) fell as if by magic into my lap and I read it relentlessly for two days, almost without sleeping, eating, bathing or responding to my partner and daughter. Like all great works of imagination, thi

Jill Boettger
White Salt Mountain

A curious inscription in a copy of a book called Fir-Flower Tablets: Poems from the Chinese inspired Peter Sanger to write White Salt Mountain (Gaspereau Press), a book that weaves together stories and facts about the life of Florence Ayscough, a lar

Patty Osborne
When the Spirits Dance

When the Spirits Dance (Theytus) by Larry Loyie with Constance Brissenden, the second book in a series of stories from Loyie’s childhood, paints a gentle picture of life in a First Nations community in northern Alberta during World War II.

Patty Osborne
Wilderness Beginnings

My deadline for finishing Wilderness Beginnings by Rose Hertel Falkenhagen (Caitlin Press) was December 21 because that’s when my partner David finished an out-of-town job. I’m a sucker for books about homesteading, especially homesteading in the nor

HAL NIEDZVIECKI
Wish Book

Wish Book (Gutter Press) by Derek McCormack. McCormack looks to the past to shatter the placid show window that the future promises us.

Kris Rothstein
Whole New Thing

The action in Whole New Thing, a film from Nova Scotia, is also precipitated by self-involved parents. Thirteen-year-old Emerson lives in a remote cabin, where he writes novels, takes saunas and gives massages to his parents’ friends.

Norbert Ruebsaat
Women With Men

Richard Ford (who I always think is John Ford) writes stories in the third person which read like stories in the first person, and I wanted to find out how and why he did this. I read the first story in his book Women With Men (Little, Brown) in Aust

Kris Rothstein
Women Who Eat: A New Generation on the Glory of Food

Food and eating are essential parts of our lives but they are seldom given serious thought.

Kris Rothstein
Witch Ball

Sabine Rose, the heroine of Witch Ball by Linda Joy Singleton (Llewellyn), is a psychic. She hides her powers from her popular friends and dreamy boyfriend by day and consults with her spirit guide by night.

Patty Osborne
Winter in July

Two days later I took Wayman’s workshop, Catching Fire, which was guaranteed to inspire us to get writing. He told us, among other things, that once we became writers we would no longer read for pure pleasure because we would always be analyzing what

Jill Boettger
Yesterday, at the Hotel Clarendon

A friend told me recently that women who write write like they are weaving and men who write write like they are having sex. Women bring together strands of things, she said, and connect them. Men focus relentlessly on a particular end, with an urgen

Michael Hayward
World War II Writings

It’s much more fun to read this first-hand account of the war and its aftermath observed from ground level than a professional historian’s account, written decades after the fact.

Kevin Barefoot
Word of Mouth

Word of Mouth (Thistledown) is M.A.C. Farrant's fourth collection of fiction and is in two parts: stories about Sybilla, a nineteen-year-old mother struggling to survive in suburban Vancouver Island, stretching welfare cheques and coping with pervert

Paul Tough
World on Fire

I’ve always resisted Sarah McLachlan, even when my heart and my ears wanted to give in to her songs. They seemed too middle-of-the-road, too angel-filled, too soft and girly, too Canadian. Then today I’m sitting at my desk on West 43rd Street in Manh

Leah Rae
Wristcutters: A Love Story

As the film begins, the main character, Zia, is listening to a Tom Waits record and cleaning his room in preparation for suicide. Too bad he misses a spot; the last thing he sees before he dies on the bathroom floor is a dust bunny in the corner. So

Michael Hayward
You’ll Be Okay: My Life With Jack Kerouac

You’ll Be Okay offers a feminine perspective on the Beat Generation from the wife of one of its most celebrated authors.

Blaine Kyllo
X-Men 1.5

Last fall, production for the film X-Men 2 set up in Vancouver, and as we await the theatrical release of the movie, the studio has issued a new DVD version of the first film. X-Men 1.5 (20th Century Fox) includes a new cut of the original film (whic

Daniel Zomparelli
Yesno

Daniel Zomparelli reviews Yesno by Dennis Lee (Anansi).

James Baker
YOU Back the Attack! WE'LL Bomb Who We Want!

In late May 2003 the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) hosted a discussion forum called Hell No: Designers and the War, featuring the design historian Steven Heller, the design icon Milton Glaser (perhaps most known for the “I Love NY” symbol

Kris Rothstein
You Be Me: Friendship in the Lives of Teen Girls

As a teen I was never happier than when in cahoots with my best friend, passing silly notes, talking obsessively on the phone, pouring out heartache, even fighting. I expected You Be Me: Friendship in the Lives of Teen Girls (Annick Press), edited by

S. K. Page
Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art Quarterly

Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art is a new quarterly published in Taiwan and Canada by the anonymously named Art and Collection Group Ltd., which turns out to be an ambitious group of editors, writers, curators and artists in several countri

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.

David Koulack
A Different Sort of Synagogue

David Koulack spends Yom Kippur in a packed gymnasium in Paris among a beehive of activity and a cacophony of sound.

Michael Hayward
Another Way of Saying Goodbye

Those who were close to the late John Berger have spoken of his generosity, praising Berger’s collaborative nature and his ability to establish and sustain creative friendships throughout a long and productive life.

Stephen Henighan
Write What You Can Imagine

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

JILL MANDRAKE
Seabrook Adventure

In The Abominable Mr. Seabrook, Joe Ollmann begins with a reflective preamble called “Me and Mr. Seabrook,” part of which reads, “I realized that no one knew about Seabrook’s work—all his books were out of print at the time…”

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Graphic Heroism

The One Hundred Nights of Hero by Isabel Greenberg (Doubleday Canada) is a beautifully illustrated graphic novel offering feminist adaptations of folk tales wrapped in an epic-feeling love story.

Eve Corbel
Some Lesser-Known Emoji

Eve Corbel draws emoji you can use when Mercury is in retrograde, when you've eaten too much hot sauce and during other specific times of need.

Thad McIlroy
I'm Sorry

In Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life (Doubleday) the main character Jude says “I’m sorry” over 100 times. And he adds in “I’m so sorry” 30 times.

Michael Hayward
Sarah Lund's Sweater

Michael Hayward reviews the sweater that Sarah Lund wears in every episode of Season 1 of The Killing, a serial crime drama.

Angela Wheelock
Something Like Armenian

Angela Wheelock meets a stranger at a bus stop and discusses Rumi, Hafiz and other great poets who were terrible leaders.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Steampunk Crimefighters

The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage by Sydney Padua asks the question: what would the world be like if mathematician Ada Lovelace and inventor Charles Babbage had succeeded in creating the first Victorian computer?

JILL MANDRAKE
Scary Stocking Stuffers

Jill Mandrake a new series called Christmas Ghost Stories (Biblioasis), selected and illustrated by Seth.

Patty Osborne
Keep On Truckin'

This fast-paced, quirky, heart warming and hilarious novel captures the fast and loose crossovers of language and culture that make southeast New Brunswick unique.

Geist Staff
Path of the Jaguar

This past December longtime Geist columnist Stephen Henighan did a promotional tour of western Canada for his latest novel, Path of the Jaguar.

EVELYN LAU
24 Sussex

Picture Harper lounging among pastel cushions, his stiff grey hair tight as a helmet on his head.

Stephen Osborne
The Great Game

The British called it the Great Game. The Russians called it Bolshoya Igra. The playing field was, and still is, Afghanistan.

Michael Hayward
Rain Falls in Norway

Michael Hayward reviews Some Rain Must Fall, part of the six volume memoir by Karl Ove Knausgaard.

CONNIE KUHNS
Last Day in Cheyenne

Remembering her father's last days in a hospital in Wyoming, Connie Kuhns struggles with questions of mortality, memory and how to fulfill her father's dying wish.

CARY FAGAN
What I Learned in Florida

There were always things to see at the pond—tadpoles, leopard frogs, dragonflies—but that day we saw two boys, with a rifle.

Patty Osborne
The Other Side of the Mountain

"The Orange Grove is dry and sparse and heartbreaking, much like the unnamed country in which it takes place."

M.A.C. Farrant
Selected Days

On Dorothy Parker Day we wear wool suits and little hats, smoke with cigarette holders and have a liver-coloured dachshund on a lead.

Eve Corbel
Greeting Cards for Tiny Occasions

Eve Corbel creates a set of greeting cards to celebrate life's best and worst mundane moments.

Stephen Osborne
Thomas Bernhard: The Gnarly Work

When faced with the gnarly writing of Thomas Bernhard readers experience again and again the difficulty of summarizing what they are reading, of thematizing what they have read.

Kris Rothstein
A Cup of Pyms

Pym’s loving but sly take on the world is reminiscent of Jane Austen, but I find Pym funnier and somehow more shrewd and gentle in her satire.

CONNIE KUHNS
Strange Women

Connie Kuhns' major profile of punk, politics and feminism in 1970s Canada: the Moral Lepers, the Dishrags and other revolutionary bands.

Dakota McFadzean
Duck Thoughts

The odd duck out.