A young Canadian man visits family in Pakistan to settle a generational feud.
CONNIE KUHNS
Signs of Life
Does a house that has been home to four generations of one family still hold their electricity?
Daniel Francis
The Artist as Coureur de Bois
Tom Thomson, godfather of the Group of Seven, drowned in an Ontario lake under mysterious circumstances, and ever since, his reputation has been the stuff of legend.
Norbert Ruebsaat
Caleb and Opa on Holiday
Opa, you know that sometimes people say things, well, indirectly? They don’t say everything that they mean?
Patty Osborne
A Little Distillery in Nowgong
A review of A Little Distillery in Nowgong by Ashok Mathur.
Alberto Manguel
Role Models and Readers
Ruskin's readers have the power to know that there is indeed room for Alice at the Mad Hatter's table.
Alberto Manguel
Imaginary Islands
In order to discharge ourselves of certain problems, why not simply erase from our maps the sites of such nuisance?
Florence Grandview
Lights Out at the Jubilee
At the Jubilee Cinema, the manager carries an imitation pistol in the John Dillinger style.
David Wisdom
UJ3RK5
A Vancouver rock band made up of musicians, photographers and at one time, a prominent sci-fi writer.
Alberto Manguel
Face in the Mirror
What does it mean to "be" yourself? The face reflected in the mirror is unrecognizable.
Stephen Henighan
The Market and the Mall
In the farmer’s market, a quintessentially Canadian setting, much of Canada is not visible.
Daniel Francis
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.
Alberto Manguel
Cri de Coeur
Compared to today's vile heros, Ned Kelly-the Australian outlaw who wrote the angry, articulate Jerilderie letter in 1879-seems as innocent as an ogre-slaughtering hero of fairy tales.
Alberto Manguel
The Other Side of the Ice
Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner is a film about community and the north.
EVELYN LAU
Love Song to America
Reflections on John Updike's death.
Alberto Manguel
Geist’s Literary Precursors
The Geist map has a venerable ancestor that goes back four centuries and halfway around the world.
Michelle Fost
Long Distance
Shared family memories of burnt baked goods.
Sheila Heti
American Soul
Slot machines sing their astral music. The tape recorder turns off. “Do you talk to friends about sex?” he asks.
Annabel Lyon
Irony-Free Reality TV
There may be more to reality TV than meets the eye.
Edith Iglauer
Mad About Harry
A new pet kitten becomes part of the family.
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...
Stephen Osborne
The Coincidence Problem
That dreamlike quality causes rational minds to dismiss the moment as “only a coincidence.”
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
Scandal Season
Headlines featuring crack-smoking mayors and election fraudsters.
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.
Stephen Henighan exposes the errors, omissions and problems with the Conservative party's study guide for Canadian citizenship.
Alberto Manguel
Burning Mistry
Alberto Manguel examines a modern-day book burning and asks: how is this still happening?
Stephen Henighan
Language and Nation Now
Do shared languages form the natural boundaries of any nation in the world?
Alberto Manguel
A Brief History of Tags
A reflection on the complex and often inexplicable process of bibliographic categorizations.
CARMINE STARNINO
Next Door Café: A Poet's Musings
Reflections on how a bar in Parc Extension, QC, influenced an eponymous poem about "unprogress, inertia, the failure to learn from mistakes."
Alberto Manguel
Imaginary Places
Alberto Manguel remembers a golden era in Canadian writing, comments on our current cultural climate and proposes a brighter future.
Stephen Henighan
In Praise of Borders
I remembered past ordeals: a U.S. official who squeezed out my toothpaste tube on the train from Montreal to Philadelphia, another who hauled me off a bus for a lengthy interrogation.
Alberto Manguel
Pictures and Conversations
"And what is the use of a book," thought Alice, "without pictures or conversation?" —Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Annabel Lyon
Ethical Juices
Parables, cautionary tales, morality plays, allegories—the notion that we can study literary works as texts of ethics is as old as literature.
Stephen Henighan
Writing Bohemia
Bohemia is a good place to grow as a writer, but is it a good place to live one’s whole life?
Alberto Manguel
Karl Kraus, Everybody's Neighbour
He is one of the strangest crea
Daniel Francis
Canada's Funnyman
A misogynist, a racist and an academic walk into a bar...
Alberto Manguel
Final Answers
For most artists, the learning of the craft never ceases, and no resulting work is fully achieved
Stephen Henighan
Becoming French
For an English-speaking Canadian who has been exposed to French from an early age, Paris is the most disorienting city in Europe. It is grandiose, but it is mundane.
Stephen Henighan
The BookNet Dictatorship
According to the numbers, Canada will never produce another Atwood or Findley.
George Fetherling
Adventures in the Nib Trade
No one knows quite how to account for the well-established shops in Vancouver, Toronto and other cities that deal exclusively in fountain pens and fine fountain-pen accessories.
Alberto Manguel
Cautionary Tales for Children
Some years ago, Susan Crean amusingly suggested that nations might be defined or understood through their emblematic children’s books and according to whether the protagonist was male or female.
Daniel Francis
Writing the Nation
Reconsidering the faintly embarrassing Pierre Berton.
Stephen Henighan
Chariots of China
A bibliophile's worst nightmare: being stuck on a plane with a terrible book. A book mistaken for a work of serious history.
Stephen Henighan
Divergence
Stephen Henighan argues that audiences used to have different opinions on the news; now they cannot even agree on the terms of debate.
Alberto Manguel
Metamorphoses
Alberto Manguel compares his life in the French countryside to that of Cain, whom God despised for being a settled crop farmer, and whom he punished by forcing him to wander.
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?
"Cedar, Salmon and Weed is probably not the Great Canadian Novel—but it could be the Great Bamfield Novel; it seems to have few competitors for that distinction."
Patty Osborne
Hidden Life
Patty Osborne reviews Last Dance in Shediac by Anny Scoones.
roni-simunovic
Waking Up With the Rock
In the Rock Clock app, you can set your own wake-up time or choose the Rock Time option, which wakes you up whenever Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson is waking up, usually between four and six in the morning. There is no snooze option.
RICHARD VAN CAMP
Home and Heart
Mary Schendlinger sees The Babushkas of Chernobyl, Inaate/se and A Good American at the DOXA Festival.
Stephen Henighan
City Apart
The idea of Europe is incarnated nowhere as much as in St. Petersburg—Stephen Henighan on Europe's greatest city.
Alex Khramov
Walrus Keeper
One of the advantages of life back then was that people had jobs that could be easily defined. None of your strategic walrus initiative development consultants or anything.
Michael Hayward
The Library of Roguery
Jim Christy and the editors who worked on Rogues, Rascals, and Scalawags Too should be congratulated for their uncanny ability to squeeze every last euphemism out of their thesauri.
Alberto Manguel
I Believe Because It’s Impossible
Memories lie because they build on memories. I think that I remember something, but in fact I remember remembering it, and so on through countless layers of memory. Every memory is a mise en abyme.
Robertson Davies
Novelist, Playwright, Sex Machine
Robertson Davies' diaries reveal his zest for life and penchant for an act he refers to only as "h.t.d."
Thad McIlroy
Conditionally Paris
Thad McIlroy reviews Paris Nocturne by Patrick Modiano, a Nobel Prize-winning author.
Stephen Osborne
Frozen, Not Forgotten
"The miscellanist Rob Kovitz in his new book Dead and Cold has assembled, coordinated or otherwise summoned into being the best, the most spellbinding and the most chilblain-inducing account of death in the Arctic that you will ever read."
Kris Rothstein
Elixirs
Craft Distilling: Making Liquor Legally at Home by Victoria Redhed Miller is a no-nonsense how-to book, and a rational plea to lift laws that prevent small-batch not-for-profit distilling.
A.D. Peterkin
Pulling the Goalie
Auto pilot, devil's handshake and four sisters on Thumb Street.
Norbert Ruebsaat
Golden Voice
Leonard Cohen pays a visit to the neighborhood in song.
Rob Kovitz
Because a Lot of Questions Are Complex
Begging the question of what can be defined as “form.”
Lily Gontard
Passage
Lily Gontard reviews Passage (2008), directed by John Walker.
Jane Silcott
Ducks
At first no one notices when the dog rushes your daughter as if she’s some kind of game and your daughter runs as if it’s some kind of chase.
Antoine Dion-Ortega
South Side Malartic
People are getting either sick or mad, or both.
Rebekah Chotem
Coming of Age Near Thunder Bay
Rebekah Chotem reviews Sleeping Giant, a critically-acclaimed coming-of-age film directed by Andrew Cividino.
Michael Hayward
Cycling in Cities
"To properly understand Mayor Gregor Robertson’s ongoing bicyclification of Vancouver, I think we need more books like Jon Day’s Cyclogeography: Journeys of a London Bicycle Courier, an extended essay about 'the bicycle in the cultural imagination.'"
Mandelbrot
Zero Degree Dining
The Kathmandu Café in multiple dimensions.
KELSEA O'CONNOR
Martel’s Mountains
In The High Mountains of Portugal (Knopf), Yann Martel returns to magic realism in three interwoven stories about lost love and journeys taken to reclaim the past.
Stephen Henighan
Power of Denial
The crowds learned that they could not act effectively in the present without confronting the past, specifically the historical treatment of indigenous people.
roni-simunovic
Teledildonics
"Sex for Dummies, the 'Fun and Easy Way to Have Great Sex in the ’90s,' sat in the window of my neighbourhood bookstore and I bought it because, as a twenty-three-year-old, I was curious about what sex was like before my time."
Michael Hayward
Following Wind, Following Water
Michael Hayward reviews a number of travelogues by Daniel Canty and Bill Porter.