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Kris Rothstein
Hail Mary Corner

No less harm in God is apparent in Brian Payton’s Hail Mary Corner (Beach Holme), set in a Vancouver Island seminary school in the 1980s. Bill, his best friend Jon and the rest of their pack run the school, promoting disorder, breaking the rules and

Kris Rothstein
Peops: Portraits & Stories of People

Peops: Portraits & Stories of People (Soft Skull) by the Canadian artist Fly is a fabulous exploration of the American underground through comics and stories.

Mandelbrot
Orca

The crisis unfolds in the Arctic Ocean where Queequeg meets his end on a iceberg, Ahab meets his flippery adversary face to face, and Ishmael alone lives to tell the tale. You have to be completely drunk to watch this (Orca is the title; it's in the

Stephen Osborne
Paul Martin & Companies: Sixty Theses on the Alegal Nature of Tax Havens

When Paul Martin was prime minister, and before that finance minister, he was seen and known to be a politician rather than a private operator in the higher echelons of global capital; indeed, his business persona cast only the faintest of shadows. A

Michael Hayward
Other Colors: Essays and a Story
Michael Hayward
Paddle to the Sea

Many boomers like me will remember trooping through school corridors to sit with their classmates in a darkened gymnasium, watching as a small hand-carved canoe survives a full range of watery perils beginning in the snowmelt streams that feed into L

Michał Kozłowski
Nomad’s Hotel: Travels in Time and Space

Cees Nooteboom begins his collection of essays, Nomad’s Hotel: Travels in Time and Space (Douglas & McIntyre), by quoting the twelfth-century philosopher Ibn al-Arabi: “The origin of existence is movement.” The next piece, “Forever Venice,” is filled

S. K. Page
The Broken Record Technique

Lee Henderson has written some very good stories in The Broken Record Technique (Penguin), a collection of painful tales about families, many of whom live in the suburbs and go to malls. This is narrative territory that may be somewhat over-reported

Rose Burkoff
The All Canadian Trivia Board Game

One dark afternoon in December, a few of the Canadian-ephemera-loving Geist staff sat down to play The All Canadian Trivia Board Game (Outset Media). The board itself is a huge map of Canada, showing places from Victoria to Goose Bay via Iqaluit.

Kris Rothstein
The Cats of Mirikitani

A perfect antidote to tension and despair is Linda Hattendorf’s remarkable documentary, The Cats of Mirikitani. She is a New York filmmaker who befriended Jimmy Mirikitani, a Japanese-American octogenarian artist who lived on the streets in her neigh

Stephen Osborne
Ryerson Review of Journalism

The summer issue of the Ryerson Review of Journalism provides a glimpse into the state of narrative writing in North America. A great many stories in its pages open with reporters reporting on themselves: “I’m standing at reception in the X hotel”; “

Patty Osborne
Saugus to the Sea

In Saugus to the Sea by Bill Brown (Smart Cookie Publishing), the narrator thinks about many things: underground irrigation systems, fire roads, the white plastic reflectors between freeway lanes, the sparkles embedded in the pavement of Hollywood Bo

Geist Staff
The Brick Reader

A perfect book to keep beside the toilet, The Brick Reader (Coach House) is a collection of essays, interviews and reviews from Brick, the literary mag. There is something here for everyone interested in good writing, including two pieces by John Ber

Michael Hayward
The Americans

The subjects—the ordinary Americans of small towns and cities, factories, sidewalks, parks and backyards—inhabit a territory that seems somewhere outside of time.

Patty Osborne
Stormy Applause: Making Music in a Worker’s State

After all the presents were open, and while the library was still closed, I borrowed the book my daughter had just finished reading. Stormy Applause: Making Music in a Worker’s State (Northeastern University Press) was written by Rostislav Dubinsky,

Sewid-Smith Daisy
The Bus

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

Stephen Osborne
The Captain Is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship

The Captain Is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship is the latest of Charles Bukowski's posthumously published books, of which there are at least five in the world (and possibly still more to come from the estimable Black Sparrow Pre

Patty Osborne
The Complaints Department

The Complaints Department by Susan Haley (Gaspereau Press) has a green cover, but the story is all about having the blues. It takes place in Prohibition Creek, N.W.T., where people say you can’t do anything about “residential school, fur prices, the

Stephen Osborne
The Complete New Yorker

A review of The Complete New Yorker, a vast treatise on writing and reading, editing and publishing in the twentieth century.

Lily Gontard
The China Fantasy: Why Capitalism Will Not Bring Democracy to China

Lily Gontard Reviews The China Fantasy by James Mann (Penguin).

Patty Osborne
The Colour of Water

I almost didn’t read Luanne Armstrong’s book The Colour of Water (Caitlin) because the cover put me off, but when I was reminded of how much I had enjoyed an earlier Armstrong book, Annie, I gave the new one a chance. The Colour of Water covers four

GILLIAN JEROME
The Complete Book of Mother and Baby Care

Child-rearing manuals cropped up with a vengeance in the latter half of the twentieth century after Dr. Benjamin Spock produced Baby and Child Care—the all-time best-selling book in American history, second only to the Bible, despite advice such as “

Ian Bullock
The Cellist of Sarajevo

An unnamed cellist plays Tomaso Albinoni’s Adagio for twenty-two consecutive days in a bomb crater.

Eve Corbel
The Comics Journal

Geist readers who take in the Globe and Mail will have seen a sobering feature not long ago reporting the jailing, flogging and even murdering of cartoonists who dare to satirize the governments of various countries, official religions, prominent cit

Geoff Inverarity
The Woman Who Talks to Her Dog at the Beach

The simple love of dogs.

Stephen Osborne
Halloween Capital of America

This year for Halloween, we creep back into the archives and Stephen Osborne digs deep into his family's history at the Salem witch trials.

Kristen den Hartog
The Two Lots

Theft, death and don't-mess-with-me expressions—unlocking the family portrait.

BRADLEY PETERS
Mission

Salmon runs, voodoo juice and chewing the fat in Mission.

BRADLEY PETERS
Mission

Salmon runs, voodoo juice and chewing the fat in Mission.

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.”

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.

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.

Michał Kozłowski
After the Money

Notes from the Governor General’s Literary Awards.

Hàn Fúsēn
Till Talk

Han Fusen navigates multiculturalism and kookoo sabzi from inside a Persian grocery store.

JILL MANDRAKE
peanut brittle

Jill Mandrake on the surprising effect of peanut brittle.

Jocelyn Kuang
49 Days to the Afterlife

Rice, tea and a trillion dollars of spirit money.

Jeff Shucard
King Zog and the Secret Heart of Albania

The secret heart of Albania is imbued with compassion and a desire to help those in need

David Look
Sleeping Class

Scenic views, fresh muffins and drunk passengers—three days and four nights aboard the Canadian from Vancouver to Toronto.

ANNMARIE MACKINNON
Chicken at Large

What was a lone hen doing in the yard, a few feet from a busy city street?

Matt Snell
Laying on Hands

In Peterborough, Pastor Billy cures arthritis, back pain, bone spurs, lymphoma, stage four liver cancer, sleep apnea and atrial fibrillation

Susie Taylor
We Smoke Our Smokes

From morning to night, there's always someone coming in for smokes and a chat.

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.

RICHARD VAN CAMP
World's Most Wanted

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

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

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
Fact
The peripatetic poet

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

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Fact
Haunted House guest

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

Michael Hayward
Fact
Beyond the event horizon

Review of "Antkind" by Charlie Kaufman.

Anson Ching
Fact
Sailing the roaring forties

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

Michael Hayward
Fact
BELLE ÉPOQUE GOSSIP

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

Peggy Thompson
Fact
More precious than rubies

Review of "Rubymusic" by Connie Kuhns.

Debby Reis
Fact
A not-totally-accurate introduction to the azores

Review of the Netflix series "Rabo de Peixe" (2023) created by Augusto de Fraga.

Michael Hayward
Fact
A Russian Brother and his sister

Review of "A Russian Sister" by Caroline Adderson.

Kris Rothstein
Fact
The messy back of history

Review of "My Grandfather’s Knife: Hidden Stories from the Second World War" by Joseph Pearson

Peggy Thompson
Fact
Have Mercy

Review of "Mercy Gene" by JD Derbyshire.

Michael Hayward
Fact
subterranean mysteries

Review of "Underland" by Robert Macfarlane.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Fact
Championing Trees

Review of "Tracking Giants: Big Trees, Tiny Triumphs, and Misadventures in the Forest" by Amanda Lewis.

Patty Osborne
Fact
Crossing Borders

Review of "Solito: A Memoir" by Javier Zamora

Michael Hayward
Fact
The Two Roberts

Review of "Turn Every Page" directed by Lizzie Gottlieb

Peggy Thompson
Fact
A moment with holden

Review of "Holden After & Before: Love Letter for a Son Lost to Overdose" by Tara McGuire.

JILL MANDRAKE
Fact
POINTS OF INFLECTION

Review of "Some of the Puzzles" by M.A.C. Farrant.

Michael Hayward
Fact
A HOLIDAY IN THE MOUNTAINS (WITH PIE)

Review of "Holiday, 1909" by Charles Chapman.

Anson Ching
Fact
THE BELL KEEPS TOLLING

Review of "For Whom the Bell Tolls" by Ernest Hemingway.

Kris Rothstein
Fact
DEFINED BY DUMPLINGS

Review of "What We Talk About When We Talk About Dumplings" edited by John Lorinc.

Jonathan Heggen
Fact
The Common Shaman

Review of "Shaman" by Kim Stanley Robinson.

Peggy Thompson
Fact
Walk Another Path

Review of "Landlines" by Raynor Winn.

Kris Rothstein
Fact
Dogs and the Writing Life

Review of "And a Dog Called Fig: Solitude, Connection, the Writing Life" by Helen Humphreys.

Patty Osborne
Fact
A Secret Well Kept

Review of "The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation" by Rosemary Sullivan.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Fact
The Human Side of Art Forgery

Review of "The Great Canadian Art Fraud Case: The Group of Seven and Tom Thomson Forgeries" by Jon S. Dellandrea.

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.

RICHARD VAN CAMP
Time-Tested

Mary Schendlinger reviews M Train by Patti Smith and My Life on the Road by Gloria Steinem.

Sarah Pollard
Mavis in Montreal

Sarah Pollard makes a pilgrimage to Montreal to hang out and write where Mavis Gallant hung out and wrote.

Marjorie Doyle
Goin’ to MUN

"'Goin’ to university' was a cover or alibi, rather than a statement of fact, providing the indolent and the imaginative with richer lives than simply having a job."

Stephen Osborne
Grinkus and Pepper

Stephen Osborne is entranced by a pair of eccentric, high profile students while on a university tour in 1964.

Rebekah Chotem
American Doppelgänger

"It’s well documented that Hollywood films use Canada to stand in for the US, including Brokeback Mountain, Good Will Hunting, the Twilight series, Rambo’s First Blood and many, many more blockbusters."

Alison McCreesh
Tuque, Socks and Nothing Else

Alison McCreesh encounters snow in May, a bemused gas station attendant and a dumpster to cook behind on a trip across Canada.

M.A.C. Farrant
Strange Birds

We don’t know why the budgie did it. He must have been unhappy. It can’t have been easy for him—pecking the bell, hanging about on the pole.

Annabel Lyon
The Life You Can Save

Hint: It’s not your own.

Norbert Ruebsaat
A History of Reading

Alberto Manguel’s A History of Reading taught me to read.

Deborah Ostrovsky
Petites Pattes

Montreal was once the “City of a Thousand Steeples.” Today it’s the city of a thousand church bazaars open on Saturdays to keep the cash flow up.

Michael Hayward
The Muskwa Assemblage

"Poetry is the most personal of the literary arts; laureates notwithstanding, few poets enjoy national stature nowadays, and fewer still are known beyond the boundaries of their native land."

Patty Osborne
A Cockney in China

At the age of 30, Gladys Aylward, a housemaid, bought a ticket from London, England, to Yangcheng, Shanxi Province, China, in order to work as a missionary.

Eve Corbel
Guide to Literary Footwear

Espadrille, paduka, chopine—Eve Corbel illustrates a guide for readers on some of the fanciest footwear found in literature.

Robert Everett-Green
Checkered Past

For me, the jacket is a piece of menswear history that I can actually put on, and a link to the tragicomic tale of an underachiever with a famous name.

Daniel Francis
Umpire of the St. Lawrence

Donald Creighton was a bigot and a curmudgeon, a cranky Tory with a chip on his shoulder. He was also the country’s leading historian, who changed the way that Canadians told their own story.

Michał Kozłowski
Poets on Film

The Western Front, Canada’s longest running artist-run centre, recently hosted a public screening of two dozen or so films from their archive of readings by poets from the 1970s, 80s and 90s.

Patty Osborne
The Mere Future

Meet the new bosses of a futuristic New York. Same as the old boss?

Alberto Manguel
Pistol Shots at a Concert

The novelist can often better define reality than the historian.

JEROME STUEART
Road Trip

A collection of Jerome Stueart's Greyhound sketches, including one Vitruvian bus driver.

Katie Addleman
Greyhound

The driver said, “Are you fit to travel, sir?” and the crack smoker said, “Are any of us fit to travel?"

Eve Corbel
The 99: Bus Without Pity

How did the 99 B-Line bus route come to be the locus of the most heartless transit rides in Greater Vancouver?

Rebekah Chotem
Room for the Real

Rebekah Chotem reviews the film adaptation of Room by Emma Donoghue.

Stephen Osborne
National Poetry Daze

CBC Radio celebrated National Poetry Day by reading a poem written in 1916 by Bliss Carman, which raises the question: are there no living poets who cut the mustard?

Michael Hayward
Coastal Memories

Michael Hayward reviews Everything Rustles by Jane Silcott and Born Out of This by Christine Lowther.

Stephen Henighan
Phony War

"We know that life-altering and possibly cataclysmic change is coming, and we continue to live as we have always done."