For the sake of the large romantic gesture

‍

Hit everything dead on, even if it’s big

The names we learn in childhood smell the sweetest to us

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

‍

No Skylab buzz in East Germany.

‍

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

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

Playing against the fastest chess player in the world.

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

That’s one for the rice bag!

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

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

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

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

Scrape every last bit of English out of your throat.

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

Remembering Norbert Ruebsaat.

Destroying books for the greater good.

Losers: you have a lifetime to hunt.

"I never went looking for them."

Tell me again how long the trip is?

Fill the room with a flock of moths.

Any resemblances to persons living or dead are purely vindictive.

The secret is in the velvet.

You can’t break eggs without making an omelette.

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

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

‍

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

‍

New bylaws for civic spaces.

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

Doing time is not a blank, suspended existence.

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

Going unnoticed must be the root sorrow for the broken.

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

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

‍

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.

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.

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."

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

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.

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

After Paul Muldoon and Raymond Williams.

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

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

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

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

Mastery of the self

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

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

Michael Hayward on an anthology of noir fiction set in neighbourhoods around Vancouver.

Unreliable narrator, post-modernist self-reference and contemporary literary references—Michael Hayward on the nature of the autobiography.

Mary Schendlinger on Fay Weldon's 48th or 53rd book, After the Peace.

Michael Hayward on a selection of work from the writing collective known as "the Beats"

Thad McIlroy on Jan Morris's "Smile Test" throughout Canadian cities.

Patty Osborne on twenty-four essays of "rants and reflections on growing up with LGBTQ+ parents."

Stephen Osborne on Tekahionwake: E. Pauline Johnson's Writings on Native North America.

Patty Osborne on Slow Twisting by Anonymous.

Anson Ching on Anna, Like Thunder.

Mary Schendlinger on Vox.com's podcast Today Explained.

Michael Hayward on Packing My Library: An Elegy and Ten Digressions by Alberto Manguel.

Kelsea O'Connor on Our Animal Hearts by Dania Tomlinson.

Roni Simunovic reviews the Yaletown Return-It Express Depot.

Michael Hayward on a collection of conversations with Brion Gysin—writer and counterculture legend.

Patty Osborne on the mixed review of Crazy Rich Asians.

Mary Schendlinger on Natalia Ginzburg's narrative of her family during the rise of Hitler and Mussolini.

The final volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle allows us to compare Karl Ove’s literary edifice with others of similar ilk—and bulk.

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

Kristen Lawson on Nailed It!, a Netflix Original

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

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

Jill Mandrake on City Poems by Joe Fiorito.

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

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

After fol

Stephen Henighan exposes the errors, omissions and problems with the Conservative party's study guide for Canadian citizenship.

Alberto Manguel examines a modern-day book burning and asks: how is this still happening?

Do shared languages form the natural boundaries of any nation in the world?

A reflection on the complex and often inexplicable process of bibliographic categorizations.

Reflections on how a bar in Parc Extension, QC, influenced an eponymous poem about "unprogress, inertia, the failure to learn from mistakes."

Alberto Manguel remembers a golden era in Canadian writing, comments on our current cultural climate and proposes a brighter future.

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.

"And what is the use of a book," thought Alice, "without pictures or conversation?" —Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Parables, cautionary tales, morality plays, allegories—the notion that we can study literary works as texts of ethics is as old as literature.

Bohemia is a good place to grow as a writer, but is it a good place to live one’s whole life?

He is one of the strangest crea

A misogynist, a racist and an academic walk into a bar...

For most artists, the learning of the craft never ceases, and no resulting work is fully achieved

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.

According to the numbers, Canada will never produce another Atwood or Findley.

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.

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.

Reconsidering the faintly embarrassing Pierre Berton.

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 argues that audiences used to have different opinions on the news; now they cannot even agree on the terms of debate.

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.

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

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