fact

All
dispatches
essays
reviews
columns
Geist Staff
The Anatomy of Arcadia

The Anatomy of Arcadia by David Solway (Véhicule Press) pretends to be an anti-travel book, written against the grain of the "usual" travel book, but is really an anti-travel-guide-book filled with hard words that seem to be inserted into the text fo

Helen Godolphin
The Assassin’s Cloak: An Anthology of the World’s Greatest Diarists

The Assassin’s Cloak: An Anthology of the World’s Greatest Diarists, edited by Irene and Alan Taylor (Canongate Books), makes excellent bedtime reading for those who have difficulty limiting themselves to just a few pages a night. For each day of the

Patty Osborne
The Apprentice's Masterpiece

Everything I know about the Spanish Inquisition I learned from a young adult novel by Melanie Little that is written in free verse.

Stephen Osborne
The Areas of My Expertise

The areas of John Hodgman’s expertise do not extend to the Northwest Passage in his new book The Areas of My Expertise (Dutton). The deficiency is more than made up for, in a chapter called “Our 51 United States,” by an entry on the drifting state of

Stephen Osborne
The Arcades Project

The Arcades Project by Walter Benjamin (Belknap/ Harvard) is one of the greatest books of the twentieth century, and it will make you want to assemble one yourself for your own life and time. This is a monumental work of excavation in history, philos

Michael Hayward
The Architects Are Here

In The Architects Are Here (Viking), Michael Winter revisits his fictional alter ego Gabriel English, who has previously appeared as a central figure in two short story collections and in This All Happened, Winter’s first novel (published in 2000).

S.K. Grant
The Arctic Sky: Inuit Astronomy, Star Lore and Legend

Another reflection of Earth’s Mind can be found in the pages of The Arctic Sky: Inuit Astronomy, Star Lore and Legend, by John MacDonald, just published by the Nunavut Research Institute with the Royal Ontario Museum. This is a gathering of the celes

Madeline Sonik
The Bone House

Luanne Armstrong’s apocalyptic novel The Bone House (New Star) is a searingly perceptive social commentary on a world in which sovereign corporate might has pillaged the goodness of humankind. The natural world and the struggle to preserve it, a recu

Leah Rae
The Bindery

In my life I have only written one fan letter that began: “I have never written a fan letter before.” It was addressed to Shane Rhodes, and I wrote it after reading his poetry collections Holding Pattern (NeWest Press) and The Wireless Room (NeWest P

Stephen Osborne
The Best Thing For You and Stevenson Under the Palm Trees

Annabel Lyon’s new book, The Best Thing for You (McClelland & Stewart), is a collection of three novellas and one of the best things in new fiction this season.

Kris Rothstein
The Best 10 Minutes of Your Life

The only book of poetry I enjoyed this year is Zoe Whittall’s The Best 10 Minutes of Your Life (McGilligan Books). Here Ally McBeal and Dr. Seuss live alongside Susan Musgrave and Rocket Richard in a mélange of popular culture and literary craving.

Carrie Villeneuve
The Black Rider: The Casting of the Magic Bullets

This year, January in Vancouver was one long, dark rainy day. Thankfully the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival offered a variety of performances that piqued my curiosity enough to seduce me out of the house, away from the comforts of Kraft

Patty Osborne
The Bird Artist

Speaking of the library, the day after I borrowed The Bird Artist by Howard Norman (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), a book my brother had recommended, The Museum Guard (Knopf), also by Norman, arrived in the Geist office. For some reason I chose to read Th

Michael Hayward
The Big Why

The subject of Michael Winter’s novel The Big Why (Anansi) is Rockwell Kent, who was an accomplished artist and book illustrator during the 1930s and who was fascinated by the far north. The Big Why begins when Kent arrives in the isolated coastal vi

Patty Osborne
The Blue Circus

The Blue Circus (Cormorant) by Jacques Savoie, also translated by Sheila Fischman. Same translator, different story. Here the prose flows smoothly from start to finish, and even features the word lexiphone, which I have never heard in any language.

Patty Osborne
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

Sixty-three years after the Holocaust, the phrase “boy in striped pajamas” evokes such a strong image of concentration camps that it is difficult to imagine anyone being innocent of its hidden meaning, but nine-year-old Bruno, the main character in T

Stephen Osborne
The Oldest Basketball Team in the World

In 2005, a team of basketball players from Vancouver, whose average age is seventy-two, arrive at the World Masters Games in Calgary and, after losing three games to teams twenty years and more younger than themselves, receive the gold medal in their

Geist Staff
The Old Farmer's Almanac

The Special Canadian Edition of The Old Farmer's Almanac, from Yankee Publishing Inc., is subtitled "Fitted for Ottawa, with special corrections and calculations for all the Canadian provinces." Items of interest include "Who is the Canadian Farmer?,

Lily Gontard
The Old Way North: Following the Oberholtzer-Magee Expedition

Here, at last, are the uninspired chronicles of a man of few words.

Geist Staff
The Old Fart

A single copy of the second number of The Old Fart, "a magazine for and by curmudgeons" appeared in the rack at the local tobacconist's just long enough to be snaffled up by a sharp-eyed Geister. This is not a pretty magazine, but it's a pretty funny

Blaine Kyllo
The Pianist

The Pianist (TVA/Lions Gate), the Roman Polanski film that took Oscars for directing, acting (Adrien Brody) and adapted screenplay (Ronald Harwood) in 2003, is one of Polanski’s finest films. It is the true story of how Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Jewish m

Stephen Osborne
The Others Raisd in Me: 150 Readings of Sonnet 150

Stephen reviews The Others Raisd in Me: 150 Readings of Sonnet 150 by Gregory Betts (Pedlar Press).

Patty Osborne
The Optimists

I still can’t figure out why the cover of The Optimists, a novel by Andrew Miller (Sceptre), is covered with blue butterflies when the story is about atrocities committed under the orders of an African politician. Clem Glass is a photographer who doc

Michael Hayward
The Oxford Companion to Food

The Oxford Companion to Food (2nd edition, Oxford) is an extremely dangerous book.

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.

Neil MacDonald
Better Living In Pursuit of Happiness From Plato To Prozac

The recently published Better Living In Pursuit of Happiness From Plato To Prozac (Viking) by Mark Kingwell, a Canadian philosopher and intellectual celebrity, provides an in-depth analysis of our pleasure-centric society and the concept of happiness

Patty Osborne
Between the Stillness and the Grove

While I don’t come across many stories about Winnipeg, Between the Stillness and the Grove by Erika de Vasconcelos (Knopf) may be the first one I’ve read about Armenia. In this book the stories of two Armenian women are interwoven to create a deep an

Lily Gontard
Beyond the Outer Shores

In the lifelong friendship between John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts, it was Steinbeck who wrote the books, won the Nobel Prize in Literature and garnered the public attention (both positive and negative), but in Beyond the Outer Shores (Raincoast), a b

Michael Hayward
Beyond the Horizon

In Beyond the Horizon (Doubleday), Colin Angus lays claim to “the first human-powered circumnavigation of the planet” and spends 374 pages documenting and defending this claim (there’s also a DVD).

Mandelbrot
Billy Elliott

Billy Elliott is surely the most offensive movie of the season. Rocky II goes to ballet school and proves that High Culture can be good for working class stiffs if only they would stop drinking beer long enough to make sacrifices for children who wis

Patty Osborne
Bialystok to Birkenau: The Holocaust Journey of Michel Mielnicki

At twenty I didn’t know anything. About that time I had a Jewish boyfriend named Alain who lived with his parents in a wealthy area of town.... Now Michel Mielnicki, with John Munro, has written Bialystok to Birkenau: The Holocaust Journey of Michel

S. K. Page
Biographical Dictionary of the World's Assassins

George Fetherling, in his Biographical Dictionary of the World’s Assassins (Random House), offers a useful five-part typology of assassins that appears to be a first of its kind. (Type fives seek personal revenge, type threes are hired mercenaries, t

Stephen Osborne
Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative

The four dozen or so essays in Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative, edited by Mary Burger, et al. (Coach House Books), contain much loose talk of “limitations” and “delimitations,” of “linearity,” of being “forced to conform”—all of which are

Margaret Brady
Black & Blue

If you like crime fiction, you will enjoy the latest Ian Rankin thriller, Black & Blue (Orion), whose title is taken from the Rolling Stones album of the same name. John Rebus, Rankin's police detective, seems at the outset just another cop-story pro

Patty Osborne
A Little Distillery in Nowgong

A review of A Little Distillery in Nowgong by Ashok Mathur.

JILL MANDRAKE
The Skinny

The UK literary journal, Flash, features concise forms of microfiction: short-short stories also known as "flashes".

JILL MANDRAKE
Pinspotting

"I hope you will agree that we more sensitive teenagers grew up surrounded by irony." Jill Mandrake calls George Bowering's memoir his most provocative work yet.

Jesmine Cham
Dear Patient

A woman, hoping to find peace, seeks her birth mother. A review of By Blood by Ellen Ullman.

RICHARD VAN CAMP
Squirmworthy

Mary Schendlinger reviews SayWha?!, a monthly evening of “readings of deliciously rotten writing”.

Norbert Ruebsaat
Real World Happiness

Norbert Ruebsaat learns that true happiness requires “an ability to live with ambiguity and tolerate a certain degree of physical humour” in Brian Fawcett's memoir, Human Happiness.

Michael Hayward
Literary Lives

Diana Athill never dreamed of writing—until one morning, suddenly she wrote. "Until that moment I had been hand-maiden, as editor, to other people’s writing, without ever dreaming of myself as a writer."

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."

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

Thad McIlroy
Teary-Eyed Testosterone

Thad McIlroy reviews Poems That Make Grown Men Cry: 100 Men on the Words That Move Them.

Becky McEachern
The Boreal Gourmet: Adventures in Northern Cooking

Becky McEachern reviews Michele Genest’s The Boreal Gourmet: Adventures in Northern Cooking, featuring a blend of the author's culinarily enlightened upbringing and indigenous northern Canadian ingredients.

Patty Osborne
The Underwood

Patty Osborne reviews The Underwood by P.G. Tarr, winner of a 3-Day Novel Contest.

Michael Hayward
To Have or Have Not

Michael Hayward reviews Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids, a collection of essays with a title that speaks for itself.

David Albahari
Two Homes, One Wolf

If a house were a good thing, the wolf would have one.

Patty Osborne
Without Reservations

Patty Osborne reviews Devil in Deerskins: My Life with Grey Owl, a memoir by Anahareo, and Kuessipan by Naomi Fontaine, two contrasting reflections on the aboriginal experience.

Michael Hayward
Notes on the Cinematographer

Michael Hayward reviews Notes on the Cinematographer, a cryptic compendium of notes and quotes from the French filmmaker Robert Bresson.

Stephen Henighan
Offend

The writer who is loved by all, by definition, neglects literature’s prime responsibility: to offend.

Daniel Francis
Folly of War

Daniel Francis reviews All Else Is Folly, a "useful antidote" to the patriotic narrative that hails World War I as Canada's "coming of age."

Eve Corbel
Jungle Out There

Eve Corbel reviews Lumberjanes, a "smart, cute-in-a-good-way" comic series that follows the supernatural hijinks of five girls at an extraordinary summer camp.

Veronica Gaylie
London Double

Veronica Gaylie encounters invisible lamps, uncooperative clerks and a cushion with a bear and/or badger on it during a trip to London.

VINCENT PAGÉ
Milton Acorn Googles His Own Work

"Could I forget: the look that tells me you want me"—Vincent Pagé creates Google autocomplete poetry.

CARIN MAKUZ
Bride of God

On her first communion, a young girl searches for peace of mind in a world of purgatory, UFOs and the Lennon Sisters.

Stephen Osborne
Canadian ten-dollar bill

The dreadful effects of “computer-assisted publishing” can be observed in the new Canadian ten-dollar bill, a specimen of which I had been carrying around for days wondering where I could have picked up such a miserable-looking coupon.

Stephen Osborne
Dream Counsels

"The soiled side of the shirt is the great baggage of dreams"—Stephen Osborne dreams of Hemingway, Harper and profiteroles.

Jill Boettger
Double Lives: Writing and Motherhood

Jill Boettger reviews Double Lives: Writing and Motherhood, a collection of 22 essays by women who are both mothers and writers.

Drunk, Armed With Guitar

"RCMP are responding to Canadian Tire for a report that a male is threatening staff with an axe he was trying to return" and other tweets from @ScanBC.

Elevator Will Not Fall

Ludwig Wittgenstein instructs you on how to comport yourself in a stuck elevator.

Annabel Lyon
Eye for Detail

What is at the heart of this Edith Iglauer profile by Giller nominee Annabel Lyon? Hint: Ice Road Truckers.

Daniel Francis
Acts of Resistance

"Resistance to wars is as much a Canadian tradition as fighting them." Daniel Francis discusses alternative histories, anti-draft demonstrations and the divisive nature of war.

Wilson MacDonald
Author Tour, 1923

The poet Wilson MacDonald reluctantly reveals secrets of literary success.

Michał Kozłowski
Publishing Life

The zine scene—comics, wrestling, skateboarding and music.

ANDREA BENNETT
Rockin' Through Ontario

andrea bennett suggests that Road Rocks Ontario, a poorly proofread guide to our middle province’s geologic wonders, has a five-star rating on Goodreads because "people who like rocks like them a whole lot."

Derek Fairbridge
Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage

Derek Fairbridge reviews a documentary on the Canadian rock band Rush.

Patty Osborne
Saint Ralph

Patty Osborne reviews Saint Ralph, the uplifting but untrue story of a boy who sets out to win the 1954 Boston Marathon.