"I stared in awe at the pink-petalled flowers of human tissue blossoming in the mass of a collapsed grey-brown lung as it was reinflated during a thoracotomy."
KELSEA O'CONNOR
Perchance to Dream
A Pillow Book by Suzanne Buffam contemplates the pillow, an ordinary object, as the buffer between internal and external life.
HAL NIEDZVIECKI
Mars TV
"Christy Foley is going to live on Mars. Or at least, that’s what she’s hoping."
Lethbridge 2034
Holographic animals, water parks and mind-reading helmets: young Lethbridgians speculate about what Lethbridge might be like in twenty years.
Samantha Warwick
Running
Running (Brindle & Glass), the first of a projected quartet of novels, unfolds between 1958 and 1960 in the fictional steel town of Raysburg, West Virginia, the setting of most of Maillard’s novels.
Patty Osborne
Come, Thou Tortoise
The hilarious story of Audrey Flowers’s mysterious upbringing in Newfoundland, narrated in part by her pet tortoise, is equally enjoyable on the second read.
Marisa Chandler
Overqualified
Overqualified by Joey Comeau (ECW Press) is a collection of satiric cover letters handcrafted to make any HR worker cringe and every job seeker smile.
Michael Hayward
Two Fish in a Western Sea
"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.
Stephen Henighan
City Apart
The idea of Europe is incarnated nowhere as much as in St. Petersburg—Stephen Henighan on Europe's greatest city.
RICHARD VAN CAMP
Home and Heart
Mary Schendlinger sees The Babushkas of Chernobyl, Inaate/se and A Good American at the DOXA Festival.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
Stephen Henighan
Reheated Races
Dividing and conquering local populations confines them to manageable administrative units.
CHERYL THOMPSON
Dismantling the Myth of the Hero
In a world dominated by heroes, difference is not tolerated.
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.
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."
LISA BIRD-WILSON
Occupation Anxiety
Lisa Bird-Wilson on UNDRIP, reconciliation, and the anxiety felt by Indigenous people in Canada.
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
Confidence Woman
The woman who called herself Tatiana Aarons gave me an address that led to a vacant lot.
Alberto Manguel
Léon Bloy and His Monogamous Reader
Dogged dedication grants a reader vicarious immortality.
Stephen Henighan
Plague
What we can—and can’t—learn from the plague
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
Art and Blasphemy
Faith seems to shiver when confronted by art.
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
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.
Dylan Gyles embarks on a quest to read all of literature's most difficult tomes, starting with Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon.
KELSEA O'CONNOR
All Zeit, No Geist?
Kelsea O'Connor reviews Kitten Clone by Douglas Coupland, a "humanizing portrait" of Alcatel-Lucent, the company that developed the internet we know and love today.
Eve Corbel
Getting It Wrong
It's human nature to jump to the wrong conclusion–and stick with it.
HOWARD WHITE
How We Imagine Ourselves
When Geist first approached me with the idea of speaking here, I made it known that of all the things I ever wanted to be when I grew up, being an after-dinner speaker was very low on the list.
Christopher Gudgeon
Waiting for Our Lord God Jesus Christ…
…in the Maple Leaf Lounge at the John G. Diefenbaker Airport in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.
Eve Corbel
Old Women Cry at Weddings
Eve Corbel on marriage and what comes after the wedding: the monster mortgage, the dreary housework, the contemptuous in-laws and more.
roni-simunovic
Literary Festival Field Guide
Roni Simunovic catalogues types of literary festival attendees: the jaded art student, the CanLit socialite, the overworked publisher and more.
Susan Mockler
Hey, Sexy
"I glanced at Jack, his tattooed arms, his gloved hands resting on the wheels of his manual chair. If only I could get my arms back. I could live with anything else."
Daniel Francis
When Treatment Becomes Torture
Daniel Francis discusses Canada's failing mental health care system and its long history of mistreatment.
Daniel Francis
Time for a Rewrite
Aboriginal people are creating a new version of Canada, and non-Aboriginals can lend a hand or get out of the way—Daniel Francis on the new Canadian narrative.
Stephen Henighan
Immigrants from Nowhere
Stephen Henighan asks: what if you don't have a tidy answer to "Where are you from?"
Stephen Henighan
Cross-Country Snow
"Cross-country skiing offered me the reassurance sought by the immigrant who is excluded from his locality’s history: a viable alternate route to belonging."
Rob Kovitz
Certain Embarrassing Questions
Cyberslang, Robert's Rules of Order and The Forest of Rhetoric collide in a series of queries, inquiries and FAQ from Rob Kovitz.
Alberto Manguel
Jewish Gauchos
European Jewish artisans on horseback in Argentina.
Alberto Manguel
The Armenian Question
"Sometimes, in politics or history, certain words, certain names are sufficient unto themselves: it is as if there were names that once pronounced require no further telling."
Lauren Ogston
Seeks Bee Nerd
The Bee Trading Card Series 1 includes twenty-four cards that feature facts about bee anatomy, physiology and classification.
KELSEA O'CONNOR
Beautiful Mess
A review of Love & the Mess We’re In by Stephen Marche.
Dan Post
Doing the Occupation
Théodora Armstrong makes her literary debut with a short-story collection, Clear Skies, No Wind, 100% Visibility.
Daniel Francis
Memoir Of A Time Traveller
A review of Voyage Through the Past Century by Rolf Knight.
Michael Hayward
Living by the Book
A review of David Mason's memoir The Pope’s Bookbinder.
Patty Osborne
Little Betrayals
Moments of misunderstandings and other drama are highlighted in the life of a Jewish family in Nazi-occupied Czechoslavia.
Michael Hayward
Life, Repeatedly
A woman is reborn on the same cold and snowy night over and over again, living a different life of disasters, in Life After Life by Kate Atkinson.
Peggy Thompson
Federal Follies
Linda Svendsen eviscerates the hypocritical nature of Canadian politics in Sussex Drive.
Michael Hayward
Plotto: A Plot Plotter
William Wallace Cook offers a literary guide to creating a unique plot.
Lily Gontard
Out Stealing Horses
Lily Gontard reviews Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson.