Malcolm Gladwell uses statistical analyses to prove that location and timing are everything in Outliers: The Story of Success, reviewed by Lily Gontard.
Thad McIlroy
Failed Experiments in the Future of Publishing
Thad McIlroy reviews The Reaper by Steven Dunne.
Eve Corbel
Ebb and Flow
Eve Corbel reviews The Sea Lady by Margaret Drabble, a novel that takes place on land but is all about the sea.
Michael Hayward
Edward Lear in Albania
Michael Hayward reviews Edward Lear in Albania, an account of the author's travels through the Balkans beginning in 1848.
Michael Hayward
Saudade
Michael Hayward reviews Anik See’s Saudade, a collection of essays to plunge you deep into the meanings of travel and place.
Thad McIlroy
The Celebrated Crad
Thad McIlroy reads Kilodney Does Shakespeare and Other Stories by Lorette Luzajic, the only book that discusses Crad Kilodney’s life and writing.
Jennesia Pedri
Scumbags Behaving Badly
Jennesia Pedri reviews Gonzalo Riedel's wonderfully disastrous short story collection, Behaving This Way Is All I Have Left.
Leah Rae
Hagiography
Leah Rae reviews Hagiography, a slim book of saintly verse filled with mystery and well-crafted poems.
Eve Corbel
How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read
Eve Corbel reviews Pierre Bayard's How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, a book on the joys of non-reading.
Stephen Osborne
Imaging The Arctic
Stephen Osborne reviews Imaging the Arctic, a collection of papers and photographs presented at a conference titled "Imaging the Arctic: The Native Photograph."
Daniel Francis
Indians at Work
"From opposite ends of the country come two important books about Indians: one old and one new. The old is a reissue of Rolf Knight's Indians at Work." Review by Daniel Francis.
Michał Kozłowski
Indigenous Beasts
"Nathan Sellyn’s debut fiction collection, Indigenous Beasts, may alienate readers who are not interested in tales of men and boys learning to deal with their egos and the world around them." Review by Michal Kozlowski.
Carra Noelle Simpson
The Deserter’s Tale: The Story of an Ordinary Soldier Who Walked Away from the War in Iraq
Carra Noelle Simpson reviews The Deserters Tale by Joshua Key, an "honest, accessible, first-hand experience of the war in Iraq that is missing in mainstream media."
Patty Osborne
The Demons of Aquilonia
Patty Osborne reviews The Demons of Aquilonia, a novel by Lina Medaglia.
Michael Hayward
Troia: Mexican Memoirs
Michael Hayward reviews Bonnie Bremser’s gritty memoirs that kick dust in the face of the romanticized Beatnik lifestyle.
S. K. Page
When Words Deny the World: The Reshaping of Canadian Writing
S.K. Page reviews Stephen Henighan's When Words Deny the World: The Reshaping of Canadian Writing, a penetrating argument for finding new ways of writing and imagining this country and our experience in it.
Michał Kozłowski
Sidewalk
Michal Kozlowski reviews Sidewalk, an ethnographic study of the lives of magazine and book vendors on Sixth Avenue in New York, written by Mitchell Duneier.
Mandelbrot
Snapshot Poetics
Mandelbrot reviews Snapshot Poetics, Allen Ginsberg's photographic memoir of the Beat era from 1953 to 1964.
Patty Osborne
The Americans Are Coming
Patty Osborne reviews The Americans Are Coming by Herb Curtis, a story set in the flyfishing lodges of the Miramichi region of New Brunswick.
Patty Osborne
The Sisters Brothers
A review of The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt, winner of Governor-General's Literary Award, the Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, shortlisted for the Giller and the Man Booker Prize.
Geist Staff
The Wild is Always There
"Greg Gatenby is the Toronto impresario whose good works on behalf of Literature are legendary. Unhappily, his latest book is not one of them." A review of The Wild is Always There.
Carrie Villeneuve
The Union: The Business Behind Getting High
Carrie Villeneuve reviews The Union: The Business Behind Getting High, a documentary on British Columbia's marijuana industry.
Kris Rothstein
Turbo Chicks: Talking Young Feminists
Kris Rothstein reviews Talking Young Feminists, a collection of essays by young feminist women.
Mandelbrot
Nanook of the North
Mandelbrot discusses the making of Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North.
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
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.
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.
Two grey whales and a poet/axe murderer play key roles in Brad Cran's poetry collection.
Daniel Francis
The Canadian New Age
A review of the Vanguard of the New Age, Gillian McCann's book about the Theosophical Society, which mixes western spiritualism and eastern mysticism.
Patty Osborne
Working it Out
Patty Osborne reviews Journeywoman: Swinging a Hammer in a Man’s World by Kate Braid.
Stephen Osborne
You Are Here
"You must change your life." According to James Pollock, a new wave of Canadian poetry has emerged.
Jennesia Pedri
Silver-Mine Gold
A review of Happy-Go-Lucky: Silver Islet Shenanigans, a creative non-fiction book by Bill MacDonald.
Eve Corbel
Stories of Storeys
A review of Chris Ware's unconventionally packaged book Building Stories, about the residents of an apartment building.
JILL MANDRAKE
My Typewriter’s So Old, It Uses A Pencil
A review of a book of variations by bpNichol.
Lily Gontard
Out Stealing Horses
Lily Gontard reviews Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson.
Michael Hayward
Plotto: A Plot Plotter
William Wallace Cook offers a literary guide to creating a unique plot.
Peggy Thompson
Federal Follies
Linda Svendsen eviscerates the hypocritical nature of Canadian politics in Sussex Drive.
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.
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
Living by the Book
A review of David Mason's memoir The Pope’s Bookbinder.
Daniel Francis
Memoir Of A Time Traveller
A review of Voyage Through the Past Century by Rolf Knight.
Dan Post
Doing the Occupation
Théodora Armstrong makes her literary debut with a short-story collection, Clear Skies, No Wind, 100% Visibility.
KELSEA O'CONNOR
Beautiful Mess
A review of Love & the Mess We’re In by Stephen Marche.
Lauren Ogston
Seeks Bee Nerd
The Bee Trading Card Series 1 includes twenty-four cards that feature facts about bee anatomy, physiology and classification.
ANNMARIE MACKINNON
Prose on Prose
AnnMarie MacKinnon reviews Reading Like A Writer by Francine Prose, a "guide for people who love books and for those who want to write them."
Jennesia Pedri
Then Came the Condos
Jennesia Pedri examines the literary legacy of Dollarton, once home to Earle Birney, Dorothy Livesay and Al Purdy, and the recently-evicted Carole Itter and Al Neil.
roni-simunovic
Hey, Jude!
Roni Simunovic reviews When Everything Feels Like the Movies, the award-winning YA novel that inspired heated controversy and a homophobic petition.
Michael Hayward
Miss Bossy Pants
Michael Hayward reviews #GIRLBOSS, a memoir by Sophia Amoruso, founder of Nasty Gal clothing retailer and capitalism's cheerleader.
Jeff Shucard
Piss-up
Jeff Shucard reminisces about St. Patrick's Day, 1979: druidic magic, Irish fiddle tunes and the greatest piss-up of all time.
KELSEA O'CONNOR
Frisco Freebooters
Kelsea O'Connor reviews We Are Pirates, a witty adventure through modern-day piracy by Daniel Handler, better known as Lemony Snicket.
Patty Osborne
Soviet Dynamite
A gaggle of kids team up with a crazy hippie named Sea Foam and an array of Angolan grandmothers in Granma Nineteen, reviewed by Patty Osborne.
Stephen Osborne
Forty-One False Starts and a Two-Headed Waiter
Stephen Osborne reviews Janet Malcolm's book of essays and discusses the worst novel ever published in Canada.