"To properly understand Mayor Gregor Robertson’s ongoing bicyclification of Vancouver, I think we need more books like Jon Day’s Cyclogeography: Journeys of a London Bicycle Courier, an extended essay about 'the bicycle in the cultural imagination.'"
Rebekah Chotem
Coming of Age Near Thunder Bay
Rebekah Chotem reviews Sleeping Giant, a critically-acclaimed coming-of-age film directed by Andrew Cividino.
Antoine Dion-Ortega
South Side Malartic
People are getting either sick or mad, or both.
Mandelbrot
Zero Degree Dining
The Kathmandu Café in multiple dimensions.
KELSEA O'CONNOR
Martel’s Mountains
In The High Mountains of Portugal (Knopf), Yann Martel returns to magic realism in three interwoven stories about lost love and journeys taken to reclaim the past.
Stephen Henighan
Power of Denial
The crowds learned that they could not act effectively in the present without confronting the past, specifically the historical treatment of indigenous people.
roni-simunovic
Teledildonics
"Sex for Dummies, the 'Fun and Easy Way to Have Great Sex in the ’90s,' sat in the window of my neighbourhood bookstore and I bought it because, as a twenty-three-year-old, I was curious about what sex was like before my time."
Michael Hayward
Following Wind, Following Water
Michael Hayward reviews a number of travelogues by Daniel Canty and Bill Porter.
M.A.C. Farrant
4-Day Forecast for Wendy
"Today your dog will decide to end things. Your dog, who is wearing a red vinyl jacket and is tied to the tree on the boulevard outside the thrift store."
Stephen Henighan
Treason of the Librarians
On the screen, only the image—not the word—can become the world.
Sarah Pollard
Mavis in Montreal
Sarah Pollard makes a pilgrimage to Montreal to hang out and write where Mavis Gallant hung out and wrote.
RICHARD VAN CAMP
Time-Tested
Mary Schendlinger reviews M Train by Patti Smith and My Life on the Road by Gloria Steinem.
RICHARD VAN CAMP
Grey Matters
It all started with a zesty little book about getting old.
Stephen Osborne
Grinkus and Pepper
Stephen Osborne is entranced by a pair of eccentric, high profile students while on a university tour in 1964.
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."
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.
Annabel Lyon
The Life You Can Save
Hint: It’s not your own.
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.
Norbert Ruebsaat
A History of Reading
Alberto Manguel’s A History of Reading taught me to read.
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."
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.
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.
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.
A review of Chris Ware's unconventionally packaged book Building Stories, about the residents of an apartment building.
Jennesia Pedri
Silver-Mine Gold
A review of Happy-Go-Lucky: Silver Islet Shenanigans, a creative non-fiction book by Bill MacDonald.
Stephen Osborne
You Are Here
"You must change your life." According to James Pollock, a new wave of Canadian poetry has emerged.
Patty Osborne
Working it Out
Patty Osborne reviews Journeywoman: Swinging a Hammer in a Man’s World by Kate Braid.
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.
Stephen Osborne
Ink on Paper
Two grey whales and a poet/axe murderer play key roles in Brad Cran's poetry collection.
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.
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."
Michael Hayward
Miss Bossy Pants
Michael Hayward reviews #GIRLBOSS, a memoir by Sophia Amoruso, founder of Nasty Gal clothing retailer and capitalism's cheerleader.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
RICHARD VAN CAMP
Culturism
Mary Schendlinger reviews The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, the riveting tale of “a Hmong child, her American doctors and the collision of two cultures.”
Eve Corbel
Cooks Who Over-Identify with Their Equipment
The rasp, the spatula and the corkscrew—Eve Corbel's series of obsessive cooks.
Eve Corbel
Odds Are
Eve Corbel lays out how likely you are to die by plane crash, shark attack, lightning, flu and other likely and unlikely causes.
Stephen Henighan
Campus Confidential
"In the public eye, universities have never recovered from the antics of Donald Sutherland as Professor Jennings in the 1978 film Animal House."
Diana Fitzgerald Bryden
Giller Filler
Diana Fitzgerald Bryden attends Between the Pages, the pre-Giller hybrid that’s a kind of sacrificial altar/beauty pageant for six Canadian authors.
Daniel Francis
Rum Row
From Closing Time: Prohibition, Rum-Runners, and Border Wars.
Stephen Osborne
Shaggy Dog Tales
Stephen Osborne on dog walking, the absurdity of online writing guides and the THE building.
Britt Huddart
Amor Aeturnus
Britt Huddart reviews Only Lovers Left Alive by Jim Jarmusch, not your average anguish and fangs vampire movie.
Michael Hayward
Beatnik Glory
Michael Hayward reviews The Stray Bullet: William S. Burroughs in Mexico and Peter Orlovsky: A Life in Words, works for "only the most dedicated fans of Beat literature."
AL PURDY
Sackcloth Missionaries
Cowboy chaps, monkey suits, sackcloths and other fashion observations from Earle Birney and Al Purdy.