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Michael Hayward
The Paris Review Interviews

While considering the list of writers interviewed for each volume of The Paris Review Interviews (Picador) I couldn’t help thinking: “What an amazing literary gathering that would have been!” For the launch of volume i we can imagine a New York penth

Kris Rothstein
The Princess Pawn

There’s something comfortingly predictable about a young adult fantasy.

Daniel Francis
The Quest of the Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia

In Ian McKay's book about Nova Scotia, The Quest of the Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia (McGill-Queen's), post-modern theory collides head-on with Canadian social history, leaving sacred cows splattered all

Patty Osborne
The Polished Hoe

It’s taken me a month to get halfway through the 462-page hardcover book The Polished Hoe by Austin Clarke (Thomas Allen), which means I’m only halfway through the twenty-four hours during which the story takes place. I like the book—Clarke’s prose i

Jacquelyn Ross
The Plots Thicken

A review of Garden Plots: Canadian Women Writers and Their Literary Gardens by Shelley Boyd.

Kevin Barefoot
The Real Guide to Canadian Universities

The Real Guide to Canadian Universities compiled by Sara Borins, and written by students, has longer entries than the older Linda Frum Guide, a more adventurous layout and information that could only come from people who know what they're talking abo

Ryszard Dubanski
The Professor and the Madman

Simon Winchester's The Professor and the Madman (HarperCollins) is subtitled "A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary," and is a thrilling, chilling yarn about language and a history of lexicography. Its bumptious

Patty Osborne
The Rain Barrel Baby

I often can’t remember the title of a book I’ve read, but I can usually remember the colour of its cover, and blue seems to be my current favourite. A recently published blue book, The Rain Barrel Baby by Alison Preston (Signature Editions), takes pl

Eve Corbel
The Rain Ascends

Joy Kogawa doesn't write easy books. Obasan jump-started the Japanese Canadian Redress movement and Itsuka documented the movement's battles, internal and external. Now Kogawa has taken on another leviathan: sexual abuse of children by clergymen. Her

Kris Rothstein
The Rebel Sell: Why Culture Cant be Jammed

From its title, The Rebel Sell: Why Culture Can’t be Jammed (HarperCollins) looked like it might be a source of new ideas about resisting the fast-paced corporate world. But the polemic of the authors, Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, informs us that

Carra Noelle Simpson
The Rice Queen Diaries

In The Rice Queen Diaries (Arsenal Pulp Press), Daniel Gawthrop grapples with his own version of white male seeking Asian girls: gay white male seeking Asian men. He starts with a high-school crush on Bruce Lee, then describes his initiation and expe

Patty Osborne
The Return

Fans who are missing Inspector Morse, the famous fictional British detective who, unfortunately, has been killed off, should try reading the Inspector Van Veeteren mysteries by Hakan Nesser (translated by Laurie Thompson; Doubleday).

Michael Hayward
The Red Tenda of Bologna

In a perfect world, the writers we love would have all their stories published as beautifully as The Red Tenda of Bologna has been.

Stephen Osborne
The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich

David Cayley, whose work is often heard on CBC Ideas, has done a great service in preparing The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich (House of Anansi), a text that makes a perfect companion to The Fabric of Reality by David Deutsc

Norbert Ruebsaat
The Reader

My friend wrote that the first part of Bernhard Schlink's The Reader (Vintage) is "brilliantly erotic, hauntingly poetic and very romantic." Part Two, my friend wrote, is "a hideous trial of Germans by Germans. Post-war youth condemned their parents

Patty Osborne
The River Midnight

The River Midnight by Lilian Nattel (Knopf) made me miss men a little, because it is a very sexy book. This is surprising, because it is about life in a Jewish village in Poland at the turn of the century, a place where women cut off their hair and w

Stephen Osborne
The Sense of Being Stared At

Rupert Sheldrake, author of Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home and The Presence of the Past, continues to have good luck with book titles: his new one is The Sense of Being Stared At (Crown). For those of us who have been haunted from t

Kris Rothstein
The Rest Is Silence

Kris Rothstein reviewed the 2008 Vancouver International Film Festival. For more reviews, visit her Geist blog at geist.com/blog/kris.

Kristin Cheung
The Secret Lives of Litterbugs

Kristen Cheung reviews The Secret Lives of Litterbugs by M.A.C. Farrant (Key Porter).

Michael Hayward
The Road

Cormac McCarthy’s new novel The Road (Knopf) presents a vision of unrelenting grimness as two nameless characters, a father and his young son, make their way beneath a sunless sky through a world adrift with ash, trudging across a post-apocalyptic Am

S. K. Page
The Search Warrant

The Search Warrant (Harvill Press) is the English title given to Dora Bruder, Patrick Modiano’s account of his attempt to find out what happened to a fifteen-year-old girl who ran away from school in Paris on a winter night in 1941.

Barbara Zatyko
The Seeds of Treason

This year my brother supplied me with Ted Allbeury's The Seeds of Treason (New English Library), about a loyal British spy who falls in love with a Russian agent's wife and is manipulated into committing an act of treason. It's an intelligent story w

Patty Osborne
The Romance Reader

I picked up The Romance Reader by Pearl Abraham (Riverhead Books) from the New Arrivals shelf in the local library, probably because the back cover blurb said it was about life in a Hasidic family—from a woman's point of view. I haven't had much expo

Patty Osborne
The Score

On the same bill with The Harp was The Score, a full-length Canadian movie (directed by Kim Collier and produced by Trish Dolman and Leah Mallen) that was adapted from a play by the Electric Company Theatre. The film considers the ramifications of re

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.

Geist Staff
Paris, France

The current film festival season features two movies written by Geist correspondents Tom Walmsley and Peg Thompson. Walmsley's film is called Paris, France. We can't tell you about it first-hand, as it hasn't come to Vancouver yet, but last week a Gl

Michael Hayward
Paris Tales

Paris Tales, edited and translated by Helen Constantine (Oxford University Press), is another study in the evocation of place: a collection of twenty-two stories by French and other Francophone writers inspired by specific Parisian locales. Many of t

Michael Hayward
Passage Through India

In the early 1960s, the Beat poet Gary Snyder was studying Buddhism in Japan with just one published book of poetry (Myths & Texts) to his credit.

Eve Corbel
Patient No More: The Politics of Breast Cancer

True or False: Breast cancer always shows up on a mammogram, early detection is your best protection, studies show a low-fat diet is linked to a lower incidence of breast cancer, mortality rates for breast cancer are going down. Answers: False, false

Jill Boettger
Past Imperfect

When I first opened Suzanne Buffam’s book Past Imperfect (Anansi), I thought it might strive in a similar way to Yesterday, at the Hotel Clarendon by Nicole Brossard. In the first poem, “Another Bildungsroman,” the speaker grows up, leaves home, fall

Patty Osborne
Paula Spencer

Paula Spencer is forty-eight. She hasn’t had a drink for four months and five days. She wants a drink. She doesn’t want a drink. She fights. She wins. But she’s alone. She’s got kids, two grown, two still at home.... The book is Paula Spencer (Knopf)

Stephen Osborne
Personhood

A review of Julie Otsuka's novel, The Buddha in the Attic, about Japanese picture brides in the 1920s.

Kris Rothstein
Persepolis

This year’s winner of the People’s Choice Award for Most Popular International Film was Persepolis, a mostly black-and-white animated film adapted from the graphic memoir by Marjane Satrapi, who documents her childhood in Iran, first living under the

Mandelbrot
Perfectly Normal

Are the Québecois the only moviemakers in North America with a sense of humour? Latest evidence to hand would certainly suggest so: three movies in the local video place this season and all winners.

Mandelbrot
PhotoGraphic Encounters: The Edges and Edginess of Reading Prose Pictures and Visual Fictions

PhotoGraphic Encounters: The Edges and Edginess of Reading Prose Pictures and Visual Fictions (University of Alberta Press and the Kamloops Art Gallery) contains much promise of “edginess” and “subversion,” once the great virtues of the postmodern ag

Patty Osborne
Pitseolak: Pictures Out of My Life

Pitseolak: Pictures Out of My Life, by Pitseolak Ashoona and Dorothy Harley Eber (McGill-Queen’s), is not a small book but it’s a little story made large by Pitseolak’s energetic drawings.

Stephen Osborne
Playground

Belated discovery of the season: John Buell, whose novel Playground was originally published in 1976 and more recently by HarperCollins in a paperback edition bearing the single quote: "Canada's most brilliant suspense novelist.–New York Times." But

Kris Rothstein
Plenty of Harm in God

The Aran Islands are described in my guidebook to Ireland as isolated, rugged and beautiful. In Plenty of Harm in God by Dana Bath (DC Books), they are the setting for a lot of human drama as well.

Rose Burkoff
Portable Altamont

Portable Altamont by Brian Joseph Davis (Coach House) is an astounding book of comic genius for slackers and Gen X-ers the world over. Davis has created strange, outlandish riffs on popular culture, paying homage to our literary and musical icons, by

Sam Macklin
Popeye

E.C. Segar’s earliest Popeye comics have just been made available in a gorgeously designed hardcover, also from Fantagraphics. Segar’s Thimble Theatre strips featured some of the most charming characters ever to appear in newsprint, including the hil

Mandelbrot
Juxtsuppose

My dog-eared copy of Juxtsuppose, a zine "conceived and coordinated by Billy Rueben and Brad Y" (available at Box 30007 Parkgate, N. Vancouver V7H 2Y8) represents the best two bucks I've spent all year.

Luanne Armstrong
Kingdom of Monkeys

The latest fashion in Canadian publishing appears to be for books of short stories or slim novels from recent graduates of creative writing programs, as publishers hedge their bets by trying to find writers with credentials. Creative writing workshop

Michael Hayward
Level 26: Dark Origins

Michael Hayward reviews Level 26: Dark Origins (Dutton).

Eve Corbel
lowercase reading room

One of the richest collections of unusual zines and artist-made books in the country has recently been installed in its new permanent home: the lowercase reading room, on Main Street in Vancouver.

Patty Osborne
Miss September

If you’ve never read a story about dry cleaning, try Miss September by François Gravel (Cormorant, translated by Sheila Fischman). In it, Geneviève Vallière, a disenchanted twenty-two-year-old, pulls off the perfect bank robbery and puts the money in

Blaine Kyllo
Miss Wyoming

When the reviews of Douglas Coupland’s Miss Wyoming (Random House) first came out, I was sitting in a diner on Yonge Street eating scrambled eggs and hash browns. This time Coupland’s lost souls are John Johnson, a movie producer, and Susan Colgate,

Lily Gontard
Modern and Normal

An etymological definition of the verb dwell prefaces Karen Solie’s second collection of poetry, Modern and Normal (Brick Books). This definition, “to lead astray, deceive; to hinder; to wander; to tarry,” sets the tone for a series of poems in perpe

Lily Gontard
Modern and Normal

An etymological definition of the verb dwell prefaces Karen Solie’s second collection of poetry, Modern and Normal (Brick Books). This definition, “to lead astray, deceive; to hinder; to wander; to tarry,” sets the tone for a series of poems in perpe

Norbert Ruebsaat
Modern Egyptian Art

It seems ironic that an authoritative history of modern Egyptian art should be written on the west coast of Canada, until one reads Modern Egyptian Art by Liliane Karnouk (American University in Cairo Press) and realizes that Egyptian artists, citize

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.

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.

Eve Corbel
Cooks Who Over-Identify with Their Equipment

The rasp, the spatula and the corkscrew—Eve Corbel's series of obsessive cooks.

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
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."

Daniel Francis
Park In Progress

Daniel Francis asks why a high-speed commuter route runs through Stanley Park, Vancouver's precious urban oasis.

Lily Gontard
Everything is Illuminated

Lily Gontard reviews The Luminaries and The Douglas Notebooks, two award-winning novels you might not have heard of.

AL PURDY
Sackcloth Missionaries

Cowboy chaps, monkey suits, sackcloths and other fashion observations from Earle Birney and Al Purdy.

JILL MANDRAKE
Sometimes the Review is Longer Than the Story

Jill Mandrake reviews There Can Never Be Enough by David Arnason, a combination of dreamscape and tragicomic monologue.

Stephen Smith
Rinkside Intellectual

Stephen Smith investigates the hockey lives of Barthes, Faulkner, Hemingway, which were marked by dismissal, befuddlement and scorn.

Stephen Smith
Clip Your Toenails and Other Advice from the Pros

Collected advice from hockey professionals, compiled by Stephen Smith.

Eve Corbel
Yes No Good Bye

Eve Corbel marks historic Ouija board milestones and talks to the spirit of a pirate queen and Ringo Starr's great great grandmother.

Stephen Osborne
Phantom Ride with Schopenhauer

Stephen Osborne's broken cellphone leads him to Schopenhauer, the Titanic publishing industry and historical Phantom Rides.

Moez Surani
Enduring Freedom

Selections from ةيلمع Operación Operation Opération 作业 Oперация (“operation” in each official United Nations language), a poem by Moez Surani consisting of the names of military operations carried out by UN member states.

Patty Osborne
Canada’s Dark Depths

Sex, suicide, Nelson and Cabbagetown—Patty Osborne reviews The Modern World and The Secret Life of Fission, two hard-hitting story collections.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
All My Little Words

Kelsea O'Connor reviews 101 Two-Letter Words, an illustrated Scrabble guide by Stephen Merritt with running themes of sloths, songwriting and vampire dogs.

Alberto Manguel
Not Finishing

"A library is never finished, only abandoned." Alberto Manguel on incompletion, voluntary interruption and the pleasure of the day before.

JANE RULE
Obsession

"Asked to write a character sketch, I wrote three pages on Ann’s hands. The paper was returned with every line crossed out and a question mark at the end."

Jan Feduck
Hurricane Diary

Jan Feduck faces Frenchish food, vomit and guys from Ontario when her ferry from the Magdalen Islands is caught in a hurricane.