fact

All
dispatches
essays
reviews
columns
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.

JILL MANDRAKE
Still Stupefying

Jill Mandrake is blown away by South of Elfrida by Holley Rubinsky, a journey into "the land of guilt and sorrow."

roni-simunovic
Second Chances

Roni Simunovic reviews Seconds by Brian Lee O'Malley, a graphic novel about getting second chances whether you deserve them or not.

Stephen Osborne
Harrowing

"This is not a documentary; it is, however, an overpowering aesthetic and emotional experience, a true happening"—Stephen Osborne reviews Susan Sontag's film Promised Lands.

Jesmine Cham
Technology Creeps On

Jesmine Cham talks scaremongering, tinfoil hats and invasive technology in this review of Technocreep by Thomas P. Keenan.

Stephen Henighan
Iberian Duet

The assumption of mutual comprehensibility between speakers of Spanish and Portuguese creates a culture of mutual ignorance.

Dylan Gyles
Philosophy and Chloroform

Dylan Gyles reviews Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever? by Dave Eggers, the story of a disillusioned young man grappling with life, the universe and metaphysical truths.

Michael Hayward
All My Troubles Seemed So Far Away

Michael Hayward reviews Stefan Zweig's The World of Yesterday, a "a window into the vanished world of the Austro-Hungarian Empire."

Eve Corbel
Seized

Eve Corbel reviews Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence by Doris Pilkington, in which two girls are taken from their family by Western Australia government officials in 1931.

Michael Hayward
Smoke and Mirrors

Michael Hayward reviews American Smoke by Iain Sinclair, an account of the author's road trip across North America in search of traces of the Beat Generation.

roni-simunovic
Based Loosely

Roni Simunovic reviews Based on a True Story by Elizabeth Renzetti, the bizarrely fascinating tale of a washed-up soap star's struggles with unemployment and substance abuse.

Lily Gontard
Wild Woman

Lily Gontard reviews Cheryl Strayed's Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, a memoir about crisis, redemption and hiking.

Dylan Gyles
Floating

“Don’t try to make anything happen,” the calm voice said. Dylan Gyles visits a sensory deprivation float tank.

roni-simunovic
Bird Metal

Roni Simunovic investigates Hatebeak, a death metal band with an African Grey parrot vocalist.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Strange Things Come From The Woods

Kelsea O'Connor reviews Through the Woods by Emily Carroll, a collection of comics full of "ghosts, parasites, dead brothers, mysterious strangers and murderous husbands."

Stephen Osborne
The Saddest Place on Earth

“I walked into the garage, and found a teenage boy in a tank top and shorts." Kathryn Mockler's poems eschew meaningless metaphors for direct language.

Michael Hayward
Talking Ducks

Michael Hayward reviews The Old Castle’s Secret by Carl Barks.

Alberto Manguel
A Novel for All Times

Alberto Manguel's column from Geist 93 about how the most important Turkish novelist of modern times took over fifty years to reach English-speaking audiences.

Jian Ghomeshi
The Ghomeshi Files

A short list of Jian Ghomeshi's short lists from 1982.

Daniel Francis
We Are Not a Nation of Amnesiacs

"Canadians have long been convinced that we do not know much, or care much, about our own history, but a new study suggests that this truism is not true."

Michael Hayward
Behind Closed Doors

Michael Hayward reviews My Struggle Book 1: A Death in the Family by Karl Ove Knausgård.

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
Assault on God's Image

Isaac A. Block has taken some real chances in Assault on God's Image (Windflower Communications), a thesis-turned-book about violence within Mennonite families living in Winnipeg.

Eve Corbel
Ascending Peculiarity: Edward Gorey on Edward Gorey

Ascending Peculiarity: Edward Gorey on Edward Gorey (Harcourt), selected and edited by Karen Wilkin, is a collection of twenty-six years’ worth of interviews of Gorey, the eccentric American artist and writer. He was best known for his intricate pen-

Patty Osborne
Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner)

In the film Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner), the story is in the action and the scenery. The sparse dialogue, which is in Inuktitut with English subtitles, fills in only where necessary.

Rose Burkoff
Asthmatica

The short stories in Jon Paul Fiorentino’s Asthmatica (Insomniac) tickle the funny bone every time, from hypothetical essay titles to a story about the tactics a kid might use to shame the son of a mediocre Swedish hockey player. In these yarns Fiore

Rick Maddocks
Au Hasard Balthazar

Au Hasard Balthazar is a forty-year-old film about a donkey. Not only that, a suffering donkey saint.

Michael Hayward
Back on the Fire

In an author photograph on the back cover of Back on the Fire (Shoemaker & Hoard) Gary Snyder is shown looking west into the distance (seen from the perspective of a Canadian reader looking south to the Sierra Nevada foothills, Snyder’s home for more

Eve Corbel
b leev abul char ak trs

bill bissett is the author of some sixty books of poetry, each more full and fluid than the last, and the most recent collection, b leev abul char ak trs (Talon Books), is jam-packed. Here are meditations on holes in the sky, endangered species, "fee

Mindy Abramowitz
Authors à la Carte

Although Authors à la Carte was among the last events in the Vancouver Writers and Readers Festival, it was the first one I attended.

Shannon Emmerson
Autobiography of Red: A Romance

Speaking of the beautifully explained inexplicable things in life Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red: A Romance (Knopf) is a gorgeous, astounding, poetic study of what things are like when you just happen to be red. The colour red.

Michał Kozłowski
Bacacay

Bacacay (Archipelago Books), a collection of some of the strangest, funniest and most wondrous stories ever published, introduces the early work Witold Gombrowicz, one of Poland’s greatest literary figures and one of the twentieth century’s most impo

Kris Rothstein
Austerlitz

W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz (Vintage Canada) is a serious European novel. This translation (by Anthea Bell) still bears more than just a trace of the heaviness and denseness of the German language, which may discourage some readers.

Anna Trutch
Bad Latitudes

The Bad in Bad Latitudes by Al Pope (Turnstone Press) turns out not to be that early ’80s, sort of harmless Michael Jackson baaaaad, but just plain bad, as in the opposite of good, as in bad northern stereotypes: abusive drunk husband, drunk wife, mi

Stephen Osborne
Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm Since Hippocrates

David Wootton writes in his introduction to Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm Since Hippocrates (Oxford) that he set out to write “a history of different ways of conceiving the human body” (the medieval, the mechanical, the chemical, the genetic) but

S. K. Page
Bambi and Me

The invaluable Sheila Fischman, whose translations have become a kind of national treasure, has brought us another book by Michel Tremblay: Bambi and Me (Talonbooks) is a small memoir of Tremblay's earliest movie-going days in Montreal in the fifties

Amy Francis
Barcelona

The close proximity of my new apartment to a repertory cinema has caused me to go through a movie-going renaissance. Unfortunately, most of my discoveries have been in the mediocre to bad category.

Patty Osborne
Baking Cakes in Kigali

Patty Osborne reviews Baking Cakes in Kigali by Gaile Parkin (McClelland & Stewart).

Daniel Francis
Basking Sharks: The Slaughter of BC's Gentle Giants

In 1995, New Star Books in Vancouver launched a series of short (about 100 pages), inexpensive books about nonmainstream subjects in the history and culture of British Columbia. The series is called Transmontanus (that’s “across the mountains” for th

Patty Osborne
Bastion Falls

I didn't expect to like Bastion Falls by Susie Moloney (Key Porter) because the back cover describes it as spine-tingling. I don't usually like having my spine tingled, but Bastion Falls was a pleasant surprise.

Michael Hayward
Basho: The Complete Haiku

Michael Hayward reviews Basho: The Complete Haiku, written by Matsuo Basho and translated by Jane Reichhold (Kodansha).

Blaine Kyllo
Beat

Beat (2000) stars Canada’s own Kiefer Sutherland (who recently got his groove back in the Fox series 24) in an amazing performance as William Burroughs in the early days—before he truly started writing and before he shot his wife Joan during a botche

Patty Osborne
Beach Boy

The next time I was up at the cabin I read Beach Boy, by Ardashir Vakil (Hamish Hamilton), an orange book that caught my eye on the New Arrivals rack at my local library. The book's narrator is a precocious eight-year-old named Cyrus Readymoney, whos

Patty Osborne
Be Near Me

Reading Be Near Me by Andrew O’Hagan (McClelland & Stewart) is like watching a slow-motion traffic accident: you’re not sure how it will end, but you’re sure it will end badly.

Susan Brady
Be Quiet

In the most successful sections of Be Quiet by Margaret Hollingsworth (Blue Lake), the author imagines Emily Carr’s six-week stay in Ste. Agathe, France in 1911, by writing the diary of Winifred Church.

Lily Gontard
Being Caribou: Five Months on Foot with an Arctic Herd

People who live in the North speak of leaving as “going outside.” I recently returned to the North after a lengthy absence and found myself reading two books about the effects of the “outside,” and about the things that brought me here in the first p

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.

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.

Stephen Osborne
On the Edge: A Journey into the Heart of Canada

Stephen Osborne reviews On the Edge: A Journey into the Heart of Canada by Lindalee Tracey.

Michael Hayward
On Hashish

Michael Hayward reviews On Hashish, a collection of Walter Benjamin’s writings on hashish.

Patty Osborne
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

Patty Osborne reviews Jeanette Winterson's Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, a fast-paced and hilarious coming-of-age story about the adopted daughter of a religious fanatic mother.