In search of a unified self.

“Excuse me, are you the customer with the peanut allergy?”

A COVID test in the city of a hundred steeples.

Why does one culture give a flower a pretty, poetic name, while another culture names it in a seemingly derogatory way?

How to perform a textual analysis of a Facebook message, while under the influence of red wine.

As men of high seriousness appear on television with their crystal balls, Stephen Osborne shares what he learned about the future from Ray the astrologer.

A tarot card reading for John Franklin, Arctic explorer and Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen's Land, by Phoebe Tsang.

A blizzard hits two days before Christmas, stirring up feelings of trepidation and excitement for the passengers of a bus.

Crack addicts, art critics and pregnant waitresses populate David Mitchell's uncanny vision of Vancouver.

A Canadian soldier captured at Dieppe in 1942 tells what happened next.

Ebb and flow in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico.

The worst time for your pet to run away is when you are moving, and my family moved a lot.

Thad McIlroy spends the night in hospital to get a hernia—possibly on his left side, possibly on his right—repaired.

A warm spring night, a country club dance, a date with an attractive young man—and braces on my two front teeth.

A trip across the country, with didgeridoo and Trudeau too.

Limits of the language.

On parle français icitte!

Justin Trudeau and Greta Thunberg attend the Montreal climate march.

Women in '50s chic, men in sports jackets, and all manner of musical instruments at a suburban home in Toronto.

Narrative text, written and spoken, refines a doctor’s ability to hear a patients’ stories.

Pansy shoes and power suits on parliament hill.

Storm prep for a category 2.

I looked in her purse and found nothing but scraps of paper so covered in writing there was hardly any white left on the pages.

Outlet Malls, Janis Joplin, The Godfather and Taco Bell—on the scent of Ameryka.

"My father began his shopping spree in the fashion department. He ordered jackets, sweaters, shirts, trousers and shoes. In his new wardrobe he looks like a mummy that has been dressed up for a big night of trick-or-treating."

Sebastian and I enjoy making fun of le mythomane. We compare him to characters in novels. Maybe he can’t return home because he’s wanted for a crime.

What does it mean to love a band? A friend? A nation?

The postcard presents a series of absences—the nameless photographer,

the unknown writer and recipient; it is constituted by what is unknown

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I always longed to be the falling woman—impelled by unruly passion, driven by beauty and desire, turned into stone, drowned in flowers.

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New bylaws for civic spaces.

It is racism, not race, that is a risk factor for dying of COVID-19.

Doing time is not a blank, suspended existence.

It was as though a magic potion had brought him back to life.

Going unnoticed must be the root sorrow for the broken.

On the curve of the contagion and on the measure of Montreality.

It took me a million miles to get here and half the time I was doing it in high heels.

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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.

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.

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."

"I want to buy a house. And build a secret room in it. And not tell the kids about it."

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.

Spiritual landscapes and unknowable people captured on film, used to convey a message.

After Paul Muldoon and Raymond Williams.

A seance to contact a dead miner at Port Arthur, Ontario, in 1923—conducted by Conan Doyle himself.

He has been called the greatest Bulgarian poet of his generation. Can one literary scandal bury his whole career?

A basement shrine in her 1920s home inspires Caroline Adderson to discover the past lives of her house and its inhabitants.

Mastery of the self

Somewhere in the sweat and ache and muscle I carved a new shape for myself that made more sense.

"If you are still alive, you must have had the experience of surrendering."

Review of "Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea" by Teffi (trans. Robert Chandler).

Review of "Our Flag Means Death" created by David Jenkins on HBO Max.

Review of No Fun (the band) and reissued music by Atomic Werewolf Records.

Review of "Godzilla Minus One" directed by Takashi Yamazaki.

Review of "Canzone di Guerra: New Battle Songs" by Daša Drndić, trans. by Celia Hawkesworth.

Review of "The Midnight Bargain" by C.L. Polk

Review of "The Invention of the Other" directed by Bruno Jorge (2022).

Review of "A Primer for Forgetting: Getting Past the Past" by Lewis Hyde.

Review of "Orwell: The New Life" by D.J. Taylor.

Review of "Iron Curtain Journals," "South American Journals" and "Fall of America Journals" by Allen Ginsberg.

Review of "Antkind" by Charlie Kaufman.

Review of "A Guest in the House" by Emily Carroll.

Review of "The Last Grain Race" by Eric Newby.

Review of "The Man in the Red Coat" by Julian Barnes.

Review of "Rubymusic" by Connie Kuhns.

Review of "A Russian Sister" by Caroline Adderson.

Review of the Netflix series "Rabo de Peixe" (2023) created by Augusto de Fraga.

Review of "My Grandfather’s Knife: Hidden Stories from the Second World War" by Joseph Pearson

Review of "Mercy Gene" by JD Derbyshire.

Review of "Underland" by Robert Macfarlane.

Review of "Tracking Giants: Big Trees, Tiny Triumphs, and Misadventures in the Forest" by Amanda Lewis.

Review of "Solito: A Memoir" by Javier Zamora

Review of "Turn Every Page" directed by Lizzie Gottlieb

Review of "Holden After & Before: Love Letter for a Son Lost to Overdose" by Tara McGuire.

Phrase books are tools of cultural globalization—but they are also among its casualties.

When building a nation, cultural riches can be lost.

Coming to harbour in a new world.

Science and the arts fulfil their functions to help us survive through the imagination.

Dividing and conquering local populations confines them to manageable administrative units.

In a world dominated by heroes, difference is not tolerated.

“Have patience” and “Tomorrow” are two inseparable locutions in the Portuguese tongue.

For a brief period the band CANO gave shape to the dream of a bilingual Canadian culture.

"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 on UNDRIP, reconciliation, and the anxiety felt by Indigenous people in Canada.

What we do when we absorb words from a screen—and we haven’t yet evolved a verb for it—is not reading.

Libraries are not only essential in educating the soul, but in forming the identity of a society.

Our society is formed on the assumption of a healthy immune system.

The woman who called herself Tatiana Aarons gave me an address that led to a vacant lot.

Dogged dedication grants a reader vicarious immortality.

What we can—and can’t—learn from the plague

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.

The newspaper wars aren’t what they used to be.

A package-deal paradise reputation curtails gringo knowledge of Dominican life.

Faith seems to shiver when confronted by art.

What can the Brothers Grimm teach us about the state of our economic system? Everything.

Must artists declare their moral integrity?

Without air travel, family networks might have dissolved long ago.

There’s something not quite right about the grid on which the game is played.