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.
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.
ARLEEN PARÉ
Paper Trail
A paranoid office-worker relieves the alienation she feels in her job by writing experimental lyric prose.
Michael Hayward
Phantom Limb
Michael Hayward reviews Phantom Limb by Theresa Kishkan, a series of essays exploring of the complexity and magic of the natural world.
Kris Rothstein
Fake ID
Kris Rothstein reviews Mariko Tamaki’s Fake ID, a collection of short stories about a young woman who moves to Toronto after finishing university in Montreal.
Michał Kozłowski
Joseph Howe and the Battle for Freedom of Speech
Michal Kozlowski reviews Joseph Howe and the Battle for Freedom of Speech by John Ralston Saul.
Last Wedding
A review of Bruce Sweeney's Last Wedding.
Sarah Maitland
Long Pen Under the Library
Sarah Maitland visits Margaret Atwood's book signing at Vancouver's Word on the Street festival.
Stephen Henighan exposes the errors, omissions and problems with the Conservative party's study guide for Canadian citizenship.
Alberto Manguel
Burning Mistry
Alberto Manguel examines a modern-day book burning and asks: how is this still happening?
Stephen Henighan
Language and Nation Now
Do shared languages form the natural boundaries of any nation in the world?
Alberto Manguel
A Brief History of Tags
A reflection on the complex and often inexplicable process of bibliographic categorizations.
CARMINE STARNINO
Next Door Café: A Poet's Musings
Reflections on how a bar in Parc Extension, QC, influenced an eponymous poem about "unprogress, inertia, the failure to learn from mistakes."
Alberto Manguel
Imaginary Places
Alberto Manguel remembers a golden era in Canadian writing, comments on our current cultural climate and proposes a brighter future.
Stephen Henighan
In Praise of Borders
I remembered past ordeals: a U.S. official who squeezed out my toothpaste tube on the train from Montreal to Philadelphia, another who hauled me off a bus for a lengthy interrogation.
Alberto Manguel
Pictures and Conversations
"And what is the use of a book," thought Alice, "without pictures or conversation?" —Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Annabel Lyon
Ethical Juices
Parables, cautionary tales, morality plays, allegories—the notion that we can study literary works as texts of ethics is as old as literature.
Stephen Henighan
Writing Bohemia
Bohemia is a good place to grow as a writer, but is it a good place to live one’s whole life?
Alberto Manguel
Karl Kraus, Everybody's Neighbour
He is one of the strangest crea
Daniel Francis
Canada's Funnyman
A misogynist, a racist and an academic walk into a bar...
Alberto Manguel
Final Answers
For most artists, the learning of the craft never ceases, and no resulting work is fully achieved
Stephen Henighan
Becoming French
For an English-speaking Canadian who has been exposed to French from an early age, Paris is the most disorienting city in Europe. It is grandiose, but it is mundane.
Stephen Henighan
The BookNet Dictatorship
According to the numbers, Canada will never produce another Atwood or Findley.
George Fetherling
Adventures in the Nib Trade
No one knows quite how to account for the well-established shops in Vancouver, Toronto and other cities that deal exclusively in fountain pens and fine fountain-pen accessories.
Alberto Manguel
Cautionary Tales for Children
Some years ago, Susan Crean amusingly suggested that nations might be defined or understood through their emblematic children’s books and according to whether the protagonist was male or female.
Daniel Francis
Writing the Nation
Reconsidering the faintly embarrassing Pierre Berton.
Stephen Henighan
Chariots of China
A bibliophile's worst nightmare: being stuck on a plane with a terrible book. A book mistaken for a work of serious history.
Stephen Henighan
Divergence
Stephen Henighan argues that audiences used to have different opinions on the news; now they cannot even agree on the terms of debate.
Alberto Manguel
Metamorphoses
Alberto Manguel compares his life in the French countryside to that of Cain, whom God despised for being a settled crop farmer, and whom he punished by forcing him to wander.
HAL NIEDZVIECKI
The Secret Market
When Frank Warren began collecting the secret thoughts of strangers at PostSecret.com, he inadvertently created a new genre.
Alberto Manguel
Hospital Reading
When you find yourself laid up in a sterile hospital room, which books do you want to have with you?
Patty Osborne reviews Eating Apples, an addictive collection of personal essays that gives glimpses into the lives of women.
Norbert Ruebsaat
Errata
Norbert Ruebsaat reviews George Bowering's Errata (1988).
Robert Everett-Green
Epileptic
Robert Everett-Green reviews David B.'s graphic memoir Epileptic, a recount of the long search by David B.’s parents for a cure for his older brother’s seizures.
Jennesia Pedri
A Second Piece of Pi
Jennesia Pedri answers: why would one want to reread a novel that devotes 211 of its 354 pages to the 227 days that followed a shipwreck?
Blaine Kyllo
All Families are Psychotic
Blaine Kyllo calls All Families are Psychotic by Douglas Coupland "a piece of sculpture: intricate, finely balanced, and threatening to tip should anyone get too close."
Norbert Ruebsaat
Autobiography of a Tattoo
Norbert Ruesbaat's Christmas book was Stan Persky’s Autobiography of a Tattoo. He read it twice, and then went back and read many parts a third time.
Patty Osborne
Prisoner of Tehran: A Memoir
Patty Osborne reviews Prisoner of Tehran: A Memoir by Marina Nemat.
Norbert Ruebsaat
Private Confessions
Norbert Ruebsaat reviews Ingmar Bergman's Private Confessions and the screening at which he saw it.
Kris Rothstein
Grand Centaur Station: Unruly Living with the New Nomads of Central Asia
Nomadic culture is at the core of Larry Frolick’s Grand Centaur Station: Unruly Living with the New Nomads of Central Asia.
How to Be a Domestic Goddess: Baking and the Art of Comfort Cooking
When Geist requested a copy of How to Be a Domestic Goddess: Baking and the Art of Comfort Cooking by the new English kitchen queen Nigella Lawson (Knopf Canada) “for review purposes,” the distributor wrote back to say “fat chance.”
Patty Osborne
I'll Be Right Back
Writing on the Rock, which takes place on Denman Island, B.C., in early August, is now my favourite writers’ festival.
ARLEEN PARÉ
Invisible Lines
In Astrid van der Pol’s poetry collection, Invisible Lines (BuschekBooks), the past is the most hopeful, whereas each new future enters some form of sadness.
Lily Gontard
The Cripple and His Talismans
The protagonist of The Cripple and His Talismans by Anosh Irani (Raincoast) is a self-centred, self-absorbed, wealthy-but-have-chosen-to-live-among-the-crippled-and-poor-in-Bombay man.
Norbert Ruebsaat
The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power
The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power and in the film it is based on, turns notions about corporate responsibility and accountability into oxymorons.
Kris Rothstein
The Nervous Tourist
Bob Gaulke’s description of his travels in Salvador (a region of Brazil), in The Nervous Tourist, evokes the age of imperialism. This modest chapbook contains insightful, engaging and funny writing about the eye-opening experience of travel.
Stephen Osborne
Weave
Lisa Pasold’s poetry collection, Weave, reads as a memoir of the twentieth century in a world bounded by Prague and Peru and the Russian front and the shores of Lake Ontario.
Kevin Barefoot
Soccer in Sun and Shadow
Eduardo Galeano’s Soccer in Sun and Shadow (Verso) collects his ruminations on the history and future of soccer, and consists of vignettes describing famous players, unlikely goals and every World Cup final since 1930.
Stephen Osborne
Snow Walker
Snow Walker, the film made from Farley Mowat’s book of stories, contains much cornball scripting, some wretched dialogue and a ponderous, bellowing soundtrack that equals the worst excesses of Cecil B DeMille’s Bible epics.
Stephen Osborne
The Secret Voyage of Sir Francis Drake 1577-1580
The Secret Voyage of Sir Francis Drake 1577-1580, by Samuel Bawlf, completes the story of European adventure in the north of North America in the sixteenth century.
Jill Boettger
Field Guide to Stains: How to Identify and Remove Virtually Every Stain Known to Man
Did you know that you are more likely to encounter Worcestershire sauce stains in winter and that correction fluid stains are most common in April?
Stephen Osborne
Marie Tyrell
“I knew that I would dream that night of the city in flames, the brown-brick towers falling, caving in on themselves (in slow motion, great clouds of burning dust), proud lights flickering out, psssfft, all the messages going dark one by one."
Sam Macklin
Complete Peanuts
Each book in the ongoing Complete Peanuts series (Fantagraphics) is beautifully designed by the Canadian cartoonist Seth, and features two years of thoughtfully reproduced daily and Sunday newspaper cartoon strips.
Derek Fairbridge
Da Capo Best Music Writing
The fourth volume in the Da Capo Best Music Writing pulls together some of the finest music writing published in 2003. It is rife with typos, but the articles are compulsively readable and they cover “rock, pop, jazz, country and more."
Jill Boettger
A Date With Destiny: Night of a Thousand Boyfriends
Just five pages into A Date With Destiny: Night of a Thousand Boyfriends by Miranda Clarke, I can’t decide whether to go to a hotel with an importer/exporter named Chaz, or ditch Chaz and go dancing at Club Neptune with a woman named Danni.
Derek Fairbridge
A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane's Signature Album
Ashley Kahn’s book A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane’s Signature Album, a lovingly detailed account of the creation of John Coltrane’s classic album of the same name, is a cause for celebration.