fact

All
dispatches
essays
reviews
columns
Michael Hayward
Miss Bossy Pants

Michael Hayward reviews #GIRLBOSS, a memoir by Sophia Amoruso, founder of Nasty Gal clothing retailer and capitalism's cheerleader.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Eve Corbel
A Few Publishing News

The folks at Mercury Press report that the mysterious graphic on the cover of their catalogue (reviewed in Geist 2) is "an Orange Griffen photograph of an arrow painted on a road. The location of the road remains a secret." Hmm, sounds like a challen

Daniel Francis
A History and Ethnography of the Beothuk

The other book is sure to become what the blurb writers call "an instant classic": A History and Ethnography of the Beothuk by Ingeborg Marshall (McGill-Queen's). The title sounds unpromising, and the book itself is a brute at 640 pages, but this is

Lily Gontard
A Good Death

Gil Courtemanche, the author of A Good Death (translated by Wayne Grady; Douglas & McIntyre), is best known for his first novel, A Sunday by the Pool in Kigali, on which the critically acclaimed film A Sunday in Kigali was based. In this, his second

Michał Kozłowski
A Grave in the Air

Stephen Henighan’s new book, A Grave in the Air (Thistledown), is a collection of short stories set in Canada, England, Germany, Poland, Romania and Bosnia-Herzegovina, which deal with themes of migration, immigration, foreignness, love, lust, adulte

Stephen Osborne
A Lover's Quarrel

Carmine Starnino has written the first useful book about poetry that we have been given in this country. A Lover’s Quarrel (Porcupine’s Quill) is a big collection (some 260 pages) of essays and reviews in which the author struggles heroically to thin

Norbert Ruebsaat
A Reading Diary

A few years ago Alberto Manguel reread twelve of his favourite books and kept a monthly diary in which he wrote about what he was reading and about the life events surrounding the reading; the result was A Reading Diary (Knopf), and I didn’t notice u

Patty Osborne
A Passion for Mountains

If you wanted to climb a mountain on the coast of B.C. in the early 1900s, you had to pound nails down through the soles of a pair of leather boots, load up a canvas pack with overnight gear and canned food, take a boat trip to the spot where the mou

Carmen Rivas
A Map of the Island

A Map of the Island by Nigel Darbasie (University of Alberta Press) is a wonderful series of poems about a young middle-class Trinidadian boy coming of age. The poems are so expressive that they take readers right to Trinidad and surround us with swa

Patty Osborne
A Provisional Life

A Provisional Life (Oberon) by Andre Major (translated by Sheila Fischman) got me thinking about the difference between a balcony and a porch. I read a lot of translated literature so I can usually overlook the occasional odd word usage, but when the

Thad McIlroy
A Moveable Book

Thad McIlroy reviews Ernest Hemingway's Paris memoir, A Moveable Feast.

Norbert Ruebsaat
A Short History of Progress

The most disturbing section of Ronald Wright’s A Short History of Progress (House of Anansi) is the story of the Easter Islanders who, three hundred years before contact with Europeans, felled the last tree on their formerly verdant island and in so

Sewid-Smith Daisy
A Settlement of Memory

I've been stuck on books from Newfoundland lately, so my fingers grabbed A Settlement of Memory by Gordon Rodgers (Killick Press) when last they cruised the shelves. Inspired by William Coaker, founder of the Fisherman's Protective Union, Rodgers has

Neil MacDonald
A Scientific Romance

In Ronald Wright's A Scientific Romance (Knopf), an archaeologist suffering from a terminal illness discovers H. G. Wells's time machine when it arrives sans pilot in a London warehouse in the year 1999.

Carrie Villeneuve
A Season in Hell

We were led outside to a gated courtyard, where we encountered the sound of furious scrubbing, a male voice growling a litany of “I hate” proclamations, and an unsteady woman in a hot pink jacket and pants at half mast.

Barry Kirsh
A Way of Being Free

A Way of Being Free (Phoenix House), a slim volume containing twelve essays, resonate with the lyrical prose style also found in Okri's famous novel, The Famished Road, and they speak even more directly about the matter of human-being.

Helen Godolphin
A Town Called Hockey

Aside from a grade school crush on Richard Brodeur, I have never been able to work up much enthusiasm for hockey, but when two hockey plays were running concurrently in Vancouver last winter I seized the chance to prove myself Canadian without having

Helen Godolphin
A Student of Weather

A Student of Weather (McClelland & Stewart), Elizabeth Hay's first novel, follows a family from their Depression-era Saskatchewan farm to New York City to a comfortable neighbourhood in Ottawa. The story centres on the alienation between the two sist

Geist Staff
A Whiter Shade of Pale and Becoming Emma

A Whiter Shade of Pale and Becoming Emma, by Catarina Edwards (NeWest), sports a truly appalling cover on the outside, and a most unfortunate typeface on the inside (can we even call it a typeface?—if this one has a name, it can only be font). These

Sarah Pollard
A Woman's Place

As the century turns, generational retrospectives are cropping up everywhere—a look back requires only file footage, the cut and paste. Recent books documenting Canadian life in the 1950s include Canada in the Fifties (Viking), selections from the ar

Dan Post
Adventures in Solitude

Dan Post reviews Grant Lawrence's Adventures in Solitude (Harbour).

Norbert Ruebsaat
Adaptation

I went to see the film Adaptation because it was recommended by a friend who thought I would like it because it was multilevelled, and I have been trying to find a way to tell him why I didn’t. Adaptation is about a Hollywood scriptwriter who tries t

Daniel Zomparelli
Aethel

Daniel Zomparelli reviews AEthel by Donato Mancini (New Star).

JILL MANDRAKE
Alien Abduction

Jill Mandrake reviews Joe Ollmann's graphic novel about a high school biology teacher who suddenly remembers being abducted by aliens.

Patty Osborne
After the Angel Mill

I also take home books that are intended only for me. The stories in After the Angel Mill by Carol Bruneau (Cormorant) are about Cape Breton, and the characters come from four generations of one family.

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.

Allison Lawlor
Bread and Salt

Allison Lawlor reviews an author reading of Bread and Salt by Renee Rodin.

JILL MANDRAKE
Caprice

Jill Mandrake reviews George Bowering's Caprice, "a poetic eulogy for a shrinking literary landscape."

Helen Godolphin
Cruddy

Helen Godolphin reviews Lynda Barry's Cruddy, a novel deep within its own whacked-out world.

Patty Osborne
Eating Apples: Knowing Women's Lives

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.