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dispatches
essays
reviews
columns
Daniel Francis
writing from an early grave

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

Eimear Laffan
The Trap Door

This invertebrate does not go looking for prey

Michael Hayward
The peripatetic poet

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

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Haunted House guest

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

Michael Hayward
Beyond the event horizon

Review of "Antkind" by Charlie Kaufman.

Anson Ching
Sailing the roaring forties

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

rob mclennan
Elizabeth Smart’s Rockcliffe Park

For the sake of the large romantic gesture

Michael Hayward
BELLE ÉPOQUE GOSSIP

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

Peggy Thompson
More precious than rubies

Review of "Rubymusic" by Connie Kuhns.

Debby Reis
A not-totally-accurate introduction to the azores

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

Michael Hayward
A Russian Brother and his sister

Review of "A Russian Sister" by Caroline Adderson.

Kris Rothstein
The messy back of history

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

Christine Lai
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

Sara de Waal
Little Women, Two Raccoons

Hit everything dead on, even if it’s big

Peggy Thompson
Have Mercy

Review of "Mercy Gene" by JD Derbyshire.

Michael Hayward
subterranean mysteries

Review of "Underland" by Robert Macfarlane.

Margaret Nowaczyk
Metanoias

The names we learn in childhood smell the sweetest to us

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Championing Trees

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

Patty Osborne
Crossing Borders

Review of "Solito: A Memoir" by Javier Zamora

Michael Hayward
The Two Roberts

Review of "Turn Every Page" directed by Lizzie Gottlieb

Ian Roy
My Body Is a Wonderland

Maybe my doctor has two patients named Ian Roy, and I’ve been sent the other Ian’s file

Peggy Thompson
A moment with holden

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

JILL MANDRAKE
POINTS OF INFLECTION

Review of "Some of the Puzzles" by M.A.C. Farrant.

Michael Hayward
A HOLIDAY IN THE MOUNTAINS (WITH PIE)

Review of "Holiday, 1909" by Charles Chapman.

Stephen Gauer
Jumper

Another classic story from Geist's 20th Anniversary Collector's Issue."I felt disoriented, almost light-headed, as though I were slightly stoned or moving inside a dream."

Saeko Usukawa
Gulf Island Sojourn

"Campbell River, best fishing in the world. They do every­thing for you. All you have to do is bring yourself and decide what you're going to drink."

Miriam Toews
Sweet Badass Dude

A nervous kid from Canada becomes the king of the basketball courts in Venice Beach.

Stephen Osborne
The Lost Art of Waving

Before people 'poked' and 'tweeted', waving was how we said hello and goodbye to each other.

Stephen Osborne
Shots Fired

A new dispatch from Geist's 20th Anniversary Collector's Edition."How did more shots fired represent what we miss in life, in city life?"

Stephen Osborne
Chiquita Canáda

Last month we had a visit from Eliz­abeth Anderson, who hails from Min­neapolis, Minnesota, where she is a graduate student at the state univer­sity. Her field of study is Canada, and she also writes about Canada for Utne Reader.

Myrl Coulter
Room Ten

Was that a ghost?Why don't you have room service?We used up all your Kleenex. Sorry.Read more entries from a guest book found in room ten of a hotel in British Columbia's Okanagan Valley.

Daniel Collins
Phallic Blessing

In Drukpa Kunley's monastery in Bhutan, Daniel Collins experiences a birthday blessing among phallic iconography.

Stephen Osborne
Banker Poet

Stephen Osborne recollects his encounter last summer with Robert Service outside a cafe in Vancouver. Service, who wrote the poem "The Cremation of Sam McGee," died in 1958.

Stephen Osborne
Life on Masterpiece Avenue

Stephen Osborne memorializes D.M. Fraser, a tiny ancient man at the age of twenty-six, who wrote sentences that made you want to take him (and them) home with you.

Michael Turner
Making Stuff Up

Author Michael Turner riffs on D.M. Fraser's short fiction Class Warfare, one of the ten classic Vancouver books reissued for Vancouver's 125th birthday.

Stephen Osborne
The Tall Women of Toronto

In this city of tall buildings, the most imposing shadows are cast by women.

Veronica Gaylie
Blue Cheese

A decadent feast of poetry; but what will it do to your heart?

Edith Iglauer
Aquafun

Plumb the depths of the Aquafit subculture with our embedded nonagenarian.

Jeff Shucard
Hurricane

Four days after Sandy, Shucard's parents are in good humour, very brave and very glad to see him—and unsure if he's taking them to Bolivia, Azerbaijan or Canada.

Thad McIlroy
Hernia Heaven, Part 2

Thad McIlroy undergoes a hernia operation—and with Neil Diamond and the right kind of drugs, it might only take ten minutes.

Sheila Heti
Stakeout

Sheila Heti spends a day in a diner in Toronto observing the enormous EUCAN electrified garbage can at the corner of College and Bathurst.

Stephen Osborne
Women of Kali

A feminist writer/publisher sought out stories of the partition of India: atrocity and hardship, looting, rape and murder committed by and upon Hindu, Muslim and Sikh.

Chelsea Novak
National Boyfriend

At a taping of George Stroumboulopoulos Tonight, Chelsea Novak meets Canada's boyfriend.

Michael Turner
Oh, Canada

Michael Turner questions a US-curated exhibit of Canadian art that exoticizes Canadian artists while suggesting they are un-exotic.

Francois-Marc Gagnon
Among the Curious

Francois-Marc Gagnon explores curiosity as the opposite of indifference.

Ted Bishop
Edith and Frank

Ted Bishop visits Edith Iglauer and her husband Frank in their seaside home, where he is treated to a fast drive on a winding road, conversation on good books, and a lesson on what it's like to grow old gracefully.

Jane Silcott
Mimesisa

Jane Silcott explores the ideas of beauty and mimicry both in theory and in the wilds of a motel complex.

Stephen Osborne
1968

Stephen Osborne compares the "major problem" of loitering in 1968 Vancouver to the 2012 Occupy movement.

Stephen Osborne
The Man Who Stole Christmas

On a dark day in January in Toronto, when the sky was much too close to the ground, I went to see the grave of Timothy Eaton with my friend Tom Walmsley.

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.

Daniel Francis
Fact
writing from an early grave

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

Michael Hayward
Fact
The peripatetic poet

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

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Fact
Haunted House guest

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

Michael Hayward
Fact
Beyond the event horizon

Review of "Antkind" by Charlie Kaufman.

Anson Ching
Fact
Sailing the roaring forties

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

Michael Hayward
Fact
BELLE ÉPOQUE GOSSIP

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

Peggy Thompson
Fact
More precious than rubies

Review of "Rubymusic" by Connie Kuhns.

Debby Reis
Fact
A not-totally-accurate introduction to the azores

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

Michael Hayward
Fact
A Russian Brother and his sister

Review of "A Russian Sister" by Caroline Adderson.

Kris Rothstein
Fact
The messy back of history

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

Peggy Thompson
Fact
Have Mercy

Review of "Mercy Gene" by JD Derbyshire.

Michael Hayward
Fact
subterranean mysteries

Review of "Underland" by Robert Macfarlane.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Fact
Championing Trees

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

Patty Osborne
Fact
Crossing Borders

Review of "Solito: A Memoir" by Javier Zamora

Michael Hayward
Fact
The Two Roberts

Review of "Turn Every Page" directed by Lizzie Gottlieb

Peggy Thompson
Fact
A moment with holden

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

JILL MANDRAKE
Fact
POINTS OF INFLECTION

Review of "Some of the Puzzles" by M.A.C. Farrant.

Michael Hayward
Fact
A HOLIDAY IN THE MOUNTAINS (WITH PIE)

Review of "Holiday, 1909" by Charles Chapman.

Anson Ching
Fact
THE BELL KEEPS TOLLING

Review of "For Whom the Bell Tolls" by Ernest Hemingway.

Kris Rothstein
Fact
DEFINED BY DUMPLINGS

Review of "What We Talk About When We Talk About Dumplings" edited by John Lorinc.

Jonathan Heggen
Fact
The Common Shaman

Review of "Shaman" by Kim Stanley Robinson.

Peggy Thompson
Fact
Walk Another Path

Review of "Landlines" by Raynor Winn.

Kris Rothstein
Fact
Dogs and the Writing Life

Review of "And a Dog Called Fig: Solitude, Connection, the Writing Life" by Helen Humphreys.

Patty Osborne
Fact
A Secret Well Kept

Review of "The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation" by Rosemary Sullivan.

Alberto Manguel
Dante in Guantánamo

After fol

Stephen Henighan
Canada for Spartans

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?

Kris Rothstein
The Diary of a Teenage Girl

In The Diary of a Teenage Girl by Phoebe Gloeckner (Frog Ltd/North Atlantic Books), Minnie Goetze shares her story of growing up in anything-goes 1970s San Francisco, using words, drawings and comics. It’s the year Minnie becomes sexually curious and

Stephen Osborne
The Diana Chronicles

The death and life of Diana, Princess of Wales, provides Tina Brown, the well-known Diana tribute artist and lookalike—her Di-likeness fills the back cover of The Diana Chronicles (Doubleday), which makes it uncomfortable to read this book on public

Patty Osborne
The English Stories

Patty Osborne reviews The English Stories by Cynthia Flood (Biblioasis).

Sewid-Smith Daisy
The Dreamlife of Bridges

The main characters of The Dreamlife of Bridges by Robert Strandquist (Anvil Press), also suffer through mental collapse and find themselves outside society on the west coast. Both Leo and June bottom out in the ways of their respective sexes: for Le

Norbert Ruebsaat
The Emigrants

In “Ambros Adelwarth,” the third story in The Emigrants (New Directions), W. G. Sebald quotes long excerpts from the titular character’s purported diary, and this character’s diction and cadences duplicate Sebald’s so exactly that one feels uneasy w

GILLIAN JEROME
The Elegance of the Hedgehog

Gillian Jerome reviews The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery (Europa).

Luanne Armstrong
The Education of Mr. Whippoorwill: A Country Boyhood

I love reading memoir and I love reading anything about farming and nature (I grew up on a farm), so I wanted to love The Education of Mr. Whippoorwill: A Country Boyhood by David Zieroth (Macfarlane Walter and Ross).

Michael Hayward
The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W.G. Sebald
Stephen Osborne
The Elvis Project: A Yukon Road Documentary

Elvis Aaron Presley, who was reborn on the Carcross Road near Whitehorse seventeen years ago during an alien encounter, is the subject of The Elvis Project: A Yukon Road Documentary by Adam Green and Bill Kendrick (Blueishgreen).

Geist Staff
The Exterminated Angel

The Exterminated Angel by Gerard Godin (Guernica Editions) is an eighteenth-century satire dressed up as a twentieth-century murder mystery in the manner of Chandler and Hammett, and great fun to read. The real subject of the book is Montreal in the

Geist Staff
The English Patient

The English Patient (McClelland & Stewart) by Michael Ondaatje is just as good as everyone says it is; and surely contains some of the most compelling desert writing in the language (you will swear that Ondaatje must have spent most of his life in th

Patty Osborne
The First Quarter of the Moon

At press time I am in the middle of The First Quarter of the Moon (TalonBooks) by Michel Tremblay (translated by Sheila Fischman), and so far have been completely drawn in by the complicated and contradictory relationship between two young boys—the f

Patty Osborne
The Gathering Tree

The Gathering Tree by Larry Loyie (Theytus Books) was initiated by Chee Mamuk, an organization that provides aboriginal communities with culturally appropriate education about HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted infections, and there is a long li

Sewid-Smith Daisy
The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios

The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios, the latest book by Yann Martel (Vintage), looked to me like a novel, not a book of short stories (which it is). So, when coming close to the end of the first “chapter,” I was alarmed at how fast the story se

Kris Rothstein
The French Guy

No secret Canadian knowledge will help illuminate The French Guy, the latest film by Ann Marie Fleming. Though it is obviously shot in Vancouver, this absurd story lacks a sense of place, and the central joke about the eponymous French guy falls flat

Michael Hayward
The Forger

As an avid long-distance cyclist who also loves to be pulled into a good adventure story, I could not resist Cioma Schönhaus’s book The Forger (Granta), a memoir that describes how Schönhaus lived in hiding in wartime Berlin while working clandestine

Patty Osborne
The Five Books of Moses Lapinsky

Here in Vancouver we had Honest Nat’s Department Store at 48th and Fraser, and in Karen X. Tulchinsky’s book The Five Books of Moses Lapinsky, Toronto had Lenny’s House of Bargains on College Street near Spadina, which, according to Tulchinsky’s stor

Michael Hayward
The Facts of Winter

Canadian readers may doubt that they can learn anything new about winter from The Facts of Winter (McSweeney’s), a book that is faux in many ways. The afterword is a faux biography by Paul La Farge, an American “translator,” of the book’s purported a

Geist Staff
The Ghost in the Gears

Howard White is known to his readers as a wry chronicler of life in the bush and on the boats. But his new book of poems, The Ghost in the Gears (Harbour), reveals the heart of a true romantic beating beneath that lumpen exterior.

Patty Osborne
The Garden Letters

Some of the books that come in over the transom I scoop up for other members of my family. But somewhere between the office and home I often find myself sneaking a read. I took home The Garden Letters by Elspeth Bradbury and Judy Maddocks (Polestar)

Geist Staff
The French Quarter

In his new book, The French Quarter (Macfarlane, Walter & Ross), Ron Graham sets out to illuminate French-English relations in Canada by exploring the French-Canadian side of his own family. Sounds promising, and sets us up brilliantly with a descrip

Geist Staff
The Girl with the Botticelli Face

The dust jacket of The Girl with the Botticelli Face (W. D. Valgardson, Douglas & McIntyre) promises an "explicit rendering of sexual politics," a dissection of "the nature of male rage" and even "one of the most hilarious scenes in CanLit." This rev

BILLEH NICKERSON
The Gladys Elegies

Barbara Nickel's The Gladys Elegies (Coteau Books) was the deserving winner of this year's Pat Lowther Memorial Award for best book of poetry by a Canadian woman. Although there are many things I'd rather do than read sonnets, Nickel's subtle and del

Lily Gontard
The Goldfish Dancer

Patricia Robertson is not a prolific writer—The Goldfish Dancer (Biblioasis) is only her second collection in over a decade—but in this collection she offers stories that draw you in and make you forget about time: a rare gift.

Patty Osborne
The Harp

At the 2005 Vancouver International Film Festival I watched The Harp, a short film that is written and produced by John Bolton, who used to share a music stand with my daughter in the local youth orchestra. John gave up playing the viola years ago, b