A young Canadian man visits family in Pakistan to settle a generational feud.
CONNIE KUHNS
Signs of Life
Does a house that has been home to four generations of one family still hold their electricity?
Daniel Francis
The Artist as Coureur de Bois
Tom Thomson, godfather of the Group of Seven, drowned in an Ontario lake under mysterious circumstances, and ever since, his reputation has been the stuff of legend.
Norbert Ruebsaat
Caleb and Opa on Holiday
Opa, you know that sometimes people say things, well, indirectly? They don’t say everything that they mean?
Patty Osborne
A Little Distillery in Nowgong
A review of A Little Distillery in Nowgong by Ashok Mathur.
Alberto Manguel
Role Models and Readers
Ruskin's readers have the power to know that there is indeed room for Alice at the Mad Hatter's table.
Alberto Manguel
Imaginary Islands
In order to discharge ourselves of certain problems, why not simply erase from our maps the sites of such nuisance?
Florence Grandview
Lights Out at the Jubilee
At the Jubilee Cinema, the manager carries an imitation pistol in the John Dillinger style.
David Wisdom
UJ3RK5
A Vancouver rock band made up of musicians, photographers and at one time, a prominent sci-fi writer.
Alberto Manguel
Face in the Mirror
What does it mean to "be" yourself? The face reflected in the mirror is unrecognizable.
Stephen Henighan
The Market and the Mall
In the farmer’s market, a quintessentially Canadian setting, much of Canada is not visible.
Daniel Francis
Sex, Drugs, Rock ’n’ Roll and the National Identity
In this essay, Daniel Francis discusses how Gerda Munsinger—a woman with ties to the criminal underworld—shaped Canadian politics in the 1960s.
Alberto Manguel
Cri de Coeur
Compared to today's vile heros, Ned Kelly-the Australian outlaw who wrote the angry, articulate Jerilderie letter in 1879-seems as innocent as an ogre-slaughtering hero of fairy tales.
Alberto Manguel
The Other Side of the Ice
Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner is a film about community and the north.
EVELYN LAU
Love Song to America
Reflections on John Updike's death.
Alberto Manguel
Geist’s Literary Precursors
The Geist map has a venerable ancestor that goes back four centuries and halfway around the world.
Michelle Fost
Long Distance
Shared family memories of burnt baked goods.
Sheila Heti
American Soul
Slot machines sing their astral music. The tape recorder turns off. “Do you talk to friends about sex?” he asks.
Annabel Lyon
Irony-Free Reality TV
There may be more to reality TV than meets the eye.
Edith Iglauer
Mad About Harry
A new pet kitten becomes part of the family.
Jill Boettger
City Under Water
The Calgary floods left behind a stew of knee-deep mud, and waterlogged piles of couches, fridges, books, toys, artworks, chairs, carpet, drywall...
Stephen Osborne
The Coincidence Problem
That dreamlike quality causes rational minds to dismiss the moment as “only a coincidence.”
Alberto Manguel
Cooking by the Book
I'm always looking for the moment in which a character must stop to eat because, for me, the very mention of food humanizes a story.
Stephen Osborne
Scandal Season
Headlines featuring crack-smoking mayors and election fraudsters.
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.
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.
Siobhan Devlin
Lucky Jim
"So today in class we talk about Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis, which I looked forward to because it’s a book with two interesting female characters, for a change." Review by Siobhan Devlin.
Michael Hayward
Mnemonic Devices
Michael Hayward reviews Mnemonic: a book of trees by Theresa Kishkan (Goose Lane).
Michael Hayward
Books That Shook the World
Michael Hayward reviews Atlantic Books' series of 'Books That Shook the World' and Alberto Manguel's biography of Homer's the Iliad and the Odyssey.
Kris Rothstein
Colonialism and Homosexuality
The promise of exotic and sensuous experience has lured many a European man to go abroad, as Robert Aldrich demonstrates in Colonialism and Homosexuality (Routledge), reviewed by Kris Rothstein.
S. K. Page
A History of the Future
"A History of the Future, by David A. Wilson, is a great idea for a book: a history of what people in the past made of the future they would never know." Review by S.K. Page.
Shannon Emmerson
A Recipe for Bees
Shannon Emmerson reviews Gail Anderson-Dargatz's A Recipe for Bees, a story about the price of our choices and the reasons we make them.
Dan Post
A Sound Like Water Dripping
Dan Post reviews A Sound Like Water Dripping by Soren Bondrup-Nielsen, the story of the author's attempts to be the first Ontarian to locate the elusive boreal owl.
Mindy Abramowitz
Action Girl Comics
"I am by no means a connoisseur of comics, and usually confine my reading to one or two titles. Now Action Girl Comics makes it three." Review by Mindy Abramowitz.
Michael Hayward
Across the Territories
Michael Hayward reviews Across the Territories by Kenneth White, a book of White's worldwide travels.
Patty Osborne
Banana Rose
Patty Osborne reviews Banana Rose by Natalie Goldberg.
Michael Hayward
Beat Generation
Michael Hayward reviews Beat Generation by Jack Kerouac, a three-act play he wrote but never produced.
Todd Coyne
Black is Back
Todd Coyne reviews Black: The History of a Color by Michel Pastoureau, a book that "charts a European social history of the most symbolic and evocative colour on earth."
Daniel Zomparelli
Rocksalt: An Anthology of Contemporary B.C. Poetry
Daniel Zomparelli reviews Rocksalt: An Anthology of Contemporary B.C. Poetry edited by Mona Fertig and Harold Rhenisch (Mother Tongue).
Michał Kozłowski
Sarajevo Marlboro
Michal Kozlowski reviews Sarajevo Marlboro by Miljenko Jergovic, twenty-nine (very) short stories set in Sarajevo during the Bosnian war of the early 1990s.
Sarah Leavitt
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
Sarah Leavitt reviews Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, Alison Bechdel's first graphic novel full of vibrantly alive, expressive characters and richly satisfying extras.
Patty Osborne
Hunger
It takes Patty Osborne a month to get halfway through the 462 pages of the Giller Prize-winning novel The Polished Hoe, which is only halfway through the 24 hours during which the story takes place.
The Eyre Affair
Karen Schendlinger reviews The Eyre Affair and Lost in a Good Book by Jasper Fforde, two smart, allegorical crime novels starring a detective named Thursday Next.
Patty Osborne
The Girl Without Anyone
The Girl Without Anyone is a series of linked short stories by Kelli Deeth, dealing with a teenage girl's budding sexuality, self-doubt and confusion. Reviewed by Patty Osborne.
Jocelyn Kuang
The Jonathans
Two different novels about family dysfunction—This Is Where I Leave you and The Corrections—written by two different Jonathans. Reviewed by Jocelyn Kuang.
S.K. Grant
The Joy of Cooking
"Scallions are eaten raw by self-assertive people": Why S.K. Grant was surprised to discover The Joy of Cooking as a literary work.
Clare Coughlan
The Love Crimes of Gillian Guess
Clare Coughlan reviews her experience seeing (and before that, waiting in line to see) The Love Crimes of Gillian Guess.
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.
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
Patty Osborne
The Glace Bay Miners' Museum
Another story about love between two misfits, The Glace Bay Miners' Museum (Breton Books) by Sheldon Currie, should have been called Margaret's Museum, like the highly praised movie that came out of it. If it hadn't been for our astute Geist intern,
Sarah Maitland
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
Sarah Maitland reviews The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows (Random House).
Geist Staff
The Girl Wants To
The Girl Wants To, edited by Lynn Crosbie (Coach House) overwhelms its readers with sheer volume. It contains everything from cartoons to photos, to articles and stories and poems, to exhibit documentation.
Michael Hayward
The Hasheesh Eater
Fitz Hugh Ludlow’s The Hasheesh Eater (Rutgers) was first published in 1857, and is now reprinted as another in Rutgers’ Subterranean Lives series. Described as “the first full-length example of American drug literature,” this account is closely mode
Kris Rothstein
The Glenwood Treasure
Until I found The Glenwood Treasure by Kim Moritsugu (Dundurn), I thought writers of adult books were ignoring one of the tried-and-true plots of children’s books: the joys and pitfalls of searching for treasure. Blithe is the quiet daughter of swank
Kris Rothstein
The Heart is an Involuntary Muscle
Monique Proulx’s long-awaited novel, The Heart is an Involuntary Muscle (Douglas & McIntyre), is the story of Florence, a web designer leading a safe virtual life. When she finds out that her father’s dying words feature prominently in a book being w
Luanne Armstrong
The Inner Green
Most of the interesting books to be found on the subject of home and place, where we live and how we relate to it, are American, but The Inner Green (Maa Press), is a collection of natural history and personal essays by K. Linda Kivi and Eileen Deleh
Michael Hayward
The Goshawk
One reality of modern publishing is that this season’s new books are next season’s remainders. This harsh fact is compounded by the inexorable disappearance of good used bookstores everywhere, with the result that many excellent books that have had t
GILLIAN JEROME
The Hip Mama Survival Guide
Child-rearing manuals cropped up with a vengeance in the latter half of the twentieth century after Dr. Benjamin Spock produced Baby and Child Care—the all-time best-selling book in American history, second only to the Bible, despite advice such as “
Patty Osborne
The Key of Do
In my reading life I’ve been locked in YA (young adult) land ever since I found myself surrounded by a gaggle of teenage nieces at a family party. I tried the usual icebreakers about school and friends, but the conversation really got going when I as
Kris Rothstein
The Last Samurai
I had fun in the gifted class in elementary school because my parents never pressured me to become a sensation in spelling, or science—or, like Maya, the ethereal figure in Nancy Huston’s tense novel Prodigy (McArthur), a brilliant ten-year-old piani
Kris Rothstein
The Interpreter of Maladies
There are few appearances by God in The Interpreter of Maladies (Mariner Books), a Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of short stories by Jhumpa Lahiri. Lahiri’s settings are both secular and multicultural, and the challenge facing her characters is t
Stephen Osborne
The Labradorians: Voices from the Land of Cain
The Labradorians: Voices from the Land of Cain (Breakwater) is another big compilation (500 pages), this one made by Lynne Fitzhugh from the pages of Them Days, a quarterly journal of oral history that has been published in Happy Valley, near Goose B
Kevin Barefoot
The Last House of Ulster: a Family in Belfast
During a trip to Ireland last spring, I remembered Charles Foran's The Last House of Ulster: a Family in Belfast (HarperCollins), so when I got back to Canada I tracked it down at the library. It describes Foran's fourteen-year relationship with the
Blaine Kyllo
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
When I was an undergrad, I took a psychology class in which the professor described various types of creativity. One of them was the creative act of taking things already in existence and reorganizing, reordering, recreating them to make something ne
Mandelbrot
The Life of Yousuf Karsh
In an interview reported in The Life of Yousuf Karsh by Maria Tippett (Anansi), Karsh said that he strove to bring out “the strength and personality” of men and “the charm and beauty” of women—an aesthetic purpose that he never abandoned, and one tha
Michael Hayward
The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories
Those who have read Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient (Vintage), and those who have seen the film version, will remember that the sole possession of the eponymous patient, Count László de Almásy, was a battered copy of Herodotus’s Histories, an
Geist Staff
The Holy Forest
The Holy Forest by Robin Blaser (Coach House) is not a book about ecology, although it does remind us of the concept of the sacred grove, which is central to aboriginal belief systems in which language and knowledge are said to come from certain land
Shannon Emmerson
The Life of Margaret Laurence
For Christmas I asked for The Life of Margaret Laurence by James King (Knopf) because I had read the reviews and articles that were published upon the book's release, and they piqued my interest in a literary icon whose life story I had always believ
Sarah Leavitt
The Love that Won’t Shut Up
On the eighth night of the Vancouver Queer Film Festival, my girlfriend and I and about 175 other people crowded into the Vancity Theatre to see The Love That Won’t Shut Up, the first production in the Out on Screen Film and Video Society’s Queer His
JILL MANDRAKE
The Man Who Killed Houdini
The Man Who Killed Houdini by Don Bell (Véhicule Press) is the story of J. Gordon Whitehead, who, as the accepted story goes, was chatting with Houdini in Montreal, along with three McGill students, when he unexpectedly punched Houdini in the stomach
Daniel Francis
The Living Unknown Soldier
In The Living Unknown Soldier (Henry Holt), the French historian Jean-Yves Le Naour tells the story of “Anthelme Mangin,” an amnesiac discovered wandering on the train-station platform in Lyon in February 1918. He was assumed to be a prisoner of war
Geist Staff
The Lotus-Eaters
The current film festival season features two movies written by Geist correspondents Tom Walmsley and Peg Thompson.... Peg Thompson's movie we have seen: it's called The Lotus-Eaters, and it's set in the sixties on one of the Gulf Islands of BC, in