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Geist Staff
A Circle of Birds

A Circle of Birds by Hayden Trenholm (Anvil Press) might serve as a benchmark for the Geist Distance Writing Contest: it crosses more than the requisite number of time zones, and it might certainly be said to be as far out there as the author can tak

Leah Rae
A Christmas Tale

A Christmas Tale offers a decidedly French take on la famille dysfonctionnelle.

Michael Hayward
A Canterbury Tale

Criterion has just released a beautifully restored two-dvd edition of Powell and Pressburger’s A Canterbury Tale (1944), which tells the story of a British soldier, an American soldier and a “land girl,” who meet by chance in a small village not far

Michael Hayward
A Blue Hand: The Beats in India

Deborah Baker uncovers archival letters, shedding new light on the expat Beats in India.

Norbert Ruebsaat
A Chorus of StonesA Chorus of Stones

Susan Griffin's A Chorus of Stones (Anchor Books), is a long meditation on war. She takes war into her self, into her body, and in writing about it she seems to give birth to it.

Lara Jenny
A Common Pornography

Portland is a great destination for fans of the independent presses. During a recent two-day trip, I selected a few must-have zines and chapbooks from a huge selection.

Blaine Kyllo
A Critical Guide to Contemporary North American Directors

The new line of books about film and filmmaking from Wallflower Press in London (available from Columbia University Press here) is a real achievement. A Critical Guide to Contemporary North American Directors, with a whopping 535 beautifully designed

RICHARD VAN CAMP
A Complicated Kindness

Nomi Nickel, the heroine of A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews (Knopf), is a bad girl. How can she help it?

Rose Burkoff
A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906

Any author who can attract a crowd to listen to explanations of changes in plate tectonics theory over several decades deserves applause, and the best-selling author Simon Winchester did just that, in a conversation with Hal Wake at the 18th Annual V

Laurie Edwards
A Discovery of Strangers

Rudy Wiebe makes the physical North present as few writers can. We see the line of light on the spring horizon, taste the lichens that feed the caribou and sometimes the humans, feel the rough granite outcroppings, stand on the edge of the great nort

Stephen Osborne
A June Night in the Late Cenozoic

Robert Allen's new book of stories, A June Night in the Late Cenozoic (Oolichan) is full of near-worlds with dimensions that intersect the three (or is it four) that we navigate by in this world. A man wakes up to find the Gaza Strip being relocated

Kris Rothstein
A Diary 1978–1980

I cringe a little when I think of my old diaries. Luckily, A Diary 1978—1980 by “Shauna” (Two-Star Press) let me relive all of my wacky pre-teen adventures without the embarrassment of my own stupid commentary.

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

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.

Minelle Mahtani
Fact
Looking for a Place to Happen

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

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

Patty Osborne
Bucket Nut

On a lighter note, Bucket Nut by Liza Cody (Doubleday) was recommended to me by a fellow mystery buff who dropped by the office the other day. I like Liza Cody's mysteries anyway, but Bucket Nut is by far the most outrageous I've read.

HAL NIEDZVIECKI
Budavox

Budavox (DC Books) by Todd Swift is a first collection of poems. Swift writes like something still matters, but he doesn't know what.

Amy Francis
Bullets Over Broadway

The close proximity of my new apartment to a repertory cinema has caused me to go through a movie-going renaissance. Unfortunately, most of my discoveries have been in the mediocre to bad category.

Eve Corbel
Caldecott & Co.: Notes on Books & Pictures

After dinner I retired with my newly acquired copy of a twenty-six-year old book, Caldecott & Co.: Notes on Books & Pictures (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), essays by Maurice Sendak, author and illustrator of In the Night Kitchen, Where the Wild Things Ar

Adam Lewis Schroeder
By a Frozen River

Tight, pithy, replete with thinly veiled autobiographical details of a childhood in Quebec and an adult life spent as an ex-pat writer in, of all places, Cornwall, the stories were short enough that I could read two or three on a twenty-minute bus ri

Mindy Abramowitz
Bust

Bust magazine is dedicated to giving voice to the generation of women caught between Cosmo and Sassy. It is also font-crazy and printed on smudgy newsprint.

HAL NIEDZVIECKI
Caesarea

Caesarea (ECW Press) by Tony Burgess. There's no better place to spend New Year's Eve than Caesarea, a small town on the shore of menacing Lake Scugog, a place to forget your troubles, relax, do a little fishing, settle into your lawn chair on the ou

Leah Rae
Buster Keaton: Cut to the Chase

According to Hollywood legend, it was Harry Houdini who gave Buster Keaton the name “Buster” after watching the young Keaton tumble down a flight of stairs. This myth is debunked in Marion Meade’s biography Buster Keaton: Cut to the Chase (Da Capo P

Barry Kirsh
Can You Wave Bye Bye Baby?

The storyteller's verve in Can You Wave Bye Bye Baby? (McClelland & Stewart), by the Montreal writer Elyse Gasco, speaks volumes in which time and place hardly matter. Gasco writes in the second person in four of the seven short stories; in one of th

Michael Hayward
Campo Santo

When W. G. Sebald died in an automobile accident in December 2001, just four of his books were available in English translation. Those four books had earned him considerable praise (Michael Ondaatje called him “the most interesting and ambitious writ

Barry Kirsh
Can You Wave Bye Bye Baby?

The storyteller's verve in Can You Wave Bye Bye Baby? (McClelland & Stewart), by the Montreal writer Elyse Gasco, speaks volumes in which time and place hardly matter. Gasco writes in the second person in four of the seven short stories; in one of th

Jon Burrows
Canada's Gigantic

Another oddly-shaped book protruding from the shelf at the library the other day was Canada's Gigantic (Summerhill), a collection of photographs by Henri Robideau, a Gianthropologist photographer who searches out Giant Things in the Canadian landscap

Sarah Pollard
Canada in the Fifties

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

Stephen Osborne
Canada's Boreal Forest

The boreal forest is the mysterious place most of us are aware of only to the extent that we know we don’t want to get lost in it: the deep unconscious of a nation (Champlain called it the land God gave to Cain).

Patty Osborne
Canada in the Rough

The show, called Canada in the Rough, is sponsored by companies that sell firearms, ammunition, trucks, outdoor gear and crossbows, and it includes a Rough Cooking segment (caribou stew with prunes and dried apricots served over couscous) and a Rough

Geist Staff
Canadian Dreams: The Making and Marketing of Independent Films

Michael Posner's Canadian Dreams: The Making and Marketing of Independent Films (D&M) is a passionate and at times hair-raising account of what's right and what's wrong with Canadian moviemaking. Posner follows the making and marketing of ten very di

Stephen Osborne
Canadian Literary Power

Somewhat more put-downable is Canadian Literary Power by Frank Davey (NeWest Press), which took me a week to read. This is a book filled with Serious Thinking, so of course it's slow, and I'm still not sure how much of it I can agree with.

Daniel Francis
Canada’s House: Rideau Hall and the Invention of a Canadian Home

On the same day that a parliamentary committee scolded the governor general for profligate spending by slashing her annual budget by ten percent, a book that purports to give the full story about life at Rideau Hall arrived on my desk. Working on the

Geist Staff
Canadian Exploration Literature: An Anthology

There is something unexplained about Germaine Warkentin's Canadian Exploration Literature: An Anthology (Oxford). This book is a collection of lengthy extracts from the written accounts of two dozen well-known explorers, starting with Pierre Radisson

Geist Staff
Canadian Notes and Queries

Curmudgeons of a more bibliophiliac bent should be subscribing to Canadian Notes and Queries, a fascinating magazine of little-known facts of interest that Doug Fetherling took over a few years ago with the intention of broadening its range and its r

Sam Macklin
Captain Beefheart: The Biography

Attention-grabbing fact: ninety-nine percent of “serious” writing about “popular” music is one hundred percent useless. One reason for this is an ingrained belief that the social significance of the entertainment industry is more interesting than any

S. K. Page
Cape Breton Road

The opening pages of Cape Breton Road by D. R. MacDonald (Harcourt) are as good as it gets: a brilliant evocation of person and place. But soon after that, things began to settle down into mere realism, and then I had to put the book aside when I hit

Barbara Stewart
Captain Alex MacLean: Jack London's Sea Wolf

Barbara Stewart reviews Captain Alex MacLean by Don MacGillivray (UBC Press).

Michael Hayward
Celine and Julie Go Boating

Jacques Rivette’s 1974 film Celine and Julie Go Boating (British Film Institute dvd) is set in a Paris that is half Wonderland, half real, a Paris in which events unfold according to the same dream-like logic that astonished Alice, and that entrances

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.

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

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