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Kris Rothstein
Forever

Forever is a Dutch film made by the experienced documentarian Heddy Honigmann. Its subject is Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris but its scope includes life and death, history and memory, art and beauty.

Shannon Emmerson
jacks: a gothic gospel

In the note accompanying Geist's copy of jacks: a gothic gospel (Livres DC Books), the book's author Anne Stone recommends it for review, or for "hanging out on a coffee table as an orange object." And, although it is a lovely orange object, jacks is

Patty Osborne
Jeannie and the Gentle Giants

In Jeannie and the Gentle Giants by Luanne Armstrong (Ronsdale), Jeannie is a young city girl who ends up in a foster home in the countryside near Kelowna, B.C., and the gentle giants are two enormous work horses named Sally and Sebastien who help Je

Carrie Villeneuve
Jesus Christ: The Lost Years

The two actors shared the portrayal of Jesus as well as playing the other characters, including Mary Magdalene, John the Baptist, Elvis and the three wise men—with a versatility and energy that contributed to a unique and very funny show.

Mandelbrot
Jeff Wall: The Complete Edition

Mandelbrot reviews Jeff Wall: The Complete Edition (Phaidon).

Carra Noelle Simpson
Josh Ritter

On February 22, 2007, the folk singer-songwriter Josh Ritter stepped on stage at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre, played three songs and said little more than “I’m excited to be here.” Uh-oh, I thought. After a few songs he absorbed the warm glow

Patricia Holmes
Karenin Sings the Blues

Many of the poems in Sharon McCartney’s second book, Karenin Sings the Blues, have won national competitions and been published in literary magazines, and so set the standard and tone for the rest of this fine collection. The book is presented in thr

Michael Hayward
Just Kids

Long before Patti Smith became “the Godmother of Punk” she was a not- atypical teenager of the 1960s, living with her parents in suburban New Jersey.

Patty Osborne
Justa

Justa by Bridget Moran is another great book—this time I'm typesetting it, and I almost never read books that I typeset But I found myself reading sections while waiting for other sections to print, and I could tell it was going to be a good one. Jus

Eve Corbel
Kafka

Mairowitz and Crumb’s Kafka, meanwhile, opens with a horrifying drawing of one of Franz K’s many grisly fantasies of his own death—a pork butcher’s cleaver hacking off neat slices from his head.

Stephen Osborne
Karla's Web: A Cultural Investigation of the Mahaffy-French Murders

Thematic convergence was far from my mind when Frank Davey's nearly-instant book, Karla's Web: A Cultural Investigation of the Mahaffy-French Murders (Viking), appeared in the office. For one thing, it came in a wrapper announcing it to be a copy of

Stephen Osborne
Karl Marx

The new Karl Marx biography by Francis Wheen (4th Estate) fails to illuminate a man who was loved by his family and revered by his followers; instead we are given a hazy sketch of a petulant, perhaps incompetent man of few skills and little disciplin

Stephen Osborne
Killshot

In the local secondhand a few weeks ago, a copy of Killshot by Elmore Leonard, and this sentence on the first page: It was time to get away from here, leave Toronto and the Waverly Hotel for good and he wouldn't drink so much and be sick in the morni

Eve Corbel
King

The first volume of King, a "comic book" biography of Martin Luther King (Fantagraphic Books), will not be misinterpreted or appropriated by neo-Nazis. Yet its power is delivered with grace and subtlety.

Michael Hayward
Kate and Anna McGarrigle: Songs and Stories

What better song for summer’s soundtrack than Kate and Anna’s “Swimming Song”? I added it to my iPod rotation while reading Kate and Anna McGarrigle: Songs and Stories (Penumbra), too much of which consists of transcribed newspaper reviews of albums

Kris Rothstein
King of the Lost & Found

Raymond J. Dunne, the sixteen-year-old hero of John Lekich’s teen novel, King of the Lost & Found (Raincoast), is an outsider.

Peggy Thompson
Kipper's Game

P.D. James meets Philip K. Dick in Barbara Ehrenreich's first novel, Kipper's Game, a complex mystery story set in an all-too-believable world of strange new diseases, genetic mutations and virtual reality.

Geist Staff
Kitchen

Grove Press has just brought out an English translation of Kitchen, by Banana Yoshimoto, an unclassifiable, magnificent little book that has won two literary awards and has had fifty-seven—yes, fifty-seven—printings in four years. As the dust jacket

Patty Osborne
Knit Lit

Sheila was reading Knit Lit, an anthology of stories about knitting edited by Linda Roghaar and Molly Wolf (Three Rivers Press) and some of them were making her laugh out loud, especially the one about an oversized synthetic orange sweater that acqui

Michael Hayward
La Haine

Mathieu Kassovitz was just twenty-eight years old when he made La Haine (Criterion dvd), a 1995 film released in black and white and set in les banlieues, the racially volatile suburbs that surround Paris like an explosive vest.

Mandelbrot
La Florida

Are the Québecois the only moviemakers in North America with a sense of humour? Latest evidence to hand would certainly suggest so: three movies in the local video place this season and all winners.

Michael Hayward
La Commune

Remember those student days when, in preparation for your final exam, you’d optimistically sit through a movie version as a substitute for the book itself?

Michael Hayward
Lancelot of the Lake

In one of the audio tracks on the dvd of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, co-director Terry Gilliam credits Robert Bresson’s 1974 film Lancelot of the Lake (New Yorker Films dvd) as an inadvertent inspiration for Grail.

Sam Macklin
Krazy & Ignatz 1937

The recent Krazy & Ignatz 1937–1938: Shifting Sands Dusts Its Cheeks in Powdered Beauty is one of the most agreeably bonkers tomes published in recent memory. Just about every strip tells the story of Ignatz Mouse’s compulsion to hurl bricks at the w

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.

Patty Osborne
The Dark Room

Several journeys go on in the three parts of The Dark Room by Rachel Seiffert (Knopf). First we meet Helmut, a young man who doesn’t go far from Berlin but spends many hours on the platform of his local train station watching his city empty of people

Michael Hayward
The Dam Busters

The Dam Busters (Anchor Bay dvd), Michael Anderson’s 1955 movie version of the attacks, is still considered a classic war movie, and despite special effects that look tame when compared to modern cgi sequences, the pacing of the film and the power of

Michael Hayward
The Dead

John Huston's final film, of the James Joyce short story from "Dubliners", was a worthy capstone to his career of nearly fifty years.

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

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.

Michael Hayward
The Maytrees

For summer I favour books that can withstand the indignities of the season: beat-up paperbacks that can get stained by sunscreen, or library hardcovers in Brodart jackets that can be wiped clean with a damp cloth. But I make exceptions for new books

Michael Hayward
The Lizard Cage

Karen Connelly has travelled extensively in southeast Asia and described her experiences through non-fiction (Touch the Dragon, a memoir of her year in Thailand, won the Governor General’s Award in 1993) and poetry. Connelly’s first novel, The Lizard

Patty Osborne
The Museum Guard

Speaking of the library, the day after I borrowed The Bird Artist by Howard Norman (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), a book my brother had recommended, The Museum Guard (Knopf), also by Norman, arrived in the Geist office. For some reason I chose to read Th

Mandelbrot
The Montreal Gazette

The Montreal Gazette reports that Réjean Ducharme, whose new novel Va Savoir is at the top of the bestseller list, has released a photograph of him after a photographic hiatus of twenty-five years, or, in the words of the Gazette caption writer, "a q

S. K. Page
The Middle Stories

Sheila Heti, author of The Middle Stories (Anansi) has received much praise in the Globe and the National Post, all of it deserved. The stories in this little volume are very short and very good: formidable might be the right word.

Michael Hayward
The Narrow Waters

Julien Gracq, one of France’s most senior and respected writers, provides a living bridge to the era of Proust and Alain-Fournier, and in his slim book The Narrow Waters (Turtle Point) Gracq explores a theme favoured by both of those writers: the mys

Stephen Osborne
The Medicine Line: Life and Death on a North American Borderland

The myth of the West in Canada and the U.S.A. issues largely from a country almost unknown to most North Americans: the wide plains that spill over the forty-ninth parallel between Montana and Saskatchewan. Beth LaDow, who lives in Massachusetts and

Patty Osborne
The Imaginary Girlfriend

John Irving's The Imaginary Girlfriend (Knopf) is an attractive little hardcover book that is a pleasure to look at and to hold. But to read it is another matter.

Carmen Rivas
The Mummy Congress

Until I read The Mummy Congress by Heather Pringle (Penguin Viking), I thought mummies were just dead people with good PR. But this book traces the role mummies have played in anthropological, historical and medical research, as well as helping to re

Patty Osborne
The Name of the Game: How Sports Talk Got That Way

It's been reported that my nephew in Ottawa needs to be encouraged to read, but he doesn't need to be encouraged to do sports. With this in mind I ventured into an unfamiliar genre. Sports books seem to come in two flavours—how-to books (which most t

Leah Rae
The Milk of Birds

Gary Michael Dault’s The Milk of Birds (Mansfield Press) is an exercise in brevity—each of the one hundred poems in the volume contains between fifteen and forty words. Dault presents the reader with images of nature and nature as metaphor in poetry

Michael Hayward
The Paris Review Interviews, IV

Michael Hayward reviews The Paris Review Interviews, IV (Picador).

Patty Osborne
The New Vancouver Library

The first time I visited the new library I was planning only to look around. It was opening week and things were pretty busy.

Darren Barefoot
The Noam Chomsky Lectures

The Noam Chomsky Lectures (Coach House) is a table play. For two hours Daniel Brooks and Guillermo Verdecchia sit behind a table and wage war on the Canadian Government and Big Business.

S. K. Page
The New Yorker Stories

The twenty-one stories by Morley Callaghan that appeared in The New Yorker between 1928 and 1938 have been gathered into a small volume by the author’s son Barry, who is the publisher of Exile Editions.

Michael Hayward
The Odyssey

The unabridged audio version of the Odyssey (Penguin) opens with a brief interlude of eerie music, followed by the voice of Gandalf announcing: “The Odyssey, translated by Robert Fagles, read by Ian McKellan,” and with that, one is caught up in an ep

Geist Staff
The New Northwest: The Photographs of the Frank Crean Expeditions 1908-1909

The New Northwest by Bill Waiser (Fifth House), is subtitled The Photographs of the Frank Crean Expeditions 1908-1909, but provides us with very little information about these two fascinating subjects. The New Northwest can be seen as another wacky v

Luanne Armstrong
The Next World War: Tribes, Cities, Nations and Ecological Decline

Roy Woodbridge tries hard to connect everything in his somewhat despairingly named book, The Next World War: Tribes, Cities, Nations and Ecological Decline (University of Toronto), in which he calls for a “war on ecological decline”—a war on the forc

Michael Hayward
Travels in the Scriptorium

Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy was a revelation to me: literary puzzles examining the nature of fiction-writing; an intellectual meta-fiction that turned the hard-boiled detective genre on its head. Those three novels featured characters with cryptic

Michael Hayward
The Wild Places

For me and other residents of the North Shore of Greater Vancouver, the wilderness is literally blocks away. A line drawn due north from the peaks of the North Shore mountains to the Yukon border will intersect only four roads other than logging road

Kris Rothstein
Tricks

Kris Rothstein reviewed the 2008 Vancouver International Film Festival. For more reviews, visit her Geist blog at geist.com/blog/kris.

Daniel Francis
Under the Tuscan Sun

For the second Christmas in a row, I asked for a ten-day holiday at a cooking school in Tuscany, and for the second year in a row my ever-practical wife found a way to indulge my fantasy without emptying our bank account. Last year she pacified me wi

Kris Rothstein
Twenty Miles

Twenty Miles by Cara Hedley (Coach House) hurtles headlong through the chaos of a season of tough young women playing university hockey. Isabel Norris (Iz) is the unlikely heroine of this novel, a pretty girl whose talent for hockey is more of a comp

Rose Burkoff
Two Lives

Vikram Seth made a name for himself with the conventional epic A Suitable Boy, but most of his publishing ventures have been strange and surprising. Two Lives (McArthur & Company) is the non-fiction story of his great uncle Shanti and great aunt Henn

Stephen Osborne
Tyndale New Testament

The Tyndale New Testament of 1526 is now available in a life-sized edition from Oxford. This was the first pocket-sized popular bible; it could be easily hidden from the thought police of the time, who were eager to burn any copies of the book they c