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Michael Hayward
Vinyl Café

I’ve always had mixed feelings about Stuart McLean’s Vinyl Café show on CBC Radio One. Sometimes it seems a bit twee or corny, but if I’m driving around town on a Sunday I’ll always tune in because I know that somewhere along the way, Stuart McLean w

Kris Rothstein
Unknown White Male

In 2003 Douglas Bruce rode the subway to Coney Island, having forgotten where he was going and who he was. His friend Rupert Murray was one of many directors interested in bringing this story of complete amnesia to the screen, and Murray’s Unknown Wh

Blaine Kyllo
Wallflower's Short Cuts Series

The new line of books about film and filmmaking from Wallflower Press in London (available from Columbia University Press here) is a real achievement.

Michael Hayward
Venices

Pushkin is one of those admirable small presses with an eclectic list that suggests the proprietors are interested in more than the bottom line; Paul Morand’s Venices, translated by Euan Cameron, would be a perfect choice for reading on the Lido.

Sewid-Smith Daisy
Waiting for Gertrude

A few weeks ago when I was knocked flat with the flu and afflicted with squinty, puffy eyes and a foggy brain, I looked for light, fun books that wouldn’t put too much of a strain on my system, and I found them in a far-east drama, a tale of reincarn

Patty Osborne
Waiting for Time

A book that I have been recommending to all of my friends is Waiting for Time by Bernice Morgan (Breakwater). This is the story of Mary Bundle, who was sent from a workhouse in England to St. John's, Newfoundland and eventually made her way to an iso

Stephen Osborne
Voice Literary Supplement

The Voice Literary Supplement for October was full of special treats, not the least of which was a profile of Marguerite Young, author of Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, a novel that I remembered from the seventies but had never read.

Daniel Francis
Waiting for the Macaws

A few years ago I drove my son to the waterfront village of Port Alice on the northwest coast of Vancouver Island to take up his summer job as an engineer in the local pulp mill. We had settled him into his new digs and I was preparing to return to V

Patty Osborne
Voyageurs

Voyageurs by Margaret Elphinstone took me back in time even further, to Upper Canada in the early 1800s, when Toronto was known as York, and Yonge Street stretched north past the last farm in Upper Canada into Mississauga Indian country. Into this ru

Sam Macklin
Walt and Skeezix: 1921 & 1922

The Canadian publisher Drawn & Quarterly has launched Walt and Skeezix: 1921 & 1922, the first in a series that collects Frank King’s seminal Gasoline Alley strips. While these books are fitting testaments to King’s incredible illustrative talents,

Eve Corbel
Weirdo

Remember Robert Crumb, the American comics artist who created Mr. Natural some twenty-five years ago, and got a whole generation to Keep On Truckin'? In the 1980s Crumb edited a comics anthology called Weirdo, which published work by Gilbert Shelton,

Sarah Leavitt
We Are On Our Own

Miriam Katin was a small child when she and her mother escaped Nazi-occupied Budapest by faking their deaths and walking into the Hungarian countryside. At sixty-three, Katin has finally told her story, in straightforward, unsentimental prose and lov

Cassia Streb
White Jade Tiger

Junior reviewer Cassia Streb (grade seven) sends the following note on White Jade Tiger (Orca Books) by Julie Lawson: "White Jade Tiger is about a girl who goes back in time to 1881 when the Chinese were brought over to Victoria to build the CPR rail

GILLIAN JEROME
When We Were Orphans

When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro (Knopf Canada) fell as if by magic into my lap and I read it relentlessly for two days, almost without sleeping, eating, bathing or responding to my partner and daughter. Like all great works of imagination, thi

Jill Boettger
White Salt Mountain

A curious inscription in a copy of a book called Fir-Flower Tablets: Poems from the Chinese inspired Peter Sanger to write White Salt Mountain (Gaspereau Press), a book that weaves together stories and facts about the life of Florence Ayscough, a lar

Patty Osborne
When the Spirits Dance

When the Spirits Dance (Theytus) by Larry Loyie with Constance Brissenden, the second book in a series of stories from Loyie’s childhood, paints a gentle picture of life in a First Nations community in northern Alberta during World War II.

Patty Osborne
Wilderness Beginnings

My deadline for finishing Wilderness Beginnings by Rose Hertel Falkenhagen (Caitlin Press) was December 21 because that’s when my partner David finished an out-of-town job. I’m a sucker for books about homesteading, especially homesteading in the nor

HAL NIEDZVIECKI
Wish Book

Wish Book (Gutter Press) by Derek McCormack. McCormack looks to the past to shatter the placid show window that the future promises us.

Kris Rothstein
Whole New Thing

The action in Whole New Thing, a film from Nova Scotia, is also precipitated by self-involved parents. Thirteen-year-old Emerson lives in a remote cabin, where he writes novels, takes saunas and gives massages to his parents’ friends.

Norbert Ruebsaat
Women With Men

Richard Ford (who I always think is John Ford) writes stories in the third person which read like stories in the first person, and I wanted to find out how and why he did this. I read the first story in his book Women With Men (Little, Brown) in Aust

Kris Rothstein
Women Who Eat: A New Generation on the Glory of Food

Food and eating are essential parts of our lives but they are seldom given serious thought.

Kris Rothstein
Witch Ball

Sabine Rose, the heroine of Witch Ball by Linda Joy Singleton (Llewellyn), is a psychic. She hides her powers from her popular friends and dreamy boyfriend by day and consults with her spirit guide by night.

Patty Osborne
Winter in July

Two days later I took Wayman’s workshop, Catching Fire, which was guaranteed to inspire us to get writing. He told us, among other things, that once we became writers we would no longer read for pure pleasure because we would always be analyzing what

Jill Boettger
Yesterday, at the Hotel Clarendon

A friend told me recently that women who write write like they are weaving and men who write write like they are having sex. Women bring together strands of things, she said, and connect them. Men focus relentlessly on a particular end, with an urgen

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.

Kris Rothstein
The Best 10 Minutes of Your Life

The only book of poetry I enjoyed this year is Zoe Whittall’s The Best 10 Minutes of Your Life (McGilligan Books). Here Ally McBeal and Dr. Seuss live alongside Susan Musgrave and Rocket Richard in a mélange of popular culture and literary craving.

Carrie Villeneuve
The Black Rider: The Casting of the Magic Bullets

This year, January in Vancouver was one long, dark rainy day. Thankfully the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival offered a variety of performances that piqued my curiosity enough to seduce me out of the house, away from the comforts of Kraft

Patty Osborne
The Bird Artist

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

Michael Hayward
The Big Why

The subject of Michael Winter’s novel The Big Why (Anansi) is Rockwell Kent, who was an accomplished artist and book illustrator during the 1930s and who was fascinated by the far north. The Big Why begins when Kent arrives in the isolated coastal vi

Patty Osborne
The Blue Circus

The Blue Circus (Cormorant) by Jacques Savoie, also translated by Sheila Fischman. Same translator, different story. Here the prose flows smoothly from start to finish, and even features the word lexiphone, which I have never heard in any language.

Patty Osborne
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

Sixty-three years after the Holocaust, the phrase “boy in striped pajamas” evokes such a strong image of concentration camps that it is difficult to imagine anyone being innocent of its hidden meaning, but nine-year-old Bruno, the main character in T

Stephen Osborne
The Oldest Basketball Team in the World

In 2005, a team of basketball players from Vancouver, whose average age is seventy-two, arrive at the World Masters Games in Calgary and, after losing three games to teams twenty years and more younger than themselves, receive the gold medal in their

Geist Staff
The Old Farmer's Almanac

The Special Canadian Edition of The Old Farmer's Almanac, from Yankee Publishing Inc., is subtitled "Fitted for Ottawa, with special corrections and calculations for all the Canadian provinces." Items of interest include "Who is the Canadian Farmer?,

Lily Gontard
The Old Way North: Following the Oberholtzer-Magee Expedition

Here, at last, are the uninspired chronicles of a man of few words.

Geist Staff
The Old Fart

A single copy of the second number of The Old Fart, "a magazine for and by curmudgeons" appeared in the rack at the local tobacconist's just long enough to be snaffled up by a sharp-eyed Geister. This is not a pretty magazine, but it's a pretty funny

Blaine Kyllo
The Pianist

The Pianist (TVA/Lions Gate), the Roman Polanski film that took Oscars for directing, acting (Adrien Brody) and adapted screenplay (Ronald Harwood) in 2003, is one of Polanski’s finest films. It is the true story of how Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Jewish m

Stephen Osborne
The Others Raisd in Me: 150 Readings of Sonnet 150

Stephen reviews The Others Raisd in Me: 150 Readings of Sonnet 150 by Gregory Betts (Pedlar Press).

Patty Osborne
The Optimists

I still can’t figure out why the cover of The Optimists, a novel by Andrew Miller (Sceptre), is covered with blue butterflies when the story is about atrocities committed under the orders of an African politician. Clem Glass is a photographer who doc

Michael Hayward
The Oxford Companion to Food

The Oxford Companion to Food (2nd edition, Oxford) is an extremely dangerous book.

Susan Crean
The Pleasure of the Crown: Anthropology, Law and First Nations

The Pleasure of the Crown: Anthropology, Law and First Nations by Dara Culhane (Talonbooks) is the book for anyone who wants to understand the Delga-muukw decision—how it happened, what it means and why the Supreme Court ruling last December has frea

Michael Hayward
The Paris Review Interviews

While considering the list of writers interviewed for each volume of The Paris Review Interviews (Picador) I couldn’t help thinking: “What an amazing literary gathering that would have been!” For the launch of volume i we can imagine a New York penth

Kris Rothstein
The Princess Pawn

There’s something comfortingly predictable about a young adult fantasy.

Daniel Francis
The Quest of the Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia

In Ian McKay's book about Nova Scotia, The Quest of the Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia (McGill-Queen's), post-modern theory collides head-on with Canadian social history, leaving sacred cows splattered all

Patty Osborne
The Polished Hoe

It’s taken me a month to get halfway through the 462-page hardcover book The Polished Hoe by Austin Clarke (Thomas Allen), which means I’m only halfway through the twenty-four hours during which the story takes place. I like the book—Clarke’s prose i

Jacquelyn Ross
The Plots Thicken

A review of Garden Plots: Canadian Women Writers and Their Literary Gardens by Shelley Boyd.

Kevin Barefoot
The Real Guide to Canadian Universities

The Real Guide to Canadian Universities compiled by Sara Borins, and written by students, has longer entries than the older Linda Frum Guide, a more adventurous layout and information that could only come from people who know what they're talking abo

Ryszard Dubanski
The Professor and the Madman

Simon Winchester's The Professor and the Madman (HarperCollins) is subtitled "A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary," and is a thrilling, chilling yarn about language and a history of lexicography. Its bumptious

Patty Osborne
The Rain Barrel Baby

I often can’t remember the title of a book I’ve read, but I can usually remember the colour of its cover, and blue seems to be my current favourite. A recently published blue book, The Rain Barrel Baby by Alison Preston (Signature Editions), takes pl

Eve Corbel
The Rain Ascends

Joy Kogawa doesn't write easy books. Obasan jump-started the Japanese Canadian Redress movement and Itsuka documented the movement's battles, internal and external. Now Kogawa has taken on another leviathan: sexual abuse of children by clergymen. Her

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