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

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

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

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

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

Evil is not darkness, I thought to myself. It’s noise.

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His look is self-concious, but well done.

Cylinders of oxy­gen rolled past like dolls, propped up in wire bas­kets. After the first few min­utes it all seemed normal.

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Stephen Osborne uncovers the genesis of the poppy and how it became evidence of horror, a token of remembrance and a promise of oblivion.

Last month I had lunch with a good friend who years ago had told me that her parents, who immigrated to Canada after the war, were Holocaust survivors. I asked my friend, whose name is Slava, to tell me again about her parents, who had lived in Vilna, the ancient Lituanian city of Europe known for three centuries as the “Jerusalem of the north.”

The police officer turned us back and told us to for

The last thing in the world I wanted was to be an exhibit, or worse.

Senior Editor Mary Schendlinger remembers her friend and Geist contributor Saeko Usukawa.

Thompson’s free-ranging narrative of the New World must be the only one in which the devil is defeated at checkers.

At home Frank and I are mutually sympathetic to the obligation to face one another and speak loudly; or, when we are away, to supply each other with new batteries when we forget them; but we have no defence against the independent wandering behaviour of our hearing aids. They are always someplace else. I probably have spent one percent of my life, close to a whole year, looking for the damned things.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Hakescher Markt became one of hippest neigh

A shuttle driver at LAX shares his idea for a Valentine’s Day gift.

He looked vaguely familiar— there was a sort of outline around his ­features that I almost recognized, a translucent and shifting visage, as of someone I once knew. He looked vaguely familiar— there was a sort of outline around his ­features that I al

Boyfriends are trouble, I said. He leaned over and gave me a high-five.

If Toronto were like Baghdad, thirty-nine res

On a recent trip to Paris, I met a young woman from Japan. But this is not a story about a sudden love affair, which one might expect in Paris.

The man who told me to sit here is wearing a blue uniform. He asks me questions. “You’re going to sacrifice your body just to save some money,” he jokes.

The organizers of tonight’s talk have branded it as a “raw exchange”—part of a series of uncensored literary gatherings around the city—and so they’ve invited three biting B.C. writers to get down to brass tacks for a group of strangers in the basement of the Vancouver Public Library. By some freak of programming, a punk-metal band is slaying the kids in the room down the hall tonight, which means every time a bookish-looking latecomer wades into our midst, a foul-sounding wave of hellish power chords does, too.

In multi-cultural Vancouver, strangers come together at a moment of crisis.

Violence could not reach them only when they were distant as the moon, not of this world

“The first time I met him, he caused me to float to the ceiling"

Sebastian and I enjoy making fun of le mythomane. We compare him to characters in novels. Maybe he can’t return home because he’s wanted for a crime.

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

The postcard presents a series of absences—the nameless photographer,

the unknown writer and recipient; it is constituted by what is unknown

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I always longed to be the falling woman—impelled by unruly passion, driven by beauty and desire, turned into stone, drowned in flowers.

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New bylaws for civic spaces.

It is racism, not race, that is a risk factor for dying of COVID-19.

Doing time is not a blank, suspended existence.

It was as though a magic potion had brought him back to life.

Going unnoticed must be the root sorrow for the broken.

On the curve of the contagion and on the measure of Montreality.

It took me a million miles to get here and half the time I was doing it in high heels.

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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.

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.

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."

"I want to buy a house. And build a secret room in it. And not tell the kids about it."

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.

Spiritual landscapes and unknowable people captured on film, used to convey a message.

After Paul Muldoon and Raymond Williams.

A seance to contact a dead miner at Port Arthur, Ontario, in 1923—conducted by Conan Doyle himself.

He has been called the greatest Bulgarian poet of his generation. Can one literary scandal bury his whole career?

A basement shrine in her 1920s home inspires Caroline Adderson to discover the past lives of her house and its inhabitants.

Mastery of the self

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You'll need more than one cross-town bus ride to polish off The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon (as abridged for Dell). But this book remains pre-eminently a great read, and it's rife with graceful periods and rolling paragraphs

Michael Hayward reviews The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, directed by David Fincher (Criterion).

Pocket Canon #4, The Complete Life of Harmon du Prés, is a masterpiece of meandering nostalgia. An unnamed narrator reminisces about youthful encounters with Harmon in sometimes baffling vignettes, constructing a mysterious tale that is anything but

Alexander Wilson, in his book The Cult of Nature (Between the Lines), makes the following remark in passing on page 25: By the late nineteenth century, almost half of North Americans lived in cities. It was not until then—the moment that in the Unite

Receiving books for Christmas raises the question: What possible reason did anyone have to give me this? ... This year it was my uncle's turn: why exactly did he send me a copy of The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals: The Lost H

The Complete Peanuts: Volume 1, 1950 to 1952 by Charles M. Schulz (Fantagraphics) is the first in a series of deluxe hardback editions in which every single Peanuts comic strip will be reprinted, in order.

In his book of poetry, The Cold Panes of Surfaces (Nightwood), Chris Banks takes the incidental moments of our lives and raises them, with stunningly precise language, to the level of the divine. In lines like these: “Today, field crickets with hum-b

Geist readers who take in the Globe and Mail will have seen a sobering feature not long ago reporting the jailing, flogging and even murdering of cartoonists who dare to satirize the governments of various countries, official religions, prominent cit

An unnamed cellist plays Tomaso Albinoni’s Adagio for twenty-two consecutive days in a bomb crater.

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 “

I almost didn’t read Luanne Armstrong’s book The Colour of Water (Caitlin) because the cover put me off, but when I was reminded of how much I had enjoyed an earlier Armstrong book, Annie, I gave the new one a chance. The Colour of Water covers four

Lily Gontard Reviews The China Fantasy by James Mann (Penguin).

A review of The Complete New Yorker, a vast treatise on writing and reading, editing and publishing in the twentieth century.

The Complaints Department by Susan Haley (Gaspereau Press) has a green cover, but the story is all about having the blues. It takes place in Prohibition Creek, N.W.T., where people say you can’t do anything about “residential school, fur prices, the

The Captain Is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship is the latest of Charles Bukowski's posthumously published books, of which there are at least five in the world (and possibly still more to come from the estimable Black Sparrow Pre

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

Phrase books are tools of cultural globalization—but they are also among its casualties.

When building a nation, cultural riches can be lost.

Coming to harbour in a new world.

Science and the arts fulfil their functions to help us survive through the imagination.

Dividing and conquering local populations confines them to manageable administrative units.

In a world dominated by heroes, difference is not tolerated.

“Have patience” and “Tomorrow” are two inseparable locutions in the Portuguese tongue.

For a brief period the band CANO gave shape to the dream of a bilingual Canadian culture.

"The hemispheric context reveals the roots of the residential school system...Destroying Indigenous cultures was a positivist policy from Patagonia to Dawson City."

Lisa Bird-Wilson on UNDRIP, reconciliation, and the anxiety felt by Indigenous people in Canada.

What we do when we absorb words from a screen—and we haven’t yet evolved a verb for it—is not reading.

Libraries are not only essential in educating the soul, but in forming the identity of a society.

Our society is formed on the assumption of a healthy immune system.

The woman who called herself Tatiana Aarons gave me an address that led to a vacant lot.

Dogged dedication grants a reader vicarious immortality.

What we can—and can’t—learn from the plague

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.

The newspaper wars aren’t what they used to be.

A package-deal paradise reputation curtails gringo knowledge of Dominican life.

Faith seems to shiver when confronted by art.

What can the Brothers Grimm teach us about the state of our economic system? Everything.

Must artists declare their moral integrity?

Without air travel, family networks might have dissolved long ago.

There’s something not quite right about the grid on which the game is played.