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Patty Osborne
Slow Dance

Slow Dance (Knopf) by Bonnie Sherr Klein also kept me from sleeping, mostly because I couldn’t put it down. When I saw Klein’s photo on the cover I realized I’d seen her around at literary events and I was interested in this tall, self-confident woma

Michael Hayward
Small Dose of the Infinite

"A mild, or homeopathic, dose of the infinite is the crucial element in the aesthetic experience known as the sublime." A review of The Shell of the Tortoise.

Stephen Osborne
Smilla's Sense of Snow

Two books full of ice and snow: Icefields (NeWest) by Thomas Wharton, and Smilla's Sense of Snow (Doubleday) by Peter Hoeg. Peter Hoeg's sense of snow is utterly convincing: his book had me shivering in August (I actually took to reading it under the

Kris Rothstein
Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood

In Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood (Penguin), Koren Zailckas recounts her history of alcohol abuse and the years she lost. She took her first drink at age fourteen and she soon craved liquor and needed it for any kind of social interaction.

Stephen Osborne
Small Apartments

The Winner of the 23rd International 3-Day Novel Writing Contest (a venerable institution) is Small Apartments (Anvil Press), written and pleasantly illustrated by Chris Millis, who lives in Saratoga Springs, New York, and has worked as a “sportswrit

Patty Osborne
Slow Lightning

In Slow Lightning by Mark Frutkin (Raincoast) we meet Sandro Cénovas, a student who is caught in the middle when civil war erupts in Spain. Threatened with arrest or conscription, Sandro flees Barcelona on a borrowed bicycle and heads for the coastal

Norbert Ruebsaat
Slow Man

The ending of J. M. Coetzee’s Slow Man (Secker & Warburg) is disappointing only because the rest of the novel is so good. The main character, Paul Rayment, suffers a crippling bike accident, becomes infatuated with his care nurse and declares his lov

Stephen Osborne
Snow Man

Snow Man, the masterful new novel by David Albahari (Douglas & McIntyre), belongs precisely to such a narrative of the world; and its provenance is evident from the first sentence, which takes us up in a moment and sweeps us into the history of langu

Mandelbrot
Solitaire

The Canadian version of Waiting for Godot takes place on Christmas Eve in a tavern somewhere in north Ontario, in a movie called Solitaire. In this one the two guys are played by the barkeep and the patrons, who indulge themselves in not enough drink

Sewid-Smith Daisy
Sointula

I like fiction when it gives me new ideas and I have to put the book down and pick up a dictionary or run something through Google—or when details I had never noticed before suddenly seem obvious. Sointula by Bill Gaston (Raincoast Books) is about a

Patty Osborne
Soucouyant

In Soucouyant by David Chariandy (Arsenal Pulp Press), a young man whose mother suffers from early-onset dementia pieces together what really happened back home in the Caribbean when she encountered a soucouyant, or evil spirit.

Geist Staff
Songs of Aging Children

Songs of Aging Children, by Ken Klonsky (Arsenal Pulp Press) is a remarkable book of stories about troubled teenagers—people who too rarely find their way onto the centre stage of contemporary fiction. These are very good stories, well imagined and v

Kris Rothstein
Some Girls Do

Clumsy slang and fake angst are what Some Girls Do (do what?) by Teresa McWhirter (Polestar) is all about. While I enjoyed the buoyant conversational style and unconventional characters, I hated McWhirter’s self-conscious portrayal of the subculture

Trevor Wilson
Socket

Three-day novels tend to get off the ground quickly and move along at a good pace but then, understandably, founder near the end. Socket by David Zimmerman (Anvil), this year’s winner, is an exception: the story never lets up. The novel follows Ronal

Patty Osborne
Spadework

When Rob and Sheila went away for the weekend, Rob was reading, but not enjoying, Spadework by Timothy Findley (HarperFlamingo). This was Rob’s first foray into Findley and he moaned and groaned about the silly plot filled with actor-worship, and the

Geist Staff
Spycatcher

Copies of Spycatcher by Peter Wright (General Publishing) are washing up in great numbers these days in the secondhand bookstores, and so may be had for a song. This book, the memoir of a British spy, is an unsettling testament to the power of fictio

Mandelbrot
Spectacle of Empire: Marc Lecarbot's Theatre of Nepturne in New France

Jerry Wasserman has assembled the original text and two translations in Spectacle of Empire: Marc Lescarbot’s Theatre of Neptune in New France (Talon Books), a useful and amusing book filled with fascinating little-known facts. The colony at Port Roy

Luanne Armstrong
Sputnik Diner

Sputnik Diner by Rick Maddocks (Knopf) is an in-depth exploration of a group of people who move through a small-town diner in the tobacco belt of southern Ontario. Maddocks shows just enough of his characters’ lives for us to understand, identify and

Patty Osborne
Something Drastic

Something Drastic by Colleen Curran (Goose Lane) found its way to the cabin because I was tired of reading serious books. This is not a new book (it came out in 1995) so I must have missed it the first time around, but it is funny and refreshing.

Eve Corbel
StatsCan Publications

During Geist's first year, we devoted many inches of this column to thoughts on browsing through Canadian book publishers' catalogues. It's as good a way as any to explore the temper of the times, to say nothing of the place. Now I've got two more te

Stephen Osborne
Straight Razor and Other Poems

Salvatore Ala has written a poem about a barbershop that may have no equal in that genre. It can be found in his new book, Straight Razor and Other Poems (Biblioasis).

Michael Hayward
Strike/Slip

Don McKay’s Strike/Slip (McClelland & Stewart) was awarded the 2007 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and, just as Geist was going to press, this year's Griffin Poetry Prize. It deserves both awards and more: poetry does not get much better than this.

Geist Staff
Stupid Crimes

We always need more books like Stupid Crimes, by Dennis Bolen (Anvil). Crime novels set in Canadian milieux have the immediate and salubrious effect of elevating places we know into places we like to see imagined.

Stephen Osborne
Struck

The protagonist in Geoffrey Bromhead’s three-day novel Struck (winner of the 25th Annual 3-Day Novel Contest) is a drifter with a penchant for being struck by lightning, and with some practical experience of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, and he

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.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Fact
The Human Side of Art Forgery

Review of "The Great Canadian Art Fraud Case: The Group of Seven and Tom Thomson Forgeries" by Jon S. Dellandrea.

JILL MANDRAKE
Fact
A Backward Glance or Two

Review of "Let the World Have You" by Mikko Harvey.

Michael Hayward
Fact
ADVENT (AND OTHERS) IN A BOX

Review of "Short Story Advent Calendar" by Hingston & Olsen Publishing.

Michael Hayward
Wanda x 3

Review of "Wanda" written and directed by Barbara Loden, "Suite for Barbara Loden" by Nathalie Léger, translated by Natasha Lehrer and Cécile Menon and "Wanda" by Barbara Lambert.

Patty Osborne
Teenaged Boys, Close Up

Review of "Sleeping Giant" directed by Andrew Cividino and written by Cividino, Blain Watters and Aaron Yeger.

Debby Reis
Dreaming of Androids

Review of "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? " by Philip K. Dick.

Anson Ching
Further Years of Solitude

Review of "Black Sugar" by Miguel Bonnefoy.

Jonathan Heggen
A Thoughtful Possession

Review of "The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories" edited and translated by Jay Rubin.

Michael Hayward
Sitting Ducks

Review of "Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands" by Kate Beaton.

Peggy Thompson
What It Means To Be Human

Review of "All the Broken Things" by Geoff Inverarity.

Daniel Francis
Future Imperfect

Review of "The Premonitions Bureau " by Sam Knight.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Rocks in a Hard Place

Review of "A Field Guide to Gold, Gemstone & Mineral Sites of British Columbia, Volume Two: Sites within a Day’s Drive of Vancouver" by Rick Hudson.

April Thompson
Prayer and Declaration

Review of "Monument" by Manahil Bandukwala.

Anson Ching
Archipelago

Review of "A Dream in Polar Fog" by Yuri Rytkheu, and "A Mind at Peace" by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar.

Michael Hayward
Vanishing Career Paths

Review of "The Last Bookseller: A Life in the Rare Book Trade" by Gary Goodman, and "A Factotum in the Book Trade" by Marius Kociejowski.

JILL MANDRAKE
Part of the Crowd

Review of "Crowded Mirror" by Sheila Delany.

JILL MANDRAKE
The Doors of Perception Had to Close

Review of "The Acid Room: The Psychedelic Trials and Tribulations of Hollywood Hospital" by Jesse Donaldson and Erika Dyck.

Michael Hayward
No Regrets

Review of "Stories I Might Regret Telling You" by Martha Wainwright.

Daniel Francis
Known It All

Review of "Know It All: Finding the Impossible Country" by James H. Marsh.

April Thompson
Call Yourself a Writer

Review of "Resonance: Essays on the Craft and Life of Writing" edited by Andrew Chesham and Laura Farina.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Coming Unravelled

Review of "Unravelling Canada: A Knitting Odyssey" by Sylvia Olsen.

Thad McIlroy
Articulating the Inarticulate Speech of the Heart

Review of "The Emotion Thesaurus: A Writer's Guide to Character Expression" by Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi.

TANVI BHATIA
Heat Death of the Universe

Review of "In the Dream House" by Carmen Maria Machado.

Michael Hayward
Is It Edible?

Review of "Mushrooms of British Columbia" by Andy MacKinnon and Kem Luther.

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.

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

Michael Hayward
World War II Writings

It’s much more fun to read this first-hand account of the war and its aftermath observed from ground level than a professional historian’s account, written decades after the fact.

Kevin Barefoot
Word of Mouth

Word of Mouth (Thistledown) is M.A.C. Farrant's fourth collection of fiction and is in two parts: stories about Sybilla, a nineteen-year-old mother struggling to survive in suburban Vancouver Island, stretching welfare cheques and coping with pervert

Paul Tough
World on Fire

I’ve always resisted Sarah McLachlan, even when my heart and my ears wanted to give in to her songs. They seemed too middle-of-the-road, too angel-filled, too soft and girly, too Canadian. Then today I’m sitting at my desk on West 43rd Street in Manh

Leah Rae
Wristcutters: A Love Story

As the film begins, the main character, Zia, is listening to a Tom Waits record and cleaning his room in preparation for suicide. Too bad he misses a spot; the last thing he sees before he dies on the bathroom floor is a dust bunny in the corner. So

Michael Hayward
You’ll Be Okay: My Life With Jack Kerouac

You’ll Be Okay offers a feminine perspective on the Beat Generation from the wife of one of its most celebrated authors.

Blaine Kyllo
X-Men 1.5

Last fall, production for the film X-Men 2 set up in Vancouver, and as we await the theatrical release of the movie, the studio has issued a new DVD version of the first film. X-Men 1.5 (20th Century Fox) includes a new cut of the original film (whic

Daniel Zomparelli
Yesno

Daniel Zomparelli reviews Yesno by Dennis Lee (Anansi).

James Baker
YOU Back the Attack! WE'LL Bomb Who We Want!

In late May 2003 the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) hosted a discussion forum called Hell No: Designers and the War, featuring the design historian Steven Heller, the design icon Milton Glaser (perhaps most known for the “I Love NY” symbol

Kris Rothstein
You Be Me: Friendship in the Lives of Teen Girls

As a teen I was never happier than when in cahoots with my best friend, passing silly notes, talking obsessively on the phone, pouring out heartache, even fighting. I expected You Be Me: Friendship in the Lives of Teen Girls (Annick Press), edited by

S. K. Page
Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art Quarterly

Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art is a new quarterly published in Taiwan and Canada by the anonymously named Art and Collection Group Ltd., which turns out to be an ambitious group of editors, writers, curators and artists in several countri

Eve Corbel
Zine

For six years while Pagan Kennedy was an "out of whack, directionless woman trying to muddle through her late twenties," she wrote, drew and published a zine called Pagan's Head, which was all about her. In 'Zine (St. Martin's Griffin), all issues of

Your Secrets Sleep With Me

Kris: In the not-too-distant future, American refugees stream into Canada, populating shelters and dilapidated warehouses. Racial tension, skittish police, a powerful elevator operators’ union and flying teens are all factors in the skewed reality of

Lara Jenny
Zigzaggery

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.

JILL MANDRAKE
Zombie Movies: The Ultimate Guide

A passionate and (nearly) complete compendium from an emotionally invested fanatic.

Geist Staff
Shades: The Whole Story of Doctor Tin

Shades: The Whole Story of Doctor Tin (Arsenal Pulp) is the sequel to Tom Walmsley's cult masterpiece, Doctor Tin, which appeared in 1979 to rave reviews and stern warnings. Walmsley was quoted in the press at that time as having said "everything he

Shannon Emmerson
Shadow Maker: The Life of Gwendolyn MacEwen

In search of a more satisfying biography, I pulled out a book I received a few Christmases ago—Rosemary Sullivan's Shadow Maker: The Life of Gwendolyn MacEwen. Sullivan's book made me weep during two separate readings.

Kris Rothstein
Shadow Company

Mercenaries and muscle for hire are the subjects of Shadow Company, a cinematic investigation into the privatization of the use of force. The film was born when a university buddy of the director, Nick Bicanic, took a job as a private military contra

Jill Boettger
Short Journey Upriver Toward Oishida

Last summer I hiked up to a fire lookout in Alberta to visit a friend who lives there for part of each year, and tucked in my sturdy pack was Roo Borson’s Short Journey Upriver Toward Oishida (McClelland & Stewart), which I was taking to my friend as