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Michael Turner
Making Stuff Up

Author Michael Turner riffs on D.M. Fraser's short fiction Class Warfare, one of the ten classic Vancouver books reissued for Vancouver's 125th birthday.

Thad McIlroy
Death and the Economist

The art of the obituary lives on: Obituaries of note from The Economist magazine, including those of the "gunrunner of CIA front companies" and "last interesting Marxist."

Daniel Francis
Double Life

The poet John Glassco lived in disguise, masquerading as a member of the gentry while writing pornography and reinventing his past.

HAL NIEDZVIECKI
The Secret Market

When Frank Warren began collecting the secret thoughts of strangers at PostSecret.com, he inadvertently created a new genre.

Alberto Manguel
Hospital Reading

When you find yourself laid up in a sterile hospital room, which books do you want to have with you?

Stephen Osborne
The Tall Women of Toronto

In this city of tall buildings, the most imposing shadows are cast by women.

Stephen Henighan
Latinocanadá

Military coups, civil wars, and NAFTA are the cause of trilingual labels in Canadian big box stores.

Veronica Gaylie
Blue Cheese

A decadent feast of poetry; but what will it do to your heart?

Edith Iglauer
Aquafun

Plumb the depths of the Aquafit subculture with our embedded nonagenarian.

Alberto Manguel
Yehuda Elberg: In Memoriam

A writer whose work is among the most important contributions to the literature of the Holocaust is forgotten by almost all.

Jeff Shucard
Hurricane

Four days after Sandy, Shucard's parents are in good humour, very brave and very glad to see him—and unsure if he's taking them to Bolivia, Azerbaijan or Canada.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Terribly Human

"Awkwardness comes with loving someone too much or not enough." A review of Other People We Married by Emma Straub.

Daniel Francis
It's a Free Country, Isn't It?

During the 1950s the RCMP used a machine to identify federal employees who were homosexuals. The name of this bogus device? The "fruit machine," of course.

RICHARD VAN CAMP
Rookie Yearbook One

The Senior Editor of Geist learns to "Wear Knee Socks with Everything" from an exceptional blog turned print book by Tavi Gevinson.

Thad McIlroy
Hernia Heaven, Part 2

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

Sheila Heti
Stakeout

Sheila Heti spends a day in a diner in Toronto observing the enormous EUCAN electrified garbage can at the corner of College and Bathurst.

Stephen Osborne
Women of Kali

A feminist writer/publisher sought out stories of the partition of India: atrocity and hardship, looting, rape and murder committed by and upon Hindu, Muslim and Sikh.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Grief-in-Progress

Kelsea O'Connor reviews Nox by Anne Carson (New Directions).

Michael Hayward
Writing in Blue

Michael Hayward reviews Blue Nights by Joan Didion (Knopf).

Mandelbrot
Zero Drag and Genius

Mandelbrot reviews The Wage Slave's Glossary written by Joshua Glenn and Mark Kingwell and illustrated by Seth.

Chelsea Novak
National Boyfriend

At a taping of George Stroumboulopoulos Tonight, Chelsea Novak meets Canada's boyfriend.

Michael Turner
Oh, Canada

Michael Turner questions a US-curated exhibit of Canadian art that exoticizes Canadian artists while suggesting they are un-exotic.

Daniel Francis
Boob Tube

Richard Stursberg’s memoir of his years in CBC programming raises the question: How did someone with no sympathy for public broadcasting get the job in the first place?

Eve Corbel
Collier Cornucopia

Eve Corbel reviews Collier’s Popular Press: 30 Years on the Newsstand.

M.A.C. Farrant
Selected Days

On Dorothy Parker Day we wear wool suits and little hats, smoke with cigarette holders and have a liver-coloured dachshund on a lead.

Shelley Kozlowski
Revving

It was the big sort of rhmmm-rhmmm you hear at demolition derbies and ball-busting monster truck rallies. It was loud. Who could be sitting in their car, revving the engine?

Thad McIlroy
Check-Out

"At the back of the line a woman with no teeth was trying to hold an eighteen-pack of budget toilet paper with one hand."

Michał Kozłowski
In the Flesh

From Jean Talon to Lenin’s Tomb

Evel Economakis
Leningrad Redact

“If we paid protection money to the KGB, there’d be nothing left for salaries. And we call it the FSB now.”

Christine Novosel
Stuck on the Grid

Christine Novosel talks life in Scotland: "What Glasgow lacks in beauty and brains, it makes up for with wit and resilience."

Stephen Osborne
The Orwell Effect

Stephen Osborne on the origins of the International 3-Day Novel Contest, the time-honoured writing contest that flies in the face of the notion that novels take years of angst to produce.

Sheila Heti
Law of Small Numbers

Forty percent of people believe that if they practice enough, they can predict the outcome of a flipped coin. Would my current love end the way my past ones had?

Margaret Nowaczyk
Ad Infinitum

"I stared in awe at the pink-petalled flowers of human tissue blossoming in the mass of a collapsed grey-brown lung as it was reinflated during a thoracotomy."

Alex Khramov
Walrus Keeper

One of the advantages of life back then was that people had jobs that could be easily defined. None of your strategic walrus initiative development consultants or anything.

Jane Silcott
Ducks

At first no one notices when the dog rushes your daughter as if she’s some kind of game and your daughter runs as if it’s some kind of chase.

Antoine Dion-Ortega
South Side Malartic

People are getting either sick or mad, or both.

Mandelbrot
Zero Degree Dining

The Kathmandu Café in multiple dimensions.

M.A.C. Farrant
4-Day Forecast for Wendy

"Today your dog will decide to end things. Your dog, who is wearing a red vinyl jacket and is tied to the tree on the boulevard outside the thrift store."

Sarah Pollard
Mavis in Montreal

Sarah Pollard makes a pilgrimage to Montreal to hang out and write where Mavis Gallant hung out and wrote.

Marjorie Doyle
Goin’ to MUN

"'Goin’ to university' was a cover or alibi, rather than a statement of fact, providing the indolent and the imaginative with richer lives than simply having a job."

Stephen Osborne
Grinkus and Pepper

Stephen Osborne is entranced by a pair of eccentric, high profile students while on a university tour in 1964.

Deborah Ostrovsky
Petites Pattes

Montreal was once the “City of a Thousand Steeples.” Today it’s the city of a thousand church bazaars open on Saturdays to keep the cash flow up.

Eve Corbel
Guide to Literary Footwear

Espadrille, paduka, chopine—Eve Corbel illustrates a guide for readers on some of the fanciest footwear found in literature.

Robert Everett-Green
Checkered Past

For me, the jacket is a piece of menswear history that I can actually put on, and a link to the tragicomic tale of an underachiever with a famous name.

JEROME STUEART
Road Trip

A collection of Jerome Stueart's Greyhound sketches, including one Vitruvian bus driver.

Katie Addleman
Greyhound

The driver said, “Are you fit to travel, sir?” and the crack smoker said, “Are any of us fit to travel?"

Eve Corbel
The 99: Bus Without Pity

How did the 99 B-Line bus route come to be the locus of the most heartless transit rides in Greater Vancouver?

Stephen Osborne
Insurgency

Stephen Osborne discusses the past, present and future of literary magazines in Canada.

Luke MacLean
Je M'Appelle Raphael

Possum-style or straight up dirty.

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.

Anson Ching
Fact
the universal human

Review of "The Invention of the Other" directed by Bruno Jorge (2022).

Michael Hayward
Fact
Getting past the past

Review of "A Primer for Forgetting: Getting Past the Past" by Lewis Hyde.

Daniel Francis
Fact
writing from an early grave

Review of "Orwell: The New Life" by D.J. Taylor.

Michael Hayward
Fact
The peripatetic poet

Review of "Iron Curtain Journals," "South American Journals" and "Fall of America Journals" by Allen Ginsberg.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Fact
Haunted House guest

Review of "A Guest in the House" by Emily Carroll.

Michael Hayward
Fact
Beyond the event horizon

Review of "Antkind" by Charlie Kaufman.

Anson Ching
Fact
Sailing the roaring forties

Review of "The Last Grain Race" by Eric Newby.

Michael Hayward
Fact
BELLE ÉPOQUE GOSSIP

Review of "The Man in the Red Coat" by Julian Barnes.

Peggy Thompson
Fact
More precious than rubies

Review of "Rubymusic" by Connie Kuhns.

Debby Reis
Fact
A not-totally-accurate introduction to the azores

Review of the Netflix series "Rabo de Peixe" (2023) created by Augusto de Fraga.

Michael Hayward
Fact
A Russian Brother and his sister

Review of "A Russian Sister" by Caroline Adderson.

Kris Rothstein
Fact
The messy back of history

Review of "My Grandfather’s Knife: Hidden Stories from the Second World War" by Joseph Pearson

Peggy Thompson
Fact
Have Mercy

Review of "Mercy Gene" by JD Derbyshire.

Michael Hayward
Fact
subterranean mysteries

Review of "Underland" by Robert Macfarlane.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Fact
Championing Trees

Review of "Tracking Giants: Big Trees, Tiny Triumphs, and Misadventures in the Forest" by Amanda Lewis.

Patty Osborne
Fact
Crossing Borders

Review of "Solito: A Memoir" by Javier Zamora

Michael Hayward
Fact
The Two Roberts

Review of "Turn Every Page" directed by Lizzie Gottlieb

Peggy Thompson
Fact
A moment with holden

Review of "Holden After & Before: Love Letter for a Son Lost to Overdose" by Tara McGuire.

JILL MANDRAKE
Fact
POINTS OF INFLECTION

Review of "Some of the Puzzles" by M.A.C. Farrant.

Michael Hayward
Fact
A HOLIDAY IN THE MOUNTAINS (WITH PIE)

Review of "Holiday, 1909" by Charles Chapman.

Anson Ching
Fact
THE BELL KEEPS TOLLING

Review of "For Whom the Bell Tolls" by Ernest Hemingway.

Kris Rothstein
Fact
DEFINED BY DUMPLINGS

Review of "What We Talk About When We Talk About Dumplings" edited by John Lorinc.

Jonathan Heggen
Fact
The Common Shaman

Review of "Shaman" by Kim Stanley Robinson.

Peggy Thompson
Fact
Walk Another Path

Review of "Landlines" by Raynor Winn.

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.

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

Darren Barefoot
Shylock

Mark Leiren-Young's Shylock (Anvil) is similar to The Noam Chomsky Lectures. In this one-man drama, Jon Davies, a Jewish actor who portrays Shylock in a cancelled production of The Merchant of Venice, is accused of betraying his fellow Jews and being

Barbara Small
Shooting Water

Shooting Water by Devyani Saltzman, daughter of the filmmaker Deepa Mehta (Key Porter), is a story about politics, love and the making of Mehta’s film Water. Saltzman’s parents divorced when she was eleven, and she chose to live with her father, a de

S. K. Page
Sign After the X

Marina Roy is the author of Sign After the X (Advance/Artspeak), an entertaining and pretentious volume devoted to the twenty-fourth letter of the alphabet.

Michael Hayward
Silk Parachute

A new collection of essays from John McPhee, staff writer at the New Yorker.

Geist Staff
Sign Crimes/Road Kill

Joyce Nelson's new book, Sign Crimes/Road Kill (Between the Lines), is her long-awaited collection of thirty essays written over the last ten years. This is an important and eminently useful book: mediascape, mindscape, landscape: Nelson keeps her ey

Geist Staff
Signs of the Times

Must the deconstructionists have every last word?—not any more: Signs of the Times by David Lehman (Poseidon) is out in paperback and worth even penny. Here at last, a work that makes sense of the gobbledygook (by identifying it as gobbledygook), the

Helen Godolphin
Sisters of Grass

If you haven't read a book with a horse sex scene before, Theresa Kishkan's Sisters of Grass (Goose Lane) is one place to start. The story reconstructs the life of Margaret Stuart, a young woman living in the Nicola Valley of B.C. at the turn of the

Carra Noelle Simpson
Skids

Cathleen With’s book of short stories, Skids (Arsenal Pulp Press), takes a closer look at the human beings who inhabit this community and other communities like it.

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