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Daniel Zomparelli
Rocksalt: An Anthology of Contemporary B.C. Poetry

Daniel Zomparelli reviews Rocksalt: An Anthology of Contemporary B.C. Poetry edited by Mona Fertig and Harold Rhenisch (Mother Tongue).

Michał Kozłowski
Sarajevo Marlboro

Michal Kozlowski reviews Sarajevo Marlboro by Miljenko Jergovic, twenty-nine (very) short stories set in Sarajevo during the Bosnian war of the early 1990s.

Sarah Leavitt
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

Sarah Leavitt reviews Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, Alison Bechdel's first graphic novel full of vibrantly alive, expressive characters and richly satisfying extras.

Patty Osborne
Hunger

It takes Patty Osborne a month to get halfway through the 462 pages of the Giller Prize-winning novel The Polished Hoe, which is only halfway through the 24 hours during which the story takes place.

The Eyre Affair

Karen Schendlinger reviews The Eyre Affair and Lost in a Good Book by Jasper Fforde, two smart, allegorical crime novels starring a detective named Thursday Next.

Patty Osborne
The Girl Without Anyone

The Girl Without Anyone is a series of linked short stories by Kelli Deeth, dealing with a teenage girl's budding sexuality, self-doubt and confusion. Reviewed by Patty Osborne.

Jocelyn Kuang
The Jonathans

Two different novels about family dysfunction—This Is Where I Leave you and The Corrections—written by two different Jonathans. Reviewed by Jocelyn Kuang.

S.K. Grant
The Joy of Cooking

"Scallions are eaten raw by self-assertive people": Why S.K. Grant was surprised to discover The Joy of Cooking as a literary work.

Clare Coughlan
The Love Crimes of Gillian Guess

Clare Coughlan reviews her experience seeing (and before that, waiting in line to see) The Love Crimes of Gillian Guess.

Michał Kozłowski
The Mole Chronicles

Michal Kozlowski reviews Andy Brown's debut novel The Mole Chronicles, which charts a sibling relationship involving moles, comic books, swimming pools, kidnapping, culture jamming and more.

Patty Osborne
Women of the World: Women Travelers and Explorers

Patty Osborne reviews Women of the World: Women Travelers and Explorers by Rebecca Stefoff, a book—complete with maps, drawings and photographs—that describes the travels of nine women.

Stephen Osborne
Shoot!

Despite high hopes, Stephen Osborne calls Shoot! by George Bowering his biggest disappointment.

Luanne Armstrong
Simple Recipes

Luanne Armstrong reviews "three of the better books of short stories to come out in 2001"—Kingdom of Monkeys, Simple Recipes and Sputnik Diner.

Michał Kozłowski
Stickboy: A Novel in Verse

In Stickboy, Shane Koyczan asks: what happens when the bullied begins to bully back? Reviewed by Michal Kozlowski.

Kris Rothstein
Souvenir of Canada

Kris Rothstein reviews Souvenir of Canada, which appeared at the 2005 Vancouver International Film Festival, and Douglas Coupland's role in it and appearance at the festival.

Neil MacDonald
Streeters

Neil MacDonald reviews Streeters, a compilation of Rick Mercer's solo rants and raves from 22 Minutes, covering everything from Mike Harris in a Speedo to "Canuba," a sovereignty association between Canada and Cuba.

Carra Noelle Simpson
Teacher Man

Carra Noelle Simpson reviews Teacher Man and Half Nelson, two works on life in the inner-city high schools of New York.

Michael Hayward
The Bottom of the Harbor

"Old New Yorker writers never die, they just keep being republished in shiny new editions." Michael Hayward reviews collections of New Yorker pieces.

Sewid-Smith Daisy
The Onion

Melissa Edwards finds three references to Sisyphus in three different publications—all in the same day.

Holly Doyle
Thirty-three Teeth

Holly Doyle reviews Colin Cotterill’s novel Thirty-three Teeth, featuring Dr. Siri Paiboun, the seventy-two-year-old coroner of Laos.

Patty Osborne
Through Black Spruce

Joseph Boyden shows a darker side of First Nations life—darker, but not dark enough to stop one from reading it. Reviewed by Patty Osborne.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Truth is Stranger

Kelsea O'Connor reviews Let's Pretend This Never Happened by Jenny Lawson, a lighthearted look at the embarrassing moments in the author's life.

GILLIAN JEROME
What to Expect When You’re Expecting

As a mother-to-be, Gillian Jerome cynically reviewed eight books on child care to glean what it means to be a mother in the twenty-first century.

HAL NIEDZVIECKI
White Lung

Hal Niedzviecki says White Lung by Grant Buday is the comic novel that should have been given to delegates at the WTO in Seattle.

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.

Kate Bird
The Turning

Tim Winton’s elegiac collection of seventeen linked short stories, The Turning (HarperCollins), explores the frailty and foibles of human existence, the power and pain of memory and the mighty wildness of western Australia. Characters reappear in lar

Daniel Francis
The Story of Lucy Gault

My local library has introduced a program called Speed Reads. In the interests of increasing the circulation of the most popular books, a patron may borrow a best-seller for just a week, and very steep fines are imposed for late returns. Under these

Michael Hayward
The Tree of Meaning

For many years, the poet, linguist and typographer Robert Bringhurst has immersed himself in studying the Aboriginal cultures and languages of the Pacific northwest coast, studies that culminated in his acclaimed Masterworks of the Classical Haida My

Patty Osborne
The Stowaway

In The Stowaway, a novel by Robert Hough (Vintage Canada), the stowaway is Romanian, the crew is Filipino, the officers are Taiwanese and the ship is the Maersk Dubai. When the real Maersk Dubai landed at Halifax Harbour in 1996, its officers were ar

Lily Gontard
The Tender Bar

The Tender Bar, the first book by J.R. Moehringer (Hyperion), a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, could be subtitled “The Secret Hearts of Dysfunctional Men.” In his memoir of growing up “fatherless” in Manhasset, Long Island, Moehringer recounts hi

Kris Rothstein
The Tracey Fragments

Fifteen-year-old Tracey Berkowitz is on a bus, naked except for a shower curtain. How did she get there? Which pieces of her life story as a misfit are reality and which are fantasy? Director Bruce McDonald tackles these questions by fracturing the s

Michael Hayward
The Surface of Meaning: Books and Book Design in Canada

Every aspect of a book—the page dimensions, paper type, font, length of text line, space between text lines, margin sizes and so on—is the result of a designer’s decision. When these decisions are well made, then reading a book’s text is like reading

Patty Osborne
The Story of My Face

The Story of My Face by Kathy Page (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) is about pictures that we don’t want to see or are forbidden to see. The face of Natalie, the main character, was badly scarred in a childhood accident; as an adult she returns to the small t

Daniel Francis
The Story of Dunbar: Voices of a Vancouver Neighbourhood

The Story of Dunbar: Voices of a Vancouver Neighbourhood (Ronsdale Press), edited by Peggy Schofield, feels a bit like a family album.

Stephen Osborne
The Three Day Novel

The Three-Day Novel, which turns nineteen on Labour Day [1996], remains one of Canada's few contributions to the world of literary form. (Milton Acorn's jack-pine sonnet is the only other one I can think of at the moment.) Writing a novel in three da

S. K. Page
The Time Being

Why don't we hear more about the books of Mary Meigs, who is one of the great prose writers of our time? On her last tour she appeared in Vancouver for a single reading in a bookstore and then she was gone, uninterviewed and unsung. Did this happen i

Kris Rothstein
The Understanding

The Understanding by Jane Barker Wright (Porcupine’s Quill) offers one of the most convincing fictionalizations of seventies hippie culture I’ve ever read. The novel is the story of the bohemian Whitechapel clan; artsy Solly and Isobel and their broo

Kevin Barefoot
The Utne Reader

The Utne Reader served us coffee aficionados a treat this month, by devoting the November/December issue to a study of the enigmatic bean. Of the nine pieces included in the "Coffee Madness" section, Mark Schapiro's "Muddy Waters" is the most enlight

Kris Rothstein
The Waterproof Bible

Kris Rothstein reviews The Waterproof Bible by Andy Kaufman (Random House).

Barry Kirsh
The Unconsoled

Mr. Ryder, the storyteller in Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled (Knopf), speaks so sincerely, humbly and clearly in the first person that we hear his voice inside ourselves; this inspires trust.

Kris Rothstein
The Virgin Spy

Kris Rothstein reviews The Virgin Spy by Krista Bridges (Douglas & McIntyre).

Patty Osborne
The Voice Imitator

A thin little book, The Voice Imitator (University of Chicago Press) by Thomas Bernhard, translated by Kenneth J. Northcott, made me laugh out loud in the dark as I sat propped up in bed, my reading light clipped to the back cover, while everyone els

Geist Staff
The Way of a Boy

The Way of a Boy is Ernest Hillen's story about his life in a Japanese prison camp in Java during World War Two. Hillen was only a boy at the time—he spent ages seven to eleven in the camp—and instead of looking back from the vantage point of adultho

Daniel Francis
The Very Richness of That Past: Canada Through the Eyes of Foreign Writers

Greg Gatenby must be stopped. A couple of years ago he edited a collection of remarks about Canada by various foreign writers. Now he has followed up with a second thick collection, The Very Richness of That Past: Canada Through the Eyes of Foreign W

Michał Kozłowski
The Wigmaker

The Wigmaker, C.E. Coughlan’s new book (Smart Cookie Publishing, webspotter.com/smartcookie), is a collection of fourteen short stories, some of which have previously appeared in Geist and other literary magazines.

Trevor Wilson
The Wide World Dreaming

I’ve read The Wide World Dreaming by JoAnne Soper-Cook (Breakwater) twice now and I’m still surprised by how good it is. It’s written by a woman from St. John’s, Newfoundland, and published by a company there that needs to learn more about good layou

Blaine Kyllo
The Weight of Water

I really want to love Kathryn Bigelow films. She’s a talented director and has never failed to take on challenging projects. She’s a talented director and has never failed to take on challenging projects. My problem with her directing is that she is

Lily Gontard
The Walking Boy

Sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll seem a little boring when compared to Lydia Kwa’s concoction of sex, bisexuality, homosexuality, tortured spirits, innocence, desire, betrayal, greed and love in her second novel, The Walking Boy (Key Porter). Kwa deftly

Patty Osborne
The Woman in the Yard

I was eager to read Stephen Miller’s The Woman in the Yard (Picador) because I had enjoyed Miller’s previous mystery novel, Wastefall. His publisher did not respond to my requests for a review copy, but fortunately Miller is a neighbour of mine and w

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.

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

Patty Osborne
Swimming to Antarctica: Tales of a Long-Distance Swimmer

On the Labour Day weekend a friend and I jumped into a secluded lake on an island in B.C. and I thought of Lynne Cox, author of Swimming to Antarctica: Tales of a Long-Distance Swimmer (Harcourt) because the lake had been stirred up by wind and rain

Daniel Zomparelli
Suicide Psalms

Daniel Zomparelli reviews Suicide Psalms by Mari-Lou Rowley (Anvil Press).

Kris Rothstein
Sun Signs

Kayleigh, the teenage protagonist of Sun Signs by Shelley Hrdlitschka (Orca), is fighting cancer, and her treatments are so intense that she’s been forced to drop out of high school. She completes her schoolwork by correspondence and discusses her as

Patty Osborne
Sunnybrook: A True Story with Lies

The inviting cover and unique layout of Sunnybrook: A True Story with Lies by Persimmon Blackbridge drew me in and kept me there. The story starts when Diane gets a job at the Sunnybrook Institution for the Mentally Handicapped by saying she had work

Lara Jenny
Super Geek Girl

I never expected to find two new zines about geeky gay girls. Sarah Dermer, author of the Toronto zine True Confessions of a Big Geek, should really get together with Joy, who publishes Super Geek Girl in Portland.

Stephen Osborne
Surviving Saskatoon: Milgaard and Me

The best $4.50 that you can spend this year will be on a copy of David Colliers's Surviving Saskatoon, a comic book account of the wrongful persecution and conviction of David Milgaard in Saskatoon in 1971 (when Milgaard was declared innocent in 1999

Stephen Osborne
Take This Waltz: A Celebration of Leonard Cohen

Book best read while standing in the aisle: the Leonard Cohen Must Be Getting Old By Now Memorial Volume. Title: Take This Waltz: A Celebration of Leonard Cohen (Muses Company).

Claire Pfeiffer
Taking Back the Rack

Yes, fiction can be quite enjoyable, but let’s admit it: nothing can match the experience of curling up with a long, detailed report on how Canadian magazines are selling on newsstands, such as Taking Back the Rack: Amid New Challenges, Canadian Maga

Kris Rothstein
Tales of Innocence and Experience

Tales of Innocence and Experience (Bloomsbury) is Eva Figes’s lyrical exploration of the bond between grandmother and granddaughter. In it she takes on the monumental subject of the loss and pain that accompany the acquisition of knowledge.

Patty Osborne
Tarnished Icons

When I got home after buying Tarnished Icons by Stuart Kaminsky (Ballantine) for our family's favourite viola teacher, I realized that I had the same tide in my pile of unread library books. So for a few days I had the luxury of never having to go up

Patty Osborne
Tatsea

Tatsea and her husband Ikotsali, the main characters in Armin Wiebe’s book Tatsea, are searching for each other in the Canadian subarctic. Tatsea and Ikotsali are members of the Dogrib tribe who are separated when their village is raided by Cree from

Stephen Osborne
Tango on the Main

The best pen-in-a-shirt-pocket photograph you will ever see is the author photo on the back cover of Joe Fiorito's new book, Tango on the Main (Nuage).

GILLIAN JEROME
Tempting Providence

Frontier stories are known to be great cultural archives but boring reads. Not so with Theatre Newfoundland Labrador’s Tempting Providence, written by Robert Chafe, directed by Jillian Keiley and performed at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre in Jan

Daniel Francis
Terra Infirma: A Life Unbalanced

In 1988 Jean Mallinson, a West Vancouver poet and essayist, entered hospital for abdominal surgery. She came through the operation without mishap, and afterwards her doctor prescribed gentamicin, an antibiotic intended to stave off infection during r

Patty Osborne
Tell No One Who You Are

For my niece in Ottawa, I chose Tell No One Who You Are by Walter Buchignani (Tundra Books). It is an account of three years in the life of a young Jewish girl in Belgium—three years during which she was hidden from the Nazis by non-Jews.

Michał Kozłowski
That or Which, and Why

Evan Jenkins collected and expanded material from his column in the Columbia Journalism Review to create That or Which, and Why (Routledge), a clear and succinct guide to English language, grammar and usage.