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Geist Staff
I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional: The Recovery Movement and Other Self-Help Fashions

Wendy Kaminer's I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional: The Recovery Movement and Other Self-Help Fashions (Random House-Vintage) took a lot of heat when it first came out. No wonder!

Kris Rothstein
I’m Special: How Individuality Became the New Conformity

In between films I read Hal Niedzviecki’s new book, Hello I’m Special: How Individuality Became the New Conformity (Penguin). It was inspired by the author’s crisis of faith in underground culture, precipitated by a Hallmark card reading “Happy Birth

Patty Osborne
In Her Own Words: Women's Memoirs from Australia, New Zealand, Canada & the United States

In Her Own Words: Women's Memoirs from Australia, New Zealand, Canada & the United States (Vintage), edited by Jill Ker Conway, is a book that invites browsing. All twelve of the memoirs here are excerpts of longer works, so many of the paragraphs en

Geist Staff
In a Glass House

The critics have not been kind to Nino Ricci's new novel, In A Glass House (M&S), and we had hoped to be in disagreement with them. But generally the critics are right: there is a flatness in this book not to be found in The Lives of the Saints, desp

Sewid-Smith Daisy
In Beautiful Disguises

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

Daniel Francis
In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War

David Reynolds, a historian, explains how Churchill did it in his own book, In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War (Allen Lane).

Kris Rothstein
In Praise of Slow: How a Worldwide Movement is Challenging the Cult of Speed

Carl Honoré isn’t the first author to investigate the phenomenon of slow living, but his book In Praise of Slow: How a Worldwide Movement is Challenging the Cult of Speed (Vintage Canada) is the most comprehensive explanation of recent attention to s

Patty Osborne
In Season

When a friend gave me a copy of the CD In Season by Freddie Stone (Unity Records) she warned me that it was a bit odd. The main instrument on this CD is a flugelhorn—which looks to be what you would get if you heated up a trumpet, stretched it out, a

Patty Osborne
In Search of Paradise

I took one look at the cover of In Search of Paradise by Susan Gabori (McGill-Queen's) and put it right back on the shelf. The abstract landscape on the cover looks static and barren so I thought this would be a book without people.

Stephen Osborne
In My Brother’s Shadow

Timm was two years old when his big brother Karl-Heinz, who was eighteen, joined the Death’s Head Division and went to the front in Ukraine. His only memory of Karl-Heinz appears on the first page of In My Brother’s Shadow, translated by Anthea Bell

Patty Osborne
In Plain Sight: Reflections on Life in Downtown Eastside Vancouver

In Plain Sight: Reflections on Life in Downtown Eastside Vancouver (Talonbooks), edited by Leslie Robertson and Dara Culhane, is a book of interviews that have been shaped into stories by seven women who tell us about their everyday lives. Once you g

Geist Staff
In the Company of Strangers

In The Company of Strangers (Talonbooks) by Mary Meigs remains one of the best, if not the very best, book(s) of the decade. If you read nothing else this year, read this one.

J.M. Bridgeman
Into Thin Air

I am not a fan of action adventure travel tales or extremes of physical exertion: everything I know about mountain climbing I learned from Earle Birney's long narrative poem "David," about two boys' summer around Banff. But once I had started Jon Kra

T.Adams
Inside Out: Reflections on A Life So Far

My favourite thing about Evelyn Lau’s new book, Inside Out: Reflections on A Life So Far (Doubleday), is the smart slipcover (design by Kevin Hoch/Pylon), which is made out of a thick, translucent onion-skin paper. It wouldn’t fit in my bag after I l

Stephen Osborne
Interview with Eleanor Wachtel

The current issue of Brick contains a transcript of Eleanor Wachtel's interview with John Berger made last year for CBC Radio, and is by itself sufficient reason to buy the magazine. Especially for what he has to say about using the words "and" and "

Blaine Kyllo
Intacto

I saw Intacto (Lions Gate) at the Vancouver International Film Festival in 2002 and loved it. The film is about an underground ring of gamblers who bet on people’s luck.

Barry Kirsh
Intimacy

I remember laughing a lot when I saw the films My Beautiful Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, both written by Hanif Kureishi, and I also laughed when I read his novel The Buddha of Suburbia, so I was hungry for more comic vision in his latest

S. K. Page
Into the Looking-Glass Wood: Essays on Words and the World

Alberto Manguel, this country's man of letters par excellence, has a new collection: Into the Looking-Glass Wood: Essays on Words and the World (Knopf), consisting of twenty-two essays cast in the assured voice of a man who knows the world and is kno

Patty Osborne
Into the Sun

Speaking of characters, for me there is no better way to understand history than to read about it in a good story that shows you what it was like to be alive back then. Lately I’ve read several children’s books that fill the bill.

Kevin Barefoot
Lynx

Attention, Joyce Nelson fans: we no longer need to scan the contents pages of Canadian Forum and the Georgia Straight for her astute essays on culture. In June 1996, Nelson started publishing Lynx, a Monthly Newsletter in the Public Interest from Jam

Michael Hayward
La Jetée

A hardcover “ciné roman” version of La Jetée has just been republished by Zone Books. The pair—film and book—make a fascinating combination: the duration of each static image in the film highlights the time dimension, while in the book version the im

Cassandra MacLeane
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell

Until Susanna Clarke wrote Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (Bloomsbury), I thought all adult fantasy novels were full of strange kingdoms and warrior princesses, but this delightful 782-page doorstop explores a complex rivalry between an autocratic ma

Michael Hayward
Fair Play

Fair Play, a brief novel by Tove Jansson, is available for the first time in an English translation by Thomas Teale. To quote from the original cover copy, Fair Play is about “two women who share a life of work, delight and consternation,” a relation

Sam Macklin
Fair Weather

Joe Matt’s Fair Weather (Drawn and Quarterly) compiles four recent issues of his autobiographical comic book Peep Show.

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.

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

Lara Jenny
True Confessions of a Big Geek

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.

Darren Barefoot
Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love

The latest book from Canada's Angry Young Playwright Brad Fraser includes a reprint of his infamous Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love alongside the screenplay of his recently produced film version Love and Human Remains (NeWest).

Jill Boettger
Unfamiliar Weather

Unfamiliar Weather (The Muses’ Company) is a first book of poems by Chris Hutchinson, who isn’t so tempered in his questions but plunges into them head-first and thirsty. These poems are afflicted by rain and sometimes flooded.

Mandelbrot
Vancouver Special

Mandelbrot reviews Vancouver Special by Charles Demers (Arsenal Pulp).

Geist Staff
Vancouver: A Visual History

Books these days, like TV miniseries and major sporting events, come with their own parallel narratives, human interest stories designed to get the consumer's attention. Stephen Hawking's medical condition helped turn his difficult philosophical trea

Stephen Osborne
Urban Coyote: New Territory

The first volume of Urban Coyote, which appeared last year (Lost Moose), was subtitled A Yukon Anthology; the second volume, just released, is subtitled New Territory and only in the cover blurb do we understand it to be a “second Yukon anthology.” O

Vernon God Little

The language on the dust jacket and in the reviews of Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre (Faber & Faber) is of the “biting satire,” “hilarious romp” variety, but I was not amused.

Michael Hayward
Venice and the Islamic World, 828-1797

Venice and the Islamic World, 828—1797, edited by Stefano Carboni (Yale University) provides a comprehensive overview of Venice’s artistic heritage, shown within the context of nine centuries of commerce between La Serenissima and the Islamic empires

Lily Gontard
Volver

My recent foray into Oscar-, bafta- and every-other-award-nominated films has left me with “movie glow,” that special feeling you have after watching a particularly good film. You are giddy. You can fly. The dvds that I picked up were Volver (Pedro A

Barbara Zatyko
Visible Worlds

Visible Worlds (HarperCollins), by Marilyn Bowering, starts out in Winnipeg, which probably has a lot in common with Windsor. But the story is too out of this world to be contained there.

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,

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.

Patty Osborne
Three Day Road

Just before the fiftieth anniversary of VE Day, I read Three Day Road (which takes place during World War I) by Joseph Boyden (Viking Canada), so for once I was not put off by the CBC’s obsessive coverage of the occasion. Three Day Road is about snip

Daniel Francis
Thunderstruck

Writer, Erik Larson, seems to have taken out a patent on a new kind of true crime story. In his recent book, Thunderstruck (Random House), Larson juxtaposes the development of wireless telegraphy by Guglielmo Marconi with the case of Dr. Hawley Cripp

S. K. Page
Three Songs by Hank Williams

Three of the stories in Calvin Wharton’s new book, Three Songs by Hank Williams (Turnstone), have appeared in Geist, and it is a pleasure to see them again in this handsome volume. The cover photograph pictures diverging highways somewhere in Texas,

Michelle Adams
Three Seasons

The film Three Seasons, a collage of small stories from modern Saigon, aroused contradictory feelings in me. The opening sequence was ravishing: at dawn in a blossom-covered lake surrounding a disused temple from some much earlier incarnation of Viet

S. K. Page
Three Pagodas Pass: A Roundabout Journey to Burma

George Fetherling has been exploring again, this time halfway around the world, part of the time on a cruise ship from hell. Three Pagodas Pass: A Roundabout Journey to Burma (Subway), Fetherling’s fifty-somethingth book, contains no maps, which is a

Michael Hayward
Time Was Soft There

Jeremy Mercer’s Time Was Soft There (St. Martin’s Press) is an account of “A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co.” In January 2000, Mercer was staying in a seedy hotel in the north of Paris and running out of money when he dropped in at Shakespeare & C

Stephen Osborne
Ticknor

Relief from the enumerative school of writing can be found in Sheila Heti’s first novel. Ticknor (Anansi) is written in the manner of the great narratives of eastern Europe and South America, of Kafka and Stevenson. Neither the subject nor the settin

BILLEH NICKERSON
Titanic: The Canadian Story

Titanic: The Canadian Story by Alan Hustak (Véhicule Press) offers a Canadian spin on the 130 passengers aboard the Titanic who were bound for Canada when the great ship went down. With the exception of the overwritten foreword by John P. Eaton, an A

Alana Mairs
Tiger Eyes

Alana Mairs reviews Tigers Eyes by Judy Blume (Bradbury Press).

Joelle Hann
Tokyo Cowboy

Canada Post hired me in January, and at first I worked at a station in my own neighbourhood, meaning I left my house at 6:48 a.m. to arrive at 6:52 a.m. Life seemed fair; I could have been posted in the suburbs. It lasted only two weeks, but back in

Barbara Zatyko
To Every Thing There Is a Season: A Cape Breton Christmas Story

To Every Thing There Is a Season: A Cape Breton Christmas Story (McClelland & Stewart) is written by Alistair MacLeod and illustrated by Peter Rankin.

Norbert Ruebsaat
Topic Sentence: A Writer's Education

I first read Stan Persky’s essay/story “Topic Sentence” in

Patty Osborne
Transitions of a Still Life: Ceramic Work by Tam Irving

To reach a higher level, one must be both talented and brave, much like Tam Irving, one of Canada’s leading ceramic artists, whose life with clay is examined in Transitions of a Still Life: Ceramic Work by Tam Irving, by Carol E. Mayer (Anvil Press).

Michael Hayward
Trauma Farm

Michael Hayward reviews Trauma Farm by Brian Brett (Greystone).

Stephen Osborne
Trailer Park Boys

Petty thievery, grow-ops and jail-time run fairly common in the first two seasons of Trailer Park Boys.

Norbert Ruebsaat
Travels in the Skin Trade

Thai prostitutes offer love and affection as well as sexual gratification to their Western clients, and it is this combination, I learned while reading Travels in the Skin Trade by Jeremy Seabrook (Pluto Press), that causes the farangs (a Thai word f

Stephen Osborne
Trite Travel Titbits, A Lil Book of Poems

Zine bargoon of the season: Trite Travel Titbits, A Lil Book of Poems by Jim Munroe, a tiny book (two by three inches) published by Lickspittle Ventures (c/o 66 Greyhound Drive, Willowdale ON M2H 1K3). Composed in pencil, printed on an out-of-tune ph

Michał Kozłowski
U2 3D

For u2 fanatics, this may be the most intimate moment they will ever have with Bono; for everyone else, it’s a little awkward.

Kris Rothstein
Untitled: A Bad Teen Novel

Tara Ariano wrote Untitled: A Bad Teen Novel (Writers Club Press) when she was thirteen. It is, she claims, “quite awful,” and was only rescued from obscurity because Tara had friends who persuaded her to share her shame with the world.

Andrew Feldmar
Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth and Art

Lewis Hyde’s Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth and Art (North Point Press) is a wonderful book of old stories about Hermes in Greece, Raven and Coyote in North America, Krishna in India and Eshu in West Africa, and new stories about Picasso,

Geist Staff
Visible Light

Major discovery of the season: Carol Windley's first collection of short fiction, Visible Light (Oolichan). This book is really something: fully realized characters living real lives in a fully realized place.

Geist Staff
Visions of Jude

Visions of Jude, by Daniel Poliquin (Douglas & McIntyre) has great promise: what more could we ask for but a serious novel about an Arctic explorer? The story of Jude the explorer (somewhat reminiscent of V. Steffanson, although Jude doesn't order a

Rebecca Cooper
UTNE

UTNE Reader: The Best of the Alternative Press has been reconceived, redesigned and reborn as UTNE: A Different Kind of Read. Its oomph has been squashed, its bite has been sugar-coated, its edge has been dulled and we are left with a self-helpy, con

Peggy Thompson
Walking With Giants

Patti Smith and Neil Young's 2012 Montreal concert is reviewed by two ardent fans.

Sarah Maitland
What It Is

Learn to draw your life with tips and writing exercises from the American cartoonist Lynda Barry.