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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.

Michael Hayward
Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread

Michael Hayward on "The Baker's Wife" by Marcel Pagnol.

Michael Hayward
Glorious lists

Michael Hayward on "The Glorious Mountains of Vancouver’s North Shore: A Peakbagger’s Guide."

Michael Hayward
Happy Talk

Michael Hayward on "Strange Planet" by Nathan W. Pyle.

Anson Ching
Why Turn to Myths

Anson Ching on "An Orchestra of Minorities."

Anson Ching
The Plot Thickens in the Weimar Republic

Anson Ching on "Babylon Berlin."

Michael Hayward
Nothing Doing

Michael Hayward on "How To Do Nothing."

Daniel Francis
Pandemic Non-Reading

Dan Francis asks you not to read "Midnight in Chernobyl."

Kathleen Murdock
Fighting Fires

Kathleen Murdock on the shiny TV adaptation of "Little Fires Everywhere".

Claudia Casper
Let’s Go For A Walk

Claudia Casper on the way "Lost Lagoon" allows us to experience time rather than get through it.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Linguistics Revolution

Kelsea O'Connor on "Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language" by the Canadian linguist Gretchen McCulloch.

Michael Hayward
Contagion During a Pandemic

Michael Hayward on his surreal experience of watching "Contagion" during lockdown.

Kate Helmore
Escaping Orthodoxy

Kate Helmore on the stark contrast between skinny jeans and ankle-length skirts in the Netflix series "Unorthodox".

Michael Hayward
Baudelaire Through the Looking Glass

Michael Hayward on "The Baudelaire Fractal" by Lisa Robertson.

Shyla Seller
Reel Love

Shyla Seller on "The Forbidden Reel"—a documentary on the legacy and preservation of Afghan Films.

roni-simunovic
Flight of Fancy

Roni Simunovic takes an Air Canada rouge flight from Halifax to Calgary and ridicules the flight attendants' absurd new uniforms.

Michael Hayward
Into the Heart of the Landscape

Michael Hayward on the recursive nature of reading and writing inspiration.

Barry Kirsh
Soulmates: Honoring the Mysteries of Love and Relationships

Barry Kirsch on the juices and nutriments of imagination.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Broken Hearted

Kelsea O'Connor on two comic-obsessed teens in rural Nova Scotia.

JILL MANDRAKE
Unity, Order and Equilibrium

Jill Mandrake on the beauty of crafted visual poetry.

Anson Ching
Zen in Ecotopia

Anson Ching on letting the facts form your privilege.

Patty Osborne
A Korean Friend

Patty Osborne on a North Korean novel from North Korea.

Anson Ching
The City in an Apartment

Anson Ching on a time and place, and the people who live there.

Kris Rothstein
Pencil Pushers

Kris Rothstein on the current state of employment in Bullshit Jobs and Temp.

RICHARD VAN CAMP
Look Out, Not In

Mary Schendlinger on "How the Girl Guides Won the War" by Janie Hampton.

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.

Amy Francis
What Happened Was

The close proximity of my new apartment to a repertory cinema has caused me to go through a movie-going renaissance. Unfortunately, most of my discoveries have been in the mediocre to bad category.

Michael Hayward
Weight

Thirty-three international publishing houses are participating in The Myths, a project in which contemporary writers from all over the world were invited to retell any myth in any way they chose. Trumpeted as “the most ambitious simultaneous world-wi

Daniel Francis
While England Sleeps

American novelist David Leavitt had a legal and literary sensation on his hands when his novel While England Sleeps was published last winter. Apparently Leavitt borrowed heavily from the memoirs of Stephen Spender, the aging English poet, in writing

Geist Staff
White Buick

Greg Hollingshead's new collection, White Buick (Oolichan), contains fifteen nearly impeccable stories. Hollingshead knows how to write: there is nothing superfluous here, his characters are present, the tensions are real enough.

Patty Osborne
When I Lived in Modern Times

In When I Lived in Modern Times by Linda Grant (Granta), Evelyn Sert looks back to her twenties, when she left England for Israel in search of a place in which she might belong. She thought of Israel as a brand new place where Jews would work to buil

Eve Corbel
Wimbledon Green: The Greatest Comic Book Collector in the World

The comics artist and writer Seth dropped in to Sophia Books in Vancouver in early November to promote his new book, Wimbledon Green: The Greatest Comic Book Collector in the World (Drawn & Quarterly), a sumptuous clothbound volume on whose cover the

Michael Hayward
When I'm 64

"A door has closed, another door has opened. You have entered the winter of your life." A review of Paul Auster's memoir.

Stephen Osborne
Wide as the Waters: The Story of the English Bible and the Revolution It Inspired

Wide as the Waters: The Story of the English Bible and the Revolution It Inspired, by Benson Bobrick, is an excellent account of “the most influential book ever published.” It begins by reminding us that the first question ever asked by an inquisitor

Michael Hayward
Words Are Stones: Impressions of Sicily

Carlo Levi is perhaps best known to North Americans for Christ Stopped at Eboli, a memoir of the time he spent in political exile (for anti-Fascist activities) in the Basilicata region of southern Italy, between 1935 and 1936 (the memoir was made int

Jill Boettger
Wisdom and Metaphor

When I saw Jan Zwicky’s latest book, Wisdom and Metaphor (Gaspereau Press) on the shelf at a local bookstore, I bought a copy for myself and another as a birthday gift for a friend.

Jill Boettger
Music Inspired by the Group of Seven

[My husband] and his oldest friend drove down the Nass Highway in an old two-tone blue Volvo station wagon, then parked and sat on the hood to watch the mountains and the setting sun while the Rheostatics’ Music Inspired by the Group of Seven album (

HAL NIEDZVIECKI
My New York Diary

My New York Diary (Drawn & Quarterly) by Julie Doucet. Like all great graphic novels, this book manages to condense a complex set of circumstances into a simple tale: Montrealer Doucet moves to New York to join her boyfriend, who turns out to be para

Carrie Villeneuve
My Name is Rachel Corrie

The Havana restaurant on Commercial Drive was an appropriate choice of venue for My Name is Rachel Corrie, an intimate one-woman show adapted by Alan Rickman from the correspondence and journals of activist Rachel Corrie and presented by Teesri Duniy

Joelle Hann
My Messy Bedroom

I like good deals but sometimes a good tip will serve the same purpose. I was happy to find in Josey Vogels's My Messy Bedroom (Véhicule Press) an intriguing tip on buying bras.

GILLIAN JEROME
Natasha and Other Stories

The seven stories told in Natasha and Other Stories by David Bezmozgis (HarperFlamingo Canada) merit much of the hullabaloo that the book has received in the international press: simple sentences, rigorous verbs and dialogue that makes you feel like

Susan Crean
Nationalism Without Walls: The Unbearable Lightness of Being Canadian

Richard Gwyn tries to get away with two puns in the title of his book Nationalism Without Walls: The Unbearable Lightness of Being Canadian (McClelland & Stewart), trading off on both André Malraux's cultural manifesto of the 1960s Museum Without Wal

Michael Hayward
Neal Cassady: Collected Letters, 1944-1967

As Kerouac later described it, the letter was “a work of literary genius. Neal, he was just telling me what happened one time in Denver, and he had every detail. It was just like Dostoevsky. And I realized that’s the way to tell a story—just tell it!

Stephen Osborne
Native Canadiana

Gregory Scofield's new book of poems is Native Canadiana (Polestar) and it's very good. So is Lola Lemire Tostevin's latest collection, Cartouches (Talonbooks), which came out last year and which we've been meaning to mention here ever since, along w

Norbert Ruebsaat
Neighbours: Freud and Hitler in Vienna

Adolf Hitler is the second man examined in the film Neighbours: Freud and Hitler in Vienna by Manfred Becker, which played recently at the Pacific Cinémathèque in Vancouver. Both the narrator of the film and the psychologist who spoke after the scree

Patty Osborne
Never Going Back

Patty Osborne reviews Never Going Back by Antonia Banyard (Thistledown).

Kris Rothstein
Nelcott Is My Darling

Alice, the protagonist of Nelcott Is My Darling by Golda Fried (Coach House), has left a sheltered life in Toronto to attend McGill University, where she joins the film society and makes friends who are dangerous and cool—all while trying to hold on

Stephen Osborne
Newfoundland Poetry Series

Newfoundland will be five hundred years old in 1997 (a hell of an age for any part of North America), and Breakwater Books of St. John's is marking the event with the Newfoundland Poetry Series, a collection of handsome slim volumes, of which they pl

Never Let Me Go

In his novel Never Let Me Go (Vintage Canada), Kazuo Ishiguro creates an alternate world in which clones are produced, raised in residential school and taught math, history, art and social skills. As they accumulate knowledge, it dawns on these child

S. K. Page
New Chapbooks from Smoking Lung

The indomitably named Smoking Lung launched five more small books into the world in October 1998, at an extravaganza held at the Western Front in Vancouver. Smoking Lung has become proficient in the art of launching chapbooks and getting them distrib

Geist Staff
News from a Foreign Country Came

Alberto Manguel's News from a Foreign Country Came (Random House) has been sufficiently praised by the reviewers; now that it's out in paperback the rest of us can add our praises to theirs. This is, quite simply, a great book with a big theme.