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Mandelbrot
Reaching Out

Mandelbrot schleps a pen around for a week to feel it out.

Michael Hayward
Old Cobblers

Michael Hayward on "Autumn" by Karl Ove Knausgaard.

JILL MANDRAKE
Orwell Recollections

Jill Mandrake on "The Orwell Tapes" compiled by Stephen Wadhams.

Thad McIlroy
Working for the Weekend

Thad McIlroy on "The Weekend Man" by Richard B. Wright.

Jasmine Sealy
Small Victories

Jasmine Sealy on "You Can't Stay Here" by Jasmina Odor.

Erin Soros
Carbon

"A folder full of awards proves to the psychiatrist I wasn't always this way."

Stephen Osborne
Espresso Nerd Heaven

"My espresso machine was in the repair shop and I had begun to despair of ever seeing it again."

Jocelyn Kuang
27,000 Cups of Tea

Battenbergs and Victoria sponge at Buckingham Palace.

Rose Burkoff
Sun in Winter: A Toronto Wartime Journal 1942-1945

During World War II, Gunda Lambton and her two young children left England to live in Canada.

Patty Osborne
Barnacle Love

A review of Barnacle Love, a collection of short stories by Anthony De Sa.

RICHARD VAN CAMP
Buried Treasure

Mary Schendlinger challenges a review of a biography of Blanche Knopf, the underrecognized co-founder of Alfred A. Knopf Inc.

RICHARD VAN CAMP
Free to Be

Her story powers along; eventually she will arrive at the start, returning to the losses set down in the preface, losses so terrible we won’t mind if she chickens out.

RICHARD VAN CAMP
Friend in Need

Helen Garner’s novel "The Spare Room" opens in Melbourne as the protagonist and narrator, a middle-aged woman also named Helen (hmm), prepares for the visit of Nicola, her dear friend.

Kris Rothstein
The Native Heath

Stolen honeycombs, a fiancé training to be a missionary in Africa, a picnic marred by quicksand and fog, a fundraising party for pig pensions...

JILL MANDRAKE
Unabashed Drawing

"Drawing the Line: The How to Draw Book" is best suited for young artists who are interested in graphic novels or comic stories.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Notes on Navigation

"This Accident of Being Lost" by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (House of Anansi) is a sharp collection of short stories and poetry that resists the colonialism of contemporary Canada.

Mandelbrot
Ordinary Bodies

Together the images in Bathers constitute a supreme study of ordinary bodies, and demonstrate in visceral ways just how unique is the ordinary body: no two alike, each an expression of itself.

Stephen Henighan
Ethnic Babies

Stephen Henighan discusses the crude first steps to finding a new way to talk about racial reality.

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
Treaties

A young Indigenous woman deals with hippy-artist-pothead boyfriends and car troubles.

Randy Fred
Borderless

Randy Fred reports on migrant workers, then and now.

Michał Kozłowski
Corpse Reviver

The restaurant had white concrete walls and chrome lights dangling from the ceiling that gave the place an operating theatre vibe.

Christine Novosel
Hived Off

Christine Novosel reports from Glasgow on art school, apiary management, Brexit and being a junkyard dog.

Michael Hayward
Jack Kerouac, Francophone

Jack Kerouac, that prototypically “all-American” writer, was born to Québécois parents, and raised in the midst of an expatriate French-Canadian community in the mill town of Lowell, Massachusetts.

JILL MANDRAKE
Are You Smarter Than a Third Grader?

Published by The Writers' Exchange, “this book was created by Division 6, Mrs. Mehnert’s grade 3 class, at Thunderbird Elementary in the winter of 2014.”

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.

ROSEANNE HARVEY
Marginalia: A Cultural Reader

Everyone has a guilty pop-culture pleasure. I read Entertainment Weekly regularly and I'm not afraid to admit it. Mark Kingwell, a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto and a noted magazine writer, has compiled all of his guilty pleasu

Geist Staff
Means of Escape

Hugh Brody has been getting a tough time from reviewers for Means of Escape, his first book of fiction (Douglas & McIntyre), offered anomalously as "a set of stories" which he introduces with the desideratum that we read them in the order in which he

Mean Boy

In Mean Boy (Anchor), the story of nineteen-year-old Larry Campbell, who idolizes a hard-drinking, plaid jacket-wearing, wood-chopping poet named Jim Arsenault, Lynn Coady revels in the Canadian literary scene of the 1970s. This is an affectionate an

Luanne Armstrong
Me Against my Brother: At War in Somalia, Sudan and Rwanda

Sometime in the future, historians will look back amazed at how little attention North American media paid to African issues in this time in history. In Scott Peterson's memoir Me Against my Brother: At War in Somalia, Sudan and Rwanda (Routledge), h

S. K. Page
Martin Frobisher: Elizabethan Privateer and The Arctic Voyages of Martin Frobisher

The story of Michael Locke is a footnote to the story of Martin Frobisher, and is not within the scope of Martin Frobisher: Elizabethan Privateer (Yale University Press).

Kris Rothstein
Measures to Better the World

The Germans have upped the ante on absurdity with the film Measures to Better the World (produced by Jörn Hintzer, Jakob Hüfner), which chronicles a series of invented social movements such as the Green Light Society and Rent-a-Brother. In the most c

Patty Osborne
Melanie Bluelake's Dream

Melanie Bluelake's Dream by Betty Dorion (Coteau) looked like it would interest my eleven-year-old son. It's a small book so I didn't mind carrying it home, and of course, once on the bus, I pulled it out to take a look.

Michael Hayward
Memory: An Anthology

The majority of Memory: An Anthology (Chatto & Windus) is what used to be called a commonplace book, a collection of extracts from other texts. The editors, Harriet Harvey Wood and A.S. Byatt, have selected 155 passages on the theme of memory, which

Michał Kozłowski
Memoirs: 1939-1993

Brian Mulroney’s Memoirs: 1939—1993 (McClelland & Stewart) is longer than The Brothers Karamazov, the index is longer than the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the book costs more than a five-year membership in the Progressive Conservative Pa

Stephen Osborne
Meta Incognita: A Discourse of Discovery: Martin Frobisher's Arctic Explorations, 1576-1578

The Canadian Museum of Civilization is to be commended for Meta Incognita: A Discourse of Discovery: Martin Frobisher’s Arctic Explorations, 1576-1578, a two-volume compilation of everything there is to know about the series of disasters known as the

Stephen Osborne
Meta Incognita: A Discourse of Discovery: Martin Frobisher's Arctic Explorations, 1576-1578

The Canadian Museum of Civilization is to be commended for Meta Incognita: A Discourse of Discovery: Martin Frobisher’s Arctic Explorations, 1576-1578, a two-volume compilation of everything there is to know about the series of disasters known as the

Kris Rothstein
Middlesex

Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex (Knopf Canada) is the eighty-year saga of the Stephanides family, who immigrate to America from Greece. It is a conventional tale, except for a few crucial details.

GILLIAN JEROME
Misconceptions: Truth, Lies and the Unexpected on the Journey to Motherhood

Child-rearing manuals cropped up with a vengeance in the latter half of the twentieth century after Dr. Benjamin Spock produced Baby and Child Care—the all-time best-selling book in American history, second only to the Bible, despite advice such as “

Patty Osborne
Blindness

I was up at the cabin, reading Blindness by José Saramago, translated from the Portuguese by Giovanni Pontiero (Harcourt Brace & Co.) when the power went out. It was about four in the afternoon so I could still read by the light from the window, but

S. K. Page
Blood

Blood (Scirocco) is the play by Tom Walmsley based on “Maxine,” a piece for performance that appeared in Geist No. 16.

Luanne Armstrong
Boiling Point

In Boiling Point: How Politicians, Big Oil and Coal, Journalists, and Activists Are Fueling the Climate Crisis—and What We Can Do to Avert Disaster (Basic Books) by Ross Gelbspan, the intricate politics of oil and money that drive the governmental po

Geist Staff
Blood Vessel

Nevertheless, Canadian writers do persist in the genres, and one is always gratified to come across a Canadian thriller or a mystery novel like Paul Grescoe's Blood Vessel (Douglas & McIntyre) for the sheer pleasure of watching Canadian places and ti

Patty Osborne
Borkmann’s Point

Fans who are missing Inspector Morse, the famous fictional British detective who, unfortunately, has been killed off, should try reading the Inspector Van Veeteren mysteries by Hakan Nesser (translated by Laurie Thompson; Doubleday).

Norbert Ruebsaat
Boyhood: a Memoir

J.M. Coetzee has written a boyhood memoir in the third person, and this is no mean feat; nor is it a postmodern "novel." This could have to do with the fact that Boyhood: a Memoir (Vintage) is set in South Africa, a country where life and history sti

Glenn Broughton
Breathing Fire

It has been said that Canadian poets are a staid, funereal bunch, but there are a lot of exciting new writers who are reinventing the form, such as those in Breathing Fire (Harbour), an anthology of young poets. Re-entering the fray is a true origina

Patty Osborne
Breath: A Novel

Breath offers insight into the minds of adolescent boys, and is also a great way to feel the thrill and power of big waves without actually surfing them.

Stephen Osborne
Broken Pencil; the Guide to Alternative Publications in Canada

Just in: a copy of Broken Pencil; the Guide to Alternative Publications in Canada, Number One. A much needed guide to the weird and wonderful of the periodical press in Canada.

Blaine Kyllo
Brotherhood of the Wolf

Brotherhood of the Wolf, the highest grossing film in the history of French cinema, is a surprise. I thought it was going to be a werewolf movie, which would have been fine, but it is an action-packed tale of political intrigue set during the reign o

Norbert Ruebsaat
British Columbia, a Natural History

Natural history writers often write as if nature were a nineteenth-century corporation. Species “colonize” territory left bare by glaciers; these “pioneer species” establish “dominance,” only to be “displaced” by “opportunistic newcomers” who “invade

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.

Becky McEachern
Nikolski

Becky McEachern reviews Nikolski by Nicolas Dicker (Vintage).

Barbara Zatyko
No Great Mischief

In November while on a trip to Toronto, I went to see the play No Great Mischief, based on the novel by Alistair MacLeod. It was a foot-stompin’ good time (only in very small measure due to the No Great Mischief Special—Glen Breton single malt at $7.

Kris Rothstein
Night of the Prom

In Night of the Prom (Thirteenth Tiger Press), four authors offer original takes on the prom tradition in poetry and prose.

Michael Hayward
No Country for Old Men

Blood flows vigorously in Cormac McCarthy’s new novel No Country for Old Men (Knopf), in which a grim and emotionless gunman methodically sets out to trace and recover the spoils of a drug deal gone wrong in the badlands just north of the Mexican bor

Shannon Emmerson
Night Train

Because I am a fairly new fan of Martin Amis's novels, I picked up slim Night Train (Knopf Canada) with much interest. Amis is well known for novelistic experimentation (his Time's Arrow is written in reverse time), and he doesn't disappoint here.

RICHARD VAN CAMP
Nobody's Mother: Life Without Kids

When a group of people who have been silent begin to speak up, one of the first literary forms to emerge is the memoir. So it is with the twenty-two women whose stories are gathered in Nobodys Mother: Life Without Kids, edited by Lynne Van Luven (Her

Michael Hayward
Novels in Three Lines

Novels in Three Lines is an addictive collection of brief items—“true stories of murder, mayhem, and everyday life”—that were first published anonymously in 1906 in the French newspaper Le Matin; I dare you to eat just one.

Geist Staff
Oblique Litanies

Oblique Litanies by Paul Davies (ECW Press) is a collection of short personal essays—the author calls them "conversations," but "monologues" would be more accurate: they are really half-conversations, the other halves of which are understood to belon

Lily Gontard
O Cadoiro

Erin Mouré’s book of poems, O Cadoiro (Anansi), is seductive in its physical beauty (kudos to the designer) and in the great romance of the verse, which reminded me of the infamously passionate Letters of a Portuguese Nun, a collection of letters tha

Patty Osborne
Nuvisavik: The Place Where We Weave

The pictures in Nuvisavik: The Place Where We Weave, edited by Maria Von Finckenstein (McGill-Queens) are of tapestries that tell the story of traditional Inuit life. The tapestries were woven by members of a weaving studio in Pangnirtung, Baffin Isl

S. K. Page
Observatory Mansions

Observatory Mansions by Edward Carey (Crown) sports a beautiful dust jacket that can be read over and over again, and the chapter starts are accompanied by wonderful illustrations by the author. The lives of the denizens of Observatory Mansions are s

JILL MANDRAKE
Of a Fire Beyond the Hills: A Novel Based on News Stories

For the folks out there who are indifferent to what’s going on in Iraq and Afghanistan, this book seems to whisper, “Stop eating your grilled Gruyère cheese with Roma tomatoes and red onion on open-face sourdough long enough to read me, if you please

Geist Staff
Old Farmer's Almanac

The Old Farmer's Almanac (Yankee Publishing Inc.) does not believe in chaos theory. "We believe," state its editors in the 1994 edition which arrived in the mail recently, "nothing in the universe occurs haphazardly." Which explains how the Almanac c

GILLIAN JEROME
Of Woman Born

Child-rearing manuals cropped up with a vengeance in the latter half of the twentieth century after Dr. Benjamin Spock produced Baby and Child Care—the all-time best-selling book in American history, second only to the Bible, despite advice such as “

Lara Jenny
Old Money

Wendy Wasserstein’s superb writing makes her latest play, Old Money, more compelling to read than most contemporary novels. Old Money concerns a Manhattan mansion and the families that inhabit it at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centurie

Patty Osborne
On Songwriting

Bob Snider is a dishevelled man with a beard and longish hair who writes and sings simple songs that play with language and usually make people laugh. In the first part of On Songwriting (Gaspereau Press), he advises songwriters to use nouns and verb

Stephen Osborne
On Earth As It Is

Steven Heighton's new book, On Earth As It Is, is bigger and much more spread out than his last one (Flight Paths of the Emperor) and more ambitious. His writing is strongest when he writes at a distance; especially fine are his excursions into the p

Stephen Osborne
On Tycho's Island: Tycho Brahe and His Assistants

Students of astronomical history will require a copy of On Tycho's Island: Tycho Brahe and His Assistants by John Robert Christianson (Cambridge), which is a very full account of the great "pre-scientific" science centre established in Denmark in the

Patty Osborne
One Bloody Thing After Another

Patty Osborne reviews One Bloody Thing After Another by Joey Comeau (ECW Press).

Michael Hayward
On the Road: The Original Scroll

With the publication of On the Road: The Original Scroll (Viking), Jack Kerouac takes a step beyond canonization toward beatitude itself. The scroll manuscript of this 1957 novel is one of the sacred artifacts of the Beat era, and conflicting stories

Norbert Ruebsaat
On Kiddie Porn: Sexual Representation, Free Speech and the Robin Sharpe Case

Stan Persky and John Dixon ask important questions in their book On Kiddie Porn: Sexual Representation, Free Speech and the Robin Sharpe Case (New Star). Is possession of a photograph depicting a criminal act a criminal act?

Luanne Armstrong
One-Eyed Jacks

Canadians have not yet produced enough mysteries to define "the Canadian mystery," but Brad Smith's book One-Eyed Jacks (Doubleday) is a welcome addition to this evolving genre. Set in the Toronto of a much earlier era, the story clips along at a fin

S. K. Page
Only A Beginning: An Anarchist Anthology

Everything you need to know about Anarchism in Canada can be found in Only A Beginning: An Anarchist Anthology (Arsenal Pulp), an enormous collection of anarchist writing and publishing in this country since 1976. Here is recorded the genesis and pas

Michael Hayward
Only in Canada, You Say

According to the cover copy on Only in Canada, You Say (Oxford), Katherine Barber is “Canada’s Word Lady,” although it does not say who appointed her to that position.

Michał Kozłowski
Outcast

With Outcast (McClelland & Stewart), Jose Latour, former vice-president of the Latin American branch of the International Association of Crime Writers, shows why many consider him a master of crime and noir writing in this stylish thriller. It has pa