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Patty Osborne
Aging: Not For the Faint of Heart

"We don’t often get clear and honest reflections out of hundred-year-old men, which is why Frank White’s new book is such a great read."

Michael Hayward
Artists Behaving Badly

Michael Hayward reviews the honest, outrageous and at times unflattering biographies of Lucian Freud and Rockwell Kent.

Mandelbrot
Private Parts

Mandelbrot reviews The Secret Parts of Fortune: Three Decades of Intense Investigations and Edgy Enthusiasms by Bruce Dern.

Stephen Henighan
Cross-Country Snow

"Cross-country skiing offered me the reassurance sought by the immigrant who is excluded from his locality’s history: a viable alternate route to belonging."

Stephen Henighan
Immigrants from Nowhere

Stephen Henighan asks: what if you don't have a tidy answer to "Where are you from?"

Daniel Francis
Time for a Rewrite

Aboriginal people are creating a new version of Canada, and non-Aboriginals can lend a hand or get out of the way—Daniel Francis on the new Canadian narrative.

Daniel Francis
When Treatment Becomes Torture

Daniel Francis discusses Canada's failing mental health care system and its long history of mistreatment.

Susan Mockler
Hey, Sexy

"I glanced at Jack, his tattooed arms, his gloved hands resting on the wheels of his manual chair. If only I could get my arms back. I could live with anything else."

roni-simunovic
Literary Festival Field Guide

Roni Simunovic catalogues types of literary festival attendees: the jaded art student, the CanLit socialite, the overworked publisher and more.

Eve Corbel
Old Women Cry at Weddings

Eve Corbel on marriage and what comes after the wedding: the monster mortgage, the dreary housework, the contemptuous in-laws and more.

Christopher Gudgeon
Waiting for Our Lord God Jesus Christ…

…in the Maple Leaf Lounge at the John G. Diefenbaker Airport in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.

HOWARD WHITE
How We Imagine Ourselves

When Geist first approached me with the idea of speaking here, I made it known that of all the things I ever wanted to be when I grew up, being an after-dinner speaker was very low on the list.

Eve Corbel
Getting It Wrong

It's human nature to jump to the wrong conclusion–and stick with it.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
All Zeit, No Geist?

Kelsea O'Connor reviews Kitten Clone by Douglas Coupland, a "humanizing portrait" of Alcatel-Lucent, the company that developed the internet we know and love today.

Dylan Gyles
Heavy Reading

Dylan Gyles embarks on a quest to read all of literature's most difficult tomes, starting with Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon.

Michael Hayward
The Chicagoan

Michael Hayward reviews a new compendium of The Chicagoan, the “Lost Magazine of the Jazz Age.”

Michael Hayward
The Life and Breath of the World

Michael Hayward reviews Cascadia: The Life and Breath of the World, co-edited by Trevor Carolan and Frank Stewart.

Stephen Osborne
Vacation

Stephen Osborne rejects the "whiny questions of national identity" posed during the "golden age" of Canadian literature in the 1960s and 70s.

MYLES WIRTH
Hibakusha

Myles Wirth tells the story of Tsutomu Yamaguchi, oil tanker designer and survivor of bombings at both Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Rob Kovitz
Plan Your Getaway

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Werner Herzog, Battlestar Galactica, Maureen Dowd, Alexandre Dumas, Weeds: Season 7—meditations on the plan.

Meags Fitzgerald
Phototeria

Meags Fitzgerald illustrates the early history of one of the first ever photo booths and its creator, a stuttering inventor from rural Ontario.

Nina Bunjevac
Letters to Manitora

Nina Bunjevac's homesick father receives hundreds of mis-addressed letters and postcards from Serbian penpals.

Stephen Osborne
Shackled

Stephen Osborne discusses the notion that Canadian literature is “shackled to a corpse dragging us down into the future.”

Barry Till
Snapshot Art

A collection of export paintings, created as souvenirs for Western tourists by Chinese painters who adopted Western painting techniques.

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.

Rose Burkoff
Do Not Pass Go

Few people have been disappointed by Monopoly, the real estate free-for-all that has been entertaining people all over the world since the 1930s, sometimes for weeks at a time. The love of this game inspired one player, a journalist named Tim Moore,

Brian Joseph Davis
Double Cross: the Hollywood Films of Douglas Gordon

Critical theory is not known to zing and hum with the menacing eloquence of Dashiell Hammett, but Double Cross: the Hollywood Films of Douglas Gordon (Art Gallery of York University/ The Power Plan) by Philip Monk, comes close.

Anna Trutch
Doctor Bloom's Story

The protagonist of Doctor Bloom’s Story by Don Coles (Vintage) is embarrassingly tall, in his mid-50s, Dutch, likes to read good books, and I suspect that he’s handsome in the way that tall Dutchmen are supposed to be handsome. He writes, too, recrea

Geist Staff
Double Duty, Sketches and Diaries of Molly Lamb Bobak, Canadian War Artist

In 1945 Molly Lamb Bobak became Canada's first female war artist, but it took her three years of army life to win that appointment. During those years she kept a unique diary in the form of a handwritten newsletter, as she traveled back and forth acr

Sam Macklin
Drawn & Quarterly Volume 5

Many of the stories presented in Drawn & Quarterly Volume 5 have an unselfconsciously literary feel that is foreign to the North American scene.

Patty Osborne
Drawn & Quarterly

Drawn & Quarterly, an almost quarterly periodical published in Montreal, is the classiest comics anthology on the market. Each issue has knockout stories, rich-but-never-slick art work, and generous design, paper and printing.

Dream City: Vancouver and the Global Imagination

Anyone who has lived in Vancouver for any length of time has watched whole neighbourhoods of gleaming condominiums rise up; no one can quite remember what was there before. Lance Berelowitz, an urban planner, tackles this collective civic amnesia in

Patty Osborne
Dreaming Home

Dreaming Home, an anthology selected by Bethany Gibson (paper-plates), is another little book stuffed full of great stories—eight of them, all by emerging writers. My favourites were "Personal Effects" by Judith Kalman, about a father leaving his hom

S.K. Grant
Earth's Mind

Roger Dunsmore is the author of Earth’s Mind, a collection of essays published last year by the University of New Mexico Press, and he is an old friend of mine. I met him thirty years ago in Europe when he had just finished reading Black Elk Speaks,

Patty Osborne
Earth and Ashes

Earth and Ashes by Atiq Rahimi, translated by Erdag M. Goknar (Harcourt) is a powerful story wrapped up in a perfect little hardcover book (4' x 7") that contains only 81 pages.

Patty Osborne
Easy Day for a Lady

In May I picked up An Easy Day for a Lady by Gillian Linscott (St. Martin's Press), from the mystery shelves at the local library.

Patty Osborne
Eating My Words

I found more history—this time to do with food—in Eve Johnson’s Eating My Words (Whitecap), a collection of essays originally written for the Vancouver Sun. Not all of them are historical, but my favourite ones are, including the history of real food

Michael Hayward
Eat, Memory: Great Writers at the Table

Michael Hayward reviews Eat, Memory: Great Writers at the Table (Norton).

Leah Rae
Edison and Leo

Gimli back my eighty minutes!

Michael Hayward
Empty Phantoms

The Mike Wallace interview is reprinted in its entirety in Empty Phantoms (Thunder’s Mouth Press), an exhaustive collection of “nearly all known printed, recorded, and filmed interviews” with Kerouac: by Ben Hecht on his Chicago radio show in 1958, b

Sarah Leavitt
English Passengers

A fast-paced seafaring adventure from my father’s bookshelf, in which a wealthy Londoner on a religious mission to Tasmania falls in with a crew of Manxmen smuggling tobacco, liquor and French porn.

Patty Osborne
Eunoia

The frontispiece of Eunoia by Christian Bök (Coach House) is a drawing of a cone, a line, a sphere and a paraboloid, all nestled inside a cylinder. This complicated arrangement of lines and points illustrates perfectly how my mind worked while I was

Kris Rothstein
Eve and the Fire Horse

When Julia Kwan’s grandmother died, her parents said the grandmother had been reincarnated as a goldfish. The report from Sunday school was quite different: Grandma had gone to hell. Eve and the Fire Horse is Kwan’s story of a young Chinese-Canadian

Norbert Ruebsaat
Elizabeth Costello

In Coetzee’s most recent book, Elizabeth Costello, the main character—“she, Elizabeth Costello”—wonders if she is “a light spirit,” and I like this idea. Elizabeth Costello is not called a novel either, although on the dust jacket Coetzee is describe

Rose Burkoff
Esther

The story of Esther Brandeau, the first Jew to set foot in New France, could have been a dull historical re-creation, but Esther, by Sharon E. McKay (Penguin), is an action-packed story about a feisty, unusual and believable heroine.

Brian Joseph Davis
Everybody Loves Nothing

An established experimental poet—the kind that comes with a beard and a fear of proper capitalization—was heard recently to denounce video art as “arty farty stuff.” As a writer and sometime video artist myself, I like to think of the two disciplines

Stephen Osborne
Everything Arrives at the Light

If a poem is going to grab you, it has to do it right away, as Lorna Crozier's poems do. Here are a few openers from her new book, Everything Arrives at the Light (McClelland & Stewart): "He had a good wife, he said, / she did not complete his senten

Stephen Osborne
Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s

Everyday Stalinism—certainly a tide to conjure with—by Sheila Fitz-Patrick (Oxford) is subtitled Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s, and is proof that under certain circumstances the everyday is never normal. This is a h

Lara Jenny
Everyone in Silico

The near future of Jim Munroe’s Everyone in Silico (No Media Kings) reads like Naomi Klein’s (No Logo) idea of hell. Ads pop up everywhere and chase you down the street, and they can only be turned off by the very rich.

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