"To properly understand Mayor Gregor Robertson’s ongoing bicyclification of Vancouver, I think we need more books like Jon Day’s Cyclogeography: Journeys of a London Bicycle Courier, an extended essay about 'the bicycle in the cultural imagination.'"
Rebekah Chotem
Coming of Age Near Thunder Bay
Rebekah Chotem reviews Sleeping Giant, a critically-acclaimed coming-of-age film directed by Andrew Cividino.
Antoine Dion-Ortega
South Side Malartic
People are getting either sick or mad, or both.
Mandelbrot
Zero Degree Dining
The Kathmandu Café in multiple dimensions.
KELSEA O'CONNOR
Martel’s Mountains
In The High Mountains of Portugal (Knopf), Yann Martel returns to magic realism in three interwoven stories about lost love and journeys taken to reclaim the past.
Stephen Henighan
Power of Denial
The crowds learned that they could not act effectively in the present without confronting the past, specifically the historical treatment of indigenous people.
roni-simunovic
Teledildonics
"Sex for Dummies, the 'Fun and Easy Way to Have Great Sex in the ’90s,' sat in the window of my neighbourhood bookstore and I bought it because, as a twenty-three-year-old, I was curious about what sex was like before my time."
Michael Hayward
Following Wind, Following Water
Michael Hayward reviews a number of travelogues by Daniel Canty and Bill Porter.
M.A.C. Farrant
4-Day Forecast for Wendy
"Today your dog will decide to end things. Your dog, who is wearing a red vinyl jacket and is tied to the tree on the boulevard outside the thrift store."
Stephen Henighan
Treason of the Librarians
On the screen, only the image—not the word—can become the world.
Sarah Pollard
Mavis in Montreal
Sarah Pollard makes a pilgrimage to Montreal to hang out and write where Mavis Gallant hung out and wrote.
RICHARD VAN CAMP
Time-Tested
Mary Schendlinger reviews M Train by Patti Smith and My Life on the Road by Gloria Steinem.
RICHARD VAN CAMP
Grey Matters
It all started with a zesty little book about getting old.
Stephen Osborne
Grinkus and Pepper
Stephen Osborne is entranced by a pair of eccentric, high profile students while on a university tour in 1964.
Marjorie Doyle
Goin’ to MUN
"'Goin’ to university' was a cover or alibi, rather than a statement of fact, providing the indolent and the imaginative with richer lives than simply having a job."
Rebekah Chotem
American Doppelgänger
"It’s well documented that Hollywood films use Canada to stand in for the US, including Brokeback Mountain, Good Will Hunting, the Twilight series, Rambo’s First Blood and many, many more blockbusters."
Alison McCreesh
Tuque, Socks and Nothing Else
Alison McCreesh encounters snow in May, a bemused gas station attendant and a dumpster to cook behind on a trip across Canada.
Annabel Lyon
The Life You Can Save
Hint: It’s not your own.
M.A.C. Farrant
Strange Birds
We don’t know why the budgie did it. He must have been unhappy. It can’t have been easy for him—pecking the bell, hanging about on the pole.
Norbert Ruebsaat
A History of Reading
Alberto Manguel’s A History of Reading taught me to read.
Michael Hayward
The Muskwa Assemblage
"Poetry is the most personal of the literary arts; laureates notwithstanding, few poets enjoy national stature nowadays, and fewer still are known beyond the boundaries of their native land."
Deborah Ostrovsky
Petites Pattes
Montreal was once the “City of a Thousand Steeples.” Today it’s the city of a thousand church bazaars open on Saturdays to keep the cash flow up.
Patty Osborne
A Cockney in China
At the age of 30, Gladys Aylward, a housemaid, bought a ticket from London, England, to Yangcheng, Shanxi Province, China, in order to work as a missionary.
Eve Corbel
Guide to Literary Footwear
Espadrille, paduka, chopine—Eve Corbel illustrates a guide for readers on some of the fanciest footwear found in literature.
“The first time I met him, he caused me to float to the ceiling"
Joseph Pearson
Fact
No Names
Sebastian and I enjoy making fun of le mythomane. We compare him to characters in novels. Maybe he can’t return home because he’s wanted for a crime.
Minelle Mahtani
Fact
Looking for a Place to Happen
What does it mean to love a band? A friend? A nation?
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.
David L. Chapman
Postcolonial Bodies
Mastery of the self
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.
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.
Stephen Henighan
Reheated Races
Dividing and conquering local populations confines them to manageable administrative units.
CHERYL THOMPSON
Dismantling the Myth of the Hero
In a world dominated by heroes, difference is not tolerated.
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.
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."
LISA BIRD-WILSON
Occupation Anxiety
Lisa Bird-Wilson on UNDRIP, reconciliation, and the anxiety felt by Indigenous people in Canada.
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
Confidence Woman
The woman who called herself Tatiana Aarons gave me an address that led to a vacant lot.
Alberto Manguel
Léon Bloy and His Monogamous Reader
Dogged dedication grants a reader vicarious immortality.
Stephen Henighan
Plague
What we can—and can’t—learn from the plague
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
Art and Blasphemy
Faith seems to shiver when confronted by art.
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
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.
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