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dispatches
essays
reviews
columns
Anson Ching
the universal human

Review of "The Invention of the Other" directed by Bruno Jorge (2022).

Michael Hayward
Getting past the past

Review of "A Primer for Forgetting: Getting Past the Past" by Lewis Hyde.

Daniel Francis
writing from an early grave

Review of "Orwell: The New Life" by D.J. Taylor.

Eimear Laffan
The Trap Door

This invertebrate does not go looking for prey

Michael Hayward
The peripatetic poet

Review of "Iron Curtain Journals," "South American Journals" and "Fall of America Journals" by Allen Ginsberg.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Haunted House guest

Review of "A Guest in the House" by Emily Carroll.

Michael Hayward
Beyond the event horizon

Review of "Antkind" by Charlie Kaufman.

Anson Ching
Sailing the roaring forties

Review of "The Last Grain Race" by Eric Newby.

rob mclennan
Elizabeth Smart’s Rockcliffe Park

For the sake of the large romantic gesture

Michael Hayward
BELLE ÉPOQUE GOSSIP

Review of "The Man in the Red Coat" by Julian Barnes.

Peggy Thompson
More precious than rubies

Review of "Rubymusic" by Connie Kuhns.

Debby Reis
A not-totally-accurate introduction to the azores

Review of the Netflix series "Rabo de Peixe" (2023) created by Augusto de Fraga.

Michael Hayward
A Russian Brother and his sister

Review of "A Russian Sister" by Caroline Adderson.

Kris Rothstein
The messy back of history

Review of "My Grandfather’s Knife: Hidden Stories from the Second World War" by Joseph Pearson

Christine Lai
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

Sara de Waal
Little Women, Two Raccoons

Hit everything dead on, even if it’s big

Peggy Thompson
Have Mercy

Review of "Mercy Gene" by JD Derbyshire.

Michael Hayward
subterranean mysteries

Review of "Underland" by Robert Macfarlane.

Margaret Nowaczyk
Metanoias

The names we learn in childhood smell the sweetest to us

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Championing Trees

Review of "Tracking Giants: Big Trees, Tiny Triumphs, and Misadventures in the Forest" by Amanda Lewis.

Patty Osborne
Crossing Borders

Review of "Solito: A Memoir" by Javier Zamora

Michael Hayward
The Two Roberts

Review of "Turn Every Page" directed by Lizzie Gottlieb

Ian Roy
My Body Is a Wonderland

Maybe my doctor has two patients named Ian Roy, and I’ve been sent the other Ian’s file

Peggy Thompson
A moment with holden

Review of "Holden After & Before: Love Letter for a Son Lost to Overdose" by Tara McGuire.

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.

Leslie Pomeroy
Experience

For those unfortunates who missed the reading (and I encountered a number on the sidewalk after the event), Amis's book, Experience (Knopf Canada), is comparable: very well written, amusing enough to make you laugh out loud, thoughtful, interesting a

GILLIAN JEROME
Expecting Baby: 9 Months of Wonder, Reflection and Sweet Anticipation

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 “

Kris Rothstein
Exploits of a Reluctant (But Extremely Goodlooking) Hero

Like Adrian Mole, the famous teenaged diarist created by Sue Townsend, the unnamed hero of Maureen Fergus’s Exploits of a Reluctant (But Extremely Good

Stephen Osborne
Fahrenheit 9/11

Toward the end of Fahrenheit 9/11, the movie written and directed by Michael Moore, various U.S. military people and some civilians voice their dismay at finding themselves embroiled in a war that has no meaning.

Extremities

Often I have yearned to go to Newfoundland, as part of an eastward reversal of the migration of the sixties. I felt that yearning again when I read Extremities, a collection of short fiction by the ten Newfoundland writers who make up the Burning Roc

Patty Osborne
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Oskar, the main narrator of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer (Houghton Mifflin), is a precocious nine-year-old who dreams up things like a tea kettle that reads in his father’s voice instead of whistling, and a skyscraper t

Barbara Zatyko
Faceoff at the Summit

I read and reread Faceoff at the Summit (Little, Brown), the story of the Summit Series written by Dryden and Mark Malvoy. Dryden describes the Team Canada star Frank Mahovlich giving the team an inspirational talk before a big game: “‘Gentlemen,’ he

Michael Hayward
1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die

Michael Hayward reviews 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die (Barron's).

Michael Hayward
49th Parallel

It is impossible, now, to see Powell and Pressburger’s 1941 film 49th Parallel (Criterion DVD) through the eyes of the audience it was intended for. To modern viewers it seems a curious mixture of anti-isolationist propaganda and travelogue, framed w

Kris Rothstein
13

The male characters in Mary-Lou Zeitoun’s 13 (Porcupine’s Quill) include a guidance counsellor who takes nude photos of his adolescent pupils and a music teacher who thinks “drums are not for girls.” No wonder Marnie, the thirteen-year-old protagonis

JILL MANDRAKE
9 Freight

A promo for this work described it as erotic, although a more accurate term might be sensual, or even celebratory. Some of the passages, like this one from “Condo,” remind me of certain lines from the later essays of D.H. Lawrence, for they detail th

Lara Jenny
9 of 1: A Window to the World

9 of 1: A Window to the World by Oliver Chin also has a message, but this one lacks the humour and subtlety of Annabelle Frumbatt. Chin tackles the aftermath of 9/11 from an original angle; his book documents America’s twentieth-century international

Geist Staff
A Circle of Birds

A Circle of Birds by Hayden Trenholm (Anvil Press) might serve as a benchmark for the Geist Distance Writing Contest: it crosses more than the requisite number of time zones, and it might certainly be said to be as far out there as the author can tak

Leah Rae
A Christmas Tale

A Christmas Tale offers a decidedly French take on la famille dysfonctionnelle.

Michael Hayward
A Canterbury Tale

Criterion has just released a beautifully restored two-dvd edition of Powell and Pressburger’s A Canterbury Tale (1944), which tells the story of a British soldier, an American soldier and a “land girl,” who meet by chance in a small village not far

Michael Hayward
A Blue Hand: The Beats in India

Deborah Baker uncovers archival letters, shedding new light on the expat Beats in India.

Norbert Ruebsaat
A Chorus of StonesA Chorus of Stones

Susan Griffin's A Chorus of Stones (Anchor Books), is a long meditation on war. She takes war into her self, into her body, and in writing about it she seems to give birth to it.

Lara Jenny
A Common Pornography

Portland is a great destination for fans of the independent presses. During a recent two-day trip, I selected a few must-have zines and chapbooks from a huge selection.

Blaine Kyllo
A Critical Guide to Contemporary North American Directors

The new line of books about film and filmmaking from Wallflower Press in London (available from Columbia University Press here) is a real achievement. A Critical Guide to Contemporary North American Directors, with a whopping 535 beautifully designed

RICHARD VAN CAMP
A Complicated Kindness

Nomi Nickel, the heroine of A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews (Knopf), is a bad girl. How can she help it?

Rose Burkoff
A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906

Any author who can attract a crowd to listen to explanations of changes in plate tectonics theory over several decades deserves applause, and the best-selling author Simon Winchester did just that, in a conversation with Hal Wake at the 18th Annual V

Laurie Edwards
A Discovery of Strangers

Rudy Wiebe makes the physical North present as few writers can. We see the line of light on the spring horizon, taste the lichens that feed the caribou and sometimes the humans, feel the rough granite outcroppings, stand on the edge of the great nort

Stephen Osborne
A June Night in the Late Cenozoic

Robert Allen's new book of stories, A June Night in the Late Cenozoic (Oolichan) is full of near-worlds with dimensions that intersect the three (or is it four) that we navigate by in this world. A man wakes up to find the Gaza Strip being relocated

Kris Rothstein
A Diary 1978–1980

I cringe a little when I think of my old diaries. Luckily, A Diary 1978—1980 by “Shauna” (Two-Star Press) let me relive all of my wacky pre-teen adventures without the embarrassment of my own stupid commentary.

Alberto Manguel
Dante in Guantánamo

After fol

Stephen Henighan
Canada for Spartans

Stephen Henighan exposes the errors, omissions and problems with the Conservative party's study guide for Canadian citizenship.

Alberto Manguel
Burning Mistry

Alberto Manguel examines a modern-day book burning and asks: how is this still happening?

Stephen Henighan
Language and Nation Now

Do shared languages form the natural boundaries of any nation in the world?

Alberto Manguel
A Brief History of Tags

A reflection on the complex and often inexplicable process of bibliographic categorizations.

CARMINE STARNINO
Next Door Café: A Poet's Musings

Reflections on how a bar in Parc Extension, QC, influenced an eponymous poem about "unprogress, inertia, the failure to learn from mistakes."

Alberto Manguel
Imaginary Places

Alberto Manguel remembers a golden era in Canadian writing, comments on our current cultural climate and proposes a brighter future.

Stephen Henighan
In Praise of Borders

I remembered past ordeals: a U.S. official who squeezed out my toothpaste tube on the train from Montreal to Philadelphia, another who hauled me off a bus for a lengthy interrogation.

Alberto Manguel
Pictures and Conversations

"And what is the use of a book," thought Alice, "without pictures or conversation?" —Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Annabel Lyon
Ethical Juices

Parables, cautionary tales, morality plays, allegories—the notion that we can study literary works as texts of ethics is as old as literature.

Stephen Henighan
Writing Bohemia

Bohemia is a good place to grow as a writer, but is it a good place to live one’s whole life?

Alberto Manguel
Karl Kraus, Everybody's Neighbour

He is one of the strangest crea

Daniel Francis
Canada's Funnyman

A misogynist, a racist and an academic walk into a bar...

Alberto Manguel
Final Answers

For most artists, the learning of the craft never ceases, and no resulting work is fully achieved

Stephen Henighan
Becoming French

For an English-speaking Canadian who has been exposed to French from an early age, Paris is the most disorienting city in Europe. It is grandiose, but it is mundane.

Stephen Henighan
The BookNet Dictatorship

According to the numbers, Canada will never produce another Atwood or Findley.

George Fetherling
Adventures in the Nib Trade

No one knows quite how to account for the well-established shops in Vancouver, Toronto and other cities that deal exclusively in fountain pens and fine fountain-pen accessories.

Alberto Manguel
Cautionary Tales for Children

Some years ago, Susan Crean amusingly suggested that nations might be defined or understood through their emblematic children’s books and according to whether the protagonist was male or female.

Daniel Francis
Writing the Nation

Reconsidering the faintly embarrassing Pierre Berton.

Stephen Henighan
Chariots of China

A bibliophile's worst nightmare: being stuck on a plane with a terrible book. A book mistaken for a work of serious history.

Stephen Henighan
Divergence

Stephen Henighan argues that audiences used to have different opinions on the news; now they cannot even agree on the terms of debate.

Alberto Manguel
Metamorphoses

Alberto Manguel compares his life in the French countryside to that of Cain, whom God despised for being a settled crop farmer, and whom he punished by forcing him to wander.

HAL NIEDZVIECKI
The Secret Market

When Frank Warren began collecting the secret thoughts of strangers at PostSecret.com, he inadvertently created a new genre.

Alberto Manguel
Hospital Reading

When you find yourself laid up in a sterile hospital room, which books do you want to have with you?

Carla Elm Clement
Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of a Man Who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books

Yiddish is a language of survival. Although spoken by only five percent of the world's population, it's one of the seven most widespread languages, spoken in every corner of the globe. In Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of a Man Who Rescue

Jenny Kent
Palpasa Café

Jenny Kent reviews Palpasa Café by Narayan Wagle (Publication Nepa~laya).

Stephen Osborne
Oxford Companion to Ships and the Sea

The second edition of the very useful Oxford Companion to Ships and the Sea, edited by I.C.B. Dear and Peter Kemp, contains more than 2,600 entries on a wide range of arcana (oceanic, naval and mythical), some fine drawings of the bowline, the clove

RICHARD VAN CAMP
Oxford Canadian Dictionary

Once a piece of writing has been accepted for publication, and the writer and the editor have worked out the size, shape and tone of the piece, how confidently does the Geist copy editor go in with her red pen and fine-tune it? Assuming that she cann

Tom Sandborn
Paper Boom: Why Real Prosperity Requires a New Approach to the Canadian Economy

This review was accepted for publication by the Vancouver Sun in January 2000, and then rejected by editors who found it "too one-sided and unfair to the bank." This is the first financial book review to be published in Geist, and is offered here in

Lily Gontard
Pan’s Labyrinth

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

Sam Macklin
Pan

Attention-grabbing fact: ninety-nine percent of “serious” writing about “popular” music is one hundred percent useless. One reason for this is an ingrained belief that the social significance of the entertainment industry is more interesting than any

Patty Osborne
Paranoia in the Launderette

While doing research for a proposed TV series on heinous Victorian criminals, the hero of Paranoia in the Launderette, by Bruce Robinson (Bloomsbury), becomes convinced that there are murderers around every corner, hiding under his bed, poisoning his

Patty Osborne
Paradise Travel

In Paradise Travel, by Jorge Franco, translated by Katherine Silver (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Marlon Cruz, a naïve young man from Colombia, finds himself alone in New York City when he has a fight with his girlfriend and storms out of their hotel

Patty Osborne
Paradise

In Paradise by A. L. Kennedy (Anansi), Hannah is a drunk whose story begins as she is coming out of a blackout.

Geist Staff
Paris, France

The current film festival season features two movies written by Geist correspondents Tom Walmsley and Peg Thompson. Walmsley's film is called Paris, France. We can't tell you about it first-hand, as it hasn't come to Vancouver yet, but last week a Gl

Michael Hayward
Paris Tales

Paris Tales, edited and translated by Helen Constantine (Oxford University Press), is another study in the evocation of place: a collection of twenty-two stories by French and other Francophone writers inspired by specific Parisian locales. Many of t

Michael Hayward
Passage Through India

In the early 1960s, the Beat poet Gary Snyder was studying Buddhism in Japan with just one published book of poetry (Myths & Texts) to his credit.

Eve Corbel
Patient No More: The Politics of Breast Cancer

True or False: Breast cancer always shows up on a mammogram, early detection is your best protection, studies show a low-fat diet is linked to a lower incidence of breast cancer, mortality rates for breast cancer are going down. Answers: False, false

Jill Boettger
Past Imperfect

When I first opened Suzanne Buffam’s book Past Imperfect (Anansi), I thought it might strive in a similar way to Yesterday, at the Hotel Clarendon by Nicole Brossard. In the first poem, “Another Bildungsroman,” the speaker grows up, leaves home, fall

Patty Osborne
Paula Spencer

Paula Spencer is forty-eight. She hasn’t had a drink for four months and five days. She wants a drink. She doesn’t want a drink. She fights. She wins. But she’s alone. She’s got kids, two grown, two still at home.... The book is Paula Spencer (Knopf)

Stephen Osborne
Personhood

A review of Julie Otsuka's novel, The Buddha in the Attic, about Japanese picture brides in the 1920s.

Kris Rothstein
Persepolis

This year’s winner of the People’s Choice Award for Most Popular International Film was Persepolis, a mostly black-and-white animated film adapted from the graphic memoir by Marjane Satrapi, who documents her childhood in Iran, first living under the

Mandelbrot
Perfectly Normal

Are the Québecois the only moviemakers in North America with a sense of humour? Latest evidence to hand would certainly suggest so: three movies in the local video place this season and all winners.

Mandelbrot
PhotoGraphic Encounters: The Edges and Edginess of Reading Prose Pictures and Visual Fictions

PhotoGraphic Encounters: The Edges and Edginess of Reading Prose Pictures and Visual Fictions (University of Alberta Press and the Kamloops Art Gallery) contains much promise of “edginess” and “subversion,” once the great virtues of the postmodern ag

Patty Osborne
Pitseolak: Pictures Out of My Life

Pitseolak: Pictures Out of My Life, by Pitseolak Ashoona and Dorothy Harley Eber (McGill-Queen’s), is not a small book but it’s a little story made large by Pitseolak’s energetic drawings.

Stephen Osborne
Playground

Belated discovery of the season: John Buell, whose novel Playground was originally published in 1976 and more recently by HarperCollins in a paperback edition bearing the single quote: "Canada's most brilliant suspense novelist.–New York Times." But

Kris Rothstein
Plenty of Harm in God

The Aran Islands are described in my guidebook to Ireland as isolated, rugged and beautiful. In Plenty of Harm in God by Dana Bath (DC Books), they are the setting for a lot of human drama as well.

Rose Burkoff
Portable Altamont

Portable Altamont by Brian Joseph Davis (Coach House) is an astounding book of comic genius for slackers and Gen X-ers the world over. Davis has created strange, outlandish riffs on popular culture, paying homage to our literary and musical icons, by

Sam Macklin
Popeye

E.C. Segar’s earliest Popeye comics have just been made available in a gorgeously designed hardcover, also from Fantagraphics. Segar’s Thimble Theatre strips featured some of the most charming characters ever to appear in newsprint, including the hil