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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.

Stephen Osborne
Mr. Tube Steak and the Schoolteacher

Former Iranian schoolteacher, Mehrar Arbab escaped execution, moved to Canada and now earns a living sellingAll Beef Smokies.

M.A.C. Farrant
The Outlook for Quirky

Space travel, world religions and quotes from Pascal are just a few of the topics covered in these little phone calls between friends.

David Albahari
My Father’s Hands

Walking along the streets of Paris, watching thousands of tourists using their digital cameras, I remember the way my father held his old Kodak when he took photographs.

David Albahari
My Father’s Hands

Walking along the streets of Paris, watching thousands of tourists using their digital cameras, I remember the way my father held his old Kodak when he took photographs.

Stephen Osborne
The Banff Protocols

Banff: a collection of scenic views and a setting for the Avant-Garde?

Stephen Osborne
Stories of a Lynching

On the night of the last Wednesday of February 1884, at about ten o’clock, a gang of armed men entered a farmhouse near Sumas Lake in southern B.C., woke the inhabitants at gunpoint and took away with them a teenage boy who was being held in the cust

Susan Crean
Milton and Michel

Michel Lambeth's photo of Milton Acorn brings back memories of dancing, love poetry and a revolution.

Stephen Osborne
Virtual City

Onstage a group of writers and critics sat in a semicircle and spoke earnestly about whether or not a national literature could exist in two languages.

Margaret Malloch Zielinski
Boarding with Mrs. Higgins

Mrs. Higgins lived with her legless brother and her blind husband in a tall, narrow old house in Nottingham. The room I rented from her in the 1950s was just below her sitting room, where she kept a life-size portrait of Lenin.

Christy Ann Conlin
Coming Ashore

The dog turns his butt to the stinging spray and wind but my boyfriend and I face the water, watching the massive waves crash on the shore. We are drenched in seconds and we have to shout over the wind. It’s exhilarating.

Jill Boettger
Born in the Caul

According to legend and prophecy, this child would possess the second sight.

Edith Iglauer
Red Smile

When I was living in New York in the 1960s, almost everyone I knew was walking or running to the office of some psychiatrist.

Rachel Lebowitz
Cottonopolis

"A rookery of dead ends and curved lanes. Everywhere heaps of debris. Pigs rooting in eyes." Explore Manchester during the Industrial Revolution, in poem.

Stephen Osborne
Dancing with Dynamite

Public bombings have a profound effect on cities, even if the bomb is a coconut filled with beans and rice.

Edith Iglauer
Snowed In at the Sylvia

I had my car at the hotel but snow was expected, and driving home alone in a snowstorm around the hairpin curves edged with deep ravines on Highway 101 was the last thing I wanted to do.

Norbert Ruebsaat
Ursula

She was a conversationalist, a home builder and a deliverer of calves. Those who loved Ursula will miss her adventurous soul.

Edith Iglauer
Wait, Save, Help

When I was twelve my father enrolled me in a typing course from which I emerged typing with two fingers.

Edith Iglauer
My Lovely Bathtub

First published in Geist #30 and now in the 20th Anniversary Collector's Edition.

Stephen Osborne
Stranger

Last month in Calgary a friend showed me the way to Louise Bridge by sketching a map with her fingertip on the dust jacket of The Wolf King, a book by Judd Palmer that we had been admiring at her kitchen table.

Jane Silcott
Lurching Man

One instinctive action saves a life in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

Veronica Gaylie
The Guy Upstairs

Veronica Gaylie encounters Trevor Linden, the Greatest Canuck Who Ever Lived, in economy class.

Veronica Gaylie
Memory Test

Does the individual have difficulty finding words, finishing sentences or naming people or things?

Manfred Buchheit
Burin Highway

From Mapping a Sense of Place: The Photographs of Manfred Buchheit, 1972-1995, an exhibition curated by Bruce Johnson for the Art Gallery of Newfoundland and Labrador.

Jane Awde Goodwin
Dear Doctor

The Health Hotline can only do so much for the exotic animals swimming in a hole on your forehead.

David Albahari
Bird in the Willow

Some

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.

Patty Osborne
Bucket Nut

On a lighter note, Bucket Nut by Liza Cody (Doubleday) was recommended to me by a fellow mystery buff who dropped by the office the other day. I like Liza Cody's mysteries anyway, but Bucket Nut is by far the most outrageous I've read.

HAL NIEDZVIECKI
Budavox

Budavox (DC Books) by Todd Swift is a first collection of poems. Swift writes like something still matters, but he doesn't know what.

Amy Francis
Bullets Over Broadway

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.

Eve Corbel
Caldecott & Co.: Notes on Books & Pictures

After dinner I retired with my newly acquired copy of a twenty-six-year old book, Caldecott & Co.: Notes on Books & Pictures (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), essays by Maurice Sendak, author and illustrator of In the Night Kitchen, Where the Wild Things Ar

Adam Lewis Schroeder
By a Frozen River

Tight, pithy, replete with thinly veiled autobiographical details of a childhood in Quebec and an adult life spent as an ex-pat writer in, of all places, Cornwall, the stories were short enough that I could read two or three on a twenty-minute bus ri

Mindy Abramowitz
Bust

Bust magazine is dedicated to giving voice to the generation of women caught between Cosmo and Sassy. It is also font-crazy and printed on smudgy newsprint.

HAL NIEDZVIECKI
Caesarea

Caesarea (ECW Press) by Tony Burgess. There's no better place to spend New Year's Eve than Caesarea, a small town on the shore of menacing Lake Scugog, a place to forget your troubles, relax, do a little fishing, settle into your lawn chair on the ou

Leah Rae
Buster Keaton: Cut to the Chase

According to Hollywood legend, it was Harry Houdini who gave Buster Keaton the name “Buster” after watching the young Keaton tumble down a flight of stairs. This myth is debunked in Marion Meade’s biography Buster Keaton: Cut to the Chase (Da Capo P

Barry Kirsh
Can You Wave Bye Bye Baby?

The storyteller's verve in Can You Wave Bye Bye Baby? (McClelland & Stewart), by the Montreal writer Elyse Gasco, speaks volumes in which time and place hardly matter. Gasco writes in the second person in four of the seven short stories; in one of th

Michael Hayward
Campo Santo

When W. G. Sebald died in an automobile accident in December 2001, just four of his books were available in English translation. Those four books had earned him considerable praise (Michael Ondaatje called him “the most interesting and ambitious writ

Barry Kirsh
Can You Wave Bye Bye Baby?

The storyteller's verve in Can You Wave Bye Bye Baby? (McClelland & Stewart), by the Montreal writer Elyse Gasco, speaks volumes in which time and place hardly matter. Gasco writes in the second person in four of the seven short stories; in one of th

Jon Burrows
Canada's Gigantic

Another oddly-shaped book protruding from the shelf at the library the other day was Canada's Gigantic (Summerhill), a collection of photographs by Henri Robideau, a Gianthropologist photographer who searches out Giant Things in the Canadian landscap

Sarah Pollard
Canada in the Fifties

As the century turns, generational retrospectives are cropping up everywhere—a look back requires only file footage, the cut and paste. Recent books documenting Canadian life in the 1950s include Canada in the Fifties (Viking), selections from the ar

Stephen Osborne
Canada's Boreal Forest

The boreal forest is the mysterious place most of us are aware of only to the extent that we know we don’t want to get lost in it: the deep unconscious of a nation (Champlain called it the land God gave to Cain).

Patty Osborne
Canada in the Rough

The show, called Canada in the Rough, is sponsored by companies that sell firearms, ammunition, trucks, outdoor gear and crossbows, and it includes a Rough Cooking segment (caribou stew with prunes and dried apricots served over couscous) and a Rough

Geist Staff
Canadian Dreams: The Making and Marketing of Independent Films

Michael Posner's Canadian Dreams: The Making and Marketing of Independent Films (D&M) is a passionate and at times hair-raising account of what's right and what's wrong with Canadian moviemaking. Posner follows the making and marketing of ten very di

Stephen Osborne
Canadian Literary Power

Somewhat more put-downable is Canadian Literary Power by Frank Davey (NeWest Press), which took me a week to read. This is a book filled with Serious Thinking, so of course it's slow, and I'm still not sure how much of it I can agree with.

Daniel Francis
Canada’s House: Rideau Hall and the Invention of a Canadian Home

On the same day that a parliamentary committee scolded the governor general for profligate spending by slashing her annual budget by ten percent, a book that purports to give the full story about life at Rideau Hall arrived on my desk. Working on the

Geist Staff
Canadian Exploration Literature: An Anthology

There is something unexplained about Germaine Warkentin's Canadian Exploration Literature: An Anthology (Oxford). This book is a collection of lengthy extracts from the written accounts of two dozen well-known explorers, starting with Pierre Radisson

Geist Staff
Canadian Notes and Queries

Curmudgeons of a more bibliophiliac bent should be subscribing to Canadian Notes and Queries, a fascinating magazine of little-known facts of interest that Doug Fetherling took over a few years ago with the intention of broadening its range and its r

Sam Macklin
Captain Beefheart: The Biography

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

S. K. Page
Cape Breton Road

The opening pages of Cape Breton Road by D. R. MacDonald (Harcourt) are as good as it gets: a brilliant evocation of person and place. But soon after that, things began to settle down into mere realism, and then I had to put the book aside when I hit

Barbara Stewart
Captain Alex MacLean: Jack London's Sea Wolf

Barbara Stewart reviews Captain Alex MacLean by Don MacGillivray (UBC Press).

Michael Hayward
Celine and Julie Go Boating

Jacques Rivette’s 1974 film Celine and Julie Go Boating (British Film Institute dvd) is set in a Paris that is half Wonderland, half real, a Paris in which events unfold according to the same dream-like logic that astonished Alice, and that entrances

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.

James Baker
Get Your War On

In late May 2003 the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) hosted a discussion forum called Hell No: Designers and the War, featuring the design historian Steven Heller, the design icon Milton Glaser (perhaps most known for the “I Love NY” symbol

JILL MANDRAKE
Ghosts: True Tales of Eerie Encounters

The question that pops to mind as you read Ghosts: True Tales of Eerie Encounters (TouchWood) is, “Why does British Columbia house so many spooks?” Robert Belyk does not provide a specific answer, but he does say that ghosts are likelier to manifest

Daniel Francis
Gettysburg

I enjoyed Killer Angels so much that I pursued my Civil War studies by renting a video of Gettysburg, the made-for-TV movie based on the book. The movie clocks in at somewhere close to four hours, and you have to put up with a lot of famous American

Norbert Ruebsaat
Gentle Northern Summer

Recently I was thinking about the difference between Brecht's poetics and Rilke's. Brecht seems to be entirely ironic.... This conundrum came back to me when I read George Stanley's Gentle Northern Summer (New Star), which is a beautiful and powerful

Patty Osborne
Ghost Hotel

Ghost Hotel is the new mystery by Jackie Manthorne (gynergy books), first of what will be a series, and it features "Harriet Hubbley: down-to-earth dyke from Montreal." This story is a great window into the lesbian lifestyle, but not a really satisfy

Kris Rothstein
Girl Culture

Girl Culture (Chronicle/Raincoast) is a coffee table book that is both attractive and disturbing. Lauren Greenfield’s photographs document how American girls relate to fashion, culture and their bodies as they grow up in the most superficial society

Lara Jenny
Fuzzy Heads are Better

Fuzzy Heads are Better (106 Press) is a small, thick zine with a lovely woodblock print on the cover. Patti Young Kim subscribes to the punk DIY ethic of zine making, including found photos, recipes, receipts.

Derek Fairbridge
Glenn Gould: A Life in Pictures

What is there to say about Glenn Gould that hasn’t already been said? Anyone who is interested in the subject is already familiar with the many mythologies surrounding this gangly, pill-popping agoraphobe who wore winter coats year-round and played t

Stephen Osborne
Gold Fools

Is it true that Gilbert Sorrentino has written a brilliant novel called Gold Fools (Green Integer), a story of grizzly prospectors and leathery cowpokes, entirely in questions?

Stephen Osborne
Going Ashore

Newly collected stories and memoirs from the great Mavis Gallant.

Stephen Osborne
Goin' Down the Road

The great Canadian road movie is finally on DVD. If you missed Goin’ Down the Road when it came out in 1970 and then disappeared, apparently forever, you can see it now for the first time, having heard about it all your life from friends who are more

Glenn Broughton
Girl's Guide to Giving Head

Re-entering the fray is a true original, Sheri-D Wilson, "action poet extraordinaire," whose work lurks on a jazzy playground of sex, glamour and intrigue—the frenzied visions of a James Bond girl. Her latest poetry collection cheekily entitled Girl'

Anna Trutch
Golden Goa

People who travel in India and return always sound amazed in retrospect at what they survived. In Golden Goa (ECW Press), Grant Buday makes the trip three times, cranky at what he has to endure on buses and trains—one of which is wrecked—but impresse

Kevin Barefoot
Graham Greene's Library

One of the April New Yorkers contains a wonderful piece by Robert McCrum on Graham Greene's library, an archive to be coveted not for its size (a mere 3000 volumes) or its variety (from Planet of the Apes to Sanctum Jesu Christi Evangelium, a gift fr

Eve Corbel
Grace Hartman: A Woman for Her Time

Grace Hartman: A Woman for Her Time by Susan Crean (New Star) is a biography, a political history and a page-turner of a story all in one. Hartman (1918-I993) went to work as a secretary for the Township of North York in the 1950s to help support her

Stephen Osborne
Gospel, A Poem

Stephen Scobie's Gospel, A Poem had the invigorating effect of making me want to read poetry again: the book is a beautiful object and not at all precious, and the poetry, a visitation of the Gospels, is simply wonderful. You want to read it out loud

Patty Osborne
Goodbye Buffalo Bay

A memoir of Loyie's youth spent at a Native residential school and his struggle to find a community.

Kris Rothstein
Great Granny Webster

In Caroline Blackwood’s slim novel Great Granny Webster (NYRB), set in Britain in the 1940s, a teenage girl is sent to live with her great-grandmother in a lifeless Victorian mansion near Brighton. Sea air has been recommended for her anemia, but the

Jill Boettger
Habitat

Sue Wheeler’s new book of poems, Habitat (Brick Books), which I read on the brink of winter in Alberta, took me back to a time I lived on the west coast of B.C., where winter was listless and wet, none of this chinook then snow, chinook then snow I’v

Michael Hayward
Guernica Editions’ Writers Series

Guernica Editions’ Writers Series was started in the year 2000, and to date twenty-two Canadian writers have been profiled, P.K. Page, Alistair MacLeod and Don McKay among them.

Sarah Leavitt
Grey

When Judy MacDonald spoke about her writing recently in Vancouver, she fascinated her audience with glimpses into how her mind works and the weird angle from which she observes the world. She describes herself as a magpie, someone who collects her ma

Mandelbrot
Greg Curnoe: Life and Stuff

The Greg Curnoe show at the Art Gallery of Ontario (Greg Curnoe: Life and Stuff), which ran from March until June 2001, was a wonderful chance to see the work of an artist committed to finding out everything about everything. Curnoe continues to be a

Sewid-Smith Daisy
Hanna's Daughters

My grandmother's picture stares down from the wall. She is very young and newly sexual. After reading Hanna’s Daughters (Orion), I thought this woman might exist in me.

Daniel Francis
Haida Monumental Art

Without any doubt the most important event of the 1994 publishing year is the re-appearance of George F. MacDonald's definitive study, Haida Monumental Art (UBC Press).

Geist Staff
Hard Core Logo

Hard Core Logo, by Michael Turner (Arsenal Pulp), is first a rock 'n' roll book, second an irrepressibly Canadian rock 'n' roll book, and third a book about how the present turns irrevocably into the past. Reading it I am much reminded of—of all thin