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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

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.

M.A.C. Farrant
Selected Days

On Dorothy Parker Day we wear wool suits and little hats, smoke with cigarette holders and have a liver-coloured dachshund on a lead.

Shelley Kozlowski
Revving

It was the big sort of rhmmm-rhmmm you hear at demolition derbies and ball-busting monster truck rallies. It was loud. Who could be sitting in their car, revving the engine?

Thad McIlroy
Check-Out

"At the back of the line a woman with no teeth was trying to hold an eighteen-pack of budget toilet paper with one hand."

Michał Kozłowski
In the Flesh

From Jean Talon to Lenin’s Tomb

Evel Economakis
Leningrad Redact

“If we paid protection money to the KGB, there’d be nothing left for salaries. And we call it the FSB now.”

Christine Novosel
Stuck on the Grid

Christine Novosel talks life in Scotland: "What Glasgow lacks in beauty and brains, it makes up for with wit and resilience."

Stephen Osborne
The Orwell Effect

Stephen Osborne on the origins of the International 3-Day Novel Contest, the time-honoured writing contest that flies in the face of the notion that novels take years of angst to produce.

Sheila Heti
Law of Small Numbers

Forty percent of people believe that if they practice enough, they can predict the outcome of a flipped coin. Would my current love end the way my past ones had?

Margaret Nowaczyk
Ad Infinitum

"I stared in awe at the pink-petalled flowers of human tissue blossoming in the mass of a collapsed grey-brown lung as it was reinflated during a thoracotomy."

Alex Khramov
Walrus Keeper

One of the advantages of life back then was that people had jobs that could be easily defined. None of your strategic walrus initiative development consultants or anything.

Jane Silcott
Ducks

At first no one notices when the dog rushes your daughter as if she’s some kind of game and your daughter runs as if it’s some kind of chase.

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.

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."

Sarah Pollard
Mavis in Montreal

Sarah Pollard makes a pilgrimage to Montreal to hang out and write where Mavis Gallant hung out and wrote.

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."

Stephen Osborne
Grinkus and Pepper

Stephen Osborne is entranced by a pair of eccentric, high profile students while on a university tour in 1964.

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.

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.

Robert Everett-Green
Checkered Past

For me, the jacket is a piece of menswear history that I can actually put on, and a link to the tragicomic tale of an underachiever with a famous name.

JEROME STUEART
Road Trip

A collection of Jerome Stueart's Greyhound sketches, including one Vitruvian bus driver.

Katie Addleman
Greyhound

The driver said, “Are you fit to travel, sir?” and the crack smoker said, “Are any of us fit to travel?"

Eve Corbel
The 99: Bus Without Pity

How did the 99 B-Line bus route come to be the locus of the most heartless transit rides in Greater Vancouver?

Stephen Osborne
Insurgency

Stephen Osborne discusses the past, present and future of literary magazines in Canada.

Luke MacLean
Je M'Appelle Raphael

Possum-style or straight up dirty.

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.

Anson Ching
Fact
the universal human

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

Michael Hayward
Fact
Getting past the past

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

Daniel Francis
Fact
writing from an early grave

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

Michael Hayward
Fact
The peripatetic poet

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

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Fact
Haunted House guest

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

Michael Hayward
Fact
Beyond the event horizon

Review of "Antkind" by Charlie Kaufman.

Anson Ching
Fact
Sailing the roaring forties

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

Michael Hayward
Fact
BELLE ÉPOQUE GOSSIP

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

Peggy Thompson
Fact
More precious than rubies

Review of "Rubymusic" by Connie Kuhns.

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

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

Michael Hayward
Fact
A Russian Brother and his sister

Review of "A Russian Sister" by Caroline Adderson.

Kris Rothstein
Fact
The messy back of history

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

Peggy Thompson
Fact
Have Mercy

Review of "Mercy Gene" by JD Derbyshire.

Michael Hayward
Fact
subterranean mysteries

Review of "Underland" by Robert Macfarlane.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Fact
Championing Trees

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

Patty Osborne
Fact
Crossing Borders

Review of "Solito: A Memoir" by Javier Zamora

Michael Hayward
Fact
The Two Roberts

Review of "Turn Every Page" directed by Lizzie Gottlieb

Peggy Thompson
Fact
A moment with holden

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

JILL MANDRAKE
Fact
POINTS OF INFLECTION

Review of "Some of the Puzzles" by M.A.C. Farrant.

Michael Hayward
Fact
A HOLIDAY IN THE MOUNTAINS (WITH PIE)

Review of "Holiday, 1909" by Charles Chapman.

Anson Ching
Fact
THE BELL KEEPS TOLLING

Review of "For Whom the Bell Tolls" by Ernest Hemingway.

Kris Rothstein
Fact
DEFINED BY DUMPLINGS

Review of "What We Talk About When We Talk About Dumplings" edited by John Lorinc.

Jonathan Heggen
Fact
The Common Shaman

Review of "Shaman" by Kim Stanley Robinson.

Peggy Thompson
Fact
Walk Another Path

Review of "Landlines" by Raynor Winn.

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