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dispatches
essays
reviews
columns
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.

Michael Hayward
The Library of Roguery

Jim Christy and the editors who worked on Rogues, Rascals, and Scalawags Too should be congratulated for their uncanny ability to squeeze every last euphemism out of their thesauri.

Alberto Manguel
I Believe Because It’s Impossible

Memories lie because they build on memories. I think that I remember something, but in fact I remember remembering it, and so on through countless layers of memory. Every memory is a mise en abyme.

Robertson Davies
Novelist, Playwright, Sex Machine

Robertson Davies' diaries reveal his zest for life and penchant for an act he refers to only as "h.t.d."

Thad McIlroy
Conditionally Paris

Thad McIlroy reviews Paris Nocturne by Patrick Modiano, a Nobel Prize-winning author.

Stephen Osborne
Frozen, Not Forgotten

"The miscellanist Rob Kovitz in his new book Dead and Cold has assembled, coordinated or otherwise summoned into being the best, the most spellbinding and the most chilblain-inducing account of death in the Arctic that you will ever read."

Kris Rothstein
Elixirs

Craft Distilling: Making Liquor Legally at Home by Victoria Redhed Miller is a no-nonsense how-to book, and a rational plea to lift laws that prevent small-batch not-for-profit distilling.

A.D. Peterkin
Pulling the Goalie

Auto pilot, devil's handshake and four sisters on Thumb Street.

Norbert Ruebsaat
Golden Voice

Leonard Cohen pays a visit to the neighborhood in song.

Rob Kovitz
Because a Lot of Questions Are Complex

Begging the question of what can be defined as “form.”

Lily Gontard
Passage

Lily Gontard reviews Passage (2008), directed by John Walker.

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.

Rebekah Chotem
Coming of Age Near Thunder Bay

Rebekah Chotem reviews Sleeping Giant, a critically-acclaimed coming-of-age film directed by Andrew Cividino.

Michael Hayward
Cycling in Cities

"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.'"

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.

RICHARD VAN CAMP
Grey Matters

It all started with a zesty little book about getting old.

RICHARD VAN CAMP
Time-Tested

Mary Schendlinger reviews M Train by Patti Smith and My Life on the Road by Gloria Steinem.

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.

Stephen Osborne
How Insensitive

Prurience or Voyeurism? One of the other anyway (more thematic convergence): this time it was How Insensitive, Russell Smith’s first novel (Porcupine’s Quill) the cover of which is emblazoned with black and white photographs of three young women in v

Carra Noelle Simpson
How to Save the World in Your Spare Time

Both nature and nurture must have inspired Elizabeth May in her book How to Save the World in Your Spare Time (Key Porter). May is the executive director of the Sierra Club of Canada; she is also the daughter of Stephanie Middleton May, an activist w

Geist Staff
How Stories Mean

How Stories Mean (Porcupine's Quill), a collection of essays on Canadian fiction edited by John Metcalf and Tim Struthers, is a good example of the blue box approach to book-making: almost everything in it is recycled. At least 39 of the 47 essays co

Patty Osborne
How to Become a Monster

How does an ordinary guy who loves to cook, and who goes out of his way to produce meals using locally grown organic meat and vegetables for the loggers he is cooking for, become a war criminal? In Jean Barbes How to Become a Monster, translated by P

Sam Macklin
I Wanna Be Me: Rock Music and the Politics of Identity

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

Rose Burkoff
How to Ruin a Summer Vacation

Amy Nelson is a privileged Chicago teen who doesn’t know anything about Israel or about being Jewish. Simone Elkeles’s young adult novel, How to Ruin a Summer Vacation (Flux), describes what happens when Amy’s Israeli father, who has stayed out of he

Patty Osborne
How to Tell Your Children About the Holocaust

I wish Ruth Mandel’s book How to Tell Your Children About the Holocaust (McGilligan) had a more lyrical title to match the poetry of the short pieces in this beautiful book because I almost didn’t read it.

JILL MANDRAKE
I, Shithead: A Life in Punk

I, Shithead: A Life in Punk (Arsenal Pulp Press), Joey Keithley’s rock memoir, shows how an apparently destructive restlessness, amidst the musical malaise of the ’70s, can be turned into something for the greater good. “We’re not looking for a riot,

Shannon Emmerson
Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media

During a heated CBC Radio discussion about one of these trends—chronic fatigue syndrome, and whether it is a "real" or psychogenic illness—both callers and panelists were emotional and argumentative, straining the usually fair, thoughtful CBC Radio s

Kris Rothstein
How the Blessed Live

In Susannah M. Smith’s How the Blessed Live (Coach House), Lucy and Levi are twins who grow up motherless on an island in Lake Ontario.

Kris Rothstein
I, Curmudgeon

I found an answer at another film, Alan Zweig’s I, Curmudgeon. Zweig, a Canadian director, is known for his documentary Vinyl, which delved into the strange world of obsessive record collectors.

Rose Burkoff
I'll Tell You a Secret: A Memory of Seven Summers

In her memoir I’ll Tell You a Secret: A Memory of Seven Summers (McClelland & Stewart), Anne Coleman examines the trajectory of her life as a young woman in the 1950s.

Mandelbrot
Iceman Is Website

In March 2006, on CBC Radio, As It Happens interviewed a man in Sweden who composes music to be performed on instruments made of ice. Then they played some of the music, which was indeed icy and tinkly, and the strings (was that a harp?) were vibrato

Stephen Osborne
Icefields

Two books full of ice and snow: Icefields (NeWest) by Thomas Wharton, and Smilla's Sense of Snow (Doubleday) by Peter Hoeg. Peter Hoeg's sense of snow is utterly convincing: his book had me shivering in August (I actually took to reading it under the

Geist Staff
I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional: The Recovery Movement and Other Self-Help Fashions

Wendy Kaminer's I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional: The Recovery Movement and Other Self-Help Fashions (Random House-Vintage) took a lot of heat when it first came out. No wonder!

Kris Rothstein
I’m Special: How Individuality Became the New Conformity

In between films I read Hal Niedzviecki’s new book, Hello I’m Special: How Individuality Became the New Conformity (Penguin). It was inspired by the author’s crisis of faith in underground culture, precipitated by a Hallmark card reading “Happy Birth

Patty Osborne
In Her Own Words: Women's Memoirs from Australia, New Zealand, Canada & the United States

In Her Own Words: Women's Memoirs from Australia, New Zealand, Canada & the United States (Vintage), edited by Jill Ker Conway, is a book that invites browsing. All twelve of the memoirs here are excerpts of longer works, so many of the paragraphs en

Geist Staff
In a Glass House

The critics have not been kind to Nino Ricci's new novel, In A Glass House (M&S), and we had hoped to be in disagreement with them. But generally the critics are right: there is a flatness in this book not to be found in The Lives of the Saints, desp

Sewid-Smith Daisy
In Beautiful Disguises

A few weeks ago when I was knocked flat with the flu and afflicted with squinty, puffy eyes and a foggy brain, I looked for light, fun books that wouldn’t put too much of a strain on my system, and I found them in a far-east drama, a tale of reincarn

Daniel Francis
In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War

David Reynolds, a historian, explains how Churchill did it in his own book, In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War (Allen Lane).

Kris Rothstein
In Praise of Slow: How a Worldwide Movement is Challenging the Cult of Speed

Carl Honoré isn’t the first author to investigate the phenomenon of slow living, but his book In Praise of Slow: How a Worldwide Movement is Challenging the Cult of Speed (Vintage Canada) is the most comprehensive explanation of recent attention to s

Patty Osborne
In Season

When a friend gave me a copy of the CD In Season by Freddie Stone (Unity Records) she warned me that it was a bit odd. The main instrument on this CD is a flugelhorn—which looks to be what you would get if you heated up a trumpet, stretched it out, a

Patty Osborne
In Search of Paradise

I took one look at the cover of In Search of Paradise by Susan Gabori (McGill-Queen's) and put it right back on the shelf. The abstract landscape on the cover looks static and barren so I thought this would be a book without people.

Stephen Osborne
In My Brother’s Shadow

Timm was two years old when his big brother Karl-Heinz, who was eighteen, joined the Death’s Head Division and went to the front in Ukraine. His only memory of Karl-Heinz appears on the first page of In My Brother’s Shadow, translated by Anthea Bell

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.

Carra Noelle Simpson
Half Nelson

In Half Nelson (THINKFilm), Ryan Gosling plays Dan Dunne, a strung-out teacher working in an inner-city middle school in New York, where, as the teacher, he is the only “white kid” in the classroom. Dunne’s passion for teaching history and his genuin

Michael Hayward
Half-Blood Blues

Review of Half-Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan. Edugyan's novel was the winner of the 2011 Giller Prize and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Governor General's Literary Award and Roger's Writer's Trust Award.

Tim McLaughlin
Hamilton Sketchbook

In the poem “Control Data” by Christopher Dewdney, a continuity consultant in his late fifties who “exhibited inordinate fear of commonplace objects and complained of spastic hair trigger orgasms” is offered a peculiar cure (or sentence)—a four-month

Michael Hayward
Havanas in Camelot

Fourteen personal essays by the American novelist William Styron, which he selected just before his death from pneumonia in 2006.

Michael Hayward
Have You Seen...?

Michael Hayward reviews Have You Seen...? by David Thomson (Knopf.)

Norbert Ruebsaat
Hello, I Must Be Going

In August 2006, in a former miner’s hall in Silverton, B.C., across Slocan Lake from New Denver Glacier in the Valhalla Range, a group of us listened to Bessie Wapp’s one-woman show, Hello, I Must Be Going, which recalls to life the voices of four Je

Patty Osborne
Heart So Hungry: The Extraordinary Expedition of Mina Hubbard into the Labrador Wilderness

In Randall Silivis’s book Heart So Hungry: The Extraordinary Expedition of Mina Hubbard into the Labrador Wilderness, (Knopf), we get only one story: Mina Hubbard’s real-life adventure.

Geist Staff
Healing the Dead

Healing the Dead by D.F. Bailey (Douglas & McIntyre)—"the screaming came in a raw, primal fury"—is a coming-of-age melodrama with all the maddeningly irrelevant details with which melodramas are wont to fill out their pages: no one speaks without sip

Patty Osborne
He Drown She in the Sea

British books and movies are some of the best exposés of the evils and absurdities of the class system, but a new book by a Canadian introduces another class system. In Shani Mootoo’s novel He Drown She in the Sea (McClelland & Stewart), the main cha

Blaine Kyllo
Headed For the Blues: A Memoir With Ten Stories

I get nervous when I can't remember what happened to me when I was younger. My parents and my grandparents never seem at a loss when telling their past, and I wonder if I have defective neurons that prevent me from storing information properly. Josef

Daniel Francis
Healthy, Wealthy and Dead

The talk show on the radio was full of praise for Suzanne North's first mystery novel (Healthy, Wealthy and Dead, from NeWest) so I paid a visit to the local mystery bookshop to buy a copy and the clerk was excited about it too. "It's about time Cana

Rose Burkoff
Hiding Edith

Hiding Edith by Kathy Kacer (Second Story) is a novel for children based on the childhood of Edith Schwalb, who fled Austria with her family to escape the Nazis, and was only able to do so because her father had been a popular soccer star. The family

Hey Nostradamus!

For me, reading a book by Douglas Coupland is a guilty pleasure, like reading James Michener or John Grisham—substantial enough to be worthwhile, yet trashy enough that I turn the cover inward as I walk down the street with it.

Michael Hayward
Here is Where We Meet

The eight and a half pieces in John Berger’s new book here is where we meet (Bloomsbury) are described by the publisher as “fictions,” but could equally be read as fragments of autobiography. In “Lisboa,” the narrator, a man named John of Berger’s ag

Kris Rothstein
Hinterland Who's Who: The Wood Spider

If you only see one short film this year, see the brilliant and witty Hinterland Who s Who: The Wood Spider, made by Andrew Struthers, a two-minute masterpiece combining old-school National Film Board aesthetic with a very modern tale of culture and

S. K. Page
Historical Atlas of Canada

The Historical Atlas of Canada by Derek Hayes (Douglas & McIntyre) contains reproductions of more than three hundred antique maps, which comprise a true history of the occupation of a continent. This is a beautiful book, almost impossible to put down

Lily Gontard
High Speed Through Shoaling Water

Feeling crabby, I picked up Tom Wayman’s High Speed Through Shoaling Water (Harbour). Wayman, bless his poetic heart, uses clear images and familiar structure.

Hemingway: The Toronto Years

Two recent books nicely illustrate, for me, the disturbing state of contemporary publishing. The first book, Hemingway: The Toronto Years (Doubleday) by William Burrill, a Toronto journalist, is a handsome example of the book-making art.

Stephen Osborne
His Majesty's Yankees

When I heard on the radio last month that Thomas Raddall had died, I was shocked and embarrassed instead of saddened because ever since discovering his books ten years ago I had thought of him as a real old-timer who must already have died. I came up

Kris Rothstein
Hester Among the Ruins

The title character in Binnie Kirshenbaum's Hester Among the Ruins is on the trail of a different kind of treasure. She is the rare historian who does not teach but makes a living from her popular books about medieval life.

Luanne Armstrong
High Tide: The Truth About Our Climate Crisis

In High Tide: The Truth About Our Climate Crisis (Picador), Mark Lynas, a British journalist, describes his travels around the world in search of disaster stories.

Helen Godolphin
Home Ice

Aside from a grade school crush on Richard Brodeur, I have never been able to work up much enthusiasm for hockey, but when two hockey plays were running concurrently in Vancouver last winter I seized the chance to prove myself Canadian without having

Michael Hayward
Hold Everything Dear

Even at age eighty-one, John Berger has lost none of his fire, which smoulders and flares in the seventeen “Dispatches on Survival and Resistance” in Hold Everything Dear (Pantheon). Berger has an innate empathy for the disadvantaged and the disenfra

Kris Rothstein
Holding Still for as Long as Possible

Kris Rothstein reviews Holding Still for as Long as Possible by Zoe Whittall (Anansi).

Patty Osborne
Hotel Sarajevo

In Hotel Sarajevo (Turtle Point Press), Jack Kersh has succeeded in translating his story into the thoughts and feelings of Alma, a fourteen-year-old girl who is caught in the hell of Sarajevo under siege. Alma is part of a group of war orphans who l