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Daniel Francis
Friend of the Devil

When I finally got around to reading Postwar, I was amused to discover that Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks was reading it too. This is the first time I have found myself reading the same book as a character in a novel.

Patty Osborne
From Bruised Fell

From Bruised Fell by Jane Finlay-Young (Viking) is a dark and unrelenting story of two sisters whose lives are dominated by their crazy mother, who abandoned them years ago but who still haunts their thoughts. The older sister, Missy, narrates the st

Geist Staff
Frontiers: Essays and Writings on Racism and Culture

Marlene Nourbese Philip achieved an inadvertent kind of fame as the woman June Callwood told to fuck off at a writers' conference some time ago. Her new book Frontiers: Essays and Writings on Racism and Culture (Mercury), makes it easy to see why.

Sheila Skye Craven
Geist on the Net

What happens when you insert the word Geist into a World Wide Web search engine? Well, there's a brief pause and then Zzzt!

Neil MacDonald
Future Noir, The Making of Blade Runner

For hard-core Blade Runner fans, or anyone interested in the filmmaking process, Paul M. Sammon's book Future Noir, The Making of Blade Runner (Harper Prism) is required reading.

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

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.

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.

Daniel Francis
Who Cares Who Ate John Franklin?

Daniel Francis on John Franklin, John Rae and the Globe and Mail's enthusiasm for cannibalism.

Alberto Manguel
Marilla

Prince Edward Island gothic.

Alberto Manguel
Hoping Against Hope

Kafka’s writing allows us intuitions and half-dreams but never total comprehension.

Joseph Weiss
King of the Post-Anthropocene

Kaiju are the heroes we deserve.

Stephen Henighan
Left Nationalists

Progressives are far less likely to be nationalists than ever before.

Alberto Manguel
Reach Out and Touch (Somebody's Hand)

There is no way to step back from the orgy of kisses without offending.

Daniel Francis
Acadia's Quiet Revolution

Revolutions need popular heroes, and unpopularvillains, and the Acadians of New Brunswick had both.

Stephen Henighan
Vanished Shore

To build a city on land flooded by the tides isn’t just a mistake—it’s utopic.

LISA BIRD-WILSON
Distant Early Warning

We think of the Arctic as pristine and untouched—but nowhere on the planet is as harshly impacted by climate change.

Alberto Manguel
Libraries without Borders

Reading is a subversive activity and does not believe in the convention of borders.

Stephen Henighan
Happy Barracks

In Hungary, goulash socialism becomes difficult to swallow

Alberto Manguel
How I Became a Writer of Colour

Airport security assures Alberto Manguel that he has been randomly picked.

Alberto Manguel
Beginning at the Beginning

To teach us how to read Don Quixote, a text so contrary to conventional literary tradition, the prologue itself needed to break from all traditions

Stephen Henighan
Caribbean Enigma

Unravelling the mysteries of Alejo Carpentier

Alberto Manguel
The Devil

We insist The Devil whispers horrible things in our ear and inspires our worst deeds.

LISA BIRD-WILSON
Smashing Identity Algorithms, Yes Please

While status registration under the Indian Act is a construct, claiming status identity isan important factor in Indigenous identity and cultural transmission.

Stephen Henighan
Victims of Anti-Communism

Anti-communism, retired by most Western governments,receives monumental status in Canada

RICHARD VAN CAMP
Buried Treasure

Mary Schendlinger challenges a review of a biography of Blanche Knopf, the underrecognized co-founder of Alfred A. Knopf Inc.

Stephen Henighan
Ethnic Babies

Stephen Henighan discusses the crude first steps to finding a new way to talk about racial reality.

Alberto Manguel
Reporting Lies

The craft of untruth has been perfected.

LISA BIRD-WILSON
Clowns, Cakes, Canoes: This is Canada?

Romantic notions that equate Indigenous peoples with nature are not going to cut it.

Rob Kovitz
Question Period

Rob Kovitz compiles the pressing questions of the day—"How are they gonna beat ISIS?" And, "On Twitter, who cares?"

Stephen Henighan
Write What You Can Imagine

Like most advice given to writers, the injunction to “write what you know” is misleading.

Stephen Henighan
City Apart

The idea of Europe is incarnated nowhere as much as in St. Petersburg—Stephen Henighan on Europe's greatest city.

Helen Godolphin
Field Guide to North America

You could take the Lesbian National Parks and Services Field Guide to North America (Pedlar Press) into the woods, but this guidebook, written by Rangers Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan, is just as suitable for reading in bed. In fact, under the cove

Shannon Emmerson
Ferry Woman's History of the World

I wish I could say that I finished Ferry Woman's History of the World (Coteau) by Susan Andrews Grace on the ferry ride home, but I didn't. This is a wonderful book, full of Celtic history, the speaker's childhood, her confrontations with Jesus, and

Lily Gontard
Finish Me

Lily Gontard reviews One Day (Hodder & Staughton), David Nicholls's novel about a decades-long friendship.

Lily Gontard
Finding Farley

Lily Gontard reviews the Farley Mowat-inspired film, Finding Farley (National Film Board).

Sarah Leavitt
Fingersmith

Sarah Waters’s novel pulls the reader into the gritty, dangerous world of mid-nineteenth-century London, where the petty thieves are known as fingersmiths.

Ann Diamond
Final Days: The Last, Desperate Abuses of Power by the Clinton White House

Barbara Olson, author of The Final Days: The Last, Desperate Abuses of Power by the Clinton White House (Regnery), died aboard Flight 77 when it hit the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. Unfortunately, therefore, she does not have to account for the no

Mandelbrot
Flesh and Bone

Flesh and Bone (with Meg Ryan, James Caan and that handsome guy whose name I keep forgetting) had been sitting for months in New Arrivals at the local video purveyor's and no one ever seemed to pick it up. Feeling more than usually desperate last wee

Blaine Kyllo
Firefly

Now that Buffy is over, Whedon has but one TV program to work on: Angel. Which is all the more sad because he had created the best thing to hit television in years: Firefly. That show starred Nathan Fillion (born in Edmonton) as Captain Malcolm Reyno

Floating Voice

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.... The secon

Geist Staff
For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down

When Thoreau remarked that most of us lead lives of quiet desperation, he must have been reading David Adams Richards. For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down (McClelland & Stewart) is Richards' latest novel, continuing his examination of life as it is l

Geist Staff
For Men Who Dream of Lolita

For Men Who Dream of Lolita (Coteau Books) is Kim Morrissey's retelling of Nabokov's story from Lolita's point of view in a series of linked poems.

Kris Rothstein
Forbidden Lie$

Forbidden Lie$ tells the story of Norma Khouri, who shot to fame when her book, Forbidden Love, became a bestseller. The book claimed to tell the story of Khouri’s best friend, who was murdered by her own family because she dated a man of a different

Kris Rothstein
It Is Bliss Here: Letters Home 1939

For Myles Hildyard, a British aristocrat, the Second World War was an adventure like no other. He joined a local military unit in the late 1930s and saw action throughout the entire war, stationed in the Middle East, North Africa, Crete and western E

Stephen Osborne
Istanbul: Memories and the City

Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul: Memories and the City, translated by Maureen Freely (Knopf), presents Istanbul as a palimpsest in which can be read the fading traces of empires Christian and Muslim, of childhood, and of a European gaze that once contemplated

Eve Corbel
Issue 2 Endnotes

In Geist No. 1, I reviewed a handful of Canadian publishers’ catalogues.

Kris Rothstein
Forever

Forever is a Dutch film made by the experienced documentarian Heddy Honigmann. Its subject is Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris but its scope includes life and death, history and memory, art and beauty.

Shannon Emmerson
jacks: a gothic gospel

In the note accompanying Geist's copy of jacks: a gothic gospel (Livres DC Books), the book's author Anne Stone recommends it for review, or for "hanging out on a coffee table as an orange object." And, although it is a lovely orange object, jacks is

Patty Osborne
Jeannie and the Gentle Giants

In Jeannie and the Gentle Giants by Luanne Armstrong (Ronsdale), Jeannie is a young city girl who ends up in a foster home in the countryside near Kelowna, B.C., and the gentle giants are two enormous work horses named Sally and Sebastien who help Je

Carrie Villeneuve
Jesus Christ: The Lost Years

The two actors shared the portrayal of Jesus as well as playing the other characters, including Mary Magdalene, John the Baptist, Elvis and the three wise men—with a versatility and energy that contributed to a unique and very funny show.

Mandelbrot
Jeff Wall: The Complete Edition

Mandelbrot reviews Jeff Wall: The Complete Edition (Phaidon).

Carra Noelle Simpson
Josh Ritter

On February 22, 2007, the folk singer-songwriter Josh Ritter stepped on stage at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre, played three songs and said little more than “I’m excited to be here.” Uh-oh, I thought. After a few songs he absorbed the warm glow

Patricia Holmes
Karenin Sings the Blues

Many of the poems in Sharon McCartney’s second book, Karenin Sings the Blues, have won national competitions and been published in literary magazines, and so set the standard and tone for the rest of this fine collection. The book is presented in thr

Michael Hayward
Just Kids

Long before Patti Smith became “the Godmother of Punk” she was a not- atypical teenager of the 1960s, living with her parents in suburban New Jersey.

Patty Osborne
Justa

Justa by Bridget Moran is another great book—this time I'm typesetting it, and I almost never read books that I typeset But I found myself reading sections while waiting for other sections to print, and I could tell it was going to be a good one. Jus

Eve Corbel
Kafka

Mairowitz and Crumb’s Kafka, meanwhile, opens with a horrifying drawing of one of Franz K’s many grisly fantasies of his own death—a pork butcher’s cleaver hacking off neat slices from his head.