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Michael Hayward
World War II Writings

It’s much more fun to read this first-hand account of the war and its aftermath observed from ground level than a professional historian’s account, written decades after the fact.

Kevin Barefoot
Word of Mouth

Word of Mouth (Thistledown) is M.A.C. Farrant's fourth collection of fiction and is in two parts: stories about Sybilla, a nineteen-year-old mother struggling to survive in suburban Vancouver Island, stretching welfare cheques and coping with pervert

Paul Tough
World on Fire

I’ve always resisted Sarah McLachlan, even when my heart and my ears wanted to give in to her songs. They seemed too middle-of-the-road, too angel-filled, too soft and girly, too Canadian. Then today I’m sitting at my desk on West 43rd Street in Manh

Leah Rae
Wristcutters: A Love Story

As the film begins, the main character, Zia, is listening to a Tom Waits record and cleaning his room in preparation for suicide. Too bad he misses a spot; the last thing he sees before he dies on the bathroom floor is a dust bunny in the corner. So

Michael Hayward
You’ll Be Okay: My Life With Jack Kerouac

You’ll Be Okay offers a feminine perspective on the Beat Generation from the wife of one of its most celebrated authors.

Blaine Kyllo
X-Men 1.5

Last fall, production for the film X-Men 2 set up in Vancouver, and as we await the theatrical release of the movie, the studio has issued a new DVD version of the first film. X-Men 1.5 (20th Century Fox) includes a new cut of the original film (whic

Daniel Zomparelli
Yesno

Daniel Zomparelli reviews Yesno by Dennis Lee (Anansi).

James Baker
YOU Back the Attack! WE'LL Bomb Who We Want!

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

Kris Rothstein
You Be Me: Friendship in the Lives of Teen Girls

As a teen I was never happier than when in cahoots with my best friend, passing silly notes, talking obsessively on the phone, pouring out heartache, even fighting. I expected You Be Me: Friendship in the Lives of Teen Girls (Annick Press), edited by

S. K. Page
Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art Quarterly

Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art is a new quarterly published in Taiwan and Canada by the anonymously named Art and Collection Group Ltd., which turns out to be an ambitious group of editors, writers, curators and artists in several countri

Eve Corbel
Zine

For six years while Pagan Kennedy was an "out of whack, directionless woman trying to muddle through her late twenties," she wrote, drew and published a zine called Pagan's Head, which was all about her. In 'Zine (St. Martin's Griffin), all issues of

Your Secrets Sleep With Me

Kris: In the not-too-distant future, American refugees stream into Canada, populating shelters and dilapidated warehouses. Racial tension, skittish police, a powerful elevator operators’ union and flying teens are all factors in the skewed reality of

Lara Jenny
Zigzaggery

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

JILL MANDRAKE
Zombie Movies: The Ultimate Guide

A passionate and (nearly) complete compendium from an emotionally invested fanatic.

Geist Staff
Shades: The Whole Story of Doctor Tin

Shades: The Whole Story of Doctor Tin (Arsenal Pulp) is the sequel to Tom Walmsley's cult masterpiece, Doctor Tin, which appeared in 1979 to rave reviews and stern warnings. Walmsley was quoted in the press at that time as having said "everything he

Shannon Emmerson
Shadow Maker: The Life of Gwendolyn MacEwen

In search of a more satisfying biography, I pulled out a book I received a few Christmases ago—Rosemary Sullivan's Shadow Maker: The Life of Gwendolyn MacEwen. Sullivan's book made me weep during two separate readings.

Kris Rothstein
Shadow Company

Mercenaries and muscle for hire are the subjects of Shadow Company, a cinematic investigation into the privatization of the use of force. The film was born when a university buddy of the director, Nick Bicanic, took a job as a private military contra

Jill Boettger
Short Journey Upriver Toward Oishida

Last summer I hiked up to a fire lookout in Alberta to visit a friend who lives there for part of each year, and tucked in my sturdy pack was Roo Borson’s Short Journey Upriver Toward Oishida (McClelland & Stewart), which I was taking to my friend as

Darren Barefoot
Shylock

Mark Leiren-Young's Shylock (Anvil) is similar to The Noam Chomsky Lectures. In this one-man drama, Jon Davies, a Jewish actor who portrays Shylock in a cancelled production of The Merchant of Venice, is accused of betraying his fellow Jews and being

Barbara Small
Shooting Water

Shooting Water by Devyani Saltzman, daughter of the filmmaker Deepa Mehta (Key Porter), is a story about politics, love and the making of Mehta’s film Water. Saltzman’s parents divorced when she was eleven, and she chose to live with her father, a de

S. K. Page
Sign After the X

Marina Roy is the author of Sign After the X (Advance/Artspeak), an entertaining and pretentious volume devoted to the twenty-fourth letter of the alphabet.

Michael Hayward
Silk Parachute

A new collection of essays from John McPhee, staff writer at the New Yorker.

Geist Staff
Sign Crimes/Road Kill

Joyce Nelson's new book, Sign Crimes/Road Kill (Between the Lines), is her long-awaited collection of thirty essays written over the last ten years. This is an important and eminently useful book: mediascape, mindscape, landscape: Nelson keeps her ey

Geist Staff
Signs of the Times

Must the deconstructionists have every last word?—not any more: Signs of the Times by David Lehman (Poseidon) is out in paperback and worth even penny. Here at last, a work that makes sense of the gobbledygook (by identifying it as gobbledygook), the

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.

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.

Stephen Osborne
Karla's Web: A Cultural Investigation of the Mahaffy-French Murders

Thematic convergence was far from my mind when Frank Davey's nearly-instant book, Karla's Web: A Cultural Investigation of the Mahaffy-French Murders (Viking), appeared in the office. For one thing, it came in a wrapper announcing it to be a copy of

Stephen Osborne
Karl Marx

The new Karl Marx biography by Francis Wheen (4th Estate) fails to illuminate a man who was loved by his family and revered by his followers; instead we are given a hazy sketch of a petulant, perhaps incompetent man of few skills and little disciplin

Stephen Osborne
Killshot

In the local secondhand a few weeks ago, a copy of Killshot by Elmore Leonard, and this sentence on the first page: It was time to get away from here, leave Toronto and the Waverly Hotel for good and he wouldn't drink so much and be sick in the morni

Eve Corbel
King

The first volume of King, a "comic book" biography of Martin Luther King (Fantagraphic Books), will not be misinterpreted or appropriated by neo-Nazis. Yet its power is delivered with grace and subtlety.

Michael Hayward
Kate and Anna McGarrigle: Songs and Stories

What better song for summer’s soundtrack than Kate and Anna’s “Swimming Song”? I added it to my iPod rotation while reading Kate and Anna McGarrigle: Songs and Stories (Penumbra), too much of which consists of transcribed newspaper reviews of albums

Kris Rothstein
King of the Lost & Found

Raymond J. Dunne, the sixteen-year-old hero of John Lekich’s teen novel, King of the Lost & Found (Raincoast), is an outsider.

Peggy Thompson
Kipper's Game

P.D. James meets Philip K. Dick in Barbara Ehrenreich's first novel, Kipper's Game, a complex mystery story set in an all-too-believable world of strange new diseases, genetic mutations and virtual reality.

Geist Staff
Kitchen

Grove Press has just brought out an English translation of Kitchen, by Banana Yoshimoto, an unclassifiable, magnificent little book that has won two literary awards and has had fifty-seven—yes, fifty-seven—printings in four years. As the dust jacket

Patty Osborne
Knit Lit

Sheila was reading Knit Lit, an anthology of stories about knitting edited by Linda Roghaar and Molly Wolf (Three Rivers Press) and some of them were making her laugh out loud, especially the one about an oversized synthetic orange sweater that acqui

Michael Hayward
La Haine

Mathieu Kassovitz was just twenty-eight years old when he made La Haine (Criterion dvd), a 1995 film released in black and white and set in les banlieues, the racially volatile suburbs that surround Paris like an explosive vest.

Mandelbrot
La Florida

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.

Michael Hayward
La Commune

Remember those student days when, in preparation for your final exam, you’d optimistically sit through a movie version as a substitute for the book itself?

Michael Hayward
Lancelot of the Lake

In one of the audio tracks on the dvd of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, co-director Terry Gilliam credits Robert Bresson’s 1974 film Lancelot of the Lake (New Yorker Films dvd) as an inadvertent inspiration for Grail.

Sam Macklin
Krazy & Ignatz 1937

The recent Krazy & Ignatz 1937–1938: Shifting Sands Dusts Its Cheeks in Powdered Beauty is one of the most agreeably bonkers tomes published in recent memory. Just about every strip tells the story of Ignatz Mouse’s compulsion to hurl bricks at the w

Lily Gontard
Lady Franklin’s Revenge

I bought Revenge and began my education in how to manipulate history and maintain your honour as a Victorian lady. McGoogan’s book is an in-depth account of a detail-oriented, uncompromising, highly motivated and intelligent woman.

Barbara Zatyko
Larry's Party

There's nothing exotic about Larry's Party (Random House), by Carol Shields: it could have taken place in Windsor. In fact, I think I went to high school with Larry Weller, an all-around ordinary guy.

Patty Osborne
Laurence

Laurence, by France Théoret (Mercury, translated by Gail Scott), is also about a young woman in Quebec, but in the 1930s a woman’s struggle to make her life her own was harder. Laurence comes from an impoverished farming family whose daughters have t

Patty Osborne
L'Art de conjuguer

Shopping for books is one part of Christmas that I really enjoy, and this year I found all the books I needed by walking between four bookstores clustered near the centre of town. At Manhattan Books I picked up two bright green hardcover copies of Be

Patty Osborne
Ledoyt

I picked up Ledoyt by Carol Emshwiller (Mercury House) because it looked a lot like Annie (Polestar), a book I reviewed in Geist No. 19-20.

Lily Gontard
Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name

Deception and some kind of love are the themes that thread through the journey that is Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name by Vendela Vida (HarperCollins). As one of the editors of the infamously cool magazine The Believer, Vida has a sharp pen a

Michael Hayward
Let Me Finish

Early in his memoir Let Me Finish (Harcourt), Roger Angell describes his mother Katherine White and his stepfather E. B. White as “a successful New Yorker couple—she a fiction editor; he a writer of casuals and poetry and the first-page Comment secti

Randy Gelling
Léolo

When the movie director Jean Claude Lauzon died in a plane crash over northern Quebec, his death was noted in a two-sentence paragraph accompanied by a small photograph in the local newspaper. In the photograph he looks like the actor in his first fi

GILLIAN JEROME
Life After Birth

Child-rearing manuals cropped up with a vengeance in the latter half of the twentieth century after Dr. Benjamin Spock produced Baby and Child Care—the all-time best-selling book in American history, second only to the Bible, despite advice such as “

Patty Osborne
Life-25: Interviews with Prisoners Serving Life Sentences

Life-25: Interviews with Prisoners Serving Life Sentences (New Star), by P.J. Murphy and Lloyd Johnsen, surprised me.

Michael Hayward
Levels of Loss

In Levels of Life, Julian Barnes writes about the grief experienced after losing his wife to cancer.