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Stephen Henighan
Writing the City

As Canada is one of the world's most urbanized countries, a reader knowing nothing of contemporary Canadian writing might expect to find a surfeit of urban novels in our bookstores. Yet novels explicitly set in Canadian cities form a mere sliver of our novelistic production.

Stephen Henighan
Kingmakers

The Giller Prize is the most conspicuous example of corporate suffocation of the public institutions that built our literary culture. True, the Giller hasn’t done as much damage as the throttling of the book market by the Chapters-Indigo chain.

Stephen Henighan
Cakchiquel Lessons

Cakchiquel, the third most widely spoken of Guatemala’s twenty Mayan languages, is understood by more than 400,000 people. It is blessed with a larger population base than most Native American languages but is cursed by its location.

Stephen Henighan
Bad Spellers

Mordecai Richler, in a withering put-down, once dismissed the novelist Hugh Garner as “a good speller.” In the summer of 2003, grinding through 160 Canadian books as a jury member for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction in English, I learned that for many contemporary Canadian writers, Garner’s level of dubious distinction remains out of reach.

Stephen Henighan
Reading the City

A city is an atmosphere defined by a history. A great city's streets may reflect its past, but only art makes a city's history, like its distinctive mood, present to the world.

Marjorie Doyle
Child Traveller

The time had come for our marathon trek through Europe. I was ten, and hated it already.

Stephen Henighan
Lost Nationalities

It is not only the children of British mothers who have lost one of their nationalities; Great Britain, too, has lost a part of itself

Stephen Henighan
Witch Hunt

In a letter of 350 words, published in Geist 65, Michael Redhill calls me a racist once and implies that I am a racist on at least four other occasions. Redhill’s repetition of the ultimate insult of the postmodern era offers a fascinating, if depressing, window into how certain Canadian writers betray their responsibility to the society they live in.

Steven Heighton
Watching the Ducks in Chiang Mai

A greying, sunburnt American mis­sionary stopped us in the fruit market and invited us for a drink.

Alberto Manguel
Idiot’s Fare

Dear George Szanto, I write in answer to your letter describing your difficulties in finding a publisher for your new novel.

Alberto Manguel
Reading Beyond the Grave

"There are people," Chateaubriand comments, "who, in the midst of the collapse of empires, visit fountains and gardens"

Alberto Manguel
In Praise of the Enemy

The epic genre suffers from disregard. To the Iliad, our new century has preferred the Odyssey: the encumbered return of the warrior matters more to us than his laborious swordplay.

Ira Wagman
The Self-Destruction of the CBC

The federal government recently announced it is reviewing the CBC’s mandate. This review is the latest chapter in a long story of questioning the value of the CBC since its inception seventy years ago. Clearly there are politics involved here; the CBC is an easy target for attack by parties of all stripes.

Alberto Manguel
Van Gogh’s Final Vision

Auvers-sur-Oise is a town of ghosts. Among the summer tourists and art-loving pilgrims who visit Auvers from all over the world, drift flocks of long-dead artists with folding easels and boxes of paints, who a century ago would disembark every week at the small railway station.

Alberto Manguel
Letter from France

For reasons I can't make out, organizers of congresses and literary get-togethers throughout the world appear to have been inspired by a common theme: America. In Germany, in Spain, in France, in Holland, writers are being asked to talk about this faraway place that is either an overwhelming country or an underdeveloped continent.

Alberto Manguel
Light and Dark

There are two big trees in my garden under which, when friends are visiting, we sit and talk, sometimes during the day, but usually at night. Especially at night, when talk seems less inhibited, wider-ranging, strangely more stimulating.

Alberto Manguel
Closing Time in the Gardens of the West

Cyril Connolly’s writings have been republished, as The Selected Works (Picador, 2002). I remember reading his work in my late adolescence and wondering how someone could write like that, in fragments and half-formed ideas, allowing his thoughts (and the reader’s) to go in a thousand directions at the same time, and yet lend his texts an overwhelming feeling of cohesiveness.

Alberto Manguel
Detective Samuel de Champlain

One of the pleasures of reading for no particular reason is coming across hidden stories, involuntary essays, samples of what someone once called “found literature”—as opposed, I imagine, to the literature that states its official identity on the cover. Leafing through a book on Samuel de Champlain, I came across, of all things, a detective story.

Alberto Manguel
Europeans

When I was in school in Argentina, Europe (our notion of Europe) was a vast and powerful conglomerate of culture and wisdom. From there, from across the Atlantic, came the history to which, magister dixit, we owed our existence; from there came the writers whose literature we read, the musicians whose music we listened to, the filmmakers whose films we watched.

Alberto Manguel
Reading Up on War

Many years ago my father-in-law, who had been a British prisoner of war in Japan, gave me a small pocket anthology, The Knapsack, edited by the undeservedly forgotten Herbert Read. The book (which I have since passed on to my daughter) had been put together for the Ministry of War to be given to its soldiers: its proclaimed intention was "to celebrate the genius of Mars." Surprisingly, however, the general tone of the anthology was above all elegiac.

Alberto Manguel
Reading at a Time of Catastrophes

A few years after Kafka’s death, Milena, the woman he had loved so dearly, was taken away by the Nazis and sent to a concentration camp. Suddenly life seemed to have become its reverse: not death, which is a conclusion, but a mad and meaningless state of brutal suffering, brought on through no visible fault and serving no visible end. To attempt to survive this nightmare, a friend of Milena devised a method: she would resort to the books she had read, stored in her memory.

Stephen Henighan
Traitor’s Dirge

“Get it right,” Rob Allen told me. “You have no idea how few novels you will actually write in your life”

Stephen Osborne
Fields of Time

With the approach of her tenth summer, Julia considers the holidays that lie before her: will there be too many things for her to do? Trying to look ahead from school time, with its time-tables and schedules, makes it hard to remember, or to imagine, what summertime will be before summer arrives and the school year ends. In the summer when I was Julia’s age I heard Elvis Presley for the first time, down by the river on the jukebox in the fish-and-chip joint where teenagers went to hold hands and drink ice cream sodas and eat salted french fries drenched in vinegar.

Stephen Osborne
Cat in the House

Toward the end of her life I drew close to Althea, the cat who had been with Mary and me for five or maybe six years, ever since her real owner, Mary’s daughter Karen, had to find a home for her when a landlord invoked the no-pets rule, and Mary and I were living mere blocks away, completely petless and, some might say, carefree.

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.

Minelle Mahtani
Fact
Looking for a Place to Happen

What does it mean to love a band? A friend? A nation?

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

Norbert Ruebsaat
Modern Egyptian Art

It seems ironic that an authoritative history of modern Egyptian art should be written on the west coast of Canada, until one reads Modern Egyptian Art by Liliane Karnouk (American University in Cairo Press) and realizes that Egyptian artists, citize

Stephen Osborne
Blood-root: Tracing the Untelling of Motherless

Betsy Warland's new book is Blood-root: Tracing the Untelling of Motherless (Second Story), an unnecessarily clunky title for such a strong and wonderful book. There are encounters in this book between mother and daughter and daughter and father that

Michał Kozłowski
Posthumous Papers of a Living Author

Another elegant Archipelago production is Posthumous Papers of a Living Author by the Austrian modernist Robert Musil.

Daniel Francis
Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

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.

Jill Boettger
Preposterous Fables for Unusual Children

In his series of books called Preposterous Fables for Unusual Children (Bayeux Arts), Judd Palmer revisits traditional tales and rewrites them with unlikely heroes and peculiar details.

Barry Kirsh
Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood

Although I am not a woman, did not grow up in the late '6os just a few blocks up from the infamous Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco and am not the child of enlightened parents who strove against mainstream American materialism, I jumped two-footed int

Kris Rothstein
Prodigy

I had fun in the gifted class in elementary school because my parents never pressured me to become a sensation in spelling, or science—or, like Maya, the ethereal figure in Nancy Huston’s tense novel Prodigy (McArthur), a brilliant ten-year-old piani

Prolifically Ubiquitous

A list of overused book review terms from achingly beautiful to woefully inadequate.

Geist Staff
Property

Marc Diamond's new novel, Property (Coach House), belongs to the tour-de force class, and will appeal most to those who appreciate ts-d-f: the whole thing is three paragraphs long: a real typesetter's nightmare. The first paragraph occupies 123 pages

Lily Gontard
Race Against Time

In Africa the AIDS/HIV pandemic is quickly, and not so quietly, killing two generations of Africans. Stephen Lewis’s book Race Against Time (Anansi) begins by introducing the eight Millennium Goals for Africa as established by the United Nations Mill

Patty Osborne
Push

I read to put myself to sleep at night but Push (Knopf) by Sapphire had no soporific effect. Long after I turned out the light and rolled over on my side to sleep, I thought about Claireece Precious Jones, the hero of this bright red book.

Geist Staff
Putrid Scum

Putrid Scum by Crad Kilodney (Charnel House) is one of those titles many of us would perhaps rather not have to ask for in the bookstore (we got our copy through an intermediary) even if we could (few bookstores carry him) but, being a Kilodney book,

Michael Hayward
Rainer Maria Rilke and Lou Andreas-Salomé: The Correspondence

Rainer Maria Rilke and Lou Andreas-Salomé: The Correspondence (Norton) collects all of the extant letters exchanged by Rilke and Andreas-Salomé , a patron and fellow author, and (as the jacket copy describes her) “a key fin de siècle intellectual” fi

Geist Staff
Racism in Canada

A subtitle in search of a title: Racism in Canada (Fifth House). Where are the marketing people with nerves of steel, when we need them?

Carrie Villeneuve
Raymond Chandler Omnibus

When the Vancouver Public Library workers went on strike, I read more of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe than I had intended.

Kris Rothstein
Rampage

>After filming Elliot Lovett, an American G.I., for a study of soldiers and their music, the Australian documentary filmmaker George Gittoes followed Lovett back to his home in the Brown Sub ghetto in Miami. The neighbourhood he found there was every

Kris Rothstein
Radiant City

The Canadian director Gary Burns’s take on the urban and suburban condition has always been fictional, until now. Burns teams up with Jim Brown to tackle life in the cul de sac in Radiant City, a film that combines commentary on design, culture and p

Eve Corbel
Readers' Notes

We get a lot of mail at the Geist offices, much of it from people who "read the mag from cover to cover!!" But some Geist readers pay closer attention than others. One such sharp-eyed fan wrote recently to ask: "Just what is a 'techno-otipimist' (Num

Eve Corbel
Readers Write'n'Recycle

A Gibsons, B.C. reader wrote in response to my review of Press Gang Publishers' catalogue (Geist 1), including that it was "not stapled, so recycle worry-free." She advises that recycling-wise, staples are much more acceptable than glue and are pulle

Michael Hayward
Reading Writing

The French writer Julien Gracq, who will be ninety-seven this year, is a living link to the era of Louis Aragon and André Breton. Gracq has avoided the kind of recognition that most modern writers crave (he refused the Prix Goncourt in 1951), and his

Rose Burkoff
Red Diaper Baby: A Boyhood in the Age of McCarthyism

Young James Laxer prayed for a normal life. He grew up in a committed Communist household, an experience he describes in Red Diaper Baby: A Boyhood in the Age of McCarthyism (Douglas & McIntyre).

Blaine Kyllo
Republic Pictures

Republic Pictures was an independent genre film studio active in the 1940s and ’50s, specializing in westerns and action-adventure serials—the movies kids went to see on Saturday afternoons. But while the movies the studio released were B films on fi

Sarah Maitland
Renovating Heaven

Fact and fiction are intermingled in this "novel" about growing up Mennonite in the Fraser Valley.

Kent Bruyneel
René Lévesque and the Parti Québecois in Power

From my parents’ bed that night, Lévesque looked like a man—maybe the first man in CBC history—who had lost two countries at the same time.

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.

Geist Staff
Means of Escape

Hugh Brody has been getting a tough time from reviewers for Means of Escape, his first book of fiction (Douglas & McIntyre), offered anomalously as "a set of stories" which he introduces with the desideratum that we read them in the order in which he

Mean Boy

In Mean Boy (Anchor), the story of nineteen-year-old Larry Campbell, who idolizes a hard-drinking, plaid jacket-wearing, wood-chopping poet named Jim Arsenault, Lynn Coady revels in the Canadian literary scene of the 1970s. This is an affectionate an

Luanne Armstrong
Me Against my Brother: At War in Somalia, Sudan and Rwanda

Sometime in the future, historians will look back amazed at how little attention North American media paid to African issues in this time in history. In Scott Peterson's memoir Me Against my Brother: At War in Somalia, Sudan and Rwanda (Routledge), h

S. K. Page
Martin Frobisher: Elizabethan Privateer and The Arctic Voyages of Martin Frobisher

The story of Michael Locke is a footnote to the story of Martin Frobisher, and is not within the scope of Martin Frobisher: Elizabethan Privateer (Yale University Press).

Kris Rothstein
Measures to Better the World

The Germans have upped the ante on absurdity with the film Measures to Better the World (produced by Jörn Hintzer, Jakob Hüfner), which chronicles a series of invented social movements such as the Green Light Society and Rent-a-Brother. In the most c

Patty Osborne
Melanie Bluelake's Dream

Melanie Bluelake's Dream by Betty Dorion (Coteau) looked like it would interest my eleven-year-old son. It's a small book so I didn't mind carrying it home, and of course, once on the bus, I pulled it out to take a look.

Michael Hayward
Memory: An Anthology

The majority of Memory: An Anthology (Chatto & Windus) is what used to be called a commonplace book, a collection of extracts from other texts. The editors, Harriet Harvey Wood and A.S. Byatt, have selected 155 passages on the theme of memory, which

Michał Kozłowski
Memoirs: 1939-1993

Brian Mulroney’s Memoirs: 1939—1993 (McClelland & Stewart) is longer than The Brothers Karamazov, the index is longer than the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the book costs more than a five-year membership in the Progressive Conservative Pa

Stephen Osborne
Meta Incognita: A Discourse of Discovery: Martin Frobisher's Arctic Explorations, 1576-1578

The Canadian Museum of Civilization is to be commended for Meta Incognita: A Discourse of Discovery: Martin Frobisher’s Arctic Explorations, 1576-1578, a two-volume compilation of everything there is to know about the series of disasters known as the

Stephen Osborne
Meta Incognita: A Discourse of Discovery: Martin Frobisher's Arctic Explorations, 1576-1578

The Canadian Museum of Civilization is to be commended for Meta Incognita: A Discourse of Discovery: Martin Frobisher’s Arctic Explorations, 1576-1578, a two-volume compilation of everything there is to know about the series of disasters known as the

Kris Rothstein
Middlesex

Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex (Knopf Canada) is the eighty-year saga of the Stephanides family, who immigrate to America from Greece. It is a conventional tale, except for a few crucial details.

GILLIAN JEROME
Misconceptions: Truth, Lies and the Unexpected on the Journey to Motherhood

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
Blindness

I was up at the cabin, reading Blindness by José Saramago, translated from the Portuguese by Giovanni Pontiero (Harcourt Brace & Co.) when the power went out. It was about four in the afternoon so I could still read by the light from the window, but

S. K. Page
Blood

Blood (Scirocco) is the play by Tom Walmsley based on “Maxine,” a piece for performance that appeared in Geist No. 16.

Luanne Armstrong
Boiling Point

In Boiling Point: How Politicians, Big Oil and Coal, Journalists, and Activists Are Fueling the Climate Crisis—and What We Can Do to Avert Disaster (Basic Books) by Ross Gelbspan, the intricate politics of oil and money that drive the governmental po

Geist Staff
Blood Vessel

Nevertheless, Canadian writers do persist in the genres, and one is always gratified to come across a Canadian thriller or a mystery novel like Paul Grescoe's Blood Vessel (Douglas & McIntyre) for the sheer pleasure of watching Canadian places and ti

Jennifer Delisle
Bosun Chair

Jennifer Delisle recounts the tale of Jean Chaulk: servant, mother, grandmother, shipwreck saviour.

Patty Osborne
Borkmann’s Point

Fans who are missing Inspector Morse, the famous fictional British detective who, unfortunately, has been killed off, should try reading the Inspector Van Veeteren mysteries by Hakan Nesser (translated by Laurie Thompson; Doubleday).

Norbert Ruebsaat
Boyhood: a Memoir

J.M. Coetzee has written a boyhood memoir in the third person, and this is no mean feat; nor is it a postmodern "novel." This could have to do with the fact that Boyhood: a Memoir (Vintage) is set in South Africa, a country where life and history sti

Glenn Broughton
Breathing Fire

It has been said that Canadian poets are a staid, funereal bunch, but there are a lot of exciting new writers who are reinventing the form, such as those in Breathing Fire (Harbour), an anthology of young poets. Re-entering the fray is a true origina

Patty Osborne
Breath: A Novel

Breath offers insight into the minds of adolescent boys, and is also a great way to feel the thrill and power of big waves without actually surfing them.

Stephen Osborne
Broken Pencil; the Guide to Alternative Publications in Canada

Just in: a copy of Broken Pencil; the Guide to Alternative Publications in Canada, Number One. A much needed guide to the weird and wonderful of the periodical press in Canada.

Blaine Kyllo
Brotherhood of the Wolf

Brotherhood of the Wolf, the highest grossing film in the history of French cinema, is a surprise. I thought it was going to be a werewolf movie, which would have been fine, but it is an action-packed tale of political intrigue set during the reign o

Norbert Ruebsaat
British Columbia, a Natural History

Natural history writers often write as if nature were a nineteenth-century corporation. Species “colonize” territory left bare by glaciers; these “pioneer species” establish “dominance,” only to be “displaced” by “opportunistic newcomers” who “invade

Patty Osborne
Bucket Nut

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