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Michael Hayward
Vinyl Café

I’ve always had mixed feelings about Stuart McLean’s Vinyl Café show on CBC Radio One. Sometimes it seems a bit twee or corny, but if I’m driving around town on a Sunday I’ll always tune in because I know that somewhere along the way, Stuart McLean w

Kris Rothstein
Unknown White Male

In 2003 Douglas Bruce rode the subway to Coney Island, having forgotten where he was going and who he was. His friend Rupert Murray was one of many directors interested in bringing this story of complete amnesia to the screen, and Murray’s Unknown Wh

Blaine Kyllo
Wallflower's Short Cuts Series

The new line of books about film and filmmaking from Wallflower Press in London (available from Columbia University Press here) is a real achievement.

Michael Hayward
Venices

Pushkin is one of those admirable small presses with an eclectic list that suggests the proprietors are interested in more than the bottom line; Paul Morand’s Venices, translated by Euan Cameron, would be a perfect choice for reading on the Lido.

Sewid-Smith Daisy
Waiting for Gertrude

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

Patty Osborne
Waiting for Time

A book that I have been recommending to all of my friends is Waiting for Time by Bernice Morgan (Breakwater). This is the story of Mary Bundle, who was sent from a workhouse in England to St. John's, Newfoundland and eventually made her way to an iso

Stephen Osborne
Voice Literary Supplement

The Voice Literary Supplement for October was full of special treats, not the least of which was a profile of Marguerite Young, author of Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, a novel that I remembered from the seventies but had never read.

Daniel Francis
Waiting for the Macaws

A few years ago I drove my son to the waterfront village of Port Alice on the northwest coast of Vancouver Island to take up his summer job as an engineer in the local pulp mill. We had settled him into his new digs and I was preparing to return to V

Patty Osborne
Voyageurs

Voyageurs by Margaret Elphinstone took me back in time even further, to Upper Canada in the early 1800s, when Toronto was known as York, and Yonge Street stretched north past the last farm in Upper Canada into Mississauga Indian country. Into this ru

Sam Macklin
Walt and Skeezix: 1921 & 1922

The Canadian publisher Drawn & Quarterly has launched Walt and Skeezix: 1921 & 1922, the first in a series that collects Frank King’s seminal Gasoline Alley strips. While these books are fitting testaments to King’s incredible illustrative talents,

Eve Corbel
Weirdo

Remember Robert Crumb, the American comics artist who created Mr. Natural some twenty-five years ago, and got a whole generation to Keep On Truckin'? In the 1980s Crumb edited a comics anthology called Weirdo, which published work by Gilbert Shelton,

Sarah Leavitt
We Are On Our Own

Miriam Katin was a small child when she and her mother escaped Nazi-occupied Budapest by faking their deaths and walking into the Hungarian countryside. At sixty-three, Katin has finally told her story, in straightforward, unsentimental prose and lov

Cassia Streb
White Jade Tiger

Junior reviewer Cassia Streb (grade seven) sends the following note on White Jade Tiger (Orca Books) by Julie Lawson: "White Jade Tiger is about a girl who goes back in time to 1881 when the Chinese were brought over to Victoria to build the CPR rail

GILLIAN JEROME
When We Were Orphans

When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro (Knopf Canada) fell as if by magic into my lap and I read it relentlessly for two days, almost without sleeping, eating, bathing or responding to my partner and daughter. Like all great works of imagination, thi

Jill Boettger
White Salt Mountain

A curious inscription in a copy of a book called Fir-Flower Tablets: Poems from the Chinese inspired Peter Sanger to write White Salt Mountain (Gaspereau Press), a book that weaves together stories and facts about the life of Florence Ayscough, a lar

Patty Osborne
When the Spirits Dance

When the Spirits Dance (Theytus) by Larry Loyie with Constance Brissenden, the second book in a series of stories from Loyie’s childhood, paints a gentle picture of life in a First Nations community in northern Alberta during World War II.

Patty Osborne
Wilderness Beginnings

My deadline for finishing Wilderness Beginnings by Rose Hertel Falkenhagen (Caitlin Press) was December 21 because that’s when my partner David finished an out-of-town job. I’m a sucker for books about homesteading, especially homesteading in the nor

HAL NIEDZVIECKI
Wish Book

Wish Book (Gutter Press) by Derek McCormack. McCormack looks to the past to shatter the placid show window that the future promises us.

Kris Rothstein
Whole New Thing

The action in Whole New Thing, a film from Nova Scotia, is also precipitated by self-involved parents. Thirteen-year-old Emerson lives in a remote cabin, where he writes novels, takes saunas and gives massages to his parents’ friends.

Norbert Ruebsaat
Women With Men

Richard Ford (who I always think is John Ford) writes stories in the third person which read like stories in the first person, and I wanted to find out how and why he did this. I read the first story in his book Women With Men (Little, Brown) in Aust

Kris Rothstein
Women Who Eat: A New Generation on the Glory of Food

Food and eating are essential parts of our lives but they are seldom given serious thought.

Kris Rothstein
Witch Ball

Sabine Rose, the heroine of Witch Ball by Linda Joy Singleton (Llewellyn), is a psychic. She hides her powers from her popular friends and dreamy boyfriend by day and consults with her spirit guide by night.

Patty Osborne
Winter in July

Two days later I took Wayman’s workshop, Catching Fire, which was guaranteed to inspire us to get writing. He told us, among other things, that once we became writers we would no longer read for pure pleasure because we would always be analyzing what

Jill Boettger
Yesterday, at the Hotel Clarendon

A friend told me recently that women who write write like they are weaving and men who write write like they are having sex. Women bring together strands of things, she said, and connect them. Men focus relentlessly on a particular end, with an urgen

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.

Daniel Francis
Under the Tuscan Sun

For the second Christmas in a row, I asked for a ten-day holiday at a cooking school in Tuscany, and for the second year in a row my ever-practical wife found a way to indulge my fantasy without emptying our bank account. Last year she pacified me wi

Kris Rothstein
Twenty Miles

Twenty Miles by Cara Hedley (Coach House) hurtles headlong through the chaos of a season of tough young women playing university hockey. Isabel Norris (Iz) is the unlikely heroine of this novel, a pretty girl whose talent for hockey is more of a comp

Rose Burkoff
Two Lives

Vikram Seth made a name for himself with the conventional epic A Suitable Boy, but most of his publishing ventures have been strange and surprising. Two Lives (McArthur & Company) is the non-fiction story of his great uncle Shanti and great aunt Henn

Stephen Osborne
Tyndale New Testament

The Tyndale New Testament of 1526 is now available in a life-sized edition from Oxford. This was the first pocket-sized popular bible; it could be easily hidden from the thought police of the time, who were eager to burn any copies of the book they c

Lara Jenny
True Confessions of a Big Geek

I never expected to find two new zines about geeky gay girls. Sarah Dermer, author of the Toronto zine True Confessions of a Big Geek, should really get together with Joy, who publishes Super Geek Girl in Portland.

Darren Barefoot
Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love

The latest book from Canada's Angry Young Playwright Brad Fraser includes a reprint of his infamous Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love alongside the screenplay of his recently produced film version Love and Human Remains (NeWest).

Jill Boettger
Unfamiliar Weather

Unfamiliar Weather (The Muses’ Company) is a first book of poems by Chris Hutchinson, who isn’t so tempered in his questions but plunges into them head-first and thirsty. These poems are afflicted by rain and sometimes flooded.

Mandelbrot
Vancouver Special

Mandelbrot reviews Vancouver Special by Charles Demers (Arsenal Pulp).

Geist Staff
Vancouver: A Visual History

Books these days, like TV miniseries and major sporting events, come with their own parallel narratives, human interest stories designed to get the consumer's attention. Stephen Hawking's medical condition helped turn his difficult philosophical trea

Stephen Osborne
Urban Coyote: New Territory

The first volume of Urban Coyote, which appeared last year (Lost Moose), was subtitled A Yukon Anthology; the second volume, just released, is subtitled New Territory and only in the cover blurb do we understand it to be a “second Yukon anthology.” O

Vernon God Little

The language on the dust jacket and in the reviews of Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre (Faber & Faber) is of the “biting satire,” “hilarious romp” variety, but I was not amused.

Michael Hayward
Venice and the Islamic World, 828-1797

Venice and the Islamic World, 828—1797, edited by Stefano Carboni (Yale University) provides a comprehensive overview of Venice’s artistic heritage, shown within the context of nine centuries of commerce between La Serenissima and the Islamic empires

Lily Gontard
Volver

My recent foray into Oscar-, bafta- and every-other-award-nominated films has left me with “movie glow,” that special feeling you have after watching a particularly good film. You are giddy. You can fly. The dvds that I picked up were Volver (Pedro A

Barbara Zatyko
Visible Worlds

Visible Worlds (HarperCollins), by Marilyn Bowering, starts out in Winnipeg, which probably has a lot in common with Windsor. But the story is too out of this world to be contained there.

Michael Hayward
Vinyl Café

I’ve always had mixed feelings about Stuart McLean’s Vinyl Café show on CBC Radio One. Sometimes it seems a bit twee or corny, but if I’m driving around town on a Sunday I’ll always tune in because I know that somewhere along the way, Stuart McLean w

Kris Rothstein
Unknown White Male

In 2003 Douglas Bruce rode the subway to Coney Island, having forgotten where he was going and who he was. His friend Rupert Murray was one of many directors interested in bringing this story of complete amnesia to the screen, and Murray’s Unknown Wh

Blaine Kyllo
Wallflower's Short Cuts Series

The new line of books about film and filmmaking from Wallflower Press in London (available from Columbia University Press here) is a real achievement.

Michael Hayward
Venices

Pushkin is one of those admirable small presses with an eclectic list that suggests the proprietors are interested in more than the bottom line; Paul Morand’s Venices, translated by Euan Cameron, would be a perfect choice for reading on the Lido.

Sewid-Smith Daisy
Waiting for Gertrude

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

Patty Osborne
Waiting for Time

A book that I have been recommending to all of my friends is Waiting for Time by Bernice Morgan (Breakwater). This is the story of Mary Bundle, who was sent from a workhouse in England to St. John's, Newfoundland and eventually made her way to an iso

Stephen Osborne
Voice Literary Supplement

The Voice Literary Supplement for October was full of special treats, not the least of which was a profile of Marguerite Young, author of Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, a novel that I remembered from the seventies but had never read.

Daniel Francis
Waiting for the Macaws

A few years ago I drove my son to the waterfront village of Port Alice on the northwest coast of Vancouver Island to take up his summer job as an engineer in the local pulp mill. We had settled him into his new digs and I was preparing to return to V

Patty Osborne
Voyageurs

Voyageurs by Margaret Elphinstone took me back in time even further, to Upper Canada in the early 1800s, when Toronto was known as York, and Yonge Street stretched north past the last farm in Upper Canada into Mississauga Indian country. Into this ru

Sam Macklin
Walt and Skeezix: 1921 & 1922

The Canadian publisher Drawn & Quarterly has launched Walt and Skeezix: 1921 & 1922, the first in a series that collects Frank King’s seminal Gasoline Alley strips. While these books are fitting testaments to King’s incredible illustrative talents,

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.

Lily Gontard
Charles the Bold

Charles Thibodeau is the hero of Charles the Bold (McClelland & Stewart), a novel by Yves Beauchemin (translated by Wayne Grady) that is truly Dickensian in style. Charles is a good and beautiful boy who endures tragedies and indignities that would d

Patty Osborne
Certain Dead Soldiers

Christine Slater's Certain Dead Soldiers (Key Porter) takes place in Ireland. It starts out being about a young drunk and ends up being about his young wife.

Kris Rothstein
Chuck Dugan is AWOL

The eponymous hero of Chuck Dugan is AWOL by Eric Chase Anderson (Chronicle) isn’t from Montreal or Toronto but he is struggling through early adulthood in this illustrated old-fashioned adventure story filled with innocence and charm. Chuck Dugan de

Kris Rothstein
Chinese Restaurant: On the Islands

Most ambitious debut project: Chinese Restaurant: On the Islands, by the Canadian director Cheuk Kwan. Intrigued by the worldwide omnipresence of Chinese restaurants, he travelled to a dozen countries to investigate the experiences of the Chinese dia

Geist Staff
Chronicles of Dissent: Conversations with Noam Chomsky, 1984-1991

Months ago someone walked off with our review copy of that Noam Chomsky book that was on the bestseller list earlier this year: Chronicles of Dissent: Conversations with Noam Chomsky, 1984-1991 (New Star). Well, it finally came back, just in time for

Leah Rae
Chomsky and Co.

Chomsky and Co. breaks all the rules of documentary filmmaking, and not for the better.

Blaine Kyllo
Chump Change

Like other unpublished novelists, I am always curious to read the new writers as they are "discovered" by the publishing houses. God help us if the people at Random House keep this up. Their latest "find" is David Eddie, whose novel Chump Change is a

S. K. Page
Civilizations

Civilizations (Key Porter) is a great big book by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, author of Millennium: A History of Our Last Thousand Years, and clearly a writer undaunted by great themes, such as how the generations of human beings all over the planet an

JAMES LONG
Clark and I Somewhere in Connecticut

In 2005, James Long discovered an abandoned suitcase filled with photo albums in the alley behind his house. The photographs in the albums and the process of tracing them—and even finding members of the family who “appear” in them.

Mandelbrot
City of Glass

Mandelbrot reviews City of Glass by Douglas Coupland (Douglas & McIntyre).

Leslie Pomeroy
CLUE

Everyone groaned when I ran back to the dinner table with the dusty flat game box labelled CLUE. It had been a food-filled Christmas day and few among the five of us were able to talk, let alone play a game that requires effort and concentration.

Patty Osborne
Cloud of Bone

In Cloud of Bone by Bernice Morgan (Knopf), Kyle, a wild young man from St. John’s, Newfoundland, runs away from the navy during World War ii and is indelibly marked by Shanawdithit, the last of the Beothuk aboriginal group, who had died more than a

Sewid-Smith Daisy
Collier's, Issue 2.23

The day began with a comment from a colleague that working with a certain buggy database program made him feel like Sisyphus, and it ended with three pieces of reading. An hour or so after the colleague’s remark, I was trading favourite Onion headlin

Kris Rothstein
Colour: Travels Through the Paintbox

Victoria Finlay’s Colour: Travels Through the Paintbox (Sceptre) looks like it could be this year’s Salt. But where Mark Kurlansky delivered a precise, fascinating account of the intersections of salt and history, Finlay offers only scattered and ram

Neil MacDonald
Comfort Zones

Pamela Donoghue's first collection of stories, Comfort Zones (Polestar First Fiction) consists of seventeen stories, most of which revolve around a Cape Breton family. Donoghue's characters don't reach great personal epiphanies and they move through

Daniel Francis
Concise Columbia Encyclopedia

Every desk requires a desk encyclopedia and for several years mine held the admirable Concise Columbia Encyclopedia (Columbia University Press).

Geist Staff
Completely Mad

Completely Mad, a diligent history of Mad magazine (by Maria Reidelbach, Little, Brown), is more than pop culture. It's literary and political history.

Comic Book: The Movie

Comic books take something back from Hollywood in Comic Book: The Movie (Miramax), directed by none other than Luke Skywalker, aka Mark Hamill, and starring him and most of the best voice talent in the animation industry. The film, a fictional docume

Lily Gontard
Consumption

Consumption, by Kevin Patterson (Random House), set in Rankin Inlet in the eastern Arctic, tells the saga of an Inuit family’s decline. The story begins in the 1950s, when a family’s only daughter, Victoria, is sent “outside” to be cured of tuberculo

JILL MANDRAKE
Coming Up For Air

When I heard that George Orwell’s Coming Up For Air was being adapted as a one-man stage show, I couldn’t wait to see it. It’s high time for a new interpretation of Orwell’s work.

Eve Corbel
Consequences

The dust jacket on Consequences, by Penelope Lively (Key Porter), bills the novel as “a sweeping saga of three generations of women and the consequences of love and life”—the sort of talk one expects to find on a good, thick bodice-ripper. But there

RICHARD VAN CAMP
Cool Yule

A review of a winter holiday show presented by The Vancouver Rainbow Concert Band, the first and only LGBTQ band in Canada.

Patty Osborne
Cross My Heart

Speaking of characters, for me there is no better way to understand history than to read about it in a good story that shows you what it was like to be alive back then. Lately I’ve read several children’s books that fill the bill.

Stephen Osborne
Craze: Gin and Debauchery in an Age of Reason

In 1738 in London, informers who exposed gin-sellers were frequently attacked by mobs of citizens. They were beaten up, burned in effigy and dunked in horse ponds and cesspools. At least one informer died of wounds after boiling water was poured down

Patty Osborne
Crucero/Crossroads

When I first encountered Guilermo Verdecchia's name I took the approach of a typical Saxon and avoided saying it out loud. So as I watched the film Crucero/Crossroads (Mongrel Media) I sympathized with Verdecchia's grade one teacher, a wholesome youn