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KELSEA O'CONNOR
All My Little Words

Kelsea O'Connor reviews 101 Two-Letter Words, an illustrated Scrabble guide by Stephen Merritt with running themes of sloths, songwriting and vampire dogs.

Alberto Manguel
Not Finishing

"A library is never finished, only abandoned." Alberto Manguel on incompletion, voluntary interruption and the pleasure of the day before.

JANE RULE
Obsession

"Asked to write a character sketch, I wrote three pages on Ann’s hands. The paper was returned with every line crossed out and a question mark at the end."

Jan Feduck
Hurricane Diary

Jan Feduck faces Frenchish food, vomit and guys from Ontario when her ferry from the Magdalen Islands is caught in a hurricane.

JILL MANDRAKE
Still Stupefying

Jill Mandrake is blown away by South of Elfrida by Holley Rubinsky, a journey into "the land of guilt and sorrow."

roni-simunovic
Second Chances

Roni Simunovic reviews Seconds by Brian Lee O'Malley, a graphic novel about getting second chances whether you deserve them or not.

Stephen Osborne
Harrowing

"This is not a documentary; it is, however, an overpowering aesthetic and emotional experience, a true happening"—Stephen Osborne reviews Susan Sontag's film Promised Lands.

Jesmine Cham
Technology Creeps On

Jesmine Cham talks scaremongering, tinfoil hats and invasive technology in this review of Technocreep by Thomas P. Keenan.

Stephen Henighan
Iberian Duet

The assumption of mutual comprehensibility between speakers of Spanish and Portuguese creates a culture of mutual ignorance.

Dylan Gyles
Philosophy and Chloroform

Dylan Gyles reviews Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever? by Dave Eggers, the story of a disillusioned young man grappling with life, the universe and metaphysical truths.

Michael Hayward
All My Troubles Seemed So Far Away

Michael Hayward reviews Stefan Zweig's The World of Yesterday, a "a window into the vanished world of the Austro-Hungarian Empire."

Eve Corbel
Seized

Eve Corbel reviews Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence by Doris Pilkington, in which two girls are taken from their family by Western Australia government officials in 1931.

Michael Hayward
Smoke and Mirrors

Michael Hayward reviews American Smoke by Iain Sinclair, an account of the author's road trip across North America in search of traces of the Beat Generation.

roni-simunovic
Based Loosely

Roni Simunovic reviews Based on a True Story by Elizabeth Renzetti, the bizarrely fascinating tale of a washed-up soap star's struggles with unemployment and substance abuse.

Lily Gontard
Wild Woman

Lily Gontard reviews Cheryl Strayed's Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, a memoir about crisis, redemption and hiking.

Dylan Gyles
Floating

“Don’t try to make anything happen,” the calm voice said. Dylan Gyles visits a sensory deprivation float tank.

roni-simunovic
Bird Metal

Roni Simunovic investigates Hatebeak, a death metal band with an African Grey parrot vocalist.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Strange Things Come From The Woods

Kelsea O'Connor reviews Through the Woods by Emily Carroll, a collection of comics full of "ghosts, parasites, dead brothers, mysterious strangers and murderous husbands."

Stephen Osborne
The Saddest Place on Earth

“I walked into the garage, and found a teenage boy in a tank top and shorts." Kathryn Mockler's poems eschew meaningless metaphors for direct language.

Michael Hayward
Talking Ducks

Michael Hayward reviews The Old Castle’s Secret by Carl Barks.

Alberto Manguel
A Novel for All Times

Alberto Manguel's column from Geist 93 about how the most important Turkish novelist of modern times took over fifty years to reach English-speaking audiences.

Jian Ghomeshi
The Ghomeshi Files

A short list of Jian Ghomeshi's short lists from 1982.

Daniel Francis
We Are Not a Nation of Amnesiacs

"Canadians have long been convinced that we do not know much, or care much, about our own history, but a new study suggests that this truism is not true."

Michael Hayward
Behind Closed Doors

Michael Hayward reviews My Struggle Book 1: A Death in the Family by Karl Ove Knausgård.

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.

S. K. Page
Observatory Mansions

Observatory Mansions by Edward Carey (Crown) sports a beautiful dust jacket that can be read over and over again, and the chapter starts are accompanied by wonderful illustrations by the author. The lives of the denizens of Observatory Mansions are s

JILL MANDRAKE
Of a Fire Beyond the Hills: A Novel Based on News Stories

For the folks out there who are indifferent to what’s going on in Iraq and Afghanistan, this book seems to whisper, “Stop eating your grilled Gruyère cheese with Roma tomatoes and red onion on open-face sourdough long enough to read me, if you please

Geist Staff
Old Farmer's Almanac

The Old Farmer's Almanac (Yankee Publishing Inc.) does not believe in chaos theory. "We believe," state its editors in the 1994 edition which arrived in the mail recently, "nothing in the universe occurs haphazardly." Which explains how the Almanac c

GILLIAN JEROME
Of Woman Born

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 “

Lara Jenny
Old Money

Wendy Wasserstein’s superb writing makes her latest play, Old Money, more compelling to read than most contemporary novels. Old Money concerns a Manhattan mansion and the families that inhabit it at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centurie

Patty Osborne
On Songwriting

Bob Snider is a dishevelled man with a beard and longish hair who writes and sings simple songs that play with language and usually make people laugh. In the first part of On Songwriting (Gaspereau Press), he advises songwriters to use nouns and verb

Stephen Osborne
On Earth As It Is

Steven Heighton's new book, On Earth As It Is, is bigger and much more spread out than his last one (Flight Paths of the Emperor) and more ambitious. His writing is strongest when he writes at a distance; especially fine are his excursions into the p

Stephen Osborne
On Tycho's Island: Tycho Brahe and His Assistants

Students of astronomical history will require a copy of On Tycho's Island: Tycho Brahe and His Assistants by John Robert Christianson (Cambridge), which is a very full account of the great "pre-scientific" science centre established in Denmark in the

Patty Osborne
One Bloody Thing After Another

Patty Osborne reviews One Bloody Thing After Another by Joey Comeau (ECW Press).

Michael Hayward
On the Road: The Original Scroll

With the publication of On the Road: The Original Scroll (Viking), Jack Kerouac takes a step beyond canonization toward beatitude itself. The scroll manuscript of this 1957 novel is one of the sacred artifacts of the Beat era, and conflicting stories

Norbert Ruebsaat
On Kiddie Porn: Sexual Representation, Free Speech and the Robin Sharpe Case

Stan Persky and John Dixon ask important questions in their book On Kiddie Porn: Sexual Representation, Free Speech and the Robin Sharpe Case (New Star). Is possession of a photograph depicting a criminal act a criminal act?

Luanne Armstrong
One-Eyed Jacks

Canadians have not yet produced enough mysteries to define "the Canadian mystery," but Brad Smith's book One-Eyed Jacks (Doubleday) is a welcome addition to this evolving genre. Set in the Toronto of a much earlier era, the story clips along at a fin

S. K. Page
Only A Beginning: An Anarchist Anthology

Everything you need to know about Anarchism in Canada can be found in Only A Beginning: An Anarchist Anthology (Arsenal Pulp), an enormous collection of anarchist writing and publishing in this country since 1976. Here is recorded the genesis and pas

Michael Hayward
Only in Canada, You Say

According to the cover copy on Only in Canada, You Say (Oxford), Katherine Barber is “Canada’s Word Lady,” although it does not say who appointed her to that position.

Michał Kozłowski
Outcast

With Outcast (McClelland & Stewart), Jose Latour, former vice-president of the Latin American branch of the International Association of Crime Writers, shows why many consider him a master of crime and noir writing in this stylish thriller. It has pa

Carla Elm Clement
Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of a Man Who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books

Yiddish is a language of survival. Although spoken by only five percent of the world's population, it's one of the seven most widespread languages, spoken in every corner of the globe. In Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of a Man Who Rescue

Jenny Kent
Palpasa Café

Jenny Kent reviews Palpasa Café by Narayan Wagle (Publication Nepa~laya).

Stephen Osborne
Oxford Companion to Ships and the Sea

The second edition of the very useful Oxford Companion to Ships and the Sea, edited by I.C.B. Dear and Peter Kemp, contains more than 2,600 entries on a wide range of arcana (oceanic, naval and mythical), some fine drawings of the bowline, the clove

RICHARD VAN CAMP
Oxford Canadian Dictionary

Once a piece of writing has been accepted for publication, and the writer and the editor have worked out the size, shape and tone of the piece, how confidently does the Geist copy editor go in with her red pen and fine-tune it? Assuming that she cann

Tom Sandborn
Paper Boom: Why Real Prosperity Requires a New Approach to the Canadian Economy

This review was accepted for publication by the Vancouver Sun in January 2000, and then rejected by editors who found it "too one-sided and unfair to the bank." This is the first financial book review to be published in Geist, and is offered here in

Lily Gontard
Pan’s Labyrinth

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

Sam Macklin
Pan

Attention-grabbing fact: ninety-nine percent of “serious” writing about “popular” music is one hundred percent useless. One reason for this is an ingrained belief that the social significance of the entertainment industry is more interesting than any

Patty Osborne
Paranoia in the Launderette

While doing research for a proposed TV series on heinous Victorian criminals, the hero of Paranoia in the Launderette, by Bruce Robinson (Bloomsbury), becomes convinced that there are murderers around every corner, hiding under his bed, poisoning his

Patty Osborne
Paradise Travel

In Paradise Travel, by Jorge Franco, translated by Katherine Silver (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Marlon Cruz, a naïve young man from Colombia, finds himself alone in New York City when he has a fight with his girlfriend and storms out of their hotel

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