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Michael Hayward
Weight

Thirty-three international publishing houses are participating in The Myths, a project in which contemporary writers from all over the world were invited to retell any myth in any way they chose. Trumpeted as “the most ambitious simultaneous world-wi

Daniel Francis
While England Sleeps

American novelist David Leavitt had a legal and literary sensation on his hands when his novel While England Sleeps was published last winter. Apparently Leavitt borrowed heavily from the memoirs of Stephen Spender, the aging English poet, in writing

Geist Staff
White Buick

Greg Hollingshead's new collection, White Buick (Oolichan), contains fifteen nearly impeccable stories. Hollingshead knows how to write: there is nothing superfluous here, his characters are present, the tensions are real enough.

Patty Osborne
When I Lived in Modern Times

In When I Lived in Modern Times by Linda Grant (Granta), Evelyn Sert looks back to her twenties, when she left England for Israel in search of a place in which she might belong. She thought of Israel as a brand new place where Jews would work to buil

Eve Corbel
Wimbledon Green: The Greatest Comic Book Collector in the World

The comics artist and writer Seth dropped in to Sophia Books in Vancouver in early November to promote his new book, Wimbledon Green: The Greatest Comic Book Collector in the World (Drawn & Quarterly), a sumptuous clothbound volume on whose cover the

Michael Hayward
When I'm 64

"A door has closed, another door has opened. You have entered the winter of your life." A review of Paul Auster's memoir.

Stephen Osborne
Wide as the Waters: The Story of the English Bible and the Revolution It Inspired

Wide as the Waters: The Story of the English Bible and the Revolution It Inspired, by Benson Bobrick, is an excellent account of “the most influential book ever published.” It begins by reminding us that the first question ever asked by an inquisitor

Michael Hayward
Words Are Stones: Impressions of Sicily

Carlo Levi is perhaps best known to North Americans for Christ Stopped at Eboli, a memoir of the time he spent in political exile (for anti-Fascist activities) in the Basilicata region of southern Italy, between 1935 and 1936 (the memoir was made int

Jill Boettger
Wisdom and Metaphor

When I saw Jan Zwicky’s latest book, Wisdom and Metaphor (Gaspereau Press) on the shelf at a local bookstore, I bought a copy for myself and another as a birthday gift for a friend.

Jill Boettger
Music Inspired by the Group of Seven

[My husband] and his oldest friend drove down the Nass Highway in an old two-tone blue Volvo station wagon, then parked and sat on the hood to watch the mountains and the setting sun while the Rheostatics’ Music Inspired by the Group of Seven album (

HAL NIEDZVIECKI
My New York Diary

My New York Diary (Drawn & Quarterly) by Julie Doucet. Like all great graphic novels, this book manages to condense a complex set of circumstances into a simple tale: Montrealer Doucet moves to New York to join her boyfriend, who turns out to be para

Carrie Villeneuve
My Name is Rachel Corrie

The Havana restaurant on Commercial Drive was an appropriate choice of venue for My Name is Rachel Corrie, an intimate one-woman show adapted by Alan Rickman from the correspondence and journals of activist Rachel Corrie and presented by Teesri Duniy

Joelle Hann
My Messy Bedroom

I like good deals but sometimes a good tip will serve the same purpose. I was happy to find in Josey Vogels's My Messy Bedroom (Véhicule Press) an intriguing tip on buying bras.

GILLIAN JEROME
Natasha and Other Stories

The seven stories told in Natasha and Other Stories by David Bezmozgis (HarperFlamingo Canada) merit much of the hullabaloo that the book has received in the international press: simple sentences, rigorous verbs and dialogue that makes you feel like

Susan Crean
Nationalism Without Walls: The Unbearable Lightness of Being Canadian

Richard Gwyn tries to get away with two puns in the title of his book Nationalism Without Walls: The Unbearable Lightness of Being Canadian (McClelland & Stewart), trading off on both André Malraux's cultural manifesto of the 1960s Museum Without Wal

Michael Hayward
Neal Cassady: Collected Letters, 1944-1967

As Kerouac later described it, the letter was “a work of literary genius. Neal, he was just telling me what happened one time in Denver, and he had every detail. It was just like Dostoevsky. And I realized that’s the way to tell a story—just tell it!

Stephen Osborne
Native Canadiana

Gregory Scofield's new book of poems is Native Canadiana (Polestar) and it's very good. So is Lola Lemire Tostevin's latest collection, Cartouches (Talonbooks), which came out last year and which we've been meaning to mention here ever since, along w

Norbert Ruebsaat
Neighbours: Freud and Hitler in Vienna

Adolf Hitler is the second man examined in the film Neighbours: Freud and Hitler in Vienna by Manfred Becker, which played recently at the Pacific Cinémathèque in Vancouver. Both the narrator of the film and the psychologist who spoke after the scree

Patty Osborne
Never Going Back

Patty Osborne reviews Never Going Back by Antonia Banyard (Thistledown).

Kris Rothstein
Nelcott Is My Darling

Alice, the protagonist of Nelcott Is My Darling by Golda Fried (Coach House), has left a sheltered life in Toronto to attend McGill University, where she joins the film society and makes friends who are dangerous and cool—all while trying to hold on

Stephen Osborne
Newfoundland Poetry Series

Newfoundland will be five hundred years old in 1997 (a hell of an age for any part of North America), and Breakwater Books of St. John's is marking the event with the Newfoundland Poetry Series, a collection of handsome slim volumes, of which they pl

Never Let Me Go

In his novel Never Let Me Go (Vintage Canada), Kazuo Ishiguro creates an alternate world in which clones are produced, raised in residential school and taught math, history, art and social skills. As they accumulate knowledge, it dawns on these child

S. K. Page
New Chapbooks from Smoking Lung

The indomitably named Smoking Lung launched five more small books into the world in October 1998, at an extravaganza held at the Western Front in Vancouver. Smoking Lung has become proficient in the art of launching chapbooks and getting them distrib

Geist Staff
News from a Foreign Country Came

Alberto Manguel's News from a Foreign Country Came (Random House) has been sufficiently praised by the reviewers; now that it's out in paperback the rest of us can add our praises to theirs. This is, quite simply, a great book with a big theme.

Eimear Laffan
Fact
The Trap Door

This invertebrate does not go looking for prey

rob mclennan
Fact
Elizabeth Smart’s Rockcliffe Park

For the sake of the large romantic gesture

Sara de Waal
Fact
Little Women, Two Raccoons

Hit everything dead on, even if it’s big

Margaret Nowaczyk
Fact
Metanoias

The names we learn in childhood smell the sweetest to us

Ian Roy
Fact
My Body Is a Wonderland

Maybe my doctor has two patients named Ian Roy, and I’ve been sent the other Ian’s file

Sara Graefe
Fact
My Summer Behind the Iron Curtain

No Skylab buzz in East Germany.

Sara Cassidy
Fact
The Lowest Tide

Nature’s sanctity is the only portal to the future.

David Sheskin
Fact
PRESS 1 IF

PRESS 1 IF YOU THINK YOU MAY HAVE HEARD THE BIG BANG.

CB Campbell
Joe and Me

Playing against the fastest chess player in the world.

Mazzy Sleep
Heart Medicine

"You have bruises / There was time / You spent trying to / Heal them. / As in, time wasted."

Jennilee Austria
Scavengers

That’s one for the rice bag!

David M. Wallace
Red Flags

The maple leaf no longer feels like a symbol of national pride.

Jeremy Colangelo
i is another

"my point that / i is but a : colon grown / too long"

Danielle Hubbard
The muse hunt

"The following resume / arrived by fax: One ex-military / man, 52, applying / for duty ..."

CONNIE KUHNS
Marriage on the Download

If marriage was a television show, it might look something like this.

Deborah Ostrovsky
Saint Joseph, Patron Saint of Bad Pronunciation

Scrape every last bit of English out of your throat.

Debra Rooney
Comics
Weird Jobs

Who puts those little stickers on the apples in the grocery store?

Stephen Osborne
Waiting for Language

Remembering Norbert Ruebsaat.

Grant Buday
Reduce, Reuse, Reincarnate

Destroying books for the greater good.

Natasha Greenblatt
Scavenger Hunt for Losers

Losers: you have a lifetime to hunt.

Finn Wylie
Shelter in Place

"I never went looking for them."

Tara McGuire
Short Term

Tell me again how long the trip is?

Jill Boettger
Do You Remotely Care?

Fill the room with a flock of moths.

Stephen Smith
The Acknowledgements

Any resemblances to persons living or dead are purely vindictive.

Robyn Ludwig
Black Velvet, If You Please

The secret is in the velvet.

Christine Lai
Fact
Now Must Say Goodbye

The postcard presents a series of absences—the nameless photographer,

the unknown writer and recipient; it is constituted by what is unknown

Gabrielle Marceau
Fact
Main Character

I always longed to be the falling woman—impelled by unruly passion, driven by beauty and desire, turned into stone, drowned in flowers.

Mia + Eric
Future Perfect

New bylaws for civic spaces.

JUDY LEBLANC
Walking in the Wound

It is racism, not race, that is a risk factor for dying of COVID-19.

SADIQA DE MEIJER
Do No Harm

Doing time is not a blank, suspended existence.

Kristen den Hartog
The Insulin Soldiers

It was as though a magic potion had brought him back to life.

Steven Heighton
Everything Turns Away

Going unnoticed must be the root sorrow for the broken.

DANIEL CANTY
The Sum of Lost Steps

On the curve of the contagion and on the measure of Montreality.

Brad Cran
Fact
Potluck Café

It took me a million miles to get here and half the time I was doing it in high heels.

Carellin Brooks
Ripple Effect

I am the only woman in the water. The rest of the swimmers are men or boys. One of them bobs his head near me, a surprising vision in green goggles, like an undocumented sea creature. I imagine us having sex, briefly, him rocking over me like a wave.

MARCELLO DI CINTIO
The Great Wall of Montreal

The chain-link fence along boulevard de l’Acadie— two metres high, with “appropriate hedge”—separates one of the wealthiest neighbourhoods in Montreal from one of the poorest.

Michał Kozłowski
New World Publisher

Randy Fred thought that life after residential school would be drinking, watching TV and dying. Instead, he became the "greatest blind Indian publisher in the world."

BRAD YUNG
Lessons I’m Going To Teach My Kids Too Late

"I want to buy a house. And build a secret room in it. And not tell the kids about it."

Paul Tough
City Still Breathing: Listening to the Weakerthans

I wasn’t certain whether I was in Winnipeg because of the Weakerthans, or whether I cared about the Weakerthans because I care about Winnipeg.

Stephen Osborne
This Postcard Life

Spiritual landscapes and unknowable people captured on film, used to convey a message.

Hilary M. V. Leathem
To Coronavirus, C: An Anthropological Abecedary

After Paul Muldoon and Raymond Williams.

Bill MacDonald
The Ghost of James Cawdor

A seance to contact a dead miner at Port Arthur, Ontario, in 1923—conducted by Conan Doyle himself.

Ann Diamond
The Second Life of Kiril Kadiiski

He has been called the greatest Bulgarian poet of his generation. Can one literary scandal bury his whole career?

Caroline Adderson
Lives of the House

A basement shrine in her 1920s home inspires Caroline Adderson to discover the past lives of her house and its inhabitants.

Ivan Coyote
Shouldn’t I Feel Pretty?

Somewhere in the sweat and ache and muscle I carved a new shape for myself that made more sense.

David L. Chapman
Postcolonial Bodies

Mastery of the self

CONNIE KUHNS
There is a Wind that Never Dies

"If you are still alive, you must have had the experience of surrendering."

Sarah Leavitt
Small Dogs

Emily’s mother had unusually large eyes that bulged slightly and often turned red, and she stared at people in restaurants and stores. Sometimes Emily’s mother commented on these people’s conversations, or laughed at their jokes, as if she were part

Ola Szczecinska
Symbiosis in Warsaw

Ola Szczecinska returns to Warsaw to visit her grandmother, and to keep from losing her memories.

Anson Ching
Fact
the universal human

Review of "The Invention of the Other" directed by Bruno Jorge (2022).

Michael Hayward
Fact
Getting past the past

Review of "A Primer for Forgetting: Getting Past the Past" by Lewis Hyde.

Daniel Francis
Fact
writing from an early grave

Review of "Orwell: The New Life" by D.J. Taylor.

Michael Hayward
Fact
The peripatetic poet

Review of "Iron Curtain Journals," "South American Journals" and "Fall of America Journals" by Allen Ginsberg.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Fact
Haunted House guest

Review of "A Guest in the House" by Emily Carroll.

Michael Hayward
Fact
Beyond the event horizon

Review of "Antkind" by Charlie Kaufman.

Anson Ching
Fact
Sailing the roaring forties

Review of "The Last Grain Race" by Eric Newby.

Michael Hayward
Fact
BELLE ÉPOQUE GOSSIP

Review of "The Man in the Red Coat" by Julian Barnes.

Peggy Thompson
Fact
More precious than rubies

Review of "Rubymusic" by Connie Kuhns.

Debby Reis
Fact
A not-totally-accurate introduction to the azores

Review of the Netflix series "Rabo de Peixe" (2023) created by Augusto de Fraga.

Michael Hayward
Fact
A Russian Brother and his sister

Review of "A Russian Sister" by Caroline Adderson.

Kris Rothstein
Fact
The messy back of history

Review of "My Grandfather’s Knife: Hidden Stories from the Second World War" by Joseph Pearson

Peggy Thompson
Fact
Have Mercy

Review of "Mercy Gene" by JD Derbyshire.

Michael Hayward
Fact
subterranean mysteries

Review of "Underland" by Robert Macfarlane.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Fact
Championing Trees

Review of "Tracking Giants: Big Trees, Tiny Triumphs, and Misadventures in the Forest" by Amanda Lewis.

Patty Osborne
Fact
Crossing Borders

Review of "Solito: A Memoir" by Javier Zamora

Michael Hayward
Fact
The Two Roberts

Review of "Turn Every Page" directed by Lizzie Gottlieb

Peggy Thompson
Fact
A moment with holden

Review of "Holden After & Before: Love Letter for a Son Lost to Overdose" by Tara McGuire.

JILL MANDRAKE
Fact
POINTS OF INFLECTION

Review of "Some of the Puzzles" by M.A.C. Farrant.

Michael Hayward
Fact
A HOLIDAY IN THE MOUNTAINS (WITH PIE)

Review of "Holiday, 1909" by Charles Chapman.

Anson Ching
Fact
THE BELL KEEPS TOLLING

Review of "For Whom the Bell Tolls" by Ernest Hemingway.

Kris Rothstein
Fact
DEFINED BY DUMPLINGS

Review of "What We Talk About When We Talk About Dumplings" edited by John Lorinc.

Jonathan Heggen
Fact
The Common Shaman

Review of "Shaman" by Kim Stanley Robinson.

Peggy Thompson
Fact
Walk Another Path

Review of "Landlines" by Raynor Winn.

Stephen Henighan
Latinocanadá

Military coups, civil wars, and NAFTA are the cause of trilingual labels in Canadian big box stores.

Alberto Manguel
Yehuda Elberg: In Memoriam

A writer whose work is among the most important contributions to the literature of the Holocaust is forgotten by almost all.

Daniel Francis
It's a Free Country, Isn't It?

During the 1950s the RCMP used a machine to identify federal employees who were homosexuals. The name of this bogus device? The "fruit machine," of course.

Daniel Francis
Boob Tube

Richard Stursberg’s memoir of his years in CBC programming raises the question: How did someone with no sympathy for public broadcasting get the job in the first place?

Stephen Henighan
Against Efficiency

Stephen Henighan argues that efficiency has become a core value that heightens social divisions.

Alberto Manguel
Being Here

In the world between here and there, what place does one call home?

Stephen Henighan
A Table in Paris

Stephen Henighan remembers Mavis Gallant, the original nomad of Canadian literature, who wrote some of Canada's finest fiction at Pablo Picasso's café table in Paris.

Stephen Henighan
Wheels

Stephen Henighan investigates bus travel as one of Canada's last surviving democratic spaces.

Daniel Francis
Deviance on Display

Daniel Francis investigates the practice of visiting asylums and penitentiaries as entertainment in nineteenth-century Canada.

Alberto Manguel
Facing the Camera

How much does a photograph really capture the essence of a person?

Daniel Francis
Noir

Daniel Francis explores the photographer as Vancouver's most interesting historian.

Alberto Manguel
Observer and Observed

Alberto Manguel reflects on art as a witness to the human desire to be infinite and eternal.

Stephen Henighan
Tigers' Anatomy

As Canadian leaders look to emulate Asian nations, our government fails to see that the tigers' fatal flaw is the absence of democracy. Or, maybe they do see.

Daniel Francis
Warrior Nation

The Great White North gets rebranded and gains some military muscle: goodbye peacenik, hello soldier.

Alberto Manguel
How to Talk About Books We Haven’t Read, Part Two

I’ve now read Comment parler des livres que l’on n’a pas lus? and I’m happy to say that I was right.

Alberto Manguel
How to Talk About Books We Haven’t Read

A French writer whose name I hadn’t heard before, Pierre Bayard, has written a book called Comment parler des livres que l’on n’a pas lus? published by Éditions de Minuit in a collection aptly titled Paradoxe. A number of critics in France have writt

Stephen Henighan
Nations Without Publishers

In 2002, when my essay collection When Words Deny the World was published, people started behaving strangely. Ambitious young writers scurried out of sight when I entered a room, as though afraid that irate authors might banish them from Toronto for having spoken to me.

Stephen Henighan
Court Jester

One of the indispensable figures of contemporary journalism is the cutting-edge cultural commentator. The columnist who offers sardonic insights into trends, fashions, television shows and publishing personalities has become an institution.

Stephen Henighan
Building Bohemia

Since the Wall came down, East German socialists in Prenzlauer Berg are free to sip coffee and talk about art.

Stephen Henighan
The Colonized Investor

When the crash came, Canadians paid the price for the colonized mentalities of their investment advisors.

Alberto Manguel
A Few Essential Words

I met Alejandra Pizarnik in Buenos Aires, in 1967, five years before her death. I had asked her to contribute to an anthology of texts that purported to continue an interrupted story begun in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale: “There was a man dwelt by a churchyard.” She agreed and wrote a haunting piece called “Los muertos y la lluvia,” “The dead and the rain.” The book was never published, but we became friends.

George Fetherling
Civilian Camo

From the trench coat to the Hummer, what does the militarization of style say about us?

Stephen Henighan
Urquhart’s Choice

In 2007, when The Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories was published, Urquhart sent me a copy. As I examined the table of contents, I felt a dull thunk in my chest.

Daniel Francis
The Big Bad Wolfe

When General James Wolfescampered up the steep path that carried him onto the Plains of Abraham andinto the pages of the history books, what was he thinking?

Patty Osborne
Amsterdam

I didn't actually read Ian McEwan's Amsterdam (Knopf) at the cottage, but I did write this note there, during a week spent blissfully alone. The only men around were the ones in this book: Clive, a prominent composer, and Vernon, the editor of a high

Stephen Osborne
An Aesthetic Underground

In 1974 John Metcalf was thirty-four years old and Margaret Atwood was thirty-five, and in the story that Metcalf tells in An Aesthetic Underground (Thomas Allen), he bought a cup of coffee for Atwood, who harangued him for not letting her pay for it

Helen Godolphin
American Stories

American Stories by Nagai Kafu (Columbia University Press) are about Kafu's travels and studies in the United States. They were written in the first decade of the twentieth century but have only just been translated into English.

Michael Hayward
An Italian Journey

Henry Miller named Jean Giono as one of the writers he most admired (a list that includes Knut Hamsun, Blaise Cendrars, and Fyodor Dostoevsky). Giono, who lived most of his life in Manosque, the small Provençal town where he was born, begins An Itali

Leah Rae
Anatomy of Keys

In the basement of an antiques store around the corner from the Geist office in Vancouver, there is a large bank of antique cabinets, each drawer of which contains a different trinket. You can find magic tricks and hand creams and wind-up toys and so

Eve Corbel
Angloman

Angloman, by Mark Shainblum and Gabriel Morrissette (Nuage), is a comic book for Canada in the '90s: it lampoons everybody in the Franco-Anglo wars and it sends up superhero comics at the same time.

Michael Hayward
And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks

A collaboration between two of America’s most important literary figures, written before anyone had heard the names Burroughs or Kerouac, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks is the most recent treasure mined from the Beat archives.

Michael Hayward
An Omelette and a Glass of Wine

Michael Hayward reviews An Omelette and a Glass of Wine by Elizabeth David (Grub Street).

Lara Jenny
Annabelle Frumbatt: A Gastronomically Ghastly Tale

Annabelle Frumbatt: A Gastronomically Ghastly Tale (Tight Sweater Press) by Nina Bays is a deliciously gory cartoon about the perils of dieting. When little Annabelle starts getting fat, her friends’ and family’s disgust drives her to a drastic plan

Patty Osborne
Annie

Annie by Luanne Armstrong (Polestar) was supposed to be for my fourteen-year-old daughter. It looks like a young adult book so I wanted to get a young adult's opinion.

Patty Osborne
Another World

On my summer holiday I immersed myself in World War I, thanks to a friend who loaned me all three parts of Pat Barker's trilogy: Regeneration, The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road (Plume/Penguin). This is a large and important work conveniently pac

Geist Staff
Apology for Absence: Selected Poems 1962-1992

Some of us have become suspicious of books bearing blurbs by Robin Skelton, but in the case of John Newlove's Apology for Absence: Selected Poems 1962-1992 (Porcupine's Quill), we are pleased to make an exception. This book is as good as it gets when

Patty Osborne
April in Paris

This deftly written, suspenseful tale by Michael Wallner is called April in Paris (translated by John Cullen; Doubleday). World War ii may be long over, but the shifting alliances and desperate situations in this story are still relevant today.

Patty Osborne
As Long as the Rivers Flow

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.

Kent Bruyneel
Ascension

Ascension, by Steven Galloway (Knopf) is the story of Salvo, a tightrope walker, and his life and family in and out of the American circus. Galloway deploys modest language and simple sentences, enlivened and emboldened by stellar subject matter: eac

Eve Corbel
Artists & Writers Colonies: Retreats, Residencies and Respites for the Creative Mind

The title of Artists & Writers Colonies: Retreats, Residencies and Respites for the Creative Mind, by Gail Hellund Bowles (Blue Heron/Orca) just about says it. This is a well-conceived, well-organized and apparently well-researched list of getaways,

Geist Staff
Assault on God's Image

Isaac A. Block has taken some real chances in Assault on God's Image (Windflower Communications), a thesis-turned-book about violence within Mennonite families living in Winnipeg.

Eve Corbel
Ascending Peculiarity: Edward Gorey on Edward Gorey

Ascending Peculiarity: Edward Gorey on Edward Gorey (Harcourt), selected and edited by Karen Wilkin, is a collection of twenty-six years’ worth of interviews of Gorey, the eccentric American artist and writer. He was best known for his intricate pen-

Patty Osborne
Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner)

In the film Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner), the story is in the action and the scenery. The sparse dialogue, which is in Inuktitut with English subtitles, fills in only where necessary.

Rose Burkoff
Asthmatica

The short stories in Jon Paul Fiorentino’s Asthmatica (Insomniac) tickle the funny bone every time, from hypothetical essay titles to a story about the tactics a kid might use to shame the son of a mediocre Swedish hockey player. In these yarns Fiore

Rick Maddocks
Au Hasard Balthazar

Au Hasard Balthazar is a forty-year-old film about a donkey. Not only that, a suffering donkey saint.

Michael Hayward
Back on the Fire

In an author photograph on the back cover of Back on the Fire (Shoemaker & Hoard) Gary Snyder is shown looking west into the distance (seen from the perspective of a Canadian reader looking south to the Sierra Nevada foothills, Snyder’s home for more

Eve Corbel
b leev abul char ak trs

bill bissett is the author of some sixty books of poetry, each more full and fluid than the last, and the most recent collection, b leev abul char ak trs (Talon Books), is jam-packed. Here are meditations on holes in the sky, endangered species, "fee

Mindy Abramowitz
Authors à la Carte

Although Authors à la Carte was among the last events in the Vancouver Writers and Readers Festival, it was the first one I attended.

Shannon Emmerson
Autobiography of Red: A Romance

Speaking of the beautifully explained inexplicable things in life Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red: A Romance (Knopf) is a gorgeous, astounding, poetic study of what things are like when you just happen to be red. The colour red.