This invertebrate does not go looking for prey

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For the sake of the large romantic gesture

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Hit everything dead on, even if it’s big

The names we learn in childhood smell the sweetest to us

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

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No Skylab buzz in East Germany.

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

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

Playing against the fastest chess player in the world.

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

That’s one for the rice bag!

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

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

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

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

Scrape every last bit of English out of your throat.

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

Remembering Norbert Ruebsaat.

Destroying books for the greater good.

Losers: you have a lifetime to hunt.

"I never went looking for them."

Tell me again how long the trip is?

Fill the room with a flock of moths.

Any resemblances to persons living or dead are purely vindictive.

The secret is in the velvet.

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

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

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

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New bylaws for civic spaces.

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

Doing time is not a blank, suspended existence.

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

Going unnoticed must be the root sorrow for the broken.

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

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

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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.

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.

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."

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

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.

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

After Paul Muldoon and Raymond Williams.

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

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

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

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

Mastery of the self

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

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

Life Skills (Coteau Books) is a collection of stories by Marlis Wesseler, who, according to the publisher's blurb, "lives in Regina with her husband Lutz and son Evan"—an example of the biographical minutiae that book lovers learn to ignore—or at lea

Living to Tell the Tale (Knopf) is the first of three autobiographical books by García Márquez. It has come out in paperback, a year after the hardcover edition, and it is a big book that you want to have in your collection, if only for the storytell

The first time I sat down to read Tim Lilburn’s book Living in the World as if It Were Home (Cormorant), I went to it with the kind of mind and feeling that I take to my favourite shelf of music at Megatunes or my Grandma’s cheese and Hovis bread san

Speaking of jarring but effective writing, Bud Osborn's Lonesome Monsters (Anvil) successfully dramatizes the harsher side of urban life. This book, though it doesn't break new ground in form or content, depicts the Main-and-Hastingses of North Ameri

Ivan E. Coyote loves her mom and dad, her extended family, her godson and her dogs—hell, she even loves her neighbours, some of whom are deeply “normal” and others of whom are lesbian, homosexual, trans-gendered and undecided—and she writes stories a

Lost Moose is already famous for the Lost Whole Moose Catalogue, a beautifully designed monster book that has everything in it you need to know to actually survive in the Yukon, and even more if you want to survive somewhere else while thinking about

The Eyre Affair and Lost in a Good Book, two novels by Jasper Fforde (New English Library), are easy to read and chock-full of smart puns, literary references and grammatical gags that are fun to fall for. The protagonist is a detective named Thursda

[Chester Brown's] latest collection, Louis Riel: A Comic Strip Biography (Drawn & Quarterly), is a fascinating look at the westward expansion of colonial Canada.

Are the Québecois the only moviemakers in North America with a sense of humour? Latest evidence to hand would certainly suggest so: three movies in the local video place this season and all winners.

Louis the 19th: King of the Air Waves (Malofilm) is a Quebec film that's all about TV-land. When Louis wins a contest that puts him on TV twenty-four hours a day, both he and his mother are over the moon.

When Mad Hot Ballroom, a film produced and directed by Marilyn Agrelo, played at The North Shore International Film Series the audience laughed, cried and cheered while the kids on the screen learned the tango, the rhumba, the foxtrot, the merengue a

Sean Horlor’s debut book of poetry, Made Beautiful by Use (Signature Editions), contains lines that must be read out loud. The line “cologne in glass bottles,” for example, is so simple; but say it, “cologne in glass bottles,” roll it around on your

I started Hal Niedzviecki’s Lurvy: A Farmer’s Almanac (Coach House Books) while on the way to a rural retreat with a bunch of book publishers. Lurvy is a bizarre retelling of the children’s classic story Charlotte’s Web, this time told from the point

Forget Jaws—the greatest fish to appear on screen is in the Québécois film Maelström, a good argument against the use of computer-generated images and a testament to the ever-creepy power of the puppet.

Daniel Zomparelli reviews Magenta Soul Whip by Lisa Robertson (Coach House).

Magnum Degrees (Phaidon Press) is the enormous book from Magnum, the photographers’ co-operative founded by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa, among others, in 1947. There are simply too many great photographs here for easy looking: 500 pages of

Make Believe Love by Lee Gowan (Vintage Canada) is billed as a tale of “love in the electronic age,” but the high-tech world has little to do with this story of obsession in dreary small-town Saskatchewan. Joan Swift, the town librarian, will never b

In Making Home in Havana (Rutgers University Press), Vincenzo Pietropaolo, a photographer, and Cecelia Lawless, a professor of romance studies, explore the notion of “home” in two Havana neighbourhoods. Havana is the site of anachronism for the rest

Making a Stone of the Heart by Cynthia Flood (Key Porter) is about history too: the history of Vancouver, a city that is generally thought to have been born yesterday. Compared to our eastern neighbours like Ottawa, Toronto and Halifax, Vancouver can

Homemade red wine in pop bottles and sausage-making/family-bonding sessions are aspects of my heritage that I had never seen reflected until I read Mamma Mia! Good Italian Girls Talk Back (ECW), collected by Maria Coletta McLean.

If fans of what is commonly referred to as “genre fiction” ever try to storm the gates that protect capital L Literature from the marauding hordes, I predict that it will be Michael Chabon who leads the charge.

Everyone has a guilty pop-culture pleasure. I read Entertainment Weekly regularly and I'm not afraid to admit it. Mark Kingwell, a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto and a noted magazine writer, has compiled all of his guilty pleasu

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

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

Daniel Francis on John Franklin, John Rae and the Globe and Mail's enthusiasm for cannibalism.

Prince Edward Island gothic.

Kafka’s writing allows us intuitions and half-dreams but never total comprehension.

Kaiju are the heroes we deserve.

Progressives are far less likely to be nationalists than ever before.

There is no way to step back from the orgy of kisses without offending.

Revolutions need popular heroes, and unpopularvillains, and the Acadians of New Brunswick had both.

To build a city on land flooded by the tides isn’t just a mistake—it’s utopic.

We think of the Arctic as pristine and untouched—but nowhere on the planet is as harshly impacted by climate change.

Reading is a subversive activity and does not believe in the convention of borders.

In Hungary, goulash socialism becomes difficult to swallow

Airport security assures Alberto Manguel that he has been randomly picked.

To teach us how to read Don Quixote, a text so contrary to conventional literary tradition, the prologue itself needed to break from all traditions

Unravelling the mysteries of Alejo Carpentier

We insist The Devil whispers horrible things in our ear and inspires our worst deeds.

While status registration under the Indian Act is a construct, claiming status identity isan important factor in Indigenous identity and cultural transmission.

Anti-communism, retired by most Western governments,receives monumental status in Canada

Mary Schendlinger challenges a review of a biography of Blanche Knopf, the underrecognized co-founder of Alfred A. Knopf Inc.

Stephen Henighan discusses the crude first steps to finding a new way to talk about racial reality.

The craft of untruth has been perfected.

Romantic notions that equate Indigenous peoples with nature are not going to cut it.

Rob Kovitz compiles the pressing questions of the day—"How are they gonna beat ISIS?" And, "On Twitter, who cares?"

Like most advice given to writers, the injunction to “write what you know” is misleading.

The idea of Europe is incarnated nowhere as much as in St. Petersburg—Stephen Henighan on Europe's greatest city.