A group of university exchange students from France at the next table watch the entire interaction as if they were on a field trip for Lessons in North American Social Behaviour. They discuss the annoying aspects of the life they’re having here. Quebec is more American than they expected, they say. You can’t smoke in restaurants. The Québécois accent is drôle.

I don’t take public transit very often, which is a failing—not just environmentally, but also personally, because sometimes that forced contact with the rest of the populated world can be profound. In Japan, many years ago, I was trapped in the small space between train cars by a crowd of schoolboys; my claustrophobia reached such a level that one leg began to judder up and down like the needle on a sewing machine, and the only thing that prevented me from climbing out over the tops of my fellow passengers’ heads was the gaze of a man about a foot away who conveyed calm to me by keeping his eyes trained on mine.

Not long ago, late on a Monday afternoon, a man with a camera clambered onto the railing of Lions Gate Bridge in Vancouver in order to get a clear view of the sunset he wanted to take a picture of, and, on stretching his upper body toward the scene t

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I went to the babysitter’s to pick up Julia, who was two and a half years old, and she said that she had been “a little bit sad for a while” because her mother, who had a new part-time job and had dropped Julia off a few hours earlier, had gone away for “quite a long time.”

At first the blackouts in Kathmandu are limited to six hours a week, so in my area we do without lights on Saturday and Sunday evenings. It’s not difficult—candles at dinner, quite charming at first—but then we jump to fifteen hours a week without power, then to thirty-six hours, all within ten days. The govern

Vientiane, the capital of Laos, is a fading one-time French colonial outpost on a spot where a bend in the Mekong River makes room for a large tear-shaped island directly opposite the centre-ville, which runs only far enough back from the riverbank to allow a few commercial streets. The new bridge to Thailand is a short distance way. Thai-style wats and other temples, minor and major, are everywhere.

When the celebrated English poet Rupert Brooke came to Canada on the train from New York in 1913, he had been warned that he would find “a country without a soul.” The gloomy streets of Montreal, overshadowed by churches and banks and heavy telephone wires, reminded him of the equally gloomy streets of Glasgow and Birmingham.

It took me three tries to get into the States, and even then I had to fake the papers. They wanted to know that I was going to come back to Canada—that I wasn’t going to stay down there.

In September 2001 I had spent a week in Istanbul foraging for remains of Byzantium when I learned from the young, personable and exceedingly neat hotel receptionist, Taner, that his hometown, Iznik, south of Istanbul, was known as Nicaea to the Byzan

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Among the people who live outside the Dominion building in downtown Vancouver, across the street from the cenotaph at Victory Square, is a woman who might be in her late forties and who occasionally turns up in a wedding dress. I’ve never seen her speak to anyone. She simply walks up and holds out her empty hand toward you.

I’m sorry, but you cannot mail any box with writing on it. I see. Perhaps you have a marker with which I can cross out the writing? No, we have no markers here. Perhaps you have some packing tape we can put over the writing? No, we have no packing tape here. How about some of that special blue-and-yellow postal service tape I see there? No, no señorita, you cannot put special blue-and-yellow postal service tape just anywhere.

Will independence bring Godzilla back into my dreams?

My friend Eric moved to Los Angeles five years ago to become a rock star, only to learn that drummers and bass players in L.A. are unreliable, that nobody in L.A. goes to see live music and that the chicks in L.A. are all crazy. Once he got to wait at a stoplight behind Patricia Arquette, once Britney Spears came into the gym where he worked and one time a bouncer let him into a club ahead of Fabio, and none of these things made him famous.

A man I haven’t thought of for nearly thirty years became a smoker of five-cent cigars during the war, and when the war was over he became a despiser of nincompoops and began taking his whisky from a pocket flask engraved with a tiny laurel wreath.

A friend in Whitehorse who was preparing to paddle down the Yukon River with seven other women in a big canoe wrote to say that she was feeling uneasy about paddling in the stern, especially, as she put it in her own words, “when the river gets big after Minto.”

A friend who was thinking of moving back home to Calgary picked up a newspaper in the corner grocery near her place in Vancouver and there was a photograph on the front page of a man in a cowboy hat surrounded by a herd of cattle.

When Malcolm Lowry’s shack on the beach at Dollarton, B.C., burned to the ground in 1944, he and his wife Marjorie were able to save the manuscript of only one of the novels that he was working on at the time. A few months later the same manuscript had to be rescued again when the house that friends found for them in Oakville, Ontario, also burned to the ground.

We were setting fires in a dry gulch in the hills at the edge of town, with crumpled sagebrush and bits of tumbleweed and no paper for kindling, and we had to start our own fire with a single match the way they did in the Cub Scout troop that met Thursday nights in the basement of St. Paul’s Anglican church on Battle Street.

One day in Vancouver in the late seventies, Pierre Berton and John Diefenbaker appeared at the same time in the book department at Eaton’s department store to sign copies of their new books, which had just been released by rival publishers.

On the last day of October in Toronto a man in an art gallery said: “Showers should be coming in around 4 pm. They don’t always get it down to the hour like that.”

The Strongest Man in the World liked to set his folding lawn chair out on the asphalt next to his gold Cadillac and stretch out in the sun with dark glasses on his nose and a two-litre carton of milk in one hand.

During the hiatus, a man in a black suit appeared in the Geist Gallery in Toronto and identified himself as a builder of ornithopters, or perhaps he said he was a promoter of ornithopters (this was during the hiatus, when nothing was clear; in any event his field was ornithoptery). I couldn’t remember what an ornithopter was but I could see one in my mind: the question was, what did an ornithopter do? The ornithopter man was accompanied by a well-dressed woman who never stopped smiling.

Allen Ginsberg is speaking into a tape recorder hanging from the rear-view mirror of my mother’s Volvo, composing a poem with the attitude of one accustomed to the gratitude of posterity.

Not long ago I was having dinner at a small cottage beside a lake in central British Columbia hundreds of kilometres north of Vancouver. Among the guests seated around the table was Elio, a neighbour from down the shore. As we talked he mentioned tha

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The first time I met Andy Warhol he was wearing a black sweater and pants; the second time he was wearing white tie and tails (it was at Lincoln Center). The third time I met him, at Arthur, the disco opened in the sixties by Sibyl Burton, he was wearing a jersey made of silver mail.

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

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.

Mastery of the self

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

"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

I’ve read The Wide World Dreaming by JoAnne Soper-Cook (Breakwater) twice now and I’m still surprised by how good it is. It’s written by a woman from St. John’s, Newfoundland, and published by a company there that needs to learn more about good layou

The Wigmaker, C.E. Coughlan’s new book (Smart Cookie Publishing, webspotter.com/smartcookie), is a collection of fourteen short stories, some of which have previously appeared in Geist and other literary magazines.

Greg Gatenby must be stopped. A couple of years ago he edited a collection of remarks about Canada by various foreign writers. Now he has followed up with a second thick collection, The Very Richness of That Past: Canada Through the Eyes of Foreign W

The Way of a Boy is Ernest Hillen's story about his life in a Japanese prison camp in Java during World War Two. Hillen was only a boy at the time—he spent ages seven to eleven in the camp—and instead of looking back from the vantage point of adultho

A thin little book, The Voice Imitator (University of Chicago Press) by Thomas Bernhard, translated by Kenneth J. Northcott, made me laugh out loud in the dark as I sat propped up in bed, my reading light clipped to the back cover, while everyone els

Kris Rothstein reviews The Virgin Spy by Krista Bridges (Douglas & McIntyre).

Mr. Ryder, the storyteller in Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled (Knopf), speaks so sincerely, humbly and clearly in the first person that we hear his voice inside ourselves; this inspires trust.

Kris Rothstein reviews The Waterproof Bible by Andy Kaufman (Random House).

The Utne Reader served us coffee aficionados a treat this month, by devoting the November/December issue to a study of the enigmatic bean. Of the nine pieces included in the "Coffee Madness" section, Mark Schapiro's "Muddy Waters" is the most enlight

The Understanding by Jane Barker Wright (Porcupine’s Quill) offers one of the most convincing fictionalizations of seventies hippie culture I’ve ever read. The novel is the story of the bohemian Whitechapel clan; artsy Solly and Isobel and their broo

Why don't we hear more about the books of Mary Meigs, who is one of the great prose writers of our time? On her last tour she appeared in Vancouver for a single reading in a bookstore and then she was gone, uninterviewed and unsung. Did this happen i

The Three-Day Novel, which turns nineteen on Labour Day [1996], remains one of Canada's few contributions to the world of literary form. (Milton Acorn's jack-pine sonnet is the only other one I can think of at the moment.) Writing a novel in three da

The Story of Dunbar: Voices of a Vancouver Neighbourhood (Ronsdale Press), edited by Peggy Schofield, feels a bit like a family album.

The Story of My Face by Kathy Page (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) is about pictures that we don’t want to see or are forbidden to see. The face of Natalie, the main character, was badly scarred in a childhood accident; as an adult she returns to the small t

Every aspect of a book—the page dimensions, paper type, font, length of text line, space between text lines, margin sizes and so on—is the result of a designer’s decision. When these decisions are well made, then reading a book’s text is like reading

Fifteen-year-old Tracey Berkowitz is on a bus, naked except for a shower curtain. How did she get there? Which pieces of her life story as a misfit are reality and which are fantasy? Director Bruce McDonald tackles these questions by fracturing the s

The Tender Bar, the first book by J.R. Moehringer (Hyperion), a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, could be subtitled “The Secret Hearts of Dysfunctional Men.” In his memoir of growing up “fatherless” in Manhasset, Long Island, Moehringer recounts hi

In The Stowaway, a novel by Robert Hough (Vintage Canada), the stowaway is Romanian, the crew is Filipino, the officers are Taiwanese and the ship is the Maersk Dubai. When the real Maersk Dubai landed at Halifax Harbour in 1996, its officers were ar

For many years, the poet, linguist and typographer Robert Bringhurst has immersed himself in studying the Aboriginal cultures and languages of the Pacific northwest coast, studies that culminated in his acclaimed Masterworks of the Classical Haida My

My local library has introduced a program called Speed Reads. In the interests of increasing the circulation of the most popular books, a patron may borrow a best-seller for just a week, and very steep fines are imposed for late returns. Under these

Tim Winton’s elegiac collection of seventeen linked short stories, The Turning (HarperCollins), explores the frailty and foibles of human existence, the power and pain of memory and the mighty wildness of western Australia. Characters reappear in lar

The dysfunctional family is a familiar theme in literature these days, and Sarah Sheard's new novel The Swing Era (Knopf) is an exception only in that it is so good. It's the story of a young woman who returns home from abroad following her mad mothe

The Stone Angel by Margaret Laurence is a classic Canadian novel, and nothing short of a great film would do it justice. Kari Skogland's film is a subtle meditation on Prairie social life and taboos in the mid-twentieth century. It’s also a complex a

J. G. Farrell’s version of a prison is the British Residency in the fictional Krishnapur. There a group of ex-pats take shelter when Indian peasant soldiers turn on their British colonizers and slaughter four hundred of them in a nearby settlement.

Phrase books are tools of cultural globalization—but they are also among its casualties.

When building a nation, cultural riches can be lost.

Coming to harbour in a new world.

Science and the arts fulfil their functions to help us survive through the imagination.

Dividing and conquering local populations confines them to manageable administrative units.

In a world dominated by heroes, difference is not tolerated.

“Have patience” and “Tomorrow” are two inseparable locutions in the Portuguese tongue.

For a brief period the band CANO gave shape to the dream of a bilingual Canadian culture.

"The hemispheric context reveals the roots of the residential school system...Destroying Indigenous cultures was a positivist policy from Patagonia to Dawson City."

Lisa Bird-Wilson on UNDRIP, reconciliation, and the anxiety felt by Indigenous people in Canada.

What we do when we absorb words from a screen—and we haven’t yet evolved a verb for it—is not reading.

Libraries are not only essential in educating the soul, but in forming the identity of a society.

Our society is formed on the assumption of a healthy immune system.

The woman who called herself Tatiana Aarons gave me an address that led to a vacant lot.

Dogged dedication grants a reader vicarious immortality.

What we can—and can’t—learn from the plague

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.

The newspaper wars aren’t what they used to be.

A package-deal paradise reputation curtails gringo knowledge of Dominican life.

Faith seems to shiver when confronted by art.

What can the Brothers Grimm teach us about the state of our economic system? Everything.

Must artists declare their moral integrity?

Without air travel, family networks might have dissolved long ago.

There’s something not quite right about the grid on which the game is played.