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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

Patty Osborne
Paradise

In Paradise by A. L. Kennedy (Anansi), Hannah is a drunk whose story begins as she is coming out of a blackout.

Geist Staff
Paris, France

The current film festival season features two movies written by Geist correspondents Tom Walmsley and Peg Thompson. Walmsley's film is called Paris, France. We can't tell you about it first-hand, as it hasn't come to Vancouver yet, but last week a Gl

Michael Hayward
Paris Tales

Paris Tales, edited and translated by Helen Constantine (Oxford University Press), is another study in the evocation of place: a collection of twenty-two stories by French and other Francophone writers inspired by specific Parisian locales. Many of t

Michael Hayward
Passage Through India

In the early 1960s, the Beat poet Gary Snyder was studying Buddhism in Japan with just one published book of poetry (Myths & Texts) to his credit.

Eve Corbel
Patient No More: The Politics of Breast Cancer

True or False: Breast cancer always shows up on a mammogram, early detection is your best protection, studies show a low-fat diet is linked to a lower incidence of breast cancer, mortality rates for breast cancer are going down. Answers: False, false

Jill Boettger
Past Imperfect

When I first opened Suzanne Buffam’s book Past Imperfect (Anansi), I thought it might strive in a similar way to Yesterday, at the Hotel Clarendon by Nicole Brossard. In the first poem, “Another Bildungsroman,” the speaker grows up, leaves home, fall

Patty Osborne
Paula Spencer

Paula Spencer is forty-eight. She hasn’t had a drink for four months and five days. She wants a drink. She doesn’t want a drink. She fights. She wins. But she’s alone. She’s got kids, two grown, two still at home.... The book is Paula Spencer (Knopf)

Stephen Osborne
Personhood

A review of Julie Otsuka's novel, The Buddha in the Attic, about Japanese picture brides in the 1920s.

Kris Rothstein
Persepolis

This year’s winner of the People’s Choice Award for Most Popular International Film was Persepolis, a mostly black-and-white animated film adapted from the graphic memoir by Marjane Satrapi, who documents her childhood in Iran, first living under the

Mandelbrot
Perfectly Normal

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.

Mandelbrot
PhotoGraphic Encounters: The Edges and Edginess of Reading Prose Pictures and Visual Fictions

PhotoGraphic Encounters: The Edges and Edginess of Reading Prose Pictures and Visual Fictions (University of Alberta Press and the Kamloops Art Gallery) contains much promise of “edginess” and “subversion,” once the great virtues of the postmodern ag

Patty Osborne
Pitseolak: Pictures Out of My Life

Pitseolak: Pictures Out of My Life, by Pitseolak Ashoona and Dorothy Harley Eber (McGill-Queen’s), is not a small book but it’s a little story made large by Pitseolak’s energetic drawings.

Stephen Osborne
Playground

Belated discovery of the season: John Buell, whose novel Playground was originally published in 1976 and more recently by HarperCollins in a paperback edition bearing the single quote: "Canada's most brilliant suspense novelist.–New York Times." But

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.

Minelle Mahtani
Fact
Looking for a Place to Happen

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

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

Patty Osborne
Alice, I Think

In my reading life I’ve been locked in YA (young adult) land ever since I found myself surrounded by a gaggle of teenage nieces at a family party. I tried the usual icebreakers about school and friends, but the conversation really got going when I as

Kris Rothstein
All Inclusive

Kris Rothstein reviewed the 2008 Vancouver International Film Festival. For more reviews, visit her Geist blog at geist.com/blog/kris.

Patty Osborne
Alphabet

Alphabet, a novel by Kathy Page (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), is a hopeful story, even though its subject, Simon Austen, is a disturbed, inarticulate, illiterate murderer who is spending his life in a British prison.

Norbert Ruebsaat
Almost a Childhood

The editor and friend who told me to read Hans-Georg Behr’s Almost a Childhood (Granta Books) gave me good advice: Behr remembers things I can’t imagine being able to remember, and offers new ways of thinking about the relationship between memory and

Shannon Emmerson
All Possible Worlds: Utopian Experiments in British Columbia

When I took a west coast vacation in Tofino last summer, I took along Justine Brown's All Possible Worlds: Utopian Experiments in British Columbia (New Star). This slim coffee table book chronicles the history of utopianism in the most western of Can

Geist Staff
All of Baba's Children

All of Baba's Children by Myrna Kostash is back in print (NeWest), which is a good news for anyone who doesn't already own a copy of this seminal Canadian work: go out right now and buy it. You'll have to ignore the cover, which is, to say the least,

JILL MANDRAKE
All Hallows: The Journal of the Ghost Story Society

The finest current ghost-story anthology originates in British Columbia—Ashcroft, to be exact. All Hallows: The Journal of the Ghost Story Society is a thrice-yearly periodical that needs to be more widely known.

Sarah Leavitt
An American Childhood

In Annie Dillard’s memoir, her parents are odd and dreamy intellectuals who adored wordsand stories, creating their own language from savoured sayings, jokesand scraps of family stories.

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,

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.

Stephen Osborne
The Coincidence Problem

That dreamlike quality causes rational minds to dismiss the moment as “only a coincidence.”

Alberto Manguel
Cooking by the Book

I'm always looking for the moment in which a character must stop to eat because, for me, the very mention of food humanizes a story.

Stephen Osborne
Scandal Season

Headlines featuring crack-smoking mayors and election fraudsters.

Stephen Henighan
How They Don’t See Us

During the 1980s the literary critic Edward Said organized occasional research seminars at Columbia University in New York.

Sheila Heti
Off the Pedestal

Rick laughed. I walked away. I was irritated at Henry, at Lee for getting stoned and being paranoid and leaving without saying goodbye, at Rick, at everyone.

Alberto Manguel
My Friendship With Rat And Mole

The books we love become our cartography.

Daniel Francis
Afghanistan

One thing Canadians have learned from our armed incursion into Afghanistan is that we do not have a vocabulary for discussing war or warlike events.

Stephen Osborne
Road King

Two women on motorcycles: one in the dead zone of Chernobyl, and the other in the cactus country of Kamloops.

Florence Grandview
Eleventh-Hour Spook Show

"You look like you've seen a ghost": a story about the death of a relationship and a trip to the Spook Show.

Daniel Francis
African Gulag

The atrocities were carried out in the name of some version of “civilization” that the Queen represented.

Stephen Osborne
First Time, Last Time

The first time losing a game of Scrabble and the last time taking a train cross-country.

Stephen Osborne
Writing Life

"One way or another we all write out of this place,” comments Patricia Young in Writing Life (McClelland & Stewart), edited by Constance Rooke, a collection of essays by fifty writers, most of them Canadian, about the process and perils of authorship

Ivan Coyote
If I Was a Girl

Femme girls get free Slurpees, but boyish ladies get free cavity searches at the border.

Devon Code
My Prizes: A Memoir

An account of the circumstances surrounding seven literary honours bestowed on a writer.

Alberto Manguel
Neighbourhood of Letters

There are imaginary cities for scientists, vampires, lechers and even bad students—but what about writers?

Daniel Francis
Identity in a Cup

Is it the icons of Canadian pop culture—hockey fights, Tim Hortons coffee, Don Cherry’s haberdashery, Rick Mercer’s rants—that reveal the deepest truths about us?

Stephen Osborne
Pathfinder Deluxe

A young man comes into possession of a 1957 Pontiac, modelled after one owned by a legendary pianist.

JILL MANDRAKE
The Skinny

The UK literary journal, Flash, features concise forms of microfiction: short-short stories also known as "flashes".

Veronica Gaylie
Melon Balls in Space

Shiny bras and worn-in sweaters—the clothes do make the woman.

Veronica Gaylie
Cowichan Sweater

You had to sleep in it and fall in love in it.

Daniel Francis
Come to the Cabaret

The Penthouse, the notorious Vancouver night club, shares a history with several of the city's missing women cases.

Alberto Manguel
Dante in Guantánamo

After fol

HAL NIEDZVIECKI
The Life and Death of Zadie Avrohom Krolik

Hal Niedzviecki com­mem­o­rates his Jewish grand­fa­ther—a heavy drinker, a bad driver and a Polish refugee.

Daniel Francis
War of Independence

World War I, Canada’s “war of independence,” marked a turning point for a young colony wanting to prove itself as a self-reliant nation, but at what cost.

JILL MANDRAKE
Pinspotting

"I hope you will agree that we more sensitive teenagers grew up surrounded by irony." Jill Mandrake calls George Bowering's memoir his most provocative work yet.