Michal Kozlowski reviews Stardust, Bruce Serafin's essay collection: "punchy narrative, little exposition, unburdened by political correctness."
Patty Osborne
Buffalo Gal
Patty Osborne reviews The Perimeter Dog by Julie Vandervoort.
Stephen Osborne
Marginal
Stephen Osborne finds a copy of Francoise Sagan's Those Without Shadows at the bus stop, complete with margin notes that create a new sort of text.
roni-simunovic
Out and About
Roni Simunovic reviews Queer and Trans Artists of Color: Stories of Some of Our Lives by Nia King, a collection of interviews about gender and sexuality, and how to make art, make rent and survive.
Michael Hayward
To the Moomins! (And Beyond)
Michael Hayward reviews Moomin: The Deluxe Anniversary Edition by Tove Jansson, a collection of comic strips that contain "the poetry of our world: sad, joyful, dangerous, enchanting."
JILL MANDRAKE
Here Lies
Jill Mandrake reviews Local Customs by Audrey Thomas, a ghost story and murder mystery set in West Africa.
Patty Osborne
Saint Ralph
Patty Osborne reviews Saint Ralph, the uplifting but untrue story of a boy who sets out to win the 1954 Boston Marathon.
Derek Fairbridge
Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage
Derek Fairbridge reviews a documentary on the Canadian rock band Rush.
ANDREA BENNETT
Rockin' Through Ontario
andrea bennett suggests that Road Rocks Ontario, a poorly proofread guide to our middle province’s geologic wonders, has a five-star rating on Goodreads because "people who like rocks like them a whole lot."
Jill Boettger
Double Lives: Writing and Motherhood
Jill Boettger reviews Double Lives: Writing and Motherhood, a collection of 22 essays by women who are both mothers and writers.
Stephen Osborne
Canadian ten-dollar bill
The dreadful effects of “computer-assisted publishing” can be observed in the new Canadian ten-dollar bill, a specimen of which I had been carrying around for days wondering where I could have picked up such a miserable-looking coupon.
Eve Corbel
Jungle Out There
Eve Corbel reviews Lumberjanes, a "smart, cute-in-a-good-way" comic series that follows the supernatural hijinks of five girls at an extraordinary summer camp.
Daniel Francis
Folly of War
Daniel Francis reviews All Else Is Folly, a "useful antidote" to the patriotic narrative that hails World War I as Canada's "coming of age."
Michael Hayward
Notes on the Cinematographer
Michael Hayward reviews Notes on the Cinematographer, a cryptic compendium of notes and quotes from the French filmmaker Robert Bresson.
Patty Osborne
Without Reservations
Patty Osborne reviews Devil in Deerskins: My Life with Grey Owl, a memoir by Anahareo, and Kuessipan by Naomi Fontaine, two contrasting reflections on the aboriginal experience.
Michael Hayward
To Have or Have Not
Michael Hayward reviews Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids, a collection of essays with a title that speaks for itself.
Patty Osborne
The Underwood
Patty Osborne reviews The Underwood by P.G. Tarr, winner of a 3-Day Novel Contest.
Becky McEachern
The Boreal Gourmet: Adventures in Northern Cooking
Becky McEachern reviews Michele Genest’s The Boreal Gourmet: Adventures in Northern Cooking, featuring a blend of the author's culinarily enlightened upbringing and indigenous northern Canadian ingredients.
Thad McIlroy
Teary-Eyed Testosterone
Thad McIlroy reviews Poems That Make Grown Men Cry: 100 Men on the Words That Move Them.
Stephen Osborne
Shackled
Stephen Osborne discusses the notion that Canadian literature is “shackled to a corpse dragging us down into the future.”
Stephen Osborne
Vacation
Stephen Osborne rejects the "whiny questions of national identity" posed during the "golden age" of Canadian literature in the 1960s and 70s.
Michael Hayward
The Life and Breath of the World
Michael Hayward reviews Cascadia: The Life and Breath of the World, co-edited by Trevor Carolan and Frank Stewart.
Michael Hayward
The Chicagoan
Michael Hayward reviews a new compendium of The Chicagoan, the “Lost Magazine of the Jazz Age.”
Dylan Gyles
Heavy Reading
Dylan Gyles embarks on a quest to read all of literature's most difficult tomes, starting with Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon.
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.
Stephen Henighan
Reheated Races
Dividing and conquering local populations confines them to manageable administrative units.
CHERYL THOMPSON
Dismantling the Myth of the Hero
In a world dominated by heroes, difference is not tolerated.
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.
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."
LISA BIRD-WILSON
Occupation Anxiety
Lisa Bird-Wilson on UNDRIP, reconciliation, and the anxiety felt by Indigenous people in Canada.
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
Confidence Woman
The woman who called herself Tatiana Aarons gave me an address that led to a vacant lot.
Alberto Manguel
Léon Bloy and His Monogamous Reader
Dogged dedication grants a reader vicarious immortality.
Stephen Henighan
Plague
What we can—and can’t—learn from the plague
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
Art and Blasphemy
Faith seems to shiver when confronted by art.
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
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.
Reflections on how a bar in Parc Extension, QC, influenced an eponymous poem about "unprogress, inertia, the failure to learn from mistakes."
RICHARD VAN CAMP
Squirmworthy
Mary Schendlinger reviews SayWha?!, a monthly evening of “readings of deliciously rotten writing”.
Stephen Osborne
The Banff Protocols
Banff: a collection of scenic views and a setting for the Avant-Garde?
Stephen Osborne
Stories of a Lynching
On the night of the last Wednesday of February 1884, at about ten o’clock, a gang of armed men entered a farmhouse near Sumas Lake in southern B.C., woke the inhabitants at gunpoint and took away with them a teenage boy who was being held in the cust
Susan Crean
Milton and Michel
Michel Lambeth's photo of Milton Acorn brings back memories of dancing, love poetry and a revolution.
Alberto Manguel
Imaginary Places
Alberto Manguel remembers a golden era in Canadian writing, comments on our current cultural climate and proposes a brighter future.
Annabel Lyon
Ethical Juices
Parables, cautionary tales, morality plays, allegories—the notion that we can study literary works as texts of ethics is as old as literature.
Christy Ann Conlin
Coming Ashore
The dog turns his butt to the stinging spray and wind but my boyfriend and I face the water, watching the massive waves crash on the shore. We are drenched in seconds and we have to shout over the wind. It’s exhilarating.
Kathleen Winter
BoYs
Derek Matthews has to be the ugliest boy in the class but I like him. I’ve liked every boy except Barry Pumphrey now. Barry Pumphrey likes me.
Margaret Malloch Zielinski
Boarding with Mrs. Higgins
Mrs. Higgins lived with her legless brother and her blind husband in a tall, narrow old house in Nottingham. The room I rented from her in the 1950s was just below her sitting room, where she kept a life-size portrait of Lenin.
Alberto Manguel
Pictures and Conversations
"And what is the use of a book," thought Alice, "without pictures or conversation?" —Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Stephen Osborne
Virtual City
Onstage a group of writers and critics sat in a semicircle and spoke earnestly about whether or not a national literature could exist in two languages.
Stephen Henighan
In Praise of Borders
I remembered past ordeals: a U.S. official who squeezed out my toothpaste tube on the train from Montreal to Philadelphia, another who hauled me off a bus for a lengthy interrogation.
Edith Iglauer
Red Smile
When I was living in New York in the 1960s, almost everyone I knew was walking or running to the office of some psychiatrist.
Jill Boettger
Born in the Caul
According to legend and prophecy, this child would possess the second sight.
Stephen Henighan
Writing Bohemia
Bohemia is a good place to grow as a writer, but is it a good place to live one’s whole life?
Norbert Ruebsaat
Real World Happiness
Norbert Ruebsaat learns that true happiness requires “an ability to live with ambiguity and tolerate a certain degree of physical humour” in Brian Fawcett's memoir, Human Happiness.
Stephen Osborne
Dancing with Dynamite
Public bombings have a profound effect on cities, even if the bomb is a coconut filled with beans and rice.
Rachel Lebowitz
Cottonopolis
"A rookery of dead ends and curved lanes. Everywhere heaps of debris. Pigs rooting in eyes." Explore Manchester during the Industrial Revolution, in poem.
Daniel Francis
Canada's Funnyman
A misogynist, a racist and an academic walk into a bar...
Alberto Manguel
Karl Kraus, Everybody's Neighbour
He is one of the strangest crea
Edith Iglauer
My Lovely Bathtub
First published in Geist #30 and now in the 20th Anniversary Collector's Edition.
Edith Iglauer
Wait, Save, Help
When I was twelve my father enrolled me in a typing course from which I emerged typing with two fingers.
Norbert Ruebsaat
Ursula
She was a conversationalist, a home builder and a deliverer of calves. Those who loved Ursula will miss her adventurous soul.
Edith Iglauer
Snowed In at the Sylvia
I had my car at the hotel but snow was expected, and driving home alone in a snowstorm around the hairpin curves edged with deep ravines on Highway 101 was the last thing I wanted to do.