We got paid once a week in cash - it made you feel special the first few times.
Alberto Manguel
The Devil
We insist The Devil whispers horrible things in our ear and inspires our worst deeds.
Michael Hayward
Recursive Voyeurism
Michael Hayward on László Krasznahorkai's The Manhattan Project.
JILL MANDRAKE
Recall, Retention, Recognition
Jill Mandrake on False Memories and Other Likely Tales by Ernest Hekkanen.
LISA BIRD-WILSON
Smashing Identity Algorithms, Yes Please
While status registration under the Indian Act is a construct, claiming status identity isan important factor in Indigenous identity and cultural transmission.
Daniel Francis
Murder, He Wrote
Daniel Francis on Geoff Meggs attempt to solve the murder of strike leader Frank Rogers.
Thad McIlroy
Baskets Case
Thad McIlroy thinks you should watch Zach Galifianakis' Baskets.
Marc Plourde
Rooms to Let in Bohemia
A poem by Marc Plourde from Borrowed Days: Poems New and Selected.
Peggy Thompson
Haunts
Peggy Thompson on Amber Dawn's Sodom Road Exit.
Kris Rothstein
The Art of Travel
Alain de Botton, whose intellect and sense of humour brought us How Proust Can Change Your Life and The Consolations of Philosophy, enters new territory with The Art of Travel (Hamish Hamilton). Here he takes on our fascination with other places and
JILL MANDRAKE
In the Wee, Small Hours of the Morning…
Jill Mandrake discusses Kevin Shaw's poetry.
Michael Hayward
The How and Why of It
Michael Hayward on books that may make you a better writer.
KELSEA O'CONNOR
New Spinsters Smash the Patriarchy
Mallory Ortberg's subversive dark fairy tales.
Patty Osborne
Freely Indirect and Illegally Selfish
Patty Osborne shares insights on Peter Carey's book.
Stephen Osborne
Putting Away Bagua
What happens when Stephen Osborne tries to get organized.
M.A.C. Farrant
Stories from a West Coast Town
Very quietly, very slowly, happiness can take over a person's life
Jennesia Pedri
T-Bay Notes
Leaving Thunder Bay isn't one of the things that gets easier with practice
J. Jill Robinson
Hot Pulse
I am sorry I caused you pain. But I thought it was okay.
Michael Hayward
Sweet Spot
Michael Hayward on a selection of Notting Hill Editions' latest releases.
KELSEA O'CONNOR
Shipwrecked Lily
Kelsea O'Connor on "The Case of the Gilded Lily," a film by Shipwrecked Comedy.
Jocelyn Kuang
Candy Cap Magic
Forgotten cutlery, missing mushrooms and lingering doubt: a recipe for bewilderment.
Stephen Henighan
Victims of Anti-Communism
Anti-communism, retired by most Western governments,receives monumental status in Canada
Mandelbrot
Reaching Out
Mandelbrot schleps a pen around for a week to feel it out.
Michael Hayward
Old Cobblers
Michael Hayward on "Autumn" by Karl Ove Knausgaard.
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.
Review of "Bunker: Building for the End Times" by Bradley Garrett.
Kathleen Murdock
Juice Worth the Squeeze
Review of "Shadow of Doubt: The Trials of Dennis Oland, Revised and Expanded Edition" by Bobbi-Jean MacKinnon.
Kris Rothstein
Decolonizing Canada
Review of "Before I Was a Critic I Was a Human Being" Amy Fung.
Kathleen Murdock
Doing It Special
Review of "nedi nezu (Good Medicine)" by Tenille K. Campbell.
Anson Ching
Recipe for a Harlequin Romance
Review of "Ring" by André Alexis.
CONNIE KUHNS
Rise Up
Review of "Rise Up: Songs of the Women's Movement" Co-Produced by Jim Brown, Heather A. Smith, and Donna Korones.
Patty Osborne
Middle Sister
Review of "Milkman" by Anna Burns.
Michael Hayward
Purveyors of Electric Fans
Review of "Clyde Fans" by Seth.
Michael Hayward
Tree Lit
Review of "The Overstory" by Richard Powers.
Anson Ching
Voyeur Galore
Review of "Captains of the Sands" by Jorge Amado.
Patty Osborne
Why White People Are Funny
Review of "Qallunaat! Why White People Are Funny" Zebedee Nungak and Mark Sandiford.
Jonathan Heggen
Korean Supper
Review of "Crying in H Mart: A Memoir " by Michelle Zauner.
Michael Hayward
Dancing About Architecture
Review of "Utopia Avenue" by David Mitchell.
KELSEA O'CONNOR
Eaten to Extinction
Review of "Lost Feast: Culinary Extinction and the Future of Food" by Lenore Newman.
Michael Hayward
A Longing to Be Far Away
Review of "Fernweh" by Teju Cole.
Shyla Seller
Postal Lit
Review of "Long Live the Post Horn!" by Vigdis Hjorth.
SYLVIA TRAN
Poutine Pilgrimage
Review of poutine at Robson Fries in Tokyo.
JILL MANDRAKE
Older and Better
Review of "The Old Man in the Mirror Isn’t Me" by Ray Robertson.
Stephen Osborne
The Becoming of Vancouver
Review of "Becoming Vancouver: A History" by Daniel Francis.
Michael Hayward
Known to be Strange
Known and Strange Things (Random House) is a collection of Teju Cole’s essays and other short pieces, many of which have previously appeared in The New Yorker and elsewhere online.
Michael Hayward
A Blindness at the Centre of Seeing
Cole’s most recent book, Blind Spot (Random House), a generous hardcover printed on glossy stock, presents Cole’s photographs on recto pages, with brief, allusive essays on the facing verso page.
Patty Osborne
B for Beatrice
Patty Osborne on wacky kid tales and the joy of animated storytelling.
Michael Hayward
Roads to Nowhere
Michael Hayward on dharma trails, lawless landscapes and Hemingway's corner table.
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.
When I was living in New York in the 1960s, almost everyone I knew was walking or running to the office of some psychiatrist.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Wait, Save, Help
When I was twelve my father enrolled me in a typing course from which I emerged typing with two fingers.
Edith Iglauer
My Lovely Bathtub
First published in Geist #30 and now in the 20th Anniversary Collector's Edition.
Alberto Manguel
Karl Kraus, Everybody's Neighbour
He is one of the strangest crea
Daniel Francis
Canada's Funnyman
A misogynist, a racist and an academic walk into a bar...
Stephen Osborne
Stranger
Last month in Calgary a friend showed me the way to Louise Bridge by sketching a map with her fingertip on the dust jacket of The Wolf King, a book by Judd Palmer that we had been admiring at her kitchen table.
Alberto Manguel
Final Answers
For most artists, the learning of the craft never ceases, and no resulting work is fully achieved
Stephen Henighan
Becoming French
For an English-speaking Canadian who has been exposed to French from an early age, Paris is the most disorienting city in Europe. It is grandiose, but it is mundane.
Stephen Henighan
The BookNet Dictatorship
According to the numbers, Canada will never produce another Atwood or Findley.
Jane Silcott
Lurching Man
One instinctive action saves a life in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.
Veronica Gaylie
The Guy Upstairs
Veronica Gaylie encounters Trevor Linden, the Greatest Canuck Who Ever Lived, in economy class.
Veronica Gaylie
Memory Test
Does the individual have difficulty finding words, finishing sentences or naming people or things?
Manfred Buchheit
Burin Highway
From Mapping a Sense of Place: The Photographs of Manfred Buchheit, 1972-1995, an exhibition curated by Bruce Johnson for the Art Gallery of Newfoundland and Labrador.
Jane Awde Goodwin
Dear Doctor
The Health Hotline can only do so much for the exotic animals swimming in a hole on your forehead.
George Fetherling
Adventures in the Nib Trade
No one knows quite how to account for the well-established shops in Vancouver, Toronto and other cities that deal exclusively in fountain pens and fine fountain-pen accessories.
David Albahari
Bird in the Willow
Some
Stephen Gauer
Jumper
Another classic story from Geist's 20th Anniversary Collector's Issue."I felt disoriented, almost light-headed, as though I were slightly stoned or moving inside a dream."
Alberto Manguel
Cautionary Tales for Children
Some years ago, Susan Crean amusingly suggested that nations might be defined or understood through their emblematic children’s books and according to whether the protagonist was male or female.
Saeko Usukawa
Gulf Island Sojourn
"Campbell River, best fishing in the world. They do everything for you. All you have to do is bring yourself and decide what you're going to drink."