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.

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.

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

In Plain Sight: Reflections on Life in Downtown Eastside Vancouver (Talonbooks), edited by Leslie Robertson and Dara Culhane, is a book of interviews that have been shaped into stories by seven women who tell us about their everyday lives. Once you g

In The Company of Strangers (Talonbooks) by Mary Meigs remains one of the best, if not the very best, book(s) of the decade. If you read nothing else this year, read this one.

I am not a fan of action adventure travel tales or extremes of physical exertion: everything I know about mountain climbing I learned from Earle Birney's long narrative poem "David," about two boys' summer around Banff. But once I had started Jon Kra

My favourite thing about Evelyn Lau’s new book, Inside Out: Reflections on A Life So Far (Doubleday), is the smart slipcover (design by Kevin Hoch/Pylon), which is made out of a thick, translucent onion-skin paper. It wouldn’t fit in my bag after I l

The current issue of Brick contains a transcript of Eleanor Wachtel's interview with John Berger made last year for CBC Radio, and is by itself sufficient reason to buy the magazine. Especially for what he has to say about using the words "and" and "

I saw Intacto (Lions Gate) at the Vancouver International Film Festival in 2002 and loved it. The film is about an underground ring of gamblers who bet on people’s luck.

I remember laughing a lot when I saw the films My Beautiful Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, both written by Hanif Kureishi, and I also laughed when I read his novel The Buddha of Suburbia, so I was hungry for more comic vision in his latest

Alberto Manguel, this country's man of letters par excellence, has a new collection: Into the Looking-Glass Wood: Essays on Words and the World (Knopf), consisting of twenty-two essays cast in the assured voice of a man who knows the world and is kno

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.

Attention, Joyce Nelson fans: we no longer need to scan the contents pages of Canadian Forum and the Georgia Straight for her astute essays on culture. In June 1996, Nelson started publishing Lynx, a Monthly Newsletter in the Public Interest from Jam

A hardcover “ciné roman” version of La Jetée has just been republished by Zone Books. The pair—film and book—make a fascinating combination: the duration of each static image in the film highlights the time dimension, while in the book version the im

Until Susanna Clarke wrote Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (Bloomsbury), I thought all adult fantasy novels were full of strange kingdoms and warrior princesses, but this delightful 782-page doorstop explores a complex rivalry between an autocratic ma

Fair Play, a brief novel by Tove Jansson, is available for the first time in an English translation by Thomas Teale. To quote from the original cover copy, Fair Play is about “two women who share a life of work, delight and consternation,” a relation

Joe Matt’s Fair Weather (Drawn and Quarterly) compiles four recent issues of his autobiographical comic book Peep Show.

Laurence Gough has another police procedural out from McClelland & Stewart: Fall Down Easy is a fast read and fun, but not much different from the American prototype.

There are a few hundred book publishers in Canada, most of them producing between one and fifteen books a year. Few of us ever get to see publishers’ whole lists and only some of us get to see their catalogues (which are usually distributed to bookst

Philippe, the crater-ridden far side of the moon, is a loser—he works as a telemarketer and still lives in his mother’s apartment while he tries to prove his thesis: that the 1960s space race was an exercise in narcissism.

Magazine addicts on the west coast have lost their most reliable (and revered) source of supply. Magpie Magazine Gallery on Commercial Drive in east Vancouver went out of business in spring 2008, after fifteen years of catering happily to a multifari

Patty Osborne reviews February by Lisa Moore (Anansi).

Kris Rothstein reviews Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks by Ethan Gilsdorf (Lyons Press).

Some good Canadian with lots of hard currency should give Pico Iyer a ticket to Yellowknife, or Inuvik, or Pangnirtung or Come By Chance—almost anywhere in Canada, come to think of it. Iyer is the author of Falling Off the Map: Some Lonely Places of

In Fierce People by Dirk Wittenborn (Bloomsbury), fifteen-year-old Finn Earl aches to enter the privileged, self-indulgent world inhabited by the billionaire Osborne family and their wealthy friends. One minute he’s trying to cover up his mother’s dr

Felicity's Fool, by François Gravel (Cormorant), is a novel with history and science in it, and both the history and the science are very good. Its protagonist is a mild-mannered doctor driven to search for the organ of happiness in the human brain.

You could take the Lesbian National Parks and Services Field Guide to North America (Pedlar Press) into the woods, but this guidebook, written by Rangers Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan, is just as suitable for reading in bed. In fact, under the cove

After fol

Stephen Henighan exposes the errors, omissions and problems with the Conservative party's study guide for Canadian citizenship.

Alberto Manguel examines a modern-day book burning and asks: how is this still happening?

Do shared languages form the natural boundaries of any nation in the world?

A reflection on the complex and often inexplicable process of bibliographic categorizations.

Reflections on how a bar in Parc Extension, QC, influenced an eponymous poem about "unprogress, inertia, the failure to learn from mistakes."

Alberto Manguel remembers a golden era in Canadian writing, comments on our current cultural climate and proposes a brighter future.

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.

"And what is the use of a book," thought Alice, "without pictures or conversation?" —Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Parables, cautionary tales, morality plays, allegories—the notion that we can study literary works as texts of ethics is as old as literature.

Bohemia is a good place to grow as a writer, but is it a good place to live one’s whole life?

He is one of the strangest crea

A misogynist, a racist and an academic walk into a bar...

For most artists, the learning of the craft never ceases, and no resulting work is fully achieved

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.

According to the numbers, Canada will never produce another Atwood or Findley.

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.

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.

Reconsidering the faintly embarrassing Pierre Berton.

A bibliophile's worst nightmare: being stuck on a plane with a terrible book. A book mistaken for a work of serious history.

Stephen Henighan argues that audiences used to have different opinions on the news; now they cannot even agree on the terms of debate.

Alberto Manguel compares his life in the French countryside to that of Cain, whom God despised for being a settled crop farmer, and whom he punished by forcing him to wander.

When Frank Warren began collecting the secret thoughts of strangers at PostSecret.com, he inadvertently created a new genre.

When you find yourself laid up in a sterile hospital room, which books do you want to have with you?