Any resemblances to persons living or dead are purely vindictive.
Robyn Ludwig
Black Velvet, If You Please
The secret is in the velvet.
Sara Cassidy
Flying the Coop
You can’t break eggs without making an omelette.
Véronique Darwin
New Normal Board Games
Use the board games you unearthed during isolation to reinventclassic games for our times.
Stephen Osborne
Hospitals of the Mind
A few years ago, someone left a pocket-sized photo album on my desk with an unsigned note stuck on the cover that said I “might know what to do with it.” Inside, glued one to a page, are twenty-four photographs of Essondale, the mental hospital in N
Tiffany Hsieh
Church on Queen
Here they are our people.
Celia Haig-Brown
Resistance and Relentlessness
The long road to decency and justice.
Randy Fred
Resistance and Renewal
After hearing survivors’ stories, nothing can ever surprise me.
Rick Maddocks
The Other 9/11
Chileans remember when their government was overthrown by Augusto Pinochet on September 11, 1973.
Carmen Tiampo
Wash With Like Colours
People have asked: What’s it like? How’s it been? Are you scared?
Stephen Osborne
Defining Moments
The Olympic Games left a trail of moments: a rare moment, a Canadian moment, a you moment, a me moment...
Myrna Garanis
World-Class Hotel
Poets trashed hotel rooms long before rock bands made it fashionable.
Patty Osborne
Underwire
"We got into Zellers through jewellery, purses and umbrellas, stockings and underwear and into brassieres, where our momentum deserted us. Now we were both in unfamiliar territory."
Sara Cassidy
Gravitass
A poetic tribute to men's rear-ends.
RICHARD VAN CAMP
Meanwhile, in 1666
Aboard a stuck SkyTrain, reading Samuel Pepys's account of the Great Fire of London.
Randy Fred
Seeing Things
When taking hallucinogenics, more is better, within limits.
Margaret Nowaczyk
Contact No Contact
Personal narratives by Indigenous and settler contributors describing significant first contacts that brought new insights.
Robert Everett-Green
Licorice Roots
A writer uncovers a family connection with a sweet English confection.
Stephen Osborne
Reading in Summer
Where in the used bookstore would mysteries by Raymond Chandler be shelved—in Novels or in Fiction? Stephen Osborne remembers the summer pleasures of reading outdoors and used bookstores.
Marko Sijan
Peace on Earth
"My father believes the world is coming to an end, yet he commits his life to curing the sick." Dispatch by Marko Sijan.
Lucianne Poole
Chainsaw Man
A man with a chainsaw boarded the number 7 bus at about 7:45 a.m., when I was on my way to work in downtown Ottawa.
Kristen den Hartog
Solace
Bud was one of the few who’d seen Stewart’s face as it was.
Jeff Shucard
My Week in Tunisia
Enjoy the fresh kebab while your freshly dented fender gets fixed.
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.
Francois-Marc Gagnon explores curiosity as the opposite of indifference.
Stephen Henighan
Against Efficiency
Stephen Henighan argues that efficiency has become a core value that heightens social divisions.
Patty Osborne
Absolute Centre
Patty Osborne reviews Dogs at the Perimeter by Madeleine Thien (McClelland & Stewart).
Jennesia Pedri
Dividing Lines
Jennesia Pedri reviews Walls: Travels Along the Barricades by Marcello di Cintio (Goose Lane).
KELSEA O'CONNOR
Cut-Out Lit
Kelsea O'Connor reviews Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer (Visual Editions).
Eve Corbel
Collier Cornucopia
Eve Corbel reviews Collier’s Popular Press: 30 Years on the Newsstand.
Daniel Francis
Boob Tube
Richard Stursberg’s memoir of his years in CBC programming raises the question: How did someone with no sympathy for public broadcasting get the job in the first place?
Michael Turner
Oh, Canada
Michael Turner questions a US-curated exhibit of Canadian art that exoticizes Canadian artists while suggesting they are un-exotic.
Chelsea Novak
National Boyfriend
At a taping of George Stroumboulopoulos Tonight, Chelsea Novak meets Canada's boyfriend.
Mandelbrot
Zero Drag and Genius
Mandelbrot reviews The Wage Slave's Glossary written by Joshua Glenn and Mark Kingwell and illustrated by Seth.
Michael Hayward
Writing in Blue
Michael Hayward reviews Blue Nights by Joan Didion (Knopf).
KELSEA O'CONNOR
Grief-in-Progress
Kelsea O'Connor reviews Nox by Anne Carson (New Directions).
Stephen Osborne
Women of Kali
A feminist writer/publisher sought out stories of the partition of India: atrocity and hardship, looting, rape and murder committed by and upon Hindu, Muslim and Sikh.
Sheila Heti
Stakeout
Sheila Heti spends a day in a diner in Toronto observing the enormous EUCAN electrified garbage can at the corner of College and Bathurst.
Thad McIlroy
Hernia Heaven, Part 2
Thad McIlroy undergoes a hernia operation—and with Neil Diamond and the right kind of drugs, it might only take ten minutes.
Stephen Henighan
A Table in Paris
Stephen Henighan remembers Mavis Gallant, the original nomad of Canadian literature, who wrote some of Canada's finest fiction at Pablo Picasso's café table in Paris.
Ted Bishop
Edith and Frank
Ted Bishop visits Edith Iglauer and her husband Frank in their seaside home, where he is treated to a fast drive on a winding road, conversation on good books, and a lesson on what it's like to grow old gracefully.
Stephen Osborne
1968
Stephen Osborne compares the "major problem" of loitering in 1968 Vancouver to the 2012 Occupy movement.
Alberto Manguel
Facing the Camera
How much does a photograph really capture the essence of a person?
Daniel Francis
Deviance on Display
Daniel Francis investigates the practice of visiting asylums and penitentiaries as entertainment in nineteenth-century Canada.
Jane Silcott
Mimesisa
Jane Silcott explores the ideas of beauty and mimicry both in theory and in the wilds of a motel complex.
Michael Turner
Vancouver Re-Remembered
Michael Turner reviews At the World's Edge: Curt Lang's Vancouver, 1937-1998, by Claudia Cornwall.
Stephen Henighan
Wheels
Stephen Henighan investigates bus travel as one of Canada's last surviving democratic spaces.
Alberto Manguel
Observer and Observed
Alberto Manguel reflects on art as a witness to the human desire to be infinite and eternal.
Daniel Francis
Noir
Daniel Francis explores the photographer as Vancouver's most interesting historian.