Carrie Villeneuve reviews The Union: The Business Behind Getting High, a documentary on British Columbia's marijuana industry.
Kris Rothstein
Turbo Chicks: Talking Young Feminists
Kris Rothstein reviews Talking Young Feminists, a collection of essays by young feminist women.
Mandelbrot
Nanook of the North
Mandelbrot discusses the making of Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North.
Stephen Osborne
On the Edge: A Journey into the Heart of Canada
Stephen Osborne reviews On the Edge: A Journey into the Heart of Canada by Lindalee Tracey.
Michael Hayward
On Hashish
Michael Hayward reviews On Hashish, a collection of Walter Benjamin’s writings on hashish.
Patty Osborne
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
Patty Osborne reviews Jeanette Winterson's Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, a fast-paced and hilarious coming-of-age story about the adopted daughter of a religious fanatic mother.
ARLEEN PARÉ
Paper Trail
A paranoid office-worker relieves the alienation she feels in her job by writing experimental lyric prose.
Michael Hayward
Phantom Limb
Michael Hayward reviews Phantom Limb by Theresa Kishkan, a series of essays exploring of the complexity and magic of the natural world.
Kris Rothstein
Fake ID
Kris Rothstein reviews Mariko Tamaki’s Fake ID, a collection of short stories about a young woman who moves to Toronto after finishing university in Montreal.
Michał Kozłowski
Joseph Howe and the Battle for Freedom of Speech
Michal Kozlowski reviews Joseph Howe and the Battle for Freedom of Speech by John Ralston Saul.
Last Wedding
A review of Bruce Sweeney's Last Wedding.
Sarah Maitland
Long Pen Under the Library
Sarah Maitland visits Margaret Atwood's book signing at Vancouver's Word on the Street festival.
Siobhan Devlin
Lucky Jim
"So today in class we talk about Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis, which I looked forward to because it’s a book with two interesting female characters, for a change." Review by Siobhan Devlin.
Michael Hayward
Mnemonic Devices
Michael Hayward reviews Mnemonic: a book of trees by Theresa Kishkan (Goose Lane).
Michael Hayward
Books That Shook the World
Michael Hayward reviews Atlantic Books' series of 'Books That Shook the World' and Alberto Manguel's biography of Homer's the Iliad and the Odyssey.
Kris Rothstein
Colonialism and Homosexuality
The promise of exotic and sensuous experience has lured many a European man to go abroad, as Robert Aldrich demonstrates in Colonialism and Homosexuality (Routledge), reviewed by Kris Rothstein.
S. K. Page
A History of the Future
"A History of the Future, by David A. Wilson, is a great idea for a book: a history of what people in the past made of the future they would never know." Review by S.K. Page.
Shannon Emmerson
A Recipe for Bees
Shannon Emmerson reviews Gail Anderson-Dargatz's A Recipe for Bees, a story about the price of our choices and the reasons we make them.
Dan Post
A Sound Like Water Dripping
Dan Post reviews A Sound Like Water Dripping by Soren Bondrup-Nielsen, the story of the author's attempts to be the first Ontarian to locate the elusive boreal owl.
Mindy Abramowitz
Action Girl Comics
"I am by no means a connoisseur of comics, and usually confine my reading to one or two titles. Now Action Girl Comics makes it three." Review by Mindy Abramowitz.
Michael Hayward
Across the Territories
Michael Hayward reviews Across the Territories by Kenneth White, a book of White's worldwide travels.
Patty Osborne
Banana Rose
Patty Osborne reviews Banana Rose by Natalie Goldberg.
Michael Hayward
Beat Generation
Michael Hayward reviews Beat Generation by Jack Kerouac, a three-act play he wrote but never produced.
Todd Coyne
Black is Back
Todd Coyne reviews Black: The History of a Color by Michel Pastoureau, a book that "charts a European social history of the most symbolic and evocative colour on earth."
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.
Jill Mandrake reviews George Bowering's Caprice, "a poetic eulogy for a shrinking literary landscape."
Helen Godolphin
Cruddy
Helen Godolphin reviews Lynda Barry's Cruddy, a novel deep within its own whacked-out world.
Patty Osborne
Eating Apples: Knowing Women's Lives
Patty Osborne reviews Eating Apples, an addictive collection of personal essays that gives glimpses into the lives of women.
Norbert Ruebsaat
Errata
Norbert Ruebsaat reviews George Bowering's Errata (1988).
Robert Everett-Green
Epileptic
Robert Everett-Green reviews David B.'s graphic memoir Epileptic, a recount of the long search by David B.’s parents for a cure for his older brother’s seizures.
Jennesia Pedri
A Second Piece of Pi
Jennesia Pedri answers: why would one want to reread a novel that devotes 211 of its 354 pages to the 227 days that followed a shipwreck?
Blaine Kyllo
All Families are Psychotic
Blaine Kyllo calls All Families are Psychotic by Douglas Coupland "a piece of sculpture: intricate, finely balanced, and threatening to tip should anyone get too close."
Norbert Ruebsaat
Autobiography of a Tattoo
Norbert Ruesbaat's Christmas book was Stan Persky’s Autobiography of a Tattoo. He read it twice, and then went back and read many parts a third time.
Patty Osborne
Prisoner of Tehran: A Memoir
Patty Osborne reviews Prisoner of Tehran: A Memoir by Marina Nemat.
Norbert Ruebsaat
Private Confessions
Norbert Ruebsaat reviews Ingmar Bergman's Private Confessions and the screening at which he saw it.
Kris Rothstein
Grand Centaur Station: Unruly Living with the New Nomads of Central Asia
Nomadic culture is at the core of Larry Frolick’s Grand Centaur Station: Unruly Living with the New Nomads of Central Asia.
How to Be a Domestic Goddess: Baking and the Art of Comfort Cooking
When Geist requested a copy of How to Be a Domestic Goddess: Baking and the Art of Comfort Cooking by the new English kitchen queen Nigella Lawson (Knopf Canada) “for review purposes,” the distributor wrote back to say “fat chance.”
Patty Osborne
I'll Be Right Back
Writing on the Rock, which takes place on Denman Island, B.C., in early August, is now my favourite writers’ festival.
ARLEEN PARÉ
Invisible Lines
In Astrid van der Pol’s poetry collection, Invisible Lines (BuschekBooks), the past is the most hopeful, whereas each new future enters some form of sadness.
Lily Gontard
The Cripple and His Talismans
The protagonist of The Cripple and His Talismans by Anosh Irani (Raincoast) is a self-centred, self-absorbed, wealthy-but-have-chosen-to-live-among-the-crippled-and-poor-in-Bombay man.
Norbert Ruebsaat
The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power
The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power and in the film it is based on, turns notions about corporate responsibility and accountability into oxymorons.
Kris Rothstein
The Nervous Tourist
Bob Gaulke’s description of his travels in Salvador (a region of Brazil), in The Nervous Tourist, evokes the age of imperialism. This modest chapbook contains insightful, engaging and funny writing about the eye-opening experience of travel.
Stephen Osborne
Weave
Lisa Pasold’s poetry collection, Weave, reads as a memoir of the twentieth century in a world bounded by Prague and Peru and the Russian front and the shores of Lake Ontario.
Kevin Barefoot
Soccer in Sun and Shadow
Eduardo Galeano’s Soccer in Sun and Shadow (Verso) collects his ruminations on the history and future of soccer, and consists of vignettes describing famous players, unlikely goals and every World Cup final since 1930.
Stephen Osborne
Snow Walker
Snow Walker, the film made from Farley Mowat’s book of stories, contains much cornball scripting, some wretched dialogue and a ponderous, bellowing soundtrack that equals the worst excesses of Cecil B DeMille’s Bible epics.
Stephen Osborne
The Secret Voyage of Sir Francis Drake 1577-1580
The Secret Voyage of Sir Francis Drake 1577-1580, by Samuel Bawlf, completes the story of European adventure in the north of North America in the sixteenth century.
Jill Boettger
Field Guide to Stains: How to Identify and Remove Virtually Every Stain Known to Man
Did you know that you are more likely to encounter Worcestershire sauce stains in winter and that correction fluid stains are most common in April?
Stephen Osborne
Marie Tyrell
“I knew that I would dream that night of the city in flames, the brown-brick towers falling, caving in on themselves (in slow motion, great clouds of burning dust), proud lights flickering out, psssfft, all the messages going dark one by one."
Sam Macklin
Complete Peanuts
Each book in the ongoing Complete Peanuts series (Fantagraphics) is beautifully designed by the Canadian cartoonist Seth, and features two years of thoughtfully reproduced daily and Sunday newspaper cartoon strips.
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 Henighan argues that efficiency has become a core value that heightens social divisions.
Francois-Marc Gagnon
Among the Curious
Francois-Marc Gagnon explores curiosity as the opposite of indifference.
Alberto Manguel
Being Here
In the world between here and there, what place does one call home?
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 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.
Stephen Henighan
Wheels
Stephen Henighan investigates bus travel as one of Canada's last surviving democratic spaces.
Michael Turner
Vancouver Re-Remembered
Michael Turner reviews At the World's Edge: Curt Lang's Vancouver, 1937-1998, by Claudia Cornwall.
Jane Silcott
Mimesisa
Jane Silcott explores the ideas of beauty and mimicry both in theory and in the wilds of a motel complex.
Daniel Francis
Deviance on Display
Daniel Francis investigates the practice of visiting asylums and penitentiaries as entertainment in nineteenth-century Canada.
Alberto Manguel
Facing the Camera
How much does a photograph really capture the essence of a person?
Stephen Osborne
1968
Stephen Osborne compares the "major problem" of loitering in 1968 Vancouver to the 2012 Occupy movement.
Michał Kozłowski
Boomtown
L.B. Foote fled Newfoundland to avoid life as a cod fisherman and became Winnipeg's best-known photographer, chronicling Boomtown's growth, energy and struggles.
Daniel Francis
Noir
Daniel Francis explores the photographer as Vancouver's most interesting historian.
Alberto Manguel
Observer and Observed
Alberto Manguel reflects on art as a witness to the human desire to be infinite and eternal.
Stephen Osborne
The Man Who Stole Christmas
On a dark day in January in Toronto, when the sky was much too close to the ground, I went to see the grave of Timothy Eaton with my friend Tom Walmsley.
Stephen Henighan
Tigers' Anatomy
As Canadian leaders look to emulate Asian nations, our government fails to see that the tigers' fatal flaw is the absence of democracy. Or, maybe they do see.
Daniel Francis
Warrior Nation
The Great White North gets rebranded and gains some military muscle: goodbye peacenik, hello soldier.
Alberto Manguel
How to Talk About Books We Haven’t Read, Part Two
I’ve now read Comment parler des livres que l’on n’a pas lus? and I’m happy to say that I was right.
Alberto Manguel
How to Talk About Books We Haven’t Read
A French writer whose name I hadn’t heard before, Pierre Bayard, has written a book called Comment parler des livres que l’on n’a pas lus? published by Éditions de Minuit in a collection aptly titled Paradoxe. A number of critics in France have writt
David Campion
Memory and the Valley: An Interview with Sandra Shields and David Campion
Ross Merriam
Ann Diamond on Memory and Forgetting
Most of our lives probably disappear from our memories, although some people remember much more than others.
Stephen Henighan
Nations Without Publishers
In 2002, when my essay collection When Words Deny the World was published, people started behaving strangely. Ambitious young writers scurried out of sight when I entered a room, as though afraid that irate authors might banish them from Toronto for having spoken to me.
Stephen Henighan
Court Jester
One of the indispensable figures of contemporary journalism is the cutting-edge cultural commentator. The columnist who offers sardonic insights into trends, fashions, television shows and publishing personalities has become an institution.
Patty Osborne
The Sound of Hockey
GILLIAN JEROME
Weeble World
Evil is not darkness, I thought to myself. It’s noise.