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reviews
columns
Michael Hayward
Pre-Potter Wizardry

Michael Hayward and 50 years of writing from Ursula K. Le Guin.

Michał Kozłowski
Waiting for Trudeau

Pansy shoes and power suits on parliament hill.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Drool-worthy

Kelsea O'Connor on many aspects of food, from culinary extinctions to kombucha microbiomes.

Lorna MacKinnon
Weekend with Dorian

Storm prep for a category 2.

Kathleen Murdock
Text That Breaks

Kathleen Murdock on the physical and meaningful structure of text.

Beth Rowntree
7 lbs. 6 oz.

I looked in her purse and found nothing but scraps of paper so covered in writing there was hardly any white left on the pages.

Alberto Manguel
Marilla

Prince Edward Island gothic.

JILL MANDRAKE
One Ring Circus: Extreme Wrestling in the Minor Leagues

The question you have to ask yourself when you finish reading One Ring Circus: Extreme Wrestling in the Minor Leagues, by Brian Howell is this:do I want to become a minor league wrestler? The answer is yes.

Michał Kozłowski
Road Trip Supreme

Outlet Malls, Janis Joplin, The Godfather and Taco Bell—on the scent of Ameryka.

Jeff Shucard
Home Front

"My father began his shopping spree in the fashion department. He ordered jackets, sweaters, shirts, trousers and shoes. In his new wardrobe he looks like a mummy that has been dressed up for a big night of trick-or-treating."

Scott Andrew Christensen
n yer comin' wit me

"have ya been ev’ryweir?"

Hàn Fúsēn
Biking Around with Ondjaki

Just decide what happens and worry about the rest later.

Stephen Osborne
Wittgenstein Walks (Commercial Drive)

"8.21 Fur Bearers Defender"—the difficulty is to say no more than we know.

Daniel Francis
Politics Times Two

Reviews of Nixonland and True Patriot Love.

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

Anson Ching
Between Quips and Dreams

Anson Ching on a storyteller.

Geoff Inverarity
The Woman Who Talks to Her Dog at the Beach

The simple love of dogs.

Alberto Manguel
Hoping Against Hope

Kafka’s writing allows us intuitions and half-dreams but never total comprehension.

Stephen Osborne
Halloween Capital of America

This year for Halloween, we creep back into the archives and Stephen Osborne digs deep into his family's history at the Salem witch trials.

CHRISTOPHER GRABOWSKI
Parade of Lost Souls

The Halloween photography of Christopher Grabowski.

Joseph Weiss
King of the Post-Anthropocene

Kaiju are the heroes we deserve.

Kris Rothstein
Mall Moll

Kris Rothstein on a book written by a book nerd, for book nerds about a book nerd.

Nicola Winstanley
Wall Spirits

Nicola Winstanley's comic on hearing spirits in the walls at a foster when she was young.

Stephen Henighan
Left Nationalists

Progressives are far less likely to be nationalists than ever before.

Geoff Inverarity
The Woman Who Talks to Her Dog at the Beach

The simple love of dogs.

Stephen Osborne
Halloween Capital of America

This year for Halloween, we creep back into the archives and Stephen Osborne digs deep into his family's history at the Salem witch trials.

Kristen den Hartog
The Two Lots

Theft, death and don't-mess-with-me expressions—unlocking the family portrait.

BRADLEY PETERS
Mission

Salmon runs, voodoo juice and chewing the fat in Mission.

BRADLEY PETERS
Mission

Salmon runs, voodoo juice and chewing the fat in Mission.

Finn Wylie
Road Trip with Cupid

“Want to marry me? My wife she burned me. She just burned me, you know. Now I’m going to court to burn her back.”

RICHARD VAN CAMP
In Memoriam: Edith Iglauer, 1917 - 2019

Respected journalist, Geist contributor and maker of olive sandwiches.

Edith Iglauer
The Prime Minister Accepts

Edith Iglauer invites Pierre Trudeau over for dinner and gets Barbra Streisand as a bonus.

JILL MANDRAKE
Ice Cream Dude

Compassionate, good truck driver, likes kids, likes ice cream—the makings of a no-fail ice cream dude.

Stephen Osborne
Exotic World

In 1989, when Harold and Barbara Morgan opened the Museum of Exotic World in the front rooms of Harold’s commercial painting business in Vancouver, they had been travelling the world every winter for forty-five years and had accumulated many souvenir

Randy Fred
Blind Man Dance

Randy Fred receives his first traditional Nuu-chah-nulth name.

Michał Kozłowski
After the Money

Notes from the Governor General’s Literary Awards.

Hàn Fúsēn
Till Talk

Han Fusen navigates multiculturalism and kookoo sabzi from inside a Persian grocery store.

JILL MANDRAKE
peanut brittle

Jill Mandrake on the surprising effect of peanut brittle.

Jocelyn Kuang
49 Days to the Afterlife

Rice, tea and a trillion dollars of spirit money.

Jeff Shucard
King Zog and the Secret Heart of Albania

The secret heart of Albania is imbued with compassion and a desire to help those in need

David Look
Sleeping Class

Scenic views, fresh muffins and drunk passengers—three days and four nights aboard the Canadian from Vancouver to Toronto.

ANNMARIE MACKINNON
Chicken at Large

What was a lone hen doing in the yard, a few feet from a busy city street?

Matt Snell
Laying on Hands

In Peterborough, Pastor Billy cures arthritis, back pain, bone spurs, lymphoma, stage four liver cancer, sleep apnea and atrial fibrillation

Susie Taylor
We Smoke Our Smokes

From morning to night, there's always someone coming in for smokes and a chat.

Marcus Youssef
Happy Shiny People

The Museum of Communism is easy to find thanks to the museum’s adver­tis­ing slo­gan: We’re above McDonald’s.

Steven Heighton
Jogging with Joyce

Before I opened for Joyce Carol Oates at her reading at Harbourfront in Toronto, we had dinner: Oates and her husband, Raymond Smith; the organizer, Greg Gatenby; and me.

RICHARD VAN CAMP
World's Most Wanted

Who knew my dad's old pen was a famous Parker 51 Vacumatic?

Véronique Darwin
K to 7

Veronique Darwin revisits her childhood journal, from hearing ghosts in kindergarten to staring at hotties in grade seven.

Ann Diamond
An Awful Thing

“Never write a line you don’t mean,” said Carver. “And don’t ever imag

Christine Lai
Fact
Now Must Say Goodbye

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.

Daniel Francis
Fact
writing from an early grave

Review of "Orwell: The New Life" by D.J. Taylor.

Michael Hayward
Fact
The peripatetic poet

Review of "Iron Curtain Journals," "South American Journals" and "Fall of America Journals" by Allen Ginsberg.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Fact
Haunted House guest

Review of "A Guest in the House" by Emily Carroll.

Michael Hayward
Fact
Beyond the event horizon

Review of "Antkind" by Charlie Kaufman.

Anson Ching
Fact
Sailing the roaring forties

Review of "The Last Grain Race" by Eric Newby.

Michael Hayward
Fact
BELLE ÉPOQUE GOSSIP

Review of "The Man in the Red Coat" by Julian Barnes.

Peggy Thompson
Fact
More precious than rubies

Review of "Rubymusic" by Connie Kuhns.

Debby Reis
Fact
A not-totally-accurate introduction to the azores

Review of the Netflix series "Rabo de Peixe" (2023) created by Augusto de Fraga.

Michael Hayward
Fact
A Russian Brother and his sister

Review of "A Russian Sister" by Caroline Adderson.

Kris Rothstein
Fact
The messy back of history

Review of "My Grandfather’s Knife: Hidden Stories from the Second World War" by Joseph Pearson

Peggy Thompson
Fact
Have Mercy

Review of "Mercy Gene" by JD Derbyshire.

Michael Hayward
Fact
subterranean mysteries

Review of "Underland" by Robert Macfarlane.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Fact
Championing Trees

Review of "Tracking Giants: Big Trees, Tiny Triumphs, and Misadventures in the Forest" by Amanda Lewis.

Patty Osborne
Fact
Crossing Borders

Review of "Solito: A Memoir" by Javier Zamora

Michael Hayward
Fact
The Two Roberts

Review of "Turn Every Page" directed by Lizzie Gottlieb

Peggy Thompson
Fact
A moment with holden

Review of "Holden After & Before: Love Letter for a Son Lost to Overdose" by Tara McGuire.

JILL MANDRAKE
Fact
POINTS OF INFLECTION

Review of "Some of the Puzzles" by M.A.C. Farrant.

Michael Hayward
Fact
A HOLIDAY IN THE MOUNTAINS (WITH PIE)

Review of "Holiday, 1909" by Charles Chapman.

Anson Ching
Fact
THE BELL KEEPS TOLLING

Review of "For Whom the Bell Tolls" by Ernest Hemingway.

Kris Rothstein
Fact
DEFINED BY DUMPLINGS

Review of "What We Talk About When We Talk About Dumplings" edited by John Lorinc.

Jonathan Heggen
Fact
The Common Shaman

Review of "Shaman" by Kim Stanley Robinson.

Peggy Thompson
Fact
Walk Another Path

Review of "Landlines" by Raynor Winn.

Kris Rothstein
Fact
Dogs and the Writing Life

Review of "And a Dog Called Fig: Solitude, Connection, the Writing Life" by Helen Humphreys.

Patty Osborne
Fact
A Secret Well Kept

Review of "The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation" by Rosemary Sullivan.

Stephen Henighan
In Search of a Phrase

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 Osborne
The Contest of Memory

Stephen Osborne uncovers the genesis of the poppy and how it became evidence of horror, a token of remembrance and a promise of oblivion.

Sarah Leavitt
3 Girls

Sarah Leavitt is more than just a clever cartoonist; she also paints pictures with her colourful prose.

Stephen Osborne
Iceman

Last month I had lunch with a good friend who years ago had told me that her parents, who immigrated to Canada after the war, were Holocaust survivors. I asked my friend, whose name is Slava, to tell me again about her parents, who had lived in Vilna, the ancient Lituanian city of Europe known for three centuries as the “Jerusalem of the north.”

Edith Iglauer
Sightseeing, Anybody?

The police officer turned us back and told us to for

Gregory Betts
Trench Poetry

The last thing in the world I wanted was to be an exhibit, or worse.

RICHARD VAN CAMP
Saeko Usukawa Remembered

Senior Editor Mary Schendlinger remembers her friend and Geist contributor Saeko Usukawa.

Stephen Osborne
David Thompson Beats the Devil on the Kisiskatchewan River

Thompson’s free-ranging narrative of the New World must be the only one in which the devil is defeated at checkers.

Edith Iglauer
What?

At home Frank and I are mutually sympathetic to the obligation to face one another and speak loudly; or, when we are away, to supply each other with new batteries when we forget them; but we have no defence against the independent wandering behaviour of our hearing aids. They are always someplace else. I probably have spent one percent of my life, close to a whole year, looking for the damned things.

M.A.C. Farrant
Notes on the Wedding

The mother of the groom measures the distance between two weddings: twenty-six years, six thousand miles, and a donkey covered with flowers. It’s outtasight.

Stephen Henighan
Building Bohemia

Since the Wall came down, East German socialists in Prenzlauer Berg are free to sip coffee and talk about art.

Ross Merriam
Interview with Ann Diamond: Part 1

The first installment of an interview with writer Ann Diamond while she works on her new novel in Greece. Conducted by Ross Merriam.

Norbert Ruebsaat
Berlin Diary

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Hakescher Markt became one of hippest neigh

Rose Hunter
c

A shuttle driver at LAX shares his idea for a Valentine’s Day gift.

EVELYN LAU
Reunion

He looked vaguely familiar— there was a sort of outline around his ­features that I almost recognized, a translucent and shifting visage, as of someone I once knew. He looked vaguely familiar— there was a sort of outline around his ­features that I al

Kathy Friedman
Tesoro

The man who told me to sit here is wearing a blue uniform. He asks me questions. “You’re going to sacrifice your body just to save some money,” he jokes.

David Albahari
Shuttle Survivors

On a recent trip to Paris, I met a young woman from Japan. But this is not a story about a sudden love affair, which one might expect in Paris.

Robert Everett-Green
Ordinary Weekly Deaths

If Toronto were like Baghdad, thirty-nine res

Lindsay Diehl
Kuta Beach

Boyfriends are trouble, I said. He leaned over and gave me a high-five.

Shelley Kozlowski
Paid Relationship

A eulogy delivered by email, from a woman living in Berlin to her lifelong friend in Vancouver.

Tom Walmsley
The Eaton Effect

Sometime in the late seventies Osborne and I walked down Spadina from Bloor to Front street, listening to Shein talk about the China Effect.

Linda Solomon
Nobody’s Fault

In multi-cultural Vancouver, strangers come together at a moment of crisis.

Bryan Zandberg
City Lectures

The organizers of tonight’s talk have branded it as a “raw exchange”—part of a series of uncensored literary gatherings around the city—and so they’ve invited three biting B.C. writers to get down to brass tacks for a group of strangers in the basement of the Vancouver Public Library. By some freak of programming, a punk-metal band is slaying the kids in the room down the hall tonight, which means every time a bookish-looking latecomer wades into our midst, a foul-sounding wave of hellish power chords does, too.

Robert Everett-Green
The Main

Last summer, during a visit to Vancouver, my nine-year-old son climbed the pediment of a cast-iron traffic-light standard and put his palm on the glowing hand that warns pedestrians to stay put. My mother pointed out afterwards that my photograph of the event contained its own French caption, in the word visible over his shoulder: main.

Stephen Henighan
The Colonized Investor

When the crash came, Canadians paid the price for the colonized mentalities of their investment advisors.

Stephen Osborne
War Stories

A question of some concern among my friends when we were growing up in the fifties and sixties was how old you had to be to go to war.