Why does one culture give a flower a pretty, poetic name, while another culture names it in a seemingly derogatory way?

How to perform a textual analysis of a Facebook message, while under the influence of red wine.

As men of high seriousness appear on television with their crystal balls, Stephen Osborne shares what he learned about the future from Ray the astrologer.

A tarot card reading for John Franklin, Arctic explorer and Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen's Land, by Phoebe Tsang.

Crack addicts, art critics and pregnant waitresses populate David Mitchell's uncanny vision of Vancouver.

A blizzard hits two days before Christmas, stirring up feelings of trepidation and excitement for the passengers of a bus.

Ebb and flow in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico.

A Canadian soldier captured at Dieppe in 1942 tells what happened next.

The worst time for your pet to run away is when you are moving, and my family moved a lot.

Thad McIlroy spends the night in hospital to get a hernia—possibly on his left side, possibly on his right—repaired.

A trip across the country, with didgeridoo and Trudeau too.

A warm spring night, a country club dance, a date with an attractive young man—and braces on my two front teeth.

Limits of the language.

On parle français icitte!

Justin Trudeau and Greta Thunberg attend the Montreal climate march.

Women in '50s chic, men in sports jackets, and all manner of musical instruments at a suburban home in Toronto.

Narrative text, written and spoken, refines a doctor’s ability to hear a patients’ stories.

Pansy shoes and power suits on parliament hill.

Storm prep for a category 2.

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.

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

"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."

"have ya been ev’ryweir?"

Just decide what happens and worry about the rest later.

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

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

Ola Szczecinska returns to Warsaw to visit her grandmother, and to keep from losing her memories.

To reach a higher level, one must be both talented and brave, much like Tam Irving, one of Canada’s leading ceramic artists, whose life with clay is examined in Transitions of a Still Life: Ceramic Work by Tam Irving, by Carol E. Mayer (Anvil Press).

Michael Hayward reviews Trauma Farm by Brian Brett (Greystone).

Petty thievery, grow-ops and jail-time run fairly common in the first two seasons of Trailer Park Boys.

Thai prostitutes offer love and affection as well as sexual gratification to their Western clients, and it is this combination, I learned while reading Travels in the Skin Trade by Jeremy Seabrook (Pluto Press), that causes the farangs (a Thai word f

Zine bargoon of the season: Trite Travel Titbits, A Lil Book of Poems by Jim Munroe, a tiny book (two by three inches) published by Lickspittle Ventures (c/o 66 Greyhound Drive, Willowdale ON M2H 1K3). Composed in pencil, printed on an out-of-tune ph

For u2 fanatics, this may be the most intimate moment they will ever have with Bono; for everyone else, it’s a little awkward.

Tara Ariano wrote Untitled: A Bad Teen Novel (Writers Club Press) when she was thirteen. It is, she claims, “quite awful,” and was only rescued from obscurity because Tara had friends who persuaded her to share her shame with the world.

Lewis Hyde’s Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth and Art (North Point Press) is a wonderful book of old stories about Hermes in Greece, Raven and Coyote in North America, Krishna in India and Eshu in West Africa, and new stories about Picasso,

Major discovery of the season: Carol Windley's first collection of short fiction, Visible Light (Oolichan). This book is really something: fully realized characters living real lives in a fully realized place.

Visions of Jude, by Daniel Poliquin (Douglas & McIntyre) has great promise: what more could we ask for but a serious novel about an Arctic explorer? The story of Jude the explorer (somewhat reminiscent of V. Steffanson, although Jude doesn't order a

UTNE Reader: The Best of the Alternative Press has been reconceived, redesigned and reborn as UTNE: A Different Kind of Read. Its oomph has been squashed, its bite has been sugar-coated, its edge has been dulled and we are left with a self-helpy, con

Patti Smith and Neil Young's 2012 Montreal concert is reviewed by two ardent fans.

Learn to draw your life with tips and writing exercises from the American cartoonist Lynda Barry.

The close proximity of my new apartment to a repertory cinema has caused me to go through a movie-going renaissance. Unfortunately, most of my discoveries have been in the mediocre to bad category.

Thirty-three international publishing houses are participating in The Myths, a project in which contemporary writers from all over the world were invited to retell any myth in any way they chose. Trumpeted as “the most ambitious simultaneous world-wi

American novelist David Leavitt had a legal and literary sensation on his hands when his novel While England Sleeps was published last winter. Apparently Leavitt borrowed heavily from the memoirs of Stephen Spender, the aging English poet, in writing

Greg Hollingshead's new collection, White Buick (Oolichan), contains fifteen nearly impeccable stories. Hollingshead knows how to write: there is nothing superfluous here, his characters are present, the tensions are real enough.

In When I Lived in Modern Times by Linda Grant (Granta), Evelyn Sert looks back to her twenties, when she left England for Israel in search of a place in which she might belong. She thought of Israel as a brand new place where Jews would work to buil

The comics artist and writer Seth dropped in to Sophia Books in Vancouver in early November to promote his new book, Wimbledon Green: The Greatest Comic Book Collector in the World (Drawn & Quarterly), a sumptuous clothbound volume on whose cover the

"A door has closed, another door has opened. You have entered the winter of your life." A review of Paul Auster's memoir.

Wide as the Waters: The Story of the English Bible and the Revolution It Inspired, by Benson Bobrick, is an excellent account of “the most influential book ever published.” It begins by reminding us that the first question ever asked by an inquisitor

Carlo Levi is perhaps best known to North Americans for Christ Stopped at Eboli, a memoir of the time he spent in political exile (for anti-Fascist activities) in the Basilicata region of southern Italy, between 1935 and 1936 (the memoir was made int

When I saw Jan Zwicky’s latest book, Wisdom and Metaphor (Gaspereau Press) on the shelf at a local bookstore, I bought a copy for myself and another as a birthday gift for a friend.

[My husband] and his oldest friend drove down the Nass Highway in an old two-tone blue Volvo station wagon, then parked and sat on the hood to watch the mountains and the setting sun while the Rheostatics’ Music Inspired by the Group of Seven album (

Phrase books are tools of cultural globalization—but they are also among its casualties.

When building a nation, cultural riches can be lost.

Coming to harbour in a new world.

Science and the arts fulfil their functions to help us survive through the imagination.

In a world dominated by heroes, difference is not tolerated.

Dividing and conquering local populations confines them to manageable administrative units.

“Have patience” and “Tomorrow” are two inseparable locutions in the Portuguese tongue.

For a brief period the band CANO gave shape to the dream of a bilingual Canadian culture.

Lisa Bird-Wilson on UNDRIP, reconciliation, and the anxiety felt by Indigenous people in Canada.

"The hemispheric context reveals the roots of the residential school system...Destroying Indigenous cultures was a positivist policy from Patagonia to Dawson City."

What we do when we absorb words from a screen—and we haven’t yet evolved a verb for it—is not reading.

Libraries are not only essential in educating the soul, but in forming the identity of a society.

Our society is formed on the assumption of a healthy immune system.

What we can—and can’t—learn from the plague

Dogged dedication grants a reader vicarious immortality.

The woman who called herself Tatiana Aarons gave me an address that led to a vacant lot.

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.

The newspaper wars aren’t what they used to be.

A package-deal paradise reputation curtails gringo knowledge of Dominican life.

What can the Brothers Grimm teach us about the state of our economic system? Everything.

Faith seems to shiver when confronted by art.

Must artists declare their moral integrity?

Without air travel, family networks might have dissolved long ago.

There’s something not quite right about the grid on which the game is played.