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Michael Hayward
World War II Writings

It’s much more fun to read this first-hand account of the war and its aftermath observed from ground level than a professional historian’s account, written decades after the fact.

Kevin Barefoot
Word of Mouth

Word of Mouth (Thistledown) is M.A.C. Farrant's fourth collection of fiction and is in two parts: stories about Sybilla, a nineteen-year-old mother struggling to survive in suburban Vancouver Island, stretching welfare cheques and coping with pervert

Paul Tough
World on Fire

I’ve always resisted Sarah McLachlan, even when my heart and my ears wanted to give in to her songs. They seemed too middle-of-the-road, too angel-filled, too soft and girly, too Canadian. Then today I’m sitting at my desk on West 43rd Street in Manh

Leah Rae
Wristcutters: A Love Story

As the film begins, the main character, Zia, is listening to a Tom Waits record and cleaning his room in preparation for suicide. Too bad he misses a spot; the last thing he sees before he dies on the bathroom floor is a dust bunny in the corner. So

Michael Hayward
You’ll Be Okay: My Life With Jack Kerouac

You’ll Be Okay offers a feminine perspective on the Beat Generation from the wife of one of its most celebrated authors.

Blaine Kyllo
X-Men 1.5

Last fall, production for the film X-Men 2 set up in Vancouver, and as we await the theatrical release of the movie, the studio has issued a new DVD version of the first film. X-Men 1.5 (20th Century Fox) includes a new cut of the original film (whic

Daniel Zomparelli
Yesno

Daniel Zomparelli reviews Yesno by Dennis Lee (Anansi).

James Baker
YOU Back the Attack! WE'LL Bomb Who We Want!

In late May 2003 the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) hosted a discussion forum called Hell No: Designers and the War, featuring the design historian Steven Heller, the design icon Milton Glaser (perhaps most known for the “I Love NY” symbol

Kris Rothstein
You Be Me: Friendship in the Lives of Teen Girls

As a teen I was never happier than when in cahoots with my best friend, passing silly notes, talking obsessively on the phone, pouring out heartache, even fighting. I expected You Be Me: Friendship in the Lives of Teen Girls (Annick Press), edited by

S. K. Page
Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art Quarterly

Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art is a new quarterly published in Taiwan and Canada by the anonymously named Art and Collection Group Ltd., which turns out to be an ambitious group of editors, writers, curators and artists in several countri

Eve Corbel
Zine

For six years while Pagan Kennedy was an "out of whack, directionless woman trying to muddle through her late twenties," she wrote, drew and published a zine called Pagan's Head, which was all about her. In 'Zine (St. Martin's Griffin), all issues of

Your Secrets Sleep With Me

Kris: In the not-too-distant future, American refugees stream into Canada, populating shelters and dilapidated warehouses. Racial tension, skittish police, a powerful elevator operators’ union and flying teens are all factors in the skewed reality of

Lara Jenny
Zigzaggery

Portland is a great destination for fans of the independent presses. During a recent two-day trip, I selected a few must-have zines and chapbooks from a huge selection.

JILL MANDRAKE
Zombie Movies: The Ultimate Guide

A passionate and (nearly) complete compendium from an emotionally invested fanatic.

Geist Staff
Shades: The Whole Story of Doctor Tin

Shades: The Whole Story of Doctor Tin (Arsenal Pulp) is the sequel to Tom Walmsley's cult masterpiece, Doctor Tin, which appeared in 1979 to rave reviews and stern warnings. Walmsley was quoted in the press at that time as having said "everything he

Shannon Emmerson
Shadow Maker: The Life of Gwendolyn MacEwen

In search of a more satisfying biography, I pulled out a book I received a few Christmases ago—Rosemary Sullivan's Shadow Maker: The Life of Gwendolyn MacEwen. Sullivan's book made me weep during two separate readings.

Kris Rothstein
Shadow Company

Mercenaries and muscle for hire are the subjects of Shadow Company, a cinematic investigation into the privatization of the use of force. The film was born when a university buddy of the director, Nick Bicanic, took a job as a private military contra

Jill Boettger
Short Journey Upriver Toward Oishida

Last summer I hiked up to a fire lookout in Alberta to visit a friend who lives there for part of each year, and tucked in my sturdy pack was Roo Borson’s Short Journey Upriver Toward Oishida (McClelland & Stewart), which I was taking to my friend as

Darren Barefoot
Shylock

Mark Leiren-Young's Shylock (Anvil) is similar to The Noam Chomsky Lectures. In this one-man drama, Jon Davies, a Jewish actor who portrays Shylock in a cancelled production of The Merchant of Venice, is accused of betraying his fellow Jews and being

Barbara Small
Shooting Water

Shooting Water by Devyani Saltzman, daughter of the filmmaker Deepa Mehta (Key Porter), is a story about politics, love and the making of Mehta’s film Water. Saltzman’s parents divorced when she was eleven, and she chose to live with her father, a de

S. K. Page
Sign After the X

Marina Roy is the author of Sign After the X (Advance/Artspeak), an entertaining and pretentious volume devoted to the twenty-fourth letter of the alphabet.

Michael Hayward
Silk Parachute

A new collection of essays from John McPhee, staff writer at the New Yorker.

Geist Staff
Sign Crimes/Road Kill

Joyce Nelson's new book, Sign Crimes/Road Kill (Between the Lines), is her long-awaited collection of thirty essays written over the last ten years. This is an important and eminently useful book: mediascape, mindscape, landscape: Nelson keeps her ey

Geist Staff
Signs of the Times

Must the deconstructionists have every last word?—not any more: Signs of the Times by David Lehman (Poseidon) is out in paperback and worth even penny. Here at last, a work that makes sense of the gobbledygook (by identifying it as gobbledygook), the

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.

Anson Ching
Fact
the universal human

Review of "The Invention of the Other" directed by Bruno Jorge (2022).

Michael Hayward
Fact
Getting past the past

Review of "A Primer for Forgetting: Getting Past the Past" by Lewis Hyde.

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.

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.

Alberto Manguel
Reading Beyond the Grave

"There are people," Chateaubriand comments, "who, in the midst of the collapse of empires, visit fountains and gardens"

Alberto Manguel
In Praise of the Enemy

The epic genre suffers from disregard. To the Iliad, our new century has preferred the Odyssey: the encumbered return of the warrior matters more to us than his laborious swordplay.

Ira Wagman
The Self-Destruction of the CBC

The federal government recently announced it is reviewing the CBC’s mandate. This review is the latest chapter in a long story of questioning the value of the CBC since its inception seventy years ago. Clearly there are politics involved here; the CBC is an easy target for attack by parties of all stripes.

Alberto Manguel
Van Gogh’s Final Vision

Auvers-sur-Oise is a town of ghosts. Among the summer tourists and art-loving pilgrims who visit Auvers from all over the world, drift flocks of long-dead artists with folding easels and boxes of paints, who a century ago would disembark every week at the small railway station.

Alberto Manguel
Letter from France

For reasons I can't make out, organizers of congresses and literary get-togethers throughout the world appear to have been inspired by a common theme: America. In Germany, in Spain, in France, in Holland, writers are being asked to talk about this faraway place that is either an overwhelming country or an underdeveloped continent.

Alberto Manguel
Light and Dark

There are two big trees in my garden under which, when friends are visiting, we sit and talk, sometimes during the day, but usually at night. Especially at night, when talk seems less inhibited, wider-ranging, strangely more stimulating.

Alberto Manguel
Closing Time in the Gardens of the West

Cyril Connolly’s writings have been republished, as The Selected Works (Picador, 2002). I remember reading his work in my late adolescence and wondering how someone could write like that, in fragments and half-formed ideas, allowing his thoughts (and the reader’s) to go in a thousand directions at the same time, and yet lend his texts an overwhelming feeling of cohesiveness.

Alberto Manguel
Detective Samuel de Champlain

One of the pleasures of reading for no particular reason is coming across hidden stories, involuntary essays, samples of what someone once called “found literature”—as opposed, I imagine, to the literature that states its official identity on the cover. Leafing through a book on Samuel de Champlain, I came across, of all things, a detective story.

Alberto Manguel
Europeans

When I was in school in Argentina, Europe (our notion of Europe) was a vast and powerful conglomerate of culture and wisdom. From there, from across the Atlantic, came the history to which, magister dixit, we owed our existence; from there came the writers whose literature we read, the musicians whose music we listened to, the filmmakers whose films we watched.

Alberto Manguel
Reading Up on War

Many years ago my father-in-law, who had been a British prisoner of war in Japan, gave me a small pocket anthology, The Knapsack, edited by the undeservedly forgotten Herbert Read. The book (which I have since passed on to my daughter) had been put together for the Ministry of War to be given to its soldiers: its proclaimed intention was "to celebrate the genius of Mars." Surprisingly, however, the general tone of the anthology was above all elegiac.

Alberto Manguel
Reading at a Time of Catastrophes

A few years after Kafka’s death, Milena, the woman he had loved so dearly, was taken away by the Nazis and sent to a concentration camp. Suddenly life seemed to have become its reverse: not death, which is a conclusion, but a mad and meaningless state of brutal suffering, brought on through no visible fault and serving no visible end. To attempt to survive this nightmare, a friend of Milena devised a method: she would resort to the books she had read, stored in her memory.

Stephen Henighan
Traitor’s Dirge

“Get it right,” Rob Allen told me. “You have no idea how few novels you will actually write in your life”

Stephen Osborne
Fields of Time

With the approach of her tenth summer, Julia considers the holidays that lie before her: will there be too many things for her to do? Trying to look ahead from school time, with its time-tables and schedules, makes it hard to remember, or to imagine, what summertime will be before summer arrives and the school year ends. In the summer when I was Julia’s age I heard Elvis Presley for the first time, down by the river on the jukebox in the fish-and-chip joint where teenagers went to hold hands and drink ice cream sodas and eat salted french fries drenched in vinegar.

Stephen Osborne
Cat in the House

Toward the end of her life I drew close to Althea, the cat who had been with Mary and me for five or maybe six years, ever since her real owner, Mary’s daughter Karen, had to find a home for her when a landlord invoked the no-pets rule, and Mary and I were living mere blocks away, completely petless and, some might say, carefree.

Alberto Manguel
Images of Work

Six days before the Passover festival in Bethany, the sisters Martha and Mary gave a dinner in honour of Jesus who (the gospels tell us) had raised their brother from the dead. Martha worked in the kitchen while Mary sat herself down at the feet of their guest, to listen to his words. Overwhelmed by the many tasks to be done, Martha asked her sister to come and help her. “Martha, Martha,” said Jesus. “You fret and fuss about many things, but only one thing is necessary. The part Mary has chosen is the best, and it will not be taken from her.”

Billie Savage Gates
Spot Fire

I am down in the cabin and Ross, who is eighty feet up in the fire tower, sees smoke. He tries to report it but his radio isn’t working and nobody can understand him. They phone him back on the cell: does he need the water bombers? He says no, it’s just a spot fire. In that moment a huge gust of wind blasts through the cabin, blows a towel off a rack, slaps it against the valve of the water cooler and turns on the water.

Quade Hermann
The Gist of Everything

My mother stands at the top of the stairs, thin as a skeleton and reeking of booze. “Are you drunk?” I ask. “No,” she says. “Have you had anything to drink today?” “No,” she says. Lies, all lies. There are always more.

Robert Hunter
Launching Greenpeace

A first-hand account of Greenpeace's first expedition to stop U.S. underwater nuclear testing on September 15, 1971.

ANDREW BODEN
Shack Stories

Mr. Maillard scared me from the moment he stepped from his red Chevy pickup. He stood six inches shorter than me and weighed sixty pounds less, but exuded tough son-of-a-bitch like cologne.

GEORGE BOWERING
She Carries

She carries my chair,she carries my walker,she carries my commode,she drops my heart   so hard it breaks into a hundred pieces

ANGELA MAIREAD COID
Show Business

A young girl gets a taste of show business by acting as Sleeping Beauty in a sideshow.

Stephen Smith
Sir John's Lost Diaries

The wind blows. The sun dwindles. The ice waits.

AMY DENNIS
Skin Graffiti

Use your grandmother’s knitting needles if they are steel and sharp, her crochet hooks. Hell, you could even use the split edge of this table. Slide your inner arm against the jagged grain, watch the splinters scrape you raw.

EMILY SCHULTZ
Soft Ice Cream

Sadness has no reasons. Sadness is a luxury of spare time, a piece of pie leftover, the blueberry’s skin caught between your teeth, the black blear of happiness.

The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara & Lenin Play Chess