William Wallace Cook offers a literary guide to creating a unique plot.
Lily Gontard
Out Stealing Horses
Lily Gontard reviews Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson.
JILL MANDRAKE
My Typewriter’s So Old, It Uses A Pencil
A review of a book of variations by bpNichol.
Eve Corbel
Stories of Storeys
A review of Chris Ware's unconventionally packaged book Building Stories, about the residents of an apartment building.
Jennesia Pedri
Silver-Mine Gold
A review of Happy-Go-Lucky: Silver Islet Shenanigans, a creative non-fiction book by Bill MacDonald.
Stephen Osborne
You Are Here
"You must change your life." According to James Pollock, a new wave of Canadian poetry has emerged.
Patty Osborne
Working it Out
Patty Osborne reviews Journeywoman: Swinging a Hammer in a Man’s World by Kate Braid.
Daniel Francis
The Canadian New Age
A review of the Vanguard of the New Age, Gillian McCann's book about the Theosophical Society, which mixes western spiritualism and eastern mysticism.
Stephen Osborne
Ink on Paper
Two grey whales and a poet/axe murderer play key roles in Brad Cran's poetry collection.
Jennesia Pedri
Then Came the Condos
Jennesia Pedri examines the literary legacy of Dollarton, once home to Earle Birney, Dorothy Livesay and Al Purdy, and the recently-evicted Carole Itter and Al Neil.
ANNMARIE MACKINNON
Prose on Prose
AnnMarie MacKinnon reviews Reading Like A Writer by Francine Prose, a "guide for people who love books and for those who want to write them."
Michael Hayward
Miss Bossy Pants
Michael Hayward reviews #GIRLBOSS, a memoir by Sophia Amoruso, founder of Nasty Gal clothing retailer and capitalism's cheerleader.
roni-simunovic
Hey, Jude!
Roni Simunovic reviews When Everything Feels Like the Movies, the award-winning YA novel that inspired heated controversy and a homophobic petition.
Patty Osborne
Soviet Dynamite
A gaggle of kids team up with a crazy hippie named Sea Foam and an array of Angolan grandmothers in Granma Nineteen, reviewed by Patty Osborne.
KELSEA O'CONNOR
Frisco Freebooters
Kelsea O'Connor reviews We Are Pirates, a witty adventure through modern-day piracy by Daniel Handler, better known as Lemony Snicket.
Jeff Shucard
Piss-up
Jeff Shucard reminisces about St. Patrick's Day, 1979: druidic magic, Irish fiddle tunes and the greatest piss-up of all time.
Stephen Osborne
Forty-One False Starts and a Two-Headed Waiter
Stephen Osborne reviews Janet Malcolm's book of essays and discusses the worst novel ever published in Canada.
RICHARD VAN CAMP
Culturism
Mary Schendlinger reviews The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, the riveting tale of “a Hmong child, her American doctors and the collision of two cultures.”
Eve Corbel
Cooks Who Over-Identify with Their Equipment
The rasp, the spatula and the corkscrew—Eve Corbel's series of obsessive cooks.
Eve Corbel
Odds Are
Eve Corbel lays out how likely you are to die by plane crash, shark attack, lightning, flu and other likely and unlikely causes.
Stephen Henighan
Campus Confidential
"In the public eye, universities have never recovered from the antics of Donald Sutherland as Professor Jennings in the 1978 film Animal House."
Diana Fitzgerald Bryden
Giller Filler
Diana Fitzgerald Bryden attends Between the Pages, the pre-Giller hybrid that’s a kind of sacrificial altar/beauty pageant for six Canadian authors.
Daniel Francis
Rum Row
From Closing Time: Prohibition, Rum-Runners, and Border Wars.
Stephen Osborne
Shaggy Dog Tales
Stephen Osborne on dog walking, the absurdity of online writing guides and the THE building.
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.
"I follow my penis around town for a while, wandering aimlessly through all the women—why do I ever leave this city?"
JACOB WREN
A Kind of Dream Therapy
"And my theory about professional artists was as follows: Artists are not necessarily the most creative or inspired individuals in any given community."
KELSEA O'CONNOR
99¢ Bin
A list of things you can get for 99¢.
MITIARJUK NAPPAALUK
Examinations
“Sanaaq! Qumaq’s blood is too weak and the same is true for Aanikallak’s. They’ll both have to go to hospital!” From Sanaaq by Mitiarjuk Nappaaluk, the first ever Inuit novel.
Drunk Family Dog Trip
Leonard Cohen, a troupe of French-Canadian clowns, a person with an antiquated profession, an unusually tall municipal bureaucrat, Gordie Howe and others coalesce in these randomly generated CanLit premises.
MICHELLE ELRICK
Ethelbert: Ten Days in May
Excerpt from Michelle Elrick's Then/Again.
RAWI HAGE
Empty City
Ten thousand bombs had fallen and I was waiting for death to come and scoop its daily share from a bowl of limbs and blood. I walked down the street under the falling bombs. The streets were empty. I walked above humans hid
Enchantment & Other Demons
CHRIS CASUCCIO
Elephant
sat behind the trailers with julie eatingthe peanut butter sandwiches peter’swife made that morning by the park sink
KEGAN MCFADDEN
Easy
it’s easy: you pour a mug of beer & then a shot of bourbon. you light a match
Drawn & Quarterly
Drawn & Quarterly Volume 5
GALE SMALLWOOD-JONES
Down East
My old pal Chuck asked me and my sister Stella to drive down east with him. We weren’t doing anything else at the time and so we jumped at the chance.
BILLEH NICKERSON
Dorothy Stratten’s Tent Trailer
When I overhear my parents talkabout the death of Dorothy Stratten,the Playboy playmate first discoveredin a Vancouver Dairy Queen,I somehow confuse her with the womanwho sold my family our tent trailer.
Rhonda Waterfall
Director, Saviour, Surgeon
In his hotel room the director took a mouthful of Scotch, swallowed a Viagra and then headed off to the gala.
BENJAMIN WOOD
Deleted Scene from a Lasting Relationship
Runner-up in the 2nd Annual Geist Literal Literary Postcard Story Contest.
CHRIS GILPIN
Dear Sasquatch
You're the kind of creature who comes to events like these and sits in the corner writing confessional poetry.
JACOB SCHEIER
Dear Office of Homeland Security
I began to run across 42nd Street, a trail of beer nuts behind me, making my way to TimesSquare, because I thought I should see The Lion King or smoke crack before I die, but could afford neither.
JOEY COMEAU
Dear Neopost
"The chance to put my Credit and Collections Management experience to work for your company is something I am willing to die for."
JONNY DIAMOND
Dave Is Dead
For a man who’d once picked a shard of glass from his cheek while laughing, Dave sure could write a pretty melody.
HAL NIEDZVIECKI
Darker Country
I have never been a success at anything in particular.
Gillian Wigmore
Crematorium
She lives in Prince George. in plastic bags on tuesday nights we load frozen corpses from industrial-sized freezers into the back of the suzuki.
Jill Boettger
Country Music Love
You are clearly preoccupied with love. See the way you siftthrough the lint from your purse, searching for the backing ofan earring. See the runway of broken leaves and bread crumbscollecting under the emergency brake in your car. Messy, messy.
DAVID MILNE
Conversation with Victor Frankenstein
When deprived of sensory input, humans experience miraculous, spiritual things
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