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dispatches
essays
reviews
columns
Daniel Francis
Who Cares Who Ate John Franklin?

Daniel Francis on John Franklin, John Rae and the Globe and Mail's enthusiasm for cannibalism.

Anson Ching
Passing on the Sport

Anson Ching on the hardest board game to learn.

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.

Eimear Laffan
Fact
The Trap Door

This invertebrate does not go looking for prey

rob mclennan
Fact
Elizabeth Smart’s Rockcliffe Park

For the sake of the large romantic gesture

Sara de Waal
Fact
Little Women, Two Raccoons

Hit everything dead on, even if it’s big

Margaret Nowaczyk
Fact
Metanoias

The names we learn in childhood smell the sweetest to us

Ian Roy
Fact
My Body Is a Wonderland

Maybe my doctor has two patients named Ian Roy, and I’ve been sent the other Ian’s file

Sara Graefe
Fact
My Summer Behind the Iron Curtain

No Skylab buzz in East Germany.

Sara Cassidy
Fact
The Lowest Tide

Nature’s sanctity is the only portal to the future.

David Sheskin
Fact
PRESS 1 IF

PRESS 1 IF YOU THINK YOU MAY HAVE HEARD THE BIG BANG.

CB Campbell
Joe and Me

Playing against the fastest chess player in the world.

Mazzy Sleep
Heart Medicine

"You have bruises / There was time / You spent trying to / Heal them. / As in, time wasted."

Jennilee Austria
Scavengers

That’s one for the rice bag!

David M. Wallace
Red Flags

The maple leaf no longer feels like a symbol of national pride.

Jeremy Colangelo
i is another

"my point that / i is but a : colon grown / too long"

Danielle Hubbard
The muse hunt

"The following resume / arrived by fax: One ex-military / man, 52, applying / for duty ..."

CONNIE KUHNS
Marriage on the Download

If marriage was a television show, it might look something like this.

Deborah Ostrovsky
Saint Joseph, Patron Saint of Bad Pronunciation

Scrape every last bit of English out of your throat.

Debra Rooney
Comics
Weird Jobs

Who puts those little stickers on the apples in the grocery store?

Stephen Osborne
Waiting for Language

Remembering Norbert Ruebsaat.

Grant Buday
Reduce, Reuse, Reincarnate

Destroying books for the greater good.

Natasha Greenblatt
Scavenger Hunt for Losers

Losers: you have a lifetime to hunt.

Finn Wylie
Shelter in Place

"I never went looking for them."

Tara McGuire
Short Term

Tell me again how long the trip is?

Jill Boettger
Do You Remotely Care?

Fill the room with a flock of moths.

Stephen Smith
The Acknowledgements

Any resemblances to persons living or dead are purely vindictive.

Robyn Ludwig
Black Velvet, If You Please

The secret is in the velvet.

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.

Derek Fairbridge
Da Capo Best Music Writing

The fourth volume in the Da Capo Best Music Writing pulls together some of the finest music writing published in 2003. It is rife with typos, but the articles are compulsively readable and they cover “rock, pop, jazz, country and more."

Jill Boettger
A Date With Destiny: Night of a Thousand Boyfriends

Just five pages into A Date With Destiny: Night of a Thousand Boyfriends by Miranda Clarke, I can’t decide whether to go to a hotel with an importer/exporter named Chaz, or ditch Chaz and go dancing at Club Neptune with a woman named Danni.

Derek Fairbridge
A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane's Signature Album

Ashley Kahn’s book A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane’s Signature Album, a lovingly detailed account of the creation of John Coltrane’s classic album of the same name, is a cause for celebration.

Sam Macklin
Asterix the Gaul

Asterix the Gaul (Orion), a comic book classic recently reprinted, tramples over all sorts of contemporary niceties.

Eve Corbel
Bannock, Beans & Black Tea

Bannock, Beans & Black Tea by the writer/comix artist Seth, is a small, beautiful, disturbing and touching book in which Seth has compiled, edited and illustrated his father’s stories of growing up poor—really poor—in St. Charles, P.E.I.

ARLEEN PARÉ
Between the Door Posts

Between the Door Posts, by Isa Milman (Ekstasis Editions), begins with this quote from Kafka: “How can one take delight in the world unless one flees to it for refuge?”

Patty Osborne
Frenetic, Instructive, Bossy

Patty Osborne reviews four new books from Mansfield Press.

Mandelbrot
Arctic Roots

Mandelbrot reviews Vanishing Point, a documentary by Stephen A. Smith and Julia Szucs.

roni-simunovic
Girls in Gangs

Roni Simunovic reviews Ashley Little's BC Book Prize-winning novel, Anatomy of a Girl Gang, which follows the story of five teenage girls growing up in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.

Stephen Osborne
The Parabolist

Stephen Osborne reviews The Parabolist by Nicholas Ruddock (Doubleday).

Daniel Francis
When Canadian Literature Moved to New York

What makes [Palmer] Cox so interesting, at least to Nick Mount in his new study When Canadian Literature Moved to New York (University of Toronto Press), is that he was part of a literary expatriation of Canadian writers to the United States. At the

Dylan Gyles
Not Quite Home

Dylan Gyles reviews They Never Told Me and Other Stories by Austin Clarke.

Patty Osborne
Punks and Beats

Patty Osborne reviews Razorcake and Tom Tom Magazine, two offbeat punk music publications.

Stephen Osborne
Finding Paradise

Mandelbrot reviews Maps of Paradise by Alessandro Scafi, a history of humanity's attempts to locate utopia.

Stephen Osborne
Fresh Hell

Stephen Osborne reviews Mary Jo Bang's translation of Dante's Inferno.

Michael Hayward
Poetry of Place

Michael Hayward reviews What Poets Are Like by Gary Soto.

Kevin Barefoot
Granta

When Bill Buford took over Granta magazine in 1979 it was a burned-out case, bankrupt and generally unread. Seven issues later he cut a deal with Penguin that gave the magazine access to a worldwide distribution network and a stable of big-name autho

Kris Rothstein
Hail Mary Corner

No less harm in God is apparent in Brian Payton’s Hail Mary Corner (Beach Holme), set in a Vancouver Island seminary school in the 1980s. Bill, his best friend Jon and the rest of their pack run the school, promoting disorder, breaking the rules and

Kris Rothstein
Peops: Portraits & Stories of People

Peops: Portraits & Stories of People (Soft Skull) by the Canadian artist Fly is a fabulous exploration of the American underground through comics and stories.

Mandelbrot
Orca

The crisis unfolds in the Arctic Ocean where Queequeg meets his end on a iceberg, Ahab meets his flippery adversary face to face, and Ishmael alone lives to tell the tale. You have to be completely drunk to watch this (Orca is the title; it's in the

Stephen Osborne
Paul Martin & Companies: Sixty Theses on the Alegal Nature of Tax Havens

When Paul Martin was prime minister, and before that finance minister, he was seen and known to be a politician rather than a private operator in the higher echelons of global capital; indeed, his business persona cast only the faintest of shadows. A

Michael Hayward
Other Colors: Essays and a Story
Michael Hayward
Paddle to the Sea

Many boomers like me will remember trooping through school corridors to sit with their classmates in a darkened gymnasium, watching as a small hand-carved canoe survives a full range of watery perils beginning in the snowmelt streams that feed into L

Michał Kozłowski
Nomad’s Hotel: Travels in Time and Space

Cees Nooteboom begins his collection of essays, Nomad’s Hotel: Travels in Time and Space (Douglas & McIntyre), by quoting the twelfth-century philosopher Ibn al-Arabi: “The origin of existence is movement.” The next piece, “Forever Venice,” is filled

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.

Artists & Writers Colonies: Retreats, Residencies and Respites for the Creative Mind
Bad Men Who Love Jesus

It isn’t what you think. I’m not just another American gringo,chasing old lady luck South.Staring wide-eyed at their beautiful skin,at the bones of the burros,the dogs and the rats. It’s not why I’ve come, to stare, to open my eyesthis wide, sucking the lemon before I drink.

Bannock, Beans & Black Tea
JACK MITCHELL
Battle Ready

And so the Marquis of Montcalm • now brought them to the field of warHis handsome face was glad • for in his heart • he knew the hour had come When destiny would be decided • ’neath impregnable Quebec

Sara Cassidy
Beautiful Days

Thinking back to the lovely black turtleneck years, before the crinkles and the white hairs.

Black & Blue
Missy Marston
Positivity!

"How do people shake off the embarrassment of being themselves, ignore the distastefulness of all that is human and just get along?"

SALVATORE DIFALCO
Rat Lake

Another classic story from Geist's 20th Anniversary Collector's Issue.

ELAINE MCCLUSKEY
Rating Dr. Chestnut

"The waiting room was filled with junkies. During my visit, the doctor almost fell asleep. He sent me for some tests, but lost the results."

MICHAEL PODGURNEY
Rings

"I hate feeling sorry for people, because the world isn't perfect and I can't feel sorry for every unfortunate bastard I come across."

rews and he waited while whoever was on the other end waited
LINDA GRIFFITHS
Royal Pillow Talk

"The world thinks of me as a great lover, but the truth is, I’m not."

CLAUDIO GAUDIO
Say Anything

"Nietzsche, for example, thought his pen was a hammer, but he may have been mistaken because German professors rarely did their own carpentry."

Brad Cran
Terry

Review of "Terry" by Douglas Coupland.

Brad Cran
Crowd of Sounds
Brad Cran
Pine
Brad Cran
The Land Beyond
Brad Cran
Family Business