fact

All
dispatches
essays
reviews
columns
Michael Hayward
Levels of Loss

In Levels of Life, Julian Barnes writes about the grief experienced after losing his wife to cancer.

Patty Osborne
Life-25: Interviews with Prisoners Serving Life Sentences

Life-25: Interviews with Prisoners Serving Life Sentences (New Star), by P.J. Murphy and Lloyd Johnsen, surprised me.

GILLIAN JEROME
Life After Birth

Child-rearing manuals cropped up with a vengeance in the latter half of the twentieth century after Dr. Benjamin Spock produced Baby and Child Care—the all-time best-selling book in American history, second only to the Bible, despite advice such as “

Randy Gelling
Léolo

When the movie director Jean Claude Lauzon died in a plane crash over northern Quebec, his death was noted in a two-sentence paragraph accompanied by a small photograph in the local newspaper. In the photograph he looks like the actor in his first fi

Michael Hayward
Let Me Finish

Early in his memoir Let Me Finish (Harcourt), Roger Angell describes his mother Katherine White and his stepfather E. B. White as “a successful New Yorker couple—she a fiction editor; he a writer of casuals and poetry and the first-page Comment secti

Lily Gontard
Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name

Deception and some kind of love are the themes that thread through the journey that is Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name by Vendela Vida (HarperCollins). As one of the editors of the infamously cool magazine The Believer, Vida has a sharp pen a

Patty Osborne
Ledoyt

I picked up Ledoyt by Carol Emshwiller (Mercury House) because it looked a lot like Annie (Polestar), a book I reviewed in Geist No. 19-20.

Patty Osborne
L'Art de conjuguer

Shopping for books is one part of Christmas that I really enjoy, and this year I found all the books I needed by walking between four bookstores clustered near the centre of town. At Manhattan Books I picked up two bright green hardcover copies of Be

Patty Osborne
Laurence

Laurence, by France Théoret (Mercury, translated by Gail Scott), is also about a young woman in Quebec, but in the 1930s a woman’s struggle to make her life her own was harder. Laurence comes from an impoverished farming family whose daughters have t

Barbara Zatyko
Larry's Party

There's nothing exotic about Larry's Party (Random House), by Carol Shields: it could have taken place in Windsor. In fact, I think I went to high school with Larry Weller, an all-around ordinary guy.

Lily Gontard
Lady Franklin’s Revenge

I bought Revenge and began my education in how to manipulate history and maintain your honour as a Victorian lady. McGoogan’s book is an in-depth account of a detail-oriented, uncompromising, highly motivated and intelligent woman.

Sam Macklin
Krazy & Ignatz 1937

The recent Krazy & Ignatz 1937–1938: Shifting Sands Dusts Its Cheeks in Powdered Beauty is one of the most agreeably bonkers tomes published in recent memory. Just about every strip tells the story of Ignatz Mouse’s compulsion to hurl bricks at the w

Michael Hayward
Lancelot of the Lake

In one of the audio tracks on the dvd of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, co-director Terry Gilliam credits Robert Bresson’s 1974 film Lancelot of the Lake (New Yorker Films dvd) as an inadvertent inspiration for Grail.

Michael Hayward
La Commune

Remember those student days when, in preparation for your final exam, you’d optimistically sit through a movie version as a substitute for the book itself?

Mandelbrot
La Florida

Are the Québecois the only moviemakers in North America with a sense of humour? Latest evidence to hand would certainly suggest so: three movies in the local video place this season and all winners.

Michael Hayward
La Haine

Mathieu Kassovitz was just twenty-eight years old when he made La Haine (Criterion dvd), a 1995 film released in black and white and set in les banlieues, the racially volatile suburbs that surround Paris like an explosive vest.

Patty Osborne
Knit Lit

Sheila was reading Knit Lit, an anthology of stories about knitting edited by Linda Roghaar and Molly Wolf (Three Rivers Press) and some of them were making her laugh out loud, especially the one about an oversized synthetic orange sweater that acqui

Geist Staff
Kitchen

Grove Press has just brought out an English translation of Kitchen, by Banana Yoshimoto, an unclassifiable, magnificent little book that has won two literary awards and has had fifty-seven—yes, fifty-seven—printings in four years. As the dust jacket

Peggy Thompson
Kipper's Game

P.D. James meets Philip K. Dick in Barbara Ehrenreich's first novel, Kipper's Game, a complex mystery story set in an all-too-believable world of strange new diseases, genetic mutations and virtual reality.

Kris Rothstein
King of the Lost & Found

Raymond J. Dunne, the sixteen-year-old hero of John Lekich’s teen novel, King of the Lost & Found (Raincoast), is an outsider.

Michael Hayward
Kate and Anna McGarrigle: Songs and Stories

What better song for summer’s soundtrack than Kate and Anna’s “Swimming Song”? I added it to my iPod rotation while reading Kate and Anna McGarrigle: Songs and Stories (Penumbra), too much of which consists of transcribed newspaper reviews of albums

Eve Corbel
King

The first volume of King, a "comic book" biography of Martin Luther King (Fantagraphic Books), will not be misinterpreted or appropriated by neo-Nazis. Yet its power is delivered with grace and subtlety.

Stephen Osborne
Killshot

In the local secondhand a few weeks ago, a copy of Killshot by Elmore Leonard, and this sentence on the first page: It was time to get away from here, leave Toronto and the Waverly Hotel for good and he wouldn't drink so much and be sick in the morni

Stephen Osborne
Karl Marx

The new Karl Marx biography by Francis Wheen (4th Estate) fails to illuminate a man who was loved by his family and revered by his followers; instead we are given a hazy sketch of a petulant, perhaps incompetent man of few skills and little disciplin

J.R. Patterson
Fact
True at First Flight

The unmistakable buzz of an approaching aircraft is enough to send my family onto the lawn

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"

CONNIE KUHNS
Marriage on the Download

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

Danielle Hubbard
The muse hunt

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

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?

Grant Buday
Reduce, Reuse, Reincarnate

Destroying books for the greater good.

Stephen Osborne
Waiting for Language

Remembering Norbert Ruebsaat.

Natasha Greenblatt
Scavenger Hunt for Losers

Losers: you have a lifetime to hunt.

Finn Wylie
Shelter in Place

"I never went looking for them."

Jill Boettger
Do You Remotely Care?

Fill the room with a flock of moths.

Tara McGuire
Short Term

Tell me again how long the trip is?

Stephen Smith
The Acknowledgements

Any resemblances to persons living or dead are purely vindictive.

Minelle Mahtani
Fact
Looking for a Place to Happen

What does it mean to love a band? A friend? A nation?

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.

David L. Chapman
Postcolonial Bodies

Mastery of the self

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.

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

Stephen Osborne
The Arcades Project

The Arcades Project by Walter Benjamin (Belknap/ Harvard) is one of the greatest books of the twentieth century, and it will make you want to assemble one yourself for your own life and time. This is a monumental work of excavation in history, philos

Stephen Osborne
The Areas of My Expertise

The areas of John Hodgman’s expertise do not extend to the Northwest Passage in his new book The Areas of My Expertise (Dutton). The deficiency is more than made up for, in a chapter called “Our 51 United States,” by an entry on the drifting state of

Patty Osborne
The Apprentice's Masterpiece

Everything I know about the Spanish Inquisition I learned from a young adult novel by Melanie Little that is written in free verse.

Helen Godolphin
The Assassin’s Cloak: An Anthology of the World’s Greatest Diarists

The Assassin’s Cloak: An Anthology of the World’s Greatest Diarists, edited by Irene and Alan Taylor (Canongate Books), makes excellent bedtime reading for those who have difficulty limiting themselves to just a few pages a night. For each day of the

Geist Staff
The Anatomy of Arcadia

The Anatomy of Arcadia by David Solway (Véhicule Press) pretends to be an anti-travel book, written against the grain of the "usual" travel book, but is really an anti-travel-guide-book filled with hard words that seem to be inserted into the text fo

Sewid-Smith Daisy
The Believer

The day began with a comment from a colleague that working with a certain buggy database program made him feel like Sisyphus, and it ended with three pieces of reading. An hour or so after the colleague’s remark, I was trading favourite Onion headlin

RICHARD VAN CAMP
The Age of Missing Information

If you read one book on the Information Age, make sure it's Bill McKibben's The Age of Missing Information (Penguin/Plume), which is a real page-turner of a long essay about What's Wrong with the Idea of Information. The device is neat: McKibben watc

Geist Staff
The Afterlife of George Cartwright

John Steffler, in The Afterlife of George Cartwright (McClelland & Stewart) goes after the big stuff in a richly imagined account of an eighteenth-century Englishman who sets up in business in Labrador. There is some terrific writing and real imagini

Lorna Crozier
That Summer in Paris

In 1929 Morley Callaghan and his wife Loretta went to Paris, where they hung out in cafés with writers and artists and rubberneckers and lounge lizards, spent a couple of hilarious evenings with James Joyce and his wife Nora Barnacle, and eventually

Patty Osborne
The Amateur, An Independent Life of Letters

Halfway through The Amateur, An Independent Life of Letters by Wendy Lesser (Pantheon Books), I stopped reading long enough to tell a few people that this was a great book of essays. Maybe I should have kept my mouth shut because from that point on I

Kevin Barefoot
The American definition of Canuck

In a recent Vancouver Sun, Don McGillivray had a note on what Americans think Canuck means to Canadians. He quotes the 1992 American Heritage Dictionary, which defines Canuck as: "offensive slang used as a disparaging term for a Canadian, especially

Michał Kozłowski
That or Which, and Why

Evan Jenkins collected and expanded material from his column in the Columbia Journalism Review to create That or Which, and Why (Routledge), a clear and succinct guide to English language, grammar and usage.

Patty Osborne
Tell No One Who You Are

For my niece in Ottawa, I chose Tell No One Who You Are by Walter Buchignani (Tundra Books). It is an account of three years in the life of a young Jewish girl in Belgium—three years during which she was hidden from the Nazis by non-Jews.

Daniel Francis
Terra Infirma: A Life Unbalanced

In 1988 Jean Mallinson, a West Vancouver poet and essayist, entered hospital for abdominal surgery. She came through the operation without mishap, and afterwards her doctor prescribed gentamicin, an antibiotic intended to stave off infection during r

GILLIAN JEROME
Tempting Providence

Frontier stories are known to be great cultural archives but boring reads. Not so with Theatre Newfoundland Labrador’s Tempting Providence, written by Robert Chafe, directed by Jillian Keiley and performed at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre in Jan

Stephen Osborne
Tango on the Main

The best pen-in-a-shirt-pocket photograph you will ever see is the author photo on the back cover of Joe Fiorito's new book, Tango on the Main (Nuage).

Patty Osborne
Tatsea

Tatsea and her husband Ikotsali, the main characters in Armin Wiebe’s book Tatsea, are searching for each other in the Canadian subarctic. Tatsea and Ikotsali are members of the Dogrib tribe who are separated when their village is raided by Cree from

Patty Osborne
Tarnished Icons

When I got home after buying Tarnished Icons by Stuart Kaminsky (Ballantine) for our family's favourite viola teacher, I realized that I had the same tide in my pile of unread library books. So for a few days I had the luxury of never having to go up

Kris Rothstein
Tales of Innocence and Experience

Tales of Innocence and Experience (Bloomsbury) is Eva Figes’s lyrical exploration of the bond between grandmother and granddaughter. In it she takes on the monumental subject of the loss and pain that accompany the acquisition of knowledge.

Claire Pfeiffer
Taking Back the Rack

Yes, fiction can be quite enjoyable, but let’s admit it: nothing can match the experience of curling up with a long, detailed report on how Canadian magazines are selling on newsstands, such as Taking Back the Rack: Amid New Challenges, Canadian Maga

Stephen Osborne
Take This Waltz: A Celebration of Leonard Cohen

Book best read while standing in the aisle: the Leonard Cohen Must Be Getting Old By Now Memorial Volume. Title: Take This Waltz: A Celebration of Leonard Cohen (Muses Company).

Stephen Osborne
Surviving Saskatoon: Milgaard and Me

The best $4.50 that you can spend this year will be on a copy of David Colliers's Surviving Saskatoon, a comic book account of the wrongful persecution and conviction of David Milgaard in Saskatoon in 1971 (when Milgaard was declared innocent in 1999

Lara Jenny
Super Geek Girl

I never expected to find two new zines about geeky gay girls. Sarah Dermer, author of the Toronto zine True Confessions of a Big Geek, should really get together with Joy, who publishes Super Geek Girl in Portland.

Patty Osborne
Sunnybrook: A True Story with Lies

The inviting cover and unique layout of Sunnybrook: A True Story with Lies by Persimmon Blackbridge drew me in and kept me there. The story starts when Diane gets a job at the Sunnybrook Institution for the Mentally Handicapped by saying she had work

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.

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.

Veronica Gaylie
Old Timer Talkin’

Uncle Tom lies in St. Paul’s Emergency pacemaker jumping like a sockeye salmon while he teaches two nurses four verses of Danny Boy.

GORAN SIMIC
Old People and Snow

My beautiful old ones are disappearing slowly. They simply leave, without rules, without a farewell.

ANTONINE MAILLET
Not Really French

So how can we be Québécois if we don’t live in Québec? Well, for the love of all that’s holy, where the hell do we live, then?

No One Explains Things To Dogs

No one explains things to dogs. The voice that’s missing has left its aroma everywhere,along with the faint stale smells of those who used to be here:

Rhonda Waterfall
Night Kitchen

The phone rings at 11:30 at night and as soon as you hear your father’s voice you know something bad has happened.

CARY FAGAN
My Father's Picasso

"You know what I think it's worth?" Goldie said. "Fifteen bucks for the frame."

CARY FAGAN
My Father's Picasso

"You know what I think it's worth?" Goldie said. "Fifteen bucks for the frame."

ERIC DUPONT
Trouble at the Henhouse

"I now know that every omelette, every angel cake, every soufflé, and every bucket of Colonel Sanders’ fried chicken brings us closer to a better, more intelligent world, where cruelty and pettiness do not exist."

MARY MEIGS
Tripwire

They felt comfortable in their resemblances, too comfortable to note that the resemblances contained differences like tripwires cunningly laid and hidden.

CRAIG SAVEL
Traversing Leonard

"He had white hair at every angle, a paunch, and he didn’t bathe much. Colleagues joked about the Leonard Condensate, one whiff of which reduced matter into muck."

KATIE DAUBS
To Be Read by My Children in the Event of My Demise

In Katie Daubs' short fiction, a father writes a deathbed letter to his children, explaining the surprising way he really met their mother.

TROY JOLLIMORE
Tom Thomson in Transit

His wallet’s stuffed with currency from allmanner of countries not in business now;his camera aches for discontinued film.

The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara & Lenin Play Chess
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.

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.

Stephen Smith
Sir John's Lost Diaries

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

ANGELA MAIREAD COID
Show Business

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

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

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.