fact

All
dispatches
essays
reviews
columns
Barry Kirsh
The Unconsoled

Mr. Ryder, the storyteller in Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled (Knopf), speaks so sincerely, humbly and clearly in the first person that we hear his voice inside ourselves; this inspires trust.

Kris Rothstein
The Virgin Spy

Kris Rothstein reviews The Virgin Spy by Krista Bridges (Douglas & McIntyre).

Patty Osborne
The Voice Imitator

A thin little book, The Voice Imitator (University of Chicago Press) by Thomas Bernhard, translated by Kenneth J. Northcott, made me laugh out loud in the dark as I sat propped up in bed, my reading light clipped to the back cover, while everyone els

Geist Staff
The Way of a Boy

The Way of a Boy is Ernest Hillen's story about his life in a Japanese prison camp in Java during World War Two. Hillen was only a boy at the time—he spent ages seven to eleven in the camp—and instead of looking back from the vantage point of adultho

Daniel Francis
The Very Richness of That Past: Canada Through the Eyes of Foreign Writers

Greg Gatenby must be stopped. A couple of years ago he edited a collection of remarks about Canada by various foreign writers. Now he has followed up with a second thick collection, The Very Richness of That Past: Canada Through the Eyes of Foreign W

Michał Kozłowski
The Wigmaker

The Wigmaker, C.E. Coughlan’s new book (Smart Cookie Publishing, webspotter.com/smartcookie), is a collection of fourteen short stories, some of which have previously appeared in Geist and other literary magazines.

Trevor Wilson
The Wide World Dreaming

I’ve read The Wide World Dreaming by JoAnne Soper-Cook (Breakwater) twice now and I’m still surprised by how good it is. It’s written by a woman from St. John’s, Newfoundland, and published by a company there that needs to learn more about good layou

Blaine Kyllo
The Weight of Water

I really want to love Kathryn Bigelow films. She’s a talented director and has never failed to take on challenging projects. She’s a talented director and has never failed to take on challenging projects. My problem with her directing is that she is

Lily Gontard
The Walking Boy

Sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll seem a little boring when compared to Lydia Kwa’s concoction of sex, bisexuality, homosexuality, tortured spirits, innocence, desire, betrayal, greed and love in her second novel, The Walking Boy (Key Porter). Kwa deftly

Patty Osborne
The Woman in the Yard

I was eager to read Stephen Miller’s The Woman in the Yard (Picador) because I had enjoyed Miller’s previous mystery novel, Wastefall. His publisher did not respond to my requests for a review copy, but fortunately Miller is a neighbour of mine and w

Patty Osborne
The Woman Who Loved Airports

The first thing that strikes you about The Woman Who Loved Airports (Press Gang) is what a good title it is; happily, the second thing is what a good book it is. The short stories by Marusya Bociurkiw, are mostly about lesbians, although some are abo

Mandelbrot
The World of William Notman

Few of us have heard of William Notman, the suggestively named inventor of Canadian photography, and possibly its greatest practitioner. Notman left England precipitately in 1856, to avoid imprisonment for fraud, and shipped out to Montreal.

Daniel Francis
The Yuquot Whalers' Shrine

...The Yuquot Whalers' Shrine (Douglas & Mclntyre/University of Washington Press), the first book-length study of the site. Along with a history of the shrine, Jonaitis presents a precise description of its contents, many photographs and several Firs

Patty Osborne
The Year of Magical Thinking

On an evening in December 2003, Joan Didion's husband John sat down at the dinner table and talked to her while she tossed the salad. One minute he was talking and the next he wasn't, because he was slumped over in his chair, dead. Nine months later

Lily Gontard
There Is a Season

There Is a Season (McClelland & Stewart), Patrick Lane’s meditative account of the year after he returned from rehab and the solace he found in his garden, is an honest telling of the past and present life of a husband, teacher, alcoholic, drug addic

Norbert Ruebsaat
Then We Take Berlin

Stan Persky has been hailed as a great prose stylist. He has also been hailed as a possible pervert (the word wasn't used, but that was the implication) for his interest in young boys. Young men, rather. Male prostitutes. Both statements are true. Th

Patty Osborne
The Wrong Boy

In The Wrong Boy, by Willy Russell (Doubleday), seventeen-year-old Raymond Marks hitchhikes from his hometown of Manchester to Grimsby, where his Uncle Bastard Jason has found him a job on a building site. Raymond considers Grimsby to be a pox hole b

Kris Rothstein
This Divided State

It is strange that a documentary [This Divided State] about a public speech at a small college in Utah should be a near-perfect film about culture, politics and the heights of absurdity. In 2004 the student government of Utah Valley State College inv

Geist Staff
Thinking Out Loud: On the Personal, the Political, the Public and the Private

Thinking Out Loud: On the Personal, the Political, the Public and the Private (Random House) is a collection of Anna Quindlen's syndicated newspaper columns. By definition the book shouldn't work: journalism, especially this kind, is necessarily ephe

Helen Godolphin
This Place Called Absence

This Place Called Absence by Lydia Kwa (Turnstone) is another debut novel. It traces the lives of two ah ku (prostitutes) living in turn-of-the-century Singapore and intertwines their stories with that of Wu Lan, a Vancouver psychologist struggling t

Jill Boettger
Thinking and Singing: Poetry and the Practice of Philosophy

Thinking and Singing: Poetry and the Practice of Philosophy is Lilburn’s most recent project, a collaboration with Jan Zwicky, Don McKay, Dennis Lee and Robert Bringhurst. Together they think and sing about eros, dreaming, naming, rhythm and ruminati

Rose Burkoff
Thom Pain (based on nothing)

Early in 2006 the Western Theatre Conspiracy in Vancouver mounted a daunting one-man show, Will Eno’s new play Thom Pain (based on nothing), at Performance Works on Granville Island. Scott Bellis starred as Thom, a rumpled neurotic loser who spills h

Patty Osborne
Three Day Road

Just before the fiftieth anniversary of VE Day, I read Three Day Road (which takes place during World War I) by Joseph Boyden (Viking Canada), so for once I was not put off by the CBC’s obsessive coverage of the occasion. Three Day Road is about snip

Daniel Francis
Thunderstruck

Writer, Erik Larson, seems to have taken out a patent on a new kind of true crime story. In his recent book, Thunderstruck (Random House), Larson juxtaposes the development of wireless telegraphy by Guglielmo Marconi with the case of Dr. Hawley Cripp

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.

Michael Hayward
Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread

Michael Hayward on "The Baker's Wife" by Marcel Pagnol.

Michael Hayward
Glorious lists

Michael Hayward on "The Glorious Mountains of Vancouver’s North Shore: A Peakbagger’s Guide."

Michael Hayward
Happy Talk

Michael Hayward on "Strange Planet" by Nathan W. Pyle.

Anson Ching
Why Turn to Myths

Anson Ching on "An Orchestra of Minorities."

Anson Ching
The Plot Thickens in the Weimar Republic

Anson Ching on "Babylon Berlin."

Michael Hayward
Nothing Doing

Michael Hayward on "How To Do Nothing."

Daniel Francis
Pandemic Non-Reading

Dan Francis asks you not to read "Midnight in Chernobyl."

Kathleen Murdock
Fighting Fires

Kathleen Murdock on the shiny TV adaptation of "Little Fires Everywhere".

Claudia Casper
Let’s Go For A Walk

Claudia Casper on the way "Lost Lagoon" allows us to experience time rather than get through it.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Linguistics Revolution

Kelsea O'Connor on "Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language" by the Canadian linguist Gretchen McCulloch.

Michael Hayward
Contagion During a Pandemic

Michael Hayward on his surreal experience of watching "Contagion" during lockdown.

Kate Helmore
Escaping Orthodoxy

Kate Helmore on the stark contrast between skinny jeans and ankle-length skirts in the Netflix series "Unorthodox".

Michael Hayward
Baudelaire Through the Looking Glass

Michael Hayward on "The Baudelaire Fractal" by Lisa Robertson.

Shyla Seller
Reel Love

Shyla Seller on "The Forbidden Reel"—a documentary on the legacy and preservation of Afghan Films.

roni-simunovic
Flight of Fancy

Roni Simunovic takes an Air Canada rouge flight from Halifax to Calgary and ridicules the flight attendants' absurd new uniforms.

Michael Hayward
Into the Heart of the Landscape

Michael Hayward on the recursive nature of reading and writing inspiration.

Barry Kirsh
Soulmates: Honoring the Mysteries of Love and Relationships

Barry Kirsch on the juices and nutriments of imagination.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Broken Hearted

Kelsea O'Connor on two comic-obsessed teens in rural Nova Scotia.

JILL MANDRAKE
Unity, Order and Equilibrium

Jill Mandrake on the beauty of crafted visual poetry.

Anson Ching
Zen in Ecotopia

Anson Ching on letting the facts form your privilege.

Patty Osborne
A Korean Friend

Patty Osborne on a North Korean novel from North Korea.

Anson Ching
The City in an Apartment

Anson Ching on a time and place, and the people who live there.

Kris Rothstein
Pencil Pushers

Kris Rothstein on the current state of employment in Bullshit Jobs and Temp.

RICHARD VAN CAMP
Look Out, Not In

Mary Schendlinger on "How the Girl Guides Won the War" by Janie Hampton.

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