Anson Ching on Mo Yan's ability to tell stories as if they were written memories.
Michael Hayward
Locked Away
Michael Hayward on I Will Never See the World Again by Ahmet Altan
Michał Kozłowski
Familiar, But Better
Michał Kozłowski on the ineffable Beverly Glenn-Copeland.
Jesmine Cham
One for the Books
Jesmine Cham on the unknown story of two women who race around the world in eighty days.
Michael Hayward
One Book
Michael Hayward on one book you should read this year.
Michael Hayward
Nova Scotian Noir
Michael Hayward on the perfect setup for a classic “film noir.”
RICHARD VAN CAMP
Suffer the Children
Immigration questions 9 and 10: How do you like where you’re living now? Are you happy here?
Patty Osborne
Shtisel
Patty Osborne on Shtisel—an Israeli TV series about an ultra-religious Jewish family in Jerusalem.
KELSEA O'CONNOR
A Hockey Romance
Kelsea O'Connor on the self-published webcomic by Ngozi Ukazu.
Kristen den Hartog
The Two Lots
Theft, death and don't-mess-with-me expressions—unlocking the family portrait.
Michael Hayward
An Atlas of Noir
Michael Hayward on an anthology of noir fiction set in neighbourhoods around Vancouver.
Kris Rothstein
You've Been Warned
Kris Rothstein on a no-nonsense Irish heroine.
KELSEA O'CONNOR
Castles, Countesses, and Cat Women
Kelsea O'Connor on queer lovers, gothic horror and fairy tale themes.
RICHARD VAN CAMP
A Matter of DNA
Mary Schendlinger on Fay Weldon's 48th or 53rd book, After the Peace.
MICHEL HUNEAULT
Memory of Winter
Only after the waters recede do marks of the disaster appear.
Michael Hayward
No One Knows
Unreliable narrator, post-modernist self-reference and contemporary literary references—Michael Hayward on the nature of the autobiography.
Alberto Manguel
Reach Out and Touch (Somebody's Hand)
There is no way to step back from the orgy of kisses without offending.
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.”
Daniel Francis
Acadia's Quiet Revolution
Revolutions need popular heroes, and unpopularvillains, and the Acadians of New Brunswick had both.
Stephen Henighan
Vanished Shore
To build a city on land flooded by the tides isn’t just a mistake—it’s utopic.
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.
Randy Fred
Religion or Culture?
Nuu-chah-nulth elder Randy Fred explores whether it is possible to introduce one culture to another without any hint of religious beliefs or practices.
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.
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.