Review of "Lost Feast: Culinary Extinction and the Future of Food" by Lenore Newman.
Michael Hayward
A Longing to Be Far Away
Review of "Fernweh" by Teju Cole.
Robyn Ludwig
Black Velvet, If You Please
The secret is in the velvet.
Shyla Seller
Postal Lit
Review of "Long Live the Post Horn!" by Vigdis Hjorth.
SYLVIA TRAN
Poutine Pilgrimage
Review of poutine at Robson Fries in Tokyo.
Stephen Henighan
Reheated Races
Dividing and conquering local populations confines them to manageable administrative units.
JILL MANDRAKE
Older and Better
Review of "The Old Man in the Mirror Isn’t Me" by Ray Robertson.
Steven Heighton
Everything Turns Away
Going unnoticed must be the root sorrow for the broken.
Stephen Osborne
The Becoming of Vancouver
Review of "Becoming Vancouver: A History" by Daniel Francis.
Sara Cassidy
Flying the Coop
You can’t break eggs without making an omelette.
Michael Hayward
Known to be Strange
Known and Strange Things (Random House) is a collection of Teju Cole’s essays and other short pieces, many of which have previously appeared in The New Yorker and elsewhere online.
Michael Hayward
A Blindness at the Centre of Seeing
Cole’s most recent book, Blind Spot (Random House), a generous hardcover printed on glossy stock, presents Cole’s photographs on recto pages, with brief, allusive essays on the facing verso page.
Alberto Manguel
Achilles and the Lusitan Tortoise
“Have patience” and “Tomorrow” are two inseparable locutions in the Portuguese tongue.
Véronique Darwin
New Normal Board Games
Use the board games you unearthed during isolation to reinventclassic games for our times.
Stephen Osborne
Hospitals of the Mind
A few years ago, someone left a pocket-sized photo album on my desk with an unsigned note stuck on the cover that said I “might know what to do with it.” Inside, glued one to a page, are twenty-four photographs of Essondale, the mental hospital in N
Tiffany Hsieh
Church on Queen
Here they are our people.
Patty Osborne
B for Beatrice
Patty Osborne on wacky kid tales and the joy of animated storytelling.
Michael Hayward
Roads to Nowhere
Michael Hayward on dharma trails, lawless landscapes and Hemingway's corner table.
SYLVIA TRAN
Manifesto
Sylvia Tran on cheesy haunted houses, destiny's child and capitalism.
Anson Ching
In Search of Time and Place
Anson Ching on desecration ratcheted to new levels.
Randy Fred
Resistance and Renewal
After hearing survivors’ stories, nothing can ever surprise me.
Celia Haig-Brown
Resistance and Relentlessness
The long road to decency and justice.
Shyla Seller
Wanting
Shyla Seller on the brilliance of the Vancouver poet Gladys Maria Hindmarch.
JILL MANDRAKE
Dirty Dirty Gets Down to the Nitty Gritty
Jill Mandrake on Mississippi Live & the Dirty Dirty, a Southern rock band in East Vancouver.
The facts (and fictions) surrounding the tale of Quebec's most famous murderess, La Corriveau.
Joe Bongiorno
The Shī Fu
Joe Bongiorno goes in search of enlightenment and finds the Shī Fu.
Carmen Tiampo
What Survives
My great-grandfather exists now only in memory, unacknowledged even by his tombstone
KATHRYN MOCKLER
I Won’t Clean the Tub
He said he just wanted towels. There was no reason to be afraid.
Carolyne Montgomery
In the Pines
It is a Sunday in August. We drive from London, Ontario, to the Pinery Provincial Park in a new green 1964 Mercury Comet.
BILLEH NICKERSON
V4G 1N4
A poem about a postal code.
John Patterson
Devil’s Night
On Halloween in 1966, John Patterson's father burned down the Jones's house to give the neighbourhood kids a thrill.
GALE SMALLWOOD-JONES
Working Life for a Girl in the 1960s
We got paid once a week in cash - it made you feel special the first few times.
M.A.C. Farrant
Stories from a West Coast Town
Very quietly, very slowly, happiness can take over a person's life
Jennesia Pedri
T-Bay Notes
Leaving Thunder Bay isn't one of the things that gets easier with practice
Jocelyn Kuang
Candy Cap Magic
Forgotten cutlery, missing mushrooms and lingering doubt: a recipe for bewilderment.
Erin Soros
Carbon
"A folder full of awards proves to the psychiatrist I wasn't always this way."
Jocelyn Kuang
27,000 Cups of Tea
Battenbergs and Victoria sponge at Buckingham Palace.
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
Treaties
A young Indigenous woman deals with hippy-artist-pothead boyfriends and car troubles.
Randy Fred
Borderless
Randy Fred reports on migrant workers, then and now.
Michał Kozłowski
Corpse Reviver
The restaurant had white concrete walls and chrome lights dangling from the ceiling that gave the place an operating theatre vibe.
Christine Novosel
Hived Off
Christine Novosel reports from Glasgow on art school, apiary management, Brexit and being a junkyard dog.
Robert Everett-Green
Wholesome Reading
Evelyn Everett-Green wrote novels for young people, of a morally improving nature. Her books were also meant to entertain, with tales of wholesome adventure and romance, often set in heroic times or picturesque locations.
Barbara Zatyko
Stumped
Despite attempts to reattach my pinkie, I woke up with nine fingers.
Julie Vandervoort
Sewing Cabinet: Short Film
A short film featuring "Sewing Cabinet" by Julie Vandervoort, originally published in Geist 74.
David Koulack
A Different Sort of Synagogue
David Koulack spends Yom Kippur in a packed gymnasium in Paris among a beehive of activity and a cacophony of sound.
Eve Corbel
Some Lesser-Known Emoji
Eve Corbel draws emoji you can use when Mercury is in retrograde, when you've eaten too much hot sauce and during other specific times of need.
Angela Wheelock
Something Like Armenian
Angela Wheelock meets a stranger at a bus stop and discusses Rumi, Hafiz and other great poets who were terrible leaders.
EVELYN LAU
24 Sussex
Picture Harper lounging among pastel cushions, his stiff grey hair tight as a helmet on his head.
M.A.C. Farrant
Selected Days
On Dorothy Parker Day we wear wool suits and little hats, smoke with cigarette holders and have a liver-coloured dachshund on a lead.
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.
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.
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.
Thad McIlroy
Trial by Water
Ebb and flow in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Paul DeLorme
Escapist
A Canadian soldier captured at Dieppe in 1942 tells what happened next.
JILL MANDRAKE
Unity, Order and Equilibrium
Jill Mandrake on the beauty of crafted visual poetry.
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?
Sewid-Smith Daisy
Three Stories About Moving
The worst time for your pet to run away is when you are moving, and my family moved a lot.
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.
George Fetherling
The Daily Apocalypse
The newspaper wars aren’t what they used to be.
Thad McIlroy
Hernia Heaven
Thad McIlroy spends the night in hospital to get a hernia—possibly on his left side, possibly on his right—repaired.
Ivan Coyote
Gender Failure
It didn’t feel like there was any possible way this could really be happening—nineteen years of binding my breasts, even more years trying not to hate them.
C. E. COUGHLAN
Three Days in Toronto
A trip across the country, with didgeridoo and Trudeau too.
Edith Iglauer
Perfect Bite
A warm spring night, a country club dance, a date with an attractive young man—and braces on my two front teeth.
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.
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.
Stephen Henighan
Taíno Tales
A package-deal paradise reputation curtails gringo knowledge of Dominican life.
Hàn Fúsēn
Little Trouble in Chinatown
Limits of the language.
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?
Joe Bongiorno
Piledrivin’ Patriots
On parle français icitte!
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.