For the sake of the large romantic gesture

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Hit everything dead on, even if it’s big

The names we learn in childhood smell the sweetest to us

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

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No Skylab buzz in East Germany.

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

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

Playing against the fastest chess player in the world.

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

That’s one for the rice bag!

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

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

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

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

Scrape every last bit of English out of your throat.

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

Remembering Norbert Ruebsaat.

Destroying books for the greater good.

Losers: you have a lifetime to hunt.

"I never went looking for them."

Tell me again how long the trip is?

Fill the room with a flock of moths.

Any resemblances to persons living or dead are purely vindictive.

The secret is in the velvet.

You can’t break eggs without making an omelette.

These stories and conversations took place in a Media and Communications Studies class at a Canadian college. Students come to the college from many countries, in the hope of enrolling eventually in a North American university.

A new anthology of reviews, interviews and commentary on Joni Mitchell's music reveals the star-making machinery.

I am sorry I caused you pain. But I thought it was okay.

The British called it the Great Game. The Russians called it Bolshoya Igra. The playing field was, and still is, Afghanistan.

Remembering her father's last days in a hospital in Wyoming, Connie Kuhns struggles with questions of mortality, memory and how to fulfill her father's dying wish.

Connie Kuhns' major profile of punk, politics and feminism in 1970s Canada: the Moral Lepers, the Dishrags and other revolutionary bands.

We don’t know why the budgie did it. He must have been unhappy. It can’t have been easy for him—pecking the bell, hanging about on the pole.

D.M. Fraser on the myth of cultural identity.

When you live in Saskatoon, you find yourself caring more about the details of grain farming then you did when you lived in Toronto or Windsor.

When Geist first approached me with the idea of speaking here, I made it known that of all the things I ever wanted to be when I grew up, being an after-dinner speaker was very low on the list.

It's human nature to jump to the wrong conclusion–and stick with it.

What is at the heart of this Edith Iglauer profile by Giller nominee Annabel Lyon? Hint: Ice Road Truckers.

Stephen Smith investigates the hockey lives of Barthes, Faulkner, Hemingway, which were marked by dismissal, befuddlement and scorn.

"Leading Men” is taken from a work-in-progress, Cinéma-Verité and the Collected Works of Ronald Reagan: A History of Propaganda in Motion Pictures.

Tom Thomson, godfather of the Group of Seven, drowned in an Ontario lake under mysterious circumstances, and ever since, his reputation has been the stuff of legend.

Compared to today's vile heros, Ned Kelly-the Australian outlaw who wrote the angry, articulate Jerilderie letter in 1879-seems as innocent as an ogre-slaughtering hero of fairy tales.

Femme girls get free Slurpees, but boyish ladies get free cavity searches at the border.

Hal Niedzviecki com­mem­o­rates his Jewish grand­fa­ther—a heavy drinker, a bad driver and a Polish refugee.

World War I, Canada’s “war of independence,” marked a turning point for a young colony wanting to prove itself as a self-reliant nation, but at what cost.

On the merry-go-round, you just shouted out a des­ti­na­tion and all the kids pushed until every­one agreed we’d arrived.

A flower child looks back, to the time between Motown and acid rock.

Derek Matthews has to be the ugliest boy in the class but I like him. I’ve liked every boy except Barry Pumphrey now. Barry Pumphrey likes me.

On a rainy night in October 1970, I crossed paths with Canada's most elusive poet.

Jill Mandrake is blown away by South of Elfrida by Holley Rubinsky, a journey into "the land of guilt and sorrow."

Roni Simunovic reviews Seconds by Brian Lee O'Malley, a graphic novel about getting second chances whether you deserve them or not.

"This is not a documentary; it is, however, an overpowering aesthetic and emotional experience, a true happening"—Stephen Osborne reviews Susan Sontag's film Promised Lands.

Jesmine Cham talks scaremongering, tinfoil hats and invasive technology in this review of Technocreep by Thomas P. Keenan.

Dylan Gyles reviews Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever? by Dave Eggers, the story of a disillusioned young man grappling with life, the universe and metaphysical truths.

Michael Hayward reviews Stefan Zweig's The World of Yesterday, a "a window into the vanished world of the Austro-Hungarian Empire."

Eve Corbel reviews Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence by Doris Pilkington, in which two girls are taken from their family by Western Australia government officials in 1931.

Michael Hayward reviews American Smoke by Iain Sinclair, an account of the author's road trip across North America in search of traces of the Beat Generation.

Roni Simunovic reviews Based on a True Story by Elizabeth Renzetti, the bizarrely fascinating tale of a washed-up soap star's struggles with unemployment and substance abuse.

Lily Gontard reviews Cheryl Strayed's Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, a memoir about crisis, redemption and hiking.

Roni Simunovic investigates Hatebeak, a death metal band with an African Grey parrot vocalist.

Kelsea O'Connor reviews Through the Woods by Emily Carroll, a collection of comics full of "ghosts, parasites, dead brothers, mysterious strangers and murderous husbands."

“I walked into the garage, and found a teenage boy in a tank top and shorts." Kathryn Mockler's poems eschew meaningless metaphors for direct language.

Michael Hayward reviews The Old Castle’s Secret by Carl Barks.

Michael Hayward reviews My Struggle Book 1: A Death in the Family by Karl Ove Knausgård.

Lily Gontard reviews Nocturne: On the Life and Death of My Brother by Helen Humphreys.

Patty Osborne reviews Working with Wool, A Coast Salish Legacy and the Cowichan Sweater by Sylvia Olsen.

Patty Osborne reviews Voices from the Sound: Chronicles of Clayoquot Sound and Tofino 1899–1929 by Margaret Horsfield, a peek into the lives of the early settlers of the West Coast of Vancouver Island.

Ronald Wright explores the modern history of our southern neighbour in What Is America? A Short History of the New World Order, reviewed by Jill Mandrake.

Robert Everett-Green reviews The Best of Times by Ludwig Bemelmans, author of the Madeline stories, consisting of illustrated articles that Bemelmans wrote about his travels through Europe.

Michael Hayward reviews Luke Barr's Provence, 1970, an investigation of the winter when six major culinary figures lived together in France.

Patty Osborne reviews Air Carnation, a story by Guadalupe Muro that combines the author's personal memoirs with poetry, songwriting and fiction.

Jennesia Pedri reviews Crossings by Betty Lambert.

"Plain, non-pretentious, utterly mundane: It’snot clear what else an inaugural poem can be." Stephen Osborne reviews Elizabeth Alexander’s poem for Barack Obama’s inauguration.

Alberto Manguel's column from Geist 93 about how the most important Turkish novelist of modern times took over fifty years to reach English-speaking audiences.

"Canadians have long been convinced that we do not know much, or care much, about our own history, but a new study suggests that this truism is not true."

A look back at World War I as the first great twentieth-century pollution of language.

An appreciation of Dante's "Commedia."

Despite hardships and dangerous slums, Nicaragua maintains a sense of hope that draws back to the democratic days of the Sandinistas.

The canoe as a fetish object, a misreading of Canadian history and a symbol of colonial oppression.

Ruskin's readers have the power to know that there is indeed room for Alice at the Mad Hatter's table.

In order to discharge ourselves of certain problems, why not simply erase from our maps the sites of such nuisance?

What does it mean to "be" yourself? The face reflected in the mirror is unrecognizable.

In the farmer’s market, a quintessentially Canadian setting, much of Canada is not visible.

In this essay, Daniel Francis discusses how Gerda Munsinger—a woman with ties to the criminal underworld—shaped Canadian politics in the 1960s.

Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner is a film about community and the north.

Reflections on John Updike's death.

The Geist map has a venerable ancestor that goes back four centuries and halfway around the world.

Slot machines sing their astral music. The tape recorder turns off. “Do you talk to friends about sex?” he asks.

There may be more to reality TV than meets the eye.

I'm always looking for the moment in which a character must stop to eat because, for me, the very mention of food humanizes a story.

During the 1980s the literary critic Edward Said organized occasional research seminars at Columbia University in New York.

The books we love become our cartography.

One thing Canadians have learned from our armed incursion into Afghanistan is that we do not have a vocabulary for discussing war or warlike events.

The atrocities were carried out in the name of some version of “civilization” that the Queen represented.

There are imaginary cities for scientists, vampires, lechers and even bad students—but what about writers?

Is it the icons of Canadian pop culture—hockey fights, Tim Hortons coffee, Don Cherry’s haberdashery, Rick Mercer’s rants—that reveal the deepest truths about us?

The Penthouse, the notorious Vancouver night club, shares a history with several of the city's missing women cases.