The fish is a suspended phantom, its magenta skeleton an exquisite, vibrant exhibit of what lies beneath

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A wildland fighter witnesses an old burn's second act

Memories sneak up, tiptoe quiet as a cat. Boom like a slapshot

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

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This invertebrate does not go looking for prey

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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"

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

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

Scrape every last bit of English out of your throat.

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

Destroying books for the greater good.

Remembering Norbert Ruebsaat.

Losers: you have a lifetime to hunt.

"I never went looking for them."

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 returns to Warsaw to visit her grandmother, and to keep from losing her memories.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Norbert Ruesbaat's Christmas book was Stan Persky’s Autobiography of a Tattoo. He read it twice, and then went back and read many parts a third time.

Blaine Kyllo calls All Families are Psychotic by Douglas Coupland "a piece of sculpture: intricate, finely balanced, and threatening to tip should anyone get too close."

Jennesia Pedri answers: why would one want to reread a novel that devotes 211 of its 354 pages to the 227 days that followed a shipwreck?

Robert Everett-Green reviews David B.'s graphic memoir Epileptic, a recount of the long search by David B.’s parents for a cure for his older brother’s seizures.

Norbert Ruebsaat reviews George Bowering's Errata (1988).

Patty Osborne reviews Eating Apples, an addictive collection of personal essays that gives glimpses into the lives of women.

Helen Godolphin reviews Lynda Barry's Cruddy, a novel deep within its own whacked-out world.

Jill Mandrake reviews George Bowering's Caprice, "a poetic eulogy for a shrinking literary landscape."

Allison Lawlor reviews an author reading of Bread and Salt by Renee Rodin.

Joanne Arnott "writes with great effort, feeling her way toward expression and sense without giving her life away as if it were in the "miscellaneous" box at a garage sale." Review by Joelle Hann.

Vicki Jensen says Eden Robinson’s novel Blood Sports forces readers to confront exactly what we’d prefer to avoid—the raw world of junkies, crazies and twisted souls.

Susan Juby's teen novel Miss Smithers—the story of an eccentric but charming girl entering a beauty pageant in a small BC town—is reviewed by Kris Rothstein.

Jim Christy muses on 121 items accumulated over 40 years of travel in Sweet Assorted: 121 Takes From a Tin Box, reviewed by Michael Hayward.

Daniel Francis reviews the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Killer Angels by Michael Shaara, a minute-by-minute reimagining of the Battle of Gettysburg.

During a trip to Portland, Lara Jenny picks a few must-have zines and chapbooks from the city's huge collection of independent presses.

In The Lynching of Louie Sam, two teenage boys watched as another—an Aboriginal named Louie Sam—was hanged by a group of men who rode on horseback. Reviewed by Patty Osborne.

Rhonda Waterfall reviews The Pharmacist's Mate by Amy Fusselman, just under 100 pages of minimalist prose called "a brief miracle of a book."

Hal Niedzviecki says White Lung by Grant Buday is the comic novel that should have been given to delegates at the WTO in Seattle.

As a mother-to-be, Gillian Jerome cynically reviewed eight books on child care to glean what it means to be a mother in the twenty-first century.

Kelsea O'Connor reviews Let's Pretend This Never Happened by Jenny Lawson, a lighthearted look at the embarrassing moments in the author's life.

Joseph Boyden shows a darker side of First Nations life—darker, but not dark enough to stop one from reading it. Reviewed by Patty Osborne.

Holly Doyle reviews Colin Cotterill’s novel Thirty-three Teeth, featuring Dr. Siri Paiboun, the seventy-two-year-old coroner of Laos.

Melissa Edwards finds three references to Sisyphus in three different publications—all in the same day.

"Old New Yorker writers never die, they just keep being republished in shiny new editions." Michael Hayward reviews collections of New Yorker pieces.

Phrase books are tools of cultural globalization—but they are also among its casualties.

When building a nation, cultural riches can be lost.

Coming to harbour in a new world.

Science and the arts fulfil their functions to help us survive through the imagination.

Dividing and conquering local populations confines them to manageable administrative units.

In a world dominated by heroes, difference is not tolerated.

“Have patience” and “Tomorrow” are two inseparable locutions in the Portuguese tongue.

For a brief period the band CANO gave shape to the dream of a bilingual Canadian culture.

"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 on UNDRIP, reconciliation, and the anxiety felt by Indigenous people in Canada.

What we do when we absorb words from a screen—and we haven’t yet evolved a verb for it—is not reading.

Libraries are not only essential in educating the soul, but in forming the identity of a society.

Our society is formed on the assumption of a healthy immune system.

The woman who called herself Tatiana Aarons gave me an address that led to a vacant lot.

Dogged dedication grants a reader vicarious immortality.

What we can—and can’t—learn from the plague

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.

The newspaper wars aren’t what they used to be.

A package-deal paradise reputation curtails gringo knowledge of Dominican life.

Faith seems to shiver when confronted by art.

What can the Brothers Grimm teach us about the state of our economic system? Everything.

Must artists declare their moral integrity?

Without air travel, family networks might have dissolved long ago.

There’s something not quite right about the grid on which the game is played.