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"

"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.

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.

The first volume of King, a "comic book" biography of Martin Luther King (Fantagraphic Books), will not be misinterpreted or appropriated by neo-Nazis. Yet its power is delivered with grace and subtlety.

What better song for summer’s soundtrack than Kate and Anna’s “Swimming Song”? I added it to my iPod rotation while reading Kate and Anna McGarrigle: Songs and Stories (Penumbra), too much of which consists of transcribed newspaper reviews of albums

Raymond J. Dunne, the sixteen-year-old hero of John Lekich’s teen novel, King of the Lost & Found (Raincoast), is an outsider.

P.D. James meets Philip K. Dick in Barbara Ehrenreich's first novel, Kipper's Game, a complex mystery story set in an all-too-believable world of strange new diseases, genetic mutations and virtual reality.

Grove Press has just brought out an English translation of Kitchen, by Banana Yoshimoto, an unclassifiable, magnificent little book that has won two literary awards and has had fifty-seven—yes, fifty-seven—printings in four years. As the dust jacket

Sheila was reading Knit Lit, an anthology of stories about knitting edited by Linda Roghaar and Molly Wolf (Three Rivers Press) and some of them were making her laugh out loud, especially the one about an oversized synthetic orange sweater that acqui

Mathieu Kassovitz was just twenty-eight years old when he made La Haine (Criterion dvd), a 1995 film released in black and white and set in les banlieues, the racially volatile suburbs that surround Paris like an explosive vest.

Are the Québecois the only moviemakers in North America with a sense of humour? Latest evidence to hand would certainly suggest so: three movies in the local video place this season and all winners.

Remember those student days when, in preparation for your final exam, you’d optimistically sit through a movie version as a substitute for the book itself?

In one of the audio tracks on the dvd of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, co-director Terry Gilliam credits Robert Bresson’s 1974 film Lancelot of the Lake (New Yorker Films dvd) as an inadvertent inspiration for Grail.

The recent Krazy & Ignatz 1937–1938: Shifting Sands Dusts Its Cheeks in Powdered Beauty is one of the most agreeably bonkers tomes published in recent memory. Just about every strip tells the story of Ignatz Mouse’s compulsion to hurl bricks at the w

I bought Revenge and began my education in how to manipulate history and maintain your honour as a Victorian lady. McGoogan’s book is an in-depth account of a detail-oriented, uncompromising, highly motivated and intelligent woman.

There's nothing exotic about Larry's Party (Random House), by Carol Shields: it could have taken place in Windsor. In fact, I think I went to high school with Larry Weller, an all-around ordinary guy.

Laurence, by France Théoret (Mercury, translated by Gail Scott), is also about a young woman in Quebec, but in the 1930s a woman’s struggle to make her life her own was harder. Laurence comes from an impoverished farming family whose daughters have t

Shopping for books is one part of Christmas that I really enjoy, and this year I found all the books I needed by walking between four bookstores clustered near the centre of town. At Manhattan Books I picked up two bright green hardcover copies of Be

I picked up Ledoyt by Carol Emshwiller (Mercury House) because it looked a lot like Annie (Polestar), a book I reviewed in Geist No. 19-20.

Deception and some kind of love are the themes that thread through the journey that is Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name by Vendela Vida (HarperCollins). As one of the editors of the infamously cool magazine The Believer, Vida has a sharp pen a

Early in his memoir Let Me Finish (Harcourt), Roger Angell describes his mother Katherine White and his stepfather E. B. White as “a successful New Yorker couple—she a fiction editor; he a writer of casuals and poetry and the first-page Comment secti

When the movie director Jean Claude Lauzon died in a plane crash over northern Quebec, his death was noted in a two-sentence paragraph accompanied by a small photograph in the local newspaper. In the photograph he looks like the actor in his first fi

Child-rearing manuals cropped up with a vengeance in the latter half of the twentieth century after Dr. Benjamin Spock produced Baby and Child Care—the all-time best-selling book in American history, second only to the Bible, despite advice such as “

Life-25: Interviews with Prisoners Serving Life Sentences (New Star), by P.J. Murphy and Lloyd Johnsen, surprised me.

In Levels of Life, Julian Barnes writes about the grief experienced after losing his wife to cancer.

White was also a prolific correspondent, as the Letters of E. B. White: Revised Edition (HarperCollins) shows: over 700 pages, indexed and footnoted, updated from the first edition with letters from 1976 to 1985.

Lifter (by Crawford Kilian, Beach Holme) is a book about a boy who learns how to fly when he is in a state that is not quite awake, but not quite asleep. It is a really neat story in the way the author describes what it would be like to fly and you a

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.