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.

Out on the set, except for the fact that there is always someone to catch us if we stumble, or someone to set up folding chairs for us between scenes, we are beneficiaries of the semi that denies the passing of clock-time. There is nothing to remind

Our film is a semi-documentary. We are ourselves, up to a point; beyond this point is the "semi," a region with boundaries that become more or less imprecise, according to our view of them. In one sense, it is semi from beginning to end, for we would

Patty Osborne reviews a collection of journal entries, correspondence and other writings produced by Mary Meigs during the last years of her life.

Did that really happen? J. Jill Robinson initiates a midnight stand-off between the police and two drunk brothers in an RV Park in White Rock, B.C.

For four decades, Jay Powell and Vickie Jensen helped to revive forgotten languages for many Aboriginal groups along the coast of the Pacific Northwest. Read their story here.

The Bolshevists are coming! The Bolshevists are coming! Daniel Francis recounts Canada's close call with a revolution.

Stephen Henighan compares the chaotic sprawl of "Third World" societies to the degradation of Canada's political, social and physical landscape.

The poet John Glassco lived in disguise, masquerading as a member of the gentry while writing pornography and reinventing his past.

L.B. Foote fled Newfoundland to avoid life as a cod fisherman and became Winnipeg's best-known photographer, chronicling Boomtown's growth, energy and struggles.

Sarah Leavitt is more than just a clever cartoonist; she also paints pictures with her colourful prose.

The mother of the groom measures the distance between two weddings: twenty-six years, six thousand miles, and a donkey covered with flowers. It’s outtasight.

Last summer, during a visit to Vancouver, my nine-year-old son climbed the pediment of a cast-iron traffic-light standard and put his palm on the glowing hand that warns pedestrians to stay put. My mother pointed out afterwards that my photograph of the event contained its own French caption, in the word visible over his shoulder: main.

Dinner with James Reaney—poet, playwright, professor—who is mistaken by a pair of Irish ladies for “that decadent writer Mordecai Richler.”

A series of lucky events seemed to conspire to bring me to Stettler, Alberta, one day in June 1998. Jennifer, the woman who was in between being my roommate and my girlfriend, was at the Banff Centre and I was on my way there from Saskatoon, where we lived. She had left me fifty dollars for gas so I could pick her up after her workshop, and I had accepted, hoping that when the time came I wouldn’t need it and I could give it back. I did need it, of course. I had been waiting for a cheque to come from the Globe and Mail for one of a series of drawings I was doing for them, and when it was time to leave, the cheque still hadn’t arrived. So I set out from Saskatoon with just a tank of gas and the fifty dollars.

It started with a note I found tucked into an anthology of poems edited by Selden Rodman, a book I opened rarely, though there was a time when I was young I had read it so closely and so many times I had most of the poems memorized. The note lay in the spine of the book against a poem of Arthur Rimbaud's titled, I think, "The Twelve-Year-Old Poet." On it are four names printed out in my sure and youthful twenty-one-year-old hand: Baghdad, Koweit, Sakakah, Jaffa.

I answered the ad: SWM likes to dance. Called him up (said his name was Jay), suggested we meet at the local cafe Tuesday night, something different, a performance poet performing. Free coffee and cookies, the place rocking with middle-aged angst.

And then I remembered an important event. It happened at a funeral in St. Paul’s chapel for a twenty-four-year-old prostitute who had overdosed in her Gastown hotel room. The small chapel was half full, and very quiet. There were a couple of fresh flower arrangements in front of the cheap, closed coffin. Most of the congregation were other prostitutes dressed in their working clothes, and a few pimps. One woman apologized to Brother Tim for having nothing black to wear, except for lingerie and a leather miniskirt.

Once while living in Burma (now Myanmar), Goran Simic and his brother, whose father was the Serbian ambassador, were stopped by rebels on their way to the international school in Yangon. They were hauled out of their diplomatic Mercedes limousine and forced at gunpoint to witness the beheading, at the side of the road, of a uniformed Myanmar government official.

During my thirty years living on the waterfront of British Columbia, I have always had some sort of container in which to sit on the water. My first boat was a ten-foot dinghy that my late husband John Daly, a commercial salmon troller, equipped with a small electric motor to surprise me. He had the bizarre idea that I, a sometime canoeist from Ohio, could manoeuvre a boat on my own around our capacious Pacific coast harbour. The electric engine would be ideal for me, he thought. No rope to pull to start it up! No gasoline tank on board!

Mary Meigs and her friend Lise Weil, editor of Beyond Recall, met regularly to do freewriting together. For each exercise they chose a line or phrase from the work of a poet they both admired; then, inspired by that "prompt," both women wrote for five or ten minutes, recording whatever came to mind (and hand).

When I lived in Ottawa in the 1970s, I used to enjoy passing lazy afternoons at the National Gallery looking at the pictures. I remember how surprised I was when I first encountered the Group of Seven collection. These paintings were completely familiar—I’d seen them in schoolbooks and on calendars, posters, t-shirts, everywhere—yet at the same time they were completely unexpected.

A first-hand account of Greenpeace's first expedition to stop U.S. underwater nuclear testing on September 15, 1971.

In The Stowaway, a novel by Robert Hough (Vintage Canada), the stowaway is Romanian, the crew is Filipino, the officers are Taiwanese and the ship is the Maersk Dubai. When the real Maersk Dubai landed at Halifax Harbour in 1996, its officers were ar

The Tender Bar, the first book by J.R. Moehringer (Hyperion), a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, could be subtitled “The Secret Hearts of Dysfunctional Men.” In his memoir of growing up “fatherless” in Manhasset, Long Island, Moehringer recounts hi

Fifteen-year-old Tracey Berkowitz is on a bus, naked except for a shower curtain. How did she get there? Which pieces of her life story as a misfit are reality and which are fantasy? Director Bruce McDonald tackles these questions by fracturing the s

Every aspect of a book—the page dimensions, paper type, font, length of text line, space between text lines, margin sizes and so on—is the result of a designer’s decision. When these decisions are well made, then reading a book’s text is like reading

The Story of My Face by Kathy Page (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) is about pictures that we don’t want to see or are forbidden to see. The face of Natalie, the main character, was badly scarred in a childhood accident; as an adult she returns to the small t

The Story of Dunbar: Voices of a Vancouver Neighbourhood (Ronsdale Press), edited by Peggy Schofield, feels a bit like a family album.

The Three-Day Novel, which turns nineteen on Labour Day [1996], remains one of Canada's few contributions to the world of literary form. (Milton Acorn's jack-pine sonnet is the only other one I can think of at the moment.) Writing a novel in three da

Why don't we hear more about the books of Mary Meigs, who is one of the great prose writers of our time? On her last tour she appeared in Vancouver for a single reading in a bookstore and then she was gone, uninterviewed and unsung. Did this happen i

The Understanding by Jane Barker Wright (Porcupine’s Quill) offers one of the most convincing fictionalizations of seventies hippie culture I’ve ever read. The novel is the story of the bohemian Whitechapel clan; artsy Solly and Isobel and their broo

The Utne Reader served us coffee aficionados a treat this month, by devoting the November/December issue to a study of the enigmatic bean. Of the nine pieces included in the "Coffee Madness" section, Mark Schapiro's "Muddy Waters" is the most enlight

Kris Rothstein reviews The Waterproof Bible by Andy Kaufman (Random House).

Mr. Ryder, the storyteller in Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled (Knopf), speaks so sincerely, humbly and clearly in the first person that we hear his voice inside ourselves; this inspires trust.

Kris Rothstein reviews The Virgin Spy by Krista Bridges (Douglas & McIntyre).

A thin little book, The Voice Imitator (University of Chicago Press) by Thomas Bernhard, translated by Kenneth J. Northcott, made me laugh out loud in the dark as I sat propped up in bed, my reading light clipped to the back cover, while everyone els

The Way of a Boy is Ernest Hillen's story about his life in a Japanese prison camp in Java during World War Two. Hillen was only a boy at the time—he spent ages seven to eleven in the camp—and instead of looking back from the vantage point of adultho

Greg Gatenby must be stopped. A couple of years ago he edited a collection of remarks about Canada by various foreign writers. Now he has followed up with a second thick collection, The Very Richness of That Past: Canada Through the Eyes of Foreign W

The Wigmaker, C.E. Coughlan’s new book (Smart Cookie Publishing, webspotter.com/smartcookie), is a collection of fourteen short stories, some of which have previously appeared in Geist and other literary magazines.

I’ve read The Wide World Dreaming by JoAnne Soper-Cook (Breakwater) twice now and I’m still surprised by how good it is. It’s written by a woman from St. John’s, Newfoundland, and published by a company there that needs to learn more about good layou

I really want to love Kathryn Bigelow films. She’s a talented director and has never failed to take on challenging projects. She’s a talented director and has never failed to take on challenging projects. My problem with her directing is that she is

Sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll seem a little boring when compared to Lydia Kwa’s concoction of sex, bisexuality, homosexuality, tortured spirits, innocence, desire, betrayal, greed and love in her second novel, The Walking Boy (Key Porter). Kwa deftly

I was eager to read Stephen Miller’s The Woman in the Yard (Picador) because I had enjoyed Miller’s previous mystery novel, Wastefall. His publisher did not respond to my requests for a review copy, but fortunately Miller is a neighbour of mine and w

The first thing that strikes you about The Woman Who Loved Airports (Press Gang) is what a good title it is; happily, the second thing is what a good book it is. The short stories by Marusya Bociurkiw, are mostly about lesbians, although some are abo

Few of us have heard of William Notman, the suggestively named inventor of Canadian photography, and possibly its greatest practitioner. Notman left England precipitately in 1856, to avoid imprisonment for fraud, and shipped out to Montreal.

...The Yuquot Whalers' Shrine (Douglas & Mclntyre/University of Washington Press), the first book-length study of the site. Along with a history of the shrine, Jonaitis presents a precise description of its contents, many photographs and several Firs

After fol

Stephen Henighan exposes the errors, omissions and problems with the Conservative party's study guide for Canadian citizenship.

Alberto Manguel examines a modern-day book burning and asks: how is this still happening?

Do shared languages form the natural boundaries of any nation in the world?

A reflection on the complex and often inexplicable process of bibliographic categorizations.

Reflections on how a bar in Parc Extension, QC, influenced an eponymous poem about "unprogress, inertia, the failure to learn from mistakes."

Alberto Manguel remembers a golden era in Canadian writing, comments on our current cultural climate and proposes a brighter future.

I remembered past ordeals: a U.S. official who squeezed out my toothpaste tube on the train from Montreal to Philadelphia, another who hauled me off a bus for a lengthy interrogation.

"And what is the use of a book," thought Alice, "without pictures or conversation?" —Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Parables, cautionary tales, morality plays, allegories—the notion that we can study literary works as texts of ethics is as old as literature.

Bohemia is a good place to grow as a writer, but is it a good place to live one’s whole life?

He is one of the strangest crea

A misogynist, a racist and an academic walk into a bar...

For most artists, the learning of the craft never ceases, and no resulting work is fully achieved

For an English-speaking Canadian who has been exposed to French from an early age, Paris is the most disorienting city in Europe. It is grandiose, but it is mundane.

According to the numbers, Canada will never produce another Atwood or Findley.

No one knows quite how to account for the well-established shops in Vancouver, Toronto and other cities that deal exclusively in fountain pens and fine fountain-pen accessories.

Some years ago, Susan Crean amusingly suggested that nations might be defined or understood through their emblematic children’s books and according to whether the protagonist was male or female.

Reconsidering the faintly embarrassing Pierre Berton.

A bibliophile's worst nightmare: being stuck on a plane with a terrible book. A book mistaken for a work of serious history.

Stephen Henighan argues that audiences used to have different opinions on the news; now they cannot even agree on the terms of debate.

Alberto Manguel compares his life in the French countryside to that of Cain, whom God despised for being a settled crop farmer, and whom he punished by forcing him to wander.

When Frank Warren began collecting the secret thoughts of strangers at PostSecret.com, he inadvertently created a new genre.

When you find yourself laid up in a sterile hospital room, which books do you want to have with you?