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RAWI HAGE
Empty City

Ten thousand bombs had fallen and I was waiting for death to come and scoop its daily share from a bowl of limbs and blood. I walked down the street under the falling bombs. The streets were empty. I walked above humans hid

Enchantment & Other Demons
Kris Rothstein
Elixirs

Craft Distilling: Making Liquor Legally at Home by Victoria Redhed Miller is a no-nonsense how-to book, and a rational plea to lift laws that prevent small-batch not-for-profit distilling.

Elevator Will Not Fall

Ludwig Wittgenstein instructs you on how to comport yourself in a stuck elevator.

CHRIS CASUCCIO
Elephant

sat behind the trailers with julie eatingthe peanut butter sandwiches peter’swife made that morning by the park sink

Florence Grandview
Eleventh-Hour Spook Show

"You look like you've seen a ghost": a story about the death of a relationship and a trip to the Spook Show.

Ted Bishop
Edith and Frank

Ted Bishop visits Edith Iglauer and her husband Frank in their seaside home, where he is treated to a fast drive on a winding road, conversation on good books, and a lesson on what it's like to grow old gracefully.

Eve Corbel
Ebb and Flow

Eve Corbel reviews The Sea Lady by Margaret Drabble, a novel that takes place on land but is all about the sea.

Leah Rae
Edison and Leo

Gimli back my eighty minutes!

Patty Osborne
Eating Apples: Knowing Women's Lives

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

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Eaten to Extinction

Review of "Lost Feast: Culinary Extinction and the Future of Food" by Lenore Newman.

ANNMARIE MACKINNON
Einsteinium Ist Nicht Geil

AnnMarie MacKinnon reviews Einsteinium (Es), an element discovered by a non-Einstein Albert.

Alberto Manguel
Eldorado

Art museums and geographical exp

Patty Osborne
Eating My Words

I found more history—this time to do with food—in Eve Johnson’s Eating My Words (Whitecap), a collection of essays originally written for the Vancouver Sun. Not all of them are historical, but my favourite ones are, including the history of real food

Mary Leah de Zwart
Eaten by Dog, Run Over by Train

Wally, the orange tabby: Fell out of travel trailer going over Pavillion Mountain, may be living happily at farm on top of mountain.

KEGAN MCFADDEN
Easy

it’s easy: you pour a mug of beer & then a shot of bourbon. you light a match

Patty Osborne
Easy Day for a Lady

In May I picked up An Easy Day for a Lady by Gillian Linscott (St. Martin's Press), from the mystery shelves at the local library.

Patty Osborne
Earth and Ashes

Earth and Ashes by Atiq Rahimi, translated by Erdag M. Goknar (Harcourt) is a powerful story wrapped up in a perfect little hardcover book (4' x 7") that contains only 81 pages.

Jane Silcott
Ducks

At first no one notices when the dog rushes your daughter as if she’s some kind of game and your daughter runs as if it’s some kind of chase.

S.K. Grant
Earth's Mind

Roger Dunsmore is the author of Earth’s Mind, a collection of essays published last year by the University of New Mexico Press, and he is an old friend of mine. I met him thirty years ago in Europe when he had just finished reading Black Elk Speaks,

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Drool-worthy

Kelsea O'Connor on many aspects of food, from culinary extinctions to kombucha microbiomes.

Drunk, Armed With Guitar

"RCMP are responding to Canadian Tire for a report that a male is threatening staff with an axe he was trying to return" and other tweets from @ScanBC.

Drawn & Quarterly
Michael Hayward
Dream-Life of Cities

"If cities can be said to be alive, how many of them dream of growing up to become Paris?" Michael Hayward reviews How Paris Became Paris by Joan DeJean.

Trevor Battye
What Day It Is

Among the people who live outside the Dominion building in downtown Vancouver, across the street from the cenotaph at Victory Square, is a woman who might be in her late forties and who occasionally turns up in a wedding dress. I’ve never seen her speak to anyone. She simply walks up and holds out her empty hand toward you.

Gregory Betts
Trench Poetry

The last thing in the world I wanted was to be an exhibit, or worse.

Stephen Osborne
The Unremembered Man

Who today remembers the man who carried Einstein’s head in a box through the streets of Vancouver? We remember clearly the box (dark wood, varnished, the door on brass hinges: what about the latch?) with Einstein’s head in it, a plaster model (was it plastic, perhaps? modelling clay? plasticine?)

Stephen Osborne
The Sweetness of Life

Twenty-five years ago in Vancouver, an underground publishing house threw a party in a mansion in a wealthy neighbourhood of curving streets with no sidewalks, to celebrate a new book.

Patty Osborne
The Sound of Hockey
Danielle Hubbard
The muse hunt

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

Stephen Osborne
The Man Who Stole Christmas

On a dark day in January in Toronto, when the sky was much too close to the ground, I went to see the grave of Timothy Eaton with my friend Tom Walmsley.

Quade Hermann
The Gist of Everything

My mother stands at the top of the stairs, thin as a skeleton and reeking of booze. “Are you drunk?” I ask. “No,” she says. “Have you had anything to drink today?” “No,” she says. Lies, all lies. There are always more.

Tom Walmsley
The Eaton Effect

Sometime in the late seventies Osborne and I walked down Spadina from Bloor to Front street, listening to Shein talk about the China Effect.

Barbara Small
Synchronized Massage

Ayurveda massage will leave you feeling like the bones have been secretly extracted from your body.

Miriam Toews
Sweet Badass Dude

A nervous kid from Canada becomes the king of the basketball courts in Venice Beach.

Stephen Osborne
Strong Man

The Strongest Man in the World liked to set his folding lawn chair out on the asphalt next to his gold Cadillac and stretch out in the sun with dark glasses on his nose and a two-litre carton of milk in one hand.

Billie Savage Gates
Spot Fire

I am down in the cabin and Ross, who is eighty feet up in the fire tower, sees smoke. He tries to report it but his radio isn’t working and nobody can understand him. They phone him back on the cell: does he need the water bombers? He says no, it’s just a spot fire. In that moment a huge gust of wind blasts through the cabin, blows a towel off a rack, slaps it against the valve of the water cooler and turns on the water.

Jeremy Colangelo
i is another

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

George Fetherling
Indochine

Vientiane, the capital of Laos, is a fading one-time French colonial outpost on a spot where a bend in the Mekong River makes room for a large tear-shaped island directly opposite the centre-ville, which runs only far enough back from the riverbank to allow a few commercial streets. The new bridge to Thailand is a short distance way. Thai-style wats and other temples, minor and major, are everywhere.

David Albahari
In Jerusalem

I haven’t been in Jerusalem for sixteen years and the first thing my friend shows me is the wall that separates them from the Palestinians.

Stephen Osborne
Hiatus

During the hiatus, a man in a black suit appeared in the Geist Gallery in Toronto and identified himself as a builder of ornithopters, or perhaps he said he was a promoter of ornithopters (this was during the hiatus, when nothing was clear; in any event his field was ornithoptery). I couldn’t remember what an ornithopter was but I could see one in my mind: the question was, what did an ornithopter do? The ornithopter man was accompanied by a well-dressed woman who never stopped smiling.

David Albahari
Godzilla in Kosovo

Will independence bring Godzilla back into my dreams?

Jane Silcott
Gangly Man

I don’t take public transit very often, which is a failing—not just environmentally, but also personally, because sometimes that forced contact with the rest of the populated world can be profound. In Japan, many years ago, I was trapped in the small space between train cars by a crowd of schoolboys; my claustrophobia reached such a level that one leg began to judder up and down like the needle on a sewing machine, and the only thing that prevented me from climbing out over the tops of my fellow passengers’ heads was the gaze of a man about a foot away who conveyed calm to me by keeping his eyes trained on mine.

HAL NIEDZVIECKI
The Life and Death of Zadie Avrohom Krolik

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

Ola Szczecinska
Symbiosis in Warsaw

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

M.A.C. Farrant
Strange Birds

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.

Ivan Coyote
If I Was a Girl

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

D.M. FRASER
Surrounded by Ducks

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

Daniel Francis
Red Scare

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

David L. Chapman
Postcolonial Bodies

Mastery of the self

Patty Osborne
Beyond Recall

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

MARY MEIGS
Being in the Company of Strangers

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

M.A.C. Farrant
Attila the Bookseller

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.

Bill MacDonald
An Ounce of Civet

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

Sarah Leavitt
3 Girls

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

Daniel Francis
Double Life

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

Norbert Ruebsaat
Burma Media Event

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.

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.

CONNIE KUHNS
Life After Virginity

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

Robert Hunter
Launching Greenpeace

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

Patrick Lane
Natural History

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.

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

Edith Iglauer
Sitting on Water

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!

Bart Campbell
The Real Woman

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.

Stephen Henighan
Third World Canada

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

Robert Everett-Green
The Main

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.

CONNIE KUHNS
Strange Women

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

Michael Hayward
Artists Behaving Badly

Michael Hayward reviews the honest, outrageous and at times unflattering biographies of Lucian Freud and Rockwell Kent.

Michael Hayward
Fair Play

Fair Play, a brief novel by Tove Jansson, is available for the first time in an English translation by Thomas Teale. To quote from the original cover copy, Fair Play is about “two women who share a life of work, delight and consternation.”

Michael Hayward
Beyond the Horizon

In Beyond the Horizon (Doubleday), Colin Angus lays claim to “the first human-powered circumnavigation of the planet” and spends 374 pages documenting and defending this claim (there’s also a DVD).

Michael Hayward
The Dead

John Huston's final film, of the James Joyce short story from "Dubliners", was a worthy capstone to his career of nearly fifty years.

Michael Hayward
Seize the Fire: Heroism, Duty, and the Battle of Trafalgar

October 21, 2005, marked the 200th anniversary of the great naval battle of Trafalgar, an engagement in which Admiral Nelson and the British fleet ended Napoleon’s dream of invading England by crushing the French and Spanish fleets off the southwest

Michael Hayward
Saudade

Michael Hayward reviews Anik See’s Saudade, a collection of essays to plunge you deep into the meanings of travel and place.

Michael Hayward
Robinson Crusoe on Mars

The first time I saw Robinson Crusoe on Mars (Byron Haskin, Criterion DVD) was in the Cedar V Theatre, a Quonset-style, single-screen movie house on Lynn Valley Road in North Vancouver: 25 cents for a science-fiction double bill in 1965.

Michael Hayward
Rain Falls in Norway

Michael Hayward reviews Some Rain Must Fall, part of the six volume memoir by Karl Ove Knausgaard.

Michael Hayward
Beat Generation

Michael Hayward reviews Beat Generation by Jack Kerouac, a three-act play he wrote but never produced.

Michael Hayward
Behind Closed Doors

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

Michael Hayward
Back on the Fire

In an author photograph on the back cover of Back on the Fire (Shoemaker & Hoard) Gary Snyder is shown looking west into the distance (seen from the perspective of a Canadian reader looking south to the Sierra Nevada foothills, Snyder’s home for more

Michael Hayward
An Omelette and a Glass of Wine

Michael Hayward reviews An Omelette and a Glass of Wine by Elizabeth David (Grub Street).

Michael Hayward
And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks

A collaboration between two of America’s most important literary figures, written before anyone had heard the names Burroughs or Kerouac, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks is the most recent treasure mined from the Beat archives.

Michael Hayward
A Canterbury Tale

Criterion has just released a beautifully restored two-DVD edition of Powell and Pressburger’s A Canterbury Tale (1944), which tells the story of a British soldier, an American soldier and a “land girl,” who meet by chance in a small village not far from Canterbury.

Michael Hayward
A Blue Hand: The Beats in India

Deborah Baker uncovers archival letters, shedding new light on the expat Beats in India.

Michael Hayward
Empty Phantoms

Empty Phantoms (Thunder’s Mouth Press) is an exhaustive collection of “nearly all known printed, recorded, and filmed interviews” with Jack Kerouac, author of On the Road (1957).

Michael Hayward
1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die

Michael Hayward reviews 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die (Barron's).

Michael Hayward
Eat, Memory: Great Writers at the Table

Michael Hayward reviews Eat, Memory: Great Writers at the Table (Norton).

Michael Hayward
Ekphrastic Literature

Michael Hayward on plastic art and slow sonnets.

Michael Hayward
Edward Lear in Albania

Michael Hayward reviews Edward Lear in Albania, an account of the author's travels through the Balkans beginning in 1848.

Michael Hayward
Maps and Legends

If fans of what is commonly referred to as “genre fiction” ever try to storm the gates that protect capital L Literature from the marauding hordes, I predict that it will be Michael Chabon who leads the charge.

Michael Hayward
Locked Away

Michael Hayward on I Will Never See the World Again by Ahmet Altan

Michael Hayward
Literary Lives

Diana Athill never dreamed of writing—until one morning, suddenly she wrote. "Until that moment I had been hand-maiden, as editor, to other people’s writing, without ever dreaming of myself as a writer."

Michael Hayward
Living by the Book

A review of David Mason's memoir The Pope’s Bookbinder.

Alberto Manguel
Role Models and Readers

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

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."

Alberto Manguel
Reading the Commedia

An appreciation of Dante's "Commedia."

Alberto Manguel
Reach Out and Touch (Somebody's Hand)

There is no way to step back from the orgy of kisses without offending.

Rob Kovitz
Question Period

Rob Kovitz compiles the pressing questions of the day—"How are they gonna beat ISIS?" And, "On Twitter, who cares?"

Stephen Henighan
Becoming French

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.

Alberto Manguel
Art and Blasphemy

Faith seems to shiver when confronted by art.

Stephen Henighan
All in the Same CANO

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

Daniel Francis
Afghanistan

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.

Daniel Francis
African Gulag

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

Daniel Francis
Acts of Resistance

"Resistance to wars is as much a Canadian tradition as fighting them." Daniel Francis discusses alternative histories, anti-draft demonstrations and the divisive nature of war.

Alberto Manguel
A Novel for All Times

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.

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.

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
A Brief History of Tags

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

Alberto Manguel
Face in the Mirror

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

Annabel Lyon
Ethical Juices

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

Stephen Henighan
Ethnic Babies

Stephen Henighan discusses the crude first steps to finding a new way to talk about racial reality.

Daniel Francis
Come to the Cabaret

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

Stephen Henighan
Chariots of China

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
Caribbean Enigma

Unravelling the mysteries of Alejo Carpentier

Daniel Francis
Canada's Funnyman

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

Stephen Henighan
Campus Confidential

"In the public eye, universities have never recovered from the antics of Donald Sutherland as Professor Jennings in the 1978 film Animal House."

Alberto Manguel
Burning Mistry

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

H.R. Straw
Living La Vie Française

Review of "Happening", "The Years", and "A Girl's Story" by Annie Ernaux

Geoff Inverarity
A Familiar Grief

Review of "Bridestones" by Miranda Pearson

Liam MacPhail
Memories of Two Boyhoods

Review of "Memories Look at Me" by Tomas Tranströmer

Sadie McCarney
Christmas in Lothlórien

It was a gruesome war, Santa added in Papyrus font, but the forces of Good eventually emerged victorious

Peggy Thompson
Opioids and Other Demons

Review of "Demon Copperhead" by Barbara Kingsolver

Madeleine Pelletier
Dummies Raising Goats

Time to call a professional

Kris Rothstein
An Ordinary Life?

Review of "There Was a Time for Everything" by Judith Friedland

Peggy Thompson
Grab Your Feather Boas

Review of "Stories from My Gay Grandparents" directed by J Stevens

Anik See
The Crush and the Rush and the Roar

And a sort of current ran through you when you saw it, a visceral, uncontrollable response. A physical resistance to the silence

KELSEA O'CONNOR
The Quiet Hunt

Review of "Mushrooming: The Joy of the Quiet Hunt" by Diane Borsato

Cornelia Mars
Once Upon a Talking Goose

Review of "The Capital of Dreams" by Heather O'Neill

Rose Divecha
Clearing Out My Mother's House

The large supply of nine-volt batteries suddenly made sense

Michael Hayward
Insecurity Blanket

Review of "The Age of Insecurity" by Astra Taylor

Anson Ching
Beach Reading

Review of "Slave Old Man" by Patrick Chamoiseau

S.I. Hassan
Becoming Canadian

I traffic deep time in a great storm, guilty of ignorance and omission

Peggy Thompson
Taken to a Place of Life

Review of "Something, Not Nothing: A Story of Grief and Love" by Sarah Leavitt.

Shyla Seller
About the House

Review of "House Work" curated by Caitlin Jones and Shiloh Sukkau.

Patty Osborne
On a Train to Anywhere

Review of "M Train" by Patti Smith.

Rayya Liebich
Righthand Justified

Language built on sounds of delight, coloured in the gardens of Beirut

Kris Rothstein
An Ongoing Space of Encounter

Review of "On Community" by Casey Plett.

Jonathan Heggen
The Boy and the Self

Review of "The Boy and the Heron" directed by Hayao Miyazaki.

Hollie Adams
A Partial List of Inconvenient Truths

In search of a big picture at the end of the singular world

Michael Hayward
Conversations with the past

Review of "Conversations with Khahtsahlano, 1932–1954" reissued by Massy Books and Talonbooks.

Maryanna Gabriel
More Than one way to hang a man

Review of "Hangman: The True Story of Canada’s First Executioner" by Julie Burtinshaw.

Peggy Thompson
Rollicking and honest: LIKE Me

Review of "Queers Like Me" by Michael V. Smith.