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."

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.

Kristen Lawson on the hero's journey through "queer/feminist/Asian/West Coast/Rocky Mountain sensibilities."

Anson Ching on Mo Yan's ability to tell stories as if they were written memories.

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

Michał Kozłowski on the ineffable Beverly Glenn-Copeland.

Jesmine Cham on the unknown story of two women who race around the world in eighty days.

Michael Hayward on one book you should read this year.

Michael Hayward on the perfect setup for a classic “film noir.”

Immigration questions 9 and 10: How do you like where you’re living now? Are you happy here?

Patty Osborne on Shtisel—an Israeli TV series about an ultra-religious Jewish family in Jerusalem.

Kelsea O'Connor on the self-published webcomic by Ngozi Ukazu.

Michael Hayward on an anthology of noir fiction set in neighbourhoods around Vancouver.

Kris Rothstein on a no-nonsense Irish heroine.

Kelsea O'Connor on queer lovers, gothic horror and fairy tale themes.

Mary Schendlinger on Fay Weldon's 48th or 53rd book, After the Peace.

Unreliable narrator, post-modernist self-reference and contemporary literary references—Michael Hayward on the nature of the autobiography.

Michael Hayward on a selection of work from the writing collective known as "the Beats"

Patty Osborne on twenty-four essays of "rants and reflections on growing up with LGBTQ+ parents."

Thad McIlroy on Jan Morris's "Smile Test" throughout Canadian cities.

Roni Simunovic reviews the Yaletown Return-It Express Depot.

Kelsea O'Connor on Our Animal Hearts by Dania Tomlinson.

Michael Hayward on Packing My Library: An Elegy and Ten Digressions by Alberto Manguel.

Mary Schendlinger on Vox.com's podcast Today Explained.

Anson Ching on Anna, Like Thunder.

Patty Osborne on Slow Twisting by Anonymous.

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."

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

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

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.

Reflections on John Updike's death.

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

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

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

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?

After fol