Sex, Drugs, Rock ’n’ Roll and the National Identity
In this essay, Daniel Francis discusses how Gerda Munsinger—a woman with ties to the criminal underworld—shaped Canadian politics in the 1960s.
EVELYN LAU
Love Song to America
Reflections on John Updike's death.
Alberto Manguel
The Other Side of the Ice
Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner is a film about community and the north.
Sheila Heti
American Soul
Slot machines sing their astral music. The tape recorder turns off. “Do you talk to friends about sex?” he asks.
Michelle Fost
Long Distance
Shared family memories of burnt baked goods.
Alberto Manguel
Geist’s Literary Precursors
The Geist map has a venerable ancestor that goes back four centuries and halfway around the world.
Jill Boettger
City Under Water
The Calgary floods left behind a stew of knee-deep mud, and waterlogged piles of couches, fridges, books, toys, artworks, chairs, carpet, drywall...
Edith Iglauer
Mad About Harry
A new pet kitten becomes part of the family.
Annabel Lyon
Irony-Free Reality TV
There may be more to reality TV than meets the eye.
Stephen Osborne
Scandal Season
Headlines featuring crack-smoking mayors and election fraudsters.
Alberto Manguel
Cooking by the Book
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.
Stephen Osborne
The Coincidence Problem
That dreamlike quality causes rational minds to dismiss the moment as “only a coincidence.”
Sheila Heti
Off the Pedestal
Rick laughed. I walked away. I was irritated at Henry, at Lee for getting stoned and being paranoid and leaving without saying goodbye, at Rick, at everyone.
Stephen Henighan
How They Don’t See Us
During the 1980s the literary critic Edward Said organized occasional research seminars at Columbia University in New York.
Alberto Manguel
My Friendship With Rat And Mole
The books we love become our cartography.
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.
Stephen Osborne
Road King
Two women on motorcycles: one in the dead zone of Chernobyl, and the other in the cactus country of Kamloops.
Daniel Francis
African Gulag
The atrocities were carried out in the name of some version of “civilization” that the Queen represented.
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.
Stephen Osborne
First Time, Last Time
The first time losing a game of Scrabble and the last time taking a train cross-country.
Ivan Coyote
If I Was a Girl
Femme girls get free Slurpees, but boyish ladies get free cavity searches at the border.
Stephen Osborne
Writing Life
"One way or another we all write out of this place,” comments Patricia Young in Writing Life (McClelland & Stewart), edited by Constance Rooke, a collection of essays by fifty writers, most of them Canadian, about the process and perils of authorship
Alberto Manguel
Neighbourhood of Letters
There are imaginary cities for scientists, vampires, lechers and even bad students—but what about writers?
Devon Code
My Prizes: A Memoir
An account of the circumstances surrounding seven literary honours bestowed on a writer.
The Penthouse, the notorious Vancouver night club, shares a history with several of the city's missing women cases.
Stephen Henighan
Canada for Spartans
Stephen Henighan exposes the errors, omissions and problems with the Conservative party's study guide for Canadian citizenship.
Alberto Manguel
Burning Mistry
Alberto Manguel examines a modern-day book burning and asks: how is this still happening?
Alberto Manguel
A Brief History of Tags
A reflection on the complex and often inexplicable process of bibliographic categorizations.
Stephen Henighan
Language and Nation Now
Do shared languages form the natural boundaries of any nation in the world?
CARMINE STARNINO
Next Door Café: A Poet's Musings
Reflections on how a bar in Parc Extension, QC, influenced an eponymous poem about "unprogress, inertia, the failure to learn from mistakes."
Alberto Manguel
Imaginary Places
Alberto Manguel remembers a golden era in Canadian writing, comments on our current cultural climate and proposes a brighter future.
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.
Alberto Manguel
Pictures and Conversations
"And what is the use of a book," thought Alice, "without pictures or conversation?" —Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Stephen Henighan
In Praise of Borders
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.
Stephen Henighan
Writing Bohemia
Bohemia is a good place to grow as a writer, but is it a good place to live one’s whole life?
Daniel Francis
Canada's Funnyman
A misogynist, a racist and an academic walk into a bar...
Alberto Manguel
Karl Kraus, Everybody's Neighbour
He is one of the strangest crea
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
Final Answers
For most artists, the learning of the craft never ceases, and no resulting work is fully achieved
George Fetherling
Adventures in the Nib Trade
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.
Stephen Henighan
The BookNet Dictatorship
According to the numbers, Canada will never produce another Atwood or Findley.
Alberto Manguel
Cautionary Tales for Children
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.
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.
Daniel Francis
Writing the Nation
Reconsidering the faintly embarrassing Pierre Berton.
Alberto Manguel
Metamorphoses
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.
Stephen Henighan
Divergence
Stephen Henighan argues that audiences used to have different opinions on the news; now they cannot even agree on the terms of debate.
HAL NIEDZVIECKI
The Secret Market
When Frank Warren began collecting the secret thoughts of strangers at PostSecret.com, he inadvertently created a new genre.
Stephen Henighan
Latinocanadá
Military coups, civil wars, and NAFTA are the cause of trilingual labels in Canadian big box stores.