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.
Sam Macklin
Louis Riel: A Comic Strip Biography
[Chester Brown's] latest collection, Louis Riel: A Comic Strip Biography (Drawn & Quarterly), is a fascinating look at the westward expansion of colonial Canada.
Lost in a Good Book
The Eyre Affair and Lost in a Good Book, two novels by Jasper Fforde (New English Library), are easy to read and chock-full of smart puns, literary references and grammatical gags that are fun to fall for. The protagonist is a detective named Thursda
Mandelbrot
Lost Whole Moose Catalogue
Lost Moose is already famous for the Lost Whole Moose Catalogue, a beautifully designed monster book that has everything in it you need to know to actually survive in the Yukon, and even more if you want to survive somewhere else while thinking about
Patty Osborne
Loose End
Ivan E. Coyote loves her mom and dad, her extended family, her godson and her dogs—hell, she even loves her neighbours, some of whom are deeply “normal” and others of whom are lesbian, homosexual, trans-gendered and undecided—and she writes stories a
Joelle Hann
Lonesome Monsters
Speaking of jarring but effective writing, Bud Osborn's Lonesome Monsters (Anvil) successfully dramatizes the harsher side of urban life. This book, though it doesn't break new ground in form or content, depicts the Main-and-Hastingses of North Ameri
Jill Boettger
Living in the World as if It Were Home
The first time I sat down to read Tim Lilburn’s book Living in the World as if It Were Home (Cormorant), I went to it with the kind of mind and feeling that I take to my favourite shelf of music at Megatunes or my Grandma’s cheese and Hovis bread san
Lily Gontard
Living to Tell the Tale
Living to Tell the Tale (Knopf) is the first of three autobiographical books by García Márquez. It has come out in paperback, a year after the hardcover edition, and it is a big book that you want to have in your collection, if only for the storytell
Geist Staff
Life Skills
Life Skills (Coteau Books) is a collection of stories by Marlis Wesseler, who, according to the publisher's blurb, "lives in Regina with her husband Lutz and son Evan"—an example of the biographical minutiae that book lovers learn to ignore—or at lea
Cassia Streb
Lifter
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
Michael Hayward
Letters of E. B. White: Revised Edition
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.
Michael Hayward
Levels of Loss
In Levels of Life, Julian Barnes writes about the grief experienced after losing his wife to cancer.
Patty Osborne
Life-25: Interviews with Prisoners Serving Life Sentences
Life-25: Interviews with Prisoners Serving Life Sentences (New Star), by P.J. Murphy and Lloyd Johnsen, surprised me.
GILLIAN JEROME
Life After Birth
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 “
Randy Gelling
Léolo
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
Michael Hayward
Let Me Finish
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
Lily Gontard
Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name
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
Patty Osborne
Ledoyt
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.
Patty Osborne
L'Art de conjuguer
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
Patty Osborne
Laurence
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
Barbara Zatyko
Larry's Party
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.
Lily Gontard
Lady Franklin’s Revenge
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.
Sam Macklin
Krazy & Ignatz 1937
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
Michael Hayward
Lancelot of the Lake
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 first time I met him, he caused me to float to the ceiling"
Joseph Pearson
Fact
No Names
Sebastian and I enjoy making fun of le mythomane. We compare him to characters in novels. Maybe he can’t return home because he’s wanted for a crime.
Minelle Mahtani
Fact
Looking for a Place to Happen
What does it mean to love a band? A friend? A nation?
Christine Lai
Fact
Now Must Say Goodbye
The postcard presents a series of absences—the nameless photographer,
the unknown writer and recipient; it is constituted by what is unknown
Gabrielle Marceau
Fact
Main Character
I always longed to be the falling woman—impelled by unruly passion, driven by beauty and desire, turned into stone, drowned in flowers.
Mia + Eric
Future Perfect
New bylaws for civic spaces.
JUDY LEBLANC
Walking in the Wound
It is racism, not race, that is a risk factor for dying of COVID-19.
SADIQA DE MEIJER
Do No Harm
Doing time is not a blank, suspended existence.
Kristen den Hartog
The Insulin Soldiers
It was as though a magic potion had brought him back to life.
Steven Heighton
Everything Turns Away
Going unnoticed must be the root sorrow for the broken.
DANIEL CANTY
The Sum of Lost Steps
On the curve of the contagion and on the measure of Montreality.
Brad Cran
Fact
Potluck Café
It took me a million miles to get here and half the time I was doing it in high heels.
Carellin Brooks
Ripple Effect
I am the only woman in the water. The rest of the swimmers are men or boys. One of them bobs his head near me, a surprising vision in green goggles, like an undocumented sea creature. I imagine us having sex, briefly, him rocking over me like a wave.
MARCELLO DI CINTIO
The Great Wall of Montreal
The chain-link fence along boulevard de l’Acadie— two metres high, with “appropriate hedge”—separates one of the wealthiest neighbourhoods in Montreal from one of the poorest.
Michał Kozłowski
New World Publisher
Randy Fred thought that life after residential school would be drinking, watching TV and dying. Instead, he became the "greatest blind Indian publisher in the world."
BRAD YUNG
Lessons I’m Going To Teach My Kids Too Late
"I want to buy a house. And build a secret room in it. And not tell the kids about it."
Paul Tough
City Still Breathing: Listening to the Weakerthans
I wasn’t certain whether I was in Winnipeg because of the Weakerthans, or whether I cared about the Weakerthans because I care about Winnipeg.
Stephen Osborne
This Postcard Life
Spiritual landscapes and unknowable people captured on film, used to convey a message.
Hilary M. V. Leathem
To Coronavirus, C: An Anthropological Abecedary
After Paul Muldoon and Raymond Williams.
Bill MacDonald
The Ghost of James Cawdor
A seance to contact a dead miner at Port Arthur, Ontario, in 1923—conducted by Conan Doyle himself.
Ann Diamond
The Second Life of Kiril Kadiiski
He has been called the greatest Bulgarian poet of his generation. Can one literary scandal bury his whole career?
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.
David L. Chapman
Postcolonial Bodies
Mastery of the self
Ivan Coyote
Shouldn’t I Feel Pretty?
Somewhere in the sweat and ache and muscle I carved a new shape for myself that made more sense.
At the age of 30, Gladys Aylward, a housemaid, bought a ticket from London, England, to Yangcheng, Shanxi Province, China, in order to work as a missionary.
Michał Kozłowski
Poets on Film
The Western Front, Canada’s longest running artist-run centre, recently hosted a public screening of two dozen or so films from their archive of readings by poets from the 1970s, 80s and 90s.
Patty Osborne
The Mere Future
Meet the new bosses of a futuristic New York. Same as the old boss?
Rebekah Chotem
Room for the Real
Rebekah Chotem reviews the film adaptation of Room by Emma Donoghue.
Michael Hayward
Coastal Memories
Michael Hayward reviews Everything Rustles by Jane Silcott and Born Out of This by Christine Lowther.
Stephen Osborne
National Poetry Daze
CBC Radio celebrated National Poetry Day by reading a poem written in 1916 by Bliss Carman, which raises the question: are there no living poets who cut the mustard?
Lily Gontard
Fathers and Daughters
Lily Gontard reviews A Rock Fell on the Moon by Alicia Priest and The Stone Thrower by Jael Ealey Richardson.
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.
Norbert Ruebsaat
Ice & Fire
Over Christmas I read my friend Stephen Osborne’s book Ice & Fire (Arsenal Pulp Press), which is also a Geist Book, and felt I was reading a handshake: familiar and new.
Kris Rothstein
All Folked Up
Kris Rothstein recounts her experience at the Pickathon, a music festival in Portland, Oregon.
Patty Osborne
Spectrums
Patty Osborne reviews Do You Think This Is Strange? by Aaron Cully Drake, a look into the mind of an autistic teenage boy.
ANNMARIE MACKINNON
Einsteinium Ist Nicht Geil
AnnMarie MacKinnon reviews Einsteinium (Es), an element discovered by a non-Einstein Albert.
Daniel Francis
Toronto The Good
Daniel Francis reviews Toronto: Biography of a City, a book bound to irritate readers who live outside Toronto—the "centre of the Canadian universe."
Stephen Osborne
Martin John and the Demon Mother
"In Martin John, Anakana Schofield’s new novel, the reader is beckoned, saluted, enticed and then drawn inexorably into the life of a demented young man."
Eve Corbel
Gagster Movies
Eve Corbel reviews two short biographic documentaries: Seth's Dominion and I Thought I Told You to Shut Up.
roni-simunovic
Space-time Queertinuum
Beyond: The Queer Sci-Fi and Fantasy Comics Anthology is an action-packed, swashbuckling collection of short comics produced by twenty six writers and artists of diverse sexualities and genders.
Stephen Osborne
Unhappy
Stephen Osborne discusses the happiness level of Vancouver, the best place on earth.
Stephen Osborne
A Dream of Bearded Ladies
Stephen Osborne talks about Bearded Ladies, a documentary about the works of renowned photographer Rosamond Norbury.
ANNMARIE MACKINNON
Skip to the Obits
AnnMarie MacKinnon reviews Death and the Penguin, a novel that follows the life of a young Ukrainian writer and his penguin.
Mandelbrot
Private Parts
Mandelbrot reviews The Secret Parts of Fortune: Three Decades of Intense Investigations and Edgy Enthusiasms by Bruce Dern.
Michael Hayward
Artists Behaving Badly
Michael Hayward reviews the honest, outrageous and at times unflattering biographies of Lucian Freud and Rockwell Kent.
Patty Osborne
Aging: Not For the Faint of Heart
"We don’t often get clear and honest reflections out of hundred-year-old men, which is why Frank White’s new book is such a great read."
Patty Osborne
Elizabeth Is Missing
"When your narrator has Alzheimer’s Disease, neither you nor she can be sure of the facts, which is what makes this such an intriguing story."
Stephen Osborne
Don't Look Back
Stephen Osborne reviews The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature by Franco Moretti.
Daniel Francis on John Franklin, John Rae and the Globe and Mail's enthusiasm for cannibalism.
Alberto Manguel
Marilla
Prince Edward Island gothic.
Joseph Weiss
King of the Post-Anthropocene
Kaiju are the heroes we deserve.
Alberto Manguel
Hoping Against Hope
Kafka’s writing allows us intuitions and half-dreams but never total comprehension.
Stephen Henighan
Left Nationalists
Progressives are far less likely to be nationalists than ever before.
Alberto Manguel
Reach Out and Touch (Somebody's Hand)
There is no way to step back from the orgy of kisses without offending.
Daniel Francis
Acadia's Quiet Revolution
Revolutions need popular heroes, and unpopularvillains, and the Acadians of New Brunswick had both.
Stephen Henighan
Vanished Shore
To build a city on land flooded by the tides isn’t just a mistake—it’s utopic.
LISA BIRD-WILSON
Distant Early Warning
We think of the Arctic as pristine and untouched—but nowhere on the planet is as harshly impacted by climate change.
Alberto Manguel
Libraries without Borders
Reading is a subversive activity and does not believe in the convention of borders.
Stephen Henighan
Happy Barracks
In Hungary, goulash socialism becomes difficult to swallow
Alberto Manguel
How I Became a Writer of Colour
Airport security assures Alberto Manguel that he has been randomly picked.
Alberto Manguel
Beginning at the Beginning
To teach us how to read Don Quixote, a text so contrary to conventional literary tradition, the prologue itself needed to break from all traditions
Stephen Henighan
Caribbean Enigma
Unravelling the mysteries of Alejo Carpentier
Alberto Manguel
The Devil
We insist The Devil whispers horrible things in our ear and inspires our worst deeds.
LISA BIRD-WILSON
Smashing Identity Algorithms, Yes Please
While status registration under the Indian Act is a construct, claiming status identity isan important factor in Indigenous identity and cultural transmission.
Stephen Henighan
Victims of Anti-Communism
Anti-communism, retired by most Western governments,receives monumental status in Canada
RICHARD VAN CAMP
Buried Treasure
Mary Schendlinger challenges a review of a biography of Blanche Knopf, the underrecognized co-founder of Alfred A. Knopf Inc.
Stephen Henighan
Ethnic Babies
Stephen Henighan discusses the crude first steps to finding a new way to talk about racial reality.
Alberto Manguel
Reporting Lies
The craft of untruth has been perfected.
LISA BIRD-WILSON
Clowns, Cakes, Canoes: This is Canada?
Romantic notions that equate Indigenous peoples with nature are not going to cut it.
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
Write What You Can Imagine
Like most advice given to writers, the injunction to “write what you know” is misleading.
Stephen Henighan
City Apart
The idea of Europe is incarnated nowhere as much as in St. Petersburg—Stephen Henighan on Europe's greatest city.