Enjoy the fresh kebab while your freshly dented fender gets fixed.

25 reasons to stop talking to my straight friend.

In search of a unified self.

“Excuse me, are you the customer with the peanut allergy?”

A COVID test in the city of a hundred steeples.

Why does one culture give a flower a pretty, poetic name, while another culture names it in a seemingly derogatory way?

How to perform a textual analysis of a Facebook message, while under the influence of red wine.

As men of high seriousness appear on television with their crystal balls, Stephen Osborne shares what he learned about the future from Ray the astrologer.

A tarot card reading for John Franklin, Arctic explorer and Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen's Land, by Phoebe Tsang.

A blizzard hits two days before Christmas, stirring up feelings of trepidation and excitement for the passengers of a bus.

Crack addicts, art critics and pregnant waitresses populate David Mitchell's uncanny vision of Vancouver.

A Canadian soldier captured at Dieppe in 1942 tells what happened next.

Ebb and flow in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico.

The worst time for your pet to run away is when you are moving, and my family moved a lot.

Thad McIlroy spends the night in hospital to get a hernia—possibly on his left side, possibly on his right—repaired.

A warm spring night, a country club dance, a date with an attractive young man—and braces on my two front teeth.

A trip across the country, with didgeridoo and Trudeau too.

Limits of the language.

On parle français icitte!

Justin Trudeau and Greta Thunberg attend the Montreal climate march.

Women in '50s chic, men in sports jackets, and all manner of musical instruments at a suburban home in Toronto.

Narrative text, written and spoken, refines a doctor’s ability to hear a patients’ stories.

Pansy shoes and power suits on parliament hill.

Storm prep for a category 2.

I looked in her purse and found nothing but scraps of paper so covered in writing there was hardly any white left on the pages.

Violence could not reach them only when they were distant as the moon, not of this world

“The first time I met him, he caused me to float to the ceiling"

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.

What does it mean to love a band? A friend? A nation?

The postcard presents a series of absences—the nameless photographer,

the unknown writer and recipient; it is constituted by what is unknown

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I always longed to be the falling woman—impelled by unruly passion, driven by beauty and desire, turned into stone, drowned in flowers.

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New bylaws for civic spaces.

It is racism, not race, that is a risk factor for dying of COVID-19.

Doing time is not a blank, suspended existence.

It was as though a magic potion had brought him back to life.

Going unnoticed must be the root sorrow for the broken.

On the curve of the contagion and on the measure of Montreality.

It took me a million miles to get here and half the time I was doing it in high heels.

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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.

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.

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."

"I want to buy a house. And build a secret room in it. And not tell the kids about it."

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.

Spiritual landscapes and unknowable people captured on film, used to convey a message.

After Paul Muldoon and Raymond Williams.

A seance to contact a dead miner at Port Arthur, Ontario, in 1923—conducted by Conan Doyle himself.

He has been called the greatest Bulgarian poet of his generation. Can one literary scandal bury his whole career?

A basement shrine in her 1920s home inspires Caroline Adderson to discover the past lives of her house and its inhabitants.

Mastery of the self

Stephen Osborne discusses the happiness level of Vancouver, the best place on earth.

Stephen Osborne talks about Bearded Ladies, a documentary about the works of renowned photographer Rosamond Norbury.

AnnMarie MacKinnon reviews Death and the Penguin, a novel that follows the life of a young Ukrainian writer and his penguin.

Mandelbrot reviews The Secret Parts of Fortune: Three Decades of Intense Investigations and Edgy Enthusiasms by Bruce Dern.

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

"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."

"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 reviews The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature by Franco Moretti.

Michal Kozlowski reviews Stardust, Bruce Serafin's essay collection: "punchy narrative, little exposition, unburdened by political correctness."

Patty Osborne reviews The Perimeter Dog by Julie Vandervoort.

Stephen Osborne finds a copy of Francoise Sagan's Those Without Shadows at the bus stop, complete with margin notes that create a new sort of text.

Roni Simunovic reviews Queer and Trans Artists of Color: Stories of Some of Our Lives by Nia King, a collection of interviews about gender and sexuality, and how to make art, make rent and survive.

Michael Hayward reviews Moomin: The Deluxe Anniversary Edition by Tove Jansson, a collection of comic strips that contain "the poetry of our world: sad, joyful, dangerous, enchanting."

Jill Mandrake reviews Local Customs by Audrey Thomas, a ghost story and murder mystery set in West Africa.

Patty Osborne reviews Saint Ralph, the uplifting but untrue story of a boy who sets out to win the 1954 Boston Marathon.

Derek Fairbridge reviews a documentary on the Canadian rock band Rush.

andrea bennett suggests that Road Rocks Ontario, a poorly proofread guide to our middle province’s geologic wonders, has a five-star rating on Goodreads because "people who like rocks like them a whole lot."

Jill Boettger reviews Double Lives: Writing and Motherhood, a collection of 22 essays by women who are both mothers and writers.

The dreadful effects of “computer-assisted publishing” can be observed in the new Canadian ten-dollar bill, a specimen of which I had been carrying around for days wondering where I could have picked up such a miserable-looking coupon.

Eve Corbel reviews Lumberjanes, a "smart, cute-in-a-good-way" comic series that follows the supernatural hijinks of five girls at an extraordinary summer camp.

Daniel Francis reviews All Else Is Folly, a "useful antidote" to the patriotic narrative that hails World War I as Canada's "coming of age."

Michael Hayward reviews Notes on the Cinematographer, a cryptic compendium of notes and quotes from the French filmmaker Robert Bresson.

Patty Osborne reviews Devil in Deerskins: My Life with Grey Owl, a memoir by Anahareo, and Kuessipan by Naomi Fontaine, two contrasting reflections on the aboriginal experience.

Michael Hayward reviews Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids, a collection of essays with a title that speaks for itself.

Memories lie because they build on memories. I think that I remember something, but in fact I remember remembering it, and so on through countless layers of memory. Every memory is a mise en abyme.

Begging the question of what can be defined as “form.”

The crowds learned that they could not act effectively in the present without confronting the past, specifically the historical treatment of indigenous people.

On the screen, only the image—not the word—can become the world.

It all started with a zesty little book about getting old.

Donald Creighton was a bigot and a curmudgeon, a cranky Tory with a chip on his shoulder. He was also the country’s leading historian, who changed the way that Canadians told their own story.

The novelist can often better define reality than the historian.

"We know that life-altering and possibly cataclysmic change is coming, and we continue to live as we have always done."

"Since the beginning of time (the telling of which is also a story), we have known that words are dangerous creatures."

Lacking in drama and embarrassingly undemocratic, Canada’s origins owe a lot to old-fashioned politics and not much to European battles or transcontinental railways.

"Authenticity is the essential quality of all travel literature, imaginary or real."

Alberto Manguel examines the rich symbology of the fist, a primal symbol of rebellion and grief, across cultures and history.

"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.

The writer who is loved by all, by definition, neglects literature’s prime responsibility: to offend.

Daniel Francis discusses Canada's failing mental health care system and its long history of mistreatment.

Aboriginal people are creating a new version of Canada, and non-Aboriginals can lend a hand or get out of the way—Daniel Francis on the new Canadian narrative.

Stephen Henighan asks: what if you don't have a tidy answer to "Where are you from?"

"Cross-country skiing offered me the reassurance sought by the immigrant who is excluded from his locality’s history: a viable alternate route to belonging."

European Jewish artisans on horseback in Argentina.

"Sometimes, in politics or history, certain words, certain names are sufficient unto themselves: it is as if there were names that once pronounced require no further telling."

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

Daniel Francis asks why a high-speed commuter route runs through Stanley Park, Vancouver's precious urban oasis.

"A library is never finished, only abandoned." Alberto Manguel on incompletion, voluntary interruption and the pleasure of the day before.

The assumption of mutual comprehensibility between speakers of Spanish and Portuguese creates a culture of mutual ignorance.