Evil is not darkness, I thought to myself. It’s noise.

‍

His look is self-concious, but well done.

Cylinders of oxy­gen rolled past like dolls, propped up in wire bas­kets. After the first few min­utes it all seemed normal.

‍

Stephen Osborne uncovers the genesis of the poppy and how it became evidence of horror, a token of remembrance and a promise of oblivion.

Last month I had lunch with a good friend who years ago had told me that her parents, who immigrated to Canada after the war, were Holocaust survivors. I asked my friend, whose name is Slava, to tell me again about her parents, who had lived in Vilna, the ancient Lituanian city of Europe known for three centuries as the “Jerusalem of the north.”

The police officer turned us back and told us to for

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

Senior Editor Mary Schendlinger remembers her friend and Geist contributor Saeko Usukawa.

Thompson’s free-ranging narrative of the New World must be the only one in which the devil is defeated at checkers.

At home Frank and I are mutually sympathetic to the obligation to face one another and speak loudly; or, when we are away, to supply each other with new batteries when we forget them; but we have no defence against the independent wandering behaviour of our hearing aids. They are always someplace else. I probably have spent one percent of my life, close to a whole year, looking for the damned things.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Hakescher Markt became one of hippest neigh

A shuttle driver at LAX shares his idea for a Valentine’s Day gift.

He looked vaguely familiar— there was a sort of outline around his ­features that I almost recognized, a translucent and shifting visage, as of someone I once knew. He looked vaguely familiar— there was a sort of outline around his ­features that I al

The man who told me to sit here is wearing a blue uniform. He asks me questions. “You’re going to sacrifice your body just to save some money,” he jokes.

On a recent trip to Paris, I met a young woman from Japan. But this is not a story about a sudden love affair, which one might expect in Paris.

If Toronto were like Baghdad, thirty-nine res

Boyfriends are trouble, I said. He leaned over and gave me a high-five.

A eulogy delivered by email, from a woman living in Berlin to her lifelong friend in Vancouver.

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

In multi-cultural Vancouver, strangers come together at a moment of crisis.

The organizers of tonight’s talk have branded it as a “raw exchange”—part of a series of uncensored literary gatherings around the city—and so they’ve invited three biting B.C. writers to get down to brass tacks for a group of strangers in the basement of the Vancouver Public Library. By some freak of programming, a punk-metal band is slaying the kids in the room down the hall tonight, which means every time a bookish-looking latecomer wades into our midst, a foul-sounding wave of hellish power chords does, too.

A question of some concern among my friends when we were growing up in the fifties and sixties was how old you had to be to go to war.

An intrepid Geist correspondent narrowly avoids being stabbed by a moose-antler letter opener in Whitehorse.

I started walking, seriously. It was the bone scan that got me going. The healthy solid green was spongy with rotting black holes.

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

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

‍

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

‍

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.

‍

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.

Somewhere in the sweat and ache and muscle I carved a new shape for myself that made more sense.

Mastery of the self

"If you are still alive, you must have had the experience of surrendering."

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

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

A review of Happy-Go-Lucky: Silver Islet Shenanigans, a creative non-fiction book by Bill MacDonald.

A review of Chris Ware's unconventionally packaged book Building Stories, about the residents of an apartment building.

A review of a book of variations by bpNichol.

Lily Gontard reviews Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson.

William Wallace Cook offers a literary guide to creating a unique plot.

Linda Svendsen eviscerates the hypocritical nature of Canadian politics in Sussex Drive.

A woman is reborn on the same cold and snowy night over and over again, living a different life of disasters, in Life After Life by Kate Atkinson.

Moments of misunderstandings and other drama are highlighted in the life of a Jewish family in Nazi-occupied Czechoslavia.

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

A review of Voyage Through the Past Century by Rolf Knight.

Théodora Armstrong makes her literary debut with a short-story collection, Clear Skies, No Wind, 100% Visibility.

A review of Love & the Mess We’re In by Stephen Marche.

The Bee Trading Card Series 1 includes twenty-four cards that feature facts about bee anatomy, physiology and classification.

AnnMarie MacKinnon reviews Reading Like A Writer by Francine Prose, a "guide for people who love books and for those who want to write them."

Jennesia Pedri examines the literary legacy of Dollarton, once home to Earle Birney, Dorothy Livesay and Al Purdy, and the recently-evicted Carole Itter and Al Neil.

Roni Simunovic reviews When Everything Feels Like the Movies, the award-winning YA novel that inspired heated controversy and a homophobic petition.

Michael Hayward reviews #GIRLBOSS, a memoir by Sophia Amoruso, founder of Nasty Gal clothing retailer and capitalism's cheerleader.

Kelsea O'Connor reviews We Are Pirates, a witty adventure through modern-day piracy by Daniel Handler, better known as Lemony Snicket.

A gaggle of kids team up with a crazy hippie named Sea Foam and an array of Angolan grandmothers in Granma Nineteen, reviewed by Patty Osborne.

Stephen Osborne reviews Janet Malcolm's book of essays and discusses the worst novel ever published in Canada.

Mary Schendlinger reviews The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, the riveting tale of “a Hmong child, her American doctors and the collision of two cultures.”

Britt Huddart reviews Only Lovers Left Alive by Jim Jarmusch, not your average anguish and fangs vampire movie.

Michael Hayward reviews The Stray Bullet: William S. Burroughs in Mexico and Peter Orlovsky: A Life in Words, works for "only the most dedicated fans of Beat literature."

Lily Gontard reviews The Luminaries and The Douglas Notebooks, two award-winning novels you might not have heard of.

Phrase books are tools of cultural globalization—but they are also among its casualties.

When building a nation, cultural riches can be lost.

Coming to harbour in a new world.

Science and the arts fulfil their functions to help us survive through the imagination.

In a world dominated by heroes, difference is not tolerated.

Dividing and conquering local populations confines them to manageable administrative units.

“Have patience” and “Tomorrow” are two inseparable locutions in the Portuguese tongue.

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

Lisa Bird-Wilson on UNDRIP, reconciliation, and the anxiety felt by Indigenous people in Canada.

"The hemispheric context reveals the roots of the residential school system...Destroying Indigenous cultures was a positivist policy from Patagonia to Dawson City."

What we do when we absorb words from a screen—and we haven’t yet evolved a verb for it—is not reading.

Libraries are not only essential in educating the soul, but in forming the identity of a society.

Our society is formed on the assumption of a healthy immune system.

What we can—and can’t—learn from the plague

Dogged dedication grants a reader vicarious immortality.

The woman who called herself Tatiana Aarons gave me an address that led to a vacant lot.

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.

The newspaper wars aren’t what they used to be.

A package-deal paradise reputation curtails gringo knowledge of Dominican life.

What can the Brothers Grimm teach us about the state of our economic system? Everything.

Faith seems to shiver when confronted by art.

Must artists declare their moral integrity?

Without air travel, family networks might have dissolved long ago.

There’s something not quite right about the grid on which the game is played.