"My father began his shopping spree in the fashion department. He ordered jackets, sweaters, shirts, trousers and shoes. In his new wardrobe he looks like a mummy that has been dressed up for a big night of trick-or-treating."

Just decide what happens and worry about the rest later.

"have ya been ev’ryweir?"

"8.21 Fur Bearers Defender"—the difficulty is to say no more than we know.

The simple love of dogs.

This year for Halloween, we creep back into the archives and Stephen Osborne digs deep into his family's history at the Salem witch trials.

Salmon runs, voodoo juice and chewing the fat in Mission.

Salmon runs, voodoo juice and chewing the fat in Mission.

Theft, death and don't-mess-with-me expressions—unlocking the family portrait.

“Want to marry me? My wife she burned me. She just burned me, you know. Now I’m going to court to burn her back.”

Respected journalist, Geist contributor and maker of olive sandwiches.

Edith Iglauer invites Pierre Trudeau over for dinner and gets Barbra Streisand as a bonus.

Compassionate, good truck driver, likes kids, likes ice cream—the makings of a no-fail ice cream dude.

In 1989, when Harold and Barbara Morgan opened the Museum of Exotic World in the front rooms of Harold’s commercial painting business in Vancouver, they had been travelling the world every winter for forty-five years and had accumulated many souvenir

Randy Fred receives his first traditional Nuu-chah-nulth name.

Notes from the Governor General’s Literary Awards.

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Jill Mandrake on the surprising effect of peanut brittle.

Han Fusen navigates multiculturalism and kookoo sabzi from inside a Persian grocery store.

Rice, tea and a trillion dollars of spirit money.

The secret heart of Albania is imbued with compassion and a desire to help those in need

Scenic views, fresh muffins and drunk passengers—three days and four nights aboard the Canadian from Vancouver to Toronto.

What was a lone hen doing in the yard, a few feet from a busy city street?

In Peterborough, Pastor Billy cures arthritis, back pain, bone spurs, lymphoma, stage four liver cancer, sleep apnea and atrial fibrillation

From morning to night, there's always someone coming in for smokes and a chat.

The Museum of Communism is easy to find thanks to the museum’s adver­tis­ing slo­gan: We’re above McDonald’s.

“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

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

Kelsea O'Connor reviews Kitten Clone by Douglas Coupland, a "humanizing portrait" of Alcatel-Lucent, the company that developed the internet we know and love today.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Lily Gontard reviews Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson.

A review of a book of variations by bpNichol.

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

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

"You must change your life." According to James Pollock, a new wave of Canadian poetry has emerged.

Patty Osborne reviews Journeywoman: Swinging a Hammer in a Man’s World by Kate Braid.

A review of the Vanguard of the New Age, Gillian McCann's book about the Theosophical Society, which mixes western spiritualism and eastern mysticism.

Two grey whales and a poet/axe murderer play key roles in Brad Cran's poetry collection.

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.

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."

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

“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.

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

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

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.

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

Dogged dedication grants a reader vicarious immortality.

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

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.

Faith seems to shiver when confronted by art.

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

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.