Space travel, world religions and quotes from Pascal are just a few of the topics covered in these little phone calls between friends.

Walking along the streets of Paris, watching thousands of tourists using their digital cameras, I remember the way my father held his old Kodak when he took photographs.

Walking along the streets of Paris, watching thousands of tourists using their digital cameras, I remember the way my father held his old Kodak when he took photographs.

Banff: a collection of scenic views and a setting for the Avant-Garde?

On the night of the last Wednesday of February 1884, at about ten o’clock, a gang of armed men entered a farmhouse near Sumas Lake in southern B.C., woke the inhabitants at gunpoint and took away with them a teenage boy who was being held in the cust

Michel Lambeth's photo of Milton Acorn brings back memories of dancing, love poetry and a revolution.

Onstage a group of writers and critics sat in a semicircle and spoke earnestly about whether or not a national literature could exist in two languages.

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Mrs. Higgins lived with her legless brother and her blind husband in a tall, narrow old house in Nottingham. The room I rented from her in the 1950s was just below her sitting room, where she kept a life-size portrait of Lenin.

The dog turns his butt to the stinging spray and wind but my boyfriend and I face the water, watching the massive waves crash on the shore. We are drenched in seconds and we have to shout over the wind. It’s exhilarating.

According to legend and prophecy, this child would possess the second sight.

When I was living in New York in the 1960s, almost everyone I knew was walking or running to the office of some psychiatrist.

"A rookery of dead ends and curved lanes. Everywhere heaps of debris. Pigs rooting in eyes." Explore Manchester during the Industrial Revolution, in poem.

Public bombings have a profound effect on cities, even if the bomb is a coconut filled with beans and rice.

I had my car at the hotel but snow was expected, and driving home alone in a snowstorm around the hairpin curves edged with deep ravines on Highway 101 was the last thing I wanted to do.

She was a conversationalist, a home builder and a deliverer of calves. Those who loved Ursula will miss her adventurous soul.

When I was twelve my father enrolled me in a typing course from which I emerged typing with two fingers.

First published in Geist #30 and now in the 20th Anniversary Collector's Edition.

Last month in Calgary a friend showed me the way to Louise Bridge by sketching a map with her fingertip on the dust jacket of The Wolf King, a book by Judd Palmer that we had been admiring at her kitchen table.

One instinctive action saves a life in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

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Veronica Gaylie encounters Trevor Linden, the Greatest Canuck Who Ever Lived, in economy class.

Does the individual have difficulty finding words, finishing sentences or naming people or things?

From Mapping a Sense of Place: The Photographs of Manfred Buchheit, 1972-1995, an exhibition curated by Bruce Johnson for the Art Gallery of Newfoundland and Labrador.

The Health Hotline can only do so much for the exotic animals swimming in a hole on your forehead.

Some

Another classic story from Geist's 20th Anniversary Collector's Issue."I felt disoriented, almost light-headed, as though I were slightly stoned or moving inside a dream."

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.

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.

Michael Hayward reviews John Berger’s From A to X, a tale of anger, displacement and resistance.

Leah Rae reviews The Echoing Years: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry and Translation from Canada and Ireland: "Finally, a comprehensive collection of fair-to-middlin’ verse for the multilingual."

Michael Hayward reviews The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. III, a collection of discussions with the leading dramatists, poets and novelists of the past fifty years.

Roger Deakin's Wildwood is a heady romp through the world’s forests and their entangled histories. Reviewed by Michael Hayward.

Michael Hayward reviews the autobiography of Jim Rimmer, a “high priest” of type design and private-press printing.

Stephen Osborne reviews a collection of Barack Obama's speeches that was surprisingly popular overseas.

Kris Rothstein reviews Anna's Shadow by David Manicom, "much more than just another post-Cold War thriller."

Stephen Osborne reviews Kahn & Engelmann, a German novel by Hans Eichner hailed as a masterpiece in Europe.

Even the healthiest reader can uncover the fatal illness within thanks to The Complete Manual of Things That Might Kill You: A Guide to Self-Diagnosis for Hypochondriacs, reviewed by Michael Hayward.

This edge-of-your-seat film follows a Spanish chef on his quest to win the prestigious cooking competition, the Bocuse D’Or. Review by Leah Rae.

Michael Hayward reviews Graham Robb's The Discovery of France, a scholarly but entertaining history of France’s emergence in the modern era.

“Adopt a reading pseudonym” is but one piece of advice offered in The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara & Lenin Play Chess by Andrei Codrescu, reviewed by Michal Kozlowski.

Carrie Villeneuve reviews a new album from an East Vancouver band that appeals to music fans of all ages.

Thad McIlroy reviews Slumdog Millionaire, a 2009 film by Danny Boyle.

A peek inside Roger Deakin’s living, breathing farmhouse in the waning years of his life in Notes from Walnut Tree Farm, reviewed by Michael Hayward.

Malcolm Gladwell uses statistical analyses to prove that location and timing are everything in Outliers: The Story of Success, reviewed by Lily Gontard.

Thad McIlroy reviews The Reaper by Steven Dunne.

Eve Corbel reviews The Sea Lady by Margaret Drabble, a novel that takes place on land but is all about the sea.

Michael Hayward reviews Edward Lear in Albania, an account of the author's travels through the Balkans beginning in 1848.

Michael Hayward reviews Anik See’s Saudade, a collection of essays to plunge you deep into the meanings of travel and place.

Thad McIlroy reads Kilodney Does Shakespeare and Other Stories by Lorette Luzajic, the only book that discusses Crad Kilodney’s life and writing.

Jennesia Pedri reviews Gonzalo Riedel's wonderfully disastrous short story collection, Behaving This Way Is All I Have Left.

Leah Rae reviews Hagiography, a slim book of saintly verse filled with mystery and well-crafted poems.

Eve Corbel reviews Pierre Bayard's How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, a book on the joys of non-reading.

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.