For the sake of the large romantic gesture

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Hit everything dead on, even if it’s big

The names we learn in childhood smell the sweetest to us

Maybe my doctor has two patients named Ian Roy, and I’ve been sent the other Ian’s file

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No Skylab buzz in East Germany.

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Nature’s sanctity is the only portal to the future.

PRESS 1 IF YOU THINK YOU MAY HAVE HEARD THE BIG BANG.

Playing against the fastest chess player in the world.

"You have bruises / There was time / You spent trying to / Heal them. / As in, time wasted."

That’s one for the rice bag!

The maple leaf no longer feels like a symbol of national pride.

"my point that / i is but a : colon grown / too long"

"The following resume / arrived by fax: One ex-military / man, 52, applying / for duty ..."

If marriage was a television show, it might look something like this.

Scrape every last bit of English out of your throat.

Who puts those little stickers on the apples in the grocery store?

Remembering Norbert Ruebsaat.

Destroying books for the greater good.

Losers: you have a lifetime to hunt.

"I never went looking for them."

Tell me again how long the trip is?

Fill the room with a flock of moths.

Any resemblances to persons living or dead are purely vindictive.

The secret is in the velvet.

You can’t break eggs without making an omelette.

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.

Stephen Osborne reviews Imaging the Arctic, a collection of papers and photographs presented at a conference titled "Imaging the Arctic: The Native Photograph."

"From opposite ends of the country come two important books about Indians: one old and one new. The old is a reissue of Rolf Knight's Indians at Work." Review by Daniel Francis.

"Nathan Sellyn’s debut fiction collection, Indigenous Beasts, may alienate readers who are not interested in tales of men and boys learning to deal with their egos and the world around them." Review by Michal Kozlowski.

Carra Noelle Simpson reviews The Deserters Tale by Joshua Key, an "honest, accessible, first-hand experience of the war in Iraq that is missing in mainstream media."

Patty Osborne reviews The Demons of Aquilonia, a novel by Lina Medaglia.

Michael Hayward reviews Bonnie Bremser’s gritty memoirs that kick dust in the face of the romanticized Beatnik lifestyle.

S.K. Page reviews Stephen Henighan's When Words Deny the World: The Reshaping of Canadian Writing, a penetrating argument for finding new ways of writing and imagining this country and our experience in it.

Michal Kozlowski reviews Sidewalk, an ethnographic study of the lives of magazine and book vendors on Sixth Avenue in New York, written by Mitchell Duneier.

Mandelbrot reviews Snapshot Poetics, Allen Ginsberg's photographic memoir of the Beat era from 1953 to 1964.

Patty Osborne reviews The Americans Are Coming by Herb Curtis, a story set in the flyfishing lodges of the Miramichi region of New Brunswick.

A review of The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt, winner of Governor-General's Literary Award, the Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, shortlisted for the Giller and the Man Booker Prize.

"Greg Gatenby is the Toronto impresario whose good works on behalf of Literature are legendary. Unhappily, his latest book is not one of them." A review of The Wild is Always There.

Carrie Villeneuve reviews The Union: The Business Behind Getting High, a documentary on British Columbia's marijuana industry.

Kris Rothstein reviews Talking Young Feminists, a collection of essays by young feminist women.

Mandelbrot discusses the making of Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North.

Stephen Osborne reviews On the Edge: A Journey into the Heart of Canada by Lindalee Tracey.

Michael Hayward reviews On Hashish, a collection of Walter Benjamin’s writings on hashish.

Patty Osborne reviews Jeanette Winterson's Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, a fast-paced and hilarious coming-of-age story about the adopted daughter of a religious fanatic mother.

A paranoid office-worker relieves the alienation she feels in her job by writing experimental lyric prose.

Michael Hayward reviews Phantom Limb by Theresa Kishkan, a series of essays exploring of the complexity and magic of the natural world.

Kris Rothstein reviews Mariko Tamaki’s Fake ID, a collection of short stories about a young woman who moves to Toronto after finishing university in Montreal.

Michal Kozlowski reviews Joseph Howe and the Battle for Freedom of Speech by John Ralston Saul.

A review of Bruce Sweeney's Last Wedding.

Sarah Maitland visits Margaret Atwood's book signing at Vancouver's Word on the Street festival.

Alberto Manguel's column from Geist 93 about how the most important Turkish novelist of modern times took over fifty years to reach English-speaking audiences.

"Canadians have long been convinced that we do not know much, or care much, about our own history, but a new study suggests that this truism is not true."

A look back at World War I as the first great twentieth-century pollution of language.

An appreciation of Dante's "Commedia."

Despite hardships and dangerous slums, Nicaragua maintains a sense of hope that draws back to the democratic days of the Sandinistas.

The canoe as a fetish object, a misreading of Canadian history and a symbol of colonial oppression.

Ruskin's readers have the power to know that there is indeed room for Alice at the Mad Hatter's table.

In order to discharge ourselves of certain problems, why not simply erase from our maps the sites of such nuisance?

What does it mean to "be" yourself? The face reflected in the mirror is unrecognizable.

In the farmer’s market, a quintessentially Canadian setting, much of Canada is not visible.

In this essay, Daniel Francis discusses how Gerda Munsinger—a woman with ties to the criminal underworld—shaped Canadian politics in the 1960s.

Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner is a film about community and the north.

Reflections on John Updike's death.

The Geist map has a venerable ancestor that goes back four centuries and halfway around the world.

Slot machines sing their astral music. The tape recorder turns off. “Do you talk to friends about sex?” he asks.

There may be more to reality TV than meets the eye.

I'm always looking for the moment in which a character must stop to eat because, for me, the very mention of food humanizes a story.

During the 1980s the literary critic Edward Said organized occasional research seminars at Columbia University in New York.

The books we love become our cartography.

One thing Canadians have learned from our armed incursion into Afghanistan is that we do not have a vocabulary for discussing war or warlike events.

The atrocities were carried out in the name of some version of “civilization” that the Queen represented.

There are imaginary cities for scientists, vampires, lechers and even bad students—but what about writers?

Is it the icons of Canadian pop culture—hockey fights, Tim Hortons coffee, Don Cherry’s haberdashery, Rick Mercer’s rants—that reveal the deepest truths about us?

The Penthouse, the notorious Vancouver night club, shares a history with several of the city's missing women cases.