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Sewid-Smith Daisy
Collier's, Issue 2.23

The day began with a comment from a colleague that working with a certain buggy database program made him feel like Sisyphus, and it ended with three pieces of reading. An hour or so after the colleague’s remark, I was trading favourite Onion headlin

Kris Rothstein
Colour: Travels Through the Paintbox

Victoria Finlay’s Colour: Travels Through the Paintbox (Sceptre) looks like it could be this year’s Salt. But where Mark Kurlansky delivered a precise, fascinating account of the intersections of salt and history, Finlay offers only scattered and ram

Neil MacDonald
Comfort Zones

Pamela Donoghue's first collection of stories, Comfort Zones (Polestar First Fiction) consists of seventeen stories, most of which revolve around a Cape Breton family. Donoghue's characters don't reach great personal epiphanies and they move through

Daniel Francis
Concise Columbia Encyclopedia

Every desk requires a desk encyclopedia and for several years mine held the admirable Concise Columbia Encyclopedia (Columbia University Press).

Geist Staff
Completely Mad

Completely Mad, a diligent history of Mad magazine (by Maria Reidelbach, Little, Brown), is more than pop culture. It's literary and political history.

Comic Book: The Movie

Comic books take something back from Hollywood in Comic Book: The Movie (Miramax), directed by none other than Luke Skywalker, aka Mark Hamill, and starring him and most of the best voice talent in the animation industry. The film, a fictional docume

Lily Gontard
Consumption

Consumption, by Kevin Patterson (Random House), set in Rankin Inlet in the eastern Arctic, tells the saga of an Inuit family’s decline. The story begins in the 1950s, when a family’s only daughter, Victoria, is sent “outside” to be cured of tuberculo

JILL MANDRAKE
Coming Up For Air

When I heard that George Orwell’s Coming Up For Air was being adapted as a one-man stage show, I couldn’t wait to see it. It’s high time for a new interpretation of Orwell’s work.

Eve Corbel
Consequences

The dust jacket on Consequences, by Penelope Lively (Key Porter), bills the novel as “a sweeping saga of three generations of women and the consequences of love and life”—the sort of talk one expects to find on a good, thick bodice-ripper. But there

RICHARD VAN CAMP
Cool Yule

A review of a winter holiday show presented by The Vancouver Rainbow Concert Band, the first and only LGBTQ band in Canada.

Patty Osborne
Cross My Heart

Speaking of characters, for me there is no better way to understand history than to read about it in a good story that shows you what it was like to be alive back then. Lately I’ve read several children’s books that fill the bill.

Stephen Osborne
Craze: Gin and Debauchery in an Age of Reason

In 1738 in London, informers who exposed gin-sellers were frequently attacked by mobs of citizens. They were beaten up, burned in effigy and dunked in horse ponds and cesspools. At least one informer died of wounds after boiling water was poured down

Patty Osborne
Crucero/Crossroads

When I first encountered Guilermo Verdecchia's name I took the approach of a typical Saxon and avoided saying it out loud. So as I watched the film Crucero/Crossroads (Mongrel Media) I sympathized with Verdecchia's grade one teacher, a wholesome youn

Kris Rothstein
Cyborg: Digital Destiny and Human Possibility in the Age of the Wearable Computer

Steve Mann, a professor at the University of Toronto, is the subject of Cyberman (2001), a fascinating film by Peter Lynch. He is also a cyborg, a concept he explains in Cyborg: Digital Destiny and Human Possibility in the Age of the Wearable Compute

Michael Turner
Crystallography

The two biggest trends in literature right now are spoken word and cybertext. The first is framed in a performance setting by wannabe rock stars, the second is played out on a computer by individuals dubbed cyber-punks.

Patty Osborne
Crumb

My maternal nerve-ends were still vibrating from that article a few days later when I went to see Crumb, a film by Terry Zwigoff about the American comics artist Robert Crumb. The film is a shocking, riveting but not lurid meditation on what shapes a

Sewid-Smith Daisy
Dancer in the Dark

While I was looking at a poster for Lars Von Trier's Dancer in the Dark, two women rushed up and begged me not to go in, crying "It's terrible, we couldn't sit through it!" I might have been swayed if a friend hadn't warned me that he almost left, ev

Kris Rothstein
Day Shift Werewolf

Supernatural beings seem to have it easy: their purpose in life (or life after death) is clear and their mission to frighten or eat humans should be simple enough. But the creatures in Day Shift Werewolf (3-Day Books) suffer from the same self-doubt,

Kris Rothstein
Darwin's Bastards

Kris Rothstein reviews Darwin's Bastards (Douglas & McIntyre).

Michael Hayward
Deactivated West 100

In Deactivated West 100 (Gaspereau Press), Don McKay continues to develop the poetics of place that he began with Vis à Vis (Gaspereau Press, 2001). In both books he tries “to think the relation between place and wilderness without going dizzy from a

Minna Schendlinger
Dead Reckoning: Confronting the Crisis in Pacific Fisheries

Until I cracked open Terry Glavin's Dead Reckoning: Confronting the Crisis in Pacific Fisheries (Greystone), I thought fish had no more significance to me than the wasabe and the soy sauce on the side. Now I know different.

Holly Doyle
Dead Man in the Orchestra Pit

It’s a miracle that only two people die in Dead Man in the Orchestra Pit by Tom Osborne (Anvil Press), during a weekend in Vancouver when a hotel robbery goes terribly wrong and the thieves get tangled up with Grey Cup rabble-rousers and the backstag

Patty Osborne
Dead White Males

David Dennings, the narrator of Ann Diamond’s new novel, Dead White Males (Livres DC Books), is a wacky hairdresser much like the one I visit every couple of months. But whereas my stylist is a filmmaker, Diamond’s is trying to be a hard-boiled priva

Corrina Hodgson
Dead Girls

I finished Dead Girls (McClelland and Stewart) with a heavy feeling in my stomach. It’s not just that the stories are disturbing, it’s that I, the reader, have been made witness to this disturbance.

Patty Osborne
The Sound of Hockey
GILLIAN JEROME
Weeble World

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

Jane Silcott
Natty Man

His look is self-concious, but well done.

Julie Vandervoort
Sewing Cabinet

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

Stephen Osborne
The Contest of Memory

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

Stephen Osborne
Iceman

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.”

Edith Iglauer
Sightseeing, Anybody?

The police officer turned us back and told us to for

Gregory Betts
Trench Poetry

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

RICHARD VAN CAMP
Saeko Usukawa Remembered

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

Stephen Osborne
David Thompson Beats the Devil on the Kisiskatchewan River

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

Edith Iglauer
What?

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.

Norbert Ruebsaat
Berlin Diary

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

Rose Hunter
c

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

EVELYN LAU
Reunion

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

Kathy Friedman
Tesoro

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.

David Albahari
Shuttle Survivors

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.

Robert Everett-Green
Ordinary Weekly Deaths

If Toronto were like Baghdad, thirty-nine res

Lindsay Diehl
Kuta Beach

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

Shelley Kozlowski
Paid Relationship

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

Tom Walmsley
The Eaton Effect

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

Linda Solomon
Nobody’s Fault

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

Bryan Zandberg
City Lectures

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.

Stephen Osborne
War Stories

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.

Michał Kozłowski
Pleasant Artistic Experience

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

Katharine O'Flynn
On the Track

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

Christine Lai
Fact
Now Must Say Goodbye

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

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

Gabrielle Marceau
Fact
Main Character

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

Mia + Eric
Future Perfect

New bylaws for civic spaces.

JUDY LEBLANC
Walking in the Wound

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

SADIQA DE MEIJER
Do No Harm

Doing time is not a blank, suspended existence.

Kristen den Hartog
The Insulin Soldiers

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

Steven Heighton
Everything Turns Away

Going unnoticed must be the root sorrow for the broken.

DANIEL CANTY
The Sum of Lost Steps

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

Brad Cran
Fact
Potluck Café

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

Carellin Brooks
Ripple Effect

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.

MARCELLO DI CINTIO
The Great Wall of Montreal

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.

Michał Kozłowski
New World Publisher

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."

BRAD YUNG
Lessons I’m Going To Teach My Kids Too Late

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

Paul Tough
City Still Breathing: Listening to the Weakerthans

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.

Stephen Osborne
This Postcard Life

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

Hilary M. V. Leathem
To Coronavirus, C: An Anthropological Abecedary

After Paul Muldoon and Raymond Williams.

Bill MacDonald
The Ghost of James Cawdor

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

Ann Diamond
The Second Life of Kiril Kadiiski

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

Caroline Adderson
Lives of the House

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

Ivan Coyote
Shouldn’t I Feel Pretty?

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

David L. Chapman
Postcolonial Bodies

Mastery of the self

CONNIE KUHNS
There is a Wind that Never Dies

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

Sarah Leavitt
Small Dogs

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
Symbiosis in Warsaw

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

Stephen Osborne
Shoot!

Despite high hopes, Stephen Osborne calls Shoot! by George Bowering his biggest disappointment.

Luanne Armstrong
Simple Recipes

Luanne Armstrong reviews "three of the better books of short stories to come out in 2001"—Kingdom of Monkeys, Simple Recipes and Sputnik Diner.

Michał Kozłowski
Stickboy: A Novel in Verse

In Stickboy, Shane Koyczan asks: what happens when the bullied begins to bully back? Reviewed by Michal Kozlowski.

Kris Rothstein
Souvenir of Canada

Kris Rothstein reviews Souvenir of Canada, which appeared at the 2005 Vancouver International Film Festival, and Douglas Coupland's role in it and appearance at the festival.

Neil MacDonald
Streeters

Neil MacDonald reviews Streeters, a compilation of Rick Mercer's solo rants and raves from 22 Minutes, covering everything from Mike Harris in a Speedo to "Canuba," a sovereignty association between Canada and Cuba.

Carra Noelle Simpson
Teacher Man

Carra Noelle Simpson reviews Teacher Man and Half Nelson, two works on life in the inner-city high schools of New York.

Michael Hayward
The Bottom of the Harbor

"Old New Yorker writers never die, they just keep being republished in shiny new editions." Michael Hayward reviews collections of New Yorker pieces.

Sewid-Smith Daisy
The Onion

Melissa Edwards finds three references to Sisyphus in three different publications—all in the same day.

Holly Doyle
Thirty-three Teeth

Holly Doyle reviews Colin Cotterill’s novel Thirty-three Teeth, featuring Dr. Siri Paiboun, the seventy-two-year-old coroner of Laos.

Patty Osborne
Through Black Spruce

Joseph Boyden shows a darker side of First Nations life—darker, but not dark enough to stop one from reading it. Reviewed by Patty Osborne.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Truth is Stranger

Kelsea O'Connor reviews Let's Pretend This Never Happened by Jenny Lawson, a lighthearted look at the embarrassing moments in the author's life.

GILLIAN JEROME
What to Expect When You’re Expecting

As a mother-to-be, Gillian Jerome cynically reviewed eight books on child care to glean what it means to be a mother in the twenty-first century.

HAL NIEDZVIECKI
White Lung

Hal Niedzviecki says White Lung by Grant Buday is the comic novel that should have been given to delegates at the WTO in Seattle.

Rhonda Waterfall
Pharmacist's Mate

Rhonda Waterfall reviews The Pharmacist's Mate by Amy Fusselman, just under 100 pages of minimalist prose called "a brief miracle of a book."

Patty Osborne
Pioneer Justice

In The Lynching of Louie Sam, two teenage boys watched as another—an Aboriginal named Louie Sam—was hanged by a group of men who rode on horseback. Reviewed by Patty Osborne.

Lara Jenny
Please Don't Kill the Freshman

During a trip to Portland, Lara Jenny picks a few must-have zines and chapbooks from the city's huge collection of independent presses.

Daniel Francis
Killer Angels

Daniel Francis reviews the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Killer Angels by Michael Shaara, a minute-by-minute reimagining of the Battle of Gettysburg.

Michael Hayward
Magpie Memoir

Jim Christy muses on 121 items accumulated over 40 years of travel in Sweet Assorted: 121 Takes From a Tin Box, reviewed by Michael Hayward.

Kris Rothstein
Miss Smithers

Susan Juby's teen novel Miss Smithers—the story of an eccentric but charming girl entering a beauty pageant in a small BC town—is reviewed by Kris Rothstein.

Vicki Jensen
Blood Sports

Vicki Jensen says Eden Robinson’s novel Blood Sports forces readers to confront exactly what we’d prefer to avoid—the raw world of junkies, crazies and twisted souls.

Joelle Hann
Breasting the Waves: On Writing and Healing

Joanne Arnott "writes with great effort, feeling her way toward expression and sense without giving her life away as if it were in the "miscellaneous" box at a garage sale." Review by Joelle Hann.

Allison Lawlor
Bread and Salt

Allison Lawlor reviews an author reading of Bread and Salt by Renee Rodin.

JILL MANDRAKE
Caprice

Jill Mandrake reviews George Bowering's Caprice, "a poetic eulogy for a shrinking literary landscape."

Helen Godolphin
Cruddy

Helen Godolphin reviews Lynda Barry's Cruddy, a novel deep within its own whacked-out world.

Stephen Henighan
In Search of a Phrase

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

Stephen Henighan
Collateral Damage

When building a nation, cultural riches can be lost.

Stephen Henighan
Transatlantic Fictions

Coming to harbour in a new world.

Alberto Manguel
Arms and Letters

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

CHERYL THOMPSON
Dismantling the Myth of the Hero

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

Stephen Henighan
Reheated Races

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

Alberto Manguel
Achilles and the Lusitan Tortoise

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

Stephen Henighan
All in the Same CANO

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

LISA BIRD-WILSON
Occupation Anxiety

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

Stephen Henighan
Residential Roots

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

Stephen Henighan
Not Reading

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

Alberto Manguel
Library as Wishful Thinking

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

Stephen Henighan
Lethal Evolutions

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

Stephen Henighan
Plague

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

Alberto Manguel
Léon Bloy and His Monogamous Reader

Dogged dedication grants a reader vicarious immortality.

Stephen Henighan
Confidence Woman

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

Stephen Henighan
A Pen Too Far

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.

George Fetherling
The Daily Apocalypse

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

Stephen Henighan
Taíno Tales

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

Alberto Manguel
A Fairy Tale for Our Time

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

Alberto Manguel
Art and Blasphemy

Faith seems to shiver when confronted by art.

Alberto Manguel
Literature & Morality

Must artists declare their moral integrity?

Stephen Henighan
Flight Shame

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

Alberto Manguel
The Defeat of Sherlock Holmes

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

Daniel Francis
writing from an early grave

Review of "Orwell: The New Life" by D.J. Taylor.

Eimear Laffan
The Trap Door

This invertebrate does not go looking for prey

Michael Hayward
The peripatetic poet

Review of "Iron Curtain Journals," "South American Journals" and "Fall of America Journals" by Allen Ginsberg.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Haunted House guest

Review of "A Guest in the House" by Emily Carroll.

Michael Hayward
Beyond the event horizon

Review of "Antkind" by Charlie Kaufman.

Anson Ching
Sailing the roaring forties

Review of "The Last Grain Race" by Eric Newby.

rob mclennan
Elizabeth Smart’s Rockcliffe Park

For the sake of the large romantic gesture

Michael Hayward
BELLE ÉPOQUE GOSSIP

Review of "The Man in the Red Coat" by Julian Barnes.

Peggy Thompson
More precious than rubies

Review of "Rubymusic" by Connie Kuhns.

Debby Reis
A not-totally-accurate introduction to the azores

Review of the Netflix series "Rabo de Peixe" (2023) created by Augusto de Fraga.

Michael Hayward
A Russian Brother and his sister

Review of "A Russian Sister" by Caroline Adderson.

Kris Rothstein
The messy back of history

Review of "My Grandfather’s Knife: Hidden Stories from the Second World War" by Joseph Pearson

Christine Lai
Now Must Say Goodbye

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

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

Sara de Waal
Little Women, Two Raccoons

Hit everything dead on, even if it’s big

Peggy Thompson
Have Mercy

Review of "Mercy Gene" by JD Derbyshire.

Michael Hayward
subterranean mysteries

Review of "Underland" by Robert Macfarlane.

Margaret Nowaczyk
Metanoias

The names we learn in childhood smell the sweetest to us

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Championing Trees

Review of "Tracking Giants: Big Trees, Tiny Triumphs, and Misadventures in the Forest" by Amanda Lewis.

Patty Osborne
Crossing Borders

Review of "Solito: A Memoir" by Javier Zamora

Michael Hayward
The Two Roberts

Review of "Turn Every Page" directed by Lizzie Gottlieb

Ian Roy
My Body Is a Wonderland

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

Peggy Thompson
A moment with holden

Review of "Holden After & Before: Love Letter for a Son Lost to Overdose" by Tara McGuire.

JILL MANDRAKE
POINTS OF INFLECTION

Review of "Some of the Puzzles" by M.A.C. Farrant.

Michael Hayward
A HOLIDAY IN THE MOUNTAINS (WITH PIE)

Review of "Holiday, 1909" by Charles Chapman.

Anson Ching
THE BELL KEEPS TOLLING

Review of "For Whom the Bell Tolls" by Ernest Hemingway.