The log jam is tall and wide and choosing wrong means we don’t make it home

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The fish is a suspended phantom, its magenta skeleton an exquisite, vibrant exhibit of what lies beneath

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A wildland fighter witnesses an old burn's second act

Memories sneak up, tiptoe quiet as a cat. Boom like a slapshot

The unmistakable buzz of an approaching aircraft is enough to send my family onto the lawn

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This invertebrate does not go looking for prey

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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"

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

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

Scrape every last bit of English out of your throat.

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

Destroying books for the greater good.

Remembering Norbert Ruebsaat.

Losers: you have a lifetime to hunt.

Violence could not reach them only when they were distant as the moon, not of this world

“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

Michael Hayward reviews What Poets Are Like by Gary Soto.

Stephen Osborne reviews Mary Jo Bang's translation of Dante's Inferno.

Yann Martel's novel Self (Knopf), seems aptly titled for a book that depicts a character growing from childhood into adulthood. Martel's first book, The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios, kept me on my couch for chapter after chapter with tears i

October 21, 2005, marked the 200th anniversary of the great naval battle of Trafalgar, an engagement in which Admiral Nelson and the British fleet ended Napoleon’s dream of invading England by crushing the French and Spanish fleets off the southwest

In Leonard Gasparini's Selected Poems (Hounslow Press), the themes range from urban night-life lyricism to wry, formally structured meditations on humanity, travel and the natural world. Gasparini's vision of life is often dark but never obscure.

Seachd: The Inaccessible Pinnacle (Simon Miller), is the first Gaelic-language movie at the Vancouver International Film Festival. Seachd ( “seven”) is the age Aonghas is when he and his siblings are orphaned and sent to their grandparents; seachd is

Portland is a great destination for fans of the independent presses. During a recent two-day trip, I selected a few must-have zines and chapbooks from a huge selection.

Stephen R. Bown’s Scurvy: How a Surgeon, a Mariner, and a Gentleman Solved the Greatest Medical Mystery of the Age of Sail (Thomas Allen) is an excellent account of life and lingering death on the high seas during the age of empires and oceanic voyag

Drugs and disillusionment also figure in Greg Everett’s memoir Screaming at a Wall (Grundle Ink), featuring a main character named Greg and events and dialogue that are too convincing to be made up. The charm of this book is its unflinching portrayal

What I remember most vividly from Existentialism 101 was nausea—not Sartre’s famous novel, but a classmate of mine who spontaneously vomited during a discussion of Nietzsche.

When the Bosnian peace agreement was announced in Dayton, Ohio, I wanted to ask Elma Softic what she thought of it all. I had just finished reading her book Sarajevo Days, Sarajevo Nights (Key Porter: translation by Nada Conic), and I wanted her to c

Near the beginning of his book, Ricou states that his intention in writing about this ubiquitous plant was to answer the question: “Could a regional culture be found by focusing on a single, native, uncharismatic species?” More simply, he wanted to f

Thanks to an educational record I had as a kid, I’ve always known that salt was once traded for gold. What I didn’t know about salt, though, is a heck of a lot, and it’s all covered in Mark Kurlansky’s 400-plus-page book Salt: A World History (Knopf

The photographs in Saqiyuq: Stories from the Lives of Three Inuit Women (McGill-Queens), are plentiful but wretchedly printed, which is a sadness because this book of stories is so good that you want to return to the photographs again and again to se

Notman's department store approach to photography is carried on in this century in the work of Courtney Milne, whose recent Sacred Places in North America, subtitled A Journey into the Medicine Wheel (Stewart, Tabori & Chang), represents the fruit of

Since the Canadian withdrawal from the North American ballistic missile defence treaty, you might think you don’t need to read Mel Hurtig’s ominously titled Rushing to Armageddon: The Shocking Truth About Canada, Missile Defence, and Star Wars (McCle

The December 1994 issue of Room of One's Own, subtitled "Geography of Gender," features the winners of its first annual literary competition, along with nine other finalists. The writing here is very good, the cover is inviting, and they've reviewed

Rocket Science by Julia Gaunce (Pedlar Press) is a wonderful first novel that should get great notices. Here is a true enactment of a certain Canadian life: Mr. Wicker is the caretaker of the apartment building; Mrs. Wicker attends leather-craft clas

Rob Kovitz's Room Behavior (Treyf/Insomniac) is an interesting attempt by a Manitoba architect to document the impact that a room has on its inhabitants. Kovitz juxtaposes text and image, inviting us to look at the rooms we live in, the spaces we oc

Geoffrey Household’s 1939 novel Rogue Male—an old favourite of mine—follows a British sportsman as he returns from an unnamed central European country (read Germany), having failed in his attempt to assassinate the dictator who is that country’s head

On my summer holiday I immersed myself in World War I, thanks to a friend who loaned me all three parts of Pat Barker's trilogy: Regeneration, The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road (Plume/Penguin). This is a large and important work conveniently pac

The first time I saw Robinson Crusoe on Mars (Byron Haskin, Criterion dvd) was in the Cedar V Theatre, a Quonset-style, single-screen movie house on Lynn Valley Road in North Vancouver: 25 cents for a science-fiction double bill in 1965.

Road Novels, 1957—1960 is an omnibus volume dressed in the standard Library of America livery: a burgundy cloth binding; a black dust jacket discreetly trimmed in red, white and blue; a bound-in ribbon marker.

Solnit’s book River of Shadows (Viking Penguin) is a brilliant account of Muybridge’s life and the “Age of the Technological Wild West”: Muybridge was a great inventor and tinkerer, one of the most original of the landscape photographers (his panoram

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

Stephen Henighan exposes the errors, omissions and problems with the Conservative party's study guide for Canadian citizenship.

Alberto Manguel examines a modern-day book burning and asks: how is this still happening?

A reflection on the complex and often inexplicable process of bibliographic categorizations.

Do shared languages form the natural boundaries of any nation in the world?

Reflections on how a bar in Parc Extension, QC, influenced an eponymous poem about "unprogress, inertia, the failure to learn from mistakes."

Alberto Manguel remembers a golden era in Canadian writing, comments on our current cultural climate and proposes a brighter future.

Parables, cautionary tales, morality plays, allegories—the notion that we can study literary works as texts of ethics is as old as literature.

"And what is the use of a book," thought Alice, "without pictures or conversation?" —Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

I remembered past ordeals: a U.S. official who squeezed out my toothpaste tube on the train from Montreal to Philadelphia, another who hauled me off a bus for a lengthy interrogation.

Bohemia is a good place to grow as a writer, but is it a good place to live one’s whole life?

A misogynist, a racist and an academic walk into a bar...

He is one of the strangest crea

For an English-speaking Canadian who has been exposed to French from an early age, Paris is the most disorienting city in Europe. It is grandiose, but it is mundane.

For most artists, the learning of the craft never ceases, and no resulting work is fully achieved

No one knows quite how to account for the well-established shops in Vancouver, Toronto and other cities that deal exclusively in fountain pens and fine fountain-pen accessories.

According to the numbers, Canada will never produce another Atwood or Findley.

Some years ago, Susan Crean amusingly suggested that nations might be defined or understood through their emblematic children’s books and according to whether the protagonist was male or female.

A bibliophile's worst nightmare: being stuck on a plane with a terrible book. A book mistaken for a work of serious history.

Reconsidering the faintly embarrassing Pierre Berton.

Alberto Manguel compares his life in the French countryside to that of Cain, whom God despised for being a settled crop farmer, and whom he punished by forcing him to wander.

Stephen Henighan argues that audiences used to have different opinions on the news; now they cannot even agree on the terms of debate.

When Frank Warren began collecting the secret thoughts of strangers at PostSecret.com, he inadvertently created a new genre.

Military coups, civil wars, and NAFTA are the cause of trilingual labels in Canadian big box stores.