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.

"I never went looking for them."

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.

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

Observatory Mansions by Edward Carey (Crown) sports a beautiful dust jacket that can be read over and over again, and the chapter starts are accompanied by wonderful illustrations by the author. The lives of the denizens of Observatory Mansions are s

The pictures in Nuvisavik: The Place Where We Weave, edited by Maria Von Finckenstein (McGill-Queens) are of tapestries that tell the story of traditional Inuit life. The tapestries were woven by members of a weaving studio in Pangnirtung, Baffin Isl

Erin Mouré’s book of poems, O Cadoiro (Anansi), is seductive in its physical beauty (kudos to the designer) and in the great romance of the verse, which reminded me of the infamously passionate Letters of a Portuguese Nun, a collection of letters tha

Oblique Litanies by Paul Davies (ECW Press) is a collection of short personal essays—the author calls them "conversations," but "monologues" would be more accurate: they are really half-conversations, the other halves of which are understood to belon

Novels in Three Lines is an addictive collection of brief items—“true stories of murder, mayhem, and everyday life”—that were first published anonymously in 1906 in the French newspaper Le Matin; I dare you to eat just one.

When a group of people who have been silent begin to speak up, one of the first literary forms to emerge is the memoir. So it is with the twenty-two women whose stories are gathered in Nobodys Mother: Life Without Kids, edited by Lynne Van Luven (Her

Because I am a fairly new fan of Martin Amis's novels, I picked up slim Night Train (Knopf Canada) with much interest. Amis is well known for novelistic experimentation (his Time's Arrow is written in reverse time), and he doesn't disappoint here.

Blood flows vigorously in Cormac McCarthy’s new novel No Country for Old Men (Knopf), in which a grim and emotionless gunman methodically sets out to trace and recover the spoils of a drug deal gone wrong in the badlands just north of the Mexican bor

In Night of the Prom (Thirteenth Tiger Press), four authors offer original takes on the prom tradition in poetry and prose.

In November while on a trip to Toronto, I went to see the play No Great Mischief, based on the novel by Alistair MacLeod. It was a foot-stompin’ good time (only in very small measure due to the No Great Mischief Special—Glen Breton single malt at $7.

Becky McEachern reviews Nikolski by Nicolas Dicker (Vintage).

Alberto Manguel's News from a Foreign Country Came (Random House) has been sufficiently praised by the reviewers; now that it's out in paperback the rest of us can add our praises to theirs. This is, quite simply, a great book with a big theme.

The indomitably named Smoking Lung launched five more small books into the world in October 1998, at an extravaganza held at the Western Front in Vancouver. Smoking Lung has become proficient in the art of launching chapbooks and getting them distrib

In his novel Never Let Me Go (Vintage Canada), Kazuo Ishiguro creates an alternate world in which clones are produced, raised in residential school and taught math, history, art and social skills. As they accumulate knowledge, it dawns on these child

Newfoundland will be five hundred years old in 1997 (a hell of an age for any part of North America), and Breakwater Books of St. John's is marking the event with the Newfoundland Poetry Series, a collection of handsome slim volumes, of which they pl

Alice, the protagonist of Nelcott Is My Darling by Golda Fried (Coach House), has left a sheltered life in Toronto to attend McGill University, where she joins the film society and makes friends who are dangerous and cool—all while trying to hold on

Patty Osborne reviews Never Going Back by Antonia Banyard (Thistledown).

Adolf Hitler is the second man examined in the film Neighbours: Freud and Hitler in Vienna by Manfred Becker, which played recently at the Pacific Cinémathèque in Vancouver. Both the narrator of the film and the psychologist who spoke after the scree

Gregory Scofield's new book of poems is Native Canadiana (Polestar) and it's very good. So is Lola Lemire Tostevin's latest collection, Cartouches (Talonbooks), which came out last year and which we've been meaning to mention here ever since, along w

As Kerouac later described it, the letter was “a work of literary genius. Neal, he was just telling me what happened one time in Denver, and he had every detail. It was just like Dostoevsky. And I realized that’s the way to tell a story—just tell it!

Richard Gwyn tries to get away with two puns in the title of his book Nationalism Without Walls: The Unbearable Lightness of Being Canadian (McClelland & Stewart), trading off on both André Malraux's cultural manifesto of the 1960s Museum Without Wal

The seven stories told in Natasha and Other Stories by David Bezmozgis (HarperFlamingo Canada) merit much of the hullabaloo that the book has received in the international press: simple sentences, rigorous verbs and dialogue that makes you feel like

I like good deals but sometimes a good tip will serve the same purpose. I was happy to find in Josey Vogels's My Messy Bedroom (Véhicule Press) an intriguing tip on buying bras.

The Havana restaurant on Commercial Drive was an appropriate choice of venue for My Name is Rachel Corrie, an intimate one-woman show adapted by Alan Rickman from the correspondence and journals of activist Rachel Corrie and presented by Teesri Duniy

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.