You can’t break eggs without making an omelette.

Use the board games you unearthed during isolation to reinventclassic games for our times.

A few years ago, someone left a pocket-sized photo album on my desk with an unsigned note stuck on the cover that said I “might know what to do with it.” Inside, glued one to a page, are twenty-four photographs of Essondale, the mental hospital in N

Here they are our people.

After hearing survivors’ stories, nothing can ever surprise me.

The long road to decency and justice.

Chileans remember when their government was overthrown by Augusto Pinochet on September 11, 1973.

People have asked: What’s it like? How’s it been? Are you scared?

"We got into Zellers through jewellery, purses and umbrellas, stockings and underwear and into brassieres, where our momentum deserted us. Now we were both in unfamiliar territory."

Poets trashed hotel rooms long before rock bands made it fashionable.

The Olympic Games left a trail of moments: a rare moment, a Canadian moment, a you moment, a me moment...

A poetic tribute to men's rear-ends.

Aboard a stuck SkyTrain, reading Samuel Pepys's account of the Great Fire of London.

A writer uncovers a family connection with a sweet English confection.

Personal narratives by Indigenous and settler contributors describing significant first contacts that brought new insights.

When taking hallucinogenics, more is better, within limits.

Where in the used bookstore would mysteries by Raymond Chandler be shelved—in Novels or in Fiction? Stephen Osborne remembers the summer pleasures of reading outdoors and used bookstores.

"My father believes the world is coming to an end, yet he commits his life to curing the sick." Dispatch by Marko Sijan.

A man with a chainsaw boarded the number 7 bus at about 7:45 a.m., when I was on my way to work in downtown Ottawa.

Bud was one of the few who’d seen Stewart’s face as it was.

Enjoy the fresh kebab while your freshly dented fender gets fixed.

A COVID test in the city of a hundred steeples.

“Excuse me, are you the customer with the peanut allergy?”

In search of a unified self.

25 reasons to stop talking to my straight friend.

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.

Review of "Bunker: Building for the End Times" by Bradley Garrett.

Review of "Shadow of Doubt: The Trials of Dennis Oland, Revised and Expanded Edition" by Bobbi-Jean MacKinnon.

Review of "Before I Was a Critic I Was a Human Being" Amy Fung.

Review of "nedi nezu (Good Medicine)" by Tenille K. Campbell.

Review of "Ring" by André Alexis.

Review of "Rise Up: Songs of the Women's Movement" Co-Produced by Jim Brown, Heather A. Smith, and Donna Korones.

Review of "Milkman" by Anna Burns.

Review of "Clyde Fans" by Seth.

Review of "The Overstory" by Richard Powers.

Review of "Captains of the Sands" by Jorge Amado.

Review of "Qallunaat! Why White People Are Funny" Zebedee Nungak and Mark Sandiford.

Review of "Crying in H Mart: A Memoir " by Michelle Zauner.

Review of "Utopia Avenue" by David Mitchell.

Review of "Lost Feast: Culinary Extinction and the Future of Food" by Lenore Newman.

Review of "Fernweh" by Teju Cole.

Review of "Long Live the Post Horn!" by Vigdis Hjorth.

Review of poutine at Robson Fries in Tokyo.

Review of "The Old Man in the Mirror Isn’t Me" by Ray Robertson.

Review of "Becoming Vancouver: A History" by Daniel Francis.

Known and Strange Things (Random House) is a collection of Teju Cole’s essays and other short pieces, many of which have previously appeared in The New Yorker and elsewhere online.

Cole’s most recent book, Blind Spot (Random House), a generous hardcover printed on glossy stock, presents Cole’s photographs on recto pages, with brief, allusive essays on the facing verso page.

Patty Osborne on wacky kid tales and the joy of animated storytelling.

Michael Hayward on dharma trails, lawless landscapes and Hemingway's corner table.

Sylvia Tran on cheesy haunted houses, destiny's child and capitalism.

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.