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ELAINE MCCLUSKEY
Rating Dr. Chestnut

"The waiting room was filled with junkies. During my visit, the doctor almost fell asleep. He sent me for some tests, but lost the results."

SALVATORE DIFALCO
Rat Lake

Another classic story from Geist's 20th Anniversary Collector's Issue.

Missy Marston
Positivity!

"How do people shake off the embarrassment of being themselves, ignore the distastefulness of all that is human and just get along?"

Black & Blue
Sara Cassidy
Beautiful Days

Thinking back to the lovely black turtleneck years, before the crinkles and the white hairs.

JACK MITCHELL
Battle Ready

And so the Marquis of Montcalm • now brought them to the field of warHis handsome face was glad • for in his heart • he knew the hour had come When destiny would be decided • ’neath impregnable Quebec

Bannock, Beans & Black Tea
Bad Men Who Love Jesus

It isn’t what you think. I’m not just another American gringo,chasing old lady luck South.Staring wide-eyed at their beautiful skin,at the bones of the burros,the dogs and the rats. It’s not why I’ve come, to stare, to open my eyesthis wide, sucking the lemon before I drink.

Artists & Writers Colonies: Retreats, Residencies and Respites for the Creative Mind
Michał Kozłowski
Antonia

Was it fever or was it the heat that made Antonia perspire so heavily?

ADAM GILDERS
Another Ventriloquist

In this excerpt from Adam Gilders' Another Ventriloquist, a father builds his daughter a swan's nest, a ventriloquist revises his act, and a beaver terrorizes a neighbourhood.

Always Waking Up in Montreal

"I follow my penis around town for a while, wandering aimlessly through all the women—why do I ever leave this city?"

JACOB WREN
A Kind of Dream Therapy

"And my theory about professional artists was as follows: Artists are not necessarily the most creative or inspired individuals in any given community."

KELSEA O'CONNOR
99¢ Bin

A list of things you can get for 99¢.

MITIARJUK NAPPAALUK
Examinations

“Sanaaq! Qumaq’s blood is too weak and the same is true for Aanikallak’s. They’ll both have to go to hospital!” From Sanaaq by Mitiarjuk Nappaaluk, the first ever Inuit novel.

Drunk Family Dog Trip

Leonard Cohen, a troupe of French-Canadian clowns, a person with an antiquated profession, an unusually tall municipal bureaucrat, Gordie Howe and others coalesce in these randomly generated CanLit premises.

MICHELLE ELRICK
Ethelbert: Ten Days in May

Excerpt from Michelle Elrick's Then/Again.

RAWI HAGE
Empty City

Ten thousand bombs had fallen and I was waiting for death to come and scoop its daily share from a bowl of limbs and blood. I walked down the street under the falling bombs. The streets were empty. I walked above humans hid

Enchantment & Other Demons
CHRIS CASUCCIO
Elephant

sat behind the trailers with julie eatingthe peanut butter sandwiches peter’swife made that morning by the park sink

KEGAN MCFADDEN
Easy

it’s easy: you pour a mug of beer & then a shot of bourbon. you light a match

Drawn & Quarterly
Drawn & Quarterly Volume 5
GALE SMALLWOOD-JONES
Down East

My old pal Chuck asked me and my sister Stella to drive down east with him. We weren’t doing anything else at the time and so we jumped at the chance.

Andrea Routley
Thank You All For Coming

25 reasons to stop talking to my straight friend.

Jonathan Montpetit
The Art of Shaving Oneself

In search of a unified self.

Hàn Fúsēn
Soy Alérgico

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

Jordyn Catalano
Goodbye and Good Luck

A COVID test in the city of a hundred steeples.

David Albahari
The Art of Renaming

Why does one culture give a flower a pretty, poetic name, while another culture names it in a seemingly derogatory way?

Jill Margo
Getting Textual

How to perform a textual analysis of a Facebook message, while under the influence of red wine.

Stephen Osborne
The Future Is Uncertain Country

As men of high seriousness appear on television with their crystal balls, Stephen Osborne shares what he learned about the future from Ray the astrologer.

Phoebe Tsang
Be Careful What You Wish For

A tarot card reading for John Franklin, Arctic explorer and Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen's Land, by Phoebe Tsang.

Stephen Osborne
Snows of Yesteryear

A blizzard hits two days before Christmas, stirring up feelings of trepidation and excitement for the passengers of a bus.

David Mitchell
Imaginary City

Crack addicts, art critics and pregnant waitresses populate David Mitchell's uncanny vision of Vancouver.

Paul DeLorme
Escapist

A Canadian soldier captured at Dieppe in 1942 tells what happened next.

Thad McIlroy
Trial by Water

Ebb and flow in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Sewid-Smith Daisy
Three Stories About Moving

The worst time for your pet to run away is when you are moving, and my family moved a lot.

Thad McIlroy
Hernia Heaven

Thad McIlroy spends the night in hospital to get a hernia—possibly on his left side, possibly on his right—repaired.

Edith Iglauer
Perfect Bite

A warm spring night, a country club dance, a date with an attractive young man—and braces on my two front teeth.

C. E. COUGHLAN
Three Days in Toronto

A trip across the country, with didgeridoo and Trudeau too.

Hàn Fúsēn
Little Trouble in Chinatown

Limits of the language.

Joe Bongiorno
Piledrivin’ Patriots

On parle français icitte!

Joe Bongiorno
Last Laughs

Justin Trudeau and Greta Thunberg attend the Montreal climate march.

Lenore Rowntree
Straight, No Chaser

Women in '50s chic, men in sports jackets, and all manner of musical instruments at a suburban home in Toronto.

Margaret Nowaczyk
Room for More

Narrative text, written and spoken, refines a doctor’s ability to hear a patients’ stories.

Michał Kozłowski
Waiting for Trudeau

Pansy shoes and power suits on parliament hill.

Lorna MacKinnon
Weekend with Dorian

Storm prep for a category 2.

Beth Rowntree
7 lbs. 6 oz.

I looked in her purse and found nothing but scraps of paper so covered in writing there was hardly any white left on the pages.

Michał Kozłowski
Road Trip Supreme

Outlet Malls, Janis Joplin, The Godfather and Taco Bell—on the scent of Ameryka.

JEROME STUEART
Fact
The Dead Viking My Birthmother Gave Me

“The first time I met him, he caused me to float to the ceiling"

Joseph Pearson
Fact
No Names

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.

Minelle Mahtani
Fact
Looking for a Place to Happen

What does it mean to love a band? A friend? A nation?

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.

David L. Chapman
Postcolonial Bodies

Mastery of the self

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.

Michael Hayward
Vanishing Career Paths

Review of "The Last Bookseller: A Life in the Rare Book Trade" by Gary Goodman, and "A Factotum in the Book Trade" by Marius Kociejowski.

JILL MANDRAKE
Part of the Crowd

Review of "Crowded Mirror" by Sheila Delany.

Thad McIlroy
Articulating the Inarticulate Speech of the Heart

Review of "The Emotion Thesaurus: A Writer's Guide to Character Expression" by Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Coming Unravelled

Review of "Unravelling Canada: A Knitting Odyssey" by Sylvia Olsen.

April Thompson
Call Yourself a Writer

Review of "Resonance: Essays on the Craft and Life of Writing" edited by Andrew Chesham and Laura Farina.

Daniel Francis
Known It All

Review of "Know It All: Finding the Impossible Country" by James H. Marsh.

Michael Hayward
No Regrets

Review of "Stories I Might Regret Telling You" by Martha Wainwright.

JILL MANDRAKE
The Doors of Perception Had to Close

Review of "The Acid Room: The Psychedelic Trials and Tribulations of Hollywood Hospital" by Jesse Donaldson and Erika Dyck.

CONNIE KUHNS
Rise Up

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

Anson Ching
Recipe for a Harlequin Romance

Review of "Ring" by André Alexis.

Kathleen Murdock
Doing It Special

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

Kris Rothstein
Decolonizing Canada

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

Kathleen Murdock
Juice Worth the Squeeze

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

Michael Hayward
Seventy-Two Hours to Animal

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

Anson Ching
The Geist of Turkey

Review of "Ethos" directed by Berkun Oya.

Michael Hayward
Is It Edible?

Review of "Mushrooms of British Columbia" by Andy MacKinnon and Kem Luther.

TANVI BHATIA
Heat Death of the Universe

Review of "In the Dream House" by Carmen Maria Machado.

Patty Osborne
Middle Sister

Review of "Milkman" by Anna Burns.

SYLVIA TRAN
Poutine Pilgrimage

Review of poutine at Robson Fries in Tokyo.

Shyla Seller
Postal Lit

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

Michael Hayward
A Longing to Be Far Away

Review of "Fernweh" by Teju Cole.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Eaten to Extinction

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

Michael Hayward
Dancing About Architecture

Review of "Utopia Avenue" by David Mitchell.

Jonathan Heggen
Korean Supper

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

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.

Stephen Henighan
Reheated Races

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

CHERYL THOMPSON
Dismantling the Myth of the Hero

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

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.

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."

LISA BIRD-WILSON
Occupation Anxiety

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

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
Confidence Woman

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

Alberto Manguel
Léon Bloy and His Monogamous Reader

Dogged dedication grants a reader vicarious immortality.

Stephen Henighan
Plague

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

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
Art and Blasphemy

Faith seems to shiver when confronted by art.

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
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.

Michael Hayward
A play is a play is a play

Review of "Gertrude and Alice" produced by United Players of Vancouver.

JEROME STUEART
The Dead Viking My Birthmother Gave Me

“The first time I met him, he caused me to float to the ceiling"

Kris Rothstein
Intelligence Girls

Review of "Censorettes" by Elizabeth Bales Frank.

Dayna Mahannah
The Academy of Profound Oddities

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

Patty Osborne
From Russia With Love

Review of "Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea" by Teffi (trans. Robert Chandler).

Helen Godolphin
ON Piracy (And petrified oranges)

Review of "Our Flag Means Death" created by David Jenkins on HBO Max.

Joseph Pearson
No Names

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.

JILL MANDRAKE
ONCE A PUNK BAND, ALWAYS A CULTURE BEARER

Review of No Fun (the band) and reissued music by Atomic Werewolf Records.

Kelly Bouchard
After the Flames

A wildland fighter witnesses an old burn's second act

Joseph Weiss
An Anti-war Godzilla

Review of "Godzilla Minus One" directed by Takashi Yamazaki.

Michael Hayward
Songs of battle

Review of "Canzone di Guerra: New Battle Songs" by Daša Drndić, trans. by Celia Hawkesworth.

ERNIE KROEGER
Acoustic Memory

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

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Pride and prejudice meets Diana Wynne Jones

Review of "The Midnight Bargain" by C.L. Polk

J.R. Patterson
True at First Flight

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

Minelle Mahtani
Looking for a Place to Happen

What does it mean to love a band? A friend? A nation?

Anson Ching
the universal human

Review of "The Invention of the Other" directed by Bruno Jorge (2022).

Michael Hayward
Getting past the past

Review of "A Primer for Forgetting: Getting Past the Past" by Lewis Hyde.

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.

Michael Hayward
Beyond the event horizon

Review of "Antkind" by Charlie Kaufman.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Haunted House guest

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

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.