Not long ago, late on a Monday afternoon, a man with a camera clambered onto the railing of Lions Gate Bridge in Vancouver in order to get a clear view of the sunset he wanted to take a picture of, and, on stretching his upper body toward the scene t

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Vientiane, the capital of Laos, is a fading one-time French colonial outpost on a spot where a bend in the Mekong River makes room for a large tear-shaped island directly opposite the centre-ville, which runs only far enough back from the riverbank to allow a few commercial streets. The new bridge to Thailand is a short distance way. Thai-style wats and other temples, minor and major, are everywhere.

At first the blackouts in Kathmandu are limited to six hours a week, so in my area we do without lights on Saturday and Sunday evenings. It’s not difficult—candles at dinner, quite charming at first—but then we jump to fifteen hours a week without power, then to thirty-six hours, all within ten days. The govern

When the celebrated English poet Rupert Brooke came to Canada on the train from New York in 1913, he had been warned that he would find “a country without a soul.” The gloomy streets of Montreal, overshadowed by churches and banks and heavy telephone wires, reminded him of the equally gloomy streets of Glasgow and Birmingham.

It took me three tries to get into the States, and even then I had to fake the papers. They wanted to know that I was going to come back to Canada—that I wasn’t going to stay down there.

In September 2001 I had spent a week in Istanbul foraging for remains of Byzantium when I learned from the young, personable and exceedingly neat hotel receptionist, Taner, that his hometown, Iznik, south of Istanbul, was known as Nicaea to the Byzan

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Among the people who live outside the Dominion building in downtown Vancouver, across the street from the cenotaph at Victory Square, is a woman who might be in her late forties and who occasionally turns up in a wedding dress. I’ve never seen her speak to anyone. She simply walks up and holds out her empty hand toward you.

I’m sorry, but you cannot mail any box with writing on it. I see. Perhaps you have a marker with which I can cross out the writing? No, we have no markers here. Perhaps you have some packing tape we can put over the writing? No, we have no packing tape here. How about some of that special blue-and-yellow postal service tape I see there? No, no señorita, you cannot put special blue-and-yellow postal service tape just anywhere.

Will independence bring Godzilla back into my dreams?

Allen Ginsberg is speaking into a tape recorder hanging from the rear-view mirror of my mother’s Volvo, composing a poem with the attitude of one accustomed to the gratitude of posterity.

During the hiatus, a man in a black suit appeared in the Geist Gallery in Toronto and identified himself as a builder of ornithopters, or perhaps he said he was a promoter of ornithopters (this was during the hiatus, when nothing was clear; in any event his field was ornithoptery). I couldn’t remember what an ornithopter was but I could see one in my mind: the question was, what did an ornithopter do? The ornithopter man was accompanied by a well-dressed woman who never stopped smiling.

The Strongest Man in the World liked to set his folding lawn chair out on the asphalt next to his gold Cadillac and stretch out in the sun with dark glasses on his nose and a two-litre carton of milk in one hand.

On the last day of October in Toronto a man in an art gallery said: “Showers should be coming in around 4 pm. They don’t always get it down to the hour like that.”

One day in Vancouver in the late seventies, Pierre Berton and John Diefenbaker appeared at the same time in the book department at Eaton’s department store to sign copies of their new books, which had just been released by rival publishers.

We were setting fires in a dry gulch in the hills at the edge of town, with crumpled sagebrush and bits of tumbleweed and no paper for kindling, and we had to start our own fire with a single match the way they did in the Cub Scout troop that met Thursday nights in the basement of St. Paul’s Anglican church on Battle Street.

When Malcolm Lowry’s shack on the beach at Dollarton, B.C., burned to the ground in 1944, he and his wife Marjorie were able to save the manuscript of only one of the novels that he was working on at the time. A few months later the same manuscript had to be rescued again when the house that friends found for them in Oakville, Ontario, also burned to the ground.

A friend who was thinking of moving back home to Calgary picked up a newspaper in the corner grocery near her place in Vancouver and there was a photograph on the front page of a man in a cowboy hat surrounded by a herd of cattle.

A friend in Whitehorse who was preparing to paddle down the Yukon River with seven other women in a big canoe wrote to say that she was feeling uneasy about paddling in the stern, especially, as she put it in her own words, “when the river gets big after Minto.”

A man I haven’t thought of for nearly thirty years became a smoker of five-cent cigars during the war, and when the war was over he became a despiser of nincompoops and began taking his whisky from a pocket flask engraved with a tiny laurel wreath.

My friend Eric moved to Los Angeles five years ago to become a rock star, only to learn that drummers and bass players in L.A. are unreliable, that nobody in L.A. goes to see live music and that the chicks in L.A. are all crazy. Once he got to wait at a stoplight behind Patricia Arquette, once Britney Spears came into the gym where he worked and one time a bouncer let him into a club ahead of Fabio, and none of these things made him famous.

Not long ago I was having dinner at a small cottage beside a lake in central British Columbia hundreds of kilometres north of Vancouver. Among the guests seated around the table was Elio, a neighbour from down the shore. As we talked he mentioned tha

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The first time I met Andy Warhol he was wearing a black sweater and pants; the second time he was wearing white tie and tails (it was at Lincoln Center). The third time I met him, at Arthur, the disco opened in the sixties by Sibyl Burton, he was wearing a jersey made of silver mail.

In early March 2003, when I arrived in Taiwan to teach English, I took to the streets of Taoyuan County to take some photographs. I was looking for anything—signs, market scenes, strange faces, cityscapes, bus stations, barber shops—but all I could see was dogs. These dogs were not pets, though they may once have been. They were strays—dogs that lived on their own.

Twenty-five years ago in Vancouver, an underground publishing house threw a party in a mansion in a wealthy neighbourhood of curving streets with no sidewalks, to celebrate a new book.

Who today remembers the man who carried Einstein’s head in a box through the streets of Vancouver? We remember clearly the box (dark wood, varnished, the door on brass hinges: what about the latch?) with Einstein’s head in it, a plaster model (was it plastic, perhaps? modelling clay? plasticine?)

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.

In The Stowaway, a novel by Robert Hough (Vintage Canada), the stowaway is Romanian, the crew is Filipino, the officers are Taiwanese and the ship is the Maersk Dubai. When the real Maersk Dubai landed at Halifax Harbour in 1996, its officers were ar

The Tender Bar, the first book by J.R. Moehringer (Hyperion), a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, could be subtitled “The Secret Hearts of Dysfunctional Men.” In his memoir of growing up “fatherless” in Manhasset, Long Island, Moehringer recounts hi

Fifteen-year-old Tracey Berkowitz is on a bus, naked except for a shower curtain. How did she get there? Which pieces of her life story as a misfit are reality and which are fantasy? Director Bruce McDonald tackles these questions by fracturing the s

Every aspect of a book—the page dimensions, paper type, font, length of text line, space between text lines, margin sizes and so on—is the result of a designer’s decision. When these decisions are well made, then reading a book’s text is like reading

The Story of My Face by Kathy Page (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) is about pictures that we don’t want to see or are forbidden to see. The face of Natalie, the main character, was badly scarred in a childhood accident; as an adult she returns to the small t

The Story of Dunbar: Voices of a Vancouver Neighbourhood (Ronsdale Press), edited by Peggy Schofield, feels a bit like a family album.

The Three-Day Novel, which turns nineteen on Labour Day [1996], remains one of Canada's few contributions to the world of literary form. (Milton Acorn's jack-pine sonnet is the only other one I can think of at the moment.) Writing a novel in three da

Why don't we hear more about the books of Mary Meigs, who is one of the great prose writers of our time? On her last tour she appeared in Vancouver for a single reading in a bookstore and then she was gone, uninterviewed and unsung. Did this happen i

The Understanding by Jane Barker Wright (Porcupine’s Quill) offers one of the most convincing fictionalizations of seventies hippie culture I’ve ever read. The novel is the story of the bohemian Whitechapel clan; artsy Solly and Isobel and their broo

The Utne Reader served us coffee aficionados a treat this month, by devoting the November/December issue to a study of the enigmatic bean. Of the nine pieces included in the "Coffee Madness" section, Mark Schapiro's "Muddy Waters" is the most enlight

Kris Rothstein reviews The Waterproof Bible by Andy Kaufman (Random House).

Mr. Ryder, the storyteller in Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled (Knopf), speaks so sincerely, humbly and clearly in the first person that we hear his voice inside ourselves; this inspires trust.

Kris Rothstein reviews The Virgin Spy by Krista Bridges (Douglas & McIntyre).

A thin little book, The Voice Imitator (University of Chicago Press) by Thomas Bernhard, translated by Kenneth J. Northcott, made me laugh out loud in the dark as I sat propped up in bed, my reading light clipped to the back cover, while everyone els

The Way of a Boy is Ernest Hillen's story about his life in a Japanese prison camp in Java during World War Two. Hillen was only a boy at the time—he spent ages seven to eleven in the camp—and instead of looking back from the vantage point of adultho

Greg Gatenby must be stopped. A couple of years ago he edited a collection of remarks about Canada by various foreign writers. Now he has followed up with a second thick collection, The Very Richness of That Past: Canada Through the Eyes of Foreign W

The Wigmaker, C.E. Coughlan’s new book (Smart Cookie Publishing, webspotter.com/smartcookie), is a collection of fourteen short stories, some of which have previously appeared in Geist and other literary magazines.

I’ve read The Wide World Dreaming by JoAnne Soper-Cook (Breakwater) twice now and I’m still surprised by how good it is. It’s written by a woman from St. John’s, Newfoundland, and published by a company there that needs to learn more about good layou

I really want to love Kathryn Bigelow films. She’s a talented director and has never failed to take on challenging projects. She’s a talented director and has never failed to take on challenging projects. My problem with her directing is that she is

Sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll seem a little boring when compared to Lydia Kwa’s concoction of sex, bisexuality, homosexuality, tortured spirits, innocence, desire, betrayal, greed and love in her second novel, The Walking Boy (Key Porter). Kwa deftly

I was eager to read Stephen Miller’s The Woman in the Yard (Picador) because I had enjoyed Miller’s previous mystery novel, Wastefall. His publisher did not respond to my requests for a review copy, but fortunately Miller is a neighbour of mine and w

The first thing that strikes you about The Woman Who Loved Airports (Press Gang) is what a good title it is; happily, the second thing is what a good book it is. The short stories by Marusya Bociurkiw, are mostly about lesbians, although some are abo

Few of us have heard of William Notman, the suggestively named inventor of Canadian photography, and possibly its greatest practitioner. Notman left England precipitately in 1856, to avoid imprisonment for fraud, and shipped out to Montreal.

...The Yuquot Whalers' Shrine (Douglas & Mclntyre/University of Washington Press), the first book-length study of the site. Along with a history of the shrine, Jonaitis presents a precise description of its contents, many photographs and several Firs

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

A writer whose work is among the most important contributions to the literature of the Holocaust is forgotten by almost all.

During the 1950s the RCMP used a machine to identify federal employees who were homosexuals. The name of this bogus device? The "fruit machine," of course.

Richard Stursberg’s memoir of his years in CBC programming raises the question: How did someone with no sympathy for public broadcasting get the job in the first place?

Stephen Henighan argues that efficiency has become a core value that heightens social divisions.

In the world between here and there, what place does one call home?

Stephen Henighan remembers Mavis Gallant, the original nomad of Canadian literature, who wrote some of Canada's finest fiction at Pablo Picasso's café table in Paris.

Stephen Henighan investigates bus travel as one of Canada's last surviving democratic spaces.

Daniel Francis investigates the practice of visiting asylums and penitentiaries as entertainment in nineteenth-century Canada.

How much does a photograph really capture the essence of a person?

Daniel Francis explores the photographer as Vancouver's most interesting historian.

Alberto Manguel reflects on art as a witness to the human desire to be infinite and eternal.

As Canadian leaders look to emulate Asian nations, our government fails to see that the tigers' fatal flaw is the absence of democracy. Or, maybe they do see.

The Great White North gets rebranded and gains some military muscle: goodbye peacenik, hello soldier.

I’ve now read Comment parler des livres que l’on n’a pas lus? and I’m happy to say that I was right.

A French writer whose name I hadn’t heard before, Pierre Bayard, has written a book called Comment parler des livres que l’on n’a pas lus? published by Éditions de Minuit in a collection aptly titled Paradoxe. A number of critics in France have writt

In 2002, when my essay collection When Words Deny the World was published, people started behaving strangely. Ambitious young writers scurried out of sight when I entered a room, as though afraid that irate authors might banish them from Toronto for having spoken to me.

One of the indispensable figures of contemporary journalism is the cutting-edge cultural commentator. The columnist who offers sardonic insights into trends, fashions, television shows and publishing personalities has become an institution.

Since the Wall came down, East German socialists in Prenzlauer Berg are free to sip coffee and talk about art.

When the crash came, Canadians paid the price for the colonized mentalities of their investment advisors.

I met Alejandra Pizarnik in Buenos Aires, in 1967, five years before her death. I had asked her to contribute to an anthology of texts that purported to continue an interrupted story begun in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale: “There was a man dwelt by a churchyard.” She agreed and wrote a haunting piece called “Los muertos y la lluvia,” “The dead and the rain.” The book was never published, but we became friends.

From the trench coat to the Hummer, what does the militarization of style say about us?

In 2007, when The Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories was published, Urquhart sent me a copy. As I examined the table of contents, I felt a dull thunk in my chest.

When General James Wolfescampered up the steep path that carried him onto the Plains of Abraham andinto the pages of the history books, what was he thinking?