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Kris Rothstein
The Rebel Sell: Why Culture Cant be Jammed

From its title, The Rebel Sell: Why Culture Can’t be Jammed (HarperCollins) looked like it might be a source of new ideas about resisting the fast-paced corporate world. But the polemic of the authors, Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, informs us that

Eve Corbel
The Rain Ascends

Joy Kogawa doesn't write easy books. Obasan jump-started the Japanese Canadian Redress movement and Itsuka documented the movement's battles, internal and external. Now Kogawa has taken on another leviathan: sexual abuse of children by clergymen. Her

Patty Osborne
The Rain Barrel Baby

I often can’t remember the title of a book I’ve read, but I can usually remember the colour of its cover, and blue seems to be my current favourite. A recently published blue book, The Rain Barrel Baby by Alison Preston (Signature Editions), takes pl

Ryszard Dubanski
The Professor and the Madman

Simon Winchester's The Professor and the Madman (HarperCollins) is subtitled "A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary," and is a thrilling, chilling yarn about language and a history of lexicography. Its bumptious

Kevin Barefoot
The Real Guide to Canadian Universities

The Real Guide to Canadian Universities compiled by Sara Borins, and written by students, has longer entries than the older Linda Frum Guide, a more adventurous layout and information that could only come from people who know what they're talking abo

Jacquelyn Ross
The Plots Thicken

A review of Garden Plots: Canadian Women Writers and Their Literary Gardens by Shelley Boyd.

Patty Osborne
The Polished Hoe

It’s taken me a month to get halfway through the 462-page hardcover book The Polished Hoe by Austin Clarke (Thomas Allen), which means I’m only halfway through the twenty-four hours during which the story takes place. I like the book—Clarke’s prose i

Daniel Francis
The Quest of the Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia

In Ian McKay's book about Nova Scotia, The Quest of the Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia (McGill-Queen's), post-modern theory collides head-on with Canadian social history, leaving sacred cows splattered all

Kris Rothstein
The Princess Pawn

There’s something comfortingly predictable about a young adult fantasy.

Michael Hayward
The Paris Review Interviews

While considering the list of writers interviewed for each volume of The Paris Review Interviews (Picador) I couldn’t help thinking: “What an amazing literary gathering that would have been!” For the launch of volume i we can imagine a New York penth

Susan Crean
The Pleasure of the Crown: Anthropology, Law and First Nations

The Pleasure of the Crown: Anthropology, Law and First Nations by Dara Culhane (Talonbooks) is the book for anyone who wants to understand the Delga-muukw decision—how it happened, what it means and why the Supreme Court ruling last December has frea

Michael Hayward
The Oxford Companion to Food

The Oxford Companion to Food (2nd edition, Oxford) is an extremely dangerous book.

Patty Osborne
The Optimists

I still can’t figure out why the cover of The Optimists, a novel by Andrew Miller (Sceptre), is covered with blue butterflies when the story is about atrocities committed under the orders of an African politician. Clem Glass is a photographer who doc

Stephen Osborne
The Others Raisd in Me: 150 Readings of Sonnet 150

Stephen reviews The Others Raisd in Me: 150 Readings of Sonnet 150 by Gregory Betts (Pedlar Press).

Blaine Kyllo
The Pianist

The Pianist (TVA/Lions Gate), the Roman Polanski film that took Oscars for directing, acting (Adrien Brody) and adapted screenplay (Ronald Harwood) in 2003, is one of Polanski’s finest films. It is the true story of how Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Jewish m

Geist Staff
The Old Fart

A single copy of the second number of The Old Fart, "a magazine for and by curmudgeons" appeared in the rack at the local tobacconist's just long enough to be snaffled up by a sharp-eyed Geister. This is not a pretty magazine, but it's a pretty funny

Lily Gontard
The Old Way North: Following the Oberholtzer-Magee Expedition

Here, at last, are the uninspired chronicles of a man of few words.

Geist Staff
The Old Farmer's Almanac

The Special Canadian Edition of The Old Farmer's Almanac, from Yankee Publishing Inc., is subtitled "Fitted for Ottawa, with special corrections and calculations for all the Canadian provinces." Items of interest include "Who is the Canadian Farmer?,

Stephen Osborne
The Oldest Basketball Team in the World

In 2005, a team of basketball players from Vancouver, whose average age is seventy-two, arrive at the World Masters Games in Calgary and, after losing three games to teams twenty years and more younger than themselves, receive the gold medal in their

Patty Osborne
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

Sixty-three years after the Holocaust, the phrase “boy in striped pajamas” evokes such a strong image of concentration camps that it is difficult to imagine anyone being innocent of its hidden meaning, but nine-year-old Bruno, the main character in T

Patty Osborne
The Blue Circus

The Blue Circus (Cormorant) by Jacques Savoie, also translated by Sheila Fischman. Same translator, different story. Here the prose flows smoothly from start to finish, and even features the word lexiphone, which I have never heard in any language.

Michael Hayward
The Big Why

The subject of Michael Winter’s novel The Big Why (Anansi) is Rockwell Kent, who was an accomplished artist and book illustrator during the 1930s and who was fascinated by the far north. The Big Why begins when Kent arrives in the isolated coastal vi

Patty Osborne
The Bird Artist

Speaking of the library, the day after I borrowed The Bird Artist by Howard Norman (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), a book my brother had recommended, The Museum Guard (Knopf), also by Norman, arrived in the Geist office. For some reason I chose to read Th

Carrie Villeneuve
The Black Rider: The Casting of the Magic Bullets

This year, January in Vancouver was one long, dark rainy day. Thankfully the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival offered a variety of performances that piqued my curiosity enough to seduce me out of the house, away from the comforts of Kraft

Michał Kozłowski
Road Trip Supreme

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

Jeff Shucard
Home Front

"My father began his shopping spree in the fashion department. He ordered jackets, sweaters, shirts, trousers and shoes. In his new wardrobe he looks like a mummy that has been dressed up for a big night of trick-or-treating."

Hàn Fúsēn
Biking Around with Ondjaki

Just decide what happens and worry about the rest later.

Scott Andrew Christensen
n yer comin' wit me

"have ya been ev’ryweir?"

Stephen Osborne
Wittgenstein Walks (Commercial Drive)

"8.21 Fur Bearers Defender"—the difficulty is to say no more than we know.

Geoff Inverarity
The Woman Who Talks to Her Dog at the Beach

The simple love of dogs.

Stephen Osborne
Halloween Capital of America

This year for Halloween, we creep back into the archives and Stephen Osborne digs deep into his family's history at the Salem witch trials.

BRADLEY PETERS
Mission

Salmon runs, voodoo juice and chewing the fat in Mission.

BRADLEY PETERS
Mission

Salmon runs, voodoo juice and chewing the fat in Mission.

Kristen den Hartog
The Two Lots

Theft, death and don't-mess-with-me expressions—unlocking the family portrait.

Finn Wylie
Road Trip with Cupid

“Want to marry me? My wife she burned me. She just burned me, you know. Now I’m going to court to burn her back.”

RICHARD VAN CAMP
In Memoriam: Edith Iglauer, 1917 - 2019

Respected journalist, Geist contributor and maker of olive sandwiches.

Edith Iglauer
The Prime Minister Accepts

Edith Iglauer invites Pierre Trudeau over for dinner and gets Barbra Streisand as a bonus.

JILL MANDRAKE
Ice Cream Dude

Compassionate, good truck driver, likes kids, likes ice cream—the makings of a no-fail ice cream dude.

Stephen Osborne
Exotic World

In 1989, when Harold and Barbara Morgan opened the Museum of Exotic World in the front rooms of Harold’s commercial painting business in Vancouver, they had been travelling the world every winter for forty-five years and had accumulated many souvenir

Randy Fred
Blind Man Dance

Randy Fred receives his first traditional Nuu-chah-nulth name.

Michał Kozłowski
After the Money

Notes from the Governor General’s Literary Awards.

JILL MANDRAKE
peanut brittle

Jill Mandrake on the surprising effect of peanut brittle.

Hàn Fúsēn
Till Talk

Han Fusen navigates multiculturalism and kookoo sabzi from inside a Persian grocery store.

Jocelyn Kuang
49 Days to the Afterlife

Rice, tea and a trillion dollars of spirit money.

Jeff Shucard
King Zog and the Secret Heart of Albania

The secret heart of Albania is imbued with compassion and a desire to help those in need

David Look
Sleeping Class

Scenic views, fresh muffins and drunk passengers—three days and four nights aboard the Canadian from Vancouver to Toronto.

ANNMARIE MACKINNON
Chicken at Large

What was a lone hen doing in the yard, a few feet from a busy city street?

Matt Snell
Laying on Hands

In Peterborough, Pastor Billy cures arthritis, back pain, bone spurs, lymphoma, stage four liver cancer, sleep apnea and atrial fibrillation

Susie Taylor
We Smoke Our Smokes

From morning to night, there's always someone coming in for smokes and a chat.

Emily Lu
Fact
Love Song for Mosquito

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

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

Trevor Wilson
Socket

Three-day novels tend to get off the ground quickly and move along at a good pace but then, understandably, founder near the end. Socket by David Zimmerman (Anvil), this year’s winner, is an exception: the story never lets up. The novel follows Ronal

Kris Rothstein
Some Girls Do

Clumsy slang and fake angst are what Some Girls Do (do what?) by Teresa McWhirter (Polestar) is all about. While I enjoyed the buoyant conversational style and unconventional characters, I hated McWhirter’s self-conscious portrayal of the subculture

Geist Staff
Songs of Aging Children

Songs of Aging Children, by Ken Klonsky (Arsenal Pulp Press) is a remarkable book of stories about troubled teenagers—people who too rarely find their way onto the centre stage of contemporary fiction. These are very good stories, well imagined and v

Patty Osborne
Soucouyant

In Soucouyant by David Chariandy (Arsenal Pulp Press), a young man whose mother suffers from early-onset dementia pieces together what really happened back home in the Caribbean when she encountered a soucouyant, or evil spirit.

Sewid-Smith Daisy
Sointula

I like fiction when it gives me new ideas and I have to put the book down and pick up a dictionary or run something through Google—or when details I had never noticed before suddenly seem obvious. Sointula by Bill Gaston (Raincoast Books) is about a

Mandelbrot
Solitaire

The Canadian version of Waiting for Godot takes place on Christmas Eve in a tavern somewhere in north Ontario, in a movie called Solitaire. In this one the two guys are played by the barkeep and the patrons, who indulge themselves in not enough drink

Stephen Osborne
Snow Man

Snow Man, the masterful new novel by David Albahari (Douglas & McIntyre), belongs precisely to such a narrative of the world; and its provenance is evident from the first sentence, which takes us up in a moment and sweeps us into the history of langu

Norbert Ruebsaat
Slow Man

The ending of J. M. Coetzee’s Slow Man (Secker & Warburg) is disappointing only because the rest of the novel is so good. The main character, Paul Rayment, suffers a crippling bike accident, becomes infatuated with his care nurse and declares his lov

Patty Osborne
Slow Lightning

In Slow Lightning by Mark Frutkin (Raincoast) we meet Sandro Cénovas, a student who is caught in the middle when civil war erupts in Spain. Threatened with arrest or conscription, Sandro flees Barcelona on a borrowed bicycle and heads for the coastal

Stephen Osborne
Small Apartments

The Winner of the 23rd International 3-Day Novel Writing Contest (a venerable institution) is Small Apartments (Anvil Press), written and pleasantly illustrated by Chris Millis, who lives in Saratoga Springs, New York, and has worked as a “sportswrit

Kris Rothstein
Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood

In Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood (Penguin), Koren Zailckas recounts her history of alcohol abuse and the years she lost. She took her first drink at age fourteen and she soon craved liquor and needed it for any kind of social interaction.

Stephen Osborne
Smilla's Sense of Snow

Two books full of ice and snow: Icefields (NeWest) by Thomas Wharton, and Smilla's Sense of Snow (Doubleday) by Peter Hoeg. Peter Hoeg's sense of snow is utterly convincing: his book had me shivering in August (I actually took to reading it under the

Michael Hayward
Small Dose of the Infinite

"A mild, or homeopathic, dose of the infinite is the crucial element in the aesthetic experience known as the sublime." A review of The Shell of the Tortoise.

Patty Osborne
Slow Dance

Slow Dance (Knopf) by Bonnie Sherr Klein also kept me from sleeping, mostly because I couldn’t put it down. When I saw Klein’s photo on the cover I realized I’d seen her around at literary events and I was interested in this tall, self-confident woma

Carra Noelle Simpson
Skids

Cathleen With’s book of short stories, Skids (Arsenal Pulp Press), takes a closer look at the human beings who inhabit this community and other communities like it.

Helen Godolphin
Sisters of Grass

If you haven't read a book with a horse sex scene before, Theresa Kishkan's Sisters of Grass (Goose Lane) is one place to start. The story reconstructs the life of Margaret Stuart, a young woman living in the Nicola Valley of B.C. at the turn of the

Geist Staff
Signs of the Times

Must the deconstructionists have every last word?—not any more: Signs of the Times by David Lehman (Poseidon) is out in paperback and worth even penny. Here at last, a work that makes sense of the gobbledygook (by identifying it as gobbledygook), the

Geist Staff
Sign Crimes/Road Kill

Joyce Nelson's new book, Sign Crimes/Road Kill (Between the Lines), is her long-awaited collection of thirty essays written over the last ten years. This is an important and eminently useful book: mediascape, mindscape, landscape: Nelson keeps her ey

Michael Hayward
Silk Parachute

A new collection of essays from John McPhee, staff writer at the New Yorker.

S. K. Page
Sign After the X

Marina Roy is the author of Sign After the X (Advance/Artspeak), an entertaining and pretentious volume devoted to the twenty-fourth letter of the alphabet.

Barbara Small
Shooting Water

Shooting Water by Devyani Saltzman, daughter of the filmmaker Deepa Mehta (Key Porter), is a story about politics, love and the making of Mehta’s film Water. Saltzman’s parents divorced when she was eleven, and she chose to live with her father, a de

Darren Barefoot
Shylock

Mark Leiren-Young's Shylock (Anvil) is similar to The Noam Chomsky Lectures. In this one-man drama, Jon Davies, a Jewish actor who portrays Shylock in a cancelled production of The Merchant of Venice, is accused of betraying his fellow Jews and being

Jill Boettger
Short Journey Upriver Toward Oishida

Last summer I hiked up to a fire lookout in Alberta to visit a friend who lives there for part of each year, and tucked in my sturdy pack was Roo Borson’s Short Journey Upriver Toward Oishida (McClelland & Stewart), which I was taking to my friend as

Kris Rothstein
Shadow Company

Mercenaries and muscle for hire are the subjects of Shadow Company, a cinematic investigation into the privatization of the use of force. The film was born when a university buddy of the director, Nick Bicanic, took a job as a private military contra

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.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
WEST COAST FORAGING

Review of "Edible and Medicinal Flora of the West Coast: British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest" by Collin Varner.

Adrian Rain
Schrödinger’s Kids

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

Kendra Heinz
Big Dread at West Ed

Review of "Big Mall: Shopping for Meaning" by Kate Black.

Anson Ching
A history of outport rivalry

Review of "The Adversary" by Michael Crummey.

Emily Lu
Love Song for Mosquito

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

Anson Ching
Fables Galore

Review of "Galore" by Michael Crummey.

Peggy Thompson
Beautiful and subversive books

Review of "Jo Cook and Perro Verlag Books by Artists: The Unreadable Sacred," organized by the Simon Fraser University Art Gallery.

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.