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All
dispatches
essays
reviews
columns
Lily Gontard
Lady Franklin’s Revenge

I bought Revenge and began my education in how to manipulate history and maintain your honour as a Victorian lady. McGoogan’s book is an in-depth account of a detail-oriented, uncompromising, highly motivated and intelligent woman.

Barbara Zatyko
Larry's Party

There's nothing exotic about Larry's Party (Random House), by Carol Shields: it could have taken place in Windsor. In fact, I think I went to high school with Larry Weller, an all-around ordinary guy.

Patty Osborne
Laurence

Laurence, by France Théoret (Mercury, translated by Gail Scott), is also about a young woman in Quebec, but in the 1930s a woman’s struggle to make her life her own was harder. Laurence comes from an impoverished farming family whose daughters have t

Patty Osborne
L'Art de conjuguer

Shopping for books is one part of Christmas that I really enjoy, and this year I found all the books I needed by walking between four bookstores clustered near the centre of town. At Manhattan Books I picked up two bright green hardcover copies of Be

Patty Osborne
Ledoyt

I picked up Ledoyt by Carol Emshwiller (Mercury House) because it looked a lot like Annie (Polestar), a book I reviewed in Geist No. 19-20.

Lily Gontard
Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name

Deception and some kind of love are the themes that thread through the journey that is Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name by Vendela Vida (HarperCollins). As one of the editors of the infamously cool magazine The Believer, Vida has a sharp pen a

Michael Hayward
Let Me Finish

Early in his memoir Let Me Finish (Harcourt), Roger Angell describes his mother Katherine White and his stepfather E. B. White as “a successful New Yorker couple—she a fiction editor; he a writer of casuals and poetry and the first-page Comment secti

Randy Gelling
Léolo

When the movie director Jean Claude Lauzon died in a plane crash over northern Quebec, his death was noted in a two-sentence paragraph accompanied by a small photograph in the local newspaper. In the photograph he looks like the actor in his first fi

GILLIAN JEROME
Life After Birth

Child-rearing manuals cropped up with a vengeance in the latter half of the twentieth century after Dr. Benjamin Spock produced Baby and Child Care—the all-time best-selling book in American history, second only to the Bible, despite advice such as “

Patty Osborne
Life-25: Interviews with Prisoners Serving Life Sentences

Life-25: Interviews with Prisoners Serving Life Sentences (New Star), by P.J. Murphy and Lloyd Johnsen, surprised me.

Michael Hayward
Levels of Loss

In Levels of Life, Julian Barnes writes about the grief experienced after losing his wife to cancer.

Michael Hayward
Letters of E. B. White: Revised Edition

White was also a prolific correspondent, as the Letters of E. B. White: Revised Edition (HarperCollins) shows: over 700 pages, indexed and footnoted, updated from the first edition with letters from 1976 to 1985.

Cassia Streb
Lifter

Lifter (by Crawford Kilian, Beach Holme) is a book about a boy who learns how to fly when he is in a state that is not quite awake, but not quite asleep. It is a really neat story in the way the author describes what it would be like to fly and you a

Geist Staff
Life Skills

Life Skills (Coteau Books) is a collection of stories by Marlis Wesseler, who, according to the publisher's blurb, "lives in Regina with her husband Lutz and son Evan"—an example of the biographical minutiae that book lovers learn to ignore—or at lea

Lily Gontard
Living to Tell the Tale

Living to Tell the Tale (Knopf) is the first of three autobiographical books by García Márquez. It has come out in paperback, a year after the hardcover edition, and it is a big book that you want to have in your collection, if only for the storytell

Jill Boettger
Living in the World as if It Were Home

The first time I sat down to read Tim Lilburn’s book Living in the World as if It Were Home (Cormorant), I went to it with the kind of mind and feeling that I take to my favourite shelf of music at Megatunes or my Grandma’s cheese and Hovis bread san

Joelle Hann
Lonesome Monsters

Speaking of jarring but effective writing, Bud Osborn's Lonesome Monsters (Anvil) successfully dramatizes the harsher side of urban life. This book, though it doesn't break new ground in form or content, depicts the Main-and-Hastingses of North Ameri

Patty Osborne
Loose End

Ivan E. Coyote loves her mom and dad, her extended family, her godson and her dogs—hell, she even loves her neighbours, some of whom are deeply “normal” and others of whom are lesbian, homosexual, trans-gendered and undecided—and she writes stories a

Mandelbrot
Lost Whole Moose Catalogue

Lost Moose is already famous for the Lost Whole Moose Catalogue, a beautifully designed monster book that has everything in it you need to know to actually survive in the Yukon, and even more if you want to survive somewhere else while thinking about

Lost in a Good Book

The Eyre Affair and Lost in a Good Book, two novels by Jasper Fforde (New English Library), are easy to read and chock-full of smart puns, literary references and grammatical gags that are fun to fall for. The protagonist is a detective named Thursda

Sam Macklin
Louis Riel: A Comic Strip Biography

[Chester Brown's] latest collection, Louis Riel: A Comic Strip Biography (Drawn & Quarterly), is a fascinating look at the westward expansion of colonial Canada.

Mandelbrot
Louis the 19th King of Television

Are the Québecois the only moviemakers in North America with a sense of humour? Latest evidence to hand would certainly suggest so: three movies in the local video place this season and all winners.

Patty Osborne
Louis the 19th: King of the Air Waves

Louis the 19th: King of the Air Waves (Malofilm) is a Quebec film that's all about TV-land. When Louis wins a contest that puts him on TV twenty-four hours a day, both he and his mother are over the moon.

Patty Osborne
Mad Hot Ballroom

When Mad Hot Ballroom, a film produced and directed by Marilyn Agrelo, played at The North Shore International Film Series the audience laughed, cried and cheered while the kids on the screen learned the tango, the rhumba, the foxtrot, the merengue a

Stephen Osborne
Phantom Ride with Schopenhauer

Stephen Osborne's broken cellphone leads him to Schopenhauer, the Titanic publishing industry and historical Phantom Rides.

Jan Feduck
Hurricane Diary

Jan Feduck faces Frenchish food, vomit and guys from Ontario when her ferry from the Magdalen Islands is caught in a hurricane.

Dylan Gyles
Floating

“Don’t try to make anything happen,” the calm voice said. Dylan Gyles visits a sensory deprivation float tank.

Stephen Osborne
A Bridge in Pangnirtung

Stephen Osborne attends a gallery opening for Elisapee Ishulutaq, an 89-year-old Inuit artist who has been making prints in Pangnirtung, Nunavut for 40 years.

Stephen Osborne
Secrets of the City

Stephen Osborne discovers that some of the most startling papers in the city archives are the letters and diaries of the first archivist himself.

Umar Saeed
Arguments

A young Canadian man visits family in Pakistan to settle a generational feud.

CONNIE KUHNS
Signs of Life

Does a house that has been home to four generations of one family still hold their electricity?

Norbert Ruebsaat
Caleb and Opa on Holiday

Opa, you know that sometimes people say things, well, indirectly? They don’t say everything that they mean?

Florence Grandview
Lights Out at the Jubilee

At the Jubilee Cinema, the manager carries an imitation pistol in the John Dillinger style.

David Wisdom
UJ3RK5

A Vancouver rock band made up of musicians, photographers and at one time, a prominent sci-fi writer.

Michelle Fost
Long Distance

Shared family memories of burnt baked goods.

Edith Iglauer
Mad About Harry

A new pet kitten becomes part of the family.

Jill Boettger
City Under Water

The Calgary floods left behind a stew of knee-deep mud, and waterlogged piles of couches, fridges, books, toys, artworks, chairs, carpet, drywall...

Stephen Osborne
The Coincidence Problem

That dreamlike quality causes rational minds to dismiss the moment as “only a coincidence.”

Stephen Osborne
Scandal Season

Headlines featuring crack-smoking mayors and election fraudsters.

Sheila Heti
Off the Pedestal

Rick laughed. I walked away. I was irritated at Henry, at Lee for getting stoned and being paranoid and leaving without saying goodbye, at Rick, at everyone.

Stephen Osborne
Road King

Two women on motorcycles: one in the dead zone of Chernobyl, and the other in the cactus country of Kamloops.

Stephen Osborne
First Time, Last Time

The first time losing a game of Scrabble and the last time taking a train cross-country.

Stephen Osborne
Writing Life

"One way or another we all write out of this place,” comments Patricia Young in Writing Life (McClelland & Stewart), edited by Constance Rooke, a collection of essays by fifty writers, most of them Canadian, about the process and perils of authorship

Devon Code
My Prizes: A Memoir

An account of the circumstances surrounding seven literary honours bestowed on a writer.

Stephen Osborne
Pathfinder Deluxe

A young man comes into possession of a 1957 Pontiac, modelled after one owned by a legendary pianist.

Veronica Gaylie
Melon Balls in Space

Shiny bras and worn-in sweaters—the clothes do make the woman.

Veronica Gaylie
Cowichan Sweater

You had to sleep in it and fall in love in it.

Ven Begamudre
Memory Game

A writer talks about personal health issues and their connection to his family history.

Stephen Osborne
Everything Is Perfect

In 1946, a young bride writes home about her month-long sea voyage to her new home on Baffin Island.

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.

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.

David L. Chapman
Postcolonial Bodies

Mastery of the self

CONNIE KUHNS
There is a Wind that Never Dies

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

Sarah Leavitt
Small Dogs

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
Symbiosis in Warsaw

Ola Szczecinska returns to Warsaw to visit her grandmother, and to keep from losing her memories.

Patty Osborne
The Woman Who Loved Airports

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

Mandelbrot
The World of William Notman

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.

Daniel Francis
The Yuquot Whalers' Shrine

...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

Patty Osborne
The Year of Magical Thinking

On an evening in December 2003, Joan Didion's husband John sat down at the dinner table and talked to her while she tossed the salad. One minute he was talking and the next he wasn't, because he was slumped over in his chair, dead. Nine months later

Lily Gontard
There Is a Season

There Is a Season (McClelland & Stewart), Patrick Lane’s meditative account of the year after he returned from rehab and the solace he found in his garden, is an honest telling of the past and present life of a husband, teacher, alcoholic, drug addic

Norbert Ruebsaat
Then We Take Berlin

Stan Persky has been hailed as a great prose stylist. He has also been hailed as a possible pervert (the word wasn't used, but that was the implication) for his interest in young boys. Young men, rather. Male prostitutes. Both statements are true. Th

Patty Osborne
The Wrong Boy

In The Wrong Boy, by Willy Russell (Doubleday), seventeen-year-old Raymond Marks hitchhikes from his hometown of Manchester to Grimsby, where his Uncle Bastard Jason has found him a job on a building site. Raymond considers Grimsby to be a pox hole b

Kris Rothstein
This Divided State

It is strange that a documentary [This Divided State] about a public speech at a small college in Utah should be a near-perfect film about culture, politics and the heights of absurdity. In 2004 the student government of Utah Valley State College inv

Geist Staff
Thinking Out Loud: On the Personal, the Political, the Public and the Private

Thinking Out Loud: On the Personal, the Political, the Public and the Private (Random House) is a collection of Anna Quindlen's syndicated newspaper columns. By definition the book shouldn't work: journalism, especially this kind, is necessarily ephe

Helen Godolphin
This Place Called Absence

This Place Called Absence by Lydia Kwa (Turnstone) is another debut novel. It traces the lives of two ah ku (prostitutes) living in turn-of-the-century Singapore and intertwines their stories with that of Wu Lan, a Vancouver psychologist struggling t

Jill Boettger
Thinking and Singing: Poetry and the Practice of Philosophy

Thinking and Singing: Poetry and the Practice of Philosophy is Lilburn’s most recent project, a collaboration with Jan Zwicky, Don McKay, Dennis Lee and Robert Bringhurst. Together they think and sing about eros, dreaming, naming, rhythm and ruminati

Rose Burkoff
Thom Pain (based on nothing)

Early in 2006 the Western Theatre Conspiracy in Vancouver mounted a daunting one-man show, Will Eno’s new play Thom Pain (based on nothing), at Performance Works on Granville Island. Scott Bellis starred as Thom, a rumpled neurotic loser who spills h

Patty Osborne
Three Day Road

Just before the fiftieth anniversary of VE Day, I read Three Day Road (which takes place during World War I) by Joseph Boyden (Viking Canada), so for once I was not put off by the CBC’s obsessive coverage of the occasion. Three Day Road is about snip

Daniel Francis
Thunderstruck

Writer, Erik Larson, seems to have taken out a patent on a new kind of true crime story. In his recent book, Thunderstruck (Random House), Larson juxtaposes the development of wireless telegraphy by Guglielmo Marconi with the case of Dr. Hawley Cripp

S. K. Page
Three Songs by Hank Williams

Three of the stories in Calvin Wharton’s new book, Three Songs by Hank Williams (Turnstone), have appeared in Geist, and it is a pleasure to see them again in this handsome volume. The cover photograph pictures diverging highways somewhere in Texas,

Michelle Adams
Three Seasons

The film Three Seasons, a collage of small stories from modern Saigon, aroused contradictory feelings in me. The opening sequence was ravishing: at dawn in a blossom-covered lake surrounding a disused temple from some much earlier incarnation of Viet

S. K. Page
Three Pagodas Pass: A Roundabout Journey to Burma

George Fetherling has been exploring again, this time halfway around the world, part of the time on a cruise ship from hell. Three Pagodas Pass: A Roundabout Journey to Burma (Subway), Fetherling’s fifty-somethingth book, contains no maps, which is a

Michael Hayward
Time Was Soft There

Jeremy Mercer’s Time Was Soft There (St. Martin’s Press) is an account of “A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co.” In January 2000, Mercer was staying in a seedy hotel in the north of Paris and running out of money when he dropped in at Shakespeare & C

Stephen Osborne
Ticknor

Relief from the enumerative school of writing can be found in Sheila Heti’s first novel. Ticknor (Anansi) is written in the manner of the great narratives of eastern Europe and South America, of Kafka and Stevenson. Neither the subject nor the settin

BILLEH NICKERSON
Titanic: The Canadian Story

Titanic: The Canadian Story by Alan Hustak (Véhicule Press) offers a Canadian spin on the 130 passengers aboard the Titanic who were bound for Canada when the great ship went down. With the exception of the overwritten foreword by John P. Eaton, an A

Alana Mairs
Tiger Eyes

Alana Mairs reviews Tigers Eyes by Judy Blume (Bradbury Press).

Joelle Hann
Tokyo Cowboy

Canada Post hired me in January, and at first I worked at a station in my own neighbourhood, meaning I left my house at 6:48 a.m. to arrive at 6:52 a.m. Life seemed fair; I could have been posted in the suburbs. It lasted only two weeks, but back in

Barbara Zatyko
To Every Thing There Is a Season: A Cape Breton Christmas Story

To Every Thing There Is a Season: A Cape Breton Christmas Story (McClelland & Stewart) is written by Alistair MacLeod and illustrated by Peter Rankin.

Norbert Ruebsaat
Topic Sentence: A Writer's Education

I first read Stan Persky’s essay/story “Topic Sentence” in

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.

CHERYL THOMPSON
Dismantling the Myth of the Hero

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

Stephen Henighan
Reheated Races

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

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.

LISA BIRD-WILSON
Occupation Anxiety

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

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."

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
Plague

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

Alberto Manguel
Léon Bloy and His Monogamous Reader

Dogged dedication grants a reader vicarious immortality.

Stephen Henighan
Confidence Woman

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

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
A Fairy Tale for Our Time

What can the Brothers Grimm teach us about the state of our economic system? Everything.

Alberto Manguel
Art and Blasphemy

Faith seems to shiver when confronted by art.

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.

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.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Haunted House guest

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

Michael Hayward
Beyond the event horizon

Review of "Antkind" by Charlie Kaufman.

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.

Peggy Thompson
More precious than rubies

Review of "Rubymusic" by Connie Kuhns.

Debby Reis
A not-totally-accurate introduction to the azores

Review of the Netflix series "Rabo de Peixe" (2023) created by Augusto de Fraga.

Michael Hayward
A Russian Brother and his sister

Review of "A Russian Sister" by Caroline Adderson.

Kris Rothstein
The messy back of history

Review of "My Grandfather’s Knife: Hidden Stories from the Second World War" by Joseph Pearson

Christine Lai
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

Sara de Waal
Little Women, Two Raccoons

Hit everything dead on, even if it’s big

Peggy Thompson
Have Mercy

Review of "Mercy Gene" by JD Derbyshire.

Michael Hayward
subterranean mysteries

Review of "Underland" by Robert Macfarlane.

Margaret Nowaczyk
Metanoias

The names we learn in childhood smell the sweetest to us

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Championing Trees

Review of "Tracking Giants: Big Trees, Tiny Triumphs, and Misadventures in the Forest" by Amanda Lewis.

Patty Osborne
Crossing Borders

Review of "Solito: A Memoir" by Javier Zamora

Michael Hayward
The Two Roberts

Review of "Turn Every Page" directed by Lizzie Gottlieb

Ian Roy
My Body Is a Wonderland

Maybe my doctor has two patients named Ian Roy, and I’ve been sent the other Ian’s file

Peggy Thompson
A moment with holden

Review of "Holden After & Before: Love Letter for a Son Lost to Overdose" by Tara McGuire.

JILL MANDRAKE
POINTS OF INFLECTION

Review of "Some of the Puzzles" by M.A.C. Farrant.