Space travel, world religions and quotes from Pascal are just a few of the topics covered in these little phone calls between friends.

Walking along the streets of Paris, watching thousands of tourists using their digital cameras, I remember the way my father held his old Kodak when he took photographs.

Walking along the streets of Paris, watching thousands of tourists using their digital cameras, I remember the way my father held his old Kodak when he took photographs.

Banff: a collection of scenic views and a setting for the Avant-Garde?

On the night of the last Wednesday of February 1884, at about ten o’clock, a gang of armed men entered a farmhouse near Sumas Lake in southern B.C., woke the inhabitants at gunpoint and took away with them a teenage boy who was being held in the cust

Michel Lambeth's photo of Milton Acorn brings back memories of dancing, love poetry and a revolution.

Onstage a group of writers and critics sat in a semicircle and spoke earnestly about whether or not a national literature could exist in two languages.

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Mrs. Higgins lived with her legless brother and her blind husband in a tall, narrow old house in Nottingham. The room I rented from her in the 1950s was just below her sitting room, where she kept a life-size portrait of Lenin.

The dog turns his butt to the stinging spray and wind but my boyfriend and I face the water, watching the massive waves crash on the shore. We are drenched in seconds and we have to shout over the wind. It’s exhilarating.

According to legend and prophecy, this child would possess the second sight.

When I was living in New York in the 1960s, almost everyone I knew was walking or running to the office of some psychiatrist.

"A rookery of dead ends and curved lanes. Everywhere heaps of debris. Pigs rooting in eyes." Explore Manchester during the Industrial Revolution, in poem.

Public bombings have a profound effect on cities, even if the bomb is a coconut filled with beans and rice.

I had my car at the hotel but snow was expected, and driving home alone in a snowstorm around the hairpin curves edged with deep ravines on Highway 101 was the last thing I wanted to do.

She was a conversationalist, a home builder and a deliverer of calves. Those who loved Ursula will miss her adventurous soul.

When I was twelve my father enrolled me in a typing course from which I emerged typing with two fingers.

First published in Geist #30 and now in the 20th Anniversary Collector's Edition.

Last month in Calgary a friend showed me the way to Louise Bridge by sketching a map with her fingertip on the dust jacket of The Wolf King, a book by Judd Palmer that we had been admiring at her kitchen table.

One instinctive action saves a life in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

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Veronica Gaylie encounters Trevor Linden, the Greatest Canuck Who Ever Lived, in economy class.

Does the individual have difficulty finding words, finishing sentences or naming people or things?

From Mapping a Sense of Place: The Photographs of Manfred Buchheit, 1972-1995, an exhibition curated by Bruce Johnson for the Art Gallery of Newfoundland and Labrador.

The Health Hotline can only do so much for the exotic animals swimming in a hole on your forehead.

Some

Another classic story from Geist's 20th Anniversary Collector's Issue."I felt disoriented, almost light-headed, as though I were slightly stoned or moving inside a dream."

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.

The seven stories told in Natasha and Other Stories by David Bezmozgis (HarperFlamingo Canada) merit much of the hullabaloo that the book has received in the international press: simple sentences, rigorous verbs and dialogue that makes you feel like

Richard Gwyn tries to get away with two puns in the title of his book Nationalism Without Walls: The Unbearable Lightness of Being Canadian (McClelland & Stewart), trading off on both André Malraux's cultural manifesto of the 1960s Museum Without Wal

As Kerouac later described it, the letter was “a work of literary genius. Neal, he was just telling me what happened one time in Denver, and he had every detail. It was just like Dostoevsky. And I realized that’s the way to tell a story—just tell it!

Gregory Scofield's new book of poems is Native Canadiana (Polestar) and it's very good. So is Lola Lemire Tostevin's latest collection, Cartouches (Talonbooks), which came out last year and which we've been meaning to mention here ever since, along w

Adolf Hitler is the second man examined in the film Neighbours: Freud and Hitler in Vienna by Manfred Becker, which played recently at the Pacific Cinémathèque in Vancouver. Both the narrator of the film and the psychologist who spoke after the scree

Patty Osborne reviews Never Going Back by Antonia Banyard (Thistledown).

Alice, the protagonist of Nelcott Is My Darling by Golda Fried (Coach House), has left a sheltered life in Toronto to attend McGill University, where she joins the film society and makes friends who are dangerous and cool—all while trying to hold on

Newfoundland will be five hundred years old in 1997 (a hell of an age for any part of North America), and Breakwater Books of St. John's is marking the event with the Newfoundland Poetry Series, a collection of handsome slim volumes, of which they pl

In his novel Never Let Me Go (Vintage Canada), Kazuo Ishiguro creates an alternate world in which clones are produced, raised in residential school and taught math, history, art and social skills. As they accumulate knowledge, it dawns on these child

The indomitably named Smoking Lung launched five more small books into the world in October 1998, at an extravaganza held at the Western Front in Vancouver. Smoking Lung has become proficient in the art of launching chapbooks and getting them distrib

Alberto Manguel's News from a Foreign Country Came (Random House) has been sufficiently praised by the reviewers; now that it's out in paperback the rest of us can add our praises to theirs. This is, quite simply, a great book with a big theme.

Becky McEachern reviews Nikolski by Nicolas Dicker (Vintage).

In November while on a trip to Toronto, I went to see the play No Great Mischief, based on the novel by Alistair MacLeod. It was a foot-stompin’ good time (only in very small measure due to the No Great Mischief Special—Glen Breton single malt at $7.

In Night of the Prom (Thirteenth Tiger Press), four authors offer original takes on the prom tradition in poetry and prose.

Blood flows vigorously in Cormac McCarthy’s new novel No Country for Old Men (Knopf), in which a grim and emotionless gunman methodically sets out to trace and recover the spoils of a drug deal gone wrong in the badlands just north of the Mexican bor

Because I am a fairly new fan of Martin Amis's novels, I picked up slim Night Train (Knopf Canada) with much interest. Amis is well known for novelistic experimentation (his Time's Arrow is written in reverse time), and he doesn't disappoint here.

When a group of people who have been silent begin to speak up, one of the first literary forms to emerge is the memoir. So it is with the twenty-two women whose stories are gathered in Nobodys Mother: Life Without Kids, edited by Lynne Van Luven (Her

Novels in Three Lines is an addictive collection of brief items—“true stories of murder, mayhem, and everyday life”—that were first published anonymously in 1906 in the French newspaper Le Matin; I dare you to eat just one.

Oblique Litanies by Paul Davies (ECW Press) is a collection of short personal essays—the author calls them "conversations," but "monologues" would be more accurate: they are really half-conversations, the other halves of which are understood to belon

Erin Mouré’s book of poems, O Cadoiro (Anansi), is seductive in its physical beauty (kudos to the designer) and in the great romance of the verse, which reminded me of the infamously passionate Letters of a Portuguese Nun, a collection of letters tha

The pictures in Nuvisavik: The Place Where We Weave, edited by Maria Von Finckenstein (McGill-Queens) are of tapestries that tell the story of traditional Inuit life. The tapestries were woven by members of a weaving studio in Pangnirtung, Baffin Isl

Observatory Mansions by Edward Carey (Crown) sports a beautiful dust jacket that can be read over and over again, and the chapter starts are accompanied by wonderful illustrations by the author. The lives of the denizens of Observatory Mansions are s

For the folks out there who are indifferent to what’s going on in Iraq and Afghanistan, this book seems to whisper, “Stop eating your grilled Gruyère cheese with Roma tomatoes and red onion on open-face sourdough long enough to read me, if you please

The Old Farmer's Almanac (Yankee Publishing Inc.) does not believe in chaos theory. "We believe," state its editors in the 1994 edition which arrived in the mail recently, "nothing in the universe occurs haphazardly." Which explains how the Almanac c

After fol

Stephen Henighan exposes the errors, omissions and problems with the Conservative party's study guide for Canadian citizenship.

Alberto Manguel examines a modern-day book burning and asks: how is this still happening?

Do shared languages form the natural boundaries of any nation in the world?

A reflection on the complex and often inexplicable process of bibliographic categorizations.

Reflections on how a bar in Parc Extension, QC, influenced an eponymous poem about "unprogress, inertia, the failure to learn from mistakes."

Alberto Manguel remembers a golden era in Canadian writing, comments on our current cultural climate and proposes a brighter future.

I remembered past ordeals: a U.S. official who squeezed out my toothpaste tube on the train from Montreal to Philadelphia, another who hauled me off a bus for a lengthy interrogation.

"And what is the use of a book," thought Alice, "without pictures or conversation?" —Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Parables, cautionary tales, morality plays, allegories—the notion that we can study literary works as texts of ethics is as old as literature.

Bohemia is a good place to grow as a writer, but is it a good place to live one’s whole life?

He is one of the strangest crea

A misogynist, a racist and an academic walk into a bar...

For most artists, the learning of the craft never ceases, and no resulting work is fully achieved

For an English-speaking Canadian who has been exposed to French from an early age, Paris is the most disorienting city in Europe. It is grandiose, but it is mundane.

According to the numbers, Canada will never produce another Atwood or Findley.

No one knows quite how to account for the well-established shops in Vancouver, Toronto and other cities that deal exclusively in fountain pens and fine fountain-pen accessories.

Some years ago, Susan Crean amusingly suggested that nations might be defined or understood through their emblematic children’s books and according to whether the protagonist was male or female.

Reconsidering the faintly embarrassing Pierre Berton.

A bibliophile's worst nightmare: being stuck on a plane with a terrible book. A book mistaken for a work of serious history.

Stephen Henighan argues that audiences used to have different opinions on the news; now they cannot even agree on the terms of debate.

Alberto Manguel compares his life in the French countryside to that of Cain, whom God despised for being a settled crop farmer, and whom he punished by forcing him to wander.

When Frank Warren began collecting the secret thoughts of strangers at PostSecret.com, he inadvertently created a new genre.

When you find yourself laid up in a sterile hospital room, which books do you want to have with you?