The simple love of dogs.

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.

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

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

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

“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.”

Respected journalist, Geist contributor and maker of olive sandwiches.

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

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

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 receives his first traditional Nuu-chah-nulth name.

Notes from the Governor General’s Literary Awards.

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

Jill Mandrake on the surprising effect of peanut brittle.

Rice, tea and a trillion dollars of spirit money.

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

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

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

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

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

The Museum of Communism is easy to find thanks to the museum’s adver­tis­ing slo­gan: We’re above McDonald’s.

Before I opened for Joyce Carol Oates at her reading at Harbourfront in Toronto, we had dinner: Oates and her husband, Raymond Smith; the organizer, Greg Gatenby; and me.

Who knew my dad's old pen was a famous Parker 51 Vacumatic?

Veronique Darwin revisits her childhood journal, from hearing ghosts in kindergarten to staring at hotties in grade seven.

“Never write a line you don’t mean,” said Carver. “And don’t ever imag

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.

Betsy Warland's new book is Blood-root: Tracing the Untelling of Motherless (Second Story), an unnecessarily clunky title for such a strong and wonderful book. There are encounters in this book between mother and daughter and daughter and father that

Another elegant Archipelago production is Posthumous Papers of a Living Author by the Austrian modernist Robert Musil.

When I finally got around to reading Postwar, I was amused to discover that Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks was reading it too. This is the first time I have found myself reading the same book as a character in a novel.

In his series of books called Preposterous Fables for Unusual Children (Bayeux Arts), Judd Palmer revisits traditional tales and rewrites them with unlikely heroes and peculiar details.

Although I am not a woman, did not grow up in the late '6os just a few blocks up from the infamous Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco and am not the child of enlightened parents who strove against mainstream American materialism, I jumped two-footed int

I had fun in the gifted class in elementary school because my parents never pressured me to become a sensation in spelling, or science—or, like Maya, the ethereal figure in Nancy Huston’s tense novel Prodigy (McArthur), a brilliant ten-year-old piani

A list of overused book review terms from achingly beautiful to woefully inadequate.

Marc Diamond's new novel, Property (Coach House), belongs to the tour-de force class, and will appeal most to those who appreciate ts-d-f: the whole thing is three paragraphs long: a real typesetter's nightmare. The first paragraph occupies 123 pages

In Africa the AIDS/HIV pandemic is quickly, and not so quietly, killing two generations of Africans. Stephen Lewis’s book Race Against Time (Anansi) begins by introducing the eight Millennium Goals for Africa as established by the United Nations Mill

I read to put myself to sleep at night but Push (Knopf) by Sapphire had no soporific effect. Long after I turned out the light and rolled over on my side to sleep, I thought about Claireece Precious Jones, the hero of this bright red book.

Putrid Scum by Crad Kilodney (Charnel House) is one of those titles many of us would perhaps rather not have to ask for in the bookstore (we got our copy through an intermediary) even if we could (few bookstores carry him) but, being a Kilodney book,

Rainer Maria Rilke and Lou Andreas-Salomé: The Correspondence (Norton) collects all of the extant letters exchanged by Rilke and Andreas-Salomé , a patron and fellow author, and (as the jacket copy describes her) “a key fin de siècle intellectual” fi

A subtitle in search of a title: Racism in Canada (Fifth House). Where are the marketing people with nerves of steel, when we need them?

When the Vancouver Public Library workers went on strike, I read more of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe than I had intended.

>After filming Elliot Lovett, an American G.I., for a study of soldiers and their music, the Australian documentary filmmaker George Gittoes followed Lovett back to his home in the Brown Sub ghetto in Miami. The neighbourhood he found there was every

The Canadian director Gary Burns’s take on the urban and suburban condition has always been fictional, until now. Burns teams up with Jim Brown to tackle life in the cul de sac in Radiant City, a film that combines commentary on design, culture and p

We get a lot of mail at the Geist offices, much of it from people who "read the mag from cover to cover!!" But some Geist readers pay closer attention than others. One such sharp-eyed fan wrote recently to ask: "Just what is a 'techno-otipimist' (Num

A Gibsons, B.C. reader wrote in response to my review of Press Gang Publishers' catalogue (Geist 1), including that it was "not stapled, so recycle worry-free." She advises that recycling-wise, staples are much more acceptable than glue and are pulle

The French writer Julien Gracq, who will be ninety-seven this year, is a living link to the era of Louis Aragon and André Breton. Gracq has avoided the kind of recognition that most modern writers crave (he refused the Prix Goncourt in 1951), and his

Young James Laxer prayed for a normal life. He grew up in a committed Communist household, an experience he describes in Red Diaper Baby: A Boyhood in the Age of McCarthyism (Douglas & McIntyre).

Republic Pictures was an independent genre film studio active in the 1940s and ’50s, specializing in westerns and action-adventure serials—the movies kids went to see on Saturday afternoons. But while the movies the studio released were B films on fi

Fact and fiction are intermingled in this "novel" about growing up Mennonite in the Fraser Valley.

From my parents’ bed that night, Lévesque looked like a man—maybe the first man in CBC history—who had lost two countries at the same time.

The most comprehensive DVD (and the most fun) to hit my machine lately is the special edition release of Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. There are so many reasons to have this DVD in your library I hardly know where to start.

Phrase books are tools of cultural globalization—but they are also among its casualties.

When building a nation, cultural riches can be lost.

Coming to harbour in a new world.

Science and the arts fulfil their functions to help us survive through the imagination.

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

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

“Have patience” and “Tomorrow” are two inseparable locutions in the Portuguese tongue.

For a brief period the band CANO gave shape to the dream of a bilingual Canadian culture.

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

"The hemispheric context reveals the roots of the residential school system...Destroying Indigenous cultures was a positivist policy from Patagonia to Dawson City."

What we do when we absorb words from a screen—and we haven’t yet evolved a verb for it—is not reading.

Libraries are not only essential in educating the soul, but in forming the identity of a society.

Our society is formed on the assumption of a healthy immune system.

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

Dogged dedication grants a reader vicarious immortality.

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

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.

The newspaper wars aren’t what they used to be.

A package-deal paradise reputation curtails gringo knowledge of Dominican life.

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

Faith seems to shiver when confronted by art.

Must artists declare their moral integrity?

Without air travel, family networks might have dissolved long ago.

There’s something not quite right about the grid on which the game is played.