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Billie Savage Gates
Spot Fire

I am down in the cabin and Ross, who is eighty feet up in the fire tower, sees smoke. He tries to report it but his radio isn’t working and nobody can understand him. They phone him back on the cell: does he need the water bombers? He says no, it’s just a spot fire. In that moment a huge gust of wind blasts through the cabin, blows a towel off a rack, slaps it against the valve of the water cooler and turns on the water.

Quade Hermann
The Gist of Everything

My mother stands at the top of the stairs, thin as a skeleton and reeking of booze. “Are you drunk?” I ask. “No,” she says. “Have you had anything to drink today?” “No,” she says. Lies, all lies. There are always more.

Robert Hunter
Launching Greenpeace

A first-hand account of Greenpeace's first expedition to stop U.S. underwater nuclear testing on September 15, 1971.

ANDREW BODEN
Shack Stories

Mr. Maillard scared me from the moment he stepped from his red Chevy pickup. He stood six inches shorter than me and weighed sixty pounds less, but exuded tough son-of-a-bitch like cologne.

GEORGE BOWERING
She Carries

She carries my chair,she carries my walker,she carries my commode,she drops my heart   so hard it breaks into a hundred pieces

ANGELA MAIREAD COID
Show Business

A young girl gets a taste of show business by acting as Sleeping Beauty in a sideshow.

Stephen Smith
Sir John's Lost Diaries

The wind blows. The sun dwindles. The ice waits.

AMY DENNIS
Skin Graffiti

Use your grandmother’s knitting needles if they are steel and sharp, her crochet hooks. Hell, you could even use the split edge of this table. Slide your inner arm against the jagged grain, watch the splinters scrape you raw.

EMILY SCHULTZ
Soft Ice Cream

Sadness has no reasons. Sadness is a luxury of spare time, a piece of pie leftover, the blueberry’s skin caught between your teeth, the black blear of happiness.

The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara & Lenin Play Chess
TROY JOLLIMORE
Tom Thomson in Transit

His wallet’s stuffed with currency from allmanner of countries not in business now;his camera aches for discontinued film.

KATIE DAUBS
To Be Read by My Children in the Event of My Demise

In Katie Daubs' short fiction, a father writes a deathbed letter to his children, explaining the surprising way he really met their mother.

CRAIG SAVEL
Traversing Leonard

"He had white hair at every angle, a paunch, and he didn’t bathe much. Colleagues joked about the Leonard Condensate, one whiff of which reduced matter into muck."

MARY MEIGS
Tripwire

They felt comfortable in their resemblances, too comfortable to note that the resemblances contained differences like tripwires cunningly laid and hidden.

ERIC DUPONT
Trouble at the Henhouse

"I now know that every omelette, every angel cake, every soufflé, and every bucket of Colonel Sanders’ fried chicken brings us closer to a better, more intelligent world, where cruelty and pettiness do not exist."

CARY FAGAN
My Father's Picasso

"You know what I think it's worth?" Goldie said. "Fifteen bucks for the frame."

CARY FAGAN
My Father's Picasso

"You know what I think it's worth?" Goldie said. "Fifteen bucks for the frame."

Rhonda Waterfall
Night Kitchen

The phone rings at 11:30 at night and as soon as you hear your father’s voice you know something bad has happened.

No One Explains Things To Dogs

No one explains things to dogs. The voice that’s missing has left its aroma everywhere,along with the faint stale smells of those who used to be here:

ANTONINE MAILLET
Not Really French

So how can we be Québécois if we don’t live in Québec? Well, for the love of all that’s holy, where the hell do we live, then?

GORAN SIMIC
Old People and Snow

My beautiful old ones are disappearing slowly. They simply leave, without rules, without a farewell.

Veronica Gaylie
Old Timer Talkin’

Uncle Tom lies in St. Paul’s Emergency pacemaker jumping like a sockeye salmon while he teaches two nurses four verses of Danny Boy.

Pacific Meats & Frozen Foods, Inc.
Paul Martin & Companies: Sixty Theses on the Alegal Nature of Tax Havens
David Albahari
The Art of Renaming

Why does one culture give a flower a pretty, poetic name, while another culture names it in a seemingly derogatory way?

Jill Margo
Getting Textual

How to perform a textual analysis of a Facebook message, while under the influence of red wine.

Stephen Osborne
The Future Is Uncertain Country

As men of high seriousness appear on television with their crystal balls, Stephen Osborne shares what he learned about the future from Ray the astrologer.

Phoebe Tsang
Be Careful What You Wish For

A tarot card reading for John Franklin, Arctic explorer and Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen's Land, by Phoebe Tsang.

David Mitchell
Imaginary City

Crack addicts, art critics and pregnant waitresses populate David Mitchell's uncanny vision of Vancouver.

Stephen Osborne
Snows of Yesteryear

A blizzard hits two days before Christmas, stirring up feelings of trepidation and excitement for the passengers of a bus.

Thad McIlroy
Trial by Water

Ebb and flow in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Paul DeLorme
Escapist

A Canadian soldier captured at Dieppe in 1942 tells what happened next.

Sewid-Smith Daisy
Three Stories About Moving

The worst time for your pet to run away is when you are moving, and my family moved a lot.

Thad McIlroy
Hernia Heaven

Thad McIlroy spends the night in hospital to get a hernia—possibly on his left side, possibly on his right—repaired.

C. E. COUGHLAN
Three Days in Toronto

A trip across the country, with didgeridoo and Trudeau too.

Edith Iglauer
Perfect Bite

A warm spring night, a country club dance, a date with an attractive young man—and braces on my two front teeth.

Hàn Fúsēn
Little Trouble in Chinatown

Limits of the language.

Joe Bongiorno
Piledrivin’ Patriots

On parle français icitte!

Joe Bongiorno
Last Laughs

Justin Trudeau and Greta Thunberg attend the Montreal climate march.

Lenore Rowntree
Straight, No Chaser

Women in '50s chic, men in sports jackets, and all manner of musical instruments at a suburban home in Toronto.

Margaret Nowaczyk
Room for More

Narrative text, written and spoken, refines a doctor’s ability to hear a patients’ stories.

Michał Kozłowski
Waiting for Trudeau

Pansy shoes and power suits on parliament hill.

Lorna MacKinnon
Weekend with Dorian

Storm prep for a category 2.

Beth Rowntree
7 lbs. 6 oz.

I looked in her purse and found nothing but scraps of paper so covered in writing there was hardly any white left on the pages.

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."

Scott Andrew Christensen
n yer comin' wit me

"have ya been ev’ryweir?"

Hàn Fúsēn
Biking Around with Ondjaki

Just decide what happens and worry about the rest later.

Stephen Osborne
Wittgenstein Walks (Commercial Drive)

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

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.

Norbert Ruebsaat
Modern Egyptian Art

It seems ironic that an authoritative history of modern Egyptian art should be written on the west coast of Canada, until one reads Modern Egyptian Art by Liliane Karnouk (American University in Cairo Press) and realizes that Egyptian artists, citize

Stephen Osborne
Blood-root: Tracing the Untelling of Motherless

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

Michał Kozłowski
Posthumous Papers of a Living Author

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

Daniel Francis
Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

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.

Jill Boettger
Preposterous Fables for Unusual Children

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.

Barry Kirsh
Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood

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

Kris Rothstein
Prodigy

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

Prolifically Ubiquitous

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

Geist Staff
Property

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

Lily Gontard
Race Against Time

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

Patty Osborne
Push

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.

Geist Staff
Putrid Scum

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,

Michael Hayward
Rainer Maria Rilke and Lou Andreas-Salomé: The Correspondence

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

Geist Staff
Racism in Canada

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?

Carrie Villeneuve
Raymond Chandler Omnibus

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

Kris Rothstein
Rampage

>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

Kris Rothstein
Radiant City

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

Eve Corbel
Readers' Notes

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

Eve Corbel
Readers Write'n'Recycle

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

Michael Hayward
Reading Writing

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

Rose Burkoff
Red Diaper Baby: A Boyhood in the Age of McCarthyism

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).

Blaine Kyllo
Republic Pictures

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

Sarah Maitland
Renovating Heaven

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

Kent Bruyneel
René Lévesque and the Parti Québecois in Power

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.

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.