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

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

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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."

Last month we had a visit from Eliz­abeth Anderson, who hails from Min­neapolis, Minnesota, where she is a graduate student at the state univer­sity. Her field of study is Canada, and she also writes about Canada for Utne Reader.

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A new dispatch from Geist's 20th Anniversary Collector's Edition."How did more shots fired represent what we miss in life, in city life?"

Before people 'poked' and 'tweeted', waving was how we said hello and goodbye to each other.

A nervous kid from Canada becomes the king of the basketball courts in Venice Beach.

"Campbell River, best fishing in the world. They do every­thing for you. All you have to do is bring yourself and decide what you're going to drink."

Stephen Osborne recollects his encounter last summer with Robert Service outside a cafe in Vancouver. Service, who wrote the poem "The Cremation of Sam McGee," died in 1958.

In Drukpa Kunley's monastery in Bhutan, Daniel Collins experiences a birthday blessing among phallic iconography.

Was that a ghost?Why don't you have room service?We used up all your Kleenex. Sorry.Read more entries from a guest book found in room ten of a hotel in British Columbia's Okanagan Valley.

Author Michael Turner riffs on D.M. Fraser's short fiction Class Warfare, one of the ten classic Vancouver books reissued for Vancouver's 125th birthday.

Stephen Osborne memorializes D.M. Fraser, a tiny ancient man at the age of twenty-six, who wrote sentences that made you want to take him (and them) home with you.

Plumb the depths of the Aquafit subculture with our embedded nonagenarian.

A decadent feast of poetry; but what will it do to your heart?

In this city of tall buildings, the most imposing shadows are cast by women.

Four days after Sandy, Shucard's parents are in good humour, very brave and very glad to see him—and unsure if he's taking them to Bolivia, Azerbaijan or Canada.

Francois-Marc Gagnon explores curiosity as the opposite of indifference.

Michael Turner questions a US-curated exhibit of Canadian art that exoticizes Canadian artists while suggesting they are un-exotic.

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At a taping of George Stroumboulopoulos Tonight, Chelsea Novak meets Canada's boyfriend.

A feminist writer/publisher sought out stories of the partition of India: atrocity and hardship, looting, rape and murder committed by and upon Hindu, Muslim and Sikh.

Sheila Heti spends a day in a diner in Toronto observing the enormous EUCAN electrified garbage can at the corner of College and Bathurst.

Thad McIlroy undergoes a hernia operation—and with Neil Diamond and the right kind of drugs, it might only take ten minutes.

Ted Bishop visits Edith Iglauer and her husband Frank in their seaside home, where he is treated to a fast drive on a winding road, conversation on good books, and a lesson on what it's like to grow old gracefully.

Stephen Osborne compares the "major problem" of loitering in 1968 Vancouver to the 2012 Occupy movement.

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What does it mean to love a band? A friend? A nation?

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.

Mastery of the self

Somewhere in the sweat and ache and muscle I carved a new shape for myself that made more sense.

"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

When Paul Martin was prime minister, and before that finance minister, he was seen and known to be a politician rather than a private operator in the higher echelons of global capital; indeed, his business persona cast only the faintest of shadows. A

The crisis unfolds in the Arctic Ocean where Queequeg meets his end on a iceberg, Ahab meets his flippery adversary face to face, and Ishmael alone lives to tell the tale. You have to be completely drunk to watch this (Orca is the title; it's in the

Peops: Portraits & Stories of People (Soft Skull) by the Canadian artist Fly is a fabulous exploration of the American underground through comics and stories.

No less harm in God is apparent in Brian Payton’s Hail Mary Corner (Beach Holme), set in a Vancouver Island seminary school in the 1980s. Bill, his best friend Jon and the rest of their pack run the school, promoting disorder, breaking the rules and

When Bill Buford took over Granta magazine in 1979 it was a burned-out case, bankrupt and generally unread. Seven issues later he cut a deal with Penguin that gave the magazine access to a worldwide distribution network and a stable of big-name autho

If you like crime fiction, you will enjoy the latest Ian Rankin thriller, Black & Blue (Orion), whose title is taken from the Rolling Stones album of the same name. John Rebus, Rankin's police detective, seems at the outset just another cop-story pro

The four dozen or so essays in Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative, edited by Mary Burger, et al. (Coach House Books), contain much loose talk of “limitations” and “delimitations,” of “linearity,” of being “forced to conform”—all of which are

George Fetherling, in his Biographical Dictionary of the World’s Assassins (Random House), offers a useful five-part typology of assassins that appears to be a first of its kind. (Type fives seek personal revenge, type threes are hired mercenaries, t

At twenty I didn’t know anything. About that time I had a Jewish boyfriend named Alain who lived with his parents in a wealthy area of town.... Now Michel Mielnicki, with John Munro, has written Bialystok to Birkenau: The Holocaust Journey of Michel

Billy Elliott is surely the most offensive movie of the season. Rocky II goes to ballet school and proves that High Culture can be good for working class stiffs if only they would stop drinking beer long enough to make sacrifices for children who wis

In Beyond the Horizon (Doubleday), Colin Angus lays claim to “the first human-powered circumnavigation of the planet” and spends 374 pages documenting and defending this claim (there’s also a DVD).

In the lifelong friendship between John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts, it was Steinbeck who wrote the books, won the Nobel Prize in Literature and garnered the public attention (both positive and negative), but in Beyond the Outer Shores (Raincoast), a b

While I don’t come across many stories about Winnipeg, Between the Stillness and the Grove by Erika de Vasconcelos (Knopf) may be the first one I’ve read about Armenia. In this book the stories of two Armenian women are interwoven to create a deep an

The recently published Better Living In Pursuit of Happiness From Plato To Prozac (Viking) by Mark Kingwell, a Canadian philosopher and intellectual celebrity, provides an in-depth analysis of our pleasure-centric society and the concept of happiness

People who live in the North speak of leaving as “going outside.” I recently returned to the North after a lengthy absence and found myself reading two books about the effects of the “outside,” and about the things that brought me here in the first p

In the most successful sections of Be Quiet by Margaret Hollingsworth (Blue Lake), the author imagines Emily Carr’s six-week stay in Ste. Agathe, France in 1911, by writing the diary of Winifred Church.

Reading Be Near Me by Andrew O’Hagan (McClelland & Stewart) is like watching a slow-motion traffic accident: you’re not sure how it will end, but you’re sure it will end badly.

The next time I was up at the cabin I read Beach Boy, by Ardashir Vakil (Hamish Hamilton), an orange book that caught my eye on the New Arrivals rack at my local library. The book's narrator is a precocious eight-year-old named Cyrus Readymoney, whos

Beat (2000) stars Canada’s own Kiefer Sutherland (who recently got his groove back in the Fox series 24) in an amazing performance as William Burroughs in the early days—before he truly started writing and before he shot his wife Joan during a botche

Michael Hayward reviews Basho: The Complete Haiku, written by Matsuo Basho and translated by Jane Reichhold (Kodansha).

I didn't expect to like Bastion Falls by Susie Moloney (Key Porter) because the back cover describes it as spine-tingling. I don't usually like having my spine tingled, but Bastion Falls was a pleasant surprise.

In 1995, New Star Books in Vancouver launched a series of short (about 100 pages), inexpensive books about nonmainstream subjects in the history and culture of British Columbia. The series is called Transmontanus (that’s “across the mountains” for th

Patty Osborne reviews Baking Cakes in Kigali by Gaile Parkin (McClelland & Stewart).

The close proximity of my new apartment to a repertory cinema has caused me to go through a movie-going renaissance. Unfortunately, most of my discoveries have been in the mediocre to bad category.

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.

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

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

“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.

"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 on UNDRIP, reconciliation, and the anxiety felt by Indigenous people in Canada.

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.

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

Dogged dedication grants a reader vicarious immortality.

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

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.

Faith seems to shiver when confronted by art.

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

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.