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

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.

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

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

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

Ebb and flow in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico.

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

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

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

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

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

Limits of the language.

On parle français icitte!

Justin Trudeau and Greta Thunberg attend the Montreal climate march.

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

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

Pansy shoes and power suits on parliament hill.

Storm prep for a category 2.

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.

Outlet Malls, Janis Joplin, The Godfather and Taco Bell—on the scent of Ameryka.

"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."

"have ya been ev’ryweir?"

Just decide what happens and worry about the rest later.

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

The simple love of dogs.

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.

Healing the Dead by D.F. Bailey (Douglas & McIntyre)—"the screaming came in a raw, primal fury"—is a coming-of-age melodrama with all the maddeningly irrelevant details with which melodramas are wont to fill out their pages: no one speaks without sip

British books and movies are some of the best exposés of the evils and absurdities of the class system, but a new book by a Canadian introduces another class system. In Shani Mootoo’s novel He Drown She in the Sea (McClelland & Stewart), the main cha

I get nervous when I can't remember what happened to me when I was younger. My parents and my grandparents never seem at a loss when telling their past, and I wonder if I have defective neurons that prevent me from storing information properly. Josef

The talk show on the radio was full of praise for Suzanne North's first mystery novel (Healthy, Wealthy and Dead, from NeWest) so I paid a visit to the local mystery bookshop to buy a copy and the clerk was excited about it too. "It's about time Cana

Hiding Edith by Kathy Kacer (Second Story) is a novel for children based on the childhood of Edith Schwalb, who fled Austria with her family to escape the Nazis, and was only able to do so because her father had been a popular soccer star. The family

For me, reading a book by Douglas Coupland is a guilty pleasure, like reading James Michener or John Grisham—substantial enough to be worthwhile, yet trashy enough that I turn the cover inward as I walk down the street with it.

The eight and a half pieces in John Berger’s new book here is where we meet (Bloomsbury) are described by the publisher as “fictions,” but could equally be read as fragments of autobiography. In “Lisboa,” the narrator, a man named John of Berger’s ag

If you only see one short film this year, see the brilliant and witty Hinterland Who s Who: The Wood Spider, made by Andrew Struthers, a two-minute masterpiece combining old-school National Film Board aesthetic with a very modern tale of culture and

The Historical Atlas of Canada by Derek Hayes (Douglas & McIntyre) contains reproductions of more than three hundred antique maps, which comprise a true history of the occupation of a continent. This is a beautiful book, almost impossible to put down

Feeling crabby, I picked up Tom Wayman’s High Speed Through Shoaling Water (Harbour). Wayman, bless his poetic heart, uses clear images and familiar structure.

Two recent books nicely illustrate, for me, the disturbing state of contemporary publishing. The first book, Hemingway: The Toronto Years (Doubleday) by William Burrill, a Toronto journalist, is a handsome example of the book-making art.

When I heard on the radio last month that Thomas Raddall had died, I was shocked and embarrassed instead of saddened because ever since discovering his books ten years ago I had thought of him as a real old-timer who must already have died. I came up

The title character in Binnie Kirshenbaum's Hester Among the Ruins is on the trail of a different kind of treasure. She is the rare historian who does not teach but makes a living from her popular books about medieval life.

In High Tide: The Truth About Our Climate Crisis (Picador), Mark Lynas, a British journalist, describes his travels around the world in search of disaster stories.

Aside from a grade school crush on Richard Brodeur, I have never been able to work up much enthusiasm for hockey, but when two hockey plays were running concurrently in Vancouver last winter I seized the chance to prove myself Canadian without having

Even at age eighty-one, John Berger has lost none of his fire, which smoulders and flares in the seventeen “Dispatches on Survival and Resistance” in Hold Everything Dear (Pantheon). Berger has an innate empathy for the disadvantaged and the disenfra

Kris Rothstein reviews Holding Still for as Long as Possible by Zoe Whittall (Anansi).

In Hotel Sarajevo (Turtle Point Press), Jack Kersh has succeeded in translating his story into the thoughts and feelings of Alma, a fourteen-year-old girl who is caught in the hell of Sarajevo under siege. Alma is part of a group of war orphans who l

Robert MacLean's new murder mystery, Home from the Party (Ronsdale) has a lot going for it: exotic location (Aegean island), a Greek cop who went to the University of Toronto to study under Andreas Papandreou (who lived in Canada until the Colonels w

I went to see Hotel Porter, a musical revue showcasing the songs of Cole Porter, with my father, who could actually afford the tickets. The characters' lives played like a Hollywood movie—all passion and crisis—and the renditions of "You're the Top,"

Patrick Lane's first book of fiction is finally out. How Do You Spell Beautiful (Fifth House) is, not surprisingly (if you know Lane's poetry), not for the faint of heart.

Prurience or Voyeurism? One of the other anyway (more thematic convergence): this time it was How Insensitive, Russell Smith’s first novel (Porcupine’s Quill) the cover of which is emblazoned with black and white photographs of three young women in v

Both nature and nurture must have inspired Elizabeth May in her book How to Save the World in Your Spare Time (Key Porter). May is the executive director of the Sierra Club of Canada; she is also the daughter of Stephanie Middleton May, an activist w

How Stories Mean (Porcupine's Quill), a collection of essays on Canadian fiction edited by John Metcalf and Tim Struthers, is a good example of the blue box approach to book-making: almost everything in it is recycled. At least 39 of the 47 essays co

Memories lie because they build on memories. I think that I remember something, but in fact I remember remembering it, and so on through countless layers of memory. Every memory is a mise en abyme.

Begging the question of what can be defined as “form.”

The crowds learned that they could not act effectively in the present without confronting the past, specifically the historical treatment of indigenous people.

On the screen, only the image—not the word—can become the world.

It all started with a zesty little book about getting old.

Donald Creighton was a bigot and a curmudgeon, a cranky Tory with a chip on his shoulder. He was also the country’s leading historian, who changed the way that Canadians told their own story.

The novelist can often better define reality than the historian.

"We know that life-altering and possibly cataclysmic change is coming, and we continue to live as we have always done."

"Since the beginning of time (the telling of which is also a story), we have known that words are dangerous creatures."

Lacking in drama and embarrassingly undemocratic, Canada’s origins owe a lot to old-fashioned politics and not much to European battles or transcontinental railways.

"Authenticity is the essential quality of all travel literature, imaginary or real."

Alberto Manguel examines the rich symbology of the fist, a primal symbol of rebellion and grief, across cultures and history.

"Cross-country skiing offered me the reassurance sought by the immigrant who is excluded from his locality’s history: a viable alternate route to belonging."

Stephen Henighan asks: what if you don't have a tidy answer to "Where are you from?"

Aboriginal people are creating a new version of Canada, and non-Aboriginals can lend a hand or get out of the way—Daniel Francis on the new Canadian narrative.

Daniel Francis discusses Canada's failing mental health care system and its long history of mistreatment.

The writer who is loved by all, by definition, neglects literature’s prime responsibility: to offend.

"Resistance to wars is as much a Canadian tradition as fighting them." Daniel Francis discusses alternative histories, anti-draft demonstrations and the divisive nature of war.

"Sometimes, in politics or history, certain words, certain names are sufficient unto themselves: it is as if there were names that once pronounced require no further telling."

European Jewish artisans on horseback in Argentina.

"In the public eye, universities have never recovered from the antics of Donald Sutherland as Professor Jennings in the 1978 film Animal House."

Daniel Francis asks why a high-speed commuter route runs through Stanley Park, Vancouver's precious urban oasis.

"A library is never finished, only abandoned." Alberto Manguel on incompletion, voluntary interruption and the pleasure of the day before.

The assumption of mutual comprehensibility between speakers of Spanish and Portuguese creates a culture of mutual ignorance.