On Dorothy Parker Day we wear wool suits and little hats, smoke with cigarette holders and have a liver-coloured dachshund on a lead.

It was the big sort of rhmmm-rhmmm you hear at demolition derbies and ball-busting monster truck rallies. It was loud. Who could be sitting in their car, revving the engine?

"At the back of the line a woman with no teeth was trying to hold an eighteen-pack of budget toilet paper with one hand."

From Jean Talon to Lenin’s Tomb

“If we paid protection money to the KGB, there’d be nothing left for salaries. And we call it the FSB now.”

Christine Novosel talks life in Scotland: "What Glasgow lacks in beauty and brains, it makes up for with wit and resilience."

Stephen Osborne on the origins of the International 3-Day Novel Contest, the time-honoured writing contest that flies in the face of the notion that novels take years of angst to produce.

Forty percent of people believe that if they practice enough, they can predict the outcome of a flipped coin. Would my current love end the way my past ones had?

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"I stared in awe at the pink-petalled flowers of human tissue blossoming in the mass of a collapsed grey-brown lung as it was reinflated during a thoracotomy."

One of the advantages of life back then was that people had jobs that could be easily defined. None of your strategic walrus initiative development consultants or anything.

At first no one notices when the dog rushes your daughter as if she’s some kind of game and your daughter runs as if it’s some kind of chase.

People are getting either sick or mad, or both.

The Kathmandu Café in multiple dimensions.

"Today your dog will decide to end things. Your dog, who is wearing a red vinyl jacket and is tied to the tree on the boulevard outside the thrift store."

Sarah Pollard makes a pilgrimage to Montreal to hang out and write where Mavis Gallant hung out and wrote.

"'Goin’ to university' was a cover or alibi, rather than a statement of fact, providing the indolent and the imaginative with richer lives than simply having a job."

Stephen Osborne is entranced by a pair of eccentric, high profile students while on a university tour in 1964.

Montreal was once the “City of a Thousand Steeples.” Today it’s the city of a thousand church bazaars open on Saturdays to keep the cash flow up.

Espadrille, paduka, chopine—Eve Corbel illustrates a guide for readers on some of the fanciest footwear found in literature.

For me, the jacket is a piece of menswear history that I can actually put on, and a link to the tragicomic tale of an underachiever with a famous name.

A collection of Jerome Stueart's Greyhound sketches, including one Vitruvian bus driver.

The driver said, “Are you fit to travel, sir?” and the crack smoker said, “Are any of us fit to travel?"

How did the 99 B-Line bus route come to be the locus of the most heartless transit rides in Greater Vancouver?

Stephen Osborne discusses the past, present and future of literary magazines in Canada.

Possum-style or straight up dirty.

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.

My favourite thing about Evelyn Lau’s new book, Inside Out: Reflections on A Life So Far (Doubleday), is the smart slipcover (design by Kevin Hoch/Pylon), which is made out of a thick, translucent onion-skin paper. It wouldn’t fit in my bag after I l

The current issue of Brick contains a transcript of Eleanor Wachtel's interview with John Berger made last year for CBC Radio, and is by itself sufficient reason to buy the magazine. Especially for what he has to say about using the words "and" and "

I saw Intacto (Lions Gate) at the Vancouver International Film Festival in 2002 and loved it. The film is about an underground ring of gamblers who bet on people’s luck.

I remember laughing a lot when I saw the films My Beautiful Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, both written by Hanif Kureishi, and I also laughed when I read his novel The Buddha of Suburbia, so I was hungry for more comic vision in his latest

Alberto Manguel, this country's man of letters par excellence, has a new collection: Into the Looking-Glass Wood: Essays on Words and the World (Knopf), consisting of twenty-two essays cast in the assured voice of a man who knows the world and is kno

Speaking of characters, for me there is no better way to understand history than to read about it in a good story that shows you what it was like to be alive back then. Lately I’ve read several children’s books that fill the bill.

Attention, Joyce Nelson fans: we no longer need to scan the contents pages of Canadian Forum and the Georgia Straight for her astute essays on culture. In June 1996, Nelson started publishing Lynx, a Monthly Newsletter in the Public Interest from Jam

A hardcover “ciné roman” version of La Jetée has just been republished by Zone Books. The pair—film and book—make a fascinating combination: the duration of each static image in the film highlights the time dimension, while in the book version the im

Until Susanna Clarke wrote Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (Bloomsbury), I thought all adult fantasy novels were full of strange kingdoms and warrior princesses, but this delightful 782-page doorstop explores a complex rivalry between an autocratic ma

Fair Play, a brief novel by Tove Jansson, is available for the first time in an English translation by Thomas Teale. To quote from the original cover copy, Fair Play is about “two women who share a life of work, delight and consternation,” a relation

Joe Matt’s Fair Weather (Drawn and Quarterly) compiles four recent issues of his autobiographical comic book Peep Show.

Laurence Gough has another police procedural out from McClelland & Stewart: Fall Down Easy is a fast read and fun, but not much different from the American prototype.

There are a few hundred book publishers in Canada, most of them producing between one and fifteen books a year. Few of us ever get to see publishers’ whole lists and only some of us get to see their catalogues (which are usually distributed to bookst

Philippe, the crater-ridden far side of the moon, is a loser—he works as a telemarketer and still lives in his mother’s apartment while he tries to prove his thesis: that the 1960s space race was an exercise in narcissism.

Magazine addicts on the west coast have lost their most reliable (and revered) source of supply. Magpie Magazine Gallery on Commercial Drive in east Vancouver went out of business in spring 2008, after fifteen years of catering happily to a multifari

Patty Osborne reviews February by Lisa Moore (Anansi).

Kris Rothstein reviews Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks by Ethan Gilsdorf (Lyons Press).

Some good Canadian with lots of hard currency should give Pico Iyer a ticket to Yellowknife, or Inuvik, or Pangnirtung or Come By Chance—almost anywhere in Canada, come to think of it. Iyer is the author of Falling Off the Map: Some Lonely Places of

In Fierce People by Dirk Wittenborn (Bloomsbury), fifteen-year-old Finn Earl aches to enter the privileged, self-indulgent world inhabited by the billionaire Osborne family and their wealthy friends. One minute he’s trying to cover up his mother’s dr

Felicity's Fool, by François Gravel (Cormorant), is a novel with history and science in it, and both the history and the science are very good. Its protagonist is a mild-mannered doctor driven to search for the organ of happiness in the human brain.

You could take the Lesbian National Parks and Services Field Guide to North America (Pedlar Press) into the woods, but this guidebook, written by Rangers Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan, is just as suitable for reading in bed. In fact, under the cove

I wish I could say that I finished Ferry Woman's History of the World (Coteau) by Susan Andrews Grace on the ferry ride home, but I didn't. This is a wonderful book, full of Celtic history, the speaker's childhood, her confrontations with Jesus, and

Lily Gontard reviews One Day (Hodder & Staughton), David Nicholls's novel about a decades-long friendship.

Lily Gontard reviews the Farley Mowat-inspired film, Finding Farley (National Film Board).

Military coups, civil wars, and NAFTA are the cause of trilingual labels in Canadian big box stores.

A writer whose work is among the most important contributions to the literature of the Holocaust is forgotten by almost all.

During the 1950s the RCMP used a machine to identify federal employees who were homosexuals. The name of this bogus device? The "fruit machine," of course.

Richard Stursberg’s memoir of his years in CBC programming raises the question: How did someone with no sympathy for public broadcasting get the job in the first place?

Stephen Henighan argues that efficiency has become a core value that heightens social divisions.

In the world between here and there, what place does one call home?

Stephen Henighan remembers Mavis Gallant, the original nomad of Canadian literature, who wrote some of Canada's finest fiction at Pablo Picasso's café table in Paris.

Stephen Henighan investigates bus travel as one of Canada's last surviving democratic spaces.

Daniel Francis investigates the practice of visiting asylums and penitentiaries as entertainment in nineteenth-century Canada.

How much does a photograph really capture the essence of a person?

Daniel Francis explores the photographer as Vancouver's most interesting historian.

Alberto Manguel reflects on art as a witness to the human desire to be infinite and eternal.

As Canadian leaders look to emulate Asian nations, our government fails to see that the tigers' fatal flaw is the absence of democracy. Or, maybe they do see.

The Great White North gets rebranded and gains some military muscle: goodbye peacenik, hello soldier.

I’ve now read Comment parler des livres que l’on n’a pas lus? and I’m happy to say that I was right.

A French writer whose name I hadn’t heard before, Pierre Bayard, has written a book called Comment parler des livres que l’on n’a pas lus? published by Éditions de Minuit in a collection aptly titled Paradoxe. A number of critics in France have writt

In 2002, when my essay collection When Words Deny the World was published, people started behaving strangely. Ambitious young writers scurried out of sight when I entered a room, as though afraid that irate authors might banish them from Toronto for having spoken to me.

One of the indispensable figures of contemporary journalism is the cutting-edge cultural commentator. The columnist who offers sardonic insights into trends, fashions, television shows and publishing personalities has become an institution.

Since the Wall came down, East German socialists in Prenzlauer Berg are free to sip coffee and talk about art.

When the crash came, Canadians paid the price for the colonized mentalities of their investment advisors.

I met Alejandra Pizarnik in Buenos Aires, in 1967, five years before her death. I had asked her to contribute to an anthology of texts that purported to continue an interrupted story begun in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale: “There was a man dwelt by a churchyard.” She agreed and wrote a haunting piece called “Los muertos y la lluvia,” “The dead and the rain.” The book was never published, but we became friends.

From the trench coat to the Hummer, what does the militarization of style say about us?

In 2007, when The Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories was published, Urquhart sent me a copy. As I examined the table of contents, I felt a dull thunk in my chest.

When General James Wolfescampered up the steep path that carried him onto the Plains of Abraham andinto the pages of the history books, what was he thinking?