Stephen Osborne reflects on the Vancouver Poetry Conference, the Occupy movement, and a brunch with NaNoWriMo novelists.

The facts (and fictions) surrounding the tale of Quebec's most famous murderess, La Corriveau.

Joe Bongiorno goes in search of enlightenment and finds the Shī Fu.

My great-grandfather exists now only in memory, unacknowledged even by his tombstone

He said he just wanted towels. There was no reason to be afraid.

It is a Sunday in August. We drive from London, Ontario, to the Pinery Provincial Park in a new green 1964 Mercury Comet.

A poem about a postal code.

On Halloween in 1966, John Patterson's father burned down the Jones's house to give the neighbourhood kids a thrill.

We got paid once a week in cash - it made you feel special the first few times.

Very quietly, very slowly, happiness can take over a person's life

Leaving Thunder Bay isn't one of the things that gets easier with practice

Forgotten cutlery, missing mushrooms and lingering doubt: a recipe for bewilderment.

"A folder full of awards proves to the psychiatrist I wasn't always this way."

Battenbergs and Victoria sponge at Buckingham Palace.

A young Indigenous woman deals with hippy-artist-pothead boyfriends and car troubles.

Randy Fred reports on migrant workers, then and now.

The restaurant had white concrete walls and chrome lights dangling from the ceiling that gave the place an operating theatre vibe.

Christine Novosel reports from Glasgow on art school, apiary management, Brexit and being a junkyard dog.

Evelyn Everett-Green wrote novels for young people, of a morally improving nature. Her books were also meant to entertain, with tales of wholesome adventure and romance, often set in heroic times or picturesque locations.

Despite attempts to reattach my pinkie, I woke up with nine fingers.

A short film featuring "Sewing Cabinet" by Julie Vandervoort, originally published in Geist 74.

David Koulack spends Yom Kippur in a packed gymnasium in Paris among a beehive of activity and a cacophony of sound.

Eve Corbel draws emoji you can use when Mercury is in retrograde, when you've eaten too much hot sauce and during other specific times of need.

Angela Wheelock meets a stranger at a bus stop and discusses Rumi, Hafiz and other great poets who were terrible leaders.

Picture Harper lounging among pastel cushions, his stiff grey hair tight as a helmet on his head.

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.

Sarah Waters’s novel pulls the reader into the gritty, dangerous world of mid-nineteenth-century London, where the petty thieves are known as fingersmiths.

Barbara Olson, author of The Final Days: The Last, Desperate Abuses of Power by the Clinton White House (Regnery), died aboard Flight 77 when it hit the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. Unfortunately, therefore, she does not have to account for the no

Flesh and Bone (with Meg Ryan, James Caan and that handsome guy whose name I keep forgetting) had been sitting for months in New Arrivals at the local video purveyor's and no one ever seemed to pick it up. Feeling more than usually desperate last wee

Now that Buffy is over, Whedon has but one TV program to work on: Angel. Which is all the more sad because he had created the best thing to hit television in years: Firefly. That show starred Nathan Fillion (born in Edmonton) as Captain Malcolm Reyno

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.... The secon

When Thoreau remarked that most of us lead lives of quiet desperation, he must have been reading David Adams Richards. For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down (McClelland & Stewart) is Richards' latest novel, continuing his examination of life as it is l

For Men Who Dream of Lolita (Coteau Books) is Kim Morrissey's retelling of Nabokov's story from Lolita's point of view in a series of linked poems.

Forbidden Lie$ tells the story of Norma Khouri, who shot to fame when her book, Forbidden Love, became a bestseller. The book claimed to tell the story of Khouri’s best friend, who was murdered by her own family because she dated a man of a different

For Myles Hildyard, a British aristocrat, the Second World War was an adventure like no other. He joined a local military unit in the late 1930s and saw action throughout the entire war, stationed in the Middle East, North Africa, Crete and western E

Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul: Memories and the City, translated by Maureen Freely (Knopf), presents Istanbul as a palimpsest in which can be read the fading traces of empires Christian and Muslim, of childhood, and of a European gaze that once contemplated

In Geist No. 1, I reviewed a handful of Canadian publishers’ catalogues.

Forever is a Dutch film made by the experienced documentarian Heddy Honigmann. Its subject is Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris but its scope includes life and death, history and memory, art and beauty.

In the note accompanying Geist's copy of jacks: a gothic gospel (Livres DC Books), the book's author Anne Stone recommends it for review, or for "hanging out on a coffee table as an orange object." And, although it is a lovely orange object, jacks is

In Jeannie and the Gentle Giants by Luanne Armstrong (Ronsdale), Jeannie is a young city girl who ends up in a foster home in the countryside near Kelowna, B.C., and the gentle giants are two enormous work horses named Sally and Sebastien who help Je

The two actors shared the portrayal of Jesus as well as playing the other characters, including Mary Magdalene, John the Baptist, Elvis and the three wise men—with a versatility and energy that contributed to a unique and very funny show.

Mandelbrot reviews Jeff Wall: The Complete Edition (Phaidon).

On February 22, 2007, the folk singer-songwriter Josh Ritter stepped on stage at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre, played three songs and said little more than “I’m excited to be here.” Uh-oh, I thought. After a few songs he absorbed the warm glow

Many of the poems in Sharon McCartney’s second book, Karenin Sings the Blues, have won national competitions and been published in literary magazines, and so set the standard and tone for the rest of this fine collection. The book is presented in thr

Long before Patti Smith became “the Godmother of Punk” she was a not- atypical teenager of the 1960s, living with her parents in suburban New Jersey.

Justa by Bridget Moran is another great book—this time I'm typesetting it, and I almost never read books that I typeset But I found myself reading sections while waiting for other sections to print, and I could tell it was going to be a good one. Jus

Mairowitz and Crumb’s Kafka, meanwhile, opens with a horrifying drawing of one of Franz K’s many grisly fantasies of his own death—a pork butcher’s cleaver hacking off neat slices from his head.

Thematic convergence was far from my mind when Frank Davey's nearly-instant book, Karla's Web: A Cultural Investigation of the Mahaffy-French Murders (Viking), appeared in the office. For one thing, it came in a wrapper announcing it to be a copy of

The new Karl Marx biography by Francis Wheen (4th Estate) fails to illuminate a man who was loved by his family and revered by his followers; instead we are given a hazy sketch of a petulant, perhaps incompetent man of few skills and little disciplin

In the local secondhand a few weeks ago, a copy of Killshot by Elmore Leonard, and this sentence on the first page: It was time to get away from here, leave Toronto and the Waverly Hotel for good and he wouldn't drink so much and be sick in the morni

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?