Who today remembers the man who carried Einstein’s head in a box through the streets of Vancouver? We remember clearly the box (dark wood, varnished, the door on brass hinges: what about the latch?) with Einstein’s head in it, a plaster model (was it plastic, perhaps? modelling clay? plasticine?)

She would see him sometimes around Yaletown, her former counsellor, heading glassy-eyed toward a bar or creeping up the back steps of the massage parlour.

The time had come for our marathon trek through Europe. I was ten, and hated it already.

A greying, sunburnt American mis­sionary stopped us in the fruit market and invited us for a drink.

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With the approach of her tenth summer, Julia considers the holidays that lie before her: will there be too many things for her to do? Trying to look ahead from school time, with its time-tables and schedules, makes it hard to remember, or to imagine, what summertime will be before summer arrives and the school year ends. In the summer when I was Julia’s age I heard Elvis Presley for the first time, down by the river on the jukebox in the fish-and-chip joint where teenagers went to hold hands and drink ice cream sodas and eat salted french fries drenched in vinegar.

Toward the end of her life I drew close to Althea, the cat who had been with Mary and me for five or maybe six years, ever since her real owner, Mary’s daughter Karen, had to find a home for her when a landlord invoked the no-pets rule, and Mary and I were living mere blocks away, completely petless and, some might say, carefree.

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.

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.

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.

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

The first volume of King, a "comic book" biography of Martin Luther King (Fantagraphic Books), will not be misinterpreted or appropriated by neo-Nazis. Yet its power is delivered with grace and subtlety.

What better song for summer’s soundtrack than Kate and Anna’s “Swimming Song”? I added it to my iPod rotation while reading Kate and Anna McGarrigle: Songs and Stories (Penumbra), too much of which consists of transcribed newspaper reviews of albums

Raymond J. Dunne, the sixteen-year-old hero of John Lekich’s teen novel, King of the Lost & Found (Raincoast), is an outsider.

P.D. James meets Philip K. Dick in Barbara Ehrenreich's first novel, Kipper's Game, a complex mystery story set in an all-too-believable world of strange new diseases, genetic mutations and virtual reality.

Grove Press has just brought out an English translation of Kitchen, by Banana Yoshimoto, an unclassifiable, magnificent little book that has won two literary awards and has had fifty-seven—yes, fifty-seven—printings in four years. As the dust jacket

Sheila was reading Knit Lit, an anthology of stories about knitting edited by Linda Roghaar and Molly Wolf (Three Rivers Press) and some of them were making her laugh out loud, especially the one about an oversized synthetic orange sweater that acqui

Mathieu Kassovitz was just twenty-eight years old when he made La Haine (Criterion dvd), a 1995 film released in black and white and set in les banlieues, the racially volatile suburbs that surround Paris like an explosive vest.

Are the Québecois the only moviemakers in North America with a sense of humour? Latest evidence to hand would certainly suggest so: three movies in the local video place this season and all winners.

Remember those student days when, in preparation for your final exam, you’d optimistically sit through a movie version as a substitute for the book itself?

In one of the audio tracks on the dvd of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, co-director Terry Gilliam credits Robert Bresson’s 1974 film Lancelot of the Lake (New Yorker Films dvd) as an inadvertent inspiration for Grail.

The recent Krazy & Ignatz 1937–1938: Shifting Sands Dusts Its Cheeks in Powdered Beauty is one of the most agreeably bonkers tomes published in recent memory. Just about every strip tells the story of Ignatz Mouse’s compulsion to hurl bricks at the w

I bought Revenge and began my education in how to manipulate history and maintain your honour as a Victorian lady. McGoogan’s book is an in-depth account of a detail-oriented, uncompromising, highly motivated and intelligent woman.

There's nothing exotic about Larry's Party (Random House), by Carol Shields: it could have taken place in Windsor. In fact, I think I went to high school with Larry Weller, an all-around ordinary guy.

Laurence, by France Théoret (Mercury, translated by Gail Scott), is also about a young woman in Quebec, but in the 1930s a woman’s struggle to make her life her own was harder. Laurence comes from an impoverished farming family whose daughters have t

Shopping for books is one part of Christmas that I really enjoy, and this year I found all the books I needed by walking between four bookstores clustered near the centre of town. At Manhattan Books I picked up two bright green hardcover copies of Be

I picked up Ledoyt by Carol Emshwiller (Mercury House) because it looked a lot like Annie (Polestar), a book I reviewed in Geist No. 19-20.

Deception and some kind of love are the themes that thread through the journey that is Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name by Vendela Vida (HarperCollins). As one of the editors of the infamously cool magazine The Believer, Vida has a sharp pen a

Early in his memoir Let Me Finish (Harcourt), Roger Angell describes his mother Katherine White and his stepfather E. B. White as “a successful New Yorker couple—she a fiction editor; he a writer of casuals and poetry and the first-page Comment secti

When the movie director Jean Claude Lauzon died in a plane crash over northern Quebec, his death was noted in a two-sentence paragraph accompanied by a small photograph in the local newspaper. In the photograph he looks like the actor in his first fi

Child-rearing manuals cropped up with a vengeance in the latter half of the twentieth century after Dr. Benjamin Spock produced Baby and Child Care—the all-time best-selling book in American history, second only to the Bible, despite advice such as “

Life-25: Interviews with Prisoners Serving Life Sentences (New Star), by P.J. Murphy and Lloyd Johnsen, surprised me.

In Levels of Life, Julian Barnes writes about the grief experienced after losing his wife to cancer.

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.

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

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

“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.

Lisa Bird-Wilson on UNDRIP, reconciliation, and the anxiety felt by Indigenous people in Canada.

"The hemispheric context reveals the roots of the residential school system...Destroying Indigenous cultures was a positivist policy from Patagonia to Dawson City."

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.

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

Dogged dedication grants a reader vicarious immortality.

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

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.

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

Faith seems to shiver when confronted by art.

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.