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.

In 1738 in London, informers who exposed gin-sellers were frequently attacked by mobs of citizens. They were beaten up, burned in effigy and dunked in horse ponds and cesspools. At least one informer died of wounds after boiling water was poured down

When I first encountered Guilermo Verdecchia's name I took the approach of a typical Saxon and avoided saying it out loud. So as I watched the film Crucero/Crossroads (Mongrel Media) I sympathized with Verdecchia's grade one teacher, a wholesome youn

Steve Mann, a professor at the University of Toronto, is the subject of Cyberman (2001), a fascinating film by Peter Lynch. He is also a cyborg, a concept he explains in Cyborg: Digital Destiny and Human Possibility in the Age of the Wearable Compute

The two biggest trends in literature right now are spoken word and cybertext. The first is framed in a performance setting by wannabe rock stars, the second is played out on a computer by individuals dubbed cyber-punks.

My maternal nerve-ends were still vibrating from that article a few days later when I went to see Crumb, a film by Terry Zwigoff about the American comics artist Robert Crumb. The film is a shocking, riveting but not lurid meditation on what shapes a

While I was looking at a poster for Lars Von Trier's Dancer in the Dark, two women rushed up and begged me not to go in, crying "It's terrible, we couldn't sit through it!" I might have been swayed if a friend hadn't warned me that he almost left, ev

Supernatural beings seem to have it easy: their purpose in life (or life after death) is clear and their mission to frighten or eat humans should be simple enough. But the creatures in Day Shift Werewolf (3-Day Books) suffer from the same self-doubt,

Kris Rothstein reviews Darwin's Bastards (Douglas & McIntyre).

In Deactivated West 100 (Gaspereau Press), Don McKay continues to develop the poetics of place that he began with Vis à Vis (Gaspereau Press, 2001). In both books he tries “to think the relation between place and wilderness without going dizzy from a

Until I cracked open Terry Glavin's Dead Reckoning: Confronting the Crisis in Pacific Fisheries (Greystone), I thought fish had no more significance to me than the wasabe and the soy sauce on the side. Now I know different.

It’s a miracle that only two people die in Dead Man in the Orchestra Pit by Tom Osborne (Anvil Press), during a weekend in Vancouver when a hotel robbery goes terribly wrong and the thieves get tangled up with Grey Cup rabble-rousers and the backstag

David Dennings, the narrator of Ann Diamond’s new novel, Dead White Males (Livres DC Books), is a wacky hairdresser much like the one I visit every couple of months. But whereas my stylist is a filmmaker, Diamond’s is trying to be a hard-boiled priva

I finished Dead Girls (McClelland and Stewart) with a heavy feeling in my stomach. It’s not just that the stories are disturbing, it’s that I, the reader, have been made witness to this disturbance.

Soon after reading Moodie's Tale I ran across Death by Degrees (Doubleday), which features Wright's Inspector Charlie Salter, a middle-aged detective just as perplexed by the ironies of life as the rest of us. Death by Degrees takes place at a commun

Only now, eighty years after the war, are we given the explanation of that process of transformation, in the pages of Death So Noble: Memory, Meaning, and the First World War, by Jonathan F. Vance (UBC Press). Vance tells the story of a tiny country

Dead Certainties, by Simon Schama (Vintage), contains two "experiments in historical narrative" that should be on the reading list of anyone interested in how we imagine the past, and how the past is imagined for us. The first piece, "The Many Deaths

Another book that deals with the Little Sister's trial is a little chapbook called Detained at Customs (Lazara Press) which gives the full testimony of Jane Rule, an important witness for the prosecution. Rule shows us the impossibility of arriving a

Long before the arrival of the wealthy boat owners, the Sound was home to large groups of coastal First Nations and subsequently many European settlers found their way there (we call them stump farmers here on the coast). This is the story Heather Ha

NeWest Press does a better job with Diamond Grill by Fred Wah. Wah is one of Canada's best contemporary poets but he is new to prose, and the appeal of a poet writing fiction is too tasty to pass up.

“This mental mucus is driving me mad. The Japanese blow their noses on paper too.” Thus begins The Diary of Andrés Fava (Archipelago), Julio Cortá

In Dharma Punx—A Memoir (Harper), Noah Levine begins his story as an adolescent punk in Santa Cruz, California, plunging in and out of mosh pits, acid trips, battles with bottles of Jack Daniels, small-time theft, post-“experimental” narcotics and ju

For the uninitiated, the poetic mysteries of baseball can seem elusive if not downright silly. Diamonds Are Forever: Artists and Writers on Baseball (Chronicle), a print version of the Smithsonian Institution exhibition of the same name, doesn’t set

Few people have been disappointed by Monopoly, the real estate free-for-all that has been entertaining people all over the world since the 1930s, sometimes for weeks at a time. The love of this game inspired one player, a journalist named Tim Moore,

Critical theory is not known to zing and hum with the menacing eloquence of Dashiell Hammett, but Double Cross: the Hollywood Films of Douglas Gordon (Art Gallery of York University/ The Power Plan) by Philip Monk, comes close.

Daniel Francis on John Franklin, John Rae and the Globe and Mail's enthusiasm for cannibalism.

Prince Edward Island gothic.

Kafka’s writing allows us intuitions and half-dreams but never total comprehension.

Kaiju are the heroes we deserve.

Progressives are far less likely to be nationalists than ever before.

There is no way to step back from the orgy of kisses without offending.

Revolutions need popular heroes, and unpopularvillains, and the Acadians of New Brunswick had both.

To build a city on land flooded by the tides isn’t just a mistake—it’s utopic.

We think of the Arctic as pristine and untouched—but nowhere on the planet is as harshly impacted by climate change.

Reading is a subversive activity and does not believe in the convention of borders.

In Hungary, goulash socialism becomes difficult to swallow

Airport security assures Alberto Manguel that he has been randomly picked.

To teach us how to read Don Quixote, a text so contrary to conventional literary tradition, the prologue itself needed to break from all traditions

Unravelling the mysteries of Alejo Carpentier

We insist The Devil whispers horrible things in our ear and inspires our worst deeds.

While status registration under the Indian Act is a construct, claiming status identity isan important factor in Indigenous identity and cultural transmission.

Anti-communism, retired by most Western governments,receives monumental status in Canada

Mary Schendlinger challenges a review of a biography of Blanche Knopf, the underrecognized co-founder of Alfred A. Knopf Inc.

Stephen Henighan discusses the crude first steps to finding a new way to talk about racial reality.

The craft of untruth has been perfected.

Romantic notions that equate Indigenous peoples with nature are not going to cut it.

Rob Kovitz compiles the pressing questions of the day—"How are they gonna beat ISIS?" And, "On Twitter, who cares?"

Like most advice given to writers, the injunction to “write what you know” is misleading.

The idea of Europe is incarnated nowhere as much as in St. Petersburg—Stephen Henighan on Europe's greatest city.