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.

Like Adrian Mole, the famous teenaged diarist created by Sue Townsend, the unnamed hero of Maureen Fergus’s Exploits of a Reluctant (But Extremely Good

Toward the end of Fahrenheit 9/11, the movie written and directed by Michael Moore, various U.S. military people and some civilians voice their dismay at finding themselves embroiled in a war that has no meaning.

Often I have yearned to go to Newfoundland, as part of an eastward reversal of the migration of the sixties. I felt that yearning again when I read Extremities, a collection of short fiction by the ten Newfoundland writers who make up the Burning Roc

Oskar, the main narrator of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer (Houghton Mifflin), is a precocious nine-year-old who dreams up things like a tea kettle that reads in his father’s voice instead of whistling, and a skyscraper t

I read and reread Faceoff at the Summit (Little, Brown), the story of the Summit Series written by Dryden and Mark Malvoy. Dryden describes the Team Canada star Frank Mahovlich giving the team an inspirational talk before a big game: “‘Gentlemen,’ he

Michael Hayward reviews 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die (Barron's).

It is impossible, now, to see Powell and Pressburger’s 1941 film 49th Parallel (Criterion DVD) through the eyes of the audience it was intended for. To modern viewers it seems a curious mixture of anti-isolationist propaganda and travelogue, framed w

The male characters in Mary-Lou Zeitoun’s 13 (Porcupine’s Quill) include a guidance counsellor who takes nude photos of his adolescent pupils and a music teacher who thinks “drums are not for girls.” No wonder Marnie, the thirteen-year-old protagonis

A promo for this work described it as erotic, although a more accurate term might be sensual, or even celebratory. Some of the passages, like this one from “Condo,” remind me of certain lines from the later essays of D.H. Lawrence, for they detail th

9 of 1: A Window to the World by Oliver Chin also has a message, but this one lacks the humour and subtlety of Annabelle Frumbatt. Chin tackles the aftermath of 9/11 from an original angle; his book documents America’s twentieth-century international

A Circle of Birds by Hayden Trenholm (Anvil Press) might serve as a benchmark for the Geist Distance Writing Contest: it crosses more than the requisite number of time zones, and it might certainly be said to be as far out there as the author can tak

A Christmas Tale offers a decidedly French take on la famille dysfonctionnelle.

Criterion has just released a beautifully restored two-dvd edition of Powell and Pressburger’s A Canterbury Tale (1944), which tells the story of a British soldier, an American soldier and a “land girl,” who meet by chance in a small village not far

Deborah Baker uncovers archival letters, shedding new light on the expat Beats in India.

Susan Griffin's A Chorus of Stones (Anchor Books), is a long meditation on war. She takes war into her self, into her body, and in writing about it she seems to give birth to it.

Portland is a great destination for fans of the independent presses. During a recent two-day trip, I selected a few must-have zines and chapbooks from a huge selection.

The new line of books about film and filmmaking from Wallflower Press in London (available from Columbia University Press here) is a real achievement. A Critical Guide to Contemporary North American Directors, with a whopping 535 beautifully designed

Nomi Nickel, the heroine of A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews (Knopf), is a bad girl. How can she help it?

Any author who can attract a crowd to listen to explanations of changes in plate tectonics theory over several decades deserves applause, and the best-selling author Simon Winchester did just that, in a conversation with Hal Wake at the 18th Annual V

Rudy Wiebe makes the physical North present as few writers can. We see the line of light on the spring horizon, taste the lichens that feed the caribou and sometimes the humans, feel the rough granite outcroppings, stand on the edge of the great nort

Robert Allen's new book of stories, A June Night in the Late Cenozoic (Oolichan) is full of near-worlds with dimensions that intersect the three (or is it four) that we navigate by in this world. A man wakes up to find the Gaza Strip being relocated

I cringe a little when I think of my old diaries. Luckily, A Diary 1978—1980 by “Shauna” (Two-Star Press) let me relive all of my wacky pre-teen adventures without the embarrassment of my own stupid commentary.

The folks at Mercury Press report that the mysterious graphic on the cover of their catalogue (reviewed in Geist 2) is "an Orange Griffen photograph of an arrow painted on a road. The location of the road remains a secret." Hmm, sounds like a challen

The other book is sure to become what the blurb writers call "an instant classic": A History and Ethnography of the Beothuk by Ingeborg Marshall (McGill-Queen's). The title sounds unpromising, and the book itself is a brute at 640 pages, but this is

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.