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S. K. Page
Bambi and Me

The invaluable Sheila Fischman, whose translations have become a kind of national treasure, has brought us another book by Michel Tremblay: Bambi and Me (Talonbooks) is a small memoir of Tremblay's earliest movie-going days in Montreal in the fifties

Amy Francis
Barcelona

The close proximity of my new apartment to a repertory cinema has caused me to go through a movie-going renaissance. Unfortunately, most of my discoveries have been in the mediocre to bad category.

Patty Osborne
Baking Cakes in Kigali

Patty Osborne reviews Baking Cakes in Kigali by Gaile Parkin (McClelland & Stewart).

Daniel Francis
Basking Sharks: The Slaughter of BC's Gentle Giants

In 1995, New Star Books in Vancouver launched a series of short (about 100 pages), inexpensive books about nonmainstream subjects in the history and culture of British Columbia. The series is called Transmontanus (that’s “across the mountains” for th

Patty Osborne
Bastion Falls

I didn't expect to like Bastion Falls by Susie Moloney (Key Porter) because the back cover describes it as spine-tingling. I don't usually like having my spine tingled, but Bastion Falls was a pleasant surprise.

Michael Hayward
Basho: The Complete Haiku

Michael Hayward reviews Basho: The Complete Haiku, written by Matsuo Basho and translated by Jane Reichhold (Kodansha).

Blaine Kyllo
Beat

Beat (2000) stars Canada’s own Kiefer Sutherland (who recently got his groove back in the Fox series 24) in an amazing performance as William Burroughs in the early days—before he truly started writing and before he shot his wife Joan during a botche

Patty Osborne
Beach Boy

The next time I was up at the cabin I read Beach Boy, by Ardashir Vakil (Hamish Hamilton), an orange book that caught my eye on the New Arrivals rack at my local library. The book's narrator is a precocious eight-year-old named Cyrus Readymoney, whos

Patty Osborne
Be Near Me

Reading Be Near Me by Andrew O’Hagan (McClelland & Stewart) is like watching a slow-motion traffic accident: you’re not sure how it will end, but you’re sure it will end badly.

Susan Brady
Be Quiet

In the most successful sections of Be Quiet by Margaret Hollingsworth (Blue Lake), the author imagines Emily Carr’s six-week stay in Ste. Agathe, France in 1911, by writing the diary of Winifred Church.

Lily Gontard
Being Caribou: Five Months on Foot with an Arctic Herd

People who live in the North speak of leaving as “going outside.” I recently returned to the North after a lengthy absence and found myself reading two books about the effects of the “outside,” and about the things that brought me here in the first p

Neil MacDonald
Better Living In Pursuit of Happiness From Plato To Prozac

The recently published Better Living In Pursuit of Happiness From Plato To Prozac (Viking) by Mark Kingwell, a Canadian philosopher and intellectual celebrity, provides an in-depth analysis of our pleasure-centric society and the concept of happiness

Patty Osborne
Between the Stillness and the Grove

While I don’t come across many stories about Winnipeg, Between the Stillness and the Grove by Erika de Vasconcelos (Knopf) may be the first one I’ve read about Armenia. In this book the stories of two Armenian women are interwoven to create a deep an

Lily Gontard
Beyond the Outer Shores

In the lifelong friendship between John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts, it was Steinbeck who wrote the books, won the Nobel Prize in Literature and garnered the public attention (both positive and negative), but in Beyond the Outer Shores (Raincoast), a b

Michael Hayward
Beyond the Horizon

In Beyond the Horizon (Doubleday), Colin Angus lays claim to “the first human-powered circumnavigation of the planet” and spends 374 pages documenting and defending this claim (there’s also a DVD).

Mandelbrot
Billy Elliott

Billy Elliott is surely the most offensive movie of the season. Rocky II goes to ballet school and proves that High Culture can be good for working class stiffs if only they would stop drinking beer long enough to make sacrifices for children who wis

Patty Osborne
Bialystok to Birkenau: The Holocaust Journey of Michel Mielnicki

At twenty I didn’t know anything. About that time I had a Jewish boyfriend named Alain who lived with his parents in a wealthy area of town.... Now Michel Mielnicki, with John Munro, has written Bialystok to Birkenau: The Holocaust Journey of Michel

S. K. Page
Biographical Dictionary of the World's Assassins

George Fetherling, in his Biographical Dictionary of the World’s Assassins (Random House), offers a useful five-part typology of assassins that appears to be a first of its kind. (Type fives seek personal revenge, type threes are hired mercenaries, t

Stephen Osborne
Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative

The four dozen or so essays in Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative, edited by Mary Burger, et al. (Coach House Books), contain much loose talk of “limitations” and “delimitations,” of “linearity,” of being “forced to conform”—all of which are

Margaret Brady
Black & Blue

If you like crime fiction, you will enjoy the latest Ian Rankin thriller, Black & Blue (Orion), whose title is taken from the Rolling Stones album of the same name. John Rebus, Rankin's police detective, seems at the outset just another cop-story pro

Stephen Osborne
Secrets of the City

Stephen Osborne discovers that some of the most startling papers in the city archives are the letters and diaries of the first archivist himself.

Alberto Manguel
Reading the Commedia

An appreciation of Dante's "Commedia."

Stephen Henighan
Homage to Nicaragua

Despite hardships and dangerous slums, Nicaragua maintains a sense of hope that draws back to the democratic days of the Sandinistas.

Daniel Francis
Magical Thinking

The canoe as a fetish object, a misreading of Canadian history and a symbol of colonial oppression.

Eimear Laffan
Fact
The Trap Door

This invertebrate does not go looking for prey

rob mclennan
Fact
Elizabeth Smart’s Rockcliffe Park

For the sake of the large romantic gesture

Sara de Waal
Fact
Little Women, Two Raccoons

Hit everything dead on, even if it’s big

Margaret Nowaczyk
Fact
Metanoias

The names we learn in childhood smell the sweetest to us

Ian Roy
Fact
My Body Is a Wonderland

Maybe my doctor has two patients named Ian Roy, and I’ve been sent the other Ian’s file

Sara Graefe
Fact
My Summer Behind the Iron Curtain

No Skylab buzz in East Germany.

Sara Cassidy
Fact
The Lowest Tide

Nature’s sanctity is the only portal to the future.

David Sheskin
Fact
PRESS 1 IF

PRESS 1 IF YOU THINK YOU MAY HAVE HEARD THE BIG BANG.

CB Campbell
Joe and Me

Playing against the fastest chess player in the world.

Mazzy Sleep
Heart Medicine

"You have bruises / There was time / You spent trying to / Heal them. / As in, time wasted."

Jennilee Austria
Scavengers

That’s one for the rice bag!

David M. Wallace
Red Flags

The maple leaf no longer feels like a symbol of national pride.

Jeremy Colangelo
i is another

"my point that / i is but a : colon grown / too long"

Danielle Hubbard
The muse hunt

"The following resume / arrived by fax: One ex-military / man, 52, applying / for duty ..."

CONNIE KUHNS
Marriage on the Download

If marriage was a television show, it might look something like this.

Deborah Ostrovsky
Saint Joseph, Patron Saint of Bad Pronunciation

Scrape every last bit of English out of your throat.

Debra Rooney
Comics
Weird Jobs

Who puts those little stickers on the apples in the grocery store?

Stephen Osborne
Waiting for Language

Remembering Norbert Ruebsaat.

Grant Buday
Reduce, Reuse, Reincarnate

Destroying books for the greater good.

Natasha Greenblatt
Scavenger Hunt for Losers

Losers: you have a lifetime to hunt.

Finn Wylie
Shelter in Place

"I never went looking for them."

Tara McGuire
Short Term

Tell me again how long the trip is?

Jill Boettger
Do You Remotely Care?

Fill the room with a flock of moths.

Stephen Smith
The Acknowledgements

Any resemblances to persons living or dead are purely vindictive.

Robyn Ludwig
Black Velvet, If You Please

The secret is in the velvet.

Christine Lai
Fact
Now Must Say Goodbye

The postcard presents a series of absences—the nameless photographer,

the unknown writer and recipient; it is constituted by what is unknown

Gabrielle Marceau
Fact
Main Character

I always longed to be the falling woman—impelled by unruly passion, driven by beauty and desire, turned into stone, drowned in flowers.

Mia + Eric
Future Perfect

New bylaws for civic spaces.

JUDY LEBLANC
Walking in the Wound

It is racism, not race, that is a risk factor for dying of COVID-19.

SADIQA DE MEIJER
Do No Harm

Doing time is not a blank, suspended existence.

Kristen den Hartog
The Insulin Soldiers

It was as though a magic potion had brought him back to life.

Steven Heighton
Everything Turns Away

Going unnoticed must be the root sorrow for the broken.

DANIEL CANTY
The Sum of Lost Steps

On the curve of the contagion and on the measure of Montreality.

Brad Cran
Fact
Potluck Café

It took me a million miles to get here and half the time I was doing it in high heels.

Carellin Brooks
Ripple Effect

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.

MARCELLO DI CINTIO
The Great Wall of Montreal

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.

Michał Kozłowski
New World Publisher

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."

BRAD YUNG
Lessons I’m Going To Teach My Kids Too Late

"I want to buy a house. And build a secret room in it. And not tell the kids about it."

Paul Tough
City Still Breathing: Listening to the Weakerthans

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.

Stephen Osborne
This Postcard Life

Spiritual landscapes and unknowable people captured on film, used to convey a message.

Hilary M. V. Leathem
To Coronavirus, C: An Anthropological Abecedary

After Paul Muldoon and Raymond Williams.

Bill MacDonald
The Ghost of James Cawdor

A seance to contact a dead miner at Port Arthur, Ontario, in 1923—conducted by Conan Doyle himself.

Ann Diamond
The Second Life of Kiril Kadiiski

He has been called the greatest Bulgarian poet of his generation. Can one literary scandal bury his whole career?

Caroline Adderson
Lives of the House

A basement shrine in her 1920s home inspires Caroline Adderson to discover the past lives of her house and its inhabitants.

Ivan Coyote
Shouldn’t I Feel Pretty?

Somewhere in the sweat and ache and muscle I carved a new shape for myself that made more sense.

David L. Chapman
Postcolonial Bodies

Mastery of the self

CONNIE KUHNS
There is a Wind that Never Dies

"If you are still alive, you must have had the experience of surrendering."

Sarah Leavitt
Small Dogs

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
Symbiosis in Warsaw

Ola Szczecinska returns to Warsaw to visit her grandmother, and to keep from losing her memories.

Geist Staff
Assault on God's Image

Isaac A. Block has taken some real chances in Assault on God's Image (Windflower Communications), a thesis-turned-book about violence within Mennonite families living in Winnipeg.

Eve Corbel
Ascending Peculiarity: Edward Gorey on Edward Gorey

Ascending Peculiarity: Edward Gorey on Edward Gorey (Harcourt), selected and edited by Karen Wilkin, is a collection of twenty-six years’ worth of interviews of Gorey, the eccentric American artist and writer. He was best known for his intricate pen-

Patty Osborne
Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner)

In the film Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner), the story is in the action and the scenery. The sparse dialogue, which is in Inuktitut with English subtitles, fills in only where necessary.

Rose Burkoff
Asthmatica

The short stories in Jon Paul Fiorentino’s Asthmatica (Insomniac) tickle the funny bone every time, from hypothetical essay titles to a story about the tactics a kid might use to shame the son of a mediocre Swedish hockey player. In these yarns Fiore

Rick Maddocks
Au Hasard Balthazar

Au Hasard Balthazar is a forty-year-old film about a donkey. Not only that, a suffering donkey saint.

Michael Hayward
Back on the Fire

In an author photograph on the back cover of Back on the Fire (Shoemaker & Hoard) Gary Snyder is shown looking west into the distance (seen from the perspective of a Canadian reader looking south to the Sierra Nevada foothills, Snyder’s home for more

Eve Corbel
b leev abul char ak trs

bill bissett is the author of some sixty books of poetry, each more full and fluid than the last, and the most recent collection, b leev abul char ak trs (Talon Books), is jam-packed. Here are meditations on holes in the sky, endangered species, "fee

Mindy Abramowitz
Authors à la Carte

Although Authors à la Carte was among the last events in the Vancouver Writers and Readers Festival, it was the first one I attended.

Shannon Emmerson
Autobiography of Red: A Romance

Speaking of the beautifully explained inexplicable things in life Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red: A Romance (Knopf) is a gorgeous, astounding, poetic study of what things are like when you just happen to be red. The colour red.

Michał Kozłowski
Bacacay

Bacacay (Archipelago Books), a collection of some of the strangest, funniest and most wondrous stories ever published, introduces the early work Witold Gombrowicz, one of Poland’s greatest literary figures and one of the twentieth century’s most impo

Kris Rothstein
Austerlitz

W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz (Vintage Canada) is a serious European novel. This translation (by Anthea Bell) still bears more than just a trace of the heaviness and denseness of the German language, which may discourage some readers.

Anna Trutch
Bad Latitudes

The Bad in Bad Latitudes by Al Pope (Turnstone Press) turns out not to be that early ’80s, sort of harmless Michael Jackson baaaaad, but just plain bad, as in the opposite of good, as in bad northern stereotypes: abusive drunk husband, drunk wife, mi

Stephen Osborne
Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm Since Hippocrates

David Wootton writes in his introduction to Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm Since Hippocrates (Oxford) that he set out to write “a history of different ways of conceiving the human body” (the medieval, the mechanical, the chemical, the genetic) but

S. K. Page
Bambi and Me

The invaluable Sheila Fischman, whose translations have become a kind of national treasure, has brought us another book by Michel Tremblay: Bambi and Me (Talonbooks) is a small memoir of Tremblay's earliest movie-going days in Montreal in the fifties

Amy Francis
Barcelona

The close proximity of my new apartment to a repertory cinema has caused me to go through a movie-going renaissance. Unfortunately, most of my discoveries have been in the mediocre to bad category.

Patty Osborne
Baking Cakes in Kigali

Patty Osborne reviews Baking Cakes in Kigali by Gaile Parkin (McClelland & Stewart).

Daniel Francis
Basking Sharks: The Slaughter of BC's Gentle Giants

In 1995, New Star Books in Vancouver launched a series of short (about 100 pages), inexpensive books about nonmainstream subjects in the history and culture of British Columbia. The series is called Transmontanus (that’s “across the mountains” for th

Patty Osborne
Bastion Falls

I didn't expect to like Bastion Falls by Susie Moloney (Key Porter) because the back cover describes it as spine-tingling. I don't usually like having my spine tingled, but Bastion Falls was a pleasant surprise.

Michael Hayward
Basho: The Complete Haiku

Michael Hayward reviews Basho: The Complete Haiku, written by Matsuo Basho and translated by Jane Reichhold (Kodansha).

Blaine Kyllo
Beat

Beat (2000) stars Canada’s own Kiefer Sutherland (who recently got his groove back in the Fox series 24) in an amazing performance as William Burroughs in the early days—before he truly started writing and before he shot his wife Joan during a botche

Patty Osborne
Beach Boy

The next time I was up at the cabin I read Beach Boy, by Ardashir Vakil (Hamish Hamilton), an orange book that caught my eye on the New Arrivals rack at my local library. The book's narrator is a precocious eight-year-old named Cyrus Readymoney, whos

Patty Osborne
Be Near Me

Reading Be Near Me by Andrew O’Hagan (McClelland & Stewart) is like watching a slow-motion traffic accident: you’re not sure how it will end, but you’re sure it will end badly.

Susan Brady
Be Quiet

In the most successful sections of Be Quiet by Margaret Hollingsworth (Blue Lake), the author imagines Emily Carr’s six-week stay in Ste. Agathe, France in 1911, by writing the diary of Winifred Church.

Lily Gontard
Being Caribou: Five Months on Foot with an Arctic Herd

People who live in the North speak of leaving as “going outside.” I recently returned to the North after a lengthy absence and found myself reading two books about the effects of the “outside,” and about the things that brought me here in the first p

Alberto Manguel
I Believe Because It’s Impossible

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.

Rob Kovitz
Because a Lot of Questions Are Complex

Begging the question of what can be defined as “form.”

Stephen Henighan
Power of Denial

The crowds learned that they could not act effectively in the present without confronting the past, specifically the historical treatment of indigenous people.

Stephen Henighan
Treason of the Librarians

On the screen, only the image—not the word—can become the world.

RICHARD VAN CAMP
Grey Matters

It all started with a zesty little book about getting old.

Daniel Francis
Umpire of the St. Lawrence

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.

Alberto Manguel
Pistol Shots at a Concert

The novelist can often better define reality than the historian.

Stephen Henighan
Phony War

"We know that life-altering and possibly cataclysmic change is coming, and we continue to live as we have always done."

Alberto Manguel
Power to the Reader

"Since the beginning of time (the telling of which is also a story), we have known that words are dangerous creatures."

Daniel Francis
Birth of a Nation

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.

Alberto Manguel
In Praise of Ronald Wright

"Authenticity is the essential quality of all travel literature, imaginary or real."

Alberto Manguel
Fist

Alberto Manguel examines the rich symbology of the fist, a primal symbol of rebellion and grief, across cultures and history.

Stephen Henighan
Cross-Country Snow

"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
Immigrants from Nowhere

Stephen Henighan asks: what if you don't have a tidy answer to "Where are you from?"

Daniel Francis
Time for a Rewrite

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
When Treatment Becomes Torture

Daniel Francis discusses Canada's failing mental health care system and its long history of mistreatment.

Stephen Henighan
Offend

The writer who is loved by all, by definition, neglects literature’s prime responsibility: to offend.

Daniel Francis
Acts of Resistance

"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.

Alberto Manguel
The Armenian Question

"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."

Alberto Manguel
Jewish Gauchos

European Jewish artisans on horseback in Argentina.

Stephen Henighan
Campus Confidential

"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
Park In Progress

Daniel Francis asks why a high-speed commuter route runs through Stanley Park, Vancouver's precious urban oasis.

Alberto Manguel
Not Finishing

"A library is never finished, only abandoned." Alberto Manguel on incompletion, voluntary interruption and the pleasure of the day before.

Stephen Henighan
Iberian Duet

The assumption of mutual comprehensibility between speakers of Spanish and Portuguese creates a culture of mutual ignorance.

Anson Ching
the universal human

Review of "The Invention of the Other" directed by Bruno Jorge (2022).

Michael Hayward
Getting past the past

Review of "A Primer for Forgetting: Getting Past the Past" by Lewis Hyde.

Daniel Francis
writing from an early grave

Review of "Orwell: The New Life" by D.J. Taylor.

Eimear Laffan
The Trap Door

This invertebrate does not go looking for prey

Michael Hayward
The peripatetic poet

Review of "Iron Curtain Journals," "South American Journals" and "Fall of America Journals" by Allen Ginsberg.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Haunted House guest

Review of "A Guest in the House" by Emily Carroll.

Michael Hayward
Beyond the event horizon

Review of "Antkind" by Charlie Kaufman.

Anson Ching
Sailing the roaring forties

Review of "The Last Grain Race" by Eric Newby.

rob mclennan
Elizabeth Smart’s Rockcliffe Park

For the sake of the large romantic gesture

Michael Hayward
BELLE ÉPOQUE GOSSIP

Review of "The Man in the Red Coat" by Julian Barnes.

Peggy Thompson
More precious than rubies

Review of "Rubymusic" by Connie Kuhns.

Debby Reis
A not-totally-accurate introduction to the azores

Review of the Netflix series "Rabo de Peixe" (2023) created by Augusto de Fraga.

Michael Hayward
A Russian Brother and his sister

Review of "A Russian Sister" by Caroline Adderson.

Kris Rothstein
The messy back of history

Review of "My Grandfather’s Knife: Hidden Stories from the Second World War" by Joseph Pearson

Christine Lai
Now Must Say Goodbye

The postcard presents a series of absences—the nameless photographer,

the unknown writer and recipient; it is constituted by what is unknown

Sara de Waal
Little Women, Two Raccoons

Hit everything dead on, even if it’s big

Peggy Thompson
Have Mercy

Review of "Mercy Gene" by JD Derbyshire.

Michael Hayward
subterranean mysteries

Review of "Underland" by Robert Macfarlane.

Margaret Nowaczyk
Metanoias

The names we learn in childhood smell the sweetest to us

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Championing Trees

Review of "Tracking Giants: Big Trees, Tiny Triumphs, and Misadventures in the Forest" by Amanda Lewis.

Patty Osborne
Crossing Borders

Review of "Solito: A Memoir" by Javier Zamora

Michael Hayward
The Two Roberts

Review of "Turn Every Page" directed by Lizzie Gottlieb

Ian Roy
My Body Is a Wonderland

Maybe my doctor has two patients named Ian Roy, and I’ve been sent the other Ian’s file

Peggy Thompson
A moment with holden

Review of "Holden After & Before: Love Letter for a Son Lost to Overdose" by Tara McGuire.

JILL MANDRAKE
POINTS OF INFLECTION

Review of "Some of the Puzzles" by M.A.C. Farrant.