The Gathering Tree by Larry Loyie (Theytus Books) was initiated by Chee Mamuk, an organization that provides aboriginal communities with culturally appropriate education about HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted infections, and there is a long li
Sewid-Smith Daisy
The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios
The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios, the latest book by Yann Martel (Vintage), looked to me like a novel, not a book of short stories (which it is). So, when coming close to the end of the first “chapter,” I was alarmed at how fast the story se
Kris Rothstein
The French Guy
No secret Canadian knowledge will help illuminate The French Guy, the latest film by Ann Marie Fleming. Though it is obviously shot in Vancouver, this absurd story lacks a sense of place, and the central joke about the eponymous French guy falls flat
Michael Hayward
The Forger
As an avid long-distance cyclist who also loves to be pulled into a good adventure story, I could not resist Cioma Schönhaus’s book The Forger (Granta), a memoir that describes how Schönhaus lived in hiding in wartime Berlin while working clandestine
Patty Osborne
The Five Books of Moses Lapinsky
Here in Vancouver we had Honest Nat’s Department Store at 48th and Fraser, and in Karen X. Tulchinsky’s book The Five Books of Moses Lapinsky, Toronto had Lenny’s House of Bargains on College Street near Spadina, which, according to Tulchinsky’s stor
Michael Hayward
The Facts of Winter
Canadian readers may doubt that they can learn anything new about winter from The Facts of Winter (McSweeney’s), a book that is faux in many ways. The afterword is a faux biography by Paul La Farge, an American “translator,” of the book’s purported a
Geist Staff
The Ghost in the Gears
Howard White is known to his readers as a wry chronicler of life in the bush and on the boats. But his new book of poems, The Ghost in the Gears (Harbour), reveals the heart of a true romantic beating beneath that lumpen exterior.
Patty Osborne
The Garden Letters
Some of the books that come in over the transom I scoop up for other members of my family. But somewhere between the office and home I often find myself sneaking a read. I took home The Garden Letters by Elspeth Bradbury and Judy Maddocks (Polestar)
Geist Staff
The French Quarter
In his new book, The French Quarter (Macfarlane, Walter & Ross), Ron Graham sets out to illuminate French-English relations in Canada by exploring the French-Canadian side of his own family. Sounds promising, and sets us up brilliantly with a descrip
Geist Staff
The Girl with the Botticelli Face
The dust jacket of The Girl with the Botticelli Face (W. D. Valgardson, Douglas & McIntyre) promises an "explicit rendering of sexual politics," a dissection of "the nature of male rage" and even "one of the most hilarious scenes in CanLit." This rev
BILLEH NICKERSON
The Gladys Elegies
Barbara Nickel's The Gladys Elegies (Coteau Books) was the deserving winner of this year's Pat Lowther Memorial Award for best book of poetry by a Canadian woman. Although there are many things I'd rather do than read sonnets, Nickel's subtle and del
Lily Gontard
The Goldfish Dancer
Patricia Robertson is not a prolific writer—The Goldfish Dancer (Biblioasis) is only her second collection in over a decade—but in this collection she offers stories that draw you in and make you forget about time: a rare gift.
Patty Osborne
The Harp
At the 2005 Vancouver International Film Festival I watched The Harp, a short film that is written and produced by John Bolton, who used to share a music stand with my daughter in the local youth orchestra. John gave up playing the viola years ago, b
Patty Osborne
The Glace Bay Miners' Museum
Another story about love between two misfits, The Glace Bay Miners' Museum (Breton Books) by Sheldon Currie, should have been called Margaret's Museum, like the highly praised movie that came out of it. If it hadn't been for our astute Geist intern,
Sarah Maitland
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
Sarah Maitland reviews The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows (Random House).
Geist Staff
The Girl Wants To
The Girl Wants To, edited by Lynn Crosbie (Coach House) overwhelms its readers with sheer volume. It contains everything from cartoons to photos, to articles and stories and poems, to exhibit documentation.
Michael Hayward
The Hasheesh Eater
Fitz Hugh Ludlow’s The Hasheesh Eater (Rutgers) was first published in 1857, and is now reprinted as another in Rutgers’ Subterranean Lives series. Described as “the first full-length example of American drug literature,” this account is closely mode
Kris Rothstein
The Glenwood Treasure
Until I found The Glenwood Treasure by Kim Moritsugu (Dundurn), I thought writers of adult books were ignoring one of the tried-and-true plots of children’s books: the joys and pitfalls of searching for treasure. Blithe is the quiet daughter of swank
Kris Rothstein
The Heart is an Involuntary Muscle
Monique Proulx’s long-awaited novel, The Heart is an Involuntary Muscle (Douglas & McIntyre), is the story of Florence, a web designer leading a safe virtual life. When she finds out that her father’s dying words feature prominently in a book being w
Luanne Armstrong
The Inner Green
Most of the interesting books to be found on the subject of home and place, where we live and how we relate to it, are American, but The Inner Green (Maa Press), is a collection of natural history and personal essays by K. Linda Kivi and Eileen Deleh
Michael Hayward
The Goshawk
One reality of modern publishing is that this season’s new books are next season’s remainders. This harsh fact is compounded by the inexorable disappearance of good used bookstores everywhere, with the result that many excellent books that have had t
GILLIAN JEROME
The Hip Mama Survival Guide
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 “
Patty Osborne
The Key of Do
In my reading life I’ve been locked in YA (young adult) land ever since I found myself surrounded by a gaggle of teenage nieces at a family party. I tried the usual icebreakers about school and friends, but the conversation really got going when I as
Kris Rothstein
The Last Samurai
I had fun in the gifted class in elementary school because my parents never pressured me to become a sensation in spelling, or science—or, like Maya, the ethereal figure in Nancy Huston’s tense novel Prodigy (McArthur), a brilliant ten-year-old piani
On Dorothy Parker Day we wear wool suits and little hats, smoke with cigarette holders and have a liver-coloured dachshund on a lead.
Shelley Kozlowski
Revving
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?
Thad McIlroy
Check-Out
"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."
Michał Kozłowski
In the Flesh
From Jean Talon to Lenin’s Tomb
Evel Economakis
Leningrad Redact
“If we paid protection money to the KGB, there’d be nothing left for salaries. And we call it the FSB now.”
Christine Novosel
Stuck on the Grid
Christine Novosel talks life in Scotland: "What Glasgow lacks in beauty and brains, it makes up for with wit and resilience."
Stephen Osborne
The Orwell Effect
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.
Sheila Heti
Law of Small Numbers
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?
Margaret Nowaczyk
Ad Infinitum
"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."
Alex Khramov
Walrus Keeper
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.
Jane Silcott
Ducks
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.
Antoine Dion-Ortega
South Side Malartic
People are getting either sick or mad, or both.
Mandelbrot
Zero Degree Dining
The Kathmandu Café in multiple dimensions.
M.A.C. Farrant
4-Day Forecast for Wendy
"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
Mavis in Montreal
Sarah Pollard makes a pilgrimage to Montreal to hang out and write where Mavis Gallant hung out and wrote.
Marjorie Doyle
Goin’ to MUN
"'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
Grinkus and Pepper
Stephen Osborne is entranced by a pair of eccentric, high profile students while on a university tour in 1964.
Deborah Ostrovsky
Petites Pattes
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.
Eve Corbel
Guide to Literary Footwear
Espadrille, paduka, chopine—Eve Corbel illustrates a guide for readers on some of the fanciest footwear found in literature.
Robert Everett-Green
Checkered Past
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.
JEROME STUEART
Road Trip
A collection of Jerome Stueart's Greyhound sketches, including one Vitruvian bus driver.
Katie Addleman
Greyhound
The driver said, “Are you fit to travel, sir?” and the crack smoker said, “Are any of us fit to travel?"
Eve Corbel
The 99: Bus Without Pity
How did the 99 B-Line bus route come to be the locus of the most heartless transit rides in Greater Vancouver?
Stephen Osborne
Insurgency
Stephen Osborne discusses the past, present and future of literary magazines in Canada.
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.
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
Patty Osborne
A Little Distillery in Nowgong
A review of A Little Distillery in Nowgong by Ashok Mathur.
JILL MANDRAKE
The Skinny
The UK literary journal, Flash, features concise forms of microfiction: short-short stories also known as "flashes".
JILL MANDRAKE
Pinspotting
"I hope you will agree that we more sensitive teenagers grew up surrounded by irony." Jill Mandrake calls George Bowering's memoir his most provocative work yet.
Jesmine Cham
Dear Patient
A woman, hoping to find peace, seeks her birth mother. A review of By Blood by Ellen Ullman.
RICHARD VAN CAMP
Squirmworthy
Mary Schendlinger reviews SayWha?!, a monthly evening of “readings of deliciously rotten writing”.
Norbert Ruebsaat
Real World Happiness
Norbert Ruebsaat learns that true happiness requires “an ability to live with ambiguity and tolerate a certain degree of physical humour” in Brian Fawcett's memoir, Human Happiness.
Michael Hayward
Literary Lives
Diana Athill never dreamed of writing—until one morning, suddenly she wrote. "Until that moment I had been hand-maiden, as editor, to other people’s writing, without ever dreaming of myself as a writer."
Thad McIlroy
Death and the Economist
The art of the obituary lives on: Obituaries of note from The Economist magazine, including those of the "gunrunner of CIA front companies" and "last interesting Marxist."
KELSEA O'CONNOR
Terribly Human
"Awkwardness comes with loving someone too much or not enough." A review of Other People We Married by Emma Straub.
RICHARD VAN CAMP
Rookie Yearbook One
The Senior Editor of Geist learns to "Wear Knee Socks with Everything" from an exceptional blog turned print book by Tavi Gevinson.
KELSEA O'CONNOR
Grief-in-Progress
Kelsea O'Connor reviews Nox by Anne Carson (New Directions).
Michael Hayward
Writing in Blue
Michael Hayward reviews Blue Nights by Joan Didion (Knopf).
Mandelbrot
Zero Drag and Genius
Mandelbrot reviews The Wage Slave's Glossary written by Joshua Glenn and Mark Kingwell and illustrated by Seth.
Eve Corbel
Collier Cornucopia
Eve Corbel reviews Collier’s Popular Press: 30 Years on the Newsstand.
KELSEA O'CONNOR
Cut-Out Lit
Kelsea O'Connor reviews Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer (Visual Editions).
Jennesia Pedri
Dividing Lines
Jennesia Pedri reviews Walls: Travels Along the Barricades by Marcello di Cintio (Goose Lane).
Phrase books are tools of cultural globalization—but they are also among its casualties.
Stephen Henighan
Collateral Damage
When building a nation, cultural riches can be lost.
Stephen Henighan
Transatlantic Fictions
Coming to harbour in a new world.
Alberto Manguel
Arms and Letters
Science and the arts fulfil their functions to help us survive through the imagination.
CHERYL THOMPSON
Dismantling the Myth of the Hero
In a world dominated by heroes, difference is not tolerated.
Stephen Henighan
Reheated Races
Dividing and conquering local populations confines them to manageable administrative units.
Alberto Manguel
Achilles and the Lusitan Tortoise
“Have patience” and “Tomorrow” are two inseparable locutions in the Portuguese tongue.
Stephen Henighan
All in the Same CANO
For a brief period the band CANO gave shape to the dream of a bilingual Canadian culture.
LISA BIRD-WILSON
Occupation Anxiety
Lisa Bird-Wilson on UNDRIP, reconciliation, and the anxiety felt by Indigenous people in Canada.
Stephen Henighan
Residential Roots
"The hemispheric context reveals the roots of the residential school system...Destroying Indigenous cultures was a positivist policy from Patagonia to Dawson City."
Stephen Henighan
Not Reading
What we do when we absorb words from a screen—and we haven’t yet evolved a verb for it—is not reading.
Alberto Manguel
Library as Wishful Thinking
Libraries are not only essential in educating the soul, but in forming the identity of a society.
Stephen Henighan
Lethal Evolutions
Our society is formed on the assumption of a healthy immune system.
Stephen Henighan
Plague
What we can—and can’t—learn from the plague
Alberto Manguel
Léon Bloy and His Monogamous Reader
Dogged dedication grants a reader vicarious immortality.
Stephen Henighan
Confidence Woman
The woman who called herself Tatiana Aarons gave me an address that led to a vacant lot.
Stephen Henighan
A Pen Too Far
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.
George Fetherling
The Daily Apocalypse
The newspaper wars aren’t what they used to be.
Stephen Henighan
Taíno Tales
A package-deal paradise reputation curtails gringo knowledge of Dominican life.
Alberto Manguel
A Fairy Tale for Our Time
What can the Brothers Grimm teach us about the state of our economic system? Everything.
Alberto Manguel
Art and Blasphemy
Faith seems to shiver when confronted by art.
Alberto Manguel
Literature & Morality
Must artists declare their moral integrity?
Stephen Henighan
Flight Shame
Without air travel, family networks might have dissolved long ago.
Alberto Manguel
The Defeat of Sherlock Holmes
There’s something not quite right about the grid on which the game is played.