This year for Halloween, we creep back into the archives and Stephen Osborne digs deep into his family's history at the Salem witch trials.

Theft, death and don't-mess-with-me expressions—unlocking the family portrait.

Salmon runs, voodoo juice and chewing the fat in Mission.

Salmon runs, voodoo juice and chewing the fat in Mission.

“Want to marry me? My wife she burned me. She just burned me, you know. Now I’m going to court to burn her back.”

Respected journalist, Geist contributor and maker of olive sandwiches.

Edith Iglauer invites Pierre Trudeau over for dinner and gets Barbra Streisand as a bonus.

Compassionate, good truck driver, likes kids, likes ice cream—the makings of a no-fail ice cream dude.

In 1989, when Harold and Barbara Morgan opened the Museum of Exotic World in the front rooms of Harold’s commercial painting business in Vancouver, they had been travelling the world every winter for forty-five years and had accumulated many souvenir

Randy Fred receives his first traditional Nuu-chah-nulth name.

Notes from the Governor General’s Literary Awards.

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Han Fusen navigates multiculturalism and kookoo sabzi from inside a Persian grocery store.

Jill Mandrake on the surprising effect of peanut brittle.

Rice, tea and a trillion dollars of spirit money.

The secret heart of Albania is imbued with compassion and a desire to help those in need

Scenic views, fresh muffins and drunk passengers—three days and four nights aboard the Canadian from Vancouver to Toronto.

What was a lone hen doing in the yard, a few feet from a busy city street?

In Peterborough, Pastor Billy cures arthritis, back pain, bone spurs, lymphoma, stage four liver cancer, sleep apnea and atrial fibrillation

From morning to night, there's always someone coming in for smokes and a chat.

The Museum of Communism is easy to find thanks to the museum’s adver­tis­ing slo­gan: We’re above McDonald’s.

Before I opened for Joyce Carol Oates at her reading at Harbourfront in Toronto, we had dinner: Oates and her husband, Raymond Smith; the organizer, Greg Gatenby; and me.

Who knew my dad's old pen was a famous Parker 51 Vacumatic?

Veronique Darwin revisits her childhood journal, from hearing ghosts in kindergarten to staring at hotties in grade seven.

“Never write a line you don’t mean,” said Carver. “And don’t ever imag

Stephen Osborne reflects on the Vancouver Poetry Conference, the Occupy movement, and a brunch with NaNoWriMo novelists.

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.

This text appeared on the back cover of It’s Never Over by Morley Callaghan, Laurentian Library edition, 1972. (Originally published in 1930.)

Michael Hayward on Memoirs from Beyond the Grave by François-René de Chateaubriand

Kelsea O’Connor on Manfried the Man by Caitlyn Major and Kelly Bastow.

Patty Osborne on the CBC documentary series The Neddeaus of Duqesne Island.

Thad McIlroy on Brian Busby's The Dusty Bookcase.

Thad McIlroy on Witold Szabłowski’s Dancing Bears: True Stories of People Nostalgic for Life Under Tyranny.

Michael Hayward on László Krasznahorkai's The Manhattan Project.

Jill Mandrake on False Memories and Other Likely Tales by Ernest Hekkanen.

Daniel Francis on Geoff Meggs attempt to solve the murder of strike leader Frank Rogers.

Thad McIlroy thinks you should watch Zach Galifianakis' Baskets.

Peggy Thompson on Amber Dawn's Sodom Road Exit.

Alain de Botton, whose intellect and sense of humour brought us How Proust Can Change Your Life and The Consolations of Philosophy, enters new territory with The Art of Travel (Hamish Hamilton). Here he takes on our fascination with other places and

Jill Mandrake discusses Kevin Shaw's poetry.

Michael Hayward on books that may make you a better writer.

Mallory Ortberg's subversive dark fairy tales.

Patty Osborne shares insights on Peter Carey's book.

Michael Hayward on a selection of Notting Hill Editions' latest releases.

Kelsea O'Connor on "The Case of the Gilded Lily," a film by Shipwrecked Comedy.

Mandelbrot schleps a pen around for a week to feel it out.

Michael Hayward on "Autumn" by Karl Ove Knausgaard.

Jill Mandrake on "The Orwell Tapes" compiled by Stephen Wadhams.

Thad McIlroy on "The Weekend Man" by Richard B. Wright.

Jasmine Sealy on "You Can't Stay Here" by Jasmina Odor.

"My espresso machine was in the repair shop and I had begun to despair of ever seeing it again."

Alberto Manguel's column from Geist 93 about how the most important Turkish novelist of modern times took over fifty years to reach English-speaking audiences.

"Canadians have long been convinced that we do not know much, or care much, about our own history, but a new study suggests that this truism is not true."

A look back at World War I as the first great twentieth-century pollution of language.

An appreciation of Dante's "Commedia."

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

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

Ruskin's readers have the power to know that there is indeed room for Alice at the Mad Hatter's table.

In order to discharge ourselves of certain problems, why not simply erase from our maps the sites of such nuisance?

What does it mean to "be" yourself? The face reflected in the mirror is unrecognizable.

In the farmer’s market, a quintessentially Canadian setting, much of Canada is not visible.

In this essay, Daniel Francis discusses how Gerda Munsinger—a woman with ties to the criminal underworld—shaped Canadian politics in the 1960s.

Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner is a film about community and the north.

Reflections on John Updike's death.

The Geist map has a venerable ancestor that goes back four centuries and halfway around the world.

Slot machines sing their astral music. The tape recorder turns off. “Do you talk to friends about sex?” he asks.

There may be more to reality TV than meets the eye.

I'm always looking for the moment in which a character must stop to eat because, for me, the very mention of food humanizes a story.

During the 1980s the literary critic Edward Said organized occasional research seminars at Columbia University in New York.

The books we love become our cartography.

One thing Canadians have learned from our armed incursion into Afghanistan is that we do not have a vocabulary for discussing war or warlike events.

The atrocities were carried out in the name of some version of “civilization” that the Queen represented.

There are imaginary cities for scientists, vampires, lechers and even bad students—but what about writers?

Is it the icons of Canadian pop culture—hockey fights, Tim Hortons coffee, Don Cherry’s haberdashery, Rick Mercer’s rants—that reveal the deepest truths about us?

The Penthouse, the notorious Vancouver night club, shares a history with several of the city's missing women cases.