Sometime in the late seventies Osborne and I walked down Spadina from Bloor to Front street, listening to Shein talk about the China Effect.

A eulogy delivered by email, from a woman living in Berlin to her lifelong friend in Vancouver.

An intrepid Geist correspondent narrowly avoids being stabbed by a moose-antler letter opener in Whitehorse.

A question of some concern among my friends when we were growing up in the fifties and sixties was how old you had to be to go to war.

I started walking, seriously. It was the bone scan that got me going. The healthy solid green was spongy with rotting black holes.

My god, I think as I wait my turn in the wash­room of the Hotel Vancouver, all of these peo­ple look just like Carol Shields.

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We did what we weren’t supposed to do. We paid a local man to take us horseback riding. He was walking up and down the beach, waving papers and shouting, “Horses!” We signalled for him to come over, and we negotiated a price.

Only when I settle down in the back seat of the cab do I notice that on the dashboard there are several stickers with the letter U, the sign of Ustashe. During the Second World War, Ustashe was the ruling party in the Independent State of Croatia.

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The main reason that I open up my doors to people on the street is so that they would have a place to sort of come home.

I haven’t been in Jerusalem for sixteen years and the first thing my friend shows me is the wall that separates them from the Palestinians.

At the end of the Electrolux era, a veteran salesman closes his store to start a new job at Future Shop.

We look back and so much of the past seems to portend what would come later. The man in the seat in front of me on the Greyhound bus was returning to Edmonton from his annual vacation in Las Vegas, where in the off-season you can get a cheap room wit

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The Borderland Foundation documents borderland culture from its headquarters in the Jewish ghost town of Sejny, Poland.

Reporting on the Michael Jackson trial from a Best Value Inn in Santa Maria, California.

How do you have a good time in Warsaw? Sing Neil Diamond songs in a karaoke bar.

Ayurveda massage will leave you feeling like the bones have been secretly extracted from your body.

It was at about this moment that I hit him in the face, which is something I’ve never done before. I don’t know what perfect form the punch took in my mind, but by the time the impulse had pushed its way through me, my hand had bent inward like an old person’s claw, or a doll’s hand—curved around but without a bottle to clutch.

This was the first pub I entered when I finally said goodbye to vomiting on local beaches because I could drink legally. And it’s the first pub I’ve come to since I’ve been home. Now it’s Tuesday night, Karaoke Night.

When I met you, one floor up from the acute psychosis ward, you were wearing a paper shower cap and green pyjamas just like mine. You glared at me through the crowd because you thought I had your hoodie on. But we just had very similar hoodies.

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It’s dark when I get off the bus by the corner store. Not the best area of town. The only other person in sight is lying on the sidewalk.

The next performer, Coco, a six-year-old Belgian shepherd, stood on his back legs and hopped alongside a woman wearing white go-go boots who jiggled her hips in time to “ymca.” Coco weaved between her legs, rolled across her feet, lay on his back and kicked his legs in the air. The woman’s brow was furrowed and sweat ran down her face. Coco bounded in front of her, then backed through her legs and sneezed twice. The judges looked at each other and one of them wrote somethingdown.

When I am dying, it would be comforting tobe told that I had been the human equivalent of a good dog. Loving,compassionate, faithful, understanding, dignified, but also goofy, curious,fun, protective, a friend. Let’s leave out obedience.

Mr. C.F. Keiss, awealthy American visitor from Bucyrus, Ohio, met death with “tragic suddenness”under the wheels of the new City auto ambulance at the corner of Pender andGranville Streets yesterday afternoon.

When we hitchhiked back to Castle­gar it was dark and the lights on the car dashboards flickered and their glass reflected the faces of the men who’d picked us up and who, I imagined, knew everything there was to know about electricity.

Not long ago on a sticky Saturday night at a comedy club in Madison, Wisconsin, the funeral director with whom I was having a drink told me how long it takes for the formaldehyde to replace the blood in a dead person’s arteries. He drank a light beer

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Violence could not reach them only when they were distant as the moon, not of this world

“The first time I met him, he caused me to float to the ceiling"

Sebastian and I enjoy making fun of le mythomane. We compare him to characters in novels. Maybe he can’t return home because he’s wanted for a crime.

What does it mean to love a band? A friend? A nation?

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.

Mastery of the self

Michael Hayward on Packing My Library: An Elegy and Ten Digressions by Alberto Manguel.

Mary Schendlinger on Vox.com's podcast Today Explained.

Anson Ching on Anna, Like Thunder.

Patty Osborne on Slow Twisting by Anonymous.

Stephen Osborne on Tekahionwake: E. Pauline Johnson's Writings on Native North America.

Michael Hayward on a collection of conversations with Brion Gysin—writer and counterculture legend.

Patty Osborne on the mixed review of Crazy Rich Asians.

Mary Schendlinger on Natalia Ginzburg's narrative of her family during the rise of Hitler and Mussolini.

The final volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle allows us to compare Karl Ove’s literary edifice with others of similar ilk—and bulk.

Michael Hayward drove across the country to see Stephen Fry's Mythos.

Kristen Lawson on Nailed It!, a Netflix Original

Michael Hayward on the newly translated The Unwomanly Face of War by Svetlana Alexievich.

Michal Kozlowski on From the Heart of It All: Ten Years of Writing from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.

Jill Mandrake on City Poems by Joe Fiorito.

Stephen Osborne on The Hotel Years, a collection of short pieces by Joseph Roth.

Michael Hayward on Gathie Falk's memoir Apples, etc.

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

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.

Thad McIlroy thinks you should watch Zach Galifianakis' Baskets.

Phrase books are tools of cultural globalization—but they are also among its casualties.

When building a nation, cultural riches can be lost.

Coming to harbour in a new world.

Science and the arts fulfil their functions to help us survive through the imagination.

Dividing and conquering local populations confines them to manageable administrative units.

In a world dominated by heroes, difference is not tolerated.

“Have patience” and “Tomorrow” are two inseparable locutions in the Portuguese tongue.

For a brief period the band CANO gave shape to the dream of a bilingual Canadian culture.

"The hemispheric context reveals the roots of the residential school system...Destroying Indigenous cultures was a positivist policy from Patagonia to Dawson City."

Lisa Bird-Wilson on UNDRIP, reconciliation, and the anxiety felt by Indigenous people in Canada.

What we do when we absorb words from a screen—and we haven’t yet evolved a verb for it—is not reading.

Libraries are not only essential in educating the soul, but in forming the identity of a society.

Our society is formed on the assumption of a healthy immune system.

The woman who called herself Tatiana Aarons gave me an address that led to a vacant lot.

Dogged dedication grants a reader vicarious immortality.

What we can—and can’t—learn from the plague

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.

The newspaper wars aren’t what they used to be.

A package-deal paradise reputation curtails gringo knowledge of Dominican life.

Faith seems to shiver when confronted by art.

What can the Brothers Grimm teach us about the state of our economic system? Everything.

Must artists declare their moral integrity?

Without air travel, family networks might have dissolved long ago.

There’s something not quite right about the grid on which the game is played.