Thad McIlroy reviews Paris Nocturne by Patrick Modiano, a Nobel Prize-winning author.
Stephen Osborne
Frozen, Not Forgotten
"The miscellanist Rob Kovitz in his new book Dead and Cold has assembled, coordinated or otherwise summoned into being the best, the most spellbinding and the most chilblain-inducing account of death in the Arctic that you will ever read."
Kris Rothstein
Elixirs
Craft Distilling: Making Liquor Legally at Home by Victoria Redhed Miller is a no-nonsense how-to book, and a rational plea to lift laws that prevent small-batch not-for-profit distilling.
A.D. Peterkin
Pulling the Goalie
Auto pilot, devil's handshake and four sisters on Thumb Street.
Norbert Ruebsaat
Golden Voice
Leonard Cohen pays a visit to the neighborhood in song.
Rob Kovitz
Because a Lot of Questions Are Complex
Begging the question of what can be defined as “form.”
Lily Gontard
Passage
Lily Gontard reviews Passage (2008), directed by John Walker.
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.
Rebekah Chotem
Coming of Age Near Thunder Bay
Rebekah Chotem reviews Sleeping Giant, a critically-acclaimed coming-of-age film directed by Andrew Cividino.
Michael Hayward
Cycling in Cities
"To properly understand Mayor Gregor Robertson’s ongoing bicyclification of Vancouver, I think we need more books like Jon Day’s Cyclogeography: Journeys of a London Bicycle Courier, an extended essay about 'the bicycle in the cultural imagination.'"
Mandelbrot
Zero Degree Dining
The Kathmandu Café in multiple dimensions.
KELSEA O'CONNOR
Martel’s Mountains
In The High Mountains of Portugal (Knopf), Yann Martel returns to magic realism in three interwoven stories about lost love and journeys taken to reclaim the past.
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.
roni-simunovic
Teledildonics
"Sex for Dummies, the 'Fun and Easy Way to Have Great Sex in the ’90s,' sat in the window of my neighbourhood bookstore and I bought it because, as a twenty-three-year-old, I was curious about what sex was like before my time."
Michael Hayward
Following Wind, Following Water
Michael Hayward reviews a number of travelogues by Daniel Canty and Bill Porter.
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."
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.
RICHARD VAN CAMP
Time-Tested
Mary Schendlinger reviews M Train by Patti Smith and My Life on the Road by Gloria Steinem.
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.
Rebekah Chotem
American Doppelgänger
"It’s well documented that Hollywood films use Canada to stand in for the US, including Brokeback Mountain, Good Will Hunting, the Twilight series, Rambo’s First Blood and many, many more blockbusters."
The facts (and fictions) surrounding the tale of Quebec's most famous murderess, La Corriveau.
Joe Bongiorno
The Shī Fu
Joe Bongiorno goes in search of enlightenment and finds the Shī Fu.
Carmen Tiampo
What Survives
My great-grandfather exists now only in memory, unacknowledged even by his tombstone
KATHRYN MOCKLER
I Won’t Clean the Tub
He said he just wanted towels. There was no reason to be afraid.
Carolyne Montgomery
In the Pines
It is a Sunday in August. We drive from London, Ontario, to the Pinery Provincial Park in a new green 1964 Mercury Comet.
BILLEH NICKERSON
V4G 1N4
A poem about a postal code.
John Patterson
Devil’s Night
On Halloween in 1966, John Patterson's father burned down the Jones's house to give the neighbourhood kids a thrill.
GALE SMALLWOOD-JONES
Working Life for a Girl in the 1960s
We got paid once a week in cash - it made you feel special the first few times.
M.A.C. Farrant
Stories from a West Coast Town
Very quietly, very slowly, happiness can take over a person's life
Jennesia Pedri
T-Bay Notes
Leaving Thunder Bay isn't one of the things that gets easier with practice
Jocelyn Kuang
Candy Cap Magic
Forgotten cutlery, missing mushrooms and lingering doubt: a recipe for bewilderment.
Erin Soros
Carbon
"A folder full of awards proves to the psychiatrist I wasn't always this way."
Jocelyn Kuang
27,000 Cups of Tea
Battenbergs and Victoria sponge at Buckingham Palace.
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
Treaties
A young Indigenous woman deals with hippy-artist-pothead boyfriends and car troubles.
Randy Fred
Borderless
Randy Fred reports on migrant workers, then and now.
Michał Kozłowski
Corpse Reviver
The restaurant had white concrete walls and chrome lights dangling from the ceiling that gave the place an operating theatre vibe.
Christine Novosel
Hived Off
Christine Novosel reports from Glasgow on art school, apiary management, Brexit and being a junkyard dog.
Robert Everett-Green
Wholesome Reading
Evelyn Everett-Green wrote novels for young people, of a morally improving nature. Her books were also meant to entertain, with tales of wholesome adventure and romance, often set in heroic times or picturesque locations.
Barbara Zatyko
Stumped
Despite attempts to reattach my pinkie, I woke up with nine fingers.
Julie Vandervoort
Sewing Cabinet: Short Film
A short film featuring "Sewing Cabinet" by Julie Vandervoort, originally published in Geist 74.
David Koulack
A Different Sort of Synagogue
David Koulack spends Yom Kippur in a packed gymnasium in Paris among a beehive of activity and a cacophony of sound.
Eve Corbel
Some Lesser-Known Emoji
Eve Corbel draws emoji you can use when Mercury is in retrograde, when you've eaten too much hot sauce and during other specific times of need.
Angela Wheelock
Something Like Armenian
Angela Wheelock meets a stranger at a bus stop and discusses Rumi, Hafiz and other great poets who were terrible leaders.
EVELYN LAU
24 Sussex
Picture Harper lounging among pastel cushions, his stiff grey hair tight as a helmet on his head.
M.A.C. Farrant
Selected Days
On Dorothy Parker Day we wear wool suits and little hats, smoke with cigarette holders and have a liver-coloured dachshund on a lead.
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.
Daniel Francis on John Franklin, John Rae and the Globe and Mail's enthusiasm for cannibalism.
Alberto Manguel
Marilla
Prince Edward Island gothic.
Alberto Manguel
Hoping Against Hope
Kafka’s writing allows us intuitions and half-dreams but never total comprehension.
Joseph Weiss
King of the Post-Anthropocene
Kaiju are the heroes we deserve.
Stephen Henighan
Left Nationalists
Progressives are far less likely to be nationalists than ever before.
Alberto Manguel
Reach Out and Touch (Somebody's Hand)
There is no way to step back from the orgy of kisses without offending.
Daniel Francis
Acadia's Quiet Revolution
Revolutions need popular heroes, and unpopularvillains, and the Acadians of New Brunswick had both.
Stephen Henighan
Vanished Shore
To build a city on land flooded by the tides isn’t just a mistake—it’s utopic.
LISA BIRD-WILSON
Distant Early Warning
We think of the Arctic as pristine and untouched—but nowhere on the planet is as harshly impacted by climate change.
Alberto Manguel
Libraries without Borders
Reading is a subversive activity and does not believe in the convention of borders.
Stephen Henighan
Happy Barracks
In Hungary, goulash socialism becomes difficult to swallow
Alberto Manguel
How I Became a Writer of Colour
Airport security assures Alberto Manguel that he has been randomly picked.
Alberto Manguel
Beginning at the Beginning
To teach us how to read Don Quixote, a text so contrary to conventional literary tradition, the prologue itself needed to break from all traditions
Stephen Henighan
Caribbean Enigma
Unravelling the mysteries of Alejo Carpentier
Alberto Manguel
The Devil
We insist The Devil whispers horrible things in our ear and inspires our worst deeds.
LISA BIRD-WILSON
Smashing Identity Algorithms, Yes Please
While status registration under the Indian Act is a construct, claiming status identity isan important factor in Indigenous identity and cultural transmission.
Stephen Henighan
Victims of Anti-Communism
Anti-communism, retired by most Western governments,receives monumental status in Canada
RICHARD VAN CAMP
Buried Treasure
Mary Schendlinger challenges a review of a biography of Blanche Knopf, the underrecognized co-founder of Alfred A. Knopf Inc.
Stephen Henighan
Ethnic Babies
Stephen Henighan discusses the crude first steps to finding a new way to talk about racial reality.
Alberto Manguel
Reporting Lies
The craft of untruth has been perfected.
LISA BIRD-WILSON
Clowns, Cakes, Canoes: This is Canada?
Romantic notions that equate Indigenous peoples with nature are not going to cut it.
Rob Kovitz
Question Period
Rob Kovitz compiles the pressing questions of the day—"How are they gonna beat ISIS?" And, "On Twitter, who cares?"
Stephen Henighan
Write What You Can Imagine
Like most advice given to writers, the injunction to “write what you know” is misleading.
Stephen Henighan
City Apart
The idea of Europe is incarnated nowhere as much as in St. Petersburg—Stephen Henighan on Europe's greatest city.