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All
dispatches
essays
reviews
columns
LINDA GRIFFITHS
Royal Pillow Talk

"The world thinks of me as a great lover, but the truth is, I’m not."

CLAUDIO GAUDIO
Say Anything

"Nietzsche, for example, thought his pen was a hammer, but he may have been mistaken because German professors rarely did their own carpentry."

Brad Cran
Terry

Review of "Terry" by Douglas Coupland.

Brad Cran
Crowd of Sounds
Brad Cran
Pine
Brad Cran
The Land Beyond
Brad Cran
Family Business
Michał Kozłowski
Centre of the Universe

Michal Kozlowski reports on the state of publishing: s'mores, Titantic metaphors, Celtic jigs, steak canapés and mechanical bull riding.

Stephen Osborne
Last Steve Standing

Stephen Osborne says goodbye to Stephen Harper.

David Albahari
Dangerous Times

David Albahari visits Canadian cities and remembers a slogan from the former Yugoslavia: Get to know your country in order to love her.

Rhonda Waterfall
Les Joyeux Lémuriens

“Thank Christ,” says Dieter when I finally wake up. “I thought you were dead.”

Mary Leah de Zwart
Eaten by Dog, Run Over by Train

Wally, the orange tabby: Fell out of travel trailer going over Pavillion Mountain, may be living happily at farm on top of mountain.

Evel Economakis
White Night Patrol

"The seven of us sat around a small, wobbly table in the living room and stared at each other between shots of rotgut vodka."

David Albahari
Voices

My friend, who writes poems and stories, tells me in the café that he finds it more and more difficult to deal with the writer inside him.

Stephen Osborne
Sleight of Hand

Stephen Osborne plunges into the pedestrian flow and encounters panhandlers, magicians and a cyclist praying to a monument of Edward VII.

Michał Kozłowski
Pillars of Salt

"The tour guide said: every hour you spend down in the mine adds three minutes to your life." Michal Kozlowski reports from 300 feet below ground.

Margaret Nowaczyk
Knitting Class

During World War II my grandmother ran contraband, hunted pigeons.

Lindsay Diehl
Honolulu

Lindsay Diehl encounters choppy waves, a beautiful man in a hot tub and a pendant shaped like a curved tongue on a trip to Hawaii.

Susan Mockler
Hey, Sexy

"I glanced at Jack, his tattooed arms, his gloved hands resting on the wheels of his manual chair. If only I could get my arms back. I could live with anything else."

roni-simunovic
Literary Festival Field Guide

Roni Simunovic catalogues types of literary festival attendees: the jaded art student, the CanLit socialite, the overworked publisher and more.

Eve Corbel
Old Women Cry at Weddings

Eve Corbel on marriage and what comes after the wedding: the monster mortgage, the dreary housework, the contemptuous in-laws and more.

Christopher Gudgeon
Waiting for Our Lord God Jesus Christ…

…in the Maple Leaf Lounge at the John G. Diefenbaker Airport in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.

David Albahari
Two Homes, One Wolf

If a house were a good thing, the wolf would have one.

Veronica Gaylie
London Double

Veronica Gaylie encounters invisible lamps, uncooperative clerks and a cushion with a bear and/or badger on it during a trip to London.

VINCENT PAGÉ
Milton Acorn Googles His Own Work

"Could I forget: the look that tells me you want me"—Vincent Pagé creates Google autocomplete poetry.

CARIN MAKUZ
Bride of God

On her first communion, a young girl searches for peace of mind in a world of purgatory, UFOs and the Lennon Sisters.

Stephen Osborne
Dream Counsels

"The soiled side of the shirt is the great baggage of dreams"—Stephen Osborne dreams of Hemingway, Harper and profiteroles.

Michał Kozłowski
Publishing Life

The zine scene—comics, wrestling, skateboarding and music.

Jeff Shucard
Piss-up

Jeff Shucard reminisces about St. Patrick's Day, 1979: druidic magic, Irish fiddle tunes and the greatest piss-up of all time.

Eve Corbel
Cooks Who Over-Identify with Their Equipment

The rasp, the spatula and the corkscrew—Eve Corbel's series of obsessive cooks.

Diana Fitzgerald Bryden
Giller Filler

Diana Fitzgerald Bryden attends Between the Pages, the pre-Giller hybrid that’s a kind of sacrificial altar/beauty pageant for six Canadian authors.

Stephen Osborne
Shaggy Dog Tales

Stephen Osborne on dog walking, the absurdity of online writing guides and the THE building.

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.

Anson Ching
Fact
the universal human

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

Michael Hayward
Fact
Getting past the past

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

Daniel Francis
Fact
writing from an early grave

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

Michael Hayward
Fact
The peripatetic poet

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

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Fact
Haunted House guest

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

Michael Hayward
Fact
Beyond the event horizon

Review of "Antkind" by Charlie Kaufman.

Anson Ching
Fact
Sailing the roaring forties

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

Michael Hayward
Fact
BELLE ÉPOQUE GOSSIP

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

Peggy Thompson
Fact
More precious than rubies

Review of "Rubymusic" by Connie Kuhns.

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

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

Michael Hayward
Fact
A Russian Brother and his sister

Review of "A Russian Sister" by Caroline Adderson.

Kris Rothstein
Fact
The messy back of history

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

Peggy Thompson
Fact
Have Mercy

Review of "Mercy Gene" by JD Derbyshire.

Michael Hayward
Fact
subterranean mysteries

Review of "Underland" by Robert Macfarlane.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Fact
Championing Trees

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

Patty Osborne
Fact
Crossing Borders

Review of "Solito: A Memoir" by Javier Zamora

Michael Hayward
Fact
The Two Roberts

Review of "Turn Every Page" directed by Lizzie Gottlieb

Peggy Thompson
Fact
A moment with holden

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

JILL MANDRAKE
Fact
POINTS OF INFLECTION

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

Michael Hayward
Fact
A HOLIDAY IN THE MOUNTAINS (WITH PIE)

Review of "Holiday, 1909" by Charles Chapman.

Anson Ching
Fact
THE BELL KEEPS TOLLING

Review of "For Whom the Bell Tolls" by Ernest Hemingway.

Kris Rothstein
Fact
DEFINED BY DUMPLINGS

Review of "What We Talk About When We Talk About Dumplings" edited by John Lorinc.

Jonathan Heggen
Fact
The Common Shaman

Review of "Shaman" by Kim Stanley Robinson.

Peggy Thompson
Fact
Walk Another Path

Review of "Landlines" by Raynor Winn.

Stephen Henighan
Separate Crossings

Dr. Portillo, a Mexican physician, lives with her husband and son in a balcony-festooned six-bedroom house in a gated suburb. The adobe walls that enclose the garden, the coloured tiles embedded in the walls and the servants’ garden house are all typical of the home of a prosperous Mexican family. The multi-generational collection of relatives who occupy the spare bedrooms also reflect Mexican tradition. Dr. Portillo receives her patients in an office located in a tower in the northern Mexican city of Tijuana; since many of the patients are American, much of her working day takes place in English. When she goes home at night, she relaxes by speaking to her husband and son in Spanish. Her son, however, often responds in English because Dr. Portillo’s typical Mexican home is located in suburban California.

Daniel Francis
The Landscape Men

The Group of Seven “vision” is an inadequate way to describe an urban, multiracial, industrial society like Canada, and pretty much always was.

George Fetherling
City of Neighbourhoods

In Bangkok as in major centres all over Asia, there is life everywhere, on every street, in every shop and at all hours.

Stephen Henighan
Before Lonely Planet

Lonely Planet readers no longer travel in Bolivia or Thailand, but within the elastic, infinitely portable boundaries of the Lonely Planet nation.

Daniel Francis
At the Margins

In Chicago, where he settled, William Henry Jackson, British settler, transformed himself into Honoré Jaxon, Métis freedom fighter. He identified so closely with the Métis struggle for justice that he became one of them. He had no trouble convincing others that he was a Native and probably had no trouble convincing himself either.

Alberto Manguel
In Memoriam: Mahmoud Darwish

When a poet friend was found dead after two days because of the do not disturb sign he had hung outside his hotel room, Darwish swore never again to hang the sign or lock his door. “When death comes,” he said, “I want to be disturbed.”

George Fetherling
The Definite Article

The top-selling American novel of the nineteenth century was Lew Wallace’s Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ. The phrase “the Christ” reminds us that the second word originally meant something along the lines of “the person who has been anointed.” By the twentieth century, the article had been dropped, making “Christ” sound like the family name of Sometime Carpenter Jesus, offspring of Joe and Mary Christ, brother of Jim Christ who keeps cropping up in the New Testament. But a couple of generations after Jesus lost His definite article, His spokesmen on Earth were still “the Reverend” So-and-so or even “the Reverend Doctor” until the editors of Time and their kind followed Samson’s example and warning: metaphor ends in 25 metres—smote them with the jawbone of an ass.

Meandricus
Wordplay

The movie Wordplay, directed by Patrick Creadon (IFC Films, available on DVD), takes us into the arcana of crossword fanatics, who call themselves puzzle heads. Once a year they come from all over the U.S. to sit at long tables in a room at the Marri

Daniel Francis
Identity Crises

Several years ago Ian McKay, a Queen’s University history professor, published a book called The Quest of the Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia (McGill-Queen’s University Press) in which he argued that the image many of us have of Nova Scotia as a tartan-wearing, bagpipe-squealing mini-Scotland is pretty much a fabrication.

Stephen Henighan
Bologna Erases Canada

Bologna, Italy, known as both “the Fat” and “the Red,” is a city to a make a bookish vacationer salivate. Less overrun by package tours than Rome, Florence or Venice, Bologna combines superb food with the wonderful bookstores that seem to be the inevitable companion of left-wing politics.

Alberto Manguel
Eldorado

Art museums and geographical exp

Tom Osborne
The Lights of the City

The theatre is plush, high-ranking and named after the Queen. I don’t know the name of the play but C does. C brings me to the theatre when I go. I undergo a pleas­ant transformation when I go to the theatre. I wear a tie, black shoes and a sports coat. At first it was difficult, “not my style.”

Daniel Francis
The Last Supper

In 1971 I went to work as a reporter at the Ottawa Journal. The newspaper depended for much of its copy on a roster of freelancers who would get their assignments by phone and drop by the office to deliver their articles. One of these contributors was D’Arcy Marsh.

Daniel Francis
Buffalo Bill’s Defunct

In the sun-streaked barroom of the Irma Hotel on the main street of Cody, Wyoming, late one afternoon in June, I made a big mistake. “What’s on tap?” I asked.

Alberto Manguel
In the Shadow of the Castle

Immediately after the New Year, both my daughters became victims of the First Great Snowfall of 1999.

Annabel Lyon
Dark Hearts

I first tried to read J. M. Coetzee in 1994, when I was twenty-three. I failed.

Stephen Henighan
Phenotypes & Flag-Wavers

Last summer, in anticipation of the opening round of the World Cup of soccer, the largely immigrant population of the narrow side street in Lisbon where I was renting an apartment draped their windows with flags. The green and red of Portugal predominated, but the blue planet on a gold-and-green background of Brazil also hung from some windows.

Stephen Henighan
The Insularity of English

Over dinner, I asked the Québécoise writer Sylvie Desrosiers, the author of successful novels for both adults and younger readers, whether her books had been translated into English. “Non, pas en anglais,” she said.

Stephen Henighan
Translated from the American

In 1999, when I returned to Canada from London, England, to teach Spanish at the University of Guelph, I was handed an introductory Spanish textbook and told that two-thirds of my teaching load was basic language instruction. The textbook was American.

Stephen Henighan
White Curtains

During the power cut that paralyzed Ontario in August 2003, the residents of my townhouse condominium complex began talking to each other. It was an event that took me by surprise.

Stephen Henighan
Totalitarian Democracy

In 1982 I had my first argument with an American about Saddam Hussein. As an undergraduate at an American liberal arts college where everyone read the New York Times, I supplemented my reading by browsing the British papers.

Stephen Henighan
Writing the City

As Canada is one of the world's most urbanized countries, a reader knowing nothing of contemporary Canadian writing might expect to find a surfeit of urban novels in our bookstores. Yet novels explicitly set in Canadian cities form a mere sliver of our novelistic production.

Stephen Henighan
Kingmakers

The Giller Prize is the most conspicuous example of corporate suffocation of the public institutions that built our literary culture. True, the Giller hasn’t done as much damage as the throttling of the book market by the Chapters-Indigo chain.

Stephen Henighan
Cakchiquel Lessons

Cakchiquel, the third most widely spoken of Guatemala’s twenty Mayan languages, is understood by more than 400,000 people. It is blessed with a larger population base than most Native American languages but is cursed by its location.

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.