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.

Stephen Osborne is entranced by a pair of eccentric, high profile students while on a university tour in 1964.

During the hiatus, a man in a black suit appeared in the Geist Gallery in Toronto and identified himself as a builder of ornithopters, or perhaps he said he was a promoter of ornithopters (this was during the hiatus, when nothing was clear; in any event his field was ornithoptery). I couldn’t remember what an ornithopter was but I could see one in my mind: the question was, what did an ornithopter do? The ornithopter man was accompanied by a well-dressed woman who never stopped smiling.

A few years ago, someone left a pocket-sized photo album on my desk with an unsigned note stuck on the cover that said I “might know what to do with it.” Inside, glued one to a page, are twenty-four photographs of Essondale, the mental hospital in N

Last month I had lunch with a good friend who years ago had told me that her parents, who immigrated to Canada after the war, were Holocaust survivors. I asked my friend, whose name is Slava, to tell me again about her parents, who had lived in Vilna, the ancient Lituanian city of Europe known for three centuries as the “Jerusalem of the north.”

When the celebrated English poet Rupert Brooke came to Canada on the train from New York in 1913, he had been warned that he would find “a country without a soul.” The gloomy streets of Montreal, overshadowed by churches and banks and heavy telephone wires, reminded him of the equally gloomy streets of Glasgow and Birmingham.

Former Iranian schoolteacher, Mehrar Arbab escaped execution, moved to Canada and now earns a living sellingAll Beef Smokies.

Stephen Osborne discusses the past, present and future of literary magazines in Canada.

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.

Last month in Calgary a friend showed me the way to Louise Bridge by sketching a map with her fingertip on the dust jacket of The Wolf King, a book by Judd Palmer that we had been admiring at her kitchen table.

On the night of the last Wednesday of February 1884, at about ten o’clock, a gang of armed men entered a farmhouse near Sumas Lake in southern B.C., woke the inhabitants at gunpoint and took away with them a teenage boy who was being held in the cust

The Strongest Man in the World liked to set his folding lawn chair out on the asphalt next to his gold Cadillac and stretch out in the sun with dark glasses on his nose and a two-litre carton of milk in one hand.

That dreamlike quality causes rational minds to dismiss the moment as “only a coincidence.”

Banff: a collection of scenic views and a setting for the Avant-Garde?

As men of high seriousness appear on television with their crystal balls, Stephen Osborne shares what he learned about the future from Ray the astrologer.

Before people 'poked' and 'tweeted', waving was how we said hello and goodbye to each other.

Stephen Osborne uncovers the genesis of the poppy and how it became evidence of horror, a token of remembrance and a promise of oblivion.

On a dark day in January in Toronto, when the sky was much too close to the ground, I went to see the grave of Timothy Eaton with my friend Tom Walmsley.

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.

In this city of tall buildings, the most imposing shadows are cast by women.

Twenty-five years ago in Vancouver, an underground publishing house threw a party in a mansion in a wealthy neighbourhood of curving streets with no sidewalks, to celebrate a new book.

Who today remembers the man who carried Einstein’s head in a box through the streets of Vancouver? We remember clearly the box (dark wood, varnished, the door on brass hinges: what about the latch?) with Einstein’s head in it, a plaster model (was it plastic, perhaps? modelling clay? plasticine?)

Onstage a group of writers and critics sat in a semicircle and spoke earnestly about whether or not a national literature could exist in two languages.

Remembering Norbert Ruebsaat.

"8.21 Fur Bearers Defender"—the difficulty is to say no more than we know.

Back then, the car of choice was a Volkswagen Beetle with a broken heater.

A feminist writer/publisher sought out stories of the partition of India: atrocity and hardship, looting, rape and murder committed by and upon Hindu, Muslim and Sikh.

The British called it the Great Game. The Russians called it Bolshoya Igra. The playing field was, and still is, Afghanistan.

Spiritual landscapes and unknowable people captured on film, used to convey a message.

Gregory Scofield's new book of poems is Native Canadiana (Polestar) and it's very good. So is Lola Lemire Tostevin's latest collection, Cartouches (Talonbooks), which came out last year and which we've been meaning to mention here ever since, along w

Stephen Osborne reviews Janet Malcolm's book of essays and discusses the worst novel ever published in Canada.

Stephen Osborne reviews Mary Jo Bang's translation of Dante's Inferno.

"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."

Is it true that Gilbert Sorrentino has written a brilliant novel called Gold Fools (Green Integer), a story of grizzly prospectors and leathery cowpokes, entirely in questions?

Newly collected stories and memoirs from the great Mavis Gallant.

The great Canadian road movie is finally on DVD. If you missed Goin’ Down the Road when it came out in 1970 and then disappeared, apparently forever, you can see it now for the first time, having heard about it all your life from friends who are more

Stephen Scobie's Gospel, A Poem had the invigorating effect of making me want to read poetry again: the book is a beautiful object and not at all precious, and the poetry, a visitation of the Gospels, is simply wonderful. You want to read it out loud

"This is not a documentary; it is, however, an overpowering aesthetic and emotional experience, a true happening"—Stephen Osborne reviews Susan Sontag's film Promised Lands.

When I heard on the radio last month that Thomas Raddall had died, I was shocked and embarrassed instead of saddened because ever since discovering his books ten years ago I had thought of him as a real old-timer who must already have died. I came up

Robert MacLean's new murder mystery, Home from the Party (Ronsdale) has a lot going for it: exotic location (Aegean island), a Greek cop who went to the University of Toronto to study under Andreas Papandreou (who lived in Canada until the Colonels w

Prurience or Voyeurism? One of the other anyway (more thematic convergence): this time it was How Insensitive, Russell Smith’s first novel (Porcupine’s Quill) the cover of which is emblazoned with black and white photographs of three young women in v

Two books full of ice and snow: Icefields (NeWest) by Thomas Wharton, and Smilla's Sense of Snow (Doubleday) by Peter Hoeg. Peter Hoeg's sense of snow is utterly convincing: his book had me shivering in August (I actually took to reading it under the

Stephen Osborne reviews Imaging the Arctic, a collection of papers and photographs presented at a conference titled "Imaging the Arctic: The Native Photograph."

Timm was two years old when his big brother Karl-Heinz, who was eighteen, joined the Death’s Head Division and went to the front in Ukraine. His only memory of Karl-Heinz appears on the first page of In My Brother’s Shadow, translated by Anthea Bell

The current issue of Brick contains a transcript of Eleanor Wachtel's interview with John Berger made last year for CBC Radio, and is by itself sufficient reason to buy the magazine. Especially for what he has to say about using the words "and" and "

Two grey whales and a poet/axe murderer play key roles in Brad Cran's poetry collection.

When Paul Martin was prime minister, and before that finance minister, he was seen and known to be a politician rather than a private operator in the higher echelons of global capital; indeed, his business persona cast only the faintest of shadows. A

Stephen Osborne reviews Kahn & Engelmann, a German novel by Hans Eichner hailed as a masterpiece in Europe.

The summer issue of the Ryerson Review of Journalism provides a glimpse into the state of narrative writing in North America. A great many stories in its pages open with reporters reporting on themselves: “I’m standing at reception in the X hotel”; “

The Captain Is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship is the latest of Charles Bukowski's posthumously published books, of which there are at least five in the world (and possibly still more to come from the estimable Black Sparrow Pre

A review of The Complete New Yorker, a vast treatise on writing and reading, editing and publishing in the twentieth century.

Alexander Wilson, in his book The Cult of Nature (Between the Lines), makes the following remark in passing on page 25: By the late nineteenth century, almost half of North Americans lived in cities. It was not until then—the moment that in the Unite

The death and life of Diana, Princess of Wales, provides Tina Brown, the well-known Diana tribute artist and lookalike—her Di-likeness fills the back cover of The Diana Chronicles (Doubleday), which makes it uncomfortable to read this book on public

Elvis Aaron Presley, who was reborn on the Carcross Road near Whitehorse seventeen years ago during an alien encounter, is the subject of The Elvis Project: A Yukon Road Documentary by Adam Green and Bill Kendrick (Blueishgreen).

The Labradorians: Voices from the Land of Cain (Breakwater) is another big compilation (500 pages), this one made by Lynne Fitzhugh from the pages of Them Days, a quarterly journal of oral history that has been published in Happy Valley, near Goose B

The myth of the West in Canada and the U.S.A. issues largely from a country almost unknown to most North Americans: the wide plains that spill over the forty-ninth parallel between Montana and Saskatchewan. Beth LaDow, who lives in Massachusetts and

Stephen Osborne reviews The Parabolist by Nicholas Ruddock (Doubleday).

The Tyndale New Testament of 1526 is now available in a life-sized edition from Oxford. This was the first pocket-sized popular bible; it could be easily hidden from the thought police of the time, who were eager to burn any copies of the book they c

Stephen Osborne discusses the happiness level of Vancouver, the best place on earth.

The first volume of Urban Coyote, which appeared last year (Lost Moose), was subtitled A Yukon Anthology; the second volume, just released, is subtitled New Territory and only in the cover blurb do we understand it to be a “second Yukon anthology.” O

Stephen Osborne rejects the "whiny questions of national identity" posed during the "golden age" of Canadian literature in the 1960s and 70s.

The Voice Literary Supplement for October was full of special treats, not the least of which was a profile of Marguerite Young, author of Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, a novel that I remembered from the seventies but had never read.

Lisa Pasold’s poetry collection, Weave, reads as a memoir of the twentieth century in a world bounded by Prague and Peru and the Russian front and the shores of Lake Ontario.

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

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

"You must change your life." According to James Pollock, a new wave of Canadian poetry has emerged.

Stephen Osborne discusses the notion that Canadian literature is “shackled to a corpse dragging us down into the future.”

Despite high hopes, Stephen Osborne calls Shoot! by George Bowering his biggest disappointment.

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

A new dispatch from Geist's 20th Anniversary Collector's Edition."How did more shots fired represent what we miss in life, in city life?"

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

Two books full of ice and snow: Icefields (NeWest) by Thomas Wharton, and Smilla's Sense of Snow (Doubleday) by Peter Hoeg. Peter Hoeg's sense of snow is utterly convincing: his book had me shivering in August (I actually took to reading it under the

The Winner of the 23rd International 3-Day Novel Writing Contest (a venerable institution) is Small Apartments (Anvil Press), written and pleasantly illustrated by Chris Millis, who lives in Saratoga Springs, New York, and has worked as a “sportswrit

Snow Man, the masterful new novel by David Albahari (Douglas & McIntyre), belongs precisely to such a narrative of the world; and its provenance is evident from the first sentence, which takes us up in a moment and sweeps us into the history of langu

A blizzard hits two days before Christmas, stirring up feelings of trepidation and excitement for the passengers of a bus.

Snow Walker, the film made from Farley Mowat’s book of stories, contains much cornball scripting, some wretched dialogue and a ponderous, bellowing soundtrack that equals the worst excesses of Cecil B DeMille’s Bible epics.

Salvatore Ala has written a poem about a barbershop that may have no equal in that genre. It can be found in his new book, Straight Razor and Other Poems (Biblioasis).

The protagonist in Geoffrey Bromhead’s three-day novel Struck (winner of the 25th Annual 3-Day Novel Contest) is a drifter with a penchant for being struck by lightning, and with some practical experience of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, and he

The best $4.50 that you can spend this year will be on a copy of David Colliers's Surviving Saskatoon, a comic book account of the wrongful persecution and conviction of David Milgaard in Saskatoon in 1971 (when Milgaard was declared innocent in 1999

Book best read while standing in the aisle: the Leonard Cohen Must Be Getting Old By Now Memorial Volume. Title: Take This Waltz: A Celebration of Leonard Cohen (Muses Company).

The best pen-in-a-shirt-pocket photograph you will ever see is the author photo on the back cover of Joe Fiorito's new book, Tango on the Main (Nuage).

The areas of John Hodgman’s expertise do not extend to the Northwest Passage in his new book The Areas of My Expertise (Dutton). The deficiency is more than made up for, in a chapter called “Our 51 United States,” by an entry on the drifting state of

The Arcades Project by Walter Benjamin (Belknap/ Harvard) is one of the greatest books of the twentieth century, and it will make you want to assemble one yourself for your own life and time. This is a monumental work of excavation in history, philos

Annabel Lyon’s new book, The Best Thing for You (McClelland & Stewart), is a collection of three novellas and one of the best things in new fiction this season.

Review of "Becoming Vancouver: A History" by Daniel Francis.

In 2005, a team of basketball players from Vancouver, whose average age is seventy-two, arrive at the World Masters Games in Calgary and, after losing three games to teams twenty years and more younger than themselves, receive the gold medal in their

Stephen reviews The Others Raisd in Me: 150 Readings of Sonnet 150 by Gregory Betts (Pedlar Press).

David Cayley, whose work is often heard on CBC Ideas, has done a great service in preparing The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich (House of Anansi), a text that makes a perfect companion to The Fabric of Reality by David Deutsc

The Secret Voyage of Sir Francis Drake 1577-1580, by Samuel Bawlf, completes the story of European adventure in the north of North America in the sixteenth century.

Rupert Sheldrake, author of Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home and The Presence of the Past, continues to have good luck with book titles: his new one is The Sense of Being Stared At (Crown). For those of us who have been haunted from t

“I walked into the garage, and found a teenage boy in a tank top and shorts." Kathryn Mockler's poems eschew meaningless metaphors for direct language.

The Three-Day Novel, which turns nineteen on Labour Day [1996], remains one of Canada's few contributions to the world of literary form. (Milton Acorn's jack-pine sonnet is the only other one I can think of at the moment.) Writing a novel in three da

When faced with the gnarly writing of Thomas Bernhard readers experience again and again the difficulty of summarizing what they are reading, of thematizing what they have read.

Relief from the enumerative school of writing can be found in Sheila Heti’s first novel. Ticknor (Anansi) is written in the manner of the great narratives of eastern Europe and South America, of Kafka and Stevenson. Neither the subject nor the settin

Petty thievery, grow-ops and jail-time run fairly common in the first two seasons of Trailer Park Boys.

Zine bargoon of the season: Trite Travel Titbits, A Lil Book of Poems by Jim Munroe, a tiny book (two by three inches) published by Lickspittle Ventures (c/o 66 Greyhound Drive, Willowdale ON M2H 1K3). Composed in pencil, printed on an out-of-tune ph

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.

Wide as the Waters: The Story of the English Bible and the Revolution It Inspired, by Benson Bobrick, is an excellent account of “the most influential book ever published.” It begins by reminding us that the first question ever asked by an inquisitor

CBC Radio celebrated National Poetry Day by reading a poem written in 1916 by Bliss Carman, which raises the question: are there no living poets who cut the mustard?

Gregory Scofield's new book of poems is Native Canadiana (Polestar) and it's very good. So is Lola Lemire Tostevin's latest collection, Cartouches (Talonbooks), which came out last year and which we've been meaning to mention here ever since, along w