In Hungary, goulash socialism becomes difficult to swallow

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

"Cross-country skiing offered me the reassurance sought by the immigrant who is excluded from his locality’s history: a viable alternate route to belonging."

Stephen Henighan argues that audiences used to have different opinions on the news; now they cannot even agree on the terms of debate.

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

The assumption of mutual comprehensibility between speakers of Spanish and Portuguese creates a culture of mutual ignorance.

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

I remembered past ordeals: a U.S. official who squeezed out my toothpaste tube on the train from Montreal to Philadelphia, another who hauled me off a bus for a lengthy interrogation.

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

Stephen Henighan asks: what if you don't have a tidy answer to "Where are you from?"

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.

According to the numbers, Canada will never produce another Atwood or Findley.

When the crash came, Canadians paid the price for the colonized mentalities of their investment advisors.

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.

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

As Canadian leaders look to emulate Asian nations, our government fails to see that the tigers' fatal flaw is the absence of democracy. Or, maybe they do see.

In 2007, when The Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories was published, Urquhart sent me a copy. As I examined the table of contents, I felt a dull thunk in my chest.

On the screen, only the image—not the word—can become the world.

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.

Anti-communism, retired by most Western governments,receives monumental status in Canada

To build a city on land flooded by the tides isn’t just a mistake—it’s utopic.

Stephen Henighan investigates bus travel as one of Canada's last surviving democratic spaces.

“Get it right,” Rob Allen told me. “You have no idea how few novels you will actually write in your life”

In a letter of 350 words, published in Geist 65, Michael Redhill calls me a racist once and implies that I am a racist on at least four other occasions. Redhill’s repetition of the ultimate insult of the postmodern era offers a fascinating, if depressing, window into how certain Canadian writers betray their responsibility to the society they live in.

Like most advice given to writers, the injunction to “write what you know” is misleading.

Bohemia is a good place to grow as a writer, but is it a good place to live one’s whole life?

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 compares the chaotic sprawl of "Third World" societies to the degradation of Canada's political, social and physical landscape.

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.

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

Coming to harbour in a new world.

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.

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.

In 2002, when my essay collection When Words Deny the World was published, people started behaving strangely. Ambitious young writers scurried out of sight when I entered a room, as though afraid that irate authors might banish them from Toronto for having spoken to me.

The writer who is loved by all, by definition, neglects literature’s prime responsibility: to offend.

"We know that life-altering and possibly cataclysmic change is coming, and we continue to live as we have always done."

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

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

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

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

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.

Do shared languages form the natural boundaries of any nation in the world?

Military coups, civil wars, and NAFTA are the cause of trilingual labels in Canadian big box stores.

Progressives are far less likely to be nationalists than ever before.

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

It is not only the children of British mothers who have lost one of their nationalities; Great Britain, too, has lost a part of itself

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.

Since the Wall came down, East German socialists in Prenzlauer Berg are free to sip coffee and talk about art.

Stephen Henighan exposes the errors, omissions and problems with the Conservative party's study guide for Canadian citizenship.

"In the public eye, universities have never recovered from the antics of Donald Sutherland as Professor Jennings in the 1978 film Animal House."

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.

Unravelling the mysteries of Alejo Carpentier

A bibliophile's worst nightmare: being stuck on a plane with a terrible book. A book mistaken for a work of serious history.

The idea of Europe is incarnated nowhere as much as in St. Petersburg—Stephen Henighan on Europe's greatest city.

When building a nation, cultural riches can be lost.

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

One of the indispensable figures of contemporary journalism is the cutting-edge cultural commentator. The columnist who offers sardonic insights into trends, fashions, television shows and publishing personalities has become an institution.

Stephen Henighan discusses the crude first steps to finding a new way to talk about racial reality.

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.

Stephen Henighan remembers Mavis Gallant, the original nomad of Canadian literature, who wrote some of Canada's finest fiction at Pablo Picasso's café table in Paris.

Stephen Henighan argues that efficiency has become a core value that heightens social divisions.

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

Mordecai Richler, in a withering put-down, once dismissed the novelist Hugh Garner as “a good speller.” In the summer of 2003, grinding through 160 Canadian books as a jury member for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction in English, I learned that for many contemporary Canadian writers, Garner’s level of dubious distinction remains out of reach.

For an English-speaking Canadian who has been exposed to French from an early age, Paris is the most disorienting city in Europe. It is grandiose, but it is mundane.

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

The crowds learned that they could not act effectively in the present without confronting the past, specifically the historical treatment of indigenous people.

A city is an atmosphere defined by a history. A great city's streets may reflect its past, but only art makes a city's history, like its distinctive mood, present to the world.

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

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