Michael Hayward reviews the honest, outrageous and at times unflattering biographies of Lucian Freud and Rockwell Kent.

Fair Play, a brief novel by Tove Jansson, is available for the first time in an English translation by Thomas Teale. To quote from the original cover copy, Fair Play is about “two women who share a life of work, delight and consternation.”

In Beyond the Horizon (Doubleday), Colin Angus lays claim to “the first human-powered circumnavigation of the planet” and spends 374 pages documenting and defending this claim (there’s also a DVD).

John Huston's final film, of the James Joyce short story from "Dubliners", was a worthy capstone to his career of nearly fifty years.

October 21, 2005, marked the 200th anniversary of the great naval battle of Trafalgar, an engagement in which Admiral Nelson and the British fleet ended Napoleon’s dream of invading England by crushing the French and Spanish fleets off the southwest

Michael Hayward reviews Anik See’s Saudade, a collection of essays to plunge you deep into the meanings of travel and place.

The first time I saw Robinson Crusoe on Mars (Byron Haskin, Criterion DVD) was in the Cedar V Theatre, a Quonset-style, single-screen movie house on Lynn Valley Road in North Vancouver: 25 cents for a science-fiction double bill in 1965.

Michael Hayward reviews Some Rain Must Fall, part of the six volume memoir by Karl Ove Knausgaard.

Michael Hayward reviews Beat Generation by Jack Kerouac, a three-act play he wrote but never produced.

Michael Hayward reviews My Struggle Book 1: A Death in the Family by Karl Ove Knausgård.

In an author photograph on the back cover of Back on the Fire (Shoemaker & Hoard) Gary Snyder is shown looking west into the distance (seen from the perspective of a Canadian reader looking south to the Sierra Nevada foothills, Snyder’s home for more

Michael Hayward reviews An Omelette and a Glass of Wine by Elizabeth David (Grub Street).

A collaboration between two of America’s most important literary figures, written before anyone had heard the names Burroughs or Kerouac, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks is the most recent treasure mined from the Beat archives.

Criterion has just released a beautifully restored two-DVD edition of Powell and Pressburger’s A Canterbury Tale (1944), which tells the story of a British soldier, an American soldier and a “land girl,” who meet by chance in a small village not far from Canterbury.

Deborah Baker uncovers archival letters, shedding new light on the expat Beats in India.

Empty Phantoms (Thunder’s Mouth Press) is an exhaustive collection of “nearly all known printed, recorded, and filmed interviews” with Jack Kerouac, author of On the Road (1957).

Michael Hayward reviews 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die (Barron's).

Michael Hayward reviews Eat, Memory: Great Writers at the Table (Norton).

Michael Hayward on plastic art and slow sonnets.

Michael Hayward reviews Edward Lear in Albania, an account of the author's travels through the Balkans beginning in 1848.

If fans of what is commonly referred to as “genre fiction” ever try to storm the gates that protect capital L Literature from the marauding hordes, I predict that it will be Michael Chabon who leads the charge.

Michael Hayward on I Will Never See the World Again by Ahmet Altan

Diana Athill never dreamed of writing—until one morning, suddenly she wrote. "Until that moment I had been hand-maiden, as editor, to other people’s writing, without ever dreaming of myself as a writer."

A review of David Mason's memoir The Pope’s Bookbinder.

Michael Hayward reviews Level 26: Dark Origins (Dutton), the world's first digi-novel.

In one of the audio tracks on the DVD of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, co-director Terry Gilliam credits Robert Bresson’s 1974 film Lancelot of the Lake (New Yorker Films DVD) as an inadvertent inspiration for Grail.

Known and Strange Things (Random House) is a collection of Teju Cole’s essays and other short pieces, many of which have previously appeared in The New Yorker and elsewhere online.

Remember those student days when, in preparation for your final exam, you’d optimistically sit through a movie version as a substitute for the book itself?

Mathieu Kassovitz was just twenty-eight years old when he made La Haine (Criterion DVD), a 1995 film released in black and white and set in les banlieues, the racially volatile suburbs that surround Paris like an explosive vest.

Long before Patti Smith became “the Godmother of Punk” she was a not- atypical teenager of the 1960s, living with her parents in suburban New Jersey.

Michael Hayward reviews Luke Barr's Provence, 1970, an investigation of the winter when six major culinary figures lived together in France.

William Wallace Cook offers a literary guide to creating a unique plot.

Michael Hayward on Félix Fénéon and the exhibits unseen during COVID-19.

Michael Hayward on a selection of work from the writing collective known as "the Beats"

Jack Kerouac, that prototypically “all-American” writer, was born to Québécois parents, and raised in the midst of an expatriate French-Canadian community in the mill town of Lowell, Massachusetts.

Michael Hayward reviews a number of travelogues by Daniel Canty and Bill Porter.

What better song for summer’s soundtrack than Kate and Anna’s  “Swimming Song”? I added it to my iPod rotation while reading Kate and Anna McGarrigle: Songs and Stories (Penumbra).

Early in his memoir Let Me Finish (Harcourt), Roger Angell describes his mother Katherine White and his stepfather E. B. White as “a successful New Yorker couple—she a fiction editor; he a writer of casuals and poetry and the first-page Comment secti

A woman is reborn on the same cold and snowy night over and over again, living a different life of disasters, in Life After Life by Kate Atkinson.

White was also a prolific correspondent, as the Letters of E. B. White: Revised Edition (HarperCollins) shows: over 700 pages, indexed and footnoted, updated from the first edition with letters from 1976 to 1985.

In Levels of Life, Julian Barnes writes about the grief experienced after losing his wife to cancer.

Jim Christy muses on 121 items accumulated over 40 years of travel in Sweet Assorted: 121 Takes From a Tin Box, reviewed by Michael Hayward.

The majority of Memory: An Anthology (Chatto & Windus) is what used to be called a commonplace book, a collection of extracts from other texts. The editors, Harriet Harvey Wood and A.S. Byatt, have selected 155 passages on the theme of memory, which

Michael Hayward reviews #GIRLBOSS, a memoir by Sophia Amoruso, founder of Nasty Gal clothing retailer and capitalism's cheerleader.

Michael Hayward reviews Mnemonic: a book of trees by Theresa Kishkan (Goose Lane).

Michael Hayward on an armchair travelogue of the troubled borders in the eastern Balkans.

When W. G. Sebald died in an automobile accident in December 2001, just four of his books were available in English translation. Those four books had earned him considerable praise (Michael Ondaatje called him “the most interesting and ambitious writ

Jacques Rivette’s 1974 film Celine and Julie Go Boating (British Film Institute dvd) is set in a Paris that is half Wonderland, half real, a Paris in which events unfold according to the same dream-like logic that astonished Alice, and that entrances

Michael Hayward reviews Everything Rustles by Jane Silcott and Born Out of This by Christine Lowther.

"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.'"

Michael Hayward on the elation and freedom of long-distance cycling.

I Cycled into the Arctic Circle: A Peregrination by James Duthie and Matt Hulse (Saltire Society) is a “newly revived and revised edition of deaf Scotsman James Duthie’s rare journal.”

In Deactivated West 100 (Gaspereau Press), Don McKay continues to develop the poetics of place that he began with Vis à Vis (Gaspereau Press, 2001). In both books he tries “to think the relation between place and wilderness without going dizzy from a

It is impossible, now, to see Powell and Pressburger’s 1941 film 49th Parallel (Criterion DVD) through the eyes of the audience it was intended for. To modern viewers it seems a curious mixture of anti-isolationist propaganda and travelogue, framed w

Michael Hayward reviews Stefan Zweig's The World of Yesterday, a "a window into the vanished world of the Austro-Hungarian Empire."

Michael Hayward reviews Across the Territories by Kenneth White, a book of White's worldwide travels.

Henry Miller named Jean Giono as one of the writers he most admired (a list that includes Knut Hamsun, Blaise Cendrars, and Fyodor Dostoevsky). Giono, who lived most of his life in Manosque, the small Provençal town where he was born, begins An Italian Journey by admitting that he is not a traveller.

Those who were close to the late John Berger have spoken of his generosity, praising Berger’s collaborative nature and his ability to establish and sustain creative friendships throughout a long and productive life.

Michael Hayward reviews Basho: The Complete Haiku, written by Matsuo Basho and translated by Jane Reichhold (Kodansha).

Michael Hayward reviews The Stray Bullet: William S. Burroughs in Mexico and Peter Orlovsky: A Life in Words, works for "only the most dedicated fans of Beat literature."

Rainer Maria Rilke and Lou Andreas-Salomé: The Correspondence (Norton) collects all of the extant letters exchanged by Rilke and Andreas-Salomé , a patron and fellow author, and (as the jacket copy describes her) “a key fin de siècle intellectual.”

The French writer Julien Gracq, who will be ninety-seven this year, is a living link to the era of Louis Aragon and André Breton. Gracq has avoided the kind of recognition that most modern writers crave (he refused the Prix Goncourt in 1951), and his body of work is little known on this continent.

Road Novels, 1957—1960 is an omnibus volume dressed in the standard Library of America livery: a burgundy cloth binding; a black dust jacket discreetly trimmed in red, white and blue; a bound-in ribbon marker.

Michael Hayward reviews the sweater that Sarah Lund wears in every episode of Season 1 of The Killing, a serial crime drama.

Geoffrey Household’s 1939 novel Rogue Male—an old favourite of mine—follows a British sportsman as he returns from an unnamed central European country (read Germany), having failed in his attempt to assassinate the dictator who is that country’s head

Review of "The Age of Insecurity" by Astra Taylor

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

Review of "Conversations with Khahtsahlano, 1932–1954" reissued by Massy Books and Talonbooks.

Review of "Cabin Fever" by Anik See.

Review of "Gertrude and Alice" produced by United Players of Vancouver.

Review of "Canzone di Guerra: New Battle Songs" by Daša Drndić, trans. by Celia Hawkesworth.

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

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

Review of "Antkind" by Charlie Kaufman.

Review of "A Russian Sister" by Caroline Adderson.

Review of "Underland" by Robert Macfarlane.

Review of "Turn Every Page" directed by Lizzie Gottlieb

Review of "Stories I Might Regret Telling You" by Martha Wainwright.

Review of "Wanda" written and directed by Barbara Loden, "Suite for Barbara Loden" by Nathalie Léger, translated by Natasha Lehrer and Cécile Menon and "Wanda" by Barbara Lambert.

Review of "Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands" by Kate Beaton.

Review of "The Last Bookseller: A Life in the Rare Book Trade" by Gary Goodman, and "A Factotum in the Book Trade" by Marius Kociejowski.

Review of "Holiday, 1909" by Charles Chapman.

Michael Hayward on books that may make you a better writer.

Review of "Short Story Advent Calendar" by Hingston & Olsen Publishing.

Michael Hayward on dharma trails, lawless landscapes and Hemingway's corner table.

Michael Hayward on László Krasznahorkai's The Manhattan Project.

Michael Hayward and 50 years of writing from Ursula K. Le Guin.

Michael Hayward on "The Baudelaire Fractal" by Lisa Robertson.

Michael Hayward on an anthology of noir fiction set in neighbourhoods around Vancouver.

Review of "Fernweh" by Teju Cole.

Cole’s most recent book, Blind Spot (Random House), a generous hardcover printed on glossy stock, presents Cole’s photographs on recto pages, with brief, allusive essays on the facing verso page.

"If cities can be said to be alive, how many of them dream of growing up to become Paris?" Michael Hayward reviews How Paris Became Paris by Joan DeJean.

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

Review of "Utopia Avenue" by David Mitchell.

Michael Hayward on his surreal experience of watching "Contagion" during lockdown.

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

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

Michael Hayward reviews Atlantic Books' series of 'Books That Shook the World' and Alberto Manguel's biography of Homer's the Iliad and the Odyssey.

Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris regularly makes it onto lists like The World’s Coolest Bookstores and The 20 Most Beautiful Bookstores in the World.

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.