fact

David Sheskin
PRESS 1 IF

PRESS 1 IF YOU THINK YOU MAY HAVE HEARD THE BIG BANG.

Peggy Thompson
What It Means To Be Human

Review of "All the Broken Things" by Geoff Inverarity.

Michael Hayward
Wanda x 3

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.

David M. Wallace
Red Flags

The maple leaf no longer feels like a symbol of national pride.

Future Perfect

New bylaws for civic spaces.

Daniel Francis
Future Imperfect

Review of "The Premonitions Bureau " by Sam Knight.

Stephen Henighan
In Search of a Phrase

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

Teenaged Boys, Close Up

Review of "Sleeping Giant" directed by Andrew Cividino and written by Cividino, Blain Watters and Aaron Yeger.

Dreaming of Androids

Review of "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? " by Philip K. Dick.

Anson Ching
Further Years of Solitude

Review of "Black Sugar" by Miguel Bonnefoy.

Mazzy Sleep
Heart Medicine

"You have bruises / There was time / You spent trying to / Heal them. / As in, time wasted."

CB Campbell
Joe and Me

Playing against the fastest chess player in the world.

Jennilee Austria
Scavengers

That’s one for the rice bag!

Jonathan Heggen
A Thoughtful Possession

Review of "The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories" edited and translated by Jay Rubin.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Rocks in a Hard Place

Review of "A Field Guide to Gold, Gemstone & Mineral Sites of British Columbia, Volume Two: Sites within a Day’s Drive of Vancouver" by Rick Hudson.

Michael Hayward
Sitting Ducks

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

April Thompson
Prayer and Declaration

Review of "Monument" by Manahil Bandukwala.

Stephen Henighan
Collateral Damage

When building a nation, cultural riches can be lost.

Jeremy Colangelo
i is another

"my point that / i is but a : colon grown / too long"

Anson Ching
Archipelago

Review of "A Dream in Polar Fog" by Yuri Rytkheu, and "A Mind at Peace" by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar.

Articulating the Inarticulate Speech of the Heart

Review of "The Emotion Thesaurus: A Writer's Guide to Character Expression" by Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi.

April Thompson
Call Yourself a Writer

Review of "Resonance: Essays on the Craft and Life of Writing" edited by Andrew Chesham and Laura Farina.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Coming Unravelled

Review of "Unravelling Canada: A Knitting Odyssey" by Sylvia Olsen.

Daniel Francis
Known It All

Review of "Know It All: Finding the Impossible Country" by James H. Marsh.

David Sheskin
Fact
PRESS 1 IF

PRESS 1 IF YOU THINK YOU MAY HAVE HEARD THE BIG BANG.

David M. Wallace
Fact
Red Flags

The maple leaf no longer feels like a symbol of national pride.

Mazzy Sleep
Fact
Heart Medicine

"You have bruises / There was time / You spent trying to / Heal them. / As in, time wasted."

CB Campbell
Fact
Joe and Me

Playing against the fastest chess player in the world.

Stephen Henighan
Fact
Collateral Damage

When building a nation, cultural riches can be lost.

Jeremy Colangelo
Fact
i is another

"my point that / i is but a : colon grown / too long"

Grant Buday
Fact
Reduce, Reuse, Reincarnate

Destroying books for the greater good.

Natasha Greenblatt
Fact
Scavenger Hunt for Losers

Losers: you have a lifetime to hunt.

Jill Boettger
Fact
Do You Remotely Care?

Fill the room with a flock of moths.

Fact
Short Term

Tell me again how long the trip is?

Michał Kozłowski
Fact
Waiting for Trudeau

Pansy shoes and power suits on parliament hill.

Fact
The Acknowledgements

Any resemblances to persons living or dead are purely vindictive.

Tiffany Hsieh
Fact
Church on Queen

Here they are our people.

Véronique Darwin
Fact
New Normal Board Games

Use the board games you unearthed during isolation to reinventclassic games for our times.

Scott Andrew Christensen
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n yer comin' wit me

"have ya been ev’ryweir?"

Fact
Who Gets Called an Unfit Mother?

"The secret that I was a bad mother was a tightness in my chest I carried everywhere."

Hàn Fúsēn
Fact
Till Talk

Han Fusen navigates multiculturalism and kookoo sabzi from inside a Persian grocery store.

Fact
Libraries without Borders

Reading is a subversive activity and does not believe in the convention of borders.

Matt Snell
Fact
Laying on Hands

In Peterborough, Pastor Billy cures arthritis, back pain, bone spurs, lymphoma, stage four liver cancer, sleep apnea and atrial fibrillation

RICHARD VAN CAMP
Fact
Buried Treasure

Mary Schendlinger challenges a review of a biography of Blanche Knopf, the underrecognized co-founder of Alfred A. Knopf Inc.

Fact
Hived Off

Christine Novosel reports from Glasgow on art school, apiary management, Brexit and being a junkyard dog.

Robert Everett-Green
Fact
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.

Fact
27,000 Cups of Tea

Battenbergs and Victoria sponge at Buckingham Palace.

Fact
Implanting Forgetfulness in Our Souls

Each of the paradigm shifts that pushed human communication forward has met with stiff resistance. Even the invention of writing. From the perspective of the twenty-first century, such resistance seems incomprehensible, almost ridiculous.

Fact
Carbon

"A folder full of awards proves to the psychiatrist I wasn't always this way."

Fact
Check-Out

"At the back of the line a woman with no teeth was trying to hold an eighteen-pack of budget toilet paper with one hand."

Fact
Occupy Indian Affairs

Arthur Manuel recounts the time he and over 300 other activists took over the Department of Indian Affairs in 1973.

M.A.C. Farrant
Fact
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.

Fact
Jamaica on Ice

Jennesia Pedri reviews A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James.

Fact
Mavis in Montreal

Sarah Pollard makes a pilgrimage to Montreal to hang out and write where Mavis Gallant hung out and wrote.

Michael Hayward
Fact
Coastal Memories

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

Stephen Henighan
Fact
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.

EVE JOSEPH
Fact
Death Matters

It is not uncommon for there to be periods of agitation shortly before death. People often try to rise from their beds as if they have to get somewhere.

Robertson Davies
Fact
Novelist, Playwright, Sex Machine

Robertson Davies' diaries reveal his zest for life and penchant for an act he refers to only as "h.t.d."

Robert Everett-Green
Fact
Checkered Past

For me, the jacket is a piece of menswear history that I can actually put on, and a link to the tragicomic tale of an underachiever with a famous name.

Anna Banana
Fact
45 Years of Fooling Around with A. Banana

An exploration of art and pop culture by Anna Banana.

Fact
Without Reservations

Patty Osborne reviews Devil in Deerskins: My Life with Grey Owl, a memoir by Anahareo, and Kuessipan by Naomi Fontaine, two contrasting reflections on the aboriginal experience.

Michał Kozłowski
Fact
Bukowski Effect

Michal Kozlowski reviews Stardust, Bruce Serafin's essay collection: "punchy narrative, little exposition, unburdened by political correctness."

Fact
Hey, Jude!

Roni Simunovic reviews When Everything Feels Like the Movies, the award-winning YA novel that inspired heated controversy and a homophobic petition.

JILL MANDRAKE
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Here Lies

Jill Mandrake reviews Local Customs by Audrey Thomas, a ghost story and murder mystery set in West Africa.

Michael Hayward
Fact
Miss Bossy Pants

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

Fact
Soviet Dynamite

A gaggle of kids team up with a crazy hippie named Sea Foam and an array of Angolan grandmothers in Granma Nineteen, reviewed by Patty Osborne.

Lily Gontard
Fact
Everything is Illuminated

Lily Gontard reviews The Luminaries and The Douglas Notebooks, two award-winning novels you might not have heard of.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Fact
All My Little Words

Kelsea O'Connor reviews 101 Two-Letter Words, an illustrated Scrabble guide by Stephen Merritt with running themes of sloths, songwriting and vampire dogs.

Michael Hayward
Fact
Beatnik Glory

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."

Daniel Francis
Fact
Folly of War

Daniel Francis reviews All Else Is Folly, a "useful antidote" to the patriotic narrative that hails World War I as Canada's "coming of age."

Daniel Francis
Fact
Rum Row

From Closing Time: Prohibition, Rum-Runners, and Border Wars.

Daniel Francis
Fact
Toronto The Good

Daniel Francis reviews Toronto: Biography of a City, a book bound to irritate readers who live outside Toronto—the "centre of the Canadian universe."

Paul DeLorme
Fact
Escapist

A Canadian soldier captured at Dieppe in 1942 tells what happened next.

Dylan Gyles
Fact
Floating

“Don’t try to make anything happen,” the calm voice said. Dylan Gyles visits a sensory deprivation float tank.

Moez Surani
Fact
Enduring Freedom

Selections from ةيلمع Operación Operation Opération 作业 Oперация (“operation” in each official United Nations language), a poem by Moez Surani consisting of the names of military operations carried out by UN member states.

Fact
Based Loosely

Roni Simunovic reviews Based on a True Story by Elizabeth Renzetti, the bizarrely fascinating tale of a washed-up soap star's struggles with unemployment and substance abuse.

Fact
Punks and Beats

Patty Osborne reviews Razorcake and Tom Tom Magazine, two offbeat punk music publications.

Mandelbrot
Fact
Private Parts

Mandelbrot reviews The Secret Parts of Fortune: Three Decades of Intense Investigations and Edgy Enthusiasms by Bruce Dern.

Daniel Francis
Fact
Magical Thinking

The canoe as a fetish object, a misreading of Canadian history and a symbol of colonial oppression.

JILL MANDRAKE
Fact
My Typewriter’s So Old, It Uses A Pencil

A review of a book of variations by bpNichol.

Fact
Personhood

A review of Julie Otsuka's novel, The Buddha in the Attic, about Japanese picture brides in the 1920s.

Michael Hayward
Fact
Levels of Loss

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

Michael Hayward
Fact
Magpie Memoir

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.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Fact
Truth is Stranger

Kelsea O'Connor reviews Let's Pretend This Never Happened by Jenny Lawson, a lighthearted look at the embarrassing moments in the author's life.

Michael Hayward
Fact
Plotto: A Plot Plotter

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

Fact
Pathfinder Deluxe

A young man comes into possession of a 1957 Pontiac, modelled after one owned by a legendary pianist.

Veronica Gaylie
Fact
Cowichan Sweater

You had to sleep in it and fall in love in it.

Michael Hayward
Fact
When I'm 64

"A door has closed, another door has opened. You have entered the winter of your life." A review of Paul Auster's memoir.

Fact
Everything Is Perfect

In 1946, a young bride writes home about her month-long sea voyage to her new home on Baffin Island.

Fact
Suicide Psalms

Daniel Zomparelli reviews Suicide Psalms by Mari-Lou Rowley (Anvil Press).

Daniel Francis
Fact
Warrior Nation

The Great White North gets rebranded and gains some military muscle: goodbye peacenik, hello soldier.

Michael Hayward
Fact
Mnemonic Devices

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

Fact
Power to the Reader

"Since the beginning of time (the telling of which is also a story), we have known that words are dangerous creatures."

Eve Corbel
Fact
Collier Cornucopia

Eve Corbel reviews Collier’s Popular Press: 30 Years on the Newsstand.

Daniel Francis
Fact
Noir

Daniel Francis explores the photographer as Vancouver's most interesting historian.

Ted Bishop
Fact
Edith and Frank

Ted Bishop visits Edith Iglauer and her husband Frank in their seaside home, where he is treated to a fast drive on a winding road, conversation on good books, and a lesson on what it's like to grow old gracefully.

Fact
One Night at the Oceanview

Did that really happen? J. Jill Robinson initiates a midnight stand-off between the police and two drunk brothers in an RV Park in White Rock, B.C.

Edith Iglauer
Fact
Perfect Bite

A warm spring night, a country club dance, a date with an attractive young man—and braces on my two front teeth.

Edith Iglauer
Fact
My Lovely Bathtub

First published in Geist #30 and now in the 20th Anniversary Collector's Edition.

GILLIAN JEROME
Fact
Weeble World

Evil is not darkness, I thought to myself. It’s noise.

Fact
Getting Textual

How to perform a textual analysis of a Facebook message, while under the influence of red wine.

Fact
Darwin's Bastards

Kris Rothstein reviews Darwin's Bastards (Douglas & McIntyre).

Michael Hayward
Fact
Trauma Farm

Michael Hayward reviews Trauma Farm by Brian Brett (Greystone).

Fact
Role Models and Readers

Ruskin's readers have the power to know that there is indeed room for Alice at the Mad Hatter's table.

Fact
Ann Diamond on Memory and Forgetting

Most of our lives probably disappear from our memories, although some people remember much more than others.

EVELYN LAU
Fact
24 Sussex

Picture Harper lounging among pastel cushions, his stiff grey hair tight as a helmet on his head.

RICHARD VAN CAMP
Fact
Grey Matters

It all started with a zesty little book about getting old.

Fact
Renovating Heaven

Fact and fiction are intermingled in this "novel" about growing up Mennonite in the Fraser Valley.

Fact
Hagiography

Leah Rae reviews Hagiography, a slim book of saintly verse filled with mystery and well-crafted poems.

Fact
Vacuum Guy

At the end of the Electrolux era, a veteran salesman closes his store to start a new job at Future Shop.

Daniel Francis
Fact
Writing the Nation

Reconsidering the faintly embarrassing Pierre Berton.

Rose Hunter
Fact
Big Red

A shuttle driver at LAX shares his idea for a Valentine’s Day gift.

Fact
Chomsky and Co.

Chomsky and Co. breaks all the rules of documentary filmmaking, and not for the better.

Fact
The Americans Are Coming

Patty Osborne reviews The Americans Are Coming by Herb Curtis, a story set in the flyfishing lodges of the Miramichi region of New Brunswick.

Fact
What It Is

Learn to draw your life with tips and writing exercises from the American cartoonist Lynda Barry.

George Fetherling
Fact
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.

Mary Leah de Zwart
Fact
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.

Michał Kozłowski
Fact
U2 3D

For u2 fanatics, this may be the most intimate moment they will ever have with Bono; for everyone else, it’s a little awkward.

Fact
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.

S. Taylor
Fact
Wet Dragonflies

When I met you, one floor up from the acute psychosis ward, you were wearing a paper shower cap and green pyjamas just like mine. You glared at me through the crowd because you thought I had your hoodie on. But we just had very similar hoodies.

Edith Iglauer
Fact
What?

At home Frank and I are mutually sympathetic to the obligation to face one another and speak loudly; or, when we are away, to supply each other with new batteries when we forget them; but we have no defence against the independent wandering behaviour of our hearing aids. They are always someplace else. I probably have spent one percent of my life, close to a whole year, looking for the damned things.

Fact
Salal: Listening for the Northwest Understory

Near the beginning of his book, Ricou states that his intention in writing about this ubiquitous plant was to answer the question: “Could a regional culture be found by focusing on a single, native, uncharismatic species?” More simply, he wanted to f

Michael Hayward
Fact
Rogue Male

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

Carrie Villeneuve
Fact
The Black Rider: The Casting of the Magic Bullets

This year, January in Vancouver was one long, dark rainy day. Thankfully the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival offered a variety of performances that piqued my curiosity enough to seduce me out of the house, away from the comforts of Kraft

JUDY LEBLANC
Fact
Walking in the Wound

It is racism, not race, that is a risk factor for dying of COVID-19.

Fact
Room for More

Narrative text, written and spoken, refines a doctor’s ability to hear a patients’ stories.

Phoebe Tsang
Fact
Be Careful What You Wish For

A tarot card reading for John Franklin, Arctic explorer and Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen's Land, by Phoebe Tsang.

ANNMARIE MACKINNON
Fact
Einsteinium Ist Nicht Geil

AnnMarie MacKinnon reviews Einsteinium (Es), an element discovered by a non-Einstein Albert.

M.A.C. Farrant
Fact
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."

Fact
Flight of Fancy

Roni Simunovic takes an Air Canada rouge flight from Halifax to Calgary and ridicules the flight attendants' absurd new uniforms.

Fact
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."

Stephen Henighan
Fact
Immigrants from Nowhere

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

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Fact
Frisco Freebooters

Kelsea O'Connor reviews We Are Pirates, a witty adventure through modern-day piracy by Daniel Handler, better known as Lemony Snicket.

Eve Corbel
Fact
Seized

Eve Corbel reviews Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence by Doris Pilkington, in which two girls are taken from their family by Western Australia government officials in 1931.

Fact
Teary-Eyed Testosterone

Thad McIlroy reviews Poems That Make Grown Men Cry: 100 Men on the Words That Move Them.

Fact
Frenetic, Instructive, Bossy

Patty Osborne reviews four new books from Mansfield Press.

Fact
Rocksalt: An Anthology of Contemporary B.C. Poetry

Daniel Zomparelli reviews Rocksalt: An Anthology of Contemporary B.C. Poetry edited by Mona Fertig and Harold Rhenisch (Mother Tongue).

Michał Kozłowski
Fact
The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara & Lenin Play Chess

“Adopt a reading pseudonym” is but one piece of advice offered in The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara & Lenin Play Chess by Andrei Codrescu, reviewed by Michal Kozlowski.

Henny-B
Fact
Nobody's Girl

The main reason that I open up my doors to people on the street is so that they would have a place to sort of come home.

Norbert Ruebsaat
Fact
Media Studies

These stories and conversations took place in a Media and Communications Studies class at a Canadian college. Students come to the college from many countries, in the hope of enrolling eventually in a North American university.

Evel Economakis
Fact
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."

Daniel Francis
Fact
Dates with Destiny

Not long ago I was having dinner at a small cottage beside a lake in central British Columbia hundreds of kilometres north of Vancouver. Among the guests seated around the table was Elio, a neighbour from down the shore. As we talked he mentioned that he had grown up before the Second World War in the Adriatic port city of Rijeka, where his father had worked in a factory making torpedoes. “Most of the torpedoes used by the Axis during the war were made there,” he informed me.

Fact
Exotic World

In 1989, when Harold and Barbara Morgan opened the Museum of Exotic World in the front rooms of Harold’s commercial painting business in Vancouver, they had been travelling the world every winter for forty-five years and had accumulated many souvenir

Margaret Malloch Zielinski
Fact
Boarding with Mrs. Higgins

Mrs. Higgins lived with her legless brother and her blind husband in a tall, narrow old house in Nottingham. The room I rented from her in the 1950s was just below her sitting room, where she kept a life-size portrait of Lenin.

Fact
Launching Greenpeace

A first-hand account of Greenpeace's first expedition to stop U.S. underwater nuclear testing on September 15, 1971.

Fact
Captain Beefheart: The Biography

Attention-grabbing fact: ninety-nine percent of “serious” writing about “popular” music is one hundred percent useless. One reason for this is an ingrained belief that the social significance of the entertainment industry is more interesting than any

Fact
Comic Book: The Movie

Comic books take something back from Hollywood in Comic Book: The Movie (Miramax), directed by none other than Luke Skywalker, aka Mark Hamill, and starring him and most of the best voice talent in the animation industry. The film, a fictional docume

Lily Gontard
Fact
Consumption

Consumption, by Kevin Patterson (Random House), set in Rankin Inlet in the eastern Arctic, tells the saga of an Inuit family’s decline. The story begins in the 1950s, when a family’s only daughter, Victoria, is sent “outside” to be cured of tuberculo

Rose Burkoff
Fact
How to Ruin a Summer Vacation

Amy Nelson is a privileged Chicago teen who doesn’t know anything about Israel or about being Jewish. Simone Elkeles’s young adult novel, How to Ruin a Summer Vacation (Flux), describes what happens when Amy’s Israeli father, who has stayed out of he

Fact
In Praise of Slow: How a Worldwide Movement is Challenging the Cult of Speed

Carl Honoré isn’t the first author to investigate the phenomenon of slow living, but his book In Praise of Slow: How a Worldwide Movement is Challenging the Cult of Speed (Vintage Canada) is the most comprehensive explanation of recent attention to s

Michał Kozłowski
Fact
Joseph Howe and the Battle for Freedom of Speech

Michal Kozlowski reviews Joseph Howe and the Battle for Freedom of Speech by John Ralston Saul.

Fact
Krazy & Ignatz 1937

The recent Krazy & Ignatz 1937–1938: Shifting Sands Dusts Its Cheeks in Powdered Beauty is one of the most agreeably bonkers tomes published in recent memory. Just about every strip tells the story of Ignatz Mouse’s compulsion to hurl bricks at the w

Michael Hayward
Fact
Let Me Finish

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

Mandelbrot
Fact
Nanook of the North

Mandelbrot discusses the making of Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North.

Michael Hayward
Fact
Neal Cassady: Collected Letters, 1944-1967

As Kerouac later described it, the letter was “a work of literary genius. Neal, he was just telling me what happened one time in Denver, and he had every detail. It was just like Dostoevsky. And I realized that’s the way to tell a story—just tell it!

Fact
On Earth As It Is

Steven Heighton's new book, On Earth As It Is, is bigger and much more spread out than his last one (Flight Paths of the Emperor) and more ambitious. His writing is strongest when he writes at a distance; especially fine are his excursions into the p

Fact
Salt: A World History

Thanks to an educational record I had as a kid, I’ve always known that salt was once traded for gold. What I didn’t know about salt, though, is a heck of a lot, and it’s all covered in Mark Kurlansky’s 400-plus-page book Salt: A World History (Knopf

Michael Hayward
Fact
Seize the Fire: Heroism, Duty, and the Battle of Trafalgar

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

Jill Boettger
Fact
Short Journey Upriver Toward Oishida

Last summer I hiked up to a fire lookout in Alberta to visit a friend who lives there for part of each year, and tucked in my sturdy pack was Roo Borson’s Short Journey Upriver Toward Oishida (McClelland & Stewart), which I was taking to my friend as

Mandelbrot
Fact
The Shipping News

The Shipping News is a novel about Newfoundland written by E. Annie Proulx (Scribners), an off-Islander who states frankly in her disclaimer that "the Newfoundland in this book, although salted with grains of truth, is an island of invention." Nevert

Fact
Untitled: A Bad Teen Novel

Tara Ariano wrote Untitled: A Bad Teen Novel (Writers Club Press) when she was thirteen. It is, she claims, “quite awful,” and was only rescued from obscurity because Tara had friends who persuaded her to share her shame with the world.

Daniel Francis
Fact
While England Sleeps

American novelist David Leavitt had a legal and literary sensation on his hands when his novel While England Sleeps was published last winter. Apparently Leavitt borrowed heavily from the memoirs of Stephen Spender, the aging English poet, in writing

HAL NIEDZVIECKI
Fact
White Lung

Hal Niedzviecki says White Lung by Grant Buday is the comic novel that should have been given to delegates at the WTO in Seattle.

Peggy Thompson
Fact
What It Means To Be Human

Review of "All the Broken Things" by Geoff Inverarity.

Michael Hayward
Fact
Wanda x 3

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.

Daniel Francis
Fact
Future Imperfect

Review of "The Premonitions Bureau " by Sam Knight.

Stephen Henighan
Fact
In Search of a Phrase

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

Fact
Teenaged Boys, Close Up

Review of "Sleeping Giant" directed by Andrew Cividino and written by Cividino, Blain Watters and Aaron Yeger.

Fact
Dreaming of Androids

Review of "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? " by Philip K. Dick.

Anson Ching
Fact
Further Years of Solitude

Review of "Black Sugar" by Miguel Bonnefoy.

Jennilee Austria
Fact
Scavengers

That’s one for the rice bag!

Jonathan Heggen
Fact
A Thoughtful Possession

Review of "The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories" edited and translated by Jay Rubin.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Fact
Rocks in a Hard Place

Review of "A Field Guide to Gold, Gemstone & Mineral Sites of British Columbia, Volume Two: Sites within a Day’s Drive of Vancouver" by Rick Hudson.

Michael Hayward
Fact
Sitting Ducks

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

April Thompson
Fact
Prayer and Declaration

Review of "Monument" by Manahil Bandukwala.

Anson Ching
Fact
Archipelago

Review of "A Dream in Polar Fog" by Yuri Rytkheu, and "A Mind at Peace" by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar.

Fact
Articulating the Inarticulate Speech of the Heart

Review of "The Emotion Thesaurus: A Writer's Guide to Character Expression" by Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi.

April Thompson
Fact
Call Yourself a Writer

Review of "Resonance: Essays on the Craft and Life of Writing" edited by Andrew Chesham and Laura Farina.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Fact
Coming Unravelled

Review of "Unravelling Canada: A Knitting Odyssey" by Sylvia Olsen.

Daniel Francis
Fact
Known It All

Review of "Know It All: Finding the Impossible Country" by James H. Marsh.

Michael Hayward
Fact
No Regrets

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

JILL MANDRAKE
Fact
Part of the Crowd

Review of "Crowded Mirror" by Sheila Delany.

CONNIE KUHNS
Fact
Marriage on the Download

If marriage was a television show, it might look something like this.

Fact
Saint Joseph, Patron Saint of Bad Pronunciation

Scrape every last bit of English out of your throat.

Fact
Doing It Special

Review of "nedi nezu (Good Medicine)" by Tenille K. Campbell.

Michael Hayward
Fact
Seventy-Two Hours to Animal

Review of "Bunker: Building for the End Times" by Bradley Garrett.

TANVI BHATIA
Fact
Heat Death of the Universe

Review of "In the Dream House" by Carmen Maria Machado.

Kris Rothstein
Fact
Decolonizing Canada

Review of "Before I Was a Critic I Was a Human Being" Amy Fung.

Michael Hayward
Fact
Is It Edible?

Review of "Mushrooms of British Columbia" by Andy MacKinnon and Kem Luther.

Fact
Juice Worth the Squeeze

Review of "Shadow of Doubt: The Trials of Dennis Oland, Revised and Expanded Edition" by Bobbi-Jean MacKinnon.

Fact
Middle Sister

Review of "Milkman" by Anna Burns.

Anson Ching
Fact
Recipe for a Harlequin Romance

Review of "Ring" by André Alexis.

CONNIE KUHNS
Fact
Rise Up

Review of "Rise Up: Songs of the Women's Movement" Co-Produced by Jim Brown, Heather A. Smith, and Donna Korones.

Fact
Arms and Letters

Science and the arts fulfil their functions to help us survive through the imagination.

Michael Hayward
Fact
A Longing to Be Far Away

Review of "Fernweh" by Teju Cole.

Robyn Ludwig
Fact
Black Velvet, If You Please

The secret is in the velvet.

Michael Hayward
Fact
Dancing About Architecture

Review of "Utopia Avenue" by David Mitchell.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Fact
Eaten to Extinction

Review of "Lost Feast: Culinary Extinction and the Future of Food" by Lenore Newman.

Sara Cassidy
Fact
Flying the Coop

You can’t break eggs without making an omelette.

Jonathan Heggen
Fact
Korean Supper

Review of "Crying in H Mart: A Memoir " by Michelle Zauner.

JILL MANDRAKE
Fact
Older and Better

Review of "The Old Man in the Mirror Isn’t Me" by Ray Robertson.

Fact
Postal Lit

Review of "Long Live the Post Horn!" by Vigdis Hjorth.

SYLVIA TRAN
Fact
Poutine Pilgrimage

Review of poutine at Robson Fries in Tokyo.

Stephen Henighan
Fact
Reheated Races

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

Fact
The Becoming of Vancouver

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

Fact
Achilles and the Lusitan Tortoise

“Have patience” and “Tomorrow” are two inseparable locutions in the Portuguese tongue.

Fact
B for Beatrice

Patty Osborne on wacky kid tales and the joy of animated storytelling.

Anson Ching
Fact
In Search of Time and Place

Anson Ching on desecration ratcheted to new levels.

SYLVIA TRAN
Fact
Manifesto

Sylvia Tran on cheesy haunted houses, destiny's child and capitalism.

Michael Hayward
Fact
Roads to Nowhere

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

JILL MANDRAKE
Fact
Dirty Dirty Gets Down to the Nitty Gritty

Jill Mandrake on Mississippi Live & the Dirty Dirty, a Southern rock band in East Vancouver.

Celia Haig-Brown
Fact
Resistance and Relentlessness

The long road to decency and justice.

Randy Fred
Fact
Resistance and Renewal

After hearing survivors’ stories, nothing can ever surprise me.

Stephen Henighan
Fact
All in the Same CANO

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

Fact
Ordinary Filipinos vs. The Normal Irish

Patty Osborne on teenage love, internet clicks and stolen babies.

Fact
Everything on Earth

Kathleen Murdock on race, resilience, rage and joy.

Michael Hayward
Fact
Fine Art in Lockdown

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

Fact
Life in the Valley

Thad McIlroy urges us to run from big tech before the death knell tolls.

Kristen den Hartog
Fact
Solace

Bud was one of the few who’d seen Stewart’s face as it was.

Fact
Library as Wishful Thinking

Libraries are not only essential in educating the soul, but in forming the identity of a society.

Stephen Henighan
Fact
Lethal Evolutions

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

Jonathan Heggen
Fact
Mirror Image

Jonathan Heggen on staying on the periphery until the proverbial dust settles.

JILL MANDRAKE
Fact
Coach Has a Vehicle

Jill Mandrake on lyrics that make her shout out loud.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Fact
Scratching the Print-Making Itch

Kelsea O’Connor on 48 printmakers and their unconventional studios.

Michael Hayward
Fact
Ekphrastic Literature

Michael Hayward on plastic art and slow sonnets.

Anson Ching
Fact
An Apartment Block in Angola

Anson Ching on the opening and closing of catastrophes.

Fact
Forgetting the Question

Patty Osborne on licking fish, erotic hallucinations and the mystery of the missing anthropologist.

JILL MANDRAKE
Fact
Life in the Tall Towers Lost

Jill Mandrake on living life on the edge—from Etobicoke to Iqaluit.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Fact
Shocked and Discredited

Kelsea O'Connor on the bible, the Golden Girls and Captain Kirk's Lesbianism.

Michael Hayward
Fact
Bordering

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

Fact
King of Bicycles

Roni Simunovic on the joker playing card through the ages.

Fact
Round the Clock Coverage

Shyla Seller on Marion Stokes and her collection of 71,716 videotapes.

Stephen Henighan
Fact
Confidence Woman

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

Michael Hayward
Fact
Into the Heart of the Landscape

Michael Hayward on the recursive nature of reading and writing inspiration.

Fact
Escaping Orthodoxy

Kate Helmore on the stark contrast between skinny jeans and ankle-length skirts in the Netflix series "Unorthodox".

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Fact
Broken Hearted

Kelsea O'Connor on two comic-obsessed teens in rural Nova Scotia.

Fact
Fighting Fires

Kathleen Murdock on the shiny TV adaptation of "Little Fires Everywhere".

Fact
Léon Bloy and His Monogamous Reader

Dogged dedication grants a reader vicarious immortality.

Fact
A Korean Friend

Patty Osborne on a North Korean novel from North Korea.

Fact
Let’s Go For A Walk

Claudia Casper on the way "Lost Lagoon" allows us to experience time rather than get through it.

Fact
Reel Love

Shyla Seller on "The Forbidden Reel"—a documentary on the legacy and preservation of Afghan Films.

Stephen Henighan
Fact
Plague

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

Jordyn Catalano
Fact
Goodbye and Good Luck

A COVID test in the city of a hundred steeples.

Daniel Francis
Fact
Pandemic Non-Reading

Dan Francis asks you not to read "Midnight in Chernobyl."

Michael Hayward
Fact
Contagion During a Pandemic

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

Michael Hayward
Fact
Glorious lists

Michael Hayward on "The Glorious Mountains of Vancouver’s North Shore: A Peakbagger’s Guide."

Joe Bongiorno
Fact
Piledrivin’ Patriots

On parle français icitte!

Michael Hayward
Fact
Nothing Doing

Michael Hayward on "How To Do Nothing."

Anson Ching
Fact
The Plot Thickens in the Weimar Republic

Anson Ching on "Babylon Berlin."

Michael Hayward
Fact
Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread

Michael Hayward on "The Baker's Wife" by Marcel Pagnol.

Michael Hayward
Fact
Happy Talk

Michael Hayward on "Strange Planet" by Nathan W. Pyle.

Hàn Fúsēn
Fact
Little Trouble in Chinatown

Limits of the language.

Michael Hayward
Fact
Baudelaire Through the Looking Glass

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

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Fact
Linguistics Revolution

Kelsea O'Connor on "Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language" by the Canadian linguist Gretchen McCulloch.

RICHARD VAN CAMP
Fact
Look Out, Not In

Mary Schendlinger on "How the Girl Guides Won the War" by Janie Hampton.

Randy Fred
Fact
Seeing Things

When taking hallucinogenics, more is better, within limits.

Stephen Henighan
Fact
Flight Shame

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

Fact
Canadian Dystopia

Patty Osborne on an engrossing world where nothing monumental happens.

Michael Hayward
Fact
Cycling the Himalayas

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

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Fact
Drool-worthy

Kelsea O'Connor on many aspects of food, from culinary extinctions to kombucha microbiomes.

Joe Bongiorno
Fact
Last Laughs

Justin Trudeau and Greta Thunberg attend the Montreal climate march.

Anson Ching
Fact
Passing on the Sport

Anson Ching on the hardest board game to learn.

Fact
Text That Breaks

Kathleen Murdock on the physical and meaningful structure of text.

Stephen Henighan
Fact
Transatlantic Fictions

Coming to harbour in a new world.

Finn Wylie
Fact
Shelter in Place

"I never went looking for them."

CHERYL THOMPSON
Fact
Dismantling the Myth of the Hero

In a world dominated by heroes, difference is not tolerated.

Carmen Tiampo
Fact
Wash With Like Colours

People have asked: What’s it like? How’s it been? Are you scared?

Fact
My Week in Tunisia

Enjoy the fresh kebab while your freshly dented fender gets fixed.

Hàn Fúsēn
Fact
Biking Around with Ondjaki

Just decide what happens and worry about the rest later.

Stephen Henighan
Fact
Left Nationalists

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

Fact
Séan-tific Femininity

Despite enormous gains by feminists in opening up scientific and medical professions to women from the late nineteenth century onward, femininity continued to be associated with intellectual ineptitude.

Fact
Ad Infinitum

"I stared in awe at the pink-petalled flowers of human tissue blossoming in the mass of a collapsed grey-brown lung as it was reinflated during a thoracotomy."

Fact
Canada’s Dark Depths

Sex, suicide, Nelson and Cabbagetown—Patty Osborne reviews The Modern World and The Secret Life of Fission, two hard-hitting story collections.

JILL MANDRAKE
Fact
Still Stupefying

Jill Mandrake is blown away by South of Elfrida by Holley Rubinsky, a journey into "the land of guilt and sorrow."

AL PURDY
Fact
Sackcloth Missionaries

Cowboy chaps, monkey suits, sackcloths and other fashion observations from Earle Birney and Al Purdy.

Daniel Francis
Fact
We Are Not a Nation of Amnesiacs

"Canadians have long been convinced that we do not know much, or care much, about our own history, but a new study suggests that this truism is not true."

Mandelbrot
Fact
Arctic Roots

Mandelbrot reviews Vanishing Point, a documentary by Stephen A. Smith and Julia Szucs.

Fact
Fresh Hell

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

Fact
Face in the Mirror

What does it mean to "be" yourself? The face reflected in the mirror is unrecognizable.

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
Fact
Treaties

A young Indigenous woman deals with hippy-artist-pothead boyfriends and car troubles.

Fact
Scandal Season

Headlines featuring crack-smoking mayors and election fraudsters.

Daniel Francis
Fact
Identity in a Cup

Is it the icons of Canadian pop culture—hockey fights, Tim Hortons coffee, Don Cherry’s haberdashery, Rick Mercer’s rants—that reveal the deepest truths about us?

Devon Code
Fact
My Prizes: A Memoir

An account of the circumstances surrounding seven literary honours bestowed on a writer.

Fact
Dear Patient

A woman, hoping to find peace, seeks her birth mother. A review of By Blood by Ellen Ullman.

Peggy Thompson
Fact
Walking With Giants

Patti Smith and Neil Young's 2012 Montreal concert is reviewed by two ardent fans.

Daniel Francis
Fact
Come to the Cabaret

The Penthouse, the notorious Vancouver night club, shares a history with several of the city's missing women cases.

Fact
Magenta Soul Whip

Daniel Zomparelli reviews Magenta Soul Whip by Lisa Robertson (Coach House).

Norbert Ruebsaat
Fact
Real World Happiness

Norbert Ruebsaat learns that true happiness requires “an ability to live with ambiguity and tolerate a certain degree of physical humour” in Brian Fawcett's memoir, Human Happiness.

Fact
Pioneer Justice

In The Lynching of Louie Sam, two teenage boys watched as another—an Aboriginal named Louie Sam—was hanged by a group of men who rode on horseback. Reviewed by Patty Osborne.

Fact
Dancing with Dynamite

Public bombings have a profound effect on cities, even if the bomb is a coconut filled with beans and rice.

Michael Turner
Fact
Oh, Canada

Michael Turner questions a US-curated exhibit of Canadian art that exoticizes Canadian artists while suggesting they are un-exotic.

Fact
Observer and Observed

Alberto Manguel reflects on art as a witness to the human desire to be infinite and eternal.

Daniel Francis
Fact
Sex, Drugs, Rock ’n’ Roll and the National Identity

In this essay, Daniel Francis discusses how Gerda Munsinger—a woman with ties to the criminal underworld—shaped Canadian politics in the 1960s.

Fact
Karl Kraus, Everybody's Neighbour

He is one of the strangest crea­tures of that strangest of lit­er­ary bes­tiaries.

Norbert Ruebsaat
Fact
Ursula

She was a conversationalist, a home builder and a deliverer of calves. Those who loved Ursula will miss her adventurous soul.

Fact
Captain Alex MacLean: Jack London's Sea Wolf

Barbara Stewart reviews Captain Alex MacLean by Don MacGillivray (UBC Press).

David Albahari
Fact
Two Homes, One Wolf

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

Fact
David Thompson Beats the Devil on the Kisiskatchewan River

Thompson’s free-ranging narrative of the New World must be the only one in which the devil is defeated at checkers.

Marcus Youssef
Fact
Happy Shiny People

The Museum of Communism is easy to find thanks to the museum’s adver­tis­ing slo­gan: We’re above McDonald’s.

Fact
February

Patty Osborne reviews February by Lisa Moore (Anansi).

Daniel Francis
Fact
War of Independence

World War I, Canada’s “war of independence,” marked a turning point for a young colony wanting to prove itself as a self-reliant nation, but at what cost.

Fact
Come, Thou Tortoise

The hilarious story of Audrey Flowers’s mysterious upbringing in Newfoundland, narrated in part by her pet tortoise, is equally enjoyable on the second read.

Edith Iglauer
Fact
Aquafun

Plumb the depths of the Aquafit subculture with our embedded nonagenarian.

Michael Hayward
Fact
Saudade

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

Fact
Saint Ralph

Patty Osborne reviews Saint Ralph, the uplifting but untrue story of a boy who sets out to win the 1954 Boston Marathon.

Fact
Pleasant Artistic Experience

An intrepid Geist correspondent narrowly avoids being stabbed by a moose-antler letter opener in Whitehorse.

Michael Hayward
Fact
Notes from Walnut Tree Farm

A peek inside Roger Deakin’s living, breathing farmhouse in the waning years of his life in Notes from Walnut Tree Farm, reviewed by Michael Hayward.

Michał Kozłowski
Fact
New World

How do you have a good time in Warsaw? Sing Neil Diamond songs in a karaoke bar.

Saeko Usukawa
Fact
Gulf Island Sojourn

"Campbell River, best fishing in the world. They do every­thing for you. All you have to do is bring yourself and decide what you're going to drink."

Daniel Francis
Fact
Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

When I finally got around to reading Postwar, I was amused to discover that Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks was reading it too. This is the first time I have found myself reading the same book as a character in a novel.

Fact
An Ounce of Civet

Dinner with James Reaney—poet, playwright, professor—who is mistaken by a pair of Irish ladies for “that decadent writer Mordecai Richler.”

Daniel Francis
Fact
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.

Fact
Trial by Water

Ebb and flow in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Michael Hayward
Fact
The Paris Review Interviews

While considering the list of writers interviewed for each volume of The Paris Review Interviews (Picador) I couldn’t help thinking: “What an amazing literary gathering that would have been!” For the launch of volume i we can imagine a New York penth

Daniel Francis
Fact
Terra Infirma: A Life Unbalanced

In 1988 Jean Mallinson, a West Vancouver poet and essayist, entered hospital for abdominal surgery. She came through the operation without mishap, and afterwards her doctor prescribed gentamicin, an antibiotic intended to stave off infection during r

Michael Hayward
Fact
The Architects Are Here

In The Architects Are Here (Viking), Michael Winter revisits his fictional alter ego Gabriel English, who has previously appeared as a central figure in two short story collections and in This All Happened, Winter’s first novel (published in 2000).

Edith Iglauer
Fact
Wait, Save, Help

When I was twelve my father enrolled me in a typing course from which I emerged typing with two fingers.

Eve Corbel
Fact
Degrees of Separation

My god, I think as I wait my turn in the wash­room of the Hotel Vancouver, all of these peo­ple look just like Carol Shields.

Fact
Forbidden Lie$

Forbidden Lie$ tells the story of Norma Khouri, who shot to fame when her book, Forbidden Love, became a bestseller. The book claimed to tell the story of Khouri’s best friend, who was murdered by her own family because she dated a man of a different

Carrie Villeneuve
Fact
Seachd: The Inaccessible Pinnacle

Seachd: The Inaccessible Pinnacle (Simon Miller), is the first Gaelic-language movie at the Vancouver International Film Festival. Seachd ( “seven”) is the age Aonghas is when he and his siblings are orphaned and sent to their grandparents; seachd is

Michael Hayward
Fact
Road Novels, 1957–1960

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.

Sheila Heti
Fact
American Soul

Slot machines sing their astral music. The tape recorder turns off. “Do you talk to friends about sex?” he asks.

Steven Heighton
Fact
Watching the Ducks in Chiang Mai

A greying, sunburnt American mis­sionary stopped us in the fruit market and invited us for a drink.

Michael Hayward
Fact
Kate and Anna McGarrigle: Songs and Stories

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), too much of which consists of transcribed newspaper reviews of albums

Eve Corbel
Fact
Paper Trail

Eve Corbel reviews Paper Trail by Arleen Paré, a blend of memoir, poetry and magic realism in which the unnamed narrator struggles through her last 206 work days as a middle manager in an insidious corporate environment.

Fact
Evictions

When Malcolm Lowry’s shack on the beach at Dollarton, B.C., burned to the ground in 1944, he and his wife Marjorie were able to save the manuscript of only one of the novels that he was working on at the time. A few months later the same manuscript had to be rescued again when the house that friends found for them in Oakville, Ontario, also burned to the ground.

Fact
Iceman

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.”

Fact
Julia’s World

I went to the babysitter’s to pick up Julia, who was two and a half years old, and she said that she had been “a little bit sad for a while” because her mother, who had a new part-time job and had dropped Julia off a few hours earlier, had gone away for “quite a long time.”

Fact
War Stories

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.

Michael Hayward
Fact
The Oxford Companion to Food

The Oxford Companion to Food (2nd edition, Oxford) is an extremely dangerous book.

Fact
A Passion for Mountains

If you wanted to climb a mountain on the coast of B.C. in the early 1900s, you had to pound nails down through the soles of a pair of leather boots, load up a canvas pack with overnight gear and canned food, take a boat trip to the spot where the mou

Edith Iglauer
Fact
Sitting on Water

During my thirty years living on the waterfront of British Columbia, I have always had some sort of container in which to sit on the water. My first boat was a ten-foot dinghy that my late husband John Daly, a commercial salmon troller, equipped with a small electric motor to surprise me. He had the bizarre idea that I, a sometime canoeist from Ohio, could manoeuvre a boat on my own around our capacious Pacific coast harbour. The electric engine would be ideal for me, he thought. No rope to pull to start it up! No gasoline tank on board!

Fact
Natural History

It started with a note I found tucked into an anthology of poems edited by Selden Rodman, a book I opened rarely, though there was a time when I was young I had read it so closely and so many times I had most of the poems memorized. The note lay in the spine of the book against a poem of Arthur Rimbaud's titled, I think, "The Twelve-Year-Old Poet." On it are four names printed out in my sure and youthful twenty-one-year-old hand: Baghdad, Koweit, Sakakah, Jaffa.

Stephen Henighan
Fact
A Pen Too Far

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.

Fact
Dark Hearts

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

Fact
Detective Samuel de Champlain

One of the pleasures of reading for no particular reason is coming across hidden stories, involuntary essays, samples of what someone once called “found literature”—as opposed, I imagine, to the literature that states its official identity on the cover. Leafing through a book on Samuel de Champlain, I came across, of all things, a detective story.

Fact
In Praise of the Enemy

The epic genre suffers from disregard. To the Iliad, our new century has preferred the Odyssey: the encumbered return of the warrior matters more to us than his laborious swordplay.

Fact
A Common Pornography

Portland is a great destination for fans of the independent presses. During a recent two-day trip, I selected a few must-have zines and chapbooks from a huge selection.

Michael Hayward
Fact
Across the Territories

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

Eve Corbel
Fact
Angloman

Angloman, by Mark Shainblum and Gabriel Morrissette (Nuage), is a comic book for Canada in the '90s: it lampoons everybody in the Franco-Anglo wars and it sends up superhero comics at the same time.

Fact
Apology for Absence: Selected Poems 1962-1992

Some of us have become suspicious of books bearing blurbs by Robin Skelton, but in the case of John Newlove's Apology for Absence: Selected Poems 1962-1992 (Porcupine's Quill), we are pleased to make an exception. This book is as good as it gets when

Fact
Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm Since Hippocrates

David Wootton writes in his introduction to Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm Since Hippocrates (Oxford) that he set out to write “a history of different ways of conceiving the human body” (the medieval, the mechanical, the chemical, the genetic) but

Mandelbrot
Fact
Billy Elliott

Billy Elliott is surely the most offensive movie of the season. Rocky II goes to ballet school and proves that High Culture can be good for working class stiffs if only they would stop drinking beer long enough to make sacrifices for children who wis

Fact
Blood Vessel

Nevertheless, Canadian writers do persist in the genres, and one is always gratified to come across a Canadian thriller or a mystery novel like Paul Grescoe's Blood Vessel (Douglas & McIntyre) for the sheer pleasure of watching Canadian places and ti

Fact
Brotherhood of the Wolf

Brotherhood of the Wolf, the highest grossing film in the history of French cinema, is a surprise. I thought it was going to be a werewolf movie, which would have been fine, but it is an action-packed tale of political intrigue set during the reign o

Fact
Canadian Literary Power

Somewhat more put-downable is Canadian Literary Power by Frank Davey (NeWest Press), which took me a week to read. This is a book filled with Serious Thinking, so of course it's slow, and I'm still not sure how much of it I can agree with.

Fact
Canadian Exploration Literature: An Anthology

There is something unexplained about Germaine Warkentin's Canadian Exploration Literature: An Anthology (Oxford). This book is a collection of lengthy extracts from the written accounts of two dozen well-known explorers, starting with Pierre Radisson

Fact
Canadian Notes and Queries

Curmudgeons of a more bibliophiliac bent should be subscribing to Canadian Notes and Queries, a fascinating magazine of little-known facts of interest that Doug Fetherling took over a few years ago with the intention of broadening its range and its r

Fact
Canadian ten-dollar bill

The dreadful effects of “computer-assisted publishing” can be observed in the new Canadian ten-dollar bill, a specimen of which I had been carrying around for days wondering where I could have picked up such a miserable-looking coupon.

Fact
Chuck Dugan is AWOL

The eponymous hero of Chuck Dugan is AWOL by Eric Chase Anderson (Chronicle) isn’t from Montreal or Toronto but he is struggling through early adulthood in this illustrated old-fashioned adventure story filled with innocence and charm. Chuck Dugan de

Derek Fairbridge
Fact
Da Capo Best Music Writing

The fourth volume in the Da Capo Best Music Writing pulls together some of the finest music writing published in 2003. It is rife with typos, but the articles are compulsively readable and they cover “rock, pop, jazz, country and more."

Fact
Earth and Ashes

Earth and Ashes by Atiq Rahimi, translated by Erdag M. Goknar (Harcourt) is a powerful story wrapped up in a perfect little hardcover book (4' x 7") that contains only 81 pages.

Fact
Eating Apples: Knowing Women's Lives

Patty Osborne reviews Eating Apples, an addictive collection of personal essays that gives glimpses into the lives of women.

Norbert Ruebsaat
Fact
Elizabeth Costello

In Coetzee’s most recent book, Elizabeth Costello, the main character—“she, Elizabeth Costello”—wonders if she is “a light spirit,” and I like this idea. Elizabeth Costello is not called a novel either, although on the dust jacket Coetzee is describe

Fact
Everything Arrives at the Light

If a poem is going to grab you, it has to do it right away, as Lorna Crozier's poems do. Here are a few openers from her new book, Everything Arrives at the Light (McClelland & Stewart): "He had a good wife, he said, / she did not complete his senten

Fact
Experience

For those unfortunates who missed the reading (and I encountered a number on the sidewalk after the event), Amis's book, Experience (Knopf Canada), is comparable: very well written, amusing enough to make you laugh out loud, thoughtful, interesting a

Fact
Fair Weather

Joe Matt’s Fair Weather (Drawn and Quarterly) compiles four recent issues of his autobiographical comic book Peep Show.

Fact
Fahrenheit 9/11

Toward the end of Fahrenheit 9/11, the movie written and directed by Michael Moore, various U.S. military people and some civilians voice their dismay at finding themselves embroiled in a war that has no meaning.

Fact
Firefly

Now that Buffy is over, Whedon has but one TV program to work on: Angel. Which is all the more sad because he had created the best thing to hit television in years: Firefly. That show starred Nathan Fillion (born in Edmonton) as Captain Malcolm Reyno

Fact
Floating Voice

Two recent books nicely illustrate, for me, the disturbing state of contemporary publishing. The first book, Hemingway: The Toronto Years (Doubleday) by William Burrill, a Toronto journalist, is a handsome example of the book-making art.... The secon

JILL MANDRAKE
Fact
Ghosts: True Tales of Eerie Encounters

The question that pops to mind as you read Ghosts: True Tales of Eerie Encounters (TouchWood) is, “Why does British Columbia house so many spooks?” Robert Belyk does not provide a specific answer, but he does say that ghosts are likelier to manifest

Fact
Ghost Hotel

Ghost Hotel is the new mystery by Jackie Manthorne (gynergy books), first of what will be a series, and it features "Harriet Hubbley: down-to-earth dyke from Montreal." This story is a great window into the lesbian lifestyle, but not a really satisfy

Jill Boettger
Fact
Habitat

Sue Wheeler’s new book of poems, Habitat (Brick Books), which I read on the brink of winter in Alberta, took me back to a time I lived on the west coast of B.C., where winter was listless and wet, none of this chinook then snow, chinook then snow I’v

David Sheskin
PRESS 1 IF

PRESS 1 IF YOU THINK YOU MAY HAVE HEARD THE BIG BANG.

Peggy Thompson
What It Means To Be Human

Review of "All the Broken Things" by Geoff Inverarity.

Michael Hayward
Wanda x 3

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.

David M. Wallace
Red Flags

The maple leaf no longer feels like a symbol of national pride.

Future Perfect

New bylaws for civic spaces.

Daniel Francis
Future Imperfect

Review of "The Premonitions Bureau " by Sam Knight.

Stephen Henighan
In Search of a Phrase

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

Teenaged Boys, Close Up

Review of "Sleeping Giant" directed by Andrew Cividino and written by Cividino, Blain Watters and Aaron Yeger.

Dreaming of Androids

Review of "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? " by Philip K. Dick.

Anson Ching
Further Years of Solitude

Review of "Black Sugar" by Miguel Bonnefoy.

Mazzy Sleep
Heart Medicine

"You have bruises / There was time / You spent trying to / Heal them. / As in, time wasted."

CB Campbell
Joe and Me

Playing against the fastest chess player in the world.

Jennilee Austria
Scavengers

That’s one for the rice bag!

Jonathan Heggen
A Thoughtful Possession

Review of "The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories" edited and translated by Jay Rubin.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Rocks in a Hard Place

Review of "A Field Guide to Gold, Gemstone & Mineral Sites of British Columbia, Volume Two: Sites within a Day’s Drive of Vancouver" by Rick Hudson.

Michael Hayward
Sitting Ducks

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

April Thompson
Prayer and Declaration

Review of "Monument" by Manahil Bandukwala.

Stephen Henighan
Collateral Damage

When building a nation, cultural riches can be lost.

Jeremy Colangelo
i is another

"my point that / i is but a : colon grown / too long"

Anson Ching
Archipelago

Review of "A Dream in Polar Fog" by Yuri Rytkheu, and "A Mind at Peace" by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar.

Articulating the Inarticulate Speech of the Heart

Review of "The Emotion Thesaurus: A Writer's Guide to Character Expression" by Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi.

April Thompson
Call Yourself a Writer

Review of "Resonance: Essays on the Craft and Life of Writing" edited by Andrew Chesham and Laura Farina.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Coming Unravelled

Review of "Unravelling Canada: A Knitting Odyssey" by Sylvia Olsen.

Daniel Francis
Known It All

Review of "Know It All: Finding the Impossible Country" by James H. Marsh.

Michael Hayward
No Regrets

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