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Barbara Zatyko
Faceoff at the Summit

I read and reread Faceoff at the Summit (Little, Brown), the story of the Summit Series written by Dryden and Mark Malvoy. Dryden describes the Team Canada star Frank Mahovlich giving the team an inspirational talk before a big game: “‘Gentlemen,’ he

Patty Osborne
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Oskar, the main narrator of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer (Houghton Mifflin), is a precocious nine-year-old who dreams up things like a tea kettle that reads in his father’s voice instead of whistling, and a skyscraper t

Stephen Osborne
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.

Extremities

Often I have yearned to go to Newfoundland, as part of an eastward reversal of the migration of the sixties. I felt that yearning again when I read Extremities, a collection of short fiction by the ten Newfoundland writers who make up the Burning Roc

Alberto Manguel
Facing the Camera

How much does a photograph really capture the essence of a person?

Stephen Osborne
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.

Roni Simunovic
Express Recycling Depot

Roni Simunovic reviews the Yaletown Return-It Express Depot.

Kris Rothstein
Exploits of a Reluctant (But Extremely Goodlooking) Hero

Like Adrian Mole, the famous teenaged diarist created by Sue Townsend, the unnamed hero of Maureen Fergus’s Exploits of a Reluctant (But Extremely Good

GILLIAN JEROME
Expecting Baby: 9 Months of Wonder, Reflection and Sweet Anticipation

Child-rearing manuals cropped up with a vengeance in the latter half of the twentieth century after Dr. Benjamin Spock produced Baby and Child Care—the all-time best-selling book in American history, second only to the Bible, despite advice such as “

Leslie Pomeroy
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

Lara Jenny
Everyone in Silico

The near future of Jim Munroe’s Everyone in Silico (No Media Kings) reads like Naomi Klein’s (No Logo) idea of hell. Ads pop up everywhere and chase you down the street, and they can only be turned off by the very rich.

MITIARJUK NAPPAALUK
Examinations

“Sanaaq! Qumaq’s blood is too weak and the same is true for Aanikallak’s. They’ll both have to go to hospital!” From Sanaaq by Mitiarjuk Nappaaluk, the first ever Inuit novel.

Stephen Osborne
Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s

Everyday Stalinism—certainly a tide to conjure with—by Sheila Fitz-Patrick (Oxford) is subtitled Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s, and is proof that under certain circumstances the everyday is never normal. This is a h

Stephen Osborne
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

Lily Gontard
Everything is Illuminated

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

Kathleen Murdock
Everything on Earth

Kathleen Murdock on race, resilience, rage and joy.

Brian Joseph Davis
Everybody Loves Nothing

An established experimental poet—the kind that comes with a beard and a fear of proper capitalization—was heard recently to denounce video art as “arty farty stuff.” As a writer and sometime video artist myself, I like to think of the two disciplines

Drunk Family Dog Trip

Leonard Cohen, a troupe of French-Canadian clowns, a person with an antiquated profession, an unusually tall municipal bureaucrat, Gordie Howe and others coalesce in these randomly generated CanLit premises.

Alberto Manguel
Europeans

When I was in school in Argentina, Europe (our notion of Europe) was a vast and powerful conglomerate of culture and wisdom. From there, from across the Atlantic, came the history to which, magister dixit, we owed our existence; from there came the writers whose literature we read, the musicians whose music we listened to, the filmmakers whose films we watched.

Stephen Osborne
Espresso Nerd Heaven

"My espresso machine was in the repair shop and I had begun to despair of ever seeing it again."

Rose Burkoff
Esther

The story of Esther Brandeau, the first Jew to set foot in New France, could have been a dull historical re-creation, but Esther, by Sharon E. McKay (Penguin), is an action-packed story about a feisty, unusual and believable heroine.

MICHELLE ELRICK
Ethelbert: Ten Days in May

Excerpt from Michelle Elrick's Then/Again.

Norbert Ruebsaat
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

Kris Rothstein
Eve and the Fire Horse

When Julia Kwan’s grandmother died, her parents said the grandmother had been reincarnated as a goldfish. The report from Sunday school was quite different: Grandma had gone to hell. Eve and the Fire Horse is Kwan’s story of a young Chinese-Canadian

Sadie McCarney
Fact
Christmas in Lothlórien

It was a gruesome war, Santa added in Papyrus font, but the forces of Good eventually emerged victorious

Madeleine Pelletier
Fact
Dummies Raising Goats

Time to call a professional

Rose Divecha
Fact
Clearing Out My Mother's House

The large supply of nine-volt batteries suddenly made sense

S.I. Hassan
Fact
Becoming Canadian

I traffic deep time in a great storm, guilty of ignorance and omission

Adrian Rain
Fact
Schrödinger’s Kids

The log jam is tall and wide and choosing wrong means we don’t make it home

Dayna Mahannah
Fact
The Academy of Profound Oddities

The fish is a suspended phantom, its magenta skeleton an exquisite, vibrant exhibit of what lies beneath

Kelly Bouchard
Fact
After the Flames

A wildland fighter witnesses an old burn's second act

ERNIE KROEGER
Fact
Acoustic Memory

Memories sneak up, tiptoe quiet as a cat. Boom like a slapshot

J.R. Patterson
Fact
True at First Flight

The unmistakable buzz of an approaching aircraft is enough to send my family onto the lawn

Eimear Laffan
Fact
The Trap Door

This invertebrate does not go looking for prey

rob mclennan
Fact
Elizabeth Smart’s Rockcliffe Park

For the sake of the large romantic gesture

Sara de Waal
Fact
Little Women, Two Raccoons

Hit everything dead on, even if it’s big

Margaret Nowaczyk
Fact
Metanoias

The names we learn in childhood smell the sweetest to us

Ian Roy
Fact
My Body Is a Wonderland

Maybe my doctor has two patients named Ian Roy, and I’ve been sent the other Ian’s file

Sara Graefe
Fact
My Summer Behind the Iron Curtain

No Skylab buzz in East Germany.

Sara Cassidy
Fact
The Lowest Tide

Nature’s sanctity is the only portal to the future.

Kathy Page
Fact
The Exquisite Cyclops

A writer roams her sleepscape in search of the extraordinary subconscious

Hollie Adams
Fact
A Partial List of Inconvenient Truths

In search of a big picture at the end of the singular world

David Sheskin
Fact
PRESS 1 IF

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

EVELYN LAU
Reunion

He looked vaguely familiar— there was a sort of outline around his ­features that I almost recognized, a translucent and shifting visage, as of someone I once knew. He looked vaguely familiar— there was a sort of outline around his ­features that I al

Craig Taylor
Punch

It was at about this moment that I hit him in the face, which is something I’ve never done before. I don’t know what perfect form the punch took in my mind, but by the time the impulse had pushed its way through me, my hand had bent inward like an old person’s claw, or a doll’s hand—curved around but without a bottle to clutch.

Stephen Osborne
Fields of Time

With the approach of her tenth summer, Julia considers the holidays that lie before her: will there be too many things for her to do? Trying to look ahead from school time, with its time-tables and schedules, makes it hard to remember, or to imagine, what summertime will be before summer arrives and the school year ends. In the summer when I was Julia’s age I heard Elvis Presley for the first time, down by the river on the jukebox in the fish-and-chip joint where teenagers went to hold hands and drink ice cream sodas and eat salted french fries drenched in vinegar.

Michał Kozłowski
Wild World

One day a Swiss couple stopped in at the carpet shop, just as they had each year for the last ten years. Every spring they loaded up a cargo van with nets and jars and drove from their home in Switzerland to east Turkey, where they collected ­butterflies together. The man, Walter, had caught snakes in Africa and South America all his life and sold them to universities and private collectors, but that day he was turning seventy-five and, he said, it is not so wise at my age to play with snakes.

Mary Vallis
Waiting for Michael (Jackson)

Reporting on the Michael Jackson trial from a Best Value Inn in Santa Maria, California.

Andrea G. Johnston
The Fallen Man

It’s dark when I get off the bus by the corner store. Not the best area of town. The only other person in sight is lying on the sidewalk.

Hilary M. V. Leathem
To Coronavirus, C: An Anthropological Abecedary

After Paul Muldoon and Raymond Williams.

DANIEL CANTY
The Sum of Lost Steps

On the curve of the contagion and on the measure of Montreality.

Stephen Osborne
This Postcard Life

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

Kristen den Hartog
The Insulin Soldiers

It was as though a magic potion had brought him back to life.

MARCELLO DI CINTIO
The Great Wall of Montreal

The chain-link fence along boulevard de l’Acadie— two metres high, with “appropriate hedge”—separates one of the wealthiest neighbourhoods in Montreal from one of the poorest.

Bill MacDonald
The Ghost of James Cawdor

A seance to contact a dead miner at Port Arthur, Ontario, in 1923—conducted by Conan Doyle himself.

Daniel Francis
The Artist as Coureur de Bois

Tom Thomson, godfather of the Group of Seven, drowned in an Ontario lake under mysterious circumstances, and ever since, his reputation has been the stuff of legend.

Carellin Brooks
Ripple Effect

I am the only woman in the water. The rest of the swimmers are men or boys. One of them bobs his head near me, a surprising vision in green goggles, like an undocumented sea creature. I imagine us having sex, briefly, him rocking over me like a wave.

Stephen Smith
Rinkside Intellectual

Stephen Smith investigates the hockey lives of Barthes, Faulkner, Hemingway, which were marked by dismissal, befuddlement and scorn.

J. Jill Robinson
Hot Pulse

I am sorry I caused you pain. But I thought it was okay.

HOWARD WHITE
How We Imagine Ourselves

When Geist first approached me with the idea of speaking here, I made it known that of all the things I ever wanted to be when I grew up, being an after-dinner speaker was very low on the list.

Mia + Eric
Future Perfect

New bylaws for civic spaces.

Ann Diamond
How I (Finally) Met Leonard Cohen

On a rainy night in October 1970, I crossed paths with Canada's most elusive poet.

JILL MANDRAKE
Elementary

On the merry-go-round, you just shouted out a des­ti­na­tion and all the kids pushed until every­one agreed we’d arrived.

Gabrielle Marceau
Fact
Main Character

I always longed to be the falling woman—impelled by unruly passion, driven by beauty and desire, turned into stone, drowned in flowers.

Annabel Lyon
Eye for Detail

What is at the heart of this Edith Iglauer profile by Giller nominee Annabel Lyon? Hint: Ice Road Truckers.

Alberto Manguel
Cri de Coeur

Compared to today's vile heros, Ned Kelly-the Australian outlaw who wrote the angry, articulate Jerilderie letter in 1879-seems as innocent as an ogre-slaughtering hero of fairy tales.

Life in Language

For four decades, Jay Powell and Vickie Jensen helped to revive forgotten languages for many Aboriginal groups along the coast of the Pacific Northwest. Read their story here.

M.A.C. Farrant
Notes on the Wedding

The mother of the groom measures the distance between two weddings: twenty-six years, six thousand miles, and a donkey covered with flowers. It’s outtasight.

Ivan Coyote
Shouldn’t I Feel Pretty?

Somewhere in the sweat and ache and muscle I carved a new shape for myself that made more sense.

CONNIE KUHNS
There is a Wind that Never Dies

"If you are still alive, you must have had the experience of surrendering."

Ann Diamond
The Second Life of Kiril Kadiiski

He has been called the greatest Bulgarian poet of his generation. Can one literary scandal bury his whole career?

DAVID COLLIER
The Last Grain Elevator in Regina

When you live in Saskatoon, you find yourself caring more about the details of grain farming then you did when you lived in Toronto or Windsor.

Stephen Osborne
The Great Game

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

S. K. Page
Only A Beginning: An Anarchist Anthology

Everything you need to know about Anarchism in Canada can be found in Only A Beginning: An Anarchist Anthology (Arsenal Pulp), an enormous collection of anarchist writing and publishing in this country since 1976. Here is recorded the genesis and pas

Luanne Armstrong
One-Eyed Jacks

Canadians have not yet produced enough mysteries to define "the Canadian mystery," but Brad Smith's book One-Eyed Jacks (Doubleday) is a welcome addition to this evolving genre. Set in the Toronto of a much earlier era, the story clips along at a fin

Norbert Ruebsaat
On Kiddie Porn: Sexual Representation, Free Speech and the Robin Sharpe Case

Stan Persky and John Dixon ask important questions in their book On Kiddie Porn: Sexual Representation, Free Speech and the Robin Sharpe Case (New Star). Is possession of a photograph depicting a criminal act a criminal act?

Michael Hayward
On the Road: The Original Scroll

With the publication of On the Road: The Original Scroll (Viking), Jack Kerouac takes a step beyond canonization toward beatitude itself. The scroll manuscript of this 1957 novel is one of the sacred artifacts of the Beat era, and conflicting stories

Michael Hayward
One Book

Michael Hayward on one book you should read this year.

Patty Osborne
One Bloody Thing After Another

Patty Osborne reviews One Bloody Thing After Another by Joey Comeau (ECW Press).

Stephen Osborne
On Tycho's Island: Tycho Brahe and His Assistants

Students of astronomical history will require a copy of On Tycho's Island: Tycho Brahe and His Assistants by John Robert Christianson (Cambridge), which is a very full account of the great "pre-scientific" science centre established in Denmark in the

Stephen Osborne
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

Patty Osborne
On Songwriting

Bob Snider is a dishevelled man with a beard and longish hair who writes and sings simple songs that play with language and usually make people laugh. In the first part of On Songwriting (Gaspereau Press), he advises songwriters to use nouns and verb

Michael Hayward
On Hashish

Michael Hayward reviews On Hashish, a collection of Walter Benjamin’s writings on hashish.

Stephen Osborne
On the Edge: A Journey into the Heart of Canada

Stephen Osborne reviews On the Edge: A Journey into the Heart of Canada by Lindalee Tracey.

Michael Hayward
Old Cobblers

Michael Hayward on "Autumn" by Karl Ove Knausgaard.

Lara Jenny
Old Money

Wendy Wasserstein’s superb writing makes her latest play, Old Money, more compelling to read than most contemporary novels. Old Money concerns a Manhattan mansion and the families that inhabit it at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centurie

GILLIAN JEROME
Of Woman Born

Child-rearing manuals cropped up with a vengeance in the latter half of the twentieth century after Dr. Benjamin Spock produced Baby and Child Care—the all-time best-selling book in American history, second only to the Bible, despite advice such as “

Geist Staff
Old Farmer's Almanac

The Old Farmer's Almanac (Yankee Publishing Inc.) does not believe in chaos theory. "We believe," state its editors in the 1994 edition which arrived in the mail recently, "nothing in the universe occurs haphazardly." Which explains how the Almanac c

Michael Hayward
Nova Scotian Noir

Michael Hayward on the perfect setup for a classic “film noir.”

JILL MANDRAKE
Of a Fire Beyond the Hills: A Novel Based on News Stories

For the folks out there who are indifferent to what’s going on in Iraq and Afghanistan, this book seems to whisper, “Stop eating your grilled Gruyère cheese with Roma tomatoes and red onion on open-face sourdough long enough to read me, if you please

S. K. Page
Observatory Mansions

Observatory Mansions by Edward Carey (Crown) sports a beautiful dust jacket that can be read over and over again, and the chapter starts are accompanied by wonderful illustrations by the author. The lives of the denizens of Observatory Mansions are s

Michael Hayward
Nothing Doing

Michael Hayward on "How To Do Nothing."

Patty Osborne
Nuvisavik: The Place Where We Weave

The pictures in Nuvisavik: The Place Where We Weave, edited by Maria Von Finckenstein (McGill-Queens) are of tapestries that tell the story of traditional Inuit life. The tapestries were woven by members of a weaving studio in Pangnirtung, Baffin Isl

Lily Gontard
O Cadoiro

Erin Mouré’s book of poems, O Cadoiro (Anansi), is seductive in its physical beauty (kudos to the designer) and in the great romance of the verse, which reminded me of the infamously passionate Letters of a Portuguese Nun, a collection of letters tha

Geist Staff
Oblique Litanies

Oblique Litanies by Paul Davies (ECW Press) is a collection of short personal essays—the author calls them "conversations," but "monologues" would be more accurate: they are really half-conversations, the other halves of which are understood to belon

Thad McIlroy
Notes on the Cosmos

Three generations of the Crosby family live and die, but all you really need to know about Tinkers by Paul Harding is the writer’s exceptional use of language.

Michael Hayward
Novels in Three Lines

Novels in Three Lines is an addictive collection of brief items—“true stories of murder, mayhem, and everyday life”—that were first published anonymously in 1906 in the French newspaper Le Matin; I dare you to eat just one.

Alberto Manguel
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.

Stephen Henighan
Residential Roots

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

Alberto Manguel
Reading the Commedia

An appreciation of Dante's "Commedia."

Alberto Manguel
Reach Out and Touch (Somebody's Hand)

There is no way to step back from the orgy of kisses without offending.

Rob Kovitz
Question Period

Rob Kovitz compiles the pressing questions of the day—"How are they gonna beat ISIS?" And, "On Twitter, who cares?"

Stephen Henighan
Becoming French

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.

Alberto Manguel
Art and Blasphemy

Faith seems to shiver when confronted by art.

Stephen Henighan
All in the Same CANO

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

Daniel Francis
Afghanistan

One thing Canadians have learned from our armed incursion into Afghanistan is that we do not have a vocabulary for discussing war or warlike events.

Daniel Francis
African Gulag

The atrocities were carried out in the name of some version of “civilization” that the Queen represented.

Daniel Francis
Acts of Resistance

"Resistance to wars is as much a Canadian tradition as fighting them." Daniel Francis discusses alternative histories, anti-draft demonstrations and the divisive nature of war.

Alberto Manguel
A Novel for All Times

Alberto Manguel's column from Geist 93 about how the most important Turkish novelist of modern times took over fifty years to reach English-speaking audiences.

Stephen Henighan
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.

Alberto Manguel
A Fairy Tale for Our Time

What can the Brothers Grimm teach us about the state of our economic system? Everything.

Alberto Manguel
A Brief History of Tags

A reflection on the complex and often inexplicable process of bibliographic categorizations.

Alberto Manguel
Face in the Mirror

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

Annabel Lyon
Ethical Juices

Parables, cautionary tales, morality plays, allegories—the notion that we can study literary works as texts of ethics is as old as literature.

Stephen Henighan
Ethnic Babies

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

Daniel Francis
Come to the Cabaret

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

Stephen Henighan
Chariots of China

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

Stephen Henighan
Caribbean Enigma

Unravelling the mysteries of Alejo Carpentier

Daniel Francis
Canada's Funnyman

A misogynist, a racist and an academic walk into a bar...

Stephen Henighan
Campus Confidential

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

Alberto Manguel
Burning Mistry

Alberto Manguel examines a modern-day book burning and asks: how is this still happening?

Sadie McCarney
Christmas in Lothlórien

It was a gruesome war, Santa added in Papyrus font, but the forces of Good eventually emerged victorious

Peggy Thompson
Opioids and Other Demons

Review of "Demon Copperhead" by Barbara Kingsolver

Madeleine Pelletier
Dummies Raising Goats

Time to call a professional

Kris Rothstein
An Ordinary Life?

Review of "There Was a Time for Everything" by Judith Friedland

Peggy Thompson
Grab Your Feather Boas

Review of "Stories from My Gay Grandparents" directed by J Stevens

Anik See
The Crush and the Rush and the Roar

And a sort of current ran through you when you saw it, a visceral, uncontrollable response. A physical resistance to the silence

KELSEA O'CONNOR
The Quiet Hunt

Review of "Mushrooming: The Joy of the Quiet Hunt" by Diane Borsato

Cornelia Mars
Once Upon a Talking Goose

Review of "The Capital of Dreams" by Heather O'Neill

Rose Divecha
Clearing Out My Mother's House

The large supply of nine-volt batteries suddenly made sense

Michael Hayward
Insecurity Blanket

Review of "The Age of Insecurity" by Astra Taylor

Anson Ching
Beach Reading

Review of "Slave Old Man" by Patrick Chamoiseau

S.I. Hassan
Becoming Canadian

I traffic deep time in a great storm, guilty of ignorance and omission

Peggy Thompson
Taken to a Place of Life

Review of "Something, Not Nothing: A Story of Grief and Love" by Sarah Leavitt.

Shyla Seller
About the House

Review of "House Work" curated by Caitlin Jones and Shiloh Sukkau.

Patty Osborne
On a Train to Anywhere

Review of "M Train" by Patti Smith.

Rayya Liebich
Righthand Justified

Language built on sounds of delight, coloured in the gardens of Beirut

Kris Rothstein
An Ongoing Space of Encounter

Review of "On Community" by Casey Plett.

Jonathan Heggen
The Boy and the Self

Review of "The Boy and the Heron" directed by Hayao Miyazaki.

Hollie Adams
A Partial List of Inconvenient Truths

In search of a big picture at the end of the singular world

Michael Hayward
Conversations with the past

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

Maryanna Gabriel
More Than one way to hang a man

Review of "Hangman: The True Story of Canada’s First Executioner" by Julie Burtinshaw.

Peggy Thompson
Rollicking and honest: LIKE Me

Review of "Queers Like Me" by Michael V. Smith.

Helen Godolphin
Pinball wizardry

Review of "Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game" written and directed by Austin Bragg and Meredith Bragg.

Kathy Page
The Exquisite Cyclops

A writer roams her sleepscape in search of the extraordinary subconscious

Meandricus
Wordy goodness

Review of "Rearrangements" by Natan Last, published in The New Yorker December 2023.