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

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

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

Ebb and flow in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico.

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

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

Scenic views, fresh muffins and drunk passengers—three days and four nights aboard the Canadian from Vancouver to Toronto.

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

Cylinders of oxy­gen rolled past like dolls, propped up in wire bas­kets. After the first few min­utes it all seemed normal.

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

We got paid once a week in cash - it made you feel special the first few times.

Who knew my dad's old pen was a famous Parker 51 Vacumatic?

Poets trashed hotel rooms long before rock bands made it fashionable.

"One way or another we all write out of this place,” comments Patricia Young in Writing Life (McClelland & Stewart), edited by Constance Rooke, a collection of essays by fifty writers, most of them Canadian, about the process and perils of authorship

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The Kathmandu Café in multiple dimensions.

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

My great-grandfather exists now only in memory, unacknowledged even by his tombstone

…in the Maple Leaf Lounge at the John G. Diefenbaker Airport in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.

Storm prep for a category 2.

From morning to night, there's always someone coming in for smokes and a chat.

One of the advantages of life back then was that people had jobs that could be easily defined. None of your strategic walrus initiative development consultants or anything.

Who puts those little stickers on the apples in the grocery store?

A poem about a postal code.

"We got into Zellers through jewellery, purses and umbrellas, stockings and underwear and into brassieres, where our momentum deserted us. Now we were both in unfamiliar territory."

Remembering Norbert Ruebsaat.

After Paul Muldoon and Raymond Williams.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

New bylaws for civic spaces.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

Begging the question of what can be defined as “form.”

To teach us how to read Don Quixote, a text so contrary to conventional literary tradition, the prologue itself needed to break from all traditions

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

When you find yourself laid up in a sterile hospital room, which books do you want to have with you?

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

In Hungary, goulash socialism becomes difficult to swallow

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

Kafka’s writing allows us intuitions and half-dreams but never total comprehension.

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

Romantic notions that equate Indigenous peoples with nature are not going to cut it.

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

Dogged dedication grants a reader vicarious immortality.

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

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

Daniel Francis on John Franklin, John Rae and the Globe and Mail's enthusiasm for cannibalism.

There’s something not quite right about the grid on which the game is played.

The newspaper wars aren’t what they used to be.

Must artists declare their moral integrity?

In the sun-streaked barroom of the Irma Hotel on the main street of Cody, Wyoming, late one afternoon in June, I made a big mistake. “What’s on tap?” I asked.

European Jewish artisans on horseback in Argentina.

The craft of untruth has been perfected.

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

A few years after Kafka’s death, Milena, the woman he had loved so dearly, was taken away by the Nazis and sent to a concentration camp. Suddenly life seemed to have become its reverse: not death, which is a conclusion, but a mad and meaningless state of brutal suffering, brought on through no visible fault and serving no visible end. To attempt to survive this nightmare, a friend of Milena devised a method: she would resort to the books she had read, stored in her memory.

Many years ago my father-in-law, who had been a British prisoner of war in Japan, gave me a small pocket anthology, The Knapsack, edited by the undeservedly forgotten Herbert Read. The book (which I have since passed on to my daughter) had been put together for the Ministry of War to be given to its soldiers: its proclaimed intention was "to celebrate the genius of Mars." Surprisingly, however, the general tone of the anthology was above all elegiac.