Sheila Heti spends a day in a diner in Toronto observing the enormous EUCAN electrified garbage can at the corner of College and Bathurst.

“Excuse me, are you the customer with the peanut allergy?”

Last month in Calgary a friend showed me the way to Louise Bridge by sketching a map with her fingertip on the dust jacket of The Wolf King, a book by Judd Palmer that we had been admiring at her kitchen table.

Women in '50s chic, men in sports jackets, and all manner of musical instruments at a suburban home in Toronto.

Angela Wheelock meets a stranger at a bus stop and discusses Rumi, Hafiz and other great poets who were terrible leaders.

I had my car at the hotel but snow was expected, and driving home alone in a snowstorm around the hairpin curves edged with deep ravines on Highway 101 was the last thing I wanted to do.

Was that a ghost?Why don't you have room service?We used up all your Kleenex. Sorry.Read more entries from a guest book found in room ten of a hotel in British Columbia's Okanagan Valley.

Eve Corbel draws emoji you can use when Mercury is in retrograde, when you've eaten too much hot sauce and during other specific times of need.

Jeff Shucard reminisces about St. Patrick's Day, 1979: druidic magic, Irish fiddle tunes and the greatest piss-up of all time.

It was the big sort of rhmmm-rhmmm you hear at demolition derbies and ball-busting monster truck rallies. It was loud. Who could be sitting in their car, revving the engine?

“Want to marry me? My wife she burned me. She just burned me, you know. Now I’m going to court to burn her back.”

A eulogy delivered by email, from a woman living in Berlin to her lifelong friend in Vancouver.

Eve Corbel on marriage and what comes after the wedding: the monster mortgage, the dreary housework, the contemptuous in-laws and more.

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Montreal was once the “City of a Thousand Steeples.” Today it’s the city of a thousand church bazaars open on Saturdays to keep the cash flow up.

It is a Sunday in August. We drive from London, Ontario, to the Pinery Provincial Park in a new green 1964 Mercury Comet.

Stephen Osborne discusses the past, present and future of literary magazines in Canada.

Roni Simunovic catalogues types of literary festival attendees: the jaded art student, the CanLit socialite, the overworked publisher and more.

From Jean Talon to Lenin’s Tomb

Former Iranian schoolteacher, Mehrar Arbab escaped execution, moved to Canada and now earns a living sellingAll Beef Smokies.

One instinctive action saves a life in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

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“If we paid protection money to the KGB, there’d be nothing left for salaries. And we call it the FSB now.”

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.”

He said he just wanted towels. There was no reason to be afraid.

Crack addicts, art critics and pregnant waitresses populate David Mitchell's uncanny vision of Vancouver.

Respected journalist, Geist contributor and maker of olive sandwiches.

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.

Hal Niedzviecki com­mem­o­rates his Jewish grand­fa­ther—a heavy drinker, a bad driver and a Polish refugee.

Reviws of "Slave Old Man" by Patrick Chamoiseau

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

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

Review of "M Train" by Patti Smith.

Review of "On Community" by Casey Plett.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review of "Cabin Fever" by Anik See.

Review of "Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Motherhood" by Lucy Jones.

Review of "Edible and Medicinal Flora of the West Coast: British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest" by Collin Varner.

Review of "The Adversary" by Michael Crummey.

Review of "Galore" by Michael Crummey.

Review of "Jo Cook and Perro Verlag Books by Artists: The Unreadable Sacred," organized by the Simon Fraser University Art Gallery.

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

Review of "Big Mall: Shopping for Meaning" by Kate Black.

Review of "Censorettes" by Elizabeth Bales Frank.

Review of "Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea" by Teffi (trans. Robert Chandler).

Review of "Our Flag Means Death" created by David Jenkins on HBO Max.

Review of No Fun (the band) and reissued music by Atomic Werewolf Records.

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

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

An appreciation of Dante's "Commedia."

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

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

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.

Faith seems to shiver when confronted by art.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unravelling the mysteries of Alejo Carpentier

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

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