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.

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?