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

Time to call a professional

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The large supply of nine-volt batteries suddenly made sense

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

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

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

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A wildland fighter witnesses an old burn's second act

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

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

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This invertebrate does not go looking for prey

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For the sake of the large romantic gesture

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Hit everything dead on, even if it’s big

The names we learn in childhood smell the sweetest to us

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

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No Skylab buzz in East Germany.

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

A writer roams her sleepscape in search of the extraordinary subconscious

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

A series of lucky events seemed to conspire to bring me to Stettler, Alberta, one day in June 1998. Jennifer, the woman who was in between being my roommate and my girlfriend, was at the Banff Centre and I was on my way there from Saskatoon, where we lived. She had left me fifty dollars for gas so I could pick her up after her workshop, and I had accepted, hoping that when the time came I wouldn’t need it and I could give it back. I did need it, of course. I had been waiting for a cheque to come from the Globe and Mail for one of a series of drawings I was doing for them, and when it was time to leave, the cheque still hadn’t arrived. So I set out from Saskatoon with just a tank of gas and the fifty dollars.

It's human nature to jump to the wrong conclusion–and stick with it.

Mary Meigs and her friend Lise Weil, editor of Beyond Recall, met regularly to do freewriting together. For each exercise they chose a line or phrase from the work of a poet they both admired; then, inspired by that "prompt," both women wrote for five or ten minutes, recording whatever came to mind (and hand).

L.B. Foote fled Newfoundland to avoid life as a cod fisherman and became Winnipeg's best-known photographer, chronicling Boomtown's growth, energy and struggles.

Young James Laxer prayed for a normal life. He grew up in a committed Communist household, an experience he describes in Red Diaper Baby: A Boyhood in the Age of McCarthyism (Douglas & McIntyre).

Michael Hayward on László Krasznahorkai's The Manhattan Project.

The French writer Julien Gracq, who will be ninety-seven this year, is a living link to the era of Louis Aragon and André Breton. Gracq has avoided the kind of recognition that most modern writers crave (he refused the Prix Goncourt in 1951), and his

A Gibsons, B.C. reader wrote in response to my review of Press Gang Publishers' catalogue (Geist 1), including that it was "not stapled, so recycle worry-free." She advises that recycling-wise, staples are much more acceptable than glue and are pulle

We get a lot of mail at the Geist offices, much of it from people who "read the mag from cover to cover!!" But some Geist readers pay closer attention than others. One such sharp-eyed fan wrote recently to ask: "Just what is a 'techno-otipimist' (Num

Michael Hayward reviews Some Rain Must Fall, part of the six volume memoir by Karl Ove Knausgaard.

Mandelbrot schleps a pen around for a week to feel it out.

The Canadian director Gary Burns’s take on the urban and suburban condition has always been fictional, until now. Burns teams up with Jim Brown to tackle life in the cul de sac in Radiant City, a film that combines commentary on design, culture and p

>After filming Elliot Lovett, an American G.I., for a study of soldiers and their music, the Australian documentary filmmaker George Gittoes followed Lovett back to his home in the Brown Sub ghetto in Miami. The neighbourhood he found there was every

When the Vancouver Public Library workers went on strike, I read more of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe than I had intended.

A subtitle in search of a title: Racism in Canada (Fifth House). Where are the marketing people with nerves of steel, when we need them?

Rainer Maria Rilke and Lou Andreas-Salomé: The Correspondence (Norton) collects all of the extant letters exchanged by Rilke and Andreas-Salomé , a patron and fellow author, and (as the jacket copy describes her) “a key fin de siècle intellectual” fi

Putrid Scum by Crad Kilodney (Charnel House) is one of those titles many of us would perhaps rather not have to ask for in the bookstore (we got our copy through an intermediary) even if we could (few bookstores carry him) but, being a Kilodney book,

I read to put myself to sleep at night but Push (Knopf) by Sapphire had no soporific effect. Long after I turned out the light and rolled over on my side to sleep, I thought about Claireece Precious Jones, the hero of this bright red book.

Patty Osborne on twenty-four essays of "rants and reflections on growing up with LGBTQ+ parents."

In Africa the AIDS/HIV pandemic is quickly, and not so quietly, killing two generations of Africans. Stephen Lewis’s book Race Against Time (Anansi) begins by introducing the eight Millennium Goals for Africa as established by the United Nations Mill

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

Marc Diamond's new novel, Property (Coach House), belongs to the tour-de force class, and will appeal most to those who appreciate ts-d-f: the whole thing is three paragraphs long: a real typesetter's nightmare. The first paragraph occupies 123 pages

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

A list of overused book review terms from achingly beautiful to woefully inadequate.

I had fun in the gifted class in elementary school because my parents never pressured me to become a sensation in spelling, or science—or, like Maya, the ethereal figure in Nancy Huston’s tense novel Prodigy (McArthur), a brilliant ten-year-old piani

Although I am not a woman, did not grow up in the late '6os just a few blocks up from the infamous Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco and am not the child of enlightened parents who strove against mainstream American materialism, I jumped two-footed int

Michael Hayward and 50 years of writing from Ursula K. Le Guin.

Norbert Ruebsaat reviews Ingmar Bergman's Private Confessions and the screening at which he saw it.

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?