Limits of the language.

Not long ago, late on a Monday afternoon, a man with a camera clambered onto the railing of Lions Gate Bridge in Vancouver in order to get a clear view of the sunset he wanted to take a picture of, and, on stretching his upper body toward the scene t

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Stephen Osborne memorializes D.M. Fraser, a tiny ancient man at the age of twenty-six, who wrote sentences that made you want to take him (and them) home with you.

A writer uncovers a family connection with a sweet English confection.

At first the blackouts in Kathmandu are limited to six hours a week, so in my area we do without lights on Saturday and Sunday evenings. It’s not difficult—candles at dinner, quite charming at first—but then we jump to fifteen hours a week without power, then to thirty-six hours, all within ten days. The govern

Forty percent of people believe that if they practice enough, they can predict the outcome of a flipped coin. Would my current love end the way my past ones had?

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Justin Trudeau and Greta Thunberg attend the Montreal climate march.

Boyfriends are trouble, I said. He leaned over and gave me a high-five.

Another classic story from Geist's 20th Anniversary Collector's Issue."I felt disoriented, almost light-headed, as though I were slightly stoned or moving inside a dream."

This was the first pub I entered when I finally said goodbye to vomiting on local beaches because I could drink legally. And it’s the first pub I’ve come to since I’ve been home. Now it’s Tuesday night, Karaoke Night.

Before I opened for Joyce Carol Oates at her reading at Harbourfront in Toronto, we had dinner: Oates and her husband, Raymond Smith; the organizer, Greg Gatenby; and me.

“Don’t try to make anything happen,” the calm voice said. Dylan Gyles visits a sensory deprivation float tank.

The first time losing a game of Scrabble and the last time taking a train cross-country.

In Drukpa Kunley's monastery in Bhutan, Daniel Collins experiences a birthday blessing among phallic iconography.

Jill Mandrake on the surprising effect of peanut brittle.

A warm spring night, a country club dance, a date with an attractive young man—and braces on my two front teeth.

At the Tim Hortons on Young Street in Halifax, a man clears his throat, a rough-looking older guy in the back corner, staring out the window. One knee, angled out from the table, jigs up and down; the rest of him is quite still. A sheet of notepaper

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Rick laughed. I walked away. I was irritated at Henry, at Lee for getting stoned and being paranoid and leaving without saying goodbye, at Rick, at everyone.

Michael Turner questions a US-curated exhibit of Canadian art that exoticizes Canadian artists while suggesting they are un-exotic.

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How do you have a good time in Warsaw? Sing Neil Diamond songs in a karaoke bar.

"have ya been ev’ryweir?"

Enjoy the fresh kebab while your freshly dented fender gets fixed.

Evelyn Everett-Green wrote novels for young people, of a morally improving nature. Her books were also meant to entertain, with tales of wholesome adventure and romance, often set in heroic times or picturesque locations.

When I met you, one floor up from the acute psychosis ward, you were wearing a paper shower cap and green pyjamas just like mine. You glared at me through the crowd because you thought I had your hoodie on. But we just had very similar hoodies.

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A greying, sunburnt American mis­sionary stopped us in the fruit market and invited us for a drink.

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Did that really happen?  J. Jill Robinson initiates a midnight stand-off between the police and two drunk brothers in an RV Park in White Rock, B.C.

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

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

“The first time I met him, he caused me to float to the ceiling"

Sebastian and I enjoy making fun of le mythomane. We compare him to characters in novels. Maybe he can’t return home because he’s wanted for a crime.

What does it mean to love a band? A friend? A nation?

The postcard presents a series of absences—the nameless photographer,

the unknown writer and recipient; it is constituted by what is unknown

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Violence could not reach them only when they were distant as the moon, not of this world

When I lived in Ottawa in the 1970s, I used to enjoy passing lazy afternoons at the National Gallery looking at the pictures. I remember how surprised I was when I first encountered the Group of Seven collection. These paintings were completely familiar—I’d seen them in schoolbooks and on calendars, posters, t-shirts, everywhere—yet at the same time they were completely unexpected.

It took me a million miles to get here and half the time I was doing it in high heels.

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"Leading Men” is taken from a work-in-progress, Cinéma-Verité and the Collected Works of Ronald Reagan: A History of Propaganda in Motion Pictures.

Going unnoticed must be the root sorrow for the broken.

Doing time is not a blank, suspended existence.

I wasn’t certain whether I was in Winnipeg because of the Weakerthans, or whether I cared about the Weakerthans because I care about Winnipeg.

Derek Matthews has to be the ugliest boy in the class but I like him. I’ve liked every boy except Barry Pumphrey now. Barry Pumphrey likes me.

These stories and conversations took place in a Media and Communications Studies class at a Canadian college. Students come to the college from many countries, in the hope of enrolling eventually in a North American university.

"I want to buy a house. And build a secret room in it. And not tell the kids about it."

Remembering her father's last days in a hospital in Wyoming, Connie Kuhns struggles with questions of mortality, memory and how to fulfill her father's dying wish.

A new anthology of reviews, interviews and commentary on Joni Mitchell's music reveals the star-making machinery.

Out on the set, except for the fact that there is always someone to catch us if we stumble, or someone to set up folding chairs for us between scenes, we are beneficiaries of the semi that denies the passing of clock-time. There is nothing to remind

Randy Fred thought that life after residential school would be drinking, watching TV and dying. Instead, he became the "greatest blind Indian publisher in the world."

It is racism, not race, that is a risk factor for dying of COVID-19.

World War I, Canada’s “war of independence,” marked a turning point for a young colony wanting to prove itself as a self-reliant nation, but at what cost.

First there was the Canadian daredevil Ken Carter who, for five years (starting in 1976), made repeated attempts to jump the St. Lawrence River in a rocket-propelled car.

I also take home books that are intended only for me. The stories in After the Angel Mill by Carol Bruneau (Cormorant) are about Cape Breton, and the characters come from four generations of one family.

Jill Mandrake reviews Joe Ollmann's graphic novel about a high school biology teacher who suddenly remembers being abducted by aliens.

"We don’t often get clear and honest reflections out of hundred-year-old men, which is why Frank White’s new book is such a great read."

Michael Hayward reviews Across the Territories by Kenneth White, a book of White's worldwide travels.

Daniel Zomparelli reviews AEthel by Donato Mancini (New Star).

I went to see the film Adaptation because it was recommended by a friend who thought I would like it because it was multilevelled, and I have been trying to find a way to tell him why I didn’t. Adaptation is about a Hollywood scriptwriter who tries t

Dan Post reviews Grant Lawrence's Adventures in Solitude (Harbour).

Gianni Celati’s new book Adventures in Africa (University of Chicago Press), is a wonderful anti-travel book by one of the great anti-literary writers of the day.

As the century turns, generational retrospectives are cropping up everywhere—a look back requires only file footage, the cut and paste. Recent books documenting Canadian life in the 1950s include Canada in the Fifties (Viking), selections from the ar

Patty Osborne reviews Dogs at the Perimeter by Madeleine Thien (McClelland & Stewart).

A Whiter Shade of Pale and Becoming Emma, by Catarina Edwards (NeWest), sports a truly appalling cover on the outside, and a most unfortunate typeface on the inside (can we even call it a typeface?—if this one has a name, it can only be font). These

"I am by no means a connoisseur of comics, and usually confine my reading to one or two titles. Now Action Girl Comics makes it three." Review by Mindy Abramowitz.

A Student of Weather (McClelland & Stewart), Elizabeth Hay's first novel, follows a family from their Depression-era Saskatchewan farm to New York City to a comfortable neighbourhood in Ottawa. The story centres on the alienation between the two sist

Aside from a grade school crush on Richard Brodeur, I have never been able to work up much enthusiasm for hockey, but when two hockey plays were running concurrently in Vancouver last winter I seized the chance to prove myself Canadian without having

Dan Post reviews A Sound Like Water Dripping by Soren Bondrup-Nielsen, the story of the author's attempts to be the first Ontarian to locate the elusive boreal owl.

A Way of Being Free (Phoenix House), a slim volume containing twelve essays, resonate with the lyrical prose style also found in Okri's famous novel, The Famished Road, and they speak even more directly about the matter of human-being.

We were led outside to a gated courtyard, where we encountered the sound of furious scrubbing, a male voice growling a litany of “I hate” proclamations, and an unsteady woman in a hot pink jacket and pants at half mast.

Jennesia Pedri answers: why would one want to reread a novel that devotes 211 of its 354 pages to the 227 days that followed a shipwreck?

In Ronald Wright's A Scientific Romance (Knopf), an archaeologist suffering from a terminal illness discovers H. G. Wells's time machine when it arrives sans pilot in a London warehouse in the year 1999.

I've been stuck on books from Newfoundland lately, so my fingers grabbed A Settlement of Memory by Gordon Rodgers (Killick Press) when last they cruised the shelves. Inspired by William Coaker, founder of the Fisherman's Protective Union, Rodgers has

The most disturbing section of Ronald Wright’s A Short History of Progress (House of Anansi) is the story of the Easter Islanders who, three hundred years before contact with Europeans, felled the last tree on their formerly verdant island and in so

Shannon Emmerson reviews Gail Anderson-Dargatz's A Recipe for Bees, a story about the price of our choices and the reasons we make them.

Thad McIlroy reviews Ernest Hemingway's Paris memoir, A Moveable Feast.

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?