Shared family memories of burnt baked goods.

At the Jubilee Cinema, the manager carries an imitation pistol in the John Dillinger style.

“Thank Christ,” says Dieter when I finally wake up. “I thought you were dead.”

In Peterborough, Pastor Billy cures arthritis, back pain, bone spurs, lymphoma, stage four liver cancer, sleep apnea and atrial fibrillation

Stephen Osborne says goodbye to Stephen Harper.

During World War II my grandmother ran contraband, hunted pigeons.

The secret heart of Albania is imbued with compassion and a desire to help those in need

Veronique Darwin revisits her childhood journal, from hearing ghosts in kindergarten to staring at hotties in grade seven.

I went to the babysitter’s to pick up Julia, who was two and a half years old, and she said that she had been “a little bit sad for a while” because her mother, who had a new part-time job and had dropped Julia off a few hours earlier, had gone away for “quite a long time.”

Playing against the fastest chess player in the world.

Possum-style or straight up dirty.

You can’t break eggs without making an omelette.

An intrepid Geist correspondent narrowly avoids being stabbed by a moose-antler letter opener in Whitehorse.

"The tour guide said: every hour you spend down in the mine adds three minutes to your life." Michal Kozlowski reports from 300 feet below ground.

On parle français icitte!

"My father believes the world is coming to an end, yet he commits his life to curing the sick." Dispatch by Marko Sijan.

A young man comes into possession of a 1957 Pontiac, modelled after one owned by a legendary pianist.

On the last day of October in Toronto a man in an art gallery said: “Showers should be coming in around 4 pm. They don’t always get it down to the hour like that.”

If Toronto were like Baghdad, thirty-nine res

I started walking, seriously. It was the bone scan that got me going. The healthy solid green was spongy with rotting black holes.

The main reason that I open up my doors to people on the street is so that they would have a place to sort of come home.

In multi-cultural Vancouver, strangers come together at a moment of crisis.

Use the board games you unearthed during isolation to reinventclassic games for our times.

His look is self-concious, but well done.

At a taping of George Stroumboulopoulos Tonight, Chelsea Novak meets Canada's boyfriend.

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.

Lily Gontard reviews The Luminaries and The Douglas Notebooks, two award-winning novels you might not have heard of.

Kathleen Murdock on race, resilience, rage and joy.

An established experimental poet—the kind that comes with a beard and a fear of proper capitalization—was heard recently to denounce video art as “arty farty stuff.” As a writer and sometime video artist myself, I like to think of the two disciplines

"My espresso machine was in the repair shop and I had begun to despair of ever seeing it again."

The story of Esther Brandeau, the first Jew to set foot in New France, could have been a dull historical re-creation, but Esther, by Sharon E. McKay (Penguin), is an action-packed story about a feisty, unusual and believable heroine.

In Coetzee’s most recent book, Elizabeth Costello, the main character—“she, Elizabeth Costello”—wonders if she is “a light spirit,” and I like this idea. Elizabeth Costello is not called a novel either, although on the dust jacket Coetzee is describe

When Julia Kwan’s grandmother died, her parents said the grandmother had been reincarnated as a goldfish. The report from Sunday school was quite different: Grandma had gone to hell. Eve and the Fire Horse is Kwan’s story of a young Chinese-Canadian

The frontispiece of Eunoia by Christian Bök (Coach House) is a drawing of a cone, a line, a sphere and a paraboloid, all nestled inside a cylinder. This complicated arrangement of lines and points illustrates perfectly how my mind worked while I was

Robert Everett-Green reviews David B.'s graphic memoir Epileptic, a recount of the long search by David B.’s parents for a cure for his older brother’s seizures.

Kate Helmore on the stark contrast between skinny jeans and ankle-length skirts in the Netflix series "Unorthodox".

A fast-paced seafaring adventure from my father’s bookshelf, in which a wealthy Londoner on a religious mission to Tasmania falls in with a crew of Manxmen smuggling tobacco, liquor and French porn.

Norbert Ruebsaat reviews George Bowering's Errata (1988).

"When your narrator has Alzheimer’s Disease, neither you nor she can be sure of the facts, which is what makes this such an intriguing story."

The Mike Wallace interview is reprinted in its entirety in Empty Phantoms (Thunder’s Mouth Press), an exhaustive collection of “nearly all known printed, recorded, and filmed interviews” with Kerouac: by Ben Hecht on his Chicago radio show in 1958, b

Michael Hayward reviews Edward Lear in Albania, an account of the author's travels through the Balkans beginning in 1848.

Craft Distilling: Making Liquor Legally at Home by Victoria Redhed Miller is a no-nonsense how-to book, and a rational plea to lift laws that prevent small-batch not-for-profit distilling.

Eve Corbel reviews The Sea Lady by Margaret Drabble, a novel that takes place on land but is all about the sea.

Michael Hayward on plastic art and slow sonnets.

Gimli back my eighty minutes!

Patty Osborne reviews Eating Apples, an addictive collection of personal essays that gives glimpses into the lives of women.

Review of "Lost Feast: Culinary Extinction and the Future of Food" by Lenore Newman.

AnnMarie MacKinnon reviews Einsteinium (Es), an element discovered by a non-Einstein Albert.

Michael Hayward reviews Eat, Memory: Great Writers at the Table (Norton).

I found more history—this time to do with food—in Eve Johnson’s Eating My Words (Whitecap), a collection of essays originally written for the Vancouver Sun. Not all of them are historical, but my favourite ones are, including the history of real food

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?