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.

My friend, who writes poems and stories, tells me in the café that he finds it more and more difficult to deal with the writer inside him.

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.

Earth and Ashes by Atiq Rahimi, translated by Erdag M. Goknar (Harcourt) is a powerful story wrapped up in a perfect little hardcover book (4' x 7") that contains only 81 pages.

Roger Dunsmore is the author of Earth’s Mind, a collection of essays published last year by the University of New Mexico Press, and he is an old friend of mine. I met him thirty years ago in Europe when he had just finished reading Black Elk Speaks,

Kelsea O'Connor on many aspects of food, from culinary extinctions to kombucha microbiomes.

"If cities can be said to be alive, how many of them dream of growing up to become Paris?" Michael Hayward reviews How Paris Became Paris by Joan DeJean.

Dreaming Home, an anthology selected by Bethany Gibson (paper-plates), is another little book stuffed full of great stories—eight of them, all by emerging writers. My favourites were "Personal Effects" by Judith Kalman, about a father leaving his hom

Anyone who has lived in Vancouver for any length of time has watched whole neighbourhoods of gleaming condominiums rise up; no one can quite remember what was there before. Lance Berelowitz, an urban planner, tackles this collective civic amnesia in

Jill Boettger reviews Double Lives: Writing and Motherhood, a collection of 22 essays by women who are both mothers and writers.

Drawn & Quarterly, an almost quarterly periodical published in Montreal, is the classiest comics anthology on the market. Each issue has knockout stories, rich-but-never-slick art work, and generous design, paper and printing.

Many of the stories presented in Drawn & Quarterly Volume 5 have an unselfconsciously literary feel that is foreign to the North American scene.

In 1945 Molly Lamb Bobak became Canada's first female war artist, but it took her three years of army life to win that appointment. During those years she kept a unique diary in the form of a handwritten newsletter, as she traveled back and forth acr

The protagonist of Doctor Bloom’s Story by Don Coles (Vintage) is embarrassingly tall, in his mid-50s, Dutch, likes to read good books, and I suspect that he’s handsome in the way that tall Dutchmen are supposed to be handsome. He writes, too, recrea

Théodora Armstrong makes her literary debut with a short-story collection, Clear Skies, No Wind, 100% Visibility.

Critical theory is not known to zing and hum with the menacing eloquence of Dashiell Hammett, but Double Cross: the Hollywood Films of Douglas Gordon (Art Gallery of York University/ The Power Plan) by Philip Monk, comes close.

Review of "nedi nezu (Good Medicine)" by Tenille K. Campbell.

Stephen Osborne reviews The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature by Franco Moretti.

Jennesia Pedri reviews Walls: Travels Along the Barricades by Marcello di Cintio (Goose Lane).

Few people have been disappointed by Monopoly, the real estate free-for-all that has been entertaining people all over the world since the 1930s, sometimes for weeks at a time. The love of this game inspired one player, a journalist named Tim Moore,

For the uninitiated, the poetic mysteries of baseball can seem elusive if not downright silly. Diamonds Are Forever: Artists and Writers on Baseball (Chronicle), a print version of the Smithsonian Institution exhibition of the same name, doesn’t set

In Dharma Punx—A Memoir (Harper), Noah Levine begins his story as an adolescent punk in Santa Cruz, California, plunging in and out of mosh pits, acid trips, battles with bottles of Jack Daniels, small-time theft, post-“experimental” narcotics and ju

“This mental mucus is driving me mad. The Japanese blow their noses on paper too.” Thus begins The Diary of Andrés Fava (Archipelago), Julio Cortá

NeWest Press does a better job with Diamond Grill by Fred Wah. Wah is one of Canada's best contemporary poets but he is new to prose, and the appeal of a poet writing fiction is too tasty to pass up.

Long before the arrival of the wealthy boat owners, the Sound was home to large groups of coastal First Nations and subsequently many European settlers found their way there (we call them stump farmers here on the coast). This is the story Heather Ha

Michael Hayward on Gathie Falk's memoir Apples, etc.

Another book that deals with the Little Sister's trial is a little chapbook called Detained at Customs (Lazara Press) which gives the full testimony of Jane Rule, an important witness for the prosecution. Rule shows us the impossibility of arriving a

Begging the question of what can be defined as “form.”

To teach us how to read Don Quixote, a text so contrary to conventional literary tradition, the prologue itself needed to break from all traditions

"Cross-country skiing offered me the reassurance sought by the immigrant who is excluded from his locality’s history: a viable alternate route to belonging."

When you find yourself laid up in a sterile hospital room, which books do you want to have with you?

Despite hardships and dangerous slums, Nicaragua maintains a sense of hope that draws back to the democratic days of the Sandinistas.

In Hungary, goulash socialism becomes difficult to swallow

It all started with a zesty little book about getting old.

Kafka’s writing allows us intuitions and half-dreams but never total comprehension.

The woman who called herself Tatiana Aarons gave me an address that led to a vacant lot.

Romantic notions that equate Indigenous peoples with nature are not going to cut it.

Libraries are not only essential in educating the soul, but in forming the identity of a society.

Dogged dedication grants a reader vicarious immortality.

Our society is formed on the assumption of a healthy immune system.

Without air travel, family networks might have dissolved long ago.

Daniel Francis on John Franklin, John Rae and the Globe and Mail's enthusiasm for cannibalism.

There’s something not quite right about the grid on which the game is played.

The newspaper wars aren’t what they used to be.

Must artists declare their moral integrity?

In the sun-streaked barroom of the Irma Hotel on the main street of Cody, Wyoming, late one afternoon in June, I made a big mistake. “What’s on tap?” I asked.

European Jewish artisans on horseback in Argentina.

The craft of untruth has been perfected.

Dividing and conquering local populations confines them to manageable administrative units.

A few years after Kafka’s death, Milena, the woman he had loved so dearly, was taken away by the Nazis and sent to a concentration camp. Suddenly life seemed to have become its reverse: not death, which is a conclusion, but a mad and meaningless state of brutal suffering, brought on through no visible fault and serving no visible end. To attempt to survive this nightmare, a friend of Milena devised a method: she would resort to the books she had read, stored in her memory.

Many years ago my father-in-law, who had been a British prisoner of war in Japan, gave me a small pocket anthology, The Knapsack, edited by the undeservedly forgotten Herbert Read. The book (which I have since passed on to my daughter) had been put together for the Ministry of War to be given to its soldiers: its proclaimed intention was "to celebrate the genius of Mars." Surprisingly, however, the general tone of the anthology was above all elegiac.