"'Goin’ to university' was a cover or alibi, rather than a statement of fact, providing the indolent and the imaginative with richer lives than simply having a job."

How to perform a textual analysis of a Facebook message, while under the influence of red wine.

Rice, tea and a trillion dollars of spirit money.

The rasp, the spatula and the corkscrew—Eve Corbel's series of obsessive cooks.

The maple leaf no longer feels like a symbol of national pride.

Public bombings have a profound effect on cities, even if the bomb is a coconut filled with beans and rice.

Stephen Osborne's broken cellphone leads him to Schopenhauer, the Titanic publishing industry and historical Phantom Rides.

"You have bruises / There was time / You spent trying to / Heal them. / As in, time wasted."

On Dorothy Parker Day we wear wool suits and little hats, smoke with cigarette holders and have a liver-coloured dachshund on a lead.

Stephen Osborne discovers that some of the most startling papers in the city archives are the letters and diaries of the first archivist himself.

My friend Eric moved to Los Angeles five years ago to become a rock star, only to learn that drummers and bass players in L.A. are unreliable, that nobody in L.A. goes to see live music and that the chicks in L.A. are all crazy. Once he got to wait at a stoplight behind Patricia Arquette, once Britney Spears came into the gym where he worked and one time a bouncer let him into a club ahead of Fabio, and none of these things made him famous.

That’s one for the rice bag!

Losers: you have a lifetime to hunt.

Headlines featuring crack-smoking mayors and election fraudsters.

Scrape every last bit of English out of your throat.

Senior Editor Mary Schendlinger remembers her friend and Geist contributor Saeko Usukawa.

Outlet Malls, Janis Joplin, The Godfather and Taco Bell—on the scent of Ameryka.

The long road to decency and justice.

After hearing survivors’ stories, nothing can ever surprise me.

The first time I met Andy Warhol he was wearing a black sweater and pants; the second time he was wearing white tie and tails (it was at Lincoln Center). The third time I met him, at Arthur, the disco opened in the sixties by Sibyl Burton, he was wearing a jersey made of silver mail.

Destroying books for the greater good.

When I was living in New York in the 1960s, almost everyone I knew was walking or running to the office of some psychiatrist.

Where in the used bookstore would mysteries by Raymond Chandler be shelved—in Novels or in Fiction? Stephen Osborne remembers the summer pleasures of reading outdoors and used bookstores.

The zine scene—comics, wrestling, skateboarding and music.

Randy Fred receives his first traditional Nuu-chah-nulth name.

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

‍

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

‍

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.

‍

"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.

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

In May I picked up An Easy Day for a Lady by Gillian Linscott (St. Martin's Press), from the mystery shelves at the local library.

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

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?