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

A writer roams her sleepscape in search of the extraordinary subconscious

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.

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

Playing against the fastest chess player in the world.

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

That’s one for the rice bag!

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

"my point that / i is but a : colon grown / too long"

If marriage was a television show, it might look something like this.

"The following resume / arrived by fax: One ex-military / man, 52, applying / for duty ..."

Scrape every last bit of English out of your throat.

Who puts those little stickers on the apples in the grocery store?

Destroying books for the greater good.

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

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

“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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I always longed to be the falling woman—impelled by unruly passion, driven by beauty and desire, turned into stone, drowned in flowers.

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New bylaws for civic spaces.

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

Doing time is not a blank, suspended existence.

It was as though a magic potion had brought him back to life.

Going unnoticed must be the root sorrow for the broken.

On the curve of the contagion and on the measure of Montreality.

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

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I am the only woman in the water. The rest of the swimmers are men or boys. One of them bobs his head near me, a surprising vision in green goggles, like an undocumented sea creature. I imagine us having sex, briefly, him rocking over me like a wave.

The chain-link fence along boulevard de l’Acadie— two metres high, with “appropriate hedge”—separates one of the wealthiest neighbourhoods in Montreal from one of the poorest.

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."

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

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.

Spiritual landscapes and unknowable people captured on film, used to convey a message.

After Paul Muldoon and Raymond Williams.

A seance to contact a dead miner at Port Arthur, Ontario, in 1923—conducted by Conan Doyle himself.

He has been called the greatest Bulgarian poet of his generation. Can one literary scandal bury his whole career?

A basement shrine in her 1920s home inspires Caroline Adderson to discover the past lives of her house and its inhabitants.

Michael Hayward reviews Beat Generation by Jack Kerouac, a three-act play he wrote but never produced.

Patty Osborne reviews Banana Rose by Natalie Goldberg.

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

"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.

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.

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.

"A History of the Future, by David A. Wilson, is a great idea for a book: a history of what people in the past made of the future they would never know." Review by S.K. Page.

The promise of exotic and sensuous experience has lured many a European man to go abroad, as Robert Aldrich demonstrates in Colonialism and Homosexuality (Routledge), reviewed by Kris Rothstein.

Michael Hayward reviews Atlantic Books' series of 'Books That Shook the World' and Alberto Manguel's biography of Homer's the Iliad and the Odyssey.

Michael Hayward reviews Mnemonic: a book of trees by Theresa Kishkan (Goose Lane).

"So today in class we talk about Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis, which I looked forward to because it’s a book with two interesting female characters, for a change." Review by Siobhan Devlin.

Sarah Maitland visits Margaret Atwood's book signing at Vancouver's Word on the Street festival.

A review of Bruce Sweeney's Last Wedding.

Michal Kozlowski reviews Joseph Howe and the Battle for Freedom of Speech by John Ralston Saul.

Kris Rothstein reviews Mariko Tamaki’s Fake ID, a collection of short stories about a young woman who moves to Toronto after finishing university in Montreal.

Michael Hayward reviews Phantom Limb by Theresa Kishkan, a series of essays exploring of the complexity and magic of the natural world.

A paranoid office-worker relieves the alienation she feels in her job by writing experimental lyric prose.

Patty Osborne reviews Jeanette Winterson's Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, a fast-paced and hilarious coming-of-age story about the adopted daughter of a religious fanatic mother.

Michael Hayward reviews On Hashish, a collection of Walter Benjamin’s writings on hashish.

Stephen Osborne reviews On the Edge: A Journey into the Heart of Canada by Lindalee Tracey.

Mandelbrot discusses the making of Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North.

Kris Rothstein reviews Talking Young Feminists, a collection of essays by young feminist women.

Carrie Villeneuve reviews The Union: The Business Behind Getting High, a documentary on British Columbia's marijuana industry.

"Greg Gatenby is the Toronto impresario whose good works on behalf of Literature are legendary. Unhappily, his latest book is not one of them." A review of The Wild is Always There.

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

Prince Edward Island gothic.

Kaiju are the heroes we deserve.

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

Progressives are far less likely to be nationalists than ever before.

There is no way to step back from the orgy of kisses without offending.

Revolutions need popular heroes, and unpopularvillains, and the Acadians of New Brunswick had both.

To build a city on land flooded by the tides isn’t just a mistake—it’s utopic.

We think of the Arctic as pristine and untouched—but nowhere on the planet is as harshly impacted by climate change.

Reading is a subversive activity and does not believe in the convention of borders.

In Hungary, goulash socialism becomes difficult to swallow

Airport security assures Alberto Manguel that he has been randomly picked.

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

Unravelling the mysteries of Alejo Carpentier

We insist The Devil whispers horrible things in our ear and inspires our worst deeds.

While status registration under the Indian Act is a construct, claiming status identity isan important factor in Indigenous identity and cultural transmission.

Anti-communism, retired by most Western governments,receives monumental status in Canada

Mary Schendlinger challenges a review of a biography of Blanche Knopf, the underrecognized co-founder of Alfred A. Knopf Inc.

Stephen Henighan discusses the crude first steps to finding a new way to talk about racial reality.

The craft of untruth has been perfected.

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

Rob Kovitz compiles the pressing questions of the day—"How are they gonna beat ISIS?" And, "On Twitter, who cares?"

Like most advice given to writers, the injunction to “write what you know” is misleading.

The idea of Europe is incarnated nowhere as much as in St. Petersburg—Stephen Henighan on Europe's greatest city.