“If we paid protection money to the KGB, there’d be nothing left for salaries. And we call it the FSB now.”

Last month I had lunch with a good friend who years ago had told me that her parents, who immigrated to Canada after the war, were Holocaust survivors. I asked my friend, whose name is Slava, to tell me again about her parents, who had lived in Vilna, the ancient Lituanian city of Europe known for three centuries as the “Jerusalem of the north.”

He said he just wanted towels. There was no reason to be afraid.

Crack addicts, art critics and pregnant waitresses populate David Mitchell's uncanny vision of Vancouver.

Respected journalist, Geist contributor and maker of olive sandwiches.

Compassionate, good truck driver, likes kids, likes ice cream—the makings of a no-fail ice cream dude.

Four days after Sandy, Shucard's parents are in good humour, very brave and very glad to see him—and unsure if he's taking them to Bolivia, Azerbaijan or Canada.

Jan Feduck faces Frenchish food, vomit and guys from Ontario when her ferry from the Magdalen Islands is caught in a hurricane.

A few years ago, someone left a pocket-sized photo album on my desk with an unsigned note stuck on the cover that said I “might know what to do with it.” Inside, glued one to a page, are twenty-four photographs of Essondale, the mental hospital in N

Christine Novosel reports from Glasgow on art school, apiary management, Brexit and being a junkyard dog.

Lindsay Diehl encounters choppy waves, a beautiful man in a hot tub and a pendant shaped like a curved tongue on a trip to Hawaii.

Thad McIlroy spends the night in hospital to get a hernia—possibly on his left side, possibly on his right—repaired.

Thad McIlroy undergoes a hernia operation—and with Neil Diamond and the right kind of drugs, it might only take ten minutes.

"I glanced at Jack, his tattooed arms, his gloved hands resting on the wheels of his manual chair. If only I could get my arms back. I could live with anything else."

"My father began his shopping spree in the fashion department. He ordered jackets, sweaters, shirts, trousers and shoes. In his new wardrobe he looks like a mummy that has been dressed up for a big night of trick-or-treating."

"Campbell River, best fishing in the world. They do every­thing for you. All you have to do is bring yourself and decide what you're going to drink."

The Museum of Communism is easy to find thanks to the museum’s adver­tis­ing slo­gan: We’re above McDonald’s.

Stephen Osborne is entranced by a pair of eccentric, high profile students while on a university tour in 1964.

The facts (and fictions) surrounding the tale of Quebec's most famous murderess, La Corriveau.

This year for Halloween, we creep back into the archives and Stephen Osborne digs deep into his family's history at the Salem witch trials.

Espadrille, paduka, chopine—Eve Corbel illustrates a guide for readers on some of the fanciest footwear found in literature.

A COVID test in the city of a hundred steeples.

A poetic tribute to men's rear-ends.

The driver said, “Are you fit to travel, sir?” and the crack smoker said, “Are any of us fit to travel?"

Diana Fitzgerald Bryden attends Between the Pages, the pre-Giller hybrid that’s a kind of sacrificial altar/beauty pageant for six Canadian authors.

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.

The day began with a comment from a colleague that working with a certain buggy database program made him feel like Sisyphus, and it ended with three pieces of reading. An hour or so after the colleague’s remark, I was trading favourite Onion headlin

In Cloud of Bone by Bernice Morgan (Knopf), Kyle, a wild young man from St. John’s, Newfoundland, runs away from the navy during World War ii and is indelibly marked by Shanawdithit, the last of the Beothuk aboriginal group, who had died more than a

Jill Mandrake on lyrics that make her shout out loud.

Michael Hayward reviews Everything Rustles by Jane Silcott and Born Out of This by Christine Lowther.

Everyone groaned when I ran back to the dinner table with the dusty flat game box labelled CLUE. It had been a food-filled Christmas day and few among the five of us were able to talk, let alone play a game that requires effort and concentration.

Mandelbrot reviews City of Glass by Douglas Coupland (Douglas & McIntyre).

Patty Osborne reviews Air Carnation, a story by Guadalupe Muro that combines the author's personal memoirs with poetry, songwriting and fiction.

In 2005, James Long discovered an abandoned suitcase filled with photo albums in the alley behind his house. The photographs in the albums and the process of tracing them—and even finding members of the family who “appear” in them.

Civilizations (Key Porter) is a great big book by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, author of Millennium: A History of Our Last Thousand Years, and clearly a writer undaunted by great themes, such as how the generations of human beings all over the planet an

Like other unpublished novelists, I am always curious to read the new writers as they are "discovered" by the publishing houses. God help us if the people at Random House keep this up. Their latest "find" is David Eddie, whose novel Chump Change is a

Chomsky and Co. breaks all the rules of documentary filmmaking, and not for the better.

Months ago someone walked off with our review copy of that Noam Chomsky book that was on the bestseller list earlier this year: Chronicles of Dissent: Conversations with Noam Chomsky, 1984-1991 (New Star). Well, it finally came back, just in time for

Most ambitious debut project: Chinese Restaurant: On the Islands, by the Canadian director Cheuk Kwan. Intrigued by the worldwide omnipresence of Chinese restaurants, he travelled to a dozen countries to investigate the experiences of the Chinese dia

The eponymous hero of Chuck Dugan is AWOL by Eric Chase Anderson (Chronicle) isn’t from Montreal or Toronto but he is struggling through early adulthood in this illustrated old-fashioned adventure story filled with innocence and charm. Chuck Dugan de

Christine Slater's Certain Dead Soldiers (Key Porter) takes place in Ireland. It starts out being about a young drunk and ends up being about his young wife.

Charles Thibodeau is the hero of Charles the Bold (McClelland & Stewart), a novel by Yves Beauchemin (translated by Wayne Grady) that is truly Dickensian in style. Charles is a good and beautiful boy who endures tragedies and indignities that would d

The cover blurb on Certifiable, a collection of short stories by David McGimpsey (Insomniac), describes it as “funny and twisted stories of American culture.” Topics range from the biological makeup of the McDonald’s character Grimace to fragmented l

Gregory Scofield's new book of poems is Native Canadiana (Polestar) and it's very good. So is Lola Lemire Tostevin's latest collection, Cartouches (Talonbooks), which came out last year and which we've been meaning to mention here ever since, along w

Michael Hayward on Packing My Library: An Elegy and Ten Digressions by Alberto Manguel.

I thought Cat Book by Emily Eve Weinstein (Beau Soleil) would be a collection of too cute stories about people and their cats, but I soon learned not to be fooled by the easy beauty of Weinstein’s cat paintings, which dot the pages, or by the text it

Jacques Rivette’s 1974 film Celine and Julie Go Boating (British Film Institute dvd) is set in a Paris that is half Wonderland, half real, a Paris in which events unfold according to the same dream-like logic that astonished Alice, and that entrances

Barbara Stewart reviews Captain Alex MacLean by Don MacGillivray (UBC Press).

Stephen Osborne on The Hotel Years, a collection of short pieces by Joseph Roth.

Jill Mandrake reviews George Bowering's Caprice, "a poetic eulogy for a shrinking literary landscape."

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

Alberto Manguel compares his life in the French countryside to that of Cain, whom God despised for being a settled crop farmer, and whom he punished by forcing him to wander.

The canoe as a fetish object, a misreading of Canadian history and a symbol of colonial oppression.

Reflections on John Updike's death.

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

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

Do shared languages form the natural boundaries of any nation in the world?

Kaiju are the heroes we deserve.

A look back at World War I as the first great twentieth-century pollution of language.

The novelist can often better define reality than the historian.

"We know that life-altering and possibly cataclysmic change is coming, and we continue to live as we have always done."

The writer who is loved by all, by definition, neglects literature’s prime responsibility: to offend.

Lisa Bird-Wilson on UNDRIP, reconciliation, and the anxiety felt by Indigenous people in Canada.

Reflections on how a bar in Parc Extension, QC, influenced an eponymous poem about "unprogress, inertia, the failure to learn from mistakes."

There are imaginary cities for scientists, vampires, lechers and even bad students—but what about writers?

The books we love become our cartography.

"Canadians have long been convinced that we do not know much, or care much, about our own history, but a new study suggests that this truism is not true."

A package-deal paradise reputation curtails gringo knowledge of Dominican life.

Bohemia is a good place to grow as a writer, but is it a good place to live one’s whole life?

Daniel Francis discusses Canada's failing mental health care system and its long history of mistreatment.

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

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

On the screen, only the image—not the word—can become the world.

Donald Creighton was a bigot and a curmudgeon, a cranky Tory with a chip on his shoulder. He was also the country’s leading historian, who changed the way that Canadians told their own story.