Remembering Norbert Ruebsaat.

Losers: you have a lifetime to hunt.

"I never went looking for them."

Fill the room with a flock of moths.

Tell me again how long the trip is?

Any resemblances to persons living or dead are purely vindictive.

The secret is in the velvet.

You can’t break eggs without making an omelette.

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

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

Here they are our people.

The long road to decency and justice.

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

Chileans remember when their government was overthrown by Augusto Pinochet on September 11, 1973.

People have asked: What’s it like? How’s it been? Are you scared?

The Olympic Games left a trail of moments: a rare moment, a Canadian moment, a you moment, a me moment...

Poets trashed hotel rooms long before rock bands made it fashionable.

"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."

A poetic tribute to men's rear-ends.

Aboard a stuck SkyTrain, reading Samuel Pepys's account of the Great Fire of London.

When taking hallucinogenics, more is better, within limits.

Personal narratives by Indigenous and settler contributors describing significant first contacts that brought new insights.

A writer uncovers a family connection with a sweet English confection.

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.

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

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.

Mastery of the self

Since the Canadian withdrawal from the North American ballistic missile defence treaty, you might think you don’t need to read Mel Hurtig’s ominously titled Rushing to Armageddon: The Shocking Truth About Canada, Missile Defence, and Star Wars (McCle

The December 1994 issue of Room of One's Own, subtitled "Geography of Gender," features the winners of its first annual literary competition, along with nine other finalists. The writing here is very good, the cover is inviting, and they've reviewed

Rocket Science by Julia Gaunce (Pedlar Press) is a wonderful first novel that should get great notices. Here is a true enactment of a certain Canadian life: Mr. Wicker is the caretaker of the apartment building; Mrs. Wicker attends leather-craft clas

Rob Kovitz's Room Behavior (Treyf/Insomniac) is an interesting attempt by a Manitoba architect to document the impact that a room has on its inhabitants. Kovitz juxtaposes text and image, inviting us to look at the rooms we live in, the spaces we oc

Geoffrey Household’s 1939 novel Rogue Male—an old favourite of mine—follows a British sportsman as he returns from an unnamed central European country (read Germany), having failed in his attempt to assassinate the dictator who is that country’s head

On my summer holiday I immersed myself in World War I, thanks to a friend who loaned me all three parts of Pat Barker's trilogy: Regeneration, The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road (Plume/Penguin). This is a large and important work conveniently pac

The first time I saw Robinson Crusoe on Mars (Byron Haskin, Criterion dvd) was in the Cedar V Theatre, a Quonset-style, single-screen movie house on Lynn Valley Road in North Vancouver: 25 cents for a science-fiction double bill in 1965.

Road Novels, 1957—1960 is an omnibus volume dressed in the standard Library of America livery: a burgundy cloth binding; a black dust jacket discreetly trimmed in red, white and blue; a bound-in ribbon marker.

Solnit’s book River of Shadows (Viking Penguin) is a brilliant account of Muybridge’s life and the “Age of the Technological Wild West”: Muybridge was a great inventor and tinkerer, one of the most original of the landscape photographers (his panoram

Readers of Dennis Lee's Riffs (Brick) might find themselves disappointed with this book, which declares itself to be fiction when they would perhaps prefer it to be fact. As fiction, these poems don't read well: they are clever, well-crafted, technic

My daughter fulfilled my request for a new cookbook. Since seeing the movie Big Night I have wanted to be able to make risotto. Now, with the help of Risotto (Macmillan) by Judith Barrett and Norma Wasserman, I can.

Eventually Lucille Johnstone told her story to Paul E. Levy, who made it into a book, River Queen: The Amazing Story of Tugboat Titan Lucille Johnstone (Harbour), an absorbing read even for people who think they’re not interested in reading about bus

Aritha van Herk’s Restlessness (Red Deer College Press), though, ought to go missing from hostel shelves. It is a meditative novel which begins on a dramatic and Gothic note with a woman in a Calgary hotel room waiting for her “chosen assassin.”

I got a copy of Restricted Entry, by Janine Fuller and Stuart Blackley (Press Gang) as part of the ticket price for a benefit for Little Sister's Bookstore & Art Emporium. For those two of you who don't already know, Little Sister's has taken the gov

The most comprehensive DVD (and the most fun) to hit my machine lately is the special edition release of Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. There are so many reasons to have this DVD in your library I hardly know where to start.

From my parents’ bed that night, Lévesque looked like a man—maybe the first man in CBC history—who had lost two countries at the same time.

Fact and fiction are intermingled in this "novel" about growing up Mennonite in the Fraser Valley.

Republic Pictures was an independent genre film studio active in the 1940s and ’50s, specializing in westerns and action-adventure serials—the movies kids went to see on Saturday afternoons. But while the movies the studio released were B films on fi

Young James Laxer prayed for a normal life. He grew up in a committed Communist household, an experience he describes in Red Diaper Baby: A Boyhood in the Age of McCarthyism (Douglas & McIntyre).

The French writer Julien Gracq, who will be ninety-seven this year, is a living link to the era of Louis Aragon and André Breton. Gracq has avoided the kind of recognition that most modern writers crave (he refused the Prix Goncourt in 1951), and his

A Gibsons, B.C. reader wrote in response to my review of Press Gang Publishers' catalogue (Geist 1), including that it was "not stapled, so recycle worry-free." She advises that recycling-wise, staples are much more acceptable than glue and are pulle

We get a lot of mail at the Geist offices, much of it from people who "read the mag from cover to cover!!" But some Geist readers pay closer attention than others. One such sharp-eyed fan wrote recently to ask: "Just what is a 'techno-otipimist' (Num

The Canadian director Gary Burns’s take on the urban and suburban condition has always been fictional, until now. Burns teams up with Jim Brown to tackle life in the cul de sac in Radiant City, a film that combines commentary on design, culture and p

>After filming Elliot Lovett, an American G.I., for a study of soldiers and their music, the Australian documentary filmmaker George Gittoes followed Lovett back to his home in the Brown Sub ghetto in Miami. The neighbourhood he found there was every

Phrase books are tools of cultural globalization—but they are also among its casualties.

When building a nation, cultural riches can be lost.

Coming to harbour in a new world.

Science and the arts fulfil their functions to help us survive through the imagination.

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

In a world dominated by heroes, difference is not tolerated.

“Have patience” and “Tomorrow” are two inseparable locutions in the Portuguese tongue.

For a brief period the band CANO gave shape to the dream of a bilingual Canadian culture.

"The hemispheric context reveals the roots of the residential school system...Destroying Indigenous cultures was a positivist policy from Patagonia to Dawson City."

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

What we do when we absorb words from a screen—and we haven’t yet evolved a verb for it—is not reading.

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

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

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

Dogged dedication grants a reader vicarious immortality.

What we can—and can’t—learn from the plague

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.

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

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

Faith seems to shiver when confronted by art.

What can the Brothers Grimm teach us about the state of our economic system? Everything.

Must artists declare their moral integrity?

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

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