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.

People are getting either sick or mad, or both.

Why does one culture give a flower a pretty, poetic name, while another culture names it in a seemingly derogatory way?

A Vancouver rock band made up of musicians, photographers and at one time, a prominent sci-fi writer.

Onstage a group of writers and critics sat in a semicircle and spoke earnestly about whether or not a national literature could exist in two languages.

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The simple love of dogs.

The worst time for your pet to run away is when you are moving, and my family moved a lot.

A trip across the country, with didgeridoo and Trudeau too.

Theft, death and don't-mess-with-me expressions—unlocking the family portrait.

In this city of tall buildings, the most imposing shadows are cast by women.

Joe Bongiorno goes in search of enlightenment and finds the Shī Fu.

Edith Iglauer invites Pierre Trudeau over for dinner and gets Barbra Streisand as a bonus.

Stephen Osborne on the origins of the International 3-Day Novel Contest, the time-honoured writing contest that flies in the face of the notion that novels take years of angst to produce.

Space travel, world religions and quotes from Pascal are just a few of the topics covered in these little phone calls between friends.

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

Stephen Osborne uncovers the genesis of the poppy and how it became evidence of horror, a token of remembrance and a promise of oblivion.

Veronica Gaylie encounters Trevor Linden, the Greatest Canuck Who Ever Lived, in economy class.

Before people 'poked' and 'tweeted', waving was how we said hello and goodbye to each other.

As men of high seriousness appear on television with their crystal balls, Stephen Osborne shares what he learned about the future from Ray the astrologer.

Banff: a collection of scenic views and a setting for the Avant-Garde?

How did the 99 B-Line bus route come to be the locus of the most heartless transit rides in Greater Vancouver?

25 reasons to stop talking to my straight friend.

That dreamlike quality causes rational minds to dismiss the moment as “only a coincidence.”

Leaving Thunder Bay isn't one of the things that gets easier with practice

In search of a unified self.

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.

During a trip to Portland, Lara Jenny picks a few must-have zines and chapbooks from the city's huge collection of independent presses.

Belated discovery of the season: John Buell, whose novel Playground was originally published in 1976 and more recently by HarperCollins in a paperback edition bearing the single quote: "Canada's most brilliant suspense novelist.–New York Times." But

Pitseolak: Pictures Out of My Life, by Pitseolak Ashoona and Dorothy Harley Eber (McGill-Queen’s), is not a small book but it’s a little story made large by Pitseolak’s energetic drawings.

"I hope you will agree that we more sensitive teenagers grew up surrounded by irony." Jill Mandrake calls George Bowering's memoir his most provocative work yet.

In The Lynching of Louie Sam, two teenage boys watched as another—an Aboriginal named Louie Sam—was hanged by a group of men who rode on horseback. Reviewed by Patty Osborne.

PhotoGraphic Encounters: The Edges and Edginess of Reading Prose Pictures and Visual Fictions (University of Alberta Press and the Kamloops Art Gallery) contains much promise of “edginess” and “subversion,” once the great virtues of the postmodern ag

Michael Hayward reviews the autobiography of Jim Rimmer, a “high priest” of type design and private-press printing.

Rhonda Waterfall reviews The Pharmacist's Mate by Amy Fusselman, just under 100 pages of minimalist prose called "a brief miracle of a book."

Dylan Gyles reviews Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever? by Dave Eggers, the story of a disillusioned young man grappling with life, the universe and metaphysical truths.

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

Are the Québecois the only moviemakers in North America with a sense of humour? Latest evidence to hand would certainly suggest so: three movies in the local video place this season and all winners.

This year’s winner of the People’s Choice Award for Most Popular International Film was Persepolis, a mostly black-and-white animated film adapted from the graphic memoir by Marjane Satrapi, who documents her childhood in Iran, first living under the

Kris Rothstein on the current state of employment in Bullshit Jobs and Temp.

Patty Osborne on the mixed review of Crazy Rich Asians.

A review of Julie Otsuka's novel, The Buddha in the Attic, about Japanese picture brides in the 1920s.

Paula Spencer is forty-eight. She hasn’t had a drink for four months and five days. She wants a drink. She doesn’t want a drink. She fights. She wins. But she’s alone. She’s got kids, two grown, two still at home.... The book is Paula Spencer (Knopf)

When I first opened Suzanne Buffam’s book Past Imperfect (Anansi), I thought it might strive in a similar way to Yesterday, at the Hotel Clarendon by Nicole Brossard. In the first poem, “Another Bildungsroman,” the speaker grows up, leaves home, fall

A Pillow Book by Suzanne Buffam contemplates the pillow, an ordinary object, as the buffer between internal and external life.

True or False: Breast cancer always shows up on a mammogram, early detection is your best protection, studies show a low-fat diet is linked to a lower incidence of breast cancer, mortality rates for breast cancer are going down. Answers: False, false

This past December longtime Geist columnist Stephen Henighan did a promotional tour of western Canada for his latest novel, Path of the Jaguar.

In the early 1960s, the Beat poet Gary Snyder was studying Buddhism in Japan with just one published book of poetry (Myths & Texts) to his credit.

Paris Tales, edited and translated by Helen Constantine (Oxford University Press), is another study in the evocation of place: a collection of twenty-two stories by French and other Francophone writers inspired by specific Parisian locales. Many of t

The current film festival season features two movies written by Geist correspondents Tom Walmsley and Peg Thompson. Walmsley's film is called Paris, France. We can't tell you about it first-hand, as it hasn't come to Vancouver yet, but last week a Gl

In Paradise by A. L. Kennedy (Anansi), Hannah is a drunk whose story begins as she is coming out of a blackout.

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?