Last month in Calgary a friend showed me the way to Louise Bridge by sketching a map with her fingertip on the dust jacket of The Wolf King, a book by Judd Palmer that we had been admiring at her kitchen table.

Some

The Health Hotline can only do so much for the exotic animals swimming in a hole on your forehead.

From Mapping a Sense of Place: The Photographs of Manfred Buchheit, 1972-1995, an exhibition curated by Bruce Johnson for the Art Gallery of Newfoundland and Labrador.

Does the individual have difficulty finding words, finishing sentences or naming people or things?

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

One instinctive action saves a life in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

‍

Another classic story from Geist's 20th Anniversary Collector's Issue."I felt disoriented, almost light-headed, as though I were slightly stoned or moving inside a dream."

Last month we had a visit from Eliz­abeth Anderson, who hails from Min­neapolis, Minnesota, where she is a graduate student at the state univer­sity. Her field of study is Canada, and she also writes about Canada for Utne Reader.

‍

A new dispatch from Geist's 20th Anniversary Collector's Edition."How did more shots fired represent what we miss in life, in city life?"

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

A nervous kid from Canada becomes the king of the basketball courts in Venice Beach.

"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."

Stephen Osborne recollects his encounter last summer with Robert Service outside a cafe in Vancouver. Service, who wrote the poem "The Cremation of Sam McGee," died in 1958.

In Drukpa Kunley's monastery in Bhutan, Daniel Collins experiences a birthday blessing among phallic iconography.

Was that a ghost?Why don't you have room service?We used up all your Kleenex. Sorry.Read more entries from a guest book found in room ten of a hotel in British Columbia's Okanagan Valley.

Author Michael Turner riffs on D.M. Fraser's short fiction Class Warfare, one of the ten classic Vancouver books reissued for Vancouver's 125th birthday.

Stephen Osborne memorializes D.M. Fraser, a tiny ancient man at the age of twenty-six, who wrote sentences that made you want to take him (and them) home with you.

Plumb the depths of the Aquafit subculture with our embedded nonagenarian.

A decadent feast of poetry; but what will it do to your heart?

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

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.

Francois-Marc Gagnon explores curiosity as the opposite of indifference.

Michael Turner questions a US-curated exhibit of Canadian art that exoticizes Canadian artists while suggesting they are un-exotic.

‍

At a taping of George Stroumboulopoulos Tonight, Chelsea Novak meets Canada's boyfriend.

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

‍

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

‍

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.

‍

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

The Oxford Companion to Food (2nd edition, Oxford) is an extremely dangerous book.

I still can’t figure out why the cover of The Optimists, a novel by Andrew Miller (Sceptre), is covered with blue butterflies when the story is about atrocities committed under the orders of an African politician. Clem Glass is a photographer who doc

Stephen reviews The Others Raisd in Me: 150 Readings of Sonnet 150 by Gregory Betts (Pedlar Press).

The Pianist (TVA/Lions Gate), the Roman Polanski film that took Oscars for directing, acting (Adrien Brody) and adapted screenplay (Ronald Harwood) in 2003, is one of Polanski’s finest films. It is the true story of how Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Jewish m

A single copy of the second number of The Old Fart, "a magazine for and by curmudgeons" appeared in the rack at the local tobacconist's just long enough to be snaffled up by a sharp-eyed Geister. This is not a pretty magazine, but it's a pretty funny

Here, at last, are the uninspired chronicles of a man of few words.

The Special Canadian Edition of The Old Farmer's Almanac, from Yankee Publishing Inc., is subtitled "Fitted for Ottawa, with special corrections and calculations for all the Canadian provinces." Items of interest include "Who is the Canadian Farmer?,

In 2005, a team of basketball players from Vancouver, whose average age is seventy-two, arrive at the World Masters Games in Calgary and, after losing three games to teams twenty years and more younger than themselves, receive the gold medal in their

Sixty-three years after the Holocaust, the phrase “boy in striped pajamas” evokes such a strong image of concentration camps that it is difficult to imagine anyone being innocent of its hidden meaning, but nine-year-old Bruno, the main character in T

The Blue Circus (Cormorant) by Jacques Savoie, also translated by Sheila Fischman. Same translator, different story. Here the prose flows smoothly from start to finish, and even features the word lexiphone, which I have never heard in any language.

The subject of Michael Winter’s novel The Big Why (Anansi) is Rockwell Kent, who was an accomplished artist and book illustrator during the 1930s and who was fascinated by the far north. The Big Why begins when Kent arrives in the isolated coastal vi

Speaking of the library, the day after I borrowed The Bird Artist by Howard Norman (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), a book my brother had recommended, The Museum Guard (Knopf), also by Norman, arrived in the Geist office. For some reason I chose to read Th

This year, January in Vancouver was one long, dark rainy day. Thankfully the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival offered a variety of performances that piqued my curiosity enough to seduce me out of the house, away from the comforts of Kraft

The only book of poetry I enjoyed this year is Zoe Whittall’s The Best 10 Minutes of Your Life (McGilligan Books). Here Ally McBeal and Dr. Seuss live alongside Susan Musgrave and Rocket Richard in a mélange of popular culture and literary craving.

Annabel Lyon’s new book, The Best Thing for You (McClelland & Stewart), is a collection of three novellas and one of the best things in new fiction this season.

In my life I have only written one fan letter that began: “I have never written a fan letter before.” It was addressed to Shane Rhodes, and I wrote it after reading his poetry collections Holding Pattern (NeWest Press) and The Wireless Room (NeWest P

Luanne Armstrong’s apocalyptic novel The Bone House (New Star) is a searingly perceptive social commentary on a world in which sovereign corporate might has pillaged the goodness of humankind. The natural world and the struggle to preserve it, a recu

Another reflection of Earth’s Mind can be found in the pages of The Arctic Sky: Inuit Astronomy, Star Lore and Legend, by John MacDonald, just published by the Nunavut Research Institute with the Royal Ontario Museum. This is a gathering of the celes

In The Architects Are Here (Viking), Michael Winter revisits his fictional alter ego Gabriel English, who has previously appeared as a central figure in two short story collections and in This All Happened, Winter’s first novel (published in 2000).

The Arcades Project by Walter Benjamin (Belknap/ Harvard) is one of the greatest books of the twentieth century, and it will make you want to assemble one yourself for your own life and time. This is a monumental work of excavation in history, philos

The areas of John Hodgman’s expertise do not extend to the Northwest Passage in his new book The Areas of My Expertise (Dutton). The deficiency is more than made up for, in a chapter called “Our 51 United States,” by an entry on the drifting state of

Everything I know about the Spanish Inquisition I learned from a young adult novel by Melanie Little that is written in free verse.

The Assassin’s Cloak: An Anthology of the World’s Greatest Diarists, edited by Irene and Alan Taylor (Canongate Books), makes excellent bedtime reading for those who have difficulty limiting themselves to just a few pages a night. For each day of the

The Anatomy of Arcadia by David Solway (Véhicule Press) pretends to be an anti-travel book, written against the grain of the "usual" travel book, but is really an anti-travel-guide-book filled with hard words that seem to be inserted into the text fo

When you find yourself laid up in a sterile hospital room, which books do you want to have with you?

During the 1950s the RCMP used a machine to identify federal employees who were homosexuals. The name of this bogus device? The "fruit machine," of course.

A writer whose work is among the most important contributions to the literature of the Holocaust is forgotten by almost all.

In the world between here and there, what place does one call home?

Stephen Henighan argues that efficiency has become a core value that heightens social divisions.

Richard Stursberg’s memoir of his years in CBC programming raises the question: How did someone with no sympathy for public broadcasting get the job in the first place?

Stephen Henighan remembers Mavis Gallant, the original nomad of Canadian literature, who wrote some of Canada's finest fiction at Pablo Picasso's café table in Paris.

How much does a photograph really capture the essence of a person?

Daniel Francis investigates the practice of visiting asylums and penitentiaries as entertainment in nineteenth-century Canada.

Stephen Henighan investigates bus travel as one of Canada's last surviving democratic spaces.

Alberto Manguel reflects on art as a witness to the human desire to be infinite and eternal.

Daniel Francis explores the photographer as Vancouver's most interesting historian.

The Great White North gets rebranded and gains some military muscle: goodbye peacenik, hello soldier.

As Canadian leaders look to emulate Asian nations, our government fails to see that the tigers' fatal flaw is the absence of democracy. Or, maybe they do see.

A French writer whose name I hadn’t heard before, Pierre Bayard, has written a book called Comment parler des livres que l’on n’a pas lus? published by Éditions de Minuit in a collection aptly titled Paradoxe. A number of critics in France have writt

I’ve now read Comment parler des livres que l’on n’a pas lus? and I’m happy to say that I was right.

One of the indispensable figures of contemporary journalism is the cutting-edge cultural commentator. The columnist who offers sardonic insights into trends, fashions, television shows and publishing personalities has become an institution.

In 2002, when my essay collection When Words Deny the World was published, people started behaving strangely. Ambitious young writers scurried out of sight when I entered a room, as though afraid that irate authors might banish them from Toronto for having spoken to me.

Since the Wall came down, East German socialists in Prenzlauer Berg are free to sip coffee and talk about art.

When the crash came, Canadians paid the price for the colonized mentalities of their investment advisors.

I met Alejandra Pizarnik in Buenos Aires, in 1967, five years before her death. I had asked her to contribute to an anthology of texts that purported to continue an interrupted story begun in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale: “There was a man dwelt by a churchyard.” She agreed and wrote a haunting piece called “Los muertos y la lluvia,” “The dead and the rain.” The book was never published, but we became friends.

From the trench coat to the Hummer, what does the militarization of style say about us?

In 2007, when The Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories was published, Urquhart sent me a copy. As I examined the table of contents, I felt a dull thunk in my chest.

When General James Wolfescampered up the steep path that carried him onto the Plains of Abraham andinto the pages of the history books, what was he thinking?