To prove my wolfishness, I shucked my skate shoes and went barefoot on the pine needles

It might be time to find a new cemetery

How do you have a good time in Warsaw? Sing Neil Diamond songs in a karaoke bar.

That is how one shows true love

I want to see what it means, on a deep level, to stay put

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It was a gruesome war, Santa added in Papyrus font, but the forces of Good eventually emerged victorious

Time to call a professional

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The large supply of nine-volt batteries suddenly made sense

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I traffic deep time in a great storm, guilty of ignorance and omission

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.

A writer roams her sleepscape in search of the extraordinary subconscious

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

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

Did you hear that the railway built Canada? That’s probably all you heard

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What is at the heart of this Edith Iglauer profile by Giller nominee Annabel Lyon? Hint: Ice Road Truckers.

Sarah Leavitt is more than just a clever cartoonist; she also paints pictures with her colourful prose.

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

Michael Hayward on the newly translated The Unwomanly Face of War by Svetlana Alexievich.

"A door has closed, another door has opened. You have entered the winter of your life." A review of Paul Auster's memoir.

Patty Osborne reviews Devil in Deerskins: My Life with Grey Owl, a memoir by Anahareo, and Kuessipan by Naomi Fontaine, two contrasting reflections on the aboriginal experience.

The comics artist and writer Seth dropped in to Sophia Books in Vancouver in early November to promote his new book, Wimbledon Green: The Greatest Comic Book Collector in the World (Drawn & Quarterly), a sumptuous clothbound volume on whose cover the

Hal Niedzviecki says White Lung by Grant Buday is the comic novel that should have been given to delegates at the WTO in Seattle.

In When I Lived in Modern Times by Linda Grant (Granta), Evelyn Sert looks back to her twenties, when she left England for Israel in search of a place in which she might belong. She thought of Israel as a brand new place where Jews would work to buil

Greg Hollingshead's new collection, White Buick (Oolichan), contains fifteen nearly impeccable stories. Hollingshead knows how to write: there is nothing superfluous here, his characters are present, the tensions are real enough.

American novelist David Leavitt had a legal and literary sensation on his hands when his novel While England Sleeps was published last winter. Apparently Leavitt borrowed heavily from the memoirs of Stephen Spender, the aging English poet, in writing

Thirty-three international publishing houses are participating in The Myths, a project in which contemporary writers from all over the world were invited to retell any myth in any way they chose. Trumpeted as “the most ambitious simultaneous world-wi

As a mother-to-be, Gillian Jerome cynically reviewed eight books on child care to glean what it means to be a mother in the twenty-first century.

The close proximity of my new apartment to a repertory cinema has caused me to go through a movie-going renaissance. Unfortunately, most of my discoveries have been in the mediocre to bad category.

"Unsettling Canada: A National Wake-Up Call by Arthur Manuel is a helluva good read, in which smart people find ingenious ways to fight for change against a Canadian government that has been intractable, no matter which party is in power."

Learn to draw your life with tips and writing exercises from the American cartoonist Lynda Barry.

Patti Smith and Neil Young's 2012 Montreal concert is reviewed by two ardent fans.

UTNE Reader: The Best of the Alternative Press has been reconceived, redesigned and reborn as UTNE: A Different Kind of Read. Its oomph has been squashed, its bite has been sugar-coated, its edge has been dulled and we are left with a self-helpy, con

Visions of Jude, by Daniel Poliquin (Douglas & McIntyre) has great promise: what more could we ask for but a serious novel about an Arctic explorer? The story of Jude the explorer (somewhat reminiscent of V. Steffanson, although Jude doesn't order a

Major discovery of the season: Carol Windley's first collection of short fiction, Visible Light (Oolichan). This book is really something: fully realized characters living real lives in a fully realized place.

Lewis Hyde’s Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth and Art (North Point Press) is a wonderful book of old stories about Hermes in Greece, Raven and Coyote in North America, Krishna in India and Eshu in West Africa, and new stories about Picasso,

Tara Ariano wrote Untitled: A Bad Teen Novel (Writers Club Press) when she was thirteen. It is, she claims, “quite awful,” and was only rescued from obscurity because Tara had friends who persuaded her to share her shame with the world.

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

Kelsea O'Connor reviews Let's Pretend This Never Happened by Jenny Lawson, a lighthearted look at the embarrassing moments in the author's life.

For u2 fanatics, this may be the most intimate moment they will ever have with Bono; for everyone else, it’s a little awkward.

Zine bargoon of the season: Trite Travel Titbits, A Lil Book of Poems by Jim Munroe, a tiny book (two by three inches) published by Lickspittle Ventures (c/o 66 Greyhound Drive, Willowdale ON M2H 1K3). Composed in pencil, printed on an out-of-tune ph

Thai prostitutes offer love and affection as well as sexual gratification to their Western clients, and it is this combination, I learned while reading Travels in the Skin Trade by Jeremy Seabrook (Pluto Press), that causes the farangs (a Thai word f

"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?

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