For me, the jacket is a piece of menswear history that I can actually put on, and a link to the tragicomic tale of an underachiever with a famous name.

A collection of Jerome Stueart's Greyhound sketches, including one Vitruvian bus driver.

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

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

Stephen Osborne discusses the past, present and future of literary magazines in Canada.

Possum-style or straight up dirty.

Michal Kozlowski reports on the state of publishing: s'mores, Titantic metaphors, Celtic jigs, steak canapés and mechanical bull riding.

Stephen Osborne says goodbye to Stephen Harper.

David Albahari visits Canadian cities and remembers a slogan from the former Yugoslavia: Get to know your country in order to love her.

“Thank Christ,” says Dieter when I finally wake up. “I thought you were dead.”

Wally, the orange tabby: Fell out of travel trailer going over Pavillion Mountain, may be living happily at farm on top of mountain.

"The seven of us sat around a small, wobbly table in the living room and stared at each other between shots of rotgut vodka."

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.

During World War II my grandmother ran contraband, hunted pigeons.

"The tour guide said: every hour you spend down in the mine adds three minutes to your life." Michal Kozlowski reports from 300 feet below ground.

Stephen Osborne plunges into the pedestrian flow and encounters panhandlers, magicians and a cyclist praying to a monument of Edward VII.

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.

The zine scene—comics, wrestling, skateboarding and music.

"The soiled side of the shirt is the great baggage of dreams"—Stephen Osborne dreams of Hemingway, Harper and profiteroles.

On her first communion, a young girl searches for peace of mind in a world of purgatory, UFOs and the Lennon Sisters.

"Could I forget: the look that tells me you want me"—Vincent Pagé creates Google autocomplete poetry.

Veronica Gaylie encounters invisible lamps, uncooperative clerks and a cushion with a bear and/or badger on it during a trip to London.

If a house were a good thing, the wolf would have one.

…in the Maple Leaf Lounge at the John G. Diefenbaker Airport in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.

Eve Corbel on marriage and what comes after the wedding: the monster mortgage, the dreary housework, the contemptuous in-laws and more.

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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

Review of "Bunker: Building for the End Times" by Bradley Garrett.

Review of "Ethos" directed by Berkun Oya.

Review of "Mushrooms of British Columbia" by Andy MacKinnon and Kem Luther.

Review of "In the Dream House" by Carmen Maria Machado.

Review of "Milkman" by Anna Burns.

Review of poutine at Robson Fries in Tokyo.

Review of "Long Live the Post Horn!" by Vigdis Hjorth.

Review of "Fernweh" by Teju Cole.

Review of "Lost Feast: Culinary Extinction and the Future of Food" by Lenore Newman.

Review of "Utopia Avenue" by David Mitchell.

Review of "Crying in H Mart: A Memoir " by Michelle Zauner.

Review of "Qallunaat! Why White People Are Funny" Zebedee Nungak and Mark Sandiford.

Review of "Captains of the Sands" by Jorge Amado.

Review of "The Overstory" by Richard Powers.

Review of "Clyde Fans" by Seth.

Review of "The Old Man in the Mirror Isn’t Me" by Ray Robertson.

Review of "Becoming Vancouver: A History" by Daniel Francis.

Cole’s most recent book, Blind Spot (Random House), a generous hardcover printed on glossy stock, presents Cole’s photographs on recto pages, with brief, allusive essays on the facing verso page.

Known and Strange Things (Random House) is a collection of Teju Cole’s essays and other short pieces, many of which have previously appeared in The New Yorker and elsewhere online.

Patty Osborne on wacky kid tales and the joy of animated storytelling.

Michael Hayward on dharma trails, lawless landscapes and Hemingway's corner table.

Anson Ching on desecration ratcheted to new levels.

Jill Mandrake on Mississippi Live & the Dirty Dirty, a Southern rock band in East Vancouver.

Shyla Seller on the brilliance of the Vancouver poet Gladys Maria Hindmarch.

Daniel Francis on John Franklin, John Rae and the Globe and Mail's enthusiasm for cannibalism.

Prince Edward Island gothic.

Kaiju are the heroes we deserve.

Kafka’s writing allows us intuitions and half-dreams but never total comprehension.

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

There is no way to step back from the orgy of kisses without offending.

Revolutions need popular heroes, and unpopularvillains, and the Acadians of New Brunswick had both.

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

We think of the Arctic as pristine and untouched—but nowhere on the planet is as harshly impacted by climate change.

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

In Hungary, goulash socialism becomes difficult to swallow

Airport security assures Alberto Manguel that he has been randomly picked.

To teach us how to read Don Quixote, a text so contrary to conventional literary tradition, the prologue itself needed to break from all traditions

Unravelling the mysteries of Alejo Carpentier

We insist The Devil whispers horrible things in our ear and inspires our worst deeds.

While status registration under the Indian Act is a construct, claiming status identity isan important factor in Indigenous identity and cultural transmission.

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

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

Stephen Henighan discusses the crude first steps to finding a new way to talk about racial reality.

The craft of untruth has been perfected.

Romantic notions that equate Indigenous peoples with nature are not going to cut it.

Rob Kovitz compiles the pressing questions of the day—"How are they gonna beat ISIS?" And, "On Twitter, who cares?"

Like most advice given to writers, the injunction to “write what you know” is misleading.

The idea of Europe is incarnated nowhere as much as in St. Petersburg—Stephen Henighan on Europe's greatest city.