Speaking of jarring but effective writing, Bud Osborn's Lonesome Monsters (Anvil) successfully dramatizes the harsher side of urban life. This book, though it doesn't break new ground in form or content, depicts the Main-and-Hastingses of North Ameri
Jill Boettger
Living in the World as if It Were Home
The first time I sat down to read Tim Lilburn’s book Living in the World as if It Were Home (Cormorant), I went to it with the kind of mind and feeling that I take to my favourite shelf of music at Megatunes or my Grandma’s cheese and Hovis bread san
Lily Gontard
Living to Tell the Tale
Living to Tell the Tale (Knopf) is the first of three autobiographical books by García Márquez. It has come out in paperback, a year after the hardcover edition, and it is a big book that you want to have in your collection, if only for the storytell
Geist Staff
Life Skills
Life Skills (Coteau Books) is a collection of stories by Marlis Wesseler, who, according to the publisher's blurb, "lives in Regina with her husband Lutz and son Evan"—an example of the biographical minutiae that book lovers learn to ignore—or at lea
Cassia Streb
Lifter
Lifter (by Crawford Kilian, Beach Holme) is a book about a boy who learns how to fly when he is in a state that is not quite awake, but not quite asleep. It is a really neat story in the way the author describes what it would be like to fly and you a
Michael Hayward
Letters of E. B. White: Revised Edition
White was also a prolific correspondent, as the Letters of E. B. White: Revised Edition (HarperCollins) shows: over 700 pages, indexed and footnoted, updated from the first edition with letters from 1976 to 1985.
Michael Hayward
Levels of Loss
In Levels of Life, Julian Barnes writes about the grief experienced after losing his wife to cancer.
Patty Osborne
Life-25: Interviews with Prisoners Serving Life Sentences
Life-25: Interviews with Prisoners Serving Life Sentences (New Star), by P.J. Murphy and Lloyd Johnsen, surprised me.
GILLIAN JEROME
Life After Birth
Child-rearing manuals cropped up with a vengeance in the latter half of the twentieth century after Dr. Benjamin Spock produced Baby and Child Care—the all-time best-selling book in American history, second only to the Bible, despite advice such as “
Randy Gelling
Léolo
When the movie director Jean Claude Lauzon died in a plane crash over northern Quebec, his death was noted in a two-sentence paragraph accompanied by a small photograph in the local newspaper. In the photograph he looks like the actor in his first fi
Michael Hayward
Let Me Finish
Early in his memoir Let Me Finish (Harcourt), Roger Angell describes his mother Katherine White and his stepfather E. B. White as “a successful New Yorker couple—she a fiction editor; he a writer of casuals and poetry and the first-page Comment secti
Lily Gontard
Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name
Deception and some kind of love are the themes that thread through the journey that is Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name by Vendela Vida (HarperCollins). As one of the editors of the infamously cool magazine The Believer, Vida has a sharp pen a
Patty Osborne
Ledoyt
I picked up Ledoyt by Carol Emshwiller (Mercury House) because it looked a lot like Annie (Polestar), a book I reviewed in Geist No. 19-20.
Patty Osborne
L'Art de conjuguer
Shopping for books is one part of Christmas that I really enjoy, and this year I found all the books I needed by walking between four bookstores clustered near the centre of town. At Manhattan Books I picked up two bright green hardcover copies of Be
Patty Osborne
Laurence
Laurence, by France Théoret (Mercury, translated by Gail Scott), is also about a young woman in Quebec, but in the 1930s a woman’s struggle to make her life her own was harder. Laurence comes from an impoverished farming family whose daughters have t
Barbara Zatyko
Larry's Party
There's nothing exotic about Larry's Party (Random House), by Carol Shields: it could have taken place in Windsor. In fact, I think I went to high school with Larry Weller, an all-around ordinary guy.
Lily Gontard
Lady Franklin’s Revenge
I bought Revenge and began my education in how to manipulate history and maintain your honour as a Victorian lady. McGoogan’s book is an in-depth account of a detail-oriented, uncompromising, highly motivated and intelligent woman.
Sam Macklin
Krazy & Ignatz 1937
The recent Krazy & Ignatz 1937–1938: Shifting Sands Dusts Its Cheeks in Powdered Beauty is one of the most agreeably bonkers tomes published in recent memory. Just about every strip tells the story of Ignatz Mouse’s compulsion to hurl bricks at the w
Michael Hayward
Lancelot of the Lake
In one of the audio tracks on the dvd of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, co-director Terry Gilliam credits Robert Bresson’s 1974 film Lancelot of the Lake (New Yorker Films dvd) as an inadvertent inspiration for Grail.
Michael Hayward
La Commune
Remember those student days when, in preparation for your final exam, you’d optimistically sit through a movie version as a substitute for the book itself?
Mandelbrot
La Florida
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.
Michael Hayward
La Haine
Mathieu Kassovitz was just twenty-eight years old when he made La Haine (Criterion dvd), a 1995 film released in black and white and set in les banlieues, the racially volatile suburbs that surround Paris like an explosive vest.
Patty Osborne
Knit Lit
Sheila was reading Knit Lit, an anthology of stories about knitting edited by Linda Roghaar and Molly Wolf (Three Rivers Press) and some of them were making her laugh out loud, especially the one about an oversized synthetic orange sweater that acqui
Geist Staff
Kitchen
Grove Press has just brought out an English translation of Kitchen, by Banana Yoshimoto, an unclassifiable, magnificent little book that has won two literary awards and has had fifty-seven—yes, fifty-seven—printings in four years. As the dust jacket
Language built on sounds of delight, coloured in the gardens of Beirut
Emily Lu
Fact
Love Song for Mosquito
Violence could not reach them only when they were distant as the moon, not of this world
JEROME STUEART
Fact
The Dead Viking My Birthmother Gave Me
“The first time I met him, he caused me to float to the ceiling"
Joseph Pearson
Fact
No Names
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.
Minelle Mahtani
Fact
Looking for a Place to Happen
What does it mean to love a band? A friend? A nation?
Christine Lai
Fact
Now Must Say Goodbye
The postcard presents a series of absences—the nameless photographer,
the unknown writer and recipient; it is constituted by what is unknown
Gabrielle Marceau
Fact
Main Character
I always longed to be the falling woman—impelled by unruly passion, driven by beauty and desire, turned into stone, drowned in flowers.
Mia + Eric
Future Perfect
New bylaws for civic spaces.
JUDY LEBLANC
Walking in the Wound
It is racism, not race, that is a risk factor for dying of COVID-19.
SADIQA DE MEIJER
Do No Harm
Doing time is not a blank, suspended existence.
Kristen den Hartog
The Insulin Soldiers
It was as though a magic potion had brought him back to life.
Steven Heighton
Everything Turns Away
Going unnoticed must be the root sorrow for the broken.
DANIEL CANTY
The Sum of Lost Steps
On the curve of the contagion and on the measure of Montreality.
Brad Cran
Fact
Potluck Café
It took me a million miles to get here and half the time I was doing it in high heels.
Carellin Brooks
Ripple Effect
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.
MARCELLO DI CINTIO
The Great Wall of Montreal
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.
Michał Kozłowski
New World Publisher
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."
BRAD YUNG
Lessons I’m Going To Teach My Kids Too Late
"I want to buy a house. And build a secret room in it. And not tell the kids about it."
Paul Tough
City Still Breathing: Listening to the Weakerthans
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.
Stephen Osborne
This Postcard Life
Spiritual landscapes and unknowable people captured on film, used to convey a message.
Hilary M. V. Leathem
To Coronavirus, C: An Anthropological Abecedary
After Paul Muldoon and Raymond Williams.
Bill MacDonald
The Ghost of James Cawdor
A seance to contact a dead miner at Port Arthur, Ontario, in 1923—conducted by Conan Doyle himself.
Ann Diamond
The Second Life of Kiril Kadiiski
He has been called the greatest Bulgarian poet of his generation. Can one literary scandal bury his whole career?
Caroline Adderson
Lives of the House
A basement shrine in her 1920s home inspires Caroline Adderson to discover the past lives of her house and its inhabitants.
Review of "nedi nezu (Good Medicine)" by Tenille K. Campbell.
Kris Rothstein
Decolonizing Canada
Review of "Before I Was a Critic I Was a Human Being" Amy Fung.
Kathleen Murdock
Juice Worth the Squeeze
Review of "Shadow of Doubt: The Trials of Dennis Oland, Revised and Expanded Edition" by Bobbi-Jean MacKinnon.
Michael Hayward
Seventy-Two Hours to Animal
Review of "Bunker: Building for the End Times" by Bradley Garrett.
Anson Ching
The Geist of Turkey
Review of "Ethos" directed by Berkun Oya.
Michael Hayward
Is It Edible?
Review of "Mushrooms of British Columbia" by Andy MacKinnon and Kem Luther.
TANVI BHATIA
Heat Death of the Universe
Review of "In the Dream House" by Carmen Maria Machado.
Patty Osborne
Middle Sister
Review of "Milkman" by Anna Burns.
SYLVIA TRAN
Poutine Pilgrimage
Review of poutine at Robson Fries in Tokyo.
Shyla Seller
Postal Lit
Review of "Long Live the Post Horn!" by Vigdis Hjorth.
Michael Hayward
A Longing to Be Far Away
Review of "Fernweh" by Teju Cole.
KELSEA O'CONNOR
Eaten to Extinction
Review of "Lost Feast: Culinary Extinction and the Future of Food" by Lenore Newman.
Michael Hayward
Dancing About Architecture
Review of "Utopia Avenue" by David Mitchell.
Jonathan Heggen
Korean Supper
Review of "Crying in H Mart: A Memoir " by Michelle Zauner.
Patty Osborne
Why White People Are Funny
Review of "Qallunaat! Why White People Are Funny" Zebedee Nungak and Mark Sandiford.
Anson Ching
Voyeur Galore
Review of "Captains of the Sands" by Jorge Amado.
Michael Hayward
Tree Lit
Review of "The Overstory" by Richard Powers.
Michael Hayward
Purveyors of Electric Fans
Review of "Clyde Fans" by Seth.
JILL MANDRAKE
Older and Better
Review of "The Old Man in the Mirror Isn’t Me" by Ray Robertson.
Stephen Osborne
The Becoming of Vancouver
Review of "Becoming Vancouver: A History" by Daniel Francis.
Michael Hayward
A Blindness at the Centre of Seeing
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.
Michael Hayward
Known to be Strange
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
B for Beatrice
Patty Osborne on wacky kid tales and the joy of animated storytelling.
Michael Hayward
Roads to Nowhere
Michael Hayward on dharma trails, lawless landscapes and Hemingway's corner table.
The Penthouse, the notorious Vancouver night club, shares a history with several of the city's missing women cases.
Stephen Henighan
Canada for Spartans
Stephen Henighan exposes the errors, omissions and problems with the Conservative party's study guide for Canadian citizenship.
Alberto Manguel
Burning Mistry
Alberto Manguel examines a modern-day book burning and asks: how is this still happening?
Alberto Manguel
A Brief History of Tags
A reflection on the complex and often inexplicable process of bibliographic categorizations.
Stephen Henighan
Language and Nation Now
Do shared languages form the natural boundaries of any nation in the world?
CARMINE STARNINO
Next Door Café: A Poet's Musings
Reflections on how a bar in Parc Extension, QC, influenced an eponymous poem about "unprogress, inertia, the failure to learn from mistakes."
Alberto Manguel
Imaginary Places
Alberto Manguel remembers a golden era in Canadian writing, comments on our current cultural climate and proposes a brighter future.
Annabel Lyon
Ethical Juices
Parables, cautionary tales, morality plays, allegories—the notion that we can study literary works as texts of ethics is as old as literature.
Alberto Manguel
Pictures and Conversations
"And what is the use of a book," thought Alice, "without pictures or conversation?" —Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Stephen Henighan
In Praise of Borders
I remembered past ordeals: a U.S. official who squeezed out my toothpaste tube on the train from Montreal to Philadelphia, another who hauled me off a bus for a lengthy interrogation.
Stephen Henighan
Writing Bohemia
Bohemia is a good place to grow as a writer, but is it a good place to live one’s whole life?
Daniel Francis
Canada's Funnyman
A misogynist, a racist and an academic walk into a bar...
Alberto Manguel
Karl Kraus, Everybody's Neighbour
He is one of the strangest crea
Stephen Henighan
Becoming French
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.
Alberto Manguel
Final Answers
For most artists, the learning of the craft never ceases, and no resulting work is fully achieved
George Fetherling
Adventures in the Nib Trade
No one knows quite how to account for the well-established shops in Vancouver, Toronto and other cities that deal exclusively in fountain pens and fine fountain-pen accessories.
Stephen Henighan
The BookNet Dictatorship
According to the numbers, Canada will never produce another Atwood or Findley.
Alberto Manguel
Cautionary Tales for Children
Some years ago, Susan Crean amusingly suggested that nations might be defined or understood through their emblematic children’s books and according to whether the protagonist was male or female.
Stephen Henighan
Chariots of China
A bibliophile's worst nightmare: being stuck on a plane with a terrible book. A book mistaken for a work of serious history.
Daniel Francis
Writing the Nation
Reconsidering the faintly embarrassing Pierre Berton.
Alberto Manguel
Metamorphoses
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.
Stephen Henighan
Divergence
Stephen Henighan argues that audiences used to have different opinions on the news; now they cannot even agree on the terms of debate.
HAL NIEDZVIECKI
The Secret Market
When Frank Warren began collecting the secret thoughts of strangers at PostSecret.com, he inadvertently created a new genre.
Stephen Henighan
Latinocanadá
Military coups, civil wars, and NAFTA are the cause of trilingual labels in Canadian big box stores.
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