Walking along the streets of Paris, watching thousands of tourists using their digital cameras, I remember the way my father held his old Kodak when he took photographs.

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

At home Frank and I are mutually sympathetic to the obligation to face one another and speak loudly; or, when we are away, to supply each other with new batteries when we forget them; but we have no defence against the independent wandering behaviour of our hearing aids. They are always someplace else. I probably have spent one percent of my life, close to a whole year, looking for the damned things.

People have asked: What’s it like? How’s it been? Are you scared?

Pansy shoes and power suits on parliament hill.

A question of some concern among my friends when we were growing up in the fifties and sixties was how old you had to be to go to war.

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

At the end of the Electrolux era, a veteran salesman closes his store to start a new job at Future Shop.

A young Indigenous woman deals with hippy-artist-pothead boyfriends and car troubles.

Han Fusen navigates multiculturalism and kookoo sabzi from inside a Persian grocery store.

Any resemblances to persons living or dead are purely vindictive.

Bud was one of the few who’d seen Stewart’s face as it was.

I’m sorry, but you cannot mail any box with writing on it. I see. Perhaps you have a marker with which I can cross out the writing? No, we have no markers here. Perhaps you have some packing tape we can put over the writing? No, we have no packing tape here. How about some of that special blue-and-yellow postal service tape I see there? No, no señorita, you cannot put special blue-and-yellow postal service tape just anywhere.

The police officer turned us back and told us to for

Does a house that has been home to four generations of one family still hold their electricity?

Tell me again how long the trip is?

On a recent trip to Paris, I met a young woman from Japan. But this is not a story about a sudden love affair, which one might expect in Paris.

Stephen Osborne on dog walking, the absurdity of online writing guides and the THE building.

"I never went looking for them."

A short film featuring "Sewing Cabinet" by Julie Vandervoort, originally published in Geist 74.

She would see him sometimes around Yaletown, her former counsellor, heading glassy-eyed toward a bar or creeping up the back steps of the massage parlour.

A group of university exchange students from France at the next table watch the entire interaction as if they were on a field trip for Lessons in North American Social Behaviour. They discuss the annoying aspects of the life they’re having here. Quebec is more American than they expected, they say. You can’t smoke in restaurants. The Québécois accent is drôle.

Among the people who live outside the Dominion building in downtown Vancouver, across the street from the cenotaph at Victory Square, is a woman who might be in her late forties and who occasionally turns up in a wedding dress. I’ve never seen her speak to anyone. She simply walks up and holds out her empty hand toward you.

The last thing in the world I wanted was to be an exhibit, or worse.

Who today remembers the man who carried Einstein’s head in a box through the streets of Vancouver? We remember clearly the box (dark wood, varnished, the door on brass hinges: what about the latch?) with Einstein’s head in it, a plaster model (was it plastic, perhaps? modelling clay? plasticine?)

Violence could not reach them only when they were distant as the moon, not of this world

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?

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.

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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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.

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.

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.

After Paul Muldoon and Raymond Williams.

"Awkwardness comes with loving someone too much or not enough." A review of Other People We Married by Emma Straub.

Halfway through The Amateur, An Independent Life of Letters by Wendy Lesser (Pantheon Books), I stopped reading long enough to tell a few people that this was a great book of essays. Maybe I should have kept my mouth shut because from that point on I

In a recent Vancouver Sun, Don McGillivray had a note on what Americans think Canuck means to Canadians. He quotes the 1992 American Heritage Dictionary, which defines Canuck as: "offensive slang used as a disparaging term for a Canadian, especially

Evan Jenkins collected and expanded material from his column in the Columbia Journalism Review to create That or Which, and Why (Routledge), a clear and succinct guide to English language, grammar and usage.

Thad McIlroy reviews Poems That Make Grown Men Cry: 100 Men on the Words That Move Them.

Jesmine Cham talks scaremongering, tinfoil hats and invasive technology in this review of Technocreep by Thomas P. Keenan.

"Sex for Dummies, the 'Fun and Easy Way to Have Great Sex in the ’90s,' sat in the window of my neighbourhood bookstore and I bought it because, as a twenty-three-year-old, I was curious about what sex was like before my time."

For my niece in Ottawa, I chose Tell No One Who You Are by Walter Buchignani (Tundra Books). It is an account of three years in the life of a young Jewish girl in Belgium—three years during which she was hidden from the Nazis by non-Jews.

Carra Noelle Simpson reviews Teacher Man and Half Nelson, two works on life in the inner-city high schools of New York.

In 1988 Jean Mallinson, a West Vancouver poet and essayist, entered hospital for abdominal surgery. She came through the operation without mishap, and afterwards her doctor prescribed gentamicin, an antibiotic intended to stave off infection during r

Frontier stories are known to be great cultural archives but boring reads. Not so with Theatre Newfoundland Labrador’s Tempting Providence, written by Robert Chafe, directed by Jillian Keiley and performed at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre in Jan

The best pen-in-a-shirt-pocket photograph you will ever see is the author photo on the back cover of Joe Fiorito's new book, Tango on the Main (Nuage).

Tatsea and her husband Ikotsali, the main characters in Armin Wiebe’s book Tatsea, are searching for each other in the Canadian subarctic. Tatsea and Ikotsali are members of the Dogrib tribe who are separated when their village is raided by Cree from

Michael Hayward reviews The Old Castle’s Secret by Carl Barks.

When I got home after buying Tarnished Icons by Stuart Kaminsky (Ballantine) for our family's favourite viola teacher, I realized that I had the same tide in my pile of unread library books. So for a few days I had the luxury of never having to go up

Tales of Innocence and Experience (Bloomsbury) is Eva Figes’s lyrical exploration of the bond between grandmother and granddaughter. In it she takes on the monumental subject of the loss and pain that accompany the acquisition of knowledge.

Yes, fiction can be quite enjoyable, but let’s admit it: nothing can match the experience of curling up with a long, detailed report on how Canadian magazines are selling on newsstands, such as Taking Back the Rack: Amid New Challenges, Canadian Maga

Book best read while standing in the aisle: the Leonard Cohen Must Be Getting Old By Now Memorial Volume. Title: Take This Waltz: A Celebration of Leonard Cohen (Muses Company).

The best $4.50 that you can spend this year will be on a copy of David Colliers's Surviving Saskatoon, a comic book account of the wrongful persecution and conviction of David Milgaard in Saskatoon in 1971 (when Milgaard was declared innocent in 1999

I never expected to find two new zines about geeky gay girls. Sarah Dermer, author of the Toronto zine True Confessions of a Big Geek, should really get together with Joy, who publishes Super Geek Girl in Portland.

The inviting cover and unique layout of Sunnybrook: A True Story with Lies by Persimmon Blackbridge drew me in and kept me there. The story starts when Diane gets a job at the Sunnybrook Institution for the Mentally Handicapped by saying she had work

Kayleigh, the teenage protagonist of Sun Signs by Shelley Hrdlitschka (Orca), is fighting cancer, and her treatments are so intense that she’s been forced to drop out of high school. She completes her schoolwork by correspondence and discusses her as

Daniel Zomparelli reviews Suicide Psalms by Mari-Lou Rowley (Anvil Press).

On the Labour Day weekend a friend and I jumped into a secluded lake on an island in B.C. and I thought of Lynne Cox, author of Swimming to Antarctica: Tales of a Long-Distance Swimmer (Harcourt) because the lake had been stirred up by wind and rain

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?