Forty percent of people believe that if they practice enough, they can predict the outcome of a flipped coin. Would my current love end the way my past ones had?

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Justin Trudeau and Greta Thunberg attend the Montreal climate march.

Boyfriends are trouble, I said. He leaned over and gave me a high-five.

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."

This was the first pub I entered when I finally said goodbye to vomiting on local beaches because I could drink legally. And it’s the first pub I’ve come to since I’ve been home. Now it’s Tuesday night, Karaoke Night.

Before I opened for Joyce Carol Oates at her reading at Harbourfront in Toronto, we had dinner: Oates and her husband, Raymond Smith; the organizer, Greg Gatenby; and me.

“Don’t try to make anything happen,” the calm voice said. Dylan Gyles visits a sensory deprivation float tank.

The first time losing a game of Scrabble and the last time taking a train cross-country.

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

Jill Mandrake on the surprising effect of peanut brittle.

A warm spring night, a country club dance, a date with an attractive young man—and braces on my two front teeth.

At the Tim Hortons on Young Street in Halifax, a man clears his throat, a rough-looking older guy in the back corner, staring out the window. One knee, angled out from the table, jigs up and down; the rest of him is quite still. A sheet of notepaper

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Rick laughed. I walked away. I was irritated at Henry, at Lee for getting stoned and being paranoid and leaving without saying goodbye, at Rick, at everyone.

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

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

"have ya been ev’ryweir?"

Enjoy the fresh kebab while your freshly dented fender gets fixed.

Evelyn Everett-Green wrote novels for young people, of a morally improving nature. Her books were also meant to entertain, with tales of wholesome adventure and romance, often set in heroic times or picturesque locations.

When I met you, one floor up from the acute psychosis ward, you were wearing a paper shower cap and green pyjamas just like mine. You glared at me through the crowd because you thought I had your hoodie on. But we just had very similar hoodies.

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A greying, sunburnt American mis­sionary stopped us in the fruit market and invited us for a drink.

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Evil is not darkness, I thought to myself. It’s noise.

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When I was twelve my father enrolled me in a typing course from which I emerged typing with two fingers.

She was a conversationalist, a home builder and a deliverer of calves. Those who loved Ursula will miss her adventurous soul.

Ebb and flow in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico.

A blizzard hits two days before Christmas, stirring up feelings of trepidation and excitement for the passengers of a bus.

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.

The protagonist in Geoffrey Bromhead’s three-day novel Struck (winner of the 25th Annual 3-Day Novel Contest) is a drifter with a penchant for being struck by lightning, and with some practical experience of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, and he

Michael Hayward on a selection of Notting Hill Editions' latest releases.

Neil MacDonald reviews Streeters, a compilation of Rick Mercer's solo rants and raves from 22 Minutes, covering everything from Mike Harris in a Speedo to "Canuba," a sovereignty association between Canada and Cuba.

We always need more books like Stupid Crimes, by Dennis Bolen (Anvil). Crime novels set in Canadian milieux have the immediate and salubrious effect of elevating places we know into places we like to see imagined.

Immigration questions 9 and 10: How do you like where you’re living now? Are you happy here?

Don McKay’s Strike/Slip (McClelland & Stewart) was awarded the 2007 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and, just as Geist was going to press, this year's Griffin Poetry Prize. It deserves both awards and more: poetry does not get much better than this.

Kris Rothstein on Fleishman Is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner.

Kris Rothstein reviews Souvenir of Canada, which appeared at the 2005 Vancouver International Film Festival, and Douglas Coupland's role in it and appearance at the festival.

Jill Mandrake is blown away by South of Elfrida by Holley Rubinsky, a journey into "the land of guilt and sorrow."

A review of Chris Ware's unconventionally packaged book Building Stories, about the residents of an apartment building.

Salvatore Ala has written a poem about a barbershop that may have no equal in that genre. It can be found in his new book, Straight Razor and Other Poems (Biblioasis).

Kelsea O'Connor reviews Through the Woods by Emily Carroll, a collection of comics full of "ghosts, parasites, dead brothers, mysterious strangers and murderous husbands."

Mary Schendlinger reviews SayWha?!, a monthly evening of “readings of deliciously rotten writing”.

During Geist's first year, we devoted many inches of this column to thoughts on browsing through Canadian book publishers' catalogues. It's as good a way as any to explore the temper of the times, to say nothing of the place. Now I've got two more te

Patty Osborne reviews Do You Think This Is Strange? by Aaron Cully Drake, a look into the mind of an autistic teenage boy.

Something Drastic by Colleen Curran (Goose Lane) found its way to the cabin because I was tired of reading serious books. This is not a new book (it came out in 1995) so I must have missed it the first time around, but it is funny and refreshing.

In Stickboy, Shane Koyczan asks: what happens when the bullied begins to bully back? Reviewed by Michal Kozlowski.

The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage by Sydney Padua asks the question: what would the world be like if mathematician Ada Lovelace and inventor Charles Babbage had succeeded in creating the first Victorian computer?

Barry Kirsch on the juices and nutriments of imagination.

Beyond: The Queer Sci-Fi and Fantasy Comics Anthology is an action-packed, swashbuckling collection of short comics produced by twenty six writers and artists of diverse sexualities and genders.

Sputnik Diner by Rick Maddocks (Knopf) is an in-depth exploration of a group of people who move through a small-town diner in the tobacco belt of southern Ontario. Maddocks shows just enough of his characters’ lives for us to understand, identify and

Jerry Wasserman has assembled the original text and two translations in Spectacle of Empire: Marc Lescarbot’s Theatre of Neptune in New France (Talon Books), a useful and amusing book filled with fascinating little-known facts. The colony at Port Roy

Copies of Spycatcher by Peter Wright (General Publishing) are washing up in great numbers these days in the secondhand bookstores, and so may be had for a song. This book, the memoir of a British spy, is an unsettling testament to the power of fictio

A gaggle of kids team up with a crazy hippie named Sea Foam and an array of Angolan grandmothers in Granma Nineteen, reviewed by Patty Osborne.

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?