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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Roni Simunovic catalogues types of literary festival attendees: the jaded art student, the CanLit socialite, the overworked publisher and more.

"I glanced at Jack, his tattooed arms, his gloved hands resting on the wheels of his manual chair. If only I could get my arms back. I could live with anything else."

Jeff Shucard reminisces about St. Patrick's Day, 1979: druidic magic, Irish fiddle tunes and the greatest piss-up of all time.

The rasp, the spatula and the corkscrew—Eve Corbel's series of obsessive cooks.

Diana Fitzgerald Bryden attends Between the Pages, the pre-Giller hybrid that’s a kind of sacrificial altar/beauty pageant for six Canadian authors.

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

Stephen Osborne's broken cellphone leads him to Schopenhauer, the Titanic publishing industry and historical Phantom Rides.

Jan Feduck faces Frenchish food, vomit and guys from Ontario when her ferry from the Magdalen Islands is caught in a hurricane.

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

Stephen Osborne attends a gallery opening for Elisapee Ishulutaq, an 89-year-old Inuit artist who has been making prints in Pangnirtung, Nunavut for 40 years.

Stephen Osborne discovers that some of the most startling papers in the city archives are the letters and diaries of the first archivist himself.

A young Canadian man visits family in Pakistan to settle a generational feud.

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

Opa, you know that sometimes people say things, well, indirectly? They don’t say everything that they mean?

At the Jubilee Cinema, the manager carries an imitation pistol in the John Dillinger style.

A Vancouver rock band made up of musicians, photographers and at one time, a prominent sci-fi writer.

Shared family memories of burnt baked goods.

The Calgary floods left behind a stew of knee-deep mud, and waterlogged piles of couches, fridges, books, toys, artworks, chairs, carpet, drywall...

A new pet kitten becomes part of the family.

Headlines featuring crack-smoking mayors and election fraudsters.

That dreamlike quality causes rational minds to dismiss the moment as “only a coincidence.”

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.

Two women on motorcycles: one in the dead zone of Chernobyl, and the other in the cactus country of Kamloops.

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

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

Caesarea (ECW Press) by Tony Burgess. There's no better place to spend New Year's Eve than Caesarea, a small town on the shore of menacing Lake Scugog, a place to forget your troubles, relax, do a little fishing, settle into your lawn chair on the ou

Bust magazine is dedicated to giving voice to the generation of women caught between Cosmo and Sassy. It is also font-crazy and printed on smudgy newsprint.

Tight, pithy, replete with thinly veiled autobiographical details of a childhood in Quebec and an adult life spent as an ex-pat writer in, of all places, Cornwall, the stories were short enough that I could read two or three on a twenty-minute bus ri

After dinner I retired with my newly acquired copy of a twenty-six-year old book, Caldecott & Co.: Notes on Books & Pictures (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), essays by Maurice Sendak, author and illustrator of In the Night Kitchen, Where the Wild Things Ar

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.

Budavox (DC Books) by Todd Swift is a first collection of poems. Swift writes like something still matters, but he doesn't know what.

On a lighter note, Bucket Nut by Liza Cody (Doubleday) was recommended to me by a fellow mystery buff who dropped by the office the other day. I like Liza Cody's mysteries anyway, but Bucket Nut is by far the most outrageous I've read.

Natural history writers often write as if nature were a nineteenth-century corporation. Species “colonize” territory left bare by glaciers; these “pioneer species” establish “dominance,” only to be “displaced” by “opportunistic newcomers” who “invade

Brotherhood of the Wolf, the highest grossing film in the history of French cinema, is a surprise. I thought it was going to be a werewolf movie, which would have been fine, but it is an action-packed tale of political intrigue set during the reign o

Just in: a copy of Broken Pencil; the Guide to Alternative Publications in Canada, Number One. A much needed guide to the weird and wonderful of the periodical press in Canada.

Breath offers insight into the minds of adolescent boys, and is also a great way to feel the thrill and power of big waves without actually surfing them.

It has been said that Canadian poets are a staid, funereal bunch, but there are a lot of exciting new writers who are reinventing the form, such as those in Breathing Fire (Harbour), an anthology of young poets. Re-entering the fray is a true origina

J.M. Coetzee has written a boyhood memoir in the third person, and this is no mean feat; nor is it a postmodern "novel." This could have to do with the fact that Boyhood: a Memoir (Vintage) is set in South Africa, a country where life and history sti

Fans who are missing Inspector Morse, the famous fictional British detective who, unfortunately, has been killed off, should try reading the Inspector Van Veeteren mysteries by Hakan Nesser (translated by Laurie Thompson; Doubleday).

Nevertheless, Canadian writers do persist in the genres, and one is always gratified to come across a Canadian thriller or a mystery novel like Paul Grescoe's Blood Vessel (Douglas & McIntyre) for the sheer pleasure of watching Canadian places and ti

In Boiling Point: How Politicians, Big Oil and Coal, Journalists, and Activists Are Fueling the Climate Crisis—and What We Can Do to Avert Disaster (Basic Books) by Ross Gelbspan, the intricate politics of oil and money that drive the governmental po

Blood (Scirocco) is the play by Tom Walmsley based on “Maxine,” a piece for performance that appeared in Geist No. 16.

I was up at the cabin, reading Blindness by José Saramago, translated from the Portuguese by Giovanni Pontiero (Harcourt Brace & Co.) when the power went out. It was about four in the afternoon so I could still read by the light from the window, but

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 “

Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex (Knopf Canada) is the eighty-year saga of the Stephanides family, who immigrate to America from Greece. It is a conventional tale, except for a few crucial details.

The Canadian Museum of Civilization is to be commended for Meta Incognita: A Discourse of Discovery: Martin Frobisher’s Arctic Explorations, 1576-1578, a two-volume compilation of everything there is to know about the series of disasters known as the

The Canadian Museum of Civilization is to be commended for Meta Incognita: A Discourse of Discovery: Martin Frobisher’s Arctic Explorations, 1576-1578, a two-volume compilation of everything there is to know about the series of disasters known as the

Brian Mulroney’s Memoirs: 1939—1993 (McClelland & Stewart) is longer than The Brothers Karamazov, the index is longer than the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the book costs more than a five-year membership in the Progressive Conservative Pa

The majority of Memory: An Anthology (Chatto & Windus) is what used to be called a commonplace book, a collection of extracts from other texts. The editors, Harriet Harvey Wood and A.S. Byatt, have selected 155 passages on the theme of memory, which

The Penthouse, the notorious Vancouver night club, shares a history with several of the city's missing women cases.

Stephen Henighan exposes the errors, omissions and problems with the Conservative party's study guide for Canadian citizenship.

Alberto Manguel examines a modern-day book burning and asks: how is this still happening?

A reflection on the complex and often inexplicable process of bibliographic categorizations.

Do shared languages form the natural boundaries of any nation in the world?

Reflections on how a bar in Parc Extension, QC, influenced an eponymous poem about "unprogress, inertia, the failure to learn from mistakes."

Alberto Manguel remembers a golden era in Canadian writing, comments on our current cultural climate and proposes a brighter future.

Parables, cautionary tales, morality plays, allegories—the notion that we can study literary works as texts of ethics is as old as literature.

"And what is the use of a book," thought Alice, "without pictures or conversation?" —Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

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.

Bohemia is a good place to grow as a writer, but is it a good place to live one’s whole life?

A misogynist, a racist and an academic walk into a bar...

He is one of the strangest crea

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.

For most artists, the learning of the craft never ceases, and no resulting work is fully achieved

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.

According to the numbers, Canada will never produce another Atwood or Findley.

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.

A bibliophile's worst nightmare: being stuck on a plane with a terrible book. A book mistaken for a work of serious history.

Reconsidering the faintly embarrassing Pierre Berton.

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 argues that audiences used to have different opinions on the news; now they cannot even agree on the terms of debate.

When Frank Warren began collecting the secret thoughts of strangers at PostSecret.com, he inadvertently created a new genre.

Military coups, civil wars, and NAFTA are the cause of trilingual labels in Canadian big box stores.