The large supply of nine-volt batteries suddenly made sense

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I traffic deep time in a great storm, guilty of ignorance and omission

The log jam is tall and wide and choosing wrong means we don’t make it home

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The fish is a suspended phantom, its magenta skeleton an exquisite, vibrant exhibit of what lies beneath

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A wildland fighter witnesses an old burn's second act

Memories sneak up, tiptoe quiet as a cat. Boom like a slapshot

The unmistakable buzz of an approaching aircraft is enough to send my family onto the lawn

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This invertebrate does not go looking for prey

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For the sake of the large romantic gesture

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Hit everything dead on, even if it’s big

The names we learn in childhood smell the sweetest to us

Maybe my doctor has two patients named Ian Roy, and I’ve been sent the other Ian’s file

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No Skylab buzz in East Germany.

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Nature’s sanctity is the only portal to the future.

A writer roams her sleepscape in search of the extraordinary subconscious

In search of a big picture at the end of the singular world

PRESS 1 IF YOU THINK YOU MAY HAVE HEARD THE BIG BANG.

He looked vaguely familiar— there was a sort of outline around his ­features that I almost recognized, a translucent and shifting visage, as of someone I once knew. He looked vaguely familiar— there was a sort of outline around his ­features that I al

It was at about this moment that I hit him in the face, which is something I’ve never done before. I don’t know what perfect form the punch took in my mind, but by the time the impulse had pushed its way through me, my hand had bent inward like an old person’s claw, or a doll’s hand—curved around but without a bottle to clutch.

With the approach of her tenth summer, Julia considers the holidays that lie before her: will there be too many things for her to do? Trying to look ahead from school time, with its time-tables and schedules, makes it hard to remember, or to imagine, what summertime will be before summer arrives and the school year ends. In the summer when I was Julia’s age I heard Elvis Presley for the first time, down by the river on the jukebox in the fish-and-chip joint where teenagers went to hold hands and drink ice cream sodas and eat salted french fries drenched in vinegar.

One day a Swiss couple stopped in at the carpet shop, just as they had each year for the last ten years. Every spring they loaded up a cargo van with nets and jars and drove from their home in Switzerland to east Turkey, where they collected ­butterflies together. The man, Walter, had caught snakes in Africa and South America all his life and sold them to universities and private collectors, but that day he was turning seventy-five and, he said, it is not so wise at my age to play with snakes.

Reporting on the Michael Jackson trial from a Best Value Inn in Santa Maria, California.

It’s dark when I get off the bus by the corner store. Not the best area of town. The only other person in sight is lying on the sidewalk.

The Borderland Foundation documents borderland culture from its headquarters in the Jewish ghost town of Sejny, Poland.

In early March 2003, when I arrived in Taiwan to teach English, I took to the streets of Taoyuan County to take some photographs. I was looking for anything—signs, market scenes, strange faces, cityscapes, bus stations, barber shops—but all I could see was dogs. These dogs were not pets, though they may once have been. They were strays—dogs that lived on their own.

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?

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

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.

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.

How Stories Mean (Porcupine's Quill), a collection of essays on Canadian fiction edited by John Metcalf and Tim Struthers, is a good example of the blue box approach to book-making: almost everything in it is recycled. At least 39 of the 47 essays co

Both nature and nurture must have inspired Elizabeth May in her book How to Save the World in Your Spare Time (Key Porter). May is the executive director of the Sierra Club of Canada; she is also the daughter of Stephanie Middleton May, an activist w

Prurience or Voyeurism? One of the other anyway (more thematic convergence): this time it was How Insensitive, Russell Smith’s first novel (Porcupine’s Quill) the cover of which is emblazoned with black and white photographs of three young women in v

Patrick Lane's first book of fiction is finally out. How Do You Spell Beautiful (Fifth House) is, not surprisingly (if you know Lane's poetry), not for the faint of heart.

I went to see Hotel Porter, a musical revue showcasing the songs of Cole Porter, with my father, who could actually afford the tickets. The characters' lives played like a Hollywood movie—all passion and crisis—and the renditions of "You're the Top,"

Robert MacLean's new murder mystery, Home from the Party (Ronsdale) has a lot going for it: exotic location (Aegean island), a Greek cop who went to the University of Toronto to study under Andreas Papandreou (who lived in Canada until the Colonels w

In Hotel Sarajevo (Turtle Point Press), Jack Kersh has succeeded in translating his story into the thoughts and feelings of Alma, a fourteen-year-old girl who is caught in the hell of Sarajevo under siege. Alma is part of a group of war orphans who l

Kris Rothstein reviews Holding Still for as Long as Possible by Zoe Whittall (Anansi).

Even at age eighty-one, John Berger has lost none of his fire, which smoulders and flares in the seventeen “Dispatches on Survival and Resistance” in Hold Everything Dear (Pantheon). Berger has an innate empathy for the disadvantaged and the disenfra

Mary Schendlinger sees The Babushkas of Chernobyl, Inaate/se and A Good American at the DOXA Festival.

Aside from a grade school crush on Richard Brodeur, I have never been able to work up much enthusiasm for hockey, but when two hockey plays were running concurrently in Vancouver last winter I seized the chance to prove myself Canadian without having

In High Tide: The Truth About Our Climate Crisis (Picador), Mark Lynas, a British journalist, describes his travels around the world in search of disaster stories.

Roni Simunovic reviews When Everything Feels Like the Movies, the award-winning YA novel that inspired heated controversy and a homophobic petition.

The title character in Binnie Kirshenbaum's Hester Among the Ruins is on the trail of a different kind of treasure. She is the rare historian who does not teach but makes a living from her popular books about medieval life.

When I heard on the radio last month that Thomas Raddall had died, I was shocked and embarrassed instead of saddened because ever since discovering his books ten years ago I had thought of him as a real old-timer who must already have died. I came up

Patty Osborne reviews Last Dance in Shediac by Anny Scoones.

Two recent books nicely illustrate, for me, the disturbing state of contemporary publishing. The first book, Hemingway: The Toronto Years (Doubleday) by William Burrill, a Toronto journalist, is a handsome example of the book-making art.

Feeling crabby, I picked up Tom Wayman’s High Speed Through Shoaling Water (Harbour). Wayman, bless his poetic heart, uses clear images and familiar structure.

Jill Mandrake reviews Local Customs by Audrey Thomas, a ghost story and murder mystery set in West Africa.

The Historical Atlas of Canada by Derek Hayes (Douglas & McIntyre) contains reproductions of more than three hundred antique maps, which comprise a true history of the occupation of a continent. This is a beautiful book, almost impossible to put down

If you only see one short film this year, see the brilliant and witty Hinterland Who s Who: The Wood Spider, made by Andrew Struthers, a two-minute masterpiece combining old-school National Film Board aesthetic with a very modern tale of culture and

The eight and a half pieces in John Berger’s new book here is where we meet (Bloomsbury) are described by the publisher as “fictions,” but could equally be read as fragments of autobiography. In “Lisboa,” the narrator, a man named John of Berger’s ag

For me, reading a book by Douglas Coupland is a guilty pleasure, like reading James Michener or John Grisham—substantial enough to be worthwhile, yet trashy enough that I turn the cover inward as I walk down the street with it.

Hiding Edith by Kathy Kacer (Second Story) is a novel for children based on the childhood of Edith Schwalb, who fled Austria with her family to escape the Nazis, and was only able to do so because her father had been a popular soccer star. The family

Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner is a film about community and the north.

In the farmer’s market, a quintessentially Canadian setting, much of Canada is not visible.

Aboriginal people are creating a new version of Canada, and non-Aboriginals can lend a hand or get out of the way—Daniel Francis on the new Canadian narrative.

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

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

"Sometimes, in politics or history, certain words, certain names are sufficient unto themselves: it is as if there were names that once pronounced require no further telling."

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

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

There may be more to reality TV than meets the eye.

Stephen Henighan asks: what if you don't have a tidy answer to "Where are you from?"

What we do when we absorb words from a screen—and we haven’t yet evolved a verb for it—is not reading.

Prince Edward Island gothic.

"Authenticity is the essential quality of all travel literature, imaginary or real."

In order to discharge ourselves of certain problems, why not simply erase from our maps the sites of such nuisance?

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

Is it the icons of Canadian pop culture—hockey fights, Tim Hortons coffee, Don Cherry’s haberdashery, Rick Mercer’s rants—that reveal the deepest truths about us?

The assumption of mutual comprehensibility between speakers of Spanish and Portuguese creates a culture of mutual ignorance.

During the 1980s the literary critic Edward Said organized occasional research seminars at Columbia University in New York.

Memories lie because they build on memories. I think that I remember something, but in fact I remember remembering it, and so on through countless layers of memory. Every memory is a mise en abyme.

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

Alberto Manguel examines the rich symbology of the fist, a primal symbol of rebellion and grief, across cultures and history.

The Geist map has a venerable ancestor that goes back four centuries and halfway around the world.

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

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