"'Goin’ to university' was a cover or alibi, rather than a statement of fact, providing the indolent and the imaginative with richer lives than simply having a job."

How to perform a textual analysis of a Facebook message, while under the influence of red wine.

Rice, tea and a trillion dollars of spirit money.

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

The maple leaf no longer feels like a symbol of national pride.

Public bombings have a profound effect on cities, even if the bomb is a coconut filled with beans and rice.

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

"You have bruises / There was time / You spent trying to / Heal them. / As in, time wasted."

On Dorothy Parker Day we wear wool suits and little hats, smoke with cigarette holders and have a liver-coloured dachshund on a lead.

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

My friend Eric moved to Los Angeles five years ago to become a rock star, only to learn that drummers and bass players in L.A. are unreliable, that nobody in L.A. goes to see live music and that the chicks in L.A. are all crazy. Once he got to wait at a stoplight behind Patricia Arquette, once Britney Spears came into the gym where he worked and one time a bouncer let him into a club ahead of Fabio, and none of these things made him famous.

That’s one for the rice bag!

Losers: you have a lifetime to hunt.

Headlines featuring crack-smoking mayors and election fraudsters.

Scrape every last bit of English out of your throat.

Senior Editor Mary Schendlinger remembers her friend and Geist contributor Saeko Usukawa.

Outlet Malls, Janis Joplin, The Godfather and Taco Bell—on the scent of Ameryka.

The long road to decency and justice.

After hearing survivors’ stories, nothing can ever surprise me.

The first time I met Andy Warhol he was wearing a black sweater and pants; the second time he was wearing white tie and tails (it was at Lincoln Center). The third time I met him, at Arthur, the disco opened in the sixties by Sibyl Burton, he was wearing a jersey made of silver mail.

Destroying books for the greater good.

When I was living in New York in the 1960s, almost everyone I knew was walking or running to the office of some psychiatrist.

Where in the used bookstore would mysteries by Raymond Chandler be shelved—in Novels or in Fiction? Stephen Osborne remembers the summer pleasures of reading outdoors and used bookstores.

The zine scene—comics, wrestling, skateboarding and music.

Randy Fred receives his first traditional Nuu-chah-nulth name.

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.

And a sort of current ran through you when you saw it, a visceral, uncontrollable response. A physical resistance to the silence

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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.

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.

Young James Laxer prayed for a normal life. He grew up in a committed Communist household, an experience he describes in Red Diaper Baby: A Boyhood in the Age of McCarthyism (Douglas & McIntyre).

Michael Hayward on László Krasznahorkai's The Manhattan Project.

The French writer Julien Gracq, who will be ninety-seven this year, is a living link to the era of Louis Aragon and André Breton. Gracq has avoided the kind of recognition that most modern writers crave (he refused the Prix Goncourt in 1951), and his

A Gibsons, B.C. reader wrote in response to my review of Press Gang Publishers' catalogue (Geist 1), including that it was "not stapled, so recycle worry-free." She advises that recycling-wise, staples are much more acceptable than glue and are pulle

We get a lot of mail at the Geist offices, much of it from people who "read the mag from cover to cover!!" But some Geist readers pay closer attention than others. One such sharp-eyed fan wrote recently to ask: "Just what is a 'techno-otipimist' (Num

Michael Hayward reviews Some Rain Must Fall, part of the six volume memoir by Karl Ove Knausgaard.

Mandelbrot schleps a pen around for a week to feel it out.

The Canadian director Gary Burns’s take on the urban and suburban condition has always been fictional, until now. Burns teams up with Jim Brown to tackle life in the cul de sac in Radiant City, a film that combines commentary on design, culture and p

>After filming Elliot Lovett, an American G.I., for a study of soldiers and their music, the Australian documentary filmmaker George Gittoes followed Lovett back to his home in the Brown Sub ghetto in Miami. The neighbourhood he found there was every

When the Vancouver Public Library workers went on strike, I read more of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe than I had intended.

A subtitle in search of a title: Racism in Canada (Fifth House). Where are the marketing people with nerves of steel, when we need them?

Rainer Maria Rilke and Lou Andreas-Salomé: The Correspondence (Norton) collects all of the extant letters exchanged by Rilke and Andreas-Salomé , a patron and fellow author, and (as the jacket copy describes her) “a key fin de siècle intellectual” fi

Putrid Scum by Crad Kilodney (Charnel House) is one of those titles many of us would perhaps rather not have to ask for in the bookstore (we got our copy through an intermediary) even if we could (few bookstores carry him) but, being a Kilodney book,

I read to put myself to sleep at night but Push (Knopf) by Sapphire had no soporific effect. Long after I turned out the light and rolled over on my side to sleep, I thought about Claireece Precious Jones, the hero of this bright red book.

Patty Osborne on twenty-four essays of "rants and reflections on growing up with LGBTQ+ parents."

In Africa the AIDS/HIV pandemic is quickly, and not so quietly, killing two generations of Africans. Stephen Lewis’s book Race Against Time (Anansi) begins by introducing the eight Millennium Goals for Africa as established by the United Nations Mill

Patty Osborne reviews Razorcake and Tom Tom Magazine, two offbeat punk music publications.

Marc Diamond's new novel, Property (Coach House), belongs to the tour-de force class, and will appeal most to those who appreciate ts-d-f: the whole thing is three paragraphs long: a real typesetter's nightmare. The first paragraph occupies 123 pages

Mandelbrot reviews The Secret Parts of Fortune: Three Decades of Intense Investigations and Edgy Enthusiasms by Bruce Dern.

A list of overused book review terms from achingly beautiful to woefully inadequate.

I had fun in the gifted class in elementary school because my parents never pressured me to become a sensation in spelling, or science—or, like Maya, the ethereal figure in Nancy Huston’s tense novel Prodigy (McArthur), a brilliant ten-year-old piani

Although I am not a woman, did not grow up in the late '6os just a few blocks up from the infamous Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco and am not the child of enlightened parents who strove against mainstream American materialism, I jumped two-footed int

Michael Hayward and 50 years of writing from Ursula K. Le Guin.

Norbert Ruebsaat reviews Ingmar Bergman's Private Confessions and the screening at which he saw it.

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?