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.

Reviws of "Slave Old Man" by Patrick Chamoiseau

Review of "Something, Not Nothing: A Story of Grief and Love" by Sarah Leavitt.

Review of "House Work" curated by Caitlin Jones and Shiloh Sukkau.

Review of "M Train" by Patti Smith.

Review of "On Community" by Casey Plett.

Review of "The Boy and the Heron" directed by Hayao Miyazaki.

Review of "The Man in the Red Coat" by Julian Barnes.

Review of "Conversations with Khahtsahlano, 1932–1954" reissued by Massy Books and Talonbooks.

Review of "Hangman: The True Story of Canada’s First Executioner" by Julie Burtinshaw.

Review of "Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game" written and directed by Austin Bragg and Meredith Bragg.

Review of "Queers Like Me" by Michael V. Smith.

Review of "Rearrangements" by Natan Last, published in The New Yorker December 2023.

Review of "Cabin Fever" by Anik See.

Review of "Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Motherhood" by Lucy Jones.

Review of "Edible and Medicinal Flora of the West Coast: British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest" by Collin Varner.

Review of "The Adversary" by Michael Crummey.

Review of "Galore" by Michael Crummey.

Review of "Jo Cook and Perro Verlag Books by Artists: The Unreadable Sacred," organized by the Simon Fraser University Art Gallery.

Review of "Gertrude and Alice" produced by United Players of Vancouver.

Review of "Big Mall: Shopping for Meaning" by Kate Black.

Review of "Censorettes" by Elizabeth Bales Frank.

Review of "Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea" by Teffi (trans. Robert Chandler).

Review of "Our Flag Means Death" created by David Jenkins on HBO Max.

Review of No Fun (the band) and reissued music by Atomic Werewolf Records.

Begging the question of what can be defined as “form.”

To teach us how to read Don Quixote, a text so contrary to conventional literary tradition, the prologue itself needed to break from all traditions

"Cross-country skiing offered me the reassurance sought by the immigrant who is excluded from his locality’s history: a viable alternate route to belonging."

When you find yourself laid up in a sterile hospital room, which books do you want to have with you?

Despite hardships and dangerous slums, Nicaragua maintains a sense of hope that draws back to the democratic days of the Sandinistas.

In Hungary, goulash socialism becomes difficult to swallow

It all started with a zesty little book about getting old.

Kafka’s writing allows us intuitions and half-dreams but never total comprehension.

The woman who called herself Tatiana Aarons gave me an address that led to a vacant lot.

Romantic notions that equate Indigenous peoples with nature are not going to cut it.

Libraries are not only essential in educating the soul, but in forming the identity of a society.

Dogged dedication grants a reader vicarious immortality.

Our society is formed on the assumption of a healthy immune system.

Without air travel, family networks might have dissolved long ago.

Daniel Francis on John Franklin, John Rae and the Globe and Mail's enthusiasm for cannibalism.

There’s something not quite right about the grid on which the game is played.

The newspaper wars aren’t what they used to be.

Must artists declare their moral integrity?

In the sun-streaked barroom of the Irma Hotel on the main street of Cody, Wyoming, late one afternoon in June, I made a big mistake. “What’s on tap?” I asked.

European Jewish artisans on horseback in Argentina.

The craft of untruth has been perfected.

Dividing and conquering local populations confines them to manageable administrative units.

A few years after Kafka’s death, Milena, the woman he had loved so dearly, was taken away by the Nazis and sent to a concentration camp. Suddenly life seemed to have become its reverse: not death, which is a conclusion, but a mad and meaningless state of brutal suffering, brought on through no visible fault and serving no visible end. To attempt to survive this nightmare, a friend of Milena devised a method: she would resort to the books she had read, stored in her memory.

Many years ago my father-in-law, who had been a British prisoner of war in Japan, gave me a small pocket anthology, The Knapsack, edited by the undeservedly forgotten Herbert Read. The book (which I have since passed on to my daughter) had been put together for the Ministry of War to be given to its soldiers: its proclaimed intention was "to celebrate the genius of Mars." Surprisingly, however, the general tone of the anthology was above all elegiac.